Kenny Lake, July 2025

Return of the boom bap

For about two decades, anti-imperialism, especially with any mass character, was largely absent from the political scene in the US. The militant protests against capitalist globalization of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which caused great chaos outside meetings of the WTO, the IMF and World Bank, and other institutions of imperialist governance and finance, came to an end in the post-9/11 climate of intensified repression. Anarchist and anarchist-leaning protesters were never able to think beyond the tactics of decentralized militancy that had been briefly successful against phalanxes of riot police. As that movement was receding, mass protests against the Iraq War gave rise to an anti-imperialist contingent, especially among youth who were not beholden to electoral anti-war politics. But by the time Bush Jr. started his second term, most anti-war protesters had given up, abandoning the masses in Iraq and Afghanistan to be slaughtered under US military occupation.

Persistence and perseverance in anti-imperialist politics has, unfortunately, only been the preserve of a few in the US. From the mid-2000s until recently, while there have been waves of mass protests against various injustices, the crimes of US imperialism abroad did not make the cut as a target of mass protest, and the rise of “privilege” discourse never included the parasitism of living in an imperialist country. That’s not to say there weren’t pockets of opposition to “war on terror” justified international torture, Obama-era drone strikes, and US interventions in countries around the world, as well as occasional bursts of protest against the actions of US imperialism abroad. But, unfortunately, none of those pockets of opposition gained a mass following and none of those bursts of protest lasted much beyond a weekend. The one more persistent anti-imperialist politics that did gain strength over the last decade was college student activism for Palestine, which created public opinion among a new generation against the legitimacy of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and in favor of the right of Palestinian people to resist that occupation.

It took the October 7^th, 2023 Al-Aqsa flood—a brilliantly planned and heroically executed military assault against the state of Israel that broke through its apartheid walls—to bring mass anti-imperialist politics and protest back on the agenda in the US. The protest movement against the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza that followed the Hamas-led Al-Aqsa flood has went through many twists and turns, struggling to break out of the confines of “safety politics”¹ set by opportunist misleadership and postmodernist petty-bourgeois hegemony, and then struggling to maintain militancy with a mass character amid a sophisticated wave of repression. Since Going Against the Tide has already summed up those twists and turns,² in what follows, I will focus not on the tactical questions of the mass movement (safety politics vs. stepping out of bounds, small group “actionism” vs. militancy with a mass character, etc.), but instead on some of the bigger ideological, political, and strategic questions raised by the return of anti-imperialist politics to the US political scene.

The Al-Aqsa flood and subsequent resistance in Gaza to Israeli military invasion, the success of the Houthi rebels against US-Saudi war of aggression and their firm stand with Palestine, Hezbollah and Iran’s involvement with the Palestinian struggle, and the Kurdish liberation struggle’s victories within the Syrian civil war all raise the question of how revolutionaries in the imperialist countries should relate to national liberation struggles around the world. There’s good reason to take heart and inspiration from people in oppressed nations, from Palestine to Yemen, from Kurdistan to the Philippines, taking up arms to assert their right to self-determination against the imperialist order. Furthermore, there’s a deep responsibility—moral, political, and ideological—that people living in the US have to stand with those fighting for their liberation around the world, especially but not only when that fight is against US imperialism. But all too often, that inspiration and sense of responsibility doesn’t go much further than cheering for the “good guys” abroad, for the ones doing the real fighting against imperialism, even if that cheering sometimes takes militant forms.

The question of how we’re going to overthrow imperialism from within the belly of the beast goes unanswered, in large part because that question can only be answered by relying on the masses within the US, and most expressions of anti-imperialist politics within imperialist countries would rather leave it to people outside imperialist countries to overthrow imperialism. The path to an answer must necessarily address the numerous attempts to evade the question that presently hold back or weigh down many people in imperialist countries who genuinely want to stand with liberation struggles around the world from fulfilling their first and foremost internationalist obligation of making revolution in their own country.

Anarchists discover Kurdistan (after failed or forgotten expeditions to Chiapas)

Amid the civil war in Syria sparked by a mass uprising against the Assad government, the Kurdish-led liberation of the Rojava region offered the hope of an egalitarian future along anarchist lines (which they called democratic confederalism). That hope stood out all the more in contrast to the Assad government’s brutality against the masses in Syria, the reactionary leadership of many of the forces fighting the Assad government, the role of inter-imperialist rivalry in the civil war (including military actions by the US and Russia), and Daesh/ISIS’s genocidal drive to carve out a theocratic state in places where the Assad government could not maintain its power. The Kurdish liberation forces that heroically fought Daesh/ISIS and carved out liberated territory in Rojava were hands down the best army in the field during the Syrian civil war, with roots in the decades-long Kurdish national liberation struggle led by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) across Kurdistan (an oppressed nation without a state, whose historic homeland stretches across Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran). In addition to beating back Daesh/ISIS and saving many lives against its onslaught, the PYD (the Democratic Union Party, the organization leading the Kurdish struggle in Syria) established new, liberatory social relations and political organization in Rojava, involving the masses in radically transforming their ways of life, with far greater equality between women and men, for example.

For purported anti-imperialists in imperialist countries, support or condemnation of the Kurdish liberation forces leading the struggle in Rojava was determined by ideological positioning rather than principled support for national liberation struggles and critical analysis of their leadership and practice. On one end was the axis of idiocy, a conglomeration of political forces and individuals I shall return to in greater detail below. For now, suffice it to say that the axis of idiocy is defined by its insistence that anyone in conflict with US imperialism must be progressive or anti-imperialist. In the context of Syria, this meant that the Assad government—which the US bourgeoisie was actively working to make collapse through sanctions, military action, and support for some of the forces fighting against it during the civil war—was the “good guys,” while the PYD and the liberated territory in Rojava were bad because they got limited military and political support from the US. On the other end was anarchists and others around the world who took inspiration from the radical transformations going on in Rojava and supported the Kurdish liberation forces against the Assad government and in the fight against Daesh/ISIS.

To their credit, many anarchists, especially in Europe and to a lesser degree in the US, took concrete measures to support Rojava, with some traveling to Rojava and joining the PYD-led military efforts in units of foreign volunteers. Several died fighting alongside the forces of Kurdish liberation, making the ultimate sacrifice. Meanwhile, members of the axis of idiocy either pretended Rojava didn’t exist or condemned it, happy to betray the Kurdish masses and their struggle for liberation in order to posture as more against US imperialism than the anarchists.

In contrast to the axis of idiocy, anarchist support for the Kurdish liberation struggle was clearly the correct moral and political position in the context of the Syrian civil war and given the oppression of the Kurdish nation by the ruling class in Syria. However, the anarchist position was mired by an ideological opportunism. The PKK had been leading a just, armed national liberation struggle, principally in Turkey, since 1984. Yet it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find any anarchist statement or action in support of that struggle until after its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, began advocating democratic confederalism as the strategic goal and organizing principle of the Kurdish national liberation struggle after he was imprisoned by the Turkish government and started reading Murray Bookchin and other anarchist theory.

