
»For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d.
Fires enwrap the earthly globe, yet Man is not consum’d«
William Blake, America: A Prophecy (1793)
»You have to know, you are working for the BBC—and all people, they are working for Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya—that everybody in Syria, population of Syria, they know, very, pretty sure, that you are lying.«
Syrian Citizen to BBC Reporter, circa 20111
Tout ce qui bouge, n’est pas rouge: not everything that moves is red. In the late naughts it felt as if this phrase — along with its chromatic cognate: color revolution—summed up the defining political insight of the era. One might even go so far as to argue that it indeed captures the zeitgeist of a renascent communist movement — at least among certain segments of the youth, at least in the West — over the past two decades, in response to the acceleration of the global ruling class’s wall‐to‐wall assault on humanity, carried out amidst a torrent of disinformation and disorientation in which the enslavers and occupiers everywhere masquerade in the snatched corpses of slain revolutionaries.
This article will attempt to proffer a proper reckoning of recent events; it will contend that all who seek the overthrow of class society and the establishment of a truly just social order owe an incalculable debt to the Syrian people and their steadfast resistance to empire under the leadership of Bashar Al‐Assad. Firstly, we owe to them the cure of the ideological cancer we might call, very clumsily, color‐revolution‐ultra‐leftist‐interventionist‐liberalism, i.e. the non‐stop forced‐diet from all compatible‐left nodes insisting that every imperial intelligence operation around the globe was really a beautiful noble »anti‐authoritarian« rebellion against Milosevic‐Mugabe‐Stalin‐Hitler‐Gaddafi‐Assad‐Aristide. Now, however, it is reasonable to hope that we may also owe to them the ultimate defeat of the massive machinery of disorientation and disinformation which the ruling class elaborated, at tremendous costs and effort, to capture, pervert, and coopt that fundamental insight into its own fascistic changeling: viz. multipolarism.
For it was and remains true: not everything that moves is red: everything that is marketed as a revolution is certainly not so. That is clear enough in Syria today. The agents of the ruling class, however, twisted this insight into its opposite: through a million and one different channels they tried to substitute in its place a conviction that nothing that moves is red: that there is no hope to be sought from revolution from below. They then took the justified devotion which real popular leaders like Assad, Nasrallah, or Mozgovoi elicited and attempted to twist the longing for capable leaders like these into a craven power‐worship of the very successful counter‐revolutionaries who betray and assassinate such leaders, and who ever more audaciously traipse about in revolutionary garb: Putin, Xi, Jeffrey Sachs (!) — once this scandalous inversion of reality had reached its zenith, even open fascists like Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman began to accrue in the spectacle an absurd aura of anti‐systemic potential, of the glitzily marketed mystique of BRICS‐ish multipolarism. Grotesque Larouchie, Duginite and Buchananite materials (see the infamous Larouche Reflux ›Cultural Marxism‹ complottisme of Gabriel Rockhill and the American Communist Party, scarcely distinguishable from the original or the Breivik Manifesto and Žižek versions) were dredged up and remobilized to lure those critical of the color revolution into a love of order. The most hoary and cartoonish forms of »sensible« geostrategic »realpolitik« were exchanged for materialist analysis.
Though many were reluctant to do so, it thus became incumbent on us to insist that the dialectical couplet remains true, and its power can now come into full light: in another sense, everything that moves is red. And it is this red tide of everything living that the Empire of Overlords has in its sights, to conquer or, if unsubmitting (as Gaza, as Syria) to annihilate.
Everything that moves is red, with the sole quantitatively negligible exception of the exploiter, the enemy. Life riots against fascism; humanity ineluctably strives for liberation. Things feel grim for us, but solidarity — described so powerfully by Che Guevara, whose »blood was red and whose heart was on the left,« as »the tenderness of peoples«2—may yet overwhelm the forces of nihilistic power‐worship. One thing in our favor is their brazen exhibitionism. In their grotesque and incoherent gymnastics as they strive to rewrite the history of the Syrian struggle — the Arab struggle, the human struggle — the BRICS‐heads are everywhere revealing their wretchedness, their hatred of the masses, their love for the boot. They are exposing themselves for all to see as our enemies. Hear the Turkish poet Năzim Hikmet:
They are the enemies of hope, my beloved,
the enemies of the running water
of the fruit‐laden tree,
of a growing and improving life.
For death has put its stamp upon their foreheads
—decaying teeth, rotten flesh—
They will tumble down and go away
never to come back again.
And surely, my beloved, surely,
in this beautiful country, Liberty
will walk around freely
will walk around in its most glorious outfit
in workingman’s overalls.3
On the Life and Death of the Color Revolution
With the defeat of the first wave of communist‐socialist revolution and the dismantling of Actually Existing Socialism, the ruling class set about systematically withdrawing from all concessions and compromises workers still trapped in capitalist conditions had achieved consequent to the nearly fatal blow dealt the ruling class by the global revolutionary masses removing themselves and their resources from the reach of proprietor exploitation. Eventually reconquering those lost lands and people — through cunning, treachery and unbridled contra terror — the newly global ruling class accelerated their reconquista, bent on establishing, in the place of the institutions of class truce, their thoroughgoing dictatorship over all of humanity.
A great many pseudo‐authorities were sponsored to distract, disrupt and disorient the masses of humanity as the ruling class cynically launched its project of re‐enslavement, culling, and caging of humanity in the guise of its opposite: a great explosive epoch of liberation, jubilation over crumbling walls and toppled despots, difference celebrated in equality in mingling and hybridity and whatnot. Trotskytes and other confused and malign intellectuals, in and out of universities, had been wont to teach the workers of the core whom they wrangled that their social democracy, their welfare states, and the relatively comfortable lifestyle attainable for most first‐worlders was a bribe they were given out of the superprofits of the periphery. Trotskytes and now pseudo‐tankies are still peddling this misconstruction of Lenin’s work. On the contrary, however, it was precisely the victories of the masses of the periphery which reduced profits, and crucially made them less secure, which obliged the imperial bourgeoisie to rely more heavily on domestic labor and thus to negotiate from a position of unprecedented weakness. (The notorious justifications for the Volcker Shock ought to make this clear to all). This and the core social movements which eliminated internal super exploitation in the core working class, strengthening class unity, (more facts in contradiction to the pernicious pseudo‐left fables now dominant) resulted in a period of advancing workers’ power worldwide.
One might very schematically map the concessions and compromises of the so‐called »thirty glorious years« of working class power onto Suavy’s »three worlds« of the cold war era. In the first world, the ruling class were forced to accept the social‐democratic welfare state or various permutations thereof, and — precisely because of the social conditions thus created — struggled to resist the forces fighting to overthrow internal colonization and super‐exploitation along racial, gender, sexual, and confessional lines. In their dealings with the second world, they were forced to accept, at least rhetorically, a minimal »liberal« consensus around civic freedoms, human rights, international law, et cetera — though one which they never ceased trying to undermine in both deed and propaganda. Finally, in the third or non‐aligned world, wherever they could not directly install dictatorship, they were forced to variously tolerate, negotiate with, court, or even support an array of nationalist anti‐colonial states and their progressive, developmentalist programs. This arose, we should note, both from the revolutionary pressures from within those countries as well as the dynamic imperatives demanding both markets and resources for the capitalist system which had been saved and put on life support precisely by the situation described above. As even Keynes dimly grasped when he remarked that to survive, capitalism would require the »euthanasia of the rentier,« the internally self‐destructive tendencies of the capitalist system so lucidly described by Marx had been partially arrested and re‐directed by both the massive destruction of WWII and the partial global victory of socialism.
