The Real Dystopian Threat is United States Capitalism-Imperialism

A Fascisizing System it is Suicidal not to Overthrow

The US intellectual “left” has justified its longtime dogged and reflexive anti-communism by saying that “dreams” of a communist future “tend to produce dystopias…look at the Soviet Union and Mao’s China! Haven’t you read George Orwell’s novels  Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm?”

Forget for a moment (if you can) that both of the two 20^th-century socialist states were far better than “dystopic” and that the lions’ share of their failures and limits are attributable to imperialist encirclement and hostility as well as to critical mistakes and crimes on the part of their leaders[1].

Put that aside and reflect on the chilling and many-sided dystopia that capitalism-imperialism has wrought here in the United States, full of horrific consequences within and beyond its shores:

• a giant military-industrial complex that swallows up more than half of all federal discretionary spending to pay for a massive empire with 750 bases located across 80 countries and enough nuclear warheads to blow up the planet 50 times over.

• an imperial foreign policy that funds, equips, and protects brazen Israeli genocide in Gaza while fueling a “meat grinder” of a war that has so far caused at least 500,000 casualties (including likely more than 200,000 deaths) in Ukraine while bringing the world closer to nuclear war than any time in recent memory

• a domestic armed madhouse with 121 firearms (including at least 15 million military-style assault rifles) for every 100 people (the next highest ratio in any nation is 60-something per 100) and well more than one mass shooting per day (no other country is even remotely in the US gun violence ballpark).

  

Crosses for five students murdered in a mass shooting at Northern Illinois University in 2008. Note the unintentionally ironic placement of US flags in front of each cross.

• a globally unmatched and racist mass incarceration system that “locks up more people per capita than any other nation, at the staggering rate of 565 per 100,000 residents” (The Prison Policy Initiative on the “Land of Liberty”) and marks 1 in 3 Black adult males with the crippling lifelong mark of a felony record.

• a corporate-crafted mass culture that insidiously promotes sadistic violence and sexism on multiple media platforms.

  

• a powerful fossil fuel sector that is turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber.

• extreme domestic de facto racial apartheid based on savage class-race segregation and inequality.

• a plutocratic Minority Rule electoral, legal, parliamentary and governance system that stands well to the right of the populace, vastly overrepresenting the wealthy ruling class and most reactionary sections and people of the country.

• the literal neofascist takeover of one US-America’s two viable and ruling class political parties, headed by a malignant narcissist Hitler fan with a good shot at returning to power atop the world’s most dangerous nation despite his previous clear attempt to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy – a despicable racist, sexist, and fascist shit of a man who channels the Nazi Third Reich by saying that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and that he’s going to “root out” the nation’s Marxist, socialist, and communist “vermin”…. a lethal lunatic who says insane shit like this: “I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the U.S.A...You hear a bell go and these geniuses…These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right. And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.”

Speaking of dystopian novels, here are some for Orwell fans to read: Jack London’s Iron Heel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, Robert Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids’ Tale,  Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly top my list. Or look at some excellent dystopian movies: Soylent Green, Dr. Strangelove, Blade Runner, Rollerball, Water World, The Runing Man, The Hunger Games, Idiocracy, Punishment Park, Moon, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Escape from New York, Escape from LA,  They Live (my fave), AI: Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Videodrome, The Trial, Robocop, The Matrix, The Road Warrior, Don’t Look Up…(that’s a short list).  These works of fiction (some quite hauntingly prophetic) mirror real-life non-fiction dystopian/ “totalitarian”/ authoritarian/fascist and/or ecocidal tendencies richly present under and rooted in US capitalism-imperialism.

The anti-communist snitch George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, directed primarily at the Soviet Union (1917-1991) diverted droves of readers away from the greatest “totalitarian” threat good in the 20th and current centuries: capitalism (roughly 1600-2????).  As the Australian propaganda critic and suicide victim Alex Carey explained back in the decade of which Orwell warned:

“The communist craze has been created and sustained for so long that we are in danger of believing…that we should take George Orwell’s warning about 1984 seriously. Orwell warned that a crude and brutal totalitarianism would come from the left of politics and subvert the liberal democratic freedoms we are all supposed to enjoy. Such a prospect is no more than part of the communist craze of the twentieth century, for while the freedoms of liberal democracy are certainly threatened, the danger has always come from the Respectable Right. It has come in the form of widespread social and political indoctrination, an indoctrination which promotes business interests as everyone’s interests and in the process fragments the community and closes off individual and critical thought…Orwell’s warnings were ..dangerously misconceived. Influenced by Orwell’s erroneous views, popular consciousness has been drilled in the expectation that the subversive Left, supported by influences from ‘outside’ the country, is about to control public and individual thinking. (This is the corporate sponsored narrative which provides the justification needed for managing democracy in the interests of business.) Meantime, the real attack is in stark contrast to Orwell’s expectations…this actual threat is more or less ignored… for it is vastly sophisticated, appears uncoercive yet is dedicated to corporate interests…Whatever Orwell’s intentions, his work has been exploited so as to misdirect and confuse the public into looking in the wrong places for the ‘brainwashing’ instinctively felt by many. Ever since World War I this circumstance has so blinded or intimidated the public that few writers and social scientists have attempted to see our world clearly or see it whole in its political-economic dimensions.”