For anarchists in imperialist countries, the Kurdish liberation forces became “good guys” to root for after (1) they turned towards anarchism and (2) they had an opportunity due to the Syrian civil war to carve out liberated territory and run it along anarchist lines. There’s nothing inherently wrong with prioritizing your ideological compatriots around the world in which struggles you decide to single out for support—the Maoist tradition did exactly that in relation to the revolutionary people’s wars in Peru and then Nepal from the 1980s through the early 2000s. But the Maoist tradition during that time, finding its most advanced international expression in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, made a point of supporting, in principle and through propaganda, any and all just struggles for liberation, from Kurdistan to Chiapas to South Africa, even while critiquing the ideological and political line leading those struggles.³ The anarchist tradition, by contrast, failed to support the Kurdish liberation struggle until that struggle adopted anarchism.

Beyond ideological opportunism, anarchist cheerleading for Rojava has also been mired by a decidedly uncritical analytical approach, offering ecstatic praise for the radical transformations going on in Rojava to the point of painting it as a heavenly kingdom devoid of contradictions or weaknesses other than the external threat posed by the Assad government and reactionary armed forces involved in the civil war.⁴ Perhaps even more difficult than finding anarchist support for the Kurdish national liberation struggle before Rojava became a success story is finding anarchist criticism of the leadership of that struggle since Rojava was liberated. Anarchist supporters of Rojava abroad never seemed bugged by the role of US political and military support for the PYD, explaining it away as a tactical necessity without any nuanced explanation of its potential pitfalls and the negative political impact that fighting alongside US special forces might have. Anarchists never seemed to be bothered by the worship of Öcalan within the Kurdish liberation movement, where Öcalan’s political turns seemed to command uncritical obedience and where Öcalan worship rivaled if not surpassed the “cult of the individual” that anarchists so detest when that individual was Lenin, Stalin, or Mao. As Öcalan moved in increasingly disturbing political directions, becoming a sort-of-apologist for Israel under the premise of democracy vs. authoritarianism and using democratic confederalism as a justification for capitulation to the Turkish ruling class, anarchist criticism was near non-existent.

Consequently, with Öcalan having recently convinced the PKK to lay down its arms, dissolve itself as a political/organizational entity, and enter the “democratic process” in Turkey, and with the PYD seeking accommodation with the al-Sharaa/Julani government and integration of its military force with it (at the time of this writing), the anarchists who looked to Rojava with great hope are left without an answer to the capitulation of their “good guys.” Finding such an answer requires not a relabeling of those good guys as bad guys (the axis of idiocy’s intellectual method), but a critical analysis of the ideology, politics, and strategy of the Kurdish liberation movement and the twists and turns in the Syrian civil war. Such a critical analysis is not only important for understanding what went wrong with the Kurdish liberation struggle, but also for how we forge ahead in the revolutionary struggle in our own countries. In other words, if we lack the analytical capacity to understand and criticize the reasons for capitulation by comrades elsewhere, especially in concentration points of revolutionary struggle such as Rojava, we’re doomed to repeat their errors in our own contexts, or, more likely, never get as far as they did to begin with.

Sadly, the inability of anarchists to see the capitulation coming in Kurdistan and analyze its causes is a repeat of the same in relation to Chiapas, Mexico. In the 1990s, anarchists, including many in the US, rightly took inspiration from the 1994 Zapatista uprising that mobilized Mayan peasants in Chiapas to refuse to go along with global capitalism’s designs on their land and livelihoods, via NAFTA, and instead develop radical new social relations in a struggle for autonomy from the Mexican bourgeois order. Many an anarchist from the US and elsewhere traveled to Chiapas in the 1990s to witness the Zapatista struggle firsthand and learn from the masses, and getting there was a bit easier than making your way to Rojava amid civil war. Those anarchists and others inspired by the revolutionary struggle in Chiapas came back transformed, humbled from seeing people in difficult conditions of intense poverty and oppression taking power (sorry, autonomy) into their hands, and eager to support the struggle in Chiapas any way they could.

As with Rojava, however, anarchists failed in relation to Chiapas in two ways. (1) They failed to criticize the Zapatista leadership when it decided the best it could do was carve out a bit of autonomy from the Mexican state and seek accommodation with the Mexican bourgeois order, with Zapatista leaders appealing to the Mexican Congress in 2001 for Indigenous rights. (2) They failed to apply the same spirit of learning from the masses in Chiapas to the exploited and oppressed in their own countries, or to popularize the Zapatista struggle among the masses in their own countries. That failure had much to do with the anarchist view of leadership as being a hierarchical imposition on the masses (unless of course you put the prefix “sub” in front of “comandante”) rather than being necessary to bring forward the revolutionary potential of the masses. But it also had to do with a view of the masses in revolutionary struggle as something to cheer on from a distance rather than get in the middle of yourself in your own context.

As righteous and productive as support was, from anarchists in imperialist countries, for the struggles in Chiapas in the 1990s and Rojava in the 2010s and early 2020s, it never quite translated into building a revolutionary movement back home in the imperialist countries. In relation to Chiapas, it certainly gave a good push to those who went on to go up against riot police in determined efforts to shut down summits of the WTO, IMF, World Bank, FTAA, TABD, etc. from late 1999 through the early 2000s. But the most important lesson of Chiapas and Rojava—the way that (anarchist-leaning) revolutionaries mobilized the masses in revolutionary struggle—eluded the cheerleaders for Chiapas and Rojava in imperialist countries.

Student protesters and young Leftists discover Hamas (but the tenured professors who taught them postcolonial theory in college get off the boat)

Like Rojava, the October 7^th, 2023 Al-Aqsa flood and the subsequent Hamas-led guerrilla fighter resistance to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has been, rightfully, an inspiration to anti-imperialists around the world. In the US, many of the student protesters and young Leftists who have been at the forefront of the mass movement against the US-Israel genocidal war have seen fit to make support for the Palestinian resistance a dividing line within the protest movement. Ordinarily, it is a good thing when student and youth protest movements take a radical position in support of anti-imperialist armed struggle and liberation movements. In this instance, it still sort of was, at least formally speaking, but it was mired by the Leftist culture of posturing, the postmodernist ideology that guided it, the failure to make a critical analysis of the resistance forces, and the strategic stupidity of failing to distinguish between correct broad dividing lines for the mass movement (being against the genocide and the US’s role in it) vs. the independent line of radical and revolutionary forces to be argued for within that mass movement.