While the precise inflection point at which the ruling class gained the upper hand is debatable, few would contest that for two decades at least, and perhaps for closer to half a century, the tide of history (however temporarily) shifted. As the Freie Linke Zukunft stressed in its 2023 Victory Day statement:
Fascism is back; armed, in power, on the march, across the entire globe. It is no longer enough to wistfully honor our heroes and martyrs with songs, with marches, with speeches and vigils. The terrible truth must be acknowledged: we must fight the liberation struggle anew.
The democratic freedoms and high living standard enjoyed in the West in the past half century were a not a gift of either ›capitalist productivity‹ or a benevolent ruling class — on the contrary, social democracy was a truce, forced on the Western ruling classes, by the organized power of the working classes. This took the form, of course, of the sedimentation victories of decades of labor struggles in the imperial core itself. But more than anything, social democracy in the West was possible because of Actually Existing Socialism in the East, and the victories of popular, anti‐imperialist regimes in the South. It was a product of popular power, of the victories of the masses, of their whole or partial liberation from the grip of the many‐headed hydra of capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. It was won through a determined class struggle. And it has been lost, as a result of an equally determined — and deliberate and coordinated and ›conspiratorial‹! — struggle on the part of the ruling class.
The great wave of liberation unleashed by the October revolution has reached its lowest ebb. Much of the world once liberated by progressive forces, with the communists at their vanguard, has been reconquered. This is not simply true abroad, but right here at home as well. With the worldwide victory of counter‐revolution in the 90s, the ruling class has set about not merely re‐enslaving every inch of the formerly socialist world — or simply destroying what it can’t get its hands on. The ruling class has set about just as eagerly chipping back domestic victories: the living wage, fair pensions, decent housing — indeed, soon even a warm, illuminated home is to be rendered a rare privilege!
And it is not only the ›social‹ in ›social democracy‹ that has all but disappeared. Indeed, with astounding audacity, the ruling class now wields the perverted husks of our former social liberties as weapons against our last remaining civil liberties: laws against hate speech are wielded to criminalize the critique of Nazi propaganda; the healthcare system has been turned into a vast engine of surveillance, torture, dysgenics and depopulation; legitimate ecological concerns are coopted to sell to the population their own impoverishment and enslavement as a righteous victory of mother earth; the telecommunications grid is welded into a vast cage around us.«4
In a similar vein, every battle for the re‐enslavement of humanity worldwide has been repackaged — particularly for gullible and chauvinistic Western audiences — as its opposite. Hence the ubiquity of the »color revolution.« Not unlike the term »fascism,« this was originally (and in some quarters even today remains) an object of self‐identification. However, it also quickly gained wide circulation on the genuinely anti‐systemic left as a useful shorthand — not only for the initial wave of glossily‐marketed, Western‐intelligence orchestrated, pseudo‐popular assaults on the remnants of working class power and wealth throughout the former USSR and its perimeter, but ultimately for the whole related constellation of means and methods by which imperialist assaults on popular power across the globe were carried out and marketed in order to sell them to liberal and left‐wing audiences (particularly domestically in the West).
Once socialism‐communism had been largely defeated in Eastern Europe and most of Central and Eastern Asia, amongst the most significant vestiges of popular wealth and power on the globe were almost certainly in Western Asia and North Africa — particularly those states defined by the interlocking legacies of Pan‐Arabism, Pan‐Africanism, Non‐Alignment, and, in a more complicated fashion, the anti‐systemic strains of political Islam associated above all with the Islamic Revolution in Iran.5 It is essential to stress that these states were institutionalized expressions of profoundly unstable and often very much partial ceasefires in the class war, both global and domestic. This fact has made their complex histories particularly vulnerable to misinterpretation and often deliberate misrepresentation in the anti‐dialectical, pseudo‐left wing narratives and frameworks which the propaganda operatives of the ruling class ceaselessly work to sow in order to undermine mutual understanding, solidarity, and cooperation amongst the masses.
Particularly disorienting was the kaleidoscopic distortions of this global reconfiguration in the spectacle, above all the world‐wide broadcast of the millennium propaganda special, the much‐celebrated End of History. The ruling class offered up, montage style, the lynching of some of their own henchman, admixed with a number of popular leaders and some compromise candidates in between. On a deeper ideological level, however, a tremendous process of irrational, tokenizing abstraction was deployed, in order to ever more openly construct an image of the virtuous global ruling class in contradistinction to sinful humanity.
Otto von Bismark, well‐known for leading the German ruling class through the establishment of the first modern welfare state in order to stave off the threat of socialist revolution, famously described politics as »the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.« This rudimentary truth seems to constantly escape many so‐called Marxists today. They appear to think only in terms of idealized abstractions, and can only conceive of ruling class victories or losses in certain flattened and stereotyped images from the past. They seem incapable of grasping that, as Marx observed:
»Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self‐selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.«6
This basic commonsense is necessary to comprehend that the following sequence is part of one unified history: At one moment in the global class war, the U.S worked to install Saddam Hussein as the most preferable of the real possibilities given the then prevailing balance of forces, the »next best« thing to an outright Hashemite monarch, etc. At another, the ruling class no longer wanted nor could tolerate any real Iraqi state, any remotely functioning arrangement of collective powers and property of the Iraqi masses — even within a hierarchy once serviceable for global capitalist accumulation. Our understanding of these changes must not merely be the superficial »pieces on the chessboard« geo‐pol wiseguy act that seems to allure so many: the content of policies and the very character of a state has a fundamentally dialectical relationship with the balance of both the internal and external class struggle. Marx, for instance, observed how the French bourgeoisie correctly recognized in their lurch towards reaction during the Second Republic that, insofar as they had become weapons in the hands of the working class advancing their own interests, archetypically »liberal« and »bourgeoisie« policies became essentially »socialistic:«
»Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: ›Socialism!‹ Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.
This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so‐called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become ›socialistic.‹ In this menace and this attack it rightly discern the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so‐called socialism knows how to judge itself …«7
With the defeat of Actually Existing Socialism, the compromises of the Cold War became intolerable to the global ruling class not only because they could, now, get away with dismantling them — but because they also now needed to: moderately free, empowered humans enjoying even a modicum of control over their conditions of existence, the value they generated and where and how it was directed — whether ›at home‹ in the imperial core amongst the so‐called ›labor aristocracies‹ or ›abroad‹ in places like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, or Syria — these posed an unacceptable threat to the global ruling class and their global designs.
One can find a more extensive account of the consolidation and transformation of the ruling class over the past half century, as well as their current trajectory and ambitions in »Imperialism Today is Conspiracy Praxis,« »Multipolarism is Neo‐Kautskyism,« as well as Molly Klein’s Substack & Lectures. Here, however, it is sufficient to emphasize that the global and thoroughgoing enslavement of humanity which the ruling class is now pursuing is incompatible with even limited amounts of autonomy anywhere on the earth, from which spring opportunities for, among other things, the solidaristic use of social surplus (e.g., in the support of the Palestinians), the production of independent journalistic, literary, or cultural output (such as Syria was renowned for), or the elaboration of self‐defense capacities. Capitalism demanded large populations and economic growth — but what the post‐capitalist vanguard of the ruling class now pursues is threatened by precisely these.
