A political manifesto for the first Post-Communist International

by Zoya Ulianova Kobapotskaya

The essay contains remarks made at the secret inaugural meeting of the first Post-Communist International by Zoya Ulianova Kobapotskaya (K), the leader of the movement and author of “A humane proposal for eradicating all inequalities'', proposal which has ultimately been adopted, by a unanimous vote, as the political manifesto of the movement. Her article, published on our substack, reviews previous attempts to create truly egalitarian societies, and finds that they have failed not because they were too ambitious, but for not going far enough. In her address K responds to the criticism made by many of her comrades, prior to the vote, that the present social, economic, and political conditions are not favorable to her proposal. 

I have to admit that the comrades criticizing me have a point, that indeed my vision of the most humane possible solution to the problem of inequalities is doomed to remain a beautiful dream, in the absence of a realistic road map for how to move our societies from their present illusions to the point where, in the name of a better world, they would be ready to embrace the “humane final solution” which I have proposed as the central point of our manifesto. 

To deconstruct these illusions, it helps to remind ourselves where they come from. To start with they are anchored in the Hebrew Bible which claims the all humans are made in the image of God, all descendants of Adam and Eve, endowed with reason and the ability to discern between Good and Evil, Truth and Falsehood, partners of God in his/her/ze, unfinished, creative process. The Bible codifies obligations towards both God and fellow men, with the latter becoming more and more prominent as belief in God receded, and gradually re-interpreted as rights rather than obligations. These “rights” are today at the core of the so-called liberal democratic system of beliefs, the dominant ideology of the modern capitalist states.

It is in the logic of this ideology that its cherished rights keep expanding. Thus the Declaration of Independence refers explicitly to the pursuit of happiness as an “unalienable right”, “endowed by the Creator”, along with “Life and Liberty”. The Bill of Rights, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, enumerates those to property, to bear arms, free speech and free pursuit of religion, etc, while also stating that “the enumeration shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people¹”, a clear invitation for articulating new ones. The number of rights expands to 17 in the Declaration of the “Rights of Men” adopted by the National Assembly at the start of the French Revolution and to 30 into the more recent Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

One can neatly classify these “human rights” on whether they are motivated by Liberty, Equality, Justice and Safety, these most basic human aspirations. The inherent tension between liberty affirming rights, such as the right to property and that to educate one's children, and those that aspire to redress the inherent inequalities produced by the former, is the weakest point, Achilles' heel of the liberal ethos. It is this contradiction that provided the moral justification of all previous generations of revolutionaries to battle against the legitimacy of the modern liberal-democratic, capitalist, states. 

The rights that address the need for personal safety, such as those for various forms of social security and health care, are at odds with the right for self determination. Freedom to make personal choices have inspired the modern new privacy rights to abortion, same sex marriage, transgenderism etc, and motivates the creation of powerful action groups to push for their recognition by the state. In the name of the right to safety these groups often demand that any organized resistance to their agendas, should be stamped as threatening hate speech and censored. Finally Justice, whatever was its original meaning, is today a massive legalistic mishmash by which liberal democracies attempt to preserve some measure of balance between these conflicting rights. 

Thus, in an astonishing reversal from its rationalist grand design of creating a minimalist, laissez-faire, state, dedicated to freedom, personal autonomy, tolerance and fairness, the modern liberal-democratic state is anything but minimalist and only conditionally tolerant. Indeed, by virtue of its inner contradictions, the liberal state is constantly expanding and only tolerant towards the most vociferous, well organized focus groups demanding one or another new right, while resorting to coercion towards the silent, disorganized, majority which opposes them. And these organized groups, comrades, are precisely those doing our bidding.

Comrades, rather than being intimidated by the enormity of the task ahead, let's take stock of how much our efforts of dismantling the illusions behind the current order have already accomplished. It is impossible to tell when the demolition started, but it is fair to say that it has its roots in the Age of Enlightenment when thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and John Locke, emboldened by the successes of the Scientific Revolution, declared reason and empiricism as the only acceptable forms of knowledge. Faith in religion took a big hit and it is fair to say that it never recovered, even as it continued to be present, in a zombie state, in the subconscious minds of simple people and, more importantly, in the values that still underlie the institutions of power of the liberal State, particularly those enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. 