Unfortunately, it has to be said that in the US, slogans and political positions along the lines of “support the Palestinian resistance” have overwhelmingly been used for performative purposes—to chase clout on social media, to build a career in the Left, and to posture as more radical than others—rather than to actually create public opinion in favor of the Palestinian resistance and follow its example. At the worst end, you have opportunist organizations holding protests that entirely stay within the bounds of what’s acceptable to the ruling class and the police monitoring the protests while chanting slogans, holding banners, and making speeches cheerleading the Palestinian resistance. Then you have Leftists too inept to become competent opportunists who attempt to position themselves as more radical than competent opportunists by way of performative gestures, such as waving the flags of Hezbollah or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, while largely sticking within the bounds of acceptable protest. These and other forms of posturing are indicative of the ideological hegemony, within the protest movement, of the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie, a reactionary class that views discursive action (in this case, rhetorical support for the Palestinian resistance) as principal over material practice.

Mastery of discursive action, especially expertise in posturing as more radical than others, is a skill that student protesters and young Leftists learn in college and practice on social media. In this instance, inculcation in postcolonial theory—a reactionary discourse, created by postmodernist professional intellectuals working in imperialist countries, whose purpose was to ideologically supplant revolutionary nationalism and communism⁵—in college classes provided the discursive foundation for cheerleading the chosen good guys (the Palestinian resistance). The reactionary nature of the postcolonial theory that ideologically guided student protesters was obfuscated, however, for two reasons. (1) In the case of Palestine, Hamas and other resistance forces are leading an anticolonial struggle, and so the postmodernist petty-bourgeoisie’s obsession with settlers and colonialism—forms of imperialism that are things of the past in most of the world—applies. The Palestinian resistance fighters are, indeed, the anticolonial good guys, and Israel is most certainly the settler-colonial bad guys. (2) Since October 7^th, 2023, the tenured professors who taught their students postcolonial theory largely stayed silent or on the sidelines of the most important moral and political question in the world, especially on the matter of supporting the Palestinian resistance. Those professors got off the “decolonize” bandwagon when anticolonial resistance struck blows against imperialism. This could have but did not clarify the reactionary, anti-masses nature of postcolonial theory due to the culture of posturing. Rather than examining the philosophical roots of their postcolonial professors’ failure to stand with the Palestinian resistance, student protesters by and large were happy to show how much more they were committed to postmodernist decolonization discourse than were the professors who taught them that discourse.

As student protesters and young Leftists (the latter essentially being a-few-years-older versions of the former) found their good guys to cheer for, they largely failed to deepen their understanding of those good guys via historical study and critical analysis. The daring actions of Palestinian resistance fighters were rightfully celebrated and Hamas’s contemporary statements were shared on social media. Yet few among the protesters bothered to study the history and politics of the various liberation forces throughout the longstanding Palestinian liberation struggle. The few that did largely did so for performative purposes, to show off their great knowledge and/or build their brand by identifying with their chosen Palestinian faction rather than to extract and apply the important political lessons. The point of “support the Palestinian resistance” never went much beyond finding your good guys to cheer for.

Beginning in the First Intifada (1987–1993), Hamas emerged as the primary Palestinian resistance force and the primary leadership of the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Its refusal of capitulation stood out starkly after Fatah, the leading force in the Palestine Liberation Organization, sold out with the Oslo Accords and went on to become a corrupt force collaborating with Israel to repress the Palestinian people and demand their acceptance of capitulation. Ever since Hamas became the governing force in Gaza in 2006–7 and faced a vicious Israeli blockade and diplomatic isolation, it has been in a tremendously difficult position. To its great credit, Hamas has continued to refuse capitulation and further distinguished itself from Fatah by being impervious to corruption. It has to be acknowledged, against longstanding assumptions among communists that secular democratic forces are inherently better than ones rooted in religious devotion, that Hamas’s religious ideology is an important source of its steadfastness and incorruptibility. But it also has to be acknowledged, from a communist standpoint, that Hamas’s ideological and political intent has always been a liberated Palestine with a sort of charitable capitalism rather than a socialist state, and that while Hamas has certainly mobilized the Palestinian masses in resistance, there are qualitative limits to its reliance on and leadership of the masses (for example, women are certainly part of the struggle, but not as guerrilla fighters or strategic commanders). Neither those acknowledgments nor any deeper critical evaluations of Hamas’s ideology and politics are reasons not to recognize it as a steadfast political force leading a righteous national liberation struggle and making great sacrifices to do so. And while, for communists, the goal of our revolutionary activity is to establish the socialist transition to communism, in any national liberation struggle it’s up to the participants to decide what kind of society to build after their victory (that’s what self-determination means), whatever our feelings about that kind of society (which we’re allowed to express in the form of critical analysis).

My point here is not to provide a comprehensive evaluation of Hamas as a political force, but to draw attention to the need for revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, wherever we find ourselves, to take a principled stand in support of national liberation struggles while critically evaluating the forces leading those struggles. In other words, not just cheering for the good guys, who will never be perfect. Sometimes they’ll be far from perfect, and we can deal with that if we’re being dialectical rather than assuming the role of cheerleader for our chosen good guys. The inability to deal with that by most of the 1960s and 70s generation of revolutionaries meant that when the leadership of successful national liberation struggles in many parts of the world sold out, became a new bourgeoisie, and sought accommodation with imperialism—from Vietnam to Algeria to Zimbabwe—their cheerleaders abroad went along uncritically or became jaded and withdrew from the game. The Palestinian resistance certainly needs to be upheld, and the bourgeois portrayal of Hamas as religious fundamentalist fanatics needs to be repudiated, but not at the expense of our own ability to think critically about the right side of the struggle.

Finally, while the Palestinian resistance needs to be upheld by anti-imperialists, there’s a non-antagonistic contradiction between that correct moral and political position and the question of how to bring forward the broadest possible resistance against the genocide in Gaza, including (especially in the US context) US imperialism’s material and political support for that genocide. Most of the performative “support the resistance” crowd failed to recognize, let alone work through, that contradiction, instead seeking self-aggrandizement through political purity tests, a thoroughly postmodernist ideological practice. Rather than trying to win over more people who were horrified by the genocide to their position through patient and persistent political work, they preferred to condemn people who opposed the genocide but did not (rhetorically) “support the resistance.” There’s certainly a difficult tension involved in propagating and promoting a thoroughly anti-imperialist politics that includes supporting the Palestinian resistance and mobilizing everyone opposed to the genocide in the broadest possible mass movement. Err in one direction and you wind up handing over leadership of the movement to chickenshit reformists and/or sowing illusions about the role of this or that Democrat politician. Err in another direction and you alienate the genuine anti-imperialist contingent from the broader mass of people and array of political forces who could be brought along in a more radical direction, at least in a support capacity. The point is to have the strategic and tactical finesse to work our way through this contradiction, which posturing will never accomplish.⁶

Perhaps a recently relevant example of how to think about this strategic and tactical finesse would be helpful to consider. Miss Rachel, in her capacity as an educator of, supreme spiritual connector⁷ with, and advocate for children, has a moral and a professional obligation to oppose the genocide in Gaza, to speak out against Israel’s massacre and starvation of children. To her great credit, Miss Rachel has been fulfilling that obligation in spite of the reactionary backlash. She does not, however, have a political or professional obligation to take a position on the Palestinian resistance. Furthermore, if Miss Rachel were organizationally part of the mass movement against the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza, the correct role for her in a strategic division of labor would be to focus on building the broadest possible opposition to the genocide and providing a moral compass to that opposition, not to draw dividing lines around supporting the Palestinian resistance. The latter would, of course, be a political conversation to have with her in private, but not a gut check to her moral stand. Do we have the strategic smarts to have that conversation, and to figure out how to help Miss Rachel make the best contribution possible to the mass movement against the genocide from her position (political, professional, and spiritual)? Certainly not if we’re content to be cheerleaders for the resistance rather than strategic leaders in the struggle to overthrow imperialism.