In these circumstances, the defense of arrangements once tolerated by the ruling class as an acceptable alternative to communism became »socialistic« or even »communistic« in precisely the sense Marx describes above — it became socialistic to have a country where there could be a wasteland, a national army where there could be roving gangs of mercenaries, to defend oneself with a Scud when one had been attacked with a Tomahawk. It is in this context that we can appreciate the tremendous significance of the war on Syria in particular. For it was over Syria perhaps more than any other issue that the ideological and propagandistic stranglehold the ruling class had established on popular political consciousness following 9/11 began to fissure — precisely thanks, in large part, to the successful military resistance to empire led by Assad, the Syrian Arab Army, and their regional allies.
With the destruction of the twin towers, the ruling class announced a new phase in their global imperial reconquista. Of course, the attack provided a pretext for two long‐planned campaigns: the first — ›abroad‹ — against all vestiges of popular power in West Asia and North Africa, particularly where it was concentrated around significant oil resources, and the second — on the ›homefront‹ — against formal civil liberties and the social‐democratic consensus against open bigotry and chauvinism. Symbolically, the decision to destroy the twin towers specifically also no doubt served to signal, among other things, the seriousness of their intention to dismantle what remained of the post‐war financial order and to withdraw whatever imperial privileges and protections American workers might have thought their citizenship and residency afforded them. In terms of propaganda, it also appears to have been the first grand roll out of what has since become the overwhelmingly dominant style of perception management.
For with the unfolding of the 9/11 operation, the public was given, on the one hand, a ludicrous, brazenly incoherent, ravingly racist and islamophobic »official story« of events from the Bush‐Cheney regime (indeed, it was so incoherent that it could hardly be termed a story so much as a collection of affects). The lack of a meaningful opposition — thanks in large part to the defeat of communism — however, meant that that, on the other, that same ruling class could manufacture a faux‐critical account — only mildly less racist, Islamophobic, and incoherent — which could be positioned as their own opposition in the spectacle. As the Freie Linke Zukunft has previously observed:
»The imperial ruling class made sure to saddle the leftist forces which should’ve been able to halt their program with the disastrous ›blowback narrative.‹ This was profoundly attractive to the petty‐bourgeoisie loyal ›left‹ opponents of the ruling class, who believe endlessly in their own cleverness and the supposed incompetence of the rulers. It flattered all their preconceptions, proved them ›right‹ — as if the problem with imperialism was bad strategy! — and gave them endless material for gloating self‐righteous tut‐tutting. Of course, in the process they were seduced into accepting the profoundly racist, Islamophobic, orientalist assumptions necessary to believe such a risible narrative. And it committed them to a fanatical, absurd negationism about the historical role of the USA in the Western Asia and North Africa (and, of course, domestically). In so doing, the ruling class managed to commit major portions of the leadership of the ›left‹ to a line which 1) reinforced the most indispensable elements of the official narrative 2) totally perplexed, divided, and disoriented popular resistance to the fascist Bush‐Cheney regime and 3) alienated them from the vast majority of the working class, especially the non‐white working class, who had no qualms about recognizing an obvious ›conspiracy‹ for what it was.«8
It is worth recalling the absurdity of the moment: Trotskyte sects with membership in the low thousands were everywhere abusing people who saw through 9/11 for supposedly »alienating the masses,« while 9/11 Truth had a following of almost 200 million Americans and billions worldwide. The bullying of left intellectuals and social nodes was hysterical. Open assets and their reliable »compatible left« bourgeois allies achieved, through infiltration and terror, the left’s abdication of the leadership of anti‐war anti‐imperialist militancy and critique and its new tidal wave, the 9/11 truth (and prosecution !) movement. We can only signpost here how this laid the groundwork for the spectacular Right‐wing appropriation of »dissent,« in the west, reaching its apogee in Trumpism and the woefully disoriented resistance to the Covid Program.9
The 9/11 aftermath, with the left successfully managed by imposters, was the context which allowed many even very genuine progressives to be lured into conflating the gamut of reactionary Islamic movements long cultivated by imperialism on the one hand with genuinely progressive, anti‐imperialist Islamic forces on the other.10 This created ideological ground ripe for the disorientations and disinformation of the so‐called »Arab Spring.« There can be no doubt that their was much discontent under many governments of Arab world, reeling in the wake of a Wall Street orchestrated famine and bristling under authoritarian policies which (though in many cases initially justified by the need to resist the endless conspiracies of empire, often rightly so) had come to serve chiefly as a cudgel in defense of their accommodation with that empire and (however covertly) its local vanguards — the Zionist Entity on one hand, the Saudi‐Wahhabi on the other. The imperialist media’s coverage itself is invariably a reliable barometer of the genuineness of these uprisings. Consider, for instance, the virtual silence regarding the protests in Bahrain which began in February of 2011.
Over the course of the early 2000s, despite (and also, at the same time, because of) the endless torrent of propaganda and increasing entrenchment of the most extreme, fanatically reactionary vanguard of the ruling class at the top of the US‐led global empire, a certain amount of genuinely critical domestic opposition once again began gaining momentum in the imperialist core, despite the bitter defeat of Actually Existing Socialism and the consequent cowing of the organized communist movement, followed shortly thereafter by the effective disorientation and co‐optation of large segments of the altermondialiste movement (in part by a program which was no doubt a key prototype for the BRICS operation, the World Social Forum).11 Indeed, a remarkable index of the growing popular threat was the inability of the ruling class to simply foreclose any positive references to socialism and communism, particularly following the so‐called »great recession« — instead, they had to invest massively in an elaborate apparatus to promote fake, fascistic pseudo‐alternatives (the most infamous case almost certainly being Slavoj Žižek — of whom Molly Klein’s extensive critique is utterly indispensable for understanding the ruling class’s techniques of perception management and social engineering today). This was greatly buoyed by the real, concrete, popular resistance to empire on the ground — notable moments of which include the implementation (however incomplete) of the Bolivarian Revolution and Chavez’s successful foiling of the 2002 coup in Venezuela, the »Pink Tide,« the difficulty the US, France, and Canada met in their project to eliminate the Lavalas movement in Haiti, the Yemeni resistance’s survival of the genocidal assault delegated by Empire to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe’s persistence on an independent course against endless imperialist chicanery, Hezbollah’s victory in 2006, the Second Intifada, the Iraqi and Naxal so‐called »insurgencies,« or the DPRK’s successful nuclear tests.
Nonetheless, anything like a genuinely anti‐systemic leftist pole — never mind a serious communist movement — failed to consolidate itself on any noteworthy scale during the naughts. Indeed, the initial domestic western response to the »Arab Spring« was woeful, with large segments of left wing forces falling for much if not all of the marketing campaign. Although there was some notable opposition to the particularly brazen and flagrant assault on the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, it remained marginal and crippled by a widespread unwillingness to reject root and branch the imperialists’ absurd and racist lies. In Syria, however, it appears that the ruling class seriously overestimated its ability to shake the snow globe and bring about its desired reconfiguration without substantial opposition. Perhaps this lay in their own failure to grasp the legitimacy and popularity of the Ba’athist government — under which, unlike states that had become almost complete creatures of empire, such as Egypt, popular discontent to misdirect could not be so easily ginned up in the first place.
What is important here is to recognize the degree to which the steadfast resistance of the Syrian people under the leadership of Bashar Al‐Assad not only inflicted an astounding and heroic defeat on empire, foiling for a truly remarkable period their regional plans, but also helped break the back of the post‐cold‐war Eustonite hegemony over the left. It is crucial here to recall the style and culture of politics which prevailed amongst the domestic western left at the outset of the »Arab Spring« — though it is perhaps very difficult to do so, because it now feels like an all together different universe from that which we now inhabit. In stark contrast to the deep and abiding snark and cynicism which now pervades virtually all mainstream political discourse, Obama’s first term was marked by an idealism which was extreme to the point of saccharine (and, of course, exclusively rhetorical and symbolic). Indeed, it seems almost entirely forgotten that the takfiri death‐squads now tacitly acknowledged by most to have formed the vast majority of »rebels« from the outset were entirely absent from the original official narrative. The Imperialist assault on Syria was initially marketed by a veritable army of spooks with an overwhelmingly left‐liberal — or even ultra‐left, anarchistic — cover story, in which almost entirely manufactured confections of radical grassroots coordinating committees and the »Free Syrian Army« dominated.
The refusal of significant portions of the Syrian Arab Army to defect, the prolonged struggle which made the narrative ever more difficult to maintain, the genuine responsiveness and reform‐willingness of the government, and the output of real, genuine journalists exposing the reality — particular credit being owed to Sharmine Narwani and Vanessa Beeley — all worked to chip away not only at the narrative about Syria itself, but the broader propaganda framework in which it was embedded. Some operatives, such as Molly Crabapple, persisted for so long and so shamelessly in trying to sell terroristic salafist mercenaries as democratic rebels that they all but discredited themselves. But even more telling is the trajectory of operatives such as Ben Nortion, Rania Khalek, or Max Blumenthal — though we should note in passing their shameless antics in trying to hinder the truth from reaching the masses, from their bowdlerlizing plagiarism of Beeley’s White Helmets exposé, throughout their campaign against Mother Agnes’ to Blumenthal’s attacks on Narwani’s early ISIS reporting and Saad‐Gorayeb at Al‐Akhbar.
The »Syria Revolution,« in deed and in propaganda construct, fundamentally failed. And with it failed, for a huge segment of its supposed audience, the very notion of the »color revolution,« and by extension the narratives embedded in it about Actually Existing Socialism, the nature of the cold‐war, and the global rule of the collective imperialism of the (ever more directly) U.S. dominated imperialist triad. However, this initially very politically productive intellectual pessimism about the rhetoric of left‐liberalism which had been mobilized so cynically by the operatives pushing the »Syrian Revolution« — summed up so well in that catch phrase: »not everything that moves is red« — was itself appropriated, perverted, and cleaved from any »optimism of the will,« by other (or, in many cases, with breath‐taking audacity, the same operatives like Ben Norton, Max Blumenthal, and Rania Khalek) into a constellation of faux‐competing and even more openly fascistic nemeses — the ›anti‐woke,‹ anti‐liberal, anti‐democratic, »multipolar« hydra of Dengism, Putinism, Lulaism etc. This transformation is well documented and analyzed in Molly Klein’s lecture series on the Greyzone Con Game (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) so we will not belabor it here.
What we can and must thank Assad and his true allies (like Soleimani or Nasrallah) for is that in point of fact through their remarkable principles, sacrifice, and dedication to humanity, they have exposed not one, but two of the most pernicious ruses of our time. For Assad first put the fundamental nail in the coffin of the »compatible left« false‐ultra‐leftism of the »color revolution.« This resistance (and parallel struggles across the globe, particularly that in Donbass) forced upon the global ruling class the massive elaboration of the multipolar scam, this immense, difficult, and very expensive effort to disorient, coopt, and recoup the anti‐systemic energies of the masses and dynamism of the periphery which had found leadership in figures like Assad, Nasrallah, Mozgovoi, etc.
In the field of propaganda, this has taken the form above all of a gamut of ideologies and styles which attempt to capture the frustration and bitterness which the shameless falsehoods of Western left‐liberalism elicit into an openly nihilistic and fascistic, wise‐guy power worship — often, astoundingly, in the guise of communism. (A key antecedent of this now ubiquitous character was probably John Dolan’s »Gary Brecher« or »War Nerd«). As already referenced above, for a schematization of this broader innovation in ruling class practice and propaganda, one can refer to »Multipolarism is Neo‐Kautskyism« in particular. What is key to emphasize here, however, is the degree to which we can hope that this noxious nonsense is increasingly untenable. The immense crime of the worldwide ruling class in jointly destroying the Syrian Arab Republic cannot be hidden or spun. It finally exposes the atrocious fraud of the multipolar‐faux‐opposition to Empire and their running dogs in media and politics.
The Red Flag, the Black Flag
Let us consider, by way of illustration, a particularly grotesque artifact in which the moral, political, and intellectual bankruptcy of multipolarism stands out in stark relief. Moreno Pasquinelli plays a leading role in the Italian group »Front of Dissent,« and, through this, the »International Initiative for Peace.« He recently published an article on Syria on the Front of Dissent website: The Eight Cantonates of the Manicheans. In it, the monstrous contortions necessary to try and paint the black flag red — i.e., the takfiri as revolutionary, defeat as victory — are evident.
From the get‐go, Pasquinelli reveals his own colors by adopting characteristic imperialist discourse, referring to the »implosion of the Assad regime« — i.e., insinuating, firstly, that this manifest defeat by external aggressors was primarily the result of internal factors (»implosion«) and, secondly, that the Syrian Arab Republic — in reality amongst the most substantively democratic states in the region — was anything but ( viz. »regime«). More absurdly, and in willful ignorance of the lessons of the past three decades, Pasquinelli contends that this self‐evident victory for what he terms the »American Zionist axis« was in fact not necessarily so by insidiously defining such a success as exclusively taking the form of an »American Zionist Pax,« i.e. a »stabilization to their advantage of the precarious balance in the Near East.« Such remarks, most charitably interpreted, are exemplary of the sort of stereotyped thinking which fails to grasp the reality of our current moment, the parameters and constraints in which the ruling class operate. What has the American ruling class done to promote »peace« or »stability« of any sort, anywhere in West Asia or North Africa over the past three decades? Is it really so difficult for our comrades to see how over and over again the »failures« of the »American« state to achieve its stated goals consistently redound to the class interests of the rulers — can they not see through rhetoric and analyze praxis?
In her introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, G.E.M. Anscombe recounted the following interaction with him:
»He once greeted me with the question: ›Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?‹ I replied: ›I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.‹ ›Well,‹ he asked, ›what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?«12
At times, it feels that our would‐be comrades suffer from a similarly pre‐copernican mental block. They cannot get themselves out of the rut of envisioning the nature of empire in simplistic images derived from the cold‐war and, even worse, potted histories of imperial conflict from the pre‐capitalist era. Let us take seriously, however, the core proposition of multipolarism — that the American (led) empire is losing its hegemony, declining, even collapsing — and really ask what that would look like? What historical precedents can we draw on to make sense of such a phenomenon. Though the Duginites and Larouchies now constantly promoted in a coordinated fashion by U.S., Chinese, and Russian intelligence services ceaselessly try to cloud our minds with hoary images — of Greece and Rome, Qing China or the Golden Horde — one would look first and foremost at the first great capitalist‐imperialist hegemon, Great Britain.
