A group of Republican lawmakers have recently introduced legislation titled the ‘Crucial Communism Teaching Act’. This act would encourage high schools across America to teach in the words of Florida Rep. Maria Salazar: ‘the true meaning of communism’, which in reality is nothing more than an escalation of the dissemination of bourgeois propaganda in classrooms across the country. This has been justified by the representative in response to the alleged growing popularity of the works of Marx and Engels in the younger generations stating that ‘unfortunately, today we’re seeing an alarming shift in our national conscience; one-third of Gen Z … have a favorable view of communism, 33%.’
In class society the ruling class subject the productive forces to itself and, as a consequence of its ownership of the means of production, subjects all other classes to its interests. Thus, in order to maintain and reproduce its control of material forces, the bourgeoisie develops ideology as a weapon in the battleground between different social classes. This ideology is a system of social and political ideas that express in theoretical form the consciousness of a particular class or social group, and justifies its political interest, the purpose of the introduction of this law is to strengthen the ideological assault against the Marxism and the organization of the proletariat in the fight for its own liberation. It is no coincidence that this alarmist proposal supported by the CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, comes at a time when the United States is facing mounting problems domestically due to the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the U.S. and global economy. Rising inflation is leading to increased food insecurity and further immiseration of the American working class, it also comes during an upswing in industrial action and growing unrest over police brutality. The bourgeoisie’s response is to ensure that revolutionary sentiment does not spread and develop; of particular concern is the youth (or “Gen Z”) which is largely uninfluenced by ideological battles of the so-called “Cold War” and whose earliest memories were of the aftermath of imperialist campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya and the 2008 global recession.
The proposed law cannot be disentangled from global developments, as such it also serves another purpose: the ideological preparation of inter-imperialist conflict with China, a new Red Scare. The rise of China has created panic in Washington as it is now clear that Beijing is seeking to displace America’s hegemonic status in the Pacific and beyond. This fear of losing the status as the world’s sole superpower is leading the bourgeoisie to start up the drumbeat of war. However, it needs the American populace to support its actions; to do this it needs to intensify the proliferation bourgeois ideology and anti-communism in order to deceive the working-class into fighting against its interests: to fight for US imperialism against Chinese imperialism.
However, the histrionics that surrounds American anti-communism reveal the unstable foundations of American capitalism. Because the majority of America consists of the working class, the bourgeoisie is outnumbered and knows this. Its fear that the American working class might turn to Marxism is becoming daily a reality as American capitalism decays and becomes increasingly moribund and unable to sustain itself. This phenomenon is not new, since the nineteenth century the bourgeoisie whenever it has found itself in the periodic crises that occur under capitalism has consistently fought to prevent a revolutionary situation from developing. The bourgeoisie accomplishes this by spreading lies and cracking down on the worker’s movement in order to halt the advance of revolutionary sentiment among the working class. It is therefore up to us Marxist-Leninists to combat bourgeois ideology and reveal to the working class how its interests are being suppressed and diverted. The famous Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels was published in order to explain clear and simple what it is that Communists fight for and how the powers-that-be slander communism for fear of the proletariat overthrowing the current ruling class and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. Similarly, the Bolsheviks under Lenin never wavered in the defense of Marxism and the communist movement even as it was being assaulted from without and within: from the bourgeoisie and by the revisionist social-imperialists and opportunists in the Second International that were sending working-class men and boys to die in the inter-imperialist conflict of the First World War. We too must continue this struggle.
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