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Why is a righteous and correct political position—support the Palestinian resistance—being subjected to so much critical scrutiny here? Isn’t it at minimum out of place to do so when that Palestinian resistance has fought heroically against a vicious enemy intent on annihilating it with a virtually unlimited supply (courtesy of US imperialism) of the most destructive weaponry available? These are fair questions, although the people most likely to ask them publicly are the very ones evoking “support the Palestinian resistance” for performative, self-serving purposes (clout-chasing, activist career climbing, etc.). The answer is that our concern, if we are to overthrow imperialism, must not be limited to what’s a correct position to take (especially rhetorically rather than in action). Instead, our focus must be where we are going with that position, how we are moving ourselves and the masses with it. And the student protesters and young Leftists at the forefront of the mass movement against the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza have by and large failed to use that position, those “support the Palestinian resistance” politics, to develop themselves as steadfast revolutionaries and to bring forward the masses as a social base for anti-imperialism within the belly of the beast. So at minimum, if we’re for real about overthrowing imperialism, we have to ask why the proliferation of professed support for the Palestinian resistance among student protesters and young Leftists has not been transformative towards revolutionary objectives—either for the ones championing the Palestinian resistance or for the masses more broadly.

I believe the answer lies in the positioning, by those student protesters and young Leftists, as cheerleaders for the good guys—in this case the Palestinian resistance—in ways that were fundamentally driven by self-serving ideological purposes (feeling good about oneself for loudly espousing the most radical position). For few of them decided to follow the example of the Palestinian resistance, both in terms of being willing to sacrifice it all to fight the enemy or in terms of mobilizing the masses to effectively fight that enemy. Outside of the brief burst of militancy that was the Spring 2024 student encampment movement, which itself was quite a mixed bag of righteous determination in the face of repression, capitulation justified by safety politics, and postmodernist carnivalesque, the exceptions that could be argued for generally fall within what’s been called the actionist trend. The latter consists of those who seek to follow the example of the Palestinian resistance by taking small-group militant actions, such as sabotaging or vandalizing symbols and infrastructure of the war machine. Laudable as these actions are, they don’t answer how to bring the masses forward as a militant anti-imperialist force or try to take up the myriad tasks that are required to do so (especially the patient, persistent work of convincing those masses to stand with and sacrifice for the people of Palestine). The actionists have moved beyond cheerleading with rhetoric to cheerleading with action, but no further than that.

(It should go without saying that my critique of actionist politics in no way means we should not defend actionists when they face repression, such as the British government banning Palestine Action under anti-terrorism laws. Furthermore, it’s important to acknowledge that actionists in Europe are generally qualitatively better than the actionists in the US that I am describing above. The former draw on a longer history of small-group militant actions, such as environmentalist activism in the 1990s, have been more willing to face prison time (albeit lesser sentences than they would face in the US), and display greater strategic and tactical smarts, whereas as the latter are often quite stupid and performative. A salient example of these differences is the defiance in the face of the ban on Palestine Action in Britain vs. the way that Samidoun chapters in the US quickly disbanded when threatened with legal repression, with barely any manifestations of protest by actionists or Samidoun members in the US beyond a few social media statements.)

The axis of idiocy discovers foreign bourgeoisies (but calls them developmentalists)

Failing to move beyond cheerleading with rhetoric and taking a reactionary turn with that rhetoric by cheering not just for national liberation movements but also for reactionary bourgeois governments who happen to be in conflict with US imperialism is what can best be described as the axis of idiocy. This is a loose conglomeration of political forces and individuals, some of which work together, some of which hate each other, that, whatever differences and rivalries among them, have in common a betrayal of the masses in favor of praise for the ruling classes and bourgeois governments of Iran, Russia, China, Syria before the fall of Assad, and elsewhere, justified with analysis and rhetoric that is utterly idiotic. The axis of idiocy (focusing mostly on its US contingent) includes publications such as Monthly Review and Black Agenda Report (both of which used to be decent publications); political organizations such as PSL (Party of Stupid Leftists), FRSO (Fucking Revisionists Should be Obliterated), Black Alliance for Peace, Palestinian Youth Movement (at least its US contingent), and the NYC People’s Forum (more accurately, the opportunists’ forum); “Marxist” intellectuals such as Max Ajl, Radhika Desai, Gabriel Rockhill, and Vijay Prashad; and journalists such as Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Rania Khalek. These fools, and others like them, view the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and other bourgeoisies as great saviors, becoming cheerleaders for foreign reactionaries in their conflicts with US imperialism.

The axis of idiocy’s logic, if it can be called that, is that the governments they praise or justify are pursuing a path of development outside US imperialist domination, so they must be supported. Some members of the axis of idiocy call that path of development socialism or suggest it could pave the way for socialism, while others are more muted in their praise for China and Russia. Either way, none of them deal with the question of development for whom and for what except to point to an infrastructure project here or there with benefits for some sections of the people. Furthermore, none of them deals with the glaring contradiction that there is a billionaire class, in both Russia and China, with unbridled power that has benefited greatly from the policies of Putin, Xi, and their predecessors. Profit and capital accumulation are clearly in command, and not only is the axis of idiocy on the side of those billionaires, they are celebrating the end of the socialist transition to communism and the restoration of capitalism (in the Soviet Union beginning in 1956 and in China beginning in 1976) that paved the way for those billionaires with the exploitation and repression of the masses. As far as Russia and China’s imperialist roles internationally, especially in Africa, is concerned, the axis of idiocy is on the side of land grabs, usury, labor exploitation, military intervention, and war of aggression so long as it’s not US imperialism doing it.

The axis of idiocy not only justifies imperialist moves by Russia and China but views their international role as progressive, even anti-imperialist. A contradiction they have yet to answer for is why neither Russia nor China took any meaningful action to stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, instead just making some mild rhetorical bluster at the UN or in other international forums. Could that fact have something to do with China’s lucrative trade with Israel, and both the Russian and Chinese bourgeoisie’s class interest in maintaining the status quo, and oil flow and trade flow, in and through the Middle East? Perhaps an even more glaring contradiction with the axis of idiocy’s logic is Russia and China’s complete inaction against Israel’s June war, and the US’s military strike, on Iran, despite Russia’s diplomatic and strategic alliance with Iran and China’s growing trade infrastructure with Iran. Russia and China neither came to Iran’s material or military defense nor severed ties with Israel (let alone attacked Israel—a move that would have been both justified and extremely popular internationally). Tell us, axis of idiocy, are these the great adversaries of US imperialism and defenders of the people of the world you would have us believe them to be?