When, after WWII, due to both internal and external factors it could no longer maintain its formal imperial position, its ruling class categorically did not rage against the dying of the light and burn itself out in a desperate and destructive fit — as we are now made to believe the ruling classes of the imperial triad are doing in the face of the supposed multipolar threat. Nor, however, did it go gently into that good night (though it indeed worked very hard to market itself as having done so). On the contrary, the British imperialist apparatus was more or less seamlessly integrated into a broader U.S.-dominated order, with its ruling class afforded a significant if nonetheless subordinate position therein. Even more significantly, the same can largely be said of the direct »inter‐imperialist« antagonists of the U.S. and U.K. in the war, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Outside of a fairly narrow band of the leadership (and even this almost entirely because of the conditions imposed by the USSR), both the Japanese and (West) German ruling classes were recuperated into an ever more consolidated capitalist imperialist bloc.
For, as was argued at length in »Imperialism Today is Conspiracy Praxis,« the crucial and undeniable fact is that capitalist‐imperialism survived the two great inter‐imperialist convulsions of the Twentieth Century — over the course of which the very threat of global communism forced a previously inconceivable and qualitatively transformative integration upon it:
The revolution which Lenin rightly foresaw as a necessary reaction to imperialism’s tendencies (which he thus assumed would arrest them) did occur, but was incomplete. The core power centers which remained in the hands of the capitalist ruling classes were turned into fortresses for the reconquest of the earth.
This is a state of affairs which Lenin failed to fully imagine. He states that ongoing, sustained cooperation amongst the imperialist bourgeoisie in the mutual division and exploitation of the world is impossible in the long run, because the balance of power between them is dynamic and ever‐shifting. When the division of territory contradicts the real power dynamics, Lenin asks, ›what other solution of the contradictions can be found under capitalism than that of force?‹ (Lenin, Imperialism VII) Well [… However,] is there not one development which in fact makes this substantive state of affairs possible? Is there not one thing with the wondrous power to help the imperialists set aside their differences and make peace — namely, working class revolution? As Marx observed as far back as in 1848, the June insurrection in Paris
›united, in England as on the Continent all fractions of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists, stock‐exchange wolves and shop‐keepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and opposition, priests and freethinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry for the salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society (Marx, Capital I, Ch. 10, Section 6).‹
The same point is made, with even greater relevance, at the very start of the Manifesto: ›all the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize‹ the specter of communism: ›Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police‐spies.‹ In Lenin’s time, of course, the tendency to unite against revolution was not strong enough to overcome the tendency towards violent inter‐imperialist conflict [nor had the financial innovations which would lay the material basis for subsequent inter‐imperialist unity reached sufficient maturity]. Indeed, the capitalists‐imperialists’ inability to overcome their differences, and the resultant first World War, resulted in nothing so disastrous for all capitalists as the first successful socialist revolution and the establishment of USSR.
Coeval with, and in part driven by, the dynamic of both inter‐imperialist war and ultra‐imperialist counter‐revolutionary struggle (above all against the USSR) emerged factors which decisively altered the nature and capacity of the imperialist ruling class — all, essentially, in the form of monopoly or ultra‐monopoly: air force, a monopoly over the sky; the communications industry, and ever growing monopolistic control over human communication; the development of highly advanced and centralized intelligence agencies, conferring a monopoly on information and perhaps gradually power and force more generally; and finally under the arbiters of the latter an unprecedented control over income streams (open and covert) unimaginable in Lenin’ time, bringing with them the corresponding capacity to bribe, subvert, assassinate, corrupt, etc.
[…]
Nevertheless, at the conclusion of Word War II the major capitalist powers were far from defeated. Much of the socialist world was left with a shattered population, desperately seeking to rebuild on salted earth. The vast majority of wealth plundered by the fascists forces, along with most of their leaders, were respectively recuperated and integrated into a now unified imperialist camp under American hegemony. A fraudulent, superficial ›denazification‹ in Germany covered up for the empowerment of all the same social forces behind Nazism, mutatis mutandis in Japan (see, in particular, The New Germany and The Old Nazis, Tetens; Martin Bormann — Nazi in Exile, Manning; All Honourable Men, Martin; Gold Warriors, Seagrave — indeed, all the Seagrave’s work; see also the extensive material available related to this theme produced by Dave Emory).
Here, we see the essential point: the empirically obvious fact of the total ultra‐imperialist hegemony established over the capitalist world by the USA after Word War II. This hegemony is established, not merely for the joint exploitation of the third world, but even more so (and always overlapping with the former, which in liberating itself constantly struggles towards socialism) out of the existential struggle against communism, the ›cold war.‹ With the end of the end of cold war and the global counter‐revolution, the clock was not set back to 1917. The experience of socialism fundamentally changed the entire world. The triumphant capitalist class not only plundered the collective wealth of the socialist world, but its collective experience and knowledge. The capitalists taking over socialized production, particularly in China, enjoyed a position of power and centralized control which had been previously unimaginable within capitalist social relations.
This is an arrangement which Lenin never explicitly explored. His rejection of ultra‐imperialism never grapples with the possibility of a world indefinitely divided (peacefully or not) between capitalist and socialist states. He certainly never grappled with the prospect of lasting socialist construction followed by counter‐revolution. Since this is the world which did, in fact, emerge, it is the one with which we must grapple — using the very many helpful tools provided by Lenin, appropriately and un‐dogmatically.
[…]
the exceptional political circumstances of the Cold War, of the existential struggle with revolutionary communism, forced the ruling class to cultivate a broad labor aristocracy. In the circumstances of both the counter‐revolutionary struggle and the inter‐imperialist struggle within the triad (as well as internal contradictory tendencies within the money supply) a strategy was adopted by the vanguard of the ruling class which allowed them, via the American Dollar, the American Military, and the covert intelligence networks controlled by the USA, to establish unprecedented power over the capitalist bloc and subsequently the world.
Dialectically entwined with the consolidation of power over the globe by the American‐led capitalist ruling class was the consolidation and concentration of power within the ruling class itself. Just as, on a macro‐scale, capitalist nations were forced, at pain of accepting the revolutionary communist alternative, to subordinate themselves to American leadership — so too, the dynamics of this process meant that the concentration of global power generated an increasingly consolidated and covert real leadership within the United States vanguard. The power of hierarchically organized, intelligence‐led power structures to achieve dominance in such circumstances was, when one surmises the big picture, inevitable. It is thus not terribly surprising that the most powerful ›capitalists‹ today are not really capitalists at all, but direct creatures of the ultra‐imperialist military‐intelligence‐industrial complex. Individuals like Gates, or Musk, or Bezos, do not run capitalist enterprises which take risks producing goods for a consumer market. Their wealth is drawn from forced consumption, forced in the sense that taxpayers must ›buy‹ the products via state budgets, or are literally forced to consume them by legal and political means. An entity like Amazon, which never made a profit but continued to be invested in by those with insider knowledge, and only started to making profits when it received government contracts, cannot be understood as a capitalist enterprise. It is a direct mechanism of ultra‐monopoly consolidation.