As faith in the Creation paradigm receded a new false faith took its place, one which claims to be anchored in reason, dismissive of traditions, and whose declared values are “freedom, fairness and reciprocity”. It believes in manifestly self-contradictory fictions such as rights to liberty and equality before the law, freedom of religion and freedom from it, right to private property and equal opportunities for all, consent of the governed and strong sovereign states, freedom of speech and the right to be defended from offensive speech, the right to life as well the right to abort new life.

The contradictions inherent in these fictions have provided a gold mine for the revolutionary zeal to dismantle the liberal ideology which both sustains and is sustained by them. Marx, in particular, understood that the road to his cherished proletarian revolution requires a “ruthless criticism of all that exists”. It is this exhortation that has inspired all the beloved critical theories of academia today. Take the words race, sex, gender, ethnic, education, pedagogy, colonialism etc and add “critical theory of” and you get half of what our students study in universities today. And these theories, comrades, are the poison pills designed by our intellectual elite to deconstruct the liberal democratic order. 

As I have often stated, Marx's obsession about the proletariat as the vanguard of the Revolution, anchored in his faulty Hegelian inspired philosophy of history, was greatly misdirected. It turned out in fact, as it is plainly evident today in the MAGA movement, that the working classes are reactionary by nature. This fact continued to be ignored by Gramsci and the other Neo-Marxists who thought that they could wake up the proletariat from their ideological slumber by a systematic critique of the most important cultural institutions of the liberal democratic societies of the West. The presupposition was wrong, as the proletariat became more and more comfortable with its bourgeois lifestyle, but the results of their relentless criticism on defanging the old illusions has been phenomenal. Though purely academic to start with, the efforts of these thinkers were vastly magnified by the “long march through the institutions” as it was called by Rudi Dutschke, German protege of Hebert Marcuse.

The original idea of Dutschke, to create a force multiplier for the ideas of the neo-Marxist critical thinkers by infiltrating the main government and cultural institutions and undermining them from within, turned out to be a stroke of genius, even though what was ultimately achieved was not exactly what Gramsci, Lukacs, Horkheimer, Marcuse and other luminaries of our movement had envisioned. The effect on the working class was minimal-they remained as reactionary as ever-but instead the long march has radicalized the liberal intellectual elites.

Ever since Lenin-Trotsky’s successful October coup d'etat it has been crystal clear, despite all those nonsensical pretensions about the leading role of the proletariat, that the intellectuals are the true revolutionary class and that the road to the Revolution require 1) a small dedicated, highly intelligent, educated and highly organized elite, 2) a much larger class of brain-washed, gullible, eggheads whose main role is to spread the propaganda of the inner group, 3) gradual penetration of the military and security organs of the State, those able to execute the Coup when the time is right.

Comrades, let's take pride that the intellectual elite of the US and of all liberal democratic states is today mostly on our side. This is particularly evident in academia where reactionary opinion, so called “conservative'', has been all but eradicated. Universities, of course, have an outsized influence on all opinion forming institutions: schools, newspapers, television and radio networks, search engine companies, and the entertainment industry. The level of influence of our ideas on these institutions is unprecedented and indeed nobody could have predicted, after the demise of the communist system 35 years ago, that its ideology, cleverly disguised as progressive, could return to play such a prominent role in modern capitalist societies. Journalism, for example, is now largely indistinguishable from that of the former communist countries in that, to paraphrase² Marx, its role is no longer to just tell the facts but to change the world.

Besides relentless criticism of the contradictions and illusions of the liberal democratic dogma we achieved our success by our unmatched ability to manipulate words and ideas. Words, as the reactionary George Orwell pointed out, can be turned around to determine thoughts, rather than just being shaped by them. The trick is to give up on any pretense that thoughts ought to express Truth. “It does not matter whether a thing is true, but only what effect it produces³”. This simple post-modern truism is a powerful weapon in our arsenal of revolutionary methods for, though we recognize it as sheer nonsense, we take advantage of the hypnotic effect it produces on gullible useful idiots. Truth in our cause is absolute, but nothing works better to further it than to create debilitating doubt, confusion, fear and hate. Nothing illustrates better the validity of Nietzsche's truism than the pro-Hamas demonstrations post October 7 last year, when it became clear that students at elite universities have lost the ability to distinguish between the old, religiously inspired, useless notions of Good and Evil. Good, comrades, is whatever advances our revolution, evil whatever delays it.

Using our mastery of means of communication we have been able to manipulate and significantly alter the meaning of plain speaking words such as woman, marriage, sex, family, criminal, victim, victimizer, or more abstract ones like equity, fairness, diversity, racism, colonialism, zionism, fascism, white supremacism, apartheid, populism, