By David Josef Volodzko
In his famous 1984 interview, Soviet dissident Yuri Bezmenov explained that Moscow knew it couldn’t defeat the United States in a head-on conflict. Instead, the Kremlin devised a four-stage plan to subvert U.S. society and turn the American public against itself.
The first stage, the former KGB agent said, was called demoralization and would take 15 to 20 years because that’s how long the media and sympathetic teachers needed to re-educate one generation of American students.
But Bezmenov said this stage was already completed because the hippies of the 1960s, who were “contaminated” with Marxist-Leninist values, were entering positions of power by the time of the interview.
The next two stages would be marked by political polarization and the erosion of trust in our institutions. The final stage of communist subversion, normalization, would be realized once Americans began to freely express the views of their own enemies.
Forty years later, we have American teens on Chinese Communist-run TikTok telling us bin Laden had a point. We have champagne socialist vloggers on BreadTube arguing Russia invaded Ukraine in self-defense. We have Leninist antiwar activists cheering when Iran fires missiles at our allies, student speakers praising North Korea, and activists chanting “Death to America!” in California, Michigan, and New York.
The United States is in the fourth and final stage of a communist subversion and half the country doesn’t even know we’re in a fight. That’s because we misidentify and misjudge communism when we see it.
We misidentify communism because we think of it in terms of Stalinist gulags and seizing the means of production without recognizing that Marxist theories of power and liberation through anti-capitalistic revolution are also central to woke politics, anti-racism, trans ideology, postcolonial theory, CRT, DEI, and pro-Palestine rallies.
We misjudge communism because it has no political power in America so we assume it has no power at all. The Communist Party USA’s last prominent member was Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996, and its best electoral performance was when Alexander Noral of California’s fifth district won 6.2% of the vote in the House elections of 1934.
But in terms of soft power—the culture wars raging in our schools, our film studios and streaming platforms turning into ministries of woke messaging, our news outlets worrying more about offending than misleading, our corporations practicing and often enforcing goodthink—this ideology has become hegemonic in the culture.
Ironically, what caused this was communism’s early failure to launch.
Frustrated by German workers having yet to overthrow capitalism, sociologists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno concluded it was because the public had been brainwashed.
In 1923, they founded the Frankfurt School to solve the problem. But instead of economists, the school was made up of social scientists, a literary critic, a philosopher, and a playwright so rather than economic analysis they produced cultural analysis.
The Frankfurt School taught that film, radio, books, and music mostly amounted to bread and circuses. In other words, pop culture is the opium of the masses, making people happier and therefore less likely to erect barricades on the neighborhood block.
They believed the culture industry would not be defeated by economists and their quantitative studies of surplus extraction, but by culture critics like themselves armed with critiques that reveal how something as seemingly benign as a Valentine’s Day card might secretly be an instrument of capitalistic exploitation through the commodification of love. Adorno himself believed jazz, which he called “the false liquidation of art,” was an especially nasty tool of capitalist mind control.
Like Adorno’s idiotic opinions on music, much of the school’s critiquing went nowhere.
But one member, Herbert Marcuse, would become the godfather of woke thanks to his conviction that the most promising revolutionaries would come not from the working class but from the margins of society.
Marginalized people would be the least content, and if society marginalized them on the basis of characteristics they could not change, they might be eager to change society itself.
Marcuse therefore regarded feminism as inherently revolutionary and in a 1974 lecture at Stanford University, he said, “The goals of the Women’s Liberation Movement go far beyond it, namely into regions which can never be attained within a capitalist framework.”
This rhetoric proved especially effective in America where the language of economic exploitation and minority status resonated with women, blacks, and Jews. Rather than convince people to believe in an abstract economic theory or support a labor cause, Marcuse got them to identify as communists on a biological level.
And it worked. Where the class revolution had failed, the cultural revolution caught on.
The shift from economic to cultural Marxism, known as the cultural turn, and from the working class to minorities, proved to be two of the most important steps in the evolution of communism in America.
But the most important step was yet to come.
In the last two weeks, more than 2,300 people have been arrested at pro-Palestine protests on over 40 university campuses across America. The situation is now completely out of control and dozens of people have been hospitalized. At Columbia University, where more than 200 have been arrested, students hung a sign that read, “Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine.”
But just as worrying as the scale and damage of these protests is their communist and racist nature.
The conflict began on April 17 when Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) unlawfully set up 50 tents. On its website, CUAD quotes the communist Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani saying Palestinianism is “a cause for every revolutionary.”