It is in this world — a world in which the internal discipline, coordination, and interlocking command of all global finance and military power amongst a narrow clique of the most reactionary vanguard of the ruling class had been consolidated — that the so called »multipolar« threat emerged (it is perhaps worth noting here in passing that the very notion of »BRICS« arose from a 2001 paper by Goldman Sachs’ then Chief Economist Jim O’Neil). Half a century prior, after the tremendous dislocations of World War II and the awesome global power of the working class on the march, the U.S. was still able to co‐opt and integrate practically all potentially autonomous nodes of capitalist power. Even France, however, perhaps the most recalcitrant outlier, was ultimately reined in over the final quarter of the Twentieth Century.
Now one must note here the immensely complicated fact that, as briefly touched upon above and as elaborated in detail in »Multipolarism is Neo‐Kautskyism,« that same process also progressively brought that ascendant ruling clique into an ever more antagonistic relationship with their formerly privileged allies both »at home,« and »abroad.« This manifested itself most dramatically, at the dawn of the brief »unipolar« moment, with the clear designs on their part to massively degrade and diminish the potentially restive subaltern petty‐bourgeoisie and labor‐aristocratic strata they themselves had cultivated or at least tolerated in the context of the cold‐war struggle. What must be appreciated is that the obvious praxis of that ruling class increasingly took the form of a wholesale war against humanity. The template for still potentially restive regions was something much less akin to Pinochet’s Chile and much more along the lines of the Generalplan Ost. This was already evident at least in both the praxis applied in the destruction of the Yugoslavia and the project for a »New Middle East.« But what must be grasped — and what causes so much confusion to this day — is that the »American« led ruling class had within the scope of its ambitions the massive disciplining and destruction not just of the third‐ and second‐ worlds, but also its »own population.« So many are confused by the evident losses for Americans, Europeans, et cetera — they say, look, American society is collapsing, the German economy is being devastated: »America« and »Germany« are losing, the »BRICS« are winning. But the ruling classes in each case are in fact strengthened, their joint program advanced.
They have systematically and with terrifying success dismantled piece by piece the constraints which capitalist ruling classes have traditionally been bound by: publicly controlled treasuries and tax revenues (at least legally, even if very much partial or even nominal); the substantial distribution of discrete assets across — and corresponding real competition between — members of the ruling class (as against the almost total interpenetration of ownership achieved through financialization); procedural democracy and its institutions, bureaucracies, and norms; a substantial strata of at least semi‐autonomous clerks /managers with their own institutions of self‐organization, (confused but not non‐existent) class‐consciousness, and esprit de corps; and, finally, money itself.
For more than half a century, this American‐led global ruling class has pursued a policy in which any zone from which a potentially autonomous and thus anti‐systemic project might be pursued can no longer simply be co‐opted and subordinated but must be destroyed. In the midst of such universal salting of the earth, Moreno’s talk of an »American Zionist Pax« is pure inanity. True indeed, the initial overly ambitious attempt to completely wreck the heartlands of the former Soviet Union risked the collapse of the whole program and the potential re‐coalescence of the communist forces — thus as noted in »Multipolarism is Neo‐Kautskyism«:
»By the late 90s, we saw very nearly what a standard ›color revolution‹ type regime could look like in Russia. But we should also note that this order was incredibly unstable. Between the near election of Zyuganov and the Ruble Crisis, it became clear that the global ruling class had gone too far, was too rapacious in Russia. It risked the return of socialism. In these conditions, concessions needed to be made, and a reliable agent installed who could ensure the continued subordination of Russians to their ongoing plunder and exploitation — Vladimir Putin. Since this obvious fact somehow still manages to escape so many, it is worth noting here that Putin, as mayor of St. Petersburg in 1993, explicitly ensured German business representatives in his belief that ›political‹ violence which undermined market conditions was criminal, while violence which protected private investment was ’necessary.‹ He further stressed his support for the implementation of a Pinochet style dictatorship by Yeltsin to solve Russia’s current political problems.«13
Putin, more than any other figure, domesticated the former USSR, extinguished — at least for an extended period — its residual anti‐systemic potential, and pacified its population in waiting for their ultimate multipolar disciplining. And it was he and his clique who were called in to perform a comparable task in Syria. We can witness the success of this broad program in the Balkans, Iraq, and Libya despite significant resistance and setbacks (and despite the fact that it is constantly marketed to the credulous as failure). Moreno, however, is willfully blind to the Pinochet in Putin and the Generalplan Ost in the Middle East. Indeed, he cravenly seeks to defend the »Russian« (American‐installed) ruling class and their risible performance of multipolarism. Thus he must shamelessly defame Assad.
After, on the one hand, absurdly evacuating the meaning of victory for the »American Zionist axis« by placing it onto an ideal plane removed from the recent history, Moreno goes on to distinguish ( in passing, without elaboration or justification) a victory for the »Resistance« (without definition or qualification) from a victory for »the so‐called Iranian‐driven ›Axis of Resistance‹ « — which he openly concedes has been dealt a »lethal blow«! To appreciate the full mendacity of his tactics here, one must recall the work of operatives like Yassin‐Kassab, Blumenthal, Norton, and Khalek during the first »Syrian Revolution« propaganda initiative. Not only was the real concrete history of tremendous support and sacrifices for the Palestinian cause on the part of Syria under Ba’athist leadership erased, but a few token Palestinians (recall the »Yarmouk« narratives) mobilized to construe Palestinians as anti‐Assad. Indeed, he even goes so far as to willfully misrepresent the response of the major Palestinian resistance factions, claiming that:
The tenacity with which the Manichaeans defend al‐Assad goes to the point of insolence, to the point of scorning and mocking the main Palestinian Resistance formations (HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front and others) because they expressed no regrets for the defunct regime and even, albeit in different ways, hailed the new rulers, asking them to support the Palestinian cause.
This is simply untrue. Shortly before Assad was overthrown, the DFLP rejected the »terrorist assault« and reemphasized its support for the Syrian Arab Army. Likewise, on Nov. 30 the PFLP described the it as a »treacherous attack« by »terrorist gangs« and explicitly identified it as a »Zionist and Western scheme.« Since then, there is no evidence in any of their statements of them »hailing the new rulers.« It does appear that they have not openly commented on Assad’s ouster itself — though in this context one must naturally consider the tremendous pressure not to openly contradict whatever line emanates from Tehran. Moreno moreover misrepresents the diplomatic circumspection of the statements of both the PIJ and Hamas — never mind entering into any consideration of the influence over such a statement in particular which the faction around Meshal likely exercises at the current moment. In a similar fashion, he declares that the »proof« that the defeat of the »so‐called Iranian‐driven ›Axis of Resistance‹ « — again, his words — does not translate into a defeat for the resistance is that »if the Palestinian one is the vanguard of the Resistance, as Gaza proves, it is still alive.«
What would Nasrallah, or Soleimani, make of such absurd claims? What is particularly interesting about Moreno’s article, though — and why it is worth any attention at all — is that in it we see a real »implosion« — unlike the false »implosion« he claims happened when the Syrian state was destroyed by imperialist agents: an implosion of the ruling classes’ narrative management machinery. For perhaps the key tactic of disorientation with which the ruling class has managed to forestall the emergence of a genuine, lucid communist understanding of the current moment over the past decade has been to ceaselessly break up all anti‐systemic forces by pulling them into mutually sustaining couplets or right and left deviations. These tend to roughly align, globally, around an ›ultra‐left‹ or ›liberal‹ tendency which orients itself towards the KKE and its »imperialist pyramid« theory on the one hand, and a ›rightist‹ /multipolarist /red‐brown tendency aligned generally towards the KPRF and /or the CPGB‐ML and its World Anti‐Imperialist Platform (WAP). Moreno’s network has clearly positioned itself along the lines of the latter — yet in his contortions he ironically lurches into the most egregious KKE‐style rhetoric.