Where things get more complicated but no less clear is with Iran. The contemporary Iranian bourgeoisie’s power grew from the 1979 revolution—a revolution of the masses against the US and Britain-backed Shah, in which religious fundamentalist forces came to power and maintained feudal relations in the countryside while facilitating capitalist development less subordinated to foreign powers. The fact that national bourgeois power can come from a popular revolution and then betray the masses who made that revolution should come as no surprise to anyone with an ounce of genuine Marxism in their brain or who has taken an honest look at the history of nationalist movements from early-nineteenth-century Latin America to nineteenth-century Europe to mid-twentieth-century Africa and Asia. The Iranian bourgeoisie—new and old—that consolidated power in the 1980s did so in the face of international isolation by US-led imperialism, and kept up the anti-imperialist rhetoric for reasons of political necessity and popular legitimacy (again, not a surprise to anyone with a little Marxism or an honest look at world history).

Beginning in the 2000s, that bourgeoisie saw an opportunity, with US imperialism’s failures in Iraq and the growth of powerful armed resistance movements and wars in the region, and Russia and China’s imperialist moves, to break out of isolation and become a regional power. In Iraq, the Iranian government supported armed resistance against the US military occupation and fostered allies in the elected Iraqi government. Iran became a political ally and, when possible, supplier of weaponry to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis (the popular name of Ansar Allah)—a role that served Iranian bourgeois interests of striking blows against its chief adversaries in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia. And in Syria, the Iranian bourgeoisie came to the rescue of its chief regional ally in power, the Assad government, propping it up against both righteous and reactionary rebellion and earning popularity for its role in helping defeat Daesh/ISIS.

What’s complicated here is that in most of the above examples, Iran was on the right side in conflicts against US imperialism and its regional allies, and in some of those examples Iran was on the side of genuine liberation movements. What’s clear is that the Iranian government would only enter into or stay in those conflicts so long as it served its bourgeoisie’s class power, and as soon as shit got too hot, as soon as that bourgeois class power was at risk, the Iranian government backed out, leaving Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis to more or less fend for themselves. Simply put, for a couple decades, the Iranian bourgeoisie played US imperialism’s proxy war playbook better than the US, but once that playbook stopped working (due to Israel’s genocidal drive in Gaza and attacks on Lebanon, its flow of weaponry from the US, and the political support or acquiescence it receives from the vast majority of bourgeois governments around the world, including Russia and China), it lost its maneuvering room and more or less abandoned (practically, if not rhetorically) those it sought to use as proxies. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, to anyone with a little Marxism or honest understanding of world history, it should come as no surprise that a rising bourgeois power would support national liberation movements that, if successful, would weaken that rising bourgeois power’s rivals, regional and international.

Since Israel’s war on Iran and the Iranian bourgeoisie’s failure to catch the steadfast spirit of the Palestinian people it purportedly supports, ideologues of the axis of idiocy have rushed to double down on their support for the Iranian bourgeoisie. “Marxist” intellectual Max Ajl is among those ideologues, and his July 2^nd essay “Peoples and Regimes: Anti-Imperialism and the Islamic Republic of Iran” is worth spending some time refuting, as it is one of the more articulate but no less idiotic examples of the axis of idiocy’s line of thinking (if such idiocy can be called thinking). Ajl sets the stage for his argument by championing the bourgeois governments that the US and Israel have carried out wars and other actions against:

These [US-Israeli] wars seek to accelerate de-development and state collapse. They work to destroy sovereign states that lie outside the US security umbrella. States that can incarnate a desire for dignity, serve as vehicles and protective shields for liberation movements, and extend solidarity through arms, technology, vetoes, or peaceful trade routes to circumvent asphyxiating embargoes.⁸

While Ajl’s characterization of US imperialism’s strategic goals is largely accurate, his praise for the states (in this case, especially Iran) targeted by US imperialism is resoundingly devoid of class analysis, with a classless notion of development and state power guiding his evaluation. This line of thought gets even worse later in Ajl’s essay, where he rightfully criticizes postmodernist critiques of state power that present it, outside Western imperialist countries at least, as being an inherently oppressive, alien force to the masses, but wrongly presents state functions as standing above class rule and class interests. Ajl’s theoretical defense of a state that stands above classes (outside Western imperialist countries—an ironic inversion of those he’s arguing against) is in fact a defense of existing reactionary bourgeois class power in states that stand outside the US-led imperialist bloc. Since Ajl takes the theoretical work of Marx and Lenin seriously,⁹ he is well aware of their insistence that state power cannot stand above classes, cannot perform functions of economic development or national defense in ways that neutrally serve both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. If he wants to ignore what he knows, that’s his business, but if he chooses to do so, then he needs to stop using the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China when their state power was in the hands of the proletariat to bolster his argument, as he does in his July 2^nd essay. Stick to the contemporary reactionary states you’re stanning for, Max, so that it’s clear which side you’re on (Deng Xiaoping’s, not Mao Zedong’s, the bourgeoisie’s, not the masses’).

As for Ajl’s claim that the bourgeois states he champions can “incarnate a desire for dignity, serve as vehicles and protective shields for liberation movements, and extend solidarity through arms, technology, vetoes, or peaceful trade routes,” first off, as explained above, recent events have proven the Iranian, Russian, and Chinese states to only perform a fraction of Ajl’s fantasy so long as it benefits the bourgeoisie that dominates those states. That Ajl is arguing this at the very moment when the Iranian bourgeois state has shown its willingness to drop its “protective shield for liberation movements” rather than risk its bourgeois class power is all the more ridiculous. Even more disturbing than how out of touch with reality Ajl is, however, is the fact that he—and the entire axis of idiocy—insists that the “desire for dignity,” the struggle for liberation by the masses of exploited and oppressed people, comes from or depends on the benevolent force from above of a (bourgeois) state power rather than from the masses themselves taking history into their hands. That’s one reason why I’ll choose anarchists over the axis of idiocy any day of the week and twice on Sunday (another reason being that the anarchists will actually jump the police barricades at anti-imperialist protests, whereas the axis of idiocy not only won’t cross police barricades but probably put in a permit to request those police barricades).

In addition to Ajl’s opportunist presentation of the state, its military, and economic development standing above class rule and class interests is his opportunist presentation of available positions of opposition to take on the US-Israel war on Iran:

…as the US-Israeli attack against the Islamic Republic proceeded with overt US involvement, those opposing this aggression were divided into two camps.