The leader of the Columbia protest and CUAD spokesperson, Khymani James, who describes himself as “anti-capitalist,” has been banned from campus for saying he hates white people, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
Moreover, the day after CUAD set up its tents, over 100 protesters were arrested and in a show of solidarity, similar tent encampments were set up on campuses nationwide by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which Vox describes as “one of the key groups currently leading protests for Palestine across US campuses” and organizing “encampments that have sprouted up at campuses in the last week.”
SJP was founded by Hatem Bazian, a Marxist professor at UC Berkeley who teaches Palestine studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory. Bazian has also shared posts on social media that question the Holocaust, as well as other antisemitic posts, and called for an intifada in the U.S.
His group American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) is under investigation for allegedly fundraising for Hamas and one of the largest law firms in the country is taking on a lawsuit claiming AJP and AMP operate in America “as collaborators and propagandists for Hamas.”
Yet even as they intensify, these explicitly communist and racist protests have garnered incredible support.
Almost 200 progressive organizations have voiced solidarity with the protesters, and although polling data shows only 28% of U.S. adults support them, that figure rises to 44% for people under 45 and 46% for Democrats.
Naturally, this coincides with an increase in communist and anti-American sentiment.
Roughly 36% of Americans now view socialism positively, including 57% of Democrats and 52% of black Americans, while 35% of Millennials support the elimination of capitalism in favor of socialism and 57% of Democrats now consider the Constitution itself racist.
Contrary to popular misconception, the term American exceptionalism was not coined by Alexis de Tocqueville but by Joseph Stalin. In 1929, Communist Party USA leader Jay Lovestone met Stalin in Moscow and informed the dictator that due to its abundant natural resources, industrial capacity, and lack of rigid class hierarchy, America was not interested in revolution. Stalin rejected this “heresy of American exceptionalism.”
So what finally helped communism overcome American exceptionalism?
The first step was when economic Marxism for the worker evolved into cultural communism for the minority.
This also allowed communism to piggyback off movements such as women’s or black liberation, while replacing their individual causes with a unified worldview.
It also gave various liberation struggles a common enemy.
The cultural turn meant communism went from combatting capitalism to combatting Western culture.
The biological turn meant it was now at war with sexism and racism too.
The final stage of evolution took place when the biological turn became specifically Black-centered.
This was partly helped along by Marcuse’s doctoral student Angela Davis who, like Marcuse, viewed her sex and race as inherently revolutionary. After all, who was the ultimate victim of capitalism if not the black slave? It also helped that while Americans don’t care if you call them bourgeoisie, they’ll do the darnedest things to avoid being called racist.
This gave communism a new language of oppression that proved far more resonant.
It also meant that now instead of critiquing various kinds of pop culture as secretly capitalist, people ran around playing the game of uncovering everything as secretly racist. And it felt good on a personal level that you no longer had to be versed in Marxist philosophy or know anything about economics. You just had to be nonwhite.
In the end, racism was the cheat code to American exceptionalism.
Sadly, we did this to ourselves.
We have told our children for generations that America is a racist, sexist, colonial, and genocidal empire.
We have used Marxist critical theory to deconstruct everything from the Revolutionary War to Mickey Mouse.
STARRS NOTE: See two West Point cadets choosing as their semester project: “Deconstructing Patriotism: Exploring Postmodernism and US Army Recruitment Amidst the Lack of a National Narrative”
We have been told our national anthem is racist, our national flag is racist, the bald eagle is racist, even the term “American” is racist. The socialist activist Raj Patel has argued that apple pie is racist.
We have been teaching our children to hate their own country for decades and they’ve finally gotten the message.
When I recently spoke to the TRIGGERnometry team about being fired from the editorial board of The Seattle Times for criticizing Vladimir Lenin, I mentioned being thrown out of a Seattle bar for not being communist. What I didn’t mention is, later that week I saw communists handing out flyers in front of Seattle’s Lenin statue and a few days after that, I was greeted by a communist parade while coming out of Elliott Bay Book Company. This didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was seeing all the people along the road and sitting at cafes and restaurants, smiling and waving.
There’s no getting rid of these people, Bezmenov warned, and you can’t reason with them either.
“Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures,” Bezmenov said, “Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him a concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it.”
As they say, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and the New Left is not only emotional but hysterical. Worse, it’s cultural.
This is why Bezmenov said the first stage takes a generation.
They had to build an entire cultural ecosystem and they did it using our own schools, news outlets, and film studios. They are now so thoroughly demoralized from American culture they’ve become nihilistic.
We may very well need another 40 years to take this all apart. And that assumes we start now.
The great problem, as I have said, is that many of us don’t even realize what we’re looking at here.
When asked about solutions to the problem, Bezmenov was clear. He said there was only one. “Educate yourself,” he advised. “You are in a state of war … There’s not much time left.”
First published on David Josef Volodzko’s The Radicalist Substack
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