He declares, for instance, that »It is wrong to consider that in the Near East only two camps were and are confronted: the Zionist‐imperialist camp and the Resistance camp.« As we know, this is very true insofar as Russia or China are included in the »resistance camp« when they manifestly and continuously work in close coordination with the West. However, this is not Moreno’s meaning. Instead he mobilizes the most ridiculous geo‐pol chessboard style imagery, contending that the situation is instead riven by the »hegemonic ambitions of regional powers, mainly Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, each with its respective global protectors« and declaring that the »contrasts« between them will increase with the fall of Assad (again, sans evidence or argument). He then even more shamelessly trains his sights on perhaps the only »multipolar« branded power in which there is a real struggle between collaborators and genuinely anti‐systemic forces: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It is not, we learn, he and his comrades who mythologize Putin, Erdogan, Xi Jingping, and Jeffrey Sachs, but the »Manicheans« who mythologize Iran’s role! And while he is conspicuously silent on any cynicism on the part of Putin, he scorns Iran’s »strategic prudence« and states that »when they realized in Tehran that the al‐Assad regime was melting away, in agreement with the Russians, they decided not only to abandon that country but to hand it over to the tutelage of Turkey.« Yet before one has even regained their bearings in this Game of Thrones style mishmash, he goes on, with breathtaking audacity, to argue that of all players in the region Erdogan’s Turkey is the »real winner,« in contradistinction to the »US‐Zionist Axis« ! Turkey, about which the very term »deep state« was coined in an attempt to articulate the rock‐solid control which the U.S. exercised over it [and Israel], and which under Erdogan in particular has never moved an inch in a fashion which might disrupt the designs of the American empire, is now cast as an autonomous and even potentially antagonistic force to Empire. He thus claims about the NATO member Turkey, which delivers Azerbaijani oil to Israel to this day:
Erdogan is thus, at least for now, the real winner of the game, not the U.S.-Zionist axis, the one who has the back and gives directives to the new Syrian authorities. To speak of an imperialist‐Zionist victory in Syria would be justified if and only if Erdogan were a puppet of the Americans and Zionists, a pawn of theirs. Is this the case? Not at all! He is carrying out his own power politics as well as that of rising as the new grand caliph of the Muslim Umma.
This wonky TV serial style, reminiscent of Sorkin, may have played well when the likes of Khalek, Norton, and Blumenthal employed it with their de‐skilled and hopelessly gullible clerk audience. With a seasoned European activist like Moreno, however, it feels difficult to speak merely of ignorance. This is pure mendacity. Al‐Jolani is now positioned, fantastically, as an »ally« of Turkey and thus not the West, and even heralded as one whom the West cannot trust (and thus, we are supposed to hope, might even pose an anti‐systemic potential himself along with Erdogan).
It is the sincere belief of the present author that this drivel can convince no one for whom it is intended and is worth convincing. As contended above, the multipolar scam was elaborated to a very significant degree in response to the mass awakening of political consciousness occasioned by the collapse of the imperial narrative about Syria. And everyone who was a part of the process knows that Al‐Jolani, like Al‐Baghdadi, were operatives trained, coordinated, and directed by the U.S. to lead their pseudo‐oppositional contra‐mercenaries from their tenure at the American »Jihadi University« at Camp Bucca at the very latest.14 Everyone knows, likewise, that Daesh and other Takfiri groups in Syria are US paramilitary forces continually serving US interests in Syria and Iraq, and were only ever »fought« by them when it served as pretext to raze Syrian territory or grab resources which could not have been claimed otherwise.
It is then, again, laughable that Moreno attempts to bolster the anti‐systemic bona fides of Al‐Jolani and his clique by citing Israel’s open invasion of ever larger swaths of Syrian territory and destruction of Syria’s military capacities as proof that they oppose him — as if his task was not precisely to enable the conditions in which Israel could do so! It seems only logical, therefore, that he should absurdly castigate the Syrian government for its secularism and adopt the vile sectarian rhetoric of its Takfiri opponents:
Let us gloss over for the sake of charity the all‐Western concept of ›secularism‹ that is completely foreign to Islamic civilization … As is well known, the al‐Assads (who took power in 1970 after the defeat of Michel Aflaq, the real socialist soul of the Ba’th) are themselves prominent members and champions of the minority religious sect of the Alawites, which what explains why in 1981 they tampered with the Syrian Constitution by abolishing the articles that enshrined the Islamic character of the Republic and that the president had to be a Muslim.
He undermines himself even further when he regurgitates the hundred‐fold debunked compatible left »Syrian Revolutionary« rhetoric of »Neo‐liberal Assad«:
With his [Hafez Al‐Assad] son’s arrival in power the doors were literally thrown wide open to the predators of the IMF, the World Bank of the Gulf petro‐monarchies. At the gates of the Arab Spring of 2011, a full market economy with a powerful yet corrupt national bourgeoisie at the top was in place in Syria. An economy that had not only exacerbated deep social inequalities, but whose engine had brutally jammed‑a trigger for the popular uprising that began in March 2011.
Once again we maintain: this rhetoric cannot succeed. It is well known amongst precisely the population to which Moreno is here dissembling that the success of the Syrian Government in resisting the »Arab Spring« operation lay precisely in its good‐faith (to a fault!) efforts to respond to supposedly popular demands for reform while retaining the popular‐democratic character of the state. Ultimately, Moreno shows his hand once and for all when he declares:
For that matter, that the Manichaeans are in the balloon is attested by their embarrassed refusal to explain the behavior of the Russians and Iranians, to abandon the al‐Assads to their fate, then to admit that the Syrian one was a ›controlled demolition,‹ the result not of an imperial‐Zionist machination but of an agreement between Turkey, Russia and Iran.
This is a particularly lame bluff. Let us first simply accept the name, Manichaens. Is it not apt enough? We who believe the class struggle is real, and that the fundamental global antagonism is between the proletarian forces of progress and the malign ruling class and their allies? Whatever we call ourselves, however, it is manifest that our explanation of events is far more coherent, rational, and legible than Moreno’s performance. For we see here now: every sort of fantastic arrangement, any back‐stabbing deal or incongruous alliance, is possible except the real one: that the ruling classes of China, Russia, and the Imperialist Triad jointly work in advancing their joint interests against us, the sinful Manichean masses, the Amalekites.
And many are very clearly not buying it. Witness the recent interviews of Laith Marouf, for instance, an evidently sincere, astute, and devoted activist who — even while apparently working from some of the premises of multipolarism — lucidly draws the obviously correct conclusions about how the Russian government under Putin conspired with the West against Syria.15 Witness the excellent deconstruction of the resurgent propaganda by the comrades at the Research Unit for Political Economy.16 Witness UK Column’s podcasts of Vanessa Beeley’s laudable defense of the truth on Syria.17 And witness how all the BRICS‐heads castigate their own audiences for their supposed »pessimism« about what has happened in Syria: i.e., for their unwillingness to instantly overhaul their long held political commitments at the drop of a hat to align, as these craven running dogs do, with the demands of Empire. This is the communist’s pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will against the multipolarist’s triumph of the will.