One camp argued in defense of Iran’s right to self-determination and self-defense against imperial powers. It insists on the Iranian people’s right to choose their government as they see fit, resist predatory aggression, and calls for the US and Israel to immediately cease all military operations. Some within this camp went further, recognizing that Iran’s material support for regional resistances [sic] forces and technological, logistical, and military support for the regional asymmetric militia, sovereign states, and popular movements is liberatory and just.

Meanwhile, another camp – the military term is the correct one – argued for solidarity with an abstract, seldom-defined people. But never with the regime, never with the state, never with the Islamic Republic. They took a radical distance from the IRI military, the apparatus of governance, and any other polluted residue or container for Iranian-style practices: repression, authoritarianism, Islamic governance, sub-imperialism.¹⁰

Both of these two camps need to burned to the ground, for neither can articulate a genuine anti-imperialist politics that resolutely stands with the masses, in Iran or elsewhere, let alone contributes to the development of a revolutionary movement that overthrows US imperialism. The first camp is the axis of idiocy, whose only almost legitimate claim to be better than the second camp is its recognition that Iran has a right to defend itself against Israel’s war of aggression. But what makes that claim not truly legitimate is that the axis of idiocy does not extend the right of states to defend themselves against wars of aggression beyond its chosen good guy states—it opposes Ukraine’s right to do so—so it does not deserve the anti-imperialist points it desires for being technically right in the instance of Iran. The second camp presumably consists of those articulating a liberal Trotskyite, milquetoast “Marxist,” or condescending petty-bourgeois humanitarian anti-war position while being light apologists for US imperialism. What makes Ajl’s presentation of these two camps opportunist is that these are not the only options available, though admittedly better options are less available today than they were twenty years ago due to the decline of various revolutionary traditions and the unchecked growth of opportunism (i.e., the two camps Ajl presents as our options) in their place.

In contrast to Ajl’s two camps, the Maoist tradition has insisted on following the principle that it’s right to rebel against reactionaries, and yes, those reactionaries include the Iranian bourgeoisie and the state apparatus that serves it. The Maoist tradition is firm that the right to rebel belongs to the masses, not to exploiting classes—in other words, US imperialism or Israel is never justified in trying to topple a reactionary regime, and will only bring different, and worse, forms of oppression and exploitation to the masses living under that reactionary regime. In the case of Israel’s June war on Iran, a telling fact of both sides of this contradiction is that Israel’s strike on the notorious Evin prison purportedly leveled a cell block where a hundred transgender prisoners were held captive by the Iranian government for the crime of being trans, presumably killing those transgender prisoners.¹¹ Hey Max, care to explain that one?

The principle of it’s right to rebel against reactionaries is not difficult to articulate, live by, and put into practice strategically if love for the masses and hatred for oppressors—both the ones who imprison trans people and the ones who bomb them—is in your heart. Beginning in 1984 and for the twenty years of its existence, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) carried out those Maoist principles, consistently opposing US imperialism and (until its collapse) Soviet social-imperialism as the main and most powerful reactionaries on a world scale, while its contingent in Iran, the Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran) fought (including militarily) against the reactionaries in power in Iran by mobilizing the masses. Of course, the principle that it’s right to rebel against reactionaries is easier to uphold when rebellion is led by genuine communists, as it was in the revolutionary people’s wars in Peru and Nepal during the RIM’s existence, but that doesn’t mean we can’t uphold and popularize rebellions led by politics we disagree with, as the RIM did. Furthermore, beyond the RIM, other traditions, such as anarchist and revolutionary nationalist traditions, did far better than Ajl’s two camps at taking principled stands against US imperialism.¹² Since the decline or demise of those traditions, it falls to a new generation to reject the available “camps” and to build an anti-imperialist pole that takes a principled stand with the masses. Given that both of the camps Ajl describes are actively blocking the emergence of such a genuine anti-imperialist pole, they will have to be destroyed as part of that process, and not just politically.

Ajl and the axis of idiocy deny the masses the right to rebel under the rationale that the states they champion (Iran, Russia, China, Syria before the fall of Assad) represent the interests of the masses in their countries against the attempts of US imperialism to bring those masses under its domination. In his July 2^nd essay, Ajl uses the truth that US imperialism would like to remove those states to give itself free reign to exploit the people and resources of those countries, and to stop rival powers from contesting US imperialist hegemony, to justify his argument. He draws attention to the fact that US imperialism claims it is acting in the interests of those masses (“By separating ‘the regime’ from ‘the people,’ the US-Israeli propaganda justifies state collapse in the name of the people”¹³).

The truths that Ajl asserts, however, in no way change the fact that, as societies divided into antagonistic classes, with various forms of national oppression and patriarchy baked into their functioning, contemporary Russia, China, and Iran and Syria under Assad prove Mao’s truth that “where there is oppression, there is resistance.” For example, in Iran, from the Maoist-led 1982 armed uprising in Amol to the 2022 popular uprising against the oppression of women in response to the murder of Mahsa Amini by the Iranian repressive state apparatus, sections of the masses have resisted their oppressors. Sometimes, those rebels have had great clarity on the reactionary nature of US imperialism, and other times they have been held back by bourgeois-democratic illusions that made them susceptible to seeing the US as a potential ally in their struggle. The axis of idiocy seizes on instances of the latter to paint any and all resistance to its favored states as serving US imperialism, often going so far as to suggest that mass rebellions inconvenient for axis of idiocy ideology and politics are entirely caused by CIA manipulation.

Undoubtedly, US imperialism and its intelligence agencies seek to manipulate mass rebellions in countries not under US domination to affect regime change, but to reduce those mass rebellions to US imperialist manipulation is a laughable analytical approach. On a spiritual level, if you see masses of oppressed people or radical youth throwing down against riot police, whether they be students in Hong Kong armed with bows and arrows or women in Iran asserting their right to self-determination against mandatory hijab laws, then you do not have revolution in your soul. On an analytical level, if you condemn those rebellions while failing to make any class analysis of what gave rise to the mass discontent that fueled them, then you have no right to claim Marxism.

The axis of idiocy, most of whose members claim to be adherents to one form or another of Marxism, fits the definition of revisionism—revising the revolutionary heart out of Marxism—with embarrassing exactitude. They hate the masses and refuse to stand with the masses when they rebel against reactionaries. Both rhetorically and in practice, they distort and abandon core revolutionary principles of Marxism, such as the insistence that the state is always a dictatorship of one class over others, and they look for condescending saviors in the form of bourgeois governments.

One final theoretical note about the axis of idiocy demonstrates its distortion of the principle of the right of nations to self-determination. The axis of idiocy equates this right with the state sovereignty of the states it has deemed developmentalist or anti-imperialist (but not Ukraine, of course), and elevates that state sovereignty above the right of the masses in those nations to self-determination. This theoretical contortion slips by some genuine anti-imperialists because of the fact that US imperialism and its allies and junior partners are infringing on and/or seeking to obliterate the state sovereignty of those states (as in Israel’s June war on Iran and the US’s bombing of Iran).