To put things more sharply, the real dystopia is capitalism-imperialism, which long ago collapsed socialism in Russia and the great world capitalist export platform that is  “communist” China, where authorities once had to place nets in order to capture the bodies of exploited iPhone-manufacturing proletarians trying to commit suicide by leaping from the windows of their industrial dormitories.    

Speaking of suicide, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is reputed to have once said that it would have been suicidal for the 1960s Black struggle for equality to take up the cause of socialist revolution in the United States.  The clear response to such counsel today (as before) is that it is even more suicidal to not try to make a socialist revolution here and elsewhere. As I have been arguing here and on CounterPunch, the capitalist-imperialist system has by its very nature produced four mutually reinforcing/multiplying apocalyptic horsemen with the potential (both together and on their own) to cancel all prospects for a decent human future: ecocide, potentially nuclear war, pandemicide, and fascism (perhaps we need to insert Artificial Intelligence [AI] into the lethal simultaneous equations system of exterminist capitalism-imperialism). The only thing “crazier” than advocating and fighting for socialist revolution is not advocating and fighting for socialist revolution. Capitalism left in power is terminal cancer, both literally and figuratively.

For what it’s worth, King, who became something of a fan of Marx during his years at the Crozer Theological Seminary, understood at least some of this reality well before his execution. In his final essay, published after his death, King (despite his problematic Christian anti-communism) wrote the following:

“The Black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes.  It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism.  It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.  It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that  radical reconstruction society of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”[2]

“The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both White and Negro – live in a cruelly unjust society,” King said in the summer of 1967. “They must organize a revolution against that injustice,” he added – a revolution that would be “more than a statement to the larger society,” more than “street marches…There must,” King said, “be a force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning” to “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force.” The alternative to this revolution, King said four days before his death, was “a rightist takeover of the government and eventually a fascist state in America.” (Fascist police states were something the Civil Rights activists knew a thing or two about from their confrontations with the likes of Bull Connor and Richard “Shoot to Kill Arsonists and Shoot to Maim and Cripple Looters” Daley.)

King was no revolutionary communist but it was not for nothing that (as the late Black Agenda Report founders and editors Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon told me) he was shunned by much of the northern bourgeois-captive Black clergy both before and after he came out openly against the US “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (as Noam Chomsky accurately described the so-called Vietnam War).

Given his realistic premonition of a premature death at fascist hands — one year to the day after his first major address denouncing the US war on Vietnam (hauntingly enough) — King might in a way have committed a form of proto-revolutionary suicide.

The post-King US would offer clear evidence of the American fascist menace with the flat-out extrajudicial police state assassination of the brilliant and charismatic young Marxist-Leninist Black Panther Fred Hampton (who did far more than merely “suggest” socialist revolution) on the West Side of Chicago in December of 1969 and with the Philadelphia police’s mass-murderous aerial firebombing of a city block inhabited by the Black liberation organization MOVE in May of 1985, to mention just two of the many outrageous imperialist US police state attacks on Black, white, Latino, and Native American radicals and revolutionaries in the wake of the 1960s-70s uprisings.

White racist Chicago Police Department pigs smiling as they carry the corpse of Fred Hampton, the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist they and the FBI had just extrajudicially executed in cold blood on December 4, 1969.

White supremacist Cop City Amerika has been punishing Black America for the Black equality and power rebellion ever since with a half century-plus campaign of racist mass arrest, mass imprisonment, and mass criminal branding, and with an ongoing syndrome of murderous racist police violence, unabated by the Ferguson (2014) and George Floyd (2020) Black Lives Rebellions. Amerika may well soon re-install as president a fascist who broke into politics by calling for the execution of the falsely accused Black and Latino “Central Park Five,” who as president viciously reinstated the racially disparate federal death penalty, who as president applauded a teenage white fascist’s murder of two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives march in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who as president wanted to deploy the US military to violently suppress the George Floyd Rebellion, who as president called pro-Black Lives Black athletes “bastards,” who calls now for the extra-judicial execution of suspected urban (Black) shoplifters, and whose policy team advocates sending the military into the nation’s minority-rich Democratic cities to impose “law and order” while lawlessly sweeping up brown-skinned immigrants and throwing them into concentration camps.

Fifty-six years after the murder of Dr. King, the “rightist takeover of government and …a fascist state in America” is looking less “eventual” and more imminent than ever in late bourgeois-democratic America. The future is already radical and the only question is will it be (a) radically reactionary, oppressive, dystopian, suicidal, militarist, racist, sexist, environmentally exterminist, palingenetic ultra-nationalist and fascist or (b) radically beautiful, liberating, sustainable, revolutionary, internationalist, anti-imperialist, and socialist on the path to the communist abolition of all exploitation and oppression. Revolution, anyone?

Endnotes

+1.  See Raymond Lotta, “You Don’t Know What You Think You ‘Know’ About the Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Liberation: It’s History and Future,” Revolution, No. 323 (November 24, 2013), pp. 3-23, available (updated for April 2024) online here. See also Bob Avakian, Phony Communism is Dead: Long Live Real Communism, 2nd Edition (Chicago: RCP Publication,1994).

+2.  King’s best biographer, David Garrow, notes that Dr. King would tell his fellow Southern Christian Leadership Conference leaders to turn off their tape recorders before explaining to them that racial oppression, poverty, and social injustice would never be truly overcome under capitalism.