Pasquinelli concludes with what we must presume he thinks the very clever remark that »God is dead, Marx as well, and the cognitive abilities of many have gone to ruin.« This declaration is particularly striking given his shameless maligning of the Ba’athists for their thoroughgoing secularism. Whether he realizes it or not, Pasquinelli here, in his inability to resist quoting the arch‐reactionary and ur‐fascist Nietzsche, helps cast into even starker relief the nihilistic and reactionary quality of the Multipolarist ideology which, like Nietzsche’s, is only coherent inasmuch as it consistently anti‐humanity.
One need only contrast this attitude with that of the »dead« Marx on a similar theme to grasp everything that is sinister and malign in this project. As he famously contended in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:
Religion … is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
…
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
In this spirit, let us return to the remark of Wittgenstein above, and ask: what would it look like for man to move around himself as his own true sun, to realize the liberating promise of religion? These running dogs of the running dogs of empire would like us to stand in awe of Putin’s Oreshniks and Xi’s »productive forces« of Foxconn slave camps — with which, apparently, they are incapable of even forcing basic humanitarian aid into Gaza against the interests of their close economic ally Israel.
Inspired by the resistance of the Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Donbass and many other peoples, the rising communist movement had largely overcome the delusions of chauvinistic Eustonite ultra‐left liberal imperialism, and had ceased to believe that the CIA’s black‐flag waving contras were red. Since then, it has struggled to work its way out of the subsequent morass imposed upon it by the sophisticated propaganda operation insisting that the American‐installed counter‐revolutionaries in the former socialist‐world and their supposedly multipolar allies were, in fact, our only hope. It is time for a final reckoning with this ludicrous and poisonous nonsense. It is time to stop tolerating it, humouring it, or treating it as merely naive or confused. For 15 months straight Empire engaged in wanton genocide as the whole world watched on. The supposedly ascendant multipolar titans not only refused to hinder this in any fashion: they actively aided and abetted it, provided it diplomatic cover, and continued to trade with all its major executors. Contrast this with the approach of the wretched of the earth, the victims of years or decades of imperialist assault in Lebanon or Yemen, working with unfathomably limited means and against inimaginable constraints. Consider how all the awesome »productive forces« and means of warfare in the hands of Xi, Putin, or Lula could not be mobilized to even deliver aid to the Palestinian people. Witness how these »good cops« of the international order then engaged in the most treacherous betrayal of Syria, handing it over to the West after keeping it on a leash and slowly starving it dead for years.
How can any sincere comrade now fail to see that the multipolar scam and its media running dogs are nothing but a tremendous vice clamped onto the global forces of resistance. The willful ignorance of the BRICS‐heads is not merely a trap for potentially progressive forces in the imperial core: they play a key role in the global machinery of disorientation which breaks the back of resistance everywhere. Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine — these countries needed and need concrete practical solidarity. Yet all attempts to establish the channels which could make this possible are ceaselessly corralled into the malign pseudo‐opposition of this ludicrous myth. Everywhere the real revolutionary potentials of the global masses are evacuated and then grossly affixed to their very enemies. The architects of their real defeat are made to figure as a fantastic realization of their liberation in the spectacle.
We remain convinced, however, that any genuine struggle towards liberation, working from any parameters, will invariably begin to revolve around its own true sun and towards the liberating truth. Thus in full knowledge of the limitations of their supposed allies, on October 7th, 2023, the Palestinian resistance forces, under the leadership of Hamas, launched a stunning operation on their own initiative and without any potentially compromising coordination. In doing so, they ascended on high in their para gliders, soaring over the walls of the Gaza Ghetto, and showed the entire world that captivity could be led captive — that the enslavers and exploiters who hold us, virtually all humanity, in bondage, can be overthrown. They did so with the most limited technological means, without Putin or Xi, without Oreshniks or even scuds. The overwhelming majority of humanity saw in their concrete praxis the signs of their own liberation. For everything that lives is holy, everything that moves is red, life delights in life and will, we have no doubt, scorn once and for all the craven agents of Empire.
Wherefore he saith: Ascending on high,
he led captivity captive; he gave gifts to men.
Now that he ascended, what is it,
but because he also descended first
into the lower parts of the earth?
Ephesians 4:8 – 9
References
2 As quoted in Noel Bamen’s »Fifteen common Myths about Hamas — and why we must fight against its Ban!« https://magma-magazin.su/2024/08/noel-bamen/fifteen-common-myths-about-hamas-and-why-we-must-fight-against-its-ban/
3 Nazim Hikmet, »The Enemies.« https://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv8n1/hikmet.htm
4 Freie Linke Zukunft, »Fascism is Back.« https://freie-linke-zukunft.org/fascism-is-back-onwards-to-the-struggle/
5 See Wesley Clark’s famous remarks in »Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid: »I Think About It Every Day«, https://www.democracynow.org/2007/3/2/gen_wesley_clark_weighs_presidential_bid
6 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Ch. 1 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
7 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Ch. 4., https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch04.htm
8 Freie Linke Zukunft, »To the Pro‐Lockdown‐Left: What Have You.« Achieved?, https://magma-magazin.su/2023/06/freie-linke-zukunft/to-the-pro-lockdown-left-what-has-your-course-achieved/
9 See ibid. and T. Mohr, »Virology as Ideology«, https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t‑mohr/virology-as-ideology-a-critique-of-ruling-class-pseudoscience-part-1-science-and-class-society/; https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t‑mohr/virology-as-ideology-part-2-the-military-academic-industrial-medico-scientific-complex-maims/; https://magma-magazin.su/2023/02/t‑mohr/virology-as-ideology-a-critique-of-ruling-class-pseudoscience-part-3-virology-as-ideology/
10 Noel Bamen’s »Fifteen common Myths about Hamas — and why we must fight against its Ban!« provides key contextualization of the issue https://magma-magazin.su/2024/08/noel-bamen/fifteen-common-myths-about-hamas-and-why-we-must-fight-against-its-ban/
11 Aspects of India’s Economy, »No. 35: The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum (September 2003)« https://oldsite.rupe-india.org/35/contents.html
12 G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction To Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Pg. 151, https://archive.org/details/g.-e.-m.-anscombe-an-introduction-to-wittgenstein-s-tractatus
13 https://magma-magazin.su/2023/04/t‑mohr/multipolarism-is-neo-kautskyism-on-real-denazification-and-its-enemies/
14 See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story; https://qz.com/553496/a‑us-prison-in-iraq-dubbed-jihadi-university-gave-birth-to-the-islamic-state
15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L‑_1EjvVTDM; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6VKYqhUj9g; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3MHRrF1zfk
16 https://rupeindia.wordpress.com/2024/12/29/the-jackals-celebration/
17 https://www.ukcolumn.org/series/syria
Image: Zhang Ruji (张汝济) and Sha Gengsi (沙更思) 1958. The poster refers to the »Lebanon Crisis« of 1958. The wolf wears a hat with 美帝 – (imperialist) America (https://chineseposters.net/)