An example that highlights the axis of idiocy’s theoretical fallacy is that in Syria since the the 2011 mass uprising, the sovereign state (the Assad government) was clearly in visible antagonistic contradiction with the vast majority of the masses of people, relying on a small minority and privileged section of the population to impose its sovereign rule over the masses. The expression of the right of self-determination of the masses in Syria, from that point on, meant overthrowing the existing sovereign state and choosing a new form of state (or, in the case of Rojava, democratic confederalism). That US imperialism also wanted to end the existing sovereign state for its own reactionary purposes does not alter that fact, though of course it complicates the struggle to realize self-determination at that historical juncture. The bottom line is that state sovereignty of the existing state in any given circumstance is not necessarily an expression of the right of the nation to self-determination, a fact that the axis of idiocy will readily acknowledge in some cases (e.g., regions of eastern Ukraine where sections of the population support Russian sovereignty over their territory) but adamantly refuse in others, even when mass rebellion makes it glaringly obvious.

Hamas, for its part, took a far better, more principled position on the Syrian civil war than did the axis of idiocy, despite the fact that doing so significantly hurt its maneuvering room. Hamas recognized at the beginning of the civil war that the overwhelming majority of the masses in Syria wanted to be rid of the Assad government and severed ties with that government, losing a political ally and a rear political operating base and causing friction with its other regional allies, Iran and Hezbollah, both of which defended the Assad government.¹⁴

Where Hamas leadership perhaps miscalculated was in its faith that the Iranian government and Hezbollah would respond to the daring Al-Aqsa flood by stepping more fully into battle against Israel. In the run-up to the Al-Aqsa flood, its chief strategic planner, Yahya Sinwar, gave the following optimistic pronouncement:

The masses of our people and our nation will rush across the borders, flowing like torrential floods to uproot your entity, and the resistance in the region, all the living forces, will rush to hit you with the utmost and most of their strength, God willing, and I am confident that the shape of the entire Middle East will become different from the Middle East in which we live.¹⁵

Whether these words were intended as strategic prediction, rousing rhetoric, or a call for assistance, we cannot know for sure, as Sinwar died heroically fighting Israel until his last breath. In any event, while Hamas and the Palestinian people have shown the path of steadfast struggle and heroic sacrifice (and the Houthis have followed their example despite their own isolation), the greatest challenge in the war of resistance against Israel has been the lack of internationalist support. The axis of idiocy’s favorite bourgeois governments have proven not to be the benevolent saviors from above that the axis of idiocy claims them to be, and the axis of idiocy’s protest actions have followed those government’s example: heavy on rhetoric, light on meaningful action. While Hamas and the Palestinian resistance fights on, the axis of idiocy and the reactionary bourgeois governments of Iran, Russia, and China it cheers for have proven their bankruptcy in the anti-imperialist struggle, and have proven to be enemies and opportunists that will need to be swept aside by the masses.

Not discovering the masses, from authentic Lin Biaoism to postmodernist and revisionist Lin Biaoism

The common thread across the three above examples—anarchist support for the Kurdish liberation struggle in Rojava, student protester and young Leftist “support the Palestinian resistance” politics and/or posturing, and the axis of idiocy’s championing of reactionary states in conflict with US imperialism—is picking a good guy to cheer for abroad while failing to figure out how to overthrow imperialism in one’s own country. The order I presented those examples in was not random, but a ranking from best to worst. Anarchist supporters of Rojava traveled there in significant numbers, some fighting and dying alongside their Kurdish ideological compatriots, going beyond cheerleading abroad to joining the battle. Student protesters and young Leftists sometimes stepped out in more militant directions in the protest movement against the US-Israel genocidal war, with a mix of genuine anti-imperialist resolve and posturing for radical positioning within a rotten postmodernist political culture online and in real life. The axis of idiocy’s actions against the Gaza war (which overlapped with those of student protesters and young Leftists), by contrast, never went beyond the police barricades (literally and metaphorically) and articulated a reactionary position of support for foreign bourgeoisies and the reactionary states that serve them in addition to their rhetorical support for the Palestinian resistance.

The entirety of that ranked order of present political forces, however, ranks far below their anti-imperialist predecessors of the late 1960s and 70s. In that revolutionary decade, contingents of anti-imperialists in imperialist countries, inspired by and seeking to support national liberation struggles and revolutionary movements raging in Vietnam, Palestine, and throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, decided to join their chosen good guys in armed struggle. Organizations such as the Weather Underground in the US, the Red Army Faction in West Germany, and the Japanese Red Army carried out bombings and (in the latter two cases) assassinations against the agents, infrastructure, and political symbols of imperialism right within the imperialist heartland. Some wound up killed or serving prison sentences for their revolutionary activity (big ups to Fusako Shigenobu). Their strategic outlook, however, was flawed in ways that divorced them from the masses.

That strategic outlook can probably best be described as Lin Biaoism. Lin Biao was a top leader in the Chinese Communist Party at the onset of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution who later proved to have his own designs on state power, which led to his death (by plane crash or assassination) in 1971. Before Lin Biao met the fate that hopefully awaits all counterrevolutionaries, he published an essay in 1965 titled Long Live the Victory of People’s War! in which, with much revolutionary bravado, he grafted Mao’s revolutionary military doctrine, protracted people’s war, of surrounding the countryside from the cities onto the world revolution. Lin imagined that national liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America would gradually surround the imperialist countries and eventually capture them for the international proletariat.

Many revolutionaries in imperialist countries at the time took the spirit of Lin Biao’s strategic conception of world revolution as license for a sort of armed rearguardism. They convinced themselves that the revolutionary seizure of power in their countries would have to await the successes of national liberation struggles in the oppressed countries, and until that day the best they could do was support those national liberation struggles by making trouble for the imperialists on their home turf. Under that thinking, they took heroic actions, but heroic actions that gave up, from the outset, on their ability to bring forward the masses of oppressed and exploited people as the force that could carry out the revolutionary seizure of power. At the end of the day, many of the best anti-imperialists of the 1960s generation in imperialist countries were armed cheerleaders for revolutionaries abroad.

Today’s cheerleaders have not had the audacity to take that step, for better or worse. Conceptually, they are carrying out a postmodernist or revisionist Lin Biaoism, expecting that someone somewhere else—whether Hamas, the Kurdish liberation forces in Rojava, or a benevolent foreign bourgeoisie—will bring liberation while they (at best) travel abroad to join them, (at mid) carry out militant but increasingly isolated protest actions at home, or (at worst) refuse militancy in favor of bullshit rhetoric. The postmodernist part of their Lin Biaoism is the posturing of it all, the way that for many of them discursive moral superiority and political purity is the end goal of their anti-imperialism. The revisionist side is the opportunist distortion of Marxist and anti-imperialist ideology, politics, and theoretical concepts in service of support for bourgeois governments and betrayal of the masses.

From authentic Lin Biaoism over fifty years ago to postmodernist and revisionist Lin Biaoism today, the common thread is the failure—the failure to even really try—to connect revolutionary impulses and anti-imperialist convictions with the masses of people in imperialist countries. So let’s turn to the challenges of that arduous task, in the hopes that some of those who have taken heart and inspiration from anti-imperialist struggles abroad and recognize our internationalist responsibility to bring down imperialism from within will be down to discover the revolutionary potential of the masses.

Discovering that the masses (in your own country) can become imperialism’s gravediggers

I’m not going to end this essay by offering a programmatic prognosis for anti-imperialist organizing in the US, as there are forums better suited for that purpose than Going Against the Tide, and such a prognosis would narrow the horizon of the challenges I’ve been putting forward here. Instead, let me focus up a challenge to all those who have been inspired in recent years by anti-imperialist armed struggle and liberation movements, from Rojava to Gaza, and taken militant actions to support them: Take your anti-imperialist convictions to the masses of oppressed and exploited people in your own country. Don’t go to grad school, don’t join a Leftist organization, don’t get a job at a nonprofit. Instead, move into a proletarian neighborhood (there’s probably one a few blocks from your college dorm or gentrifying neighborhood) and get a proletarian job—the kind where you get a little sense of the labor that fuels imperialism, and where you’ll likely be working alongside immigrants from countries exploited by imperialism. Get to know the proletarian masses you work with and live alongside, get to know their lives, struggles, culture, and ideas. And share with them your own ideas about imperialism and the struggle to overthrow it, not with arrogance or know-it-all-ism, but with the right combination of righteous conviction, humility, listening and learning, and a desire to connect and share.

In sharing your anti-imperialist convictions, you’ll need to reject the postmodernist identity politics discourse that insists that (1) it’s not your place to bring revolutionary politics to people more oppressed than you, and (2) oppressed people only care about and can only be approached about and organized around the direct oppression they face, not other forms of oppression in some distant place. Once you wash those postmodernist identity politics from your brain, you’ll find that it’s quite easy to go talk to people who know a thing or two about oppression from their own personal experience about oppression that isn’t their personal experience, that there is a social base for anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalism inside the belly of the beast.

On the basis of that integration with the masses, it then becomes possible to begin figuring out how anti-imperialism in the belly of the beast can extend beyond committed radicals, on college campuses and in insular circles of activists, to the broader masses. Those radicals, concentrated among students and youth, will still have to be on the frontlines of the struggle, taking the blows of repression and stepping forward in more militant directions, proving themselves to the masses as real revolutionaries. But they can do so as fish in a sea of mass support if we turn proletarian and immigrant neighborhoods into strongholds of anti-imperialist activity and culture. And while anti-imperialist and revolutionary politics will find its most solid base of support among the proletariat, especially but not only the large number of immigrants within it, there’s broader layers of support to enlist in the anti-imperialist struggle, from diaspora populations of different classes who know a thing or two about imperialism to religious congregations with a conscience to rebellious youth cultures to the wider student body (beyond insular circles of student activists) on college campuses, if we develop the strategic sophistication and tactical finesse to do so.

The question is how deep are our anti-imperialist convictions. If they remain shallow, we’ll be content to posture, to cheerlead our chosen good guys, to prove ourselves rhetorically and perhaps with the occasional small-group militant action, and then in all likelihood go dormant until the next monstrous crime of US imperialism ignites the next wave of anti-imperialist mass protest. But if, from the depths of our souls, we desire nothing short of the overthrow of US imperialism, then we’ll be willing to do the patient and persistent political work, getting to know and winning over the masses who can be the force that overthrows US imperialism from within the belly of the beast. Only then will we start walking the path paved by those brave souls abroad, from Gaza to Rojava, whose anti-imperialist resistance we rightfully cheer for. Time to play a home game, and one that we dare to win.

1By “safety politics,” I mean the presumption—or insistence—that protests are supposed to be safe for protesters.

2See “The reactionary repudiation of a restorationist program…” in GATT #3 (2025), in particular pp. 72–83.

3Examples of that principled support and propaganda abound in the pages of A World To Win, the journal inspired by the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. Some such examples are available in the library section of goingagainstthetide.org.

4For examples of this trend, see any anarchist-leaning account of Rojava, such as Michael Knapp, Anja Flach, and Ercan Ayboga, Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan (Pluto Press, 2016).

5For a helpful explanation and critique of postcolonial theory, see chapter 5 of Arif Dirlik’s After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Wesleyan University Press, 1994).

6Though it has been much misused by Trotskyites and opportunists, Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder remains a brilliant guide to working our way through this contradiction, even if much of its particularities do not apply exactly to our contemporary context.

7Feel free to call me an idealist for that one, but I question your materialism if you don’t recognize that some spiritual force must be at work in Miss Rachel’s baby-whisperer ability to connect so deeply with children.

8Max Ajl, “Peoples and Regimes: Anti-Imperialism and the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Al-Akhbar English, 2 July 2025 (available on en.al-akhbar.com).

9But not Mao. While the axis of idiocy claims Marxism and anoints itself as champions of oppressed countries and anti-imperialism, it refuses to take Mao, the non-European Marxist, seriously as a theorist, at best respecting him for leading the Chinese people in their liberation struggle from imperialism. Mao’s penetrating analysis of the challenges oppressed countries face in their revolutionary struggle, his insistence on the principle of self-reliance in the revolutionary struggle and socialist transition period, and especially his theory of the persistence of class struggle under socialism and the danger of capitalist restoration are conveniently ignored by the axis of idiocy. One theory of Mao’s that is proven by Max Ajl’s essay is that intellectuals need to be “sent to the countryside” to labor alongside the masses and integrate with them if they are to stand a chance of being remolded to serve the people under socialism, rather than pontificate their bullshit from the ivory tower, divorced from the masses.

10Max Ajl, “Peoples and Regimes: Anti-Imperialism and the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Al-Akhbar English, 2 July 2025 (available on en.al-akhbar.com).

11As of this writing, details are still coming out about Israel’s bombing of Evin prison, including how many were killed, but it’s crystal clear this was another Israeli-perpetrated massacre, with at least dozens of people, including prisoners, prison staff, and families visiting their loved ones, killed. See, for example, Farnaz Fassihi, Parin Behrooz, Leily Nikounazar, “Israel’s deadly assault on Iran prison incites fury, even among dissidents,” New York Times, 6 July 2025.

12It’s important to note here that the axis of idiocy includes, in the US, some people cosplaying as the heirs to the revolutionary Black nationalist tradition, but they have little in common ideologically or politically with the best of that tradition.

13Max Ajl, “Peoples and Regimes: Anti-Imperialism and the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Al-Akhbar English, 2 July 2025 (available on en.al-akhbar.com).

14Khaled Hroub, Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide, 3^rd edition (Pluto Press, 2025), 211.

15As quoted in Hroub, Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide, 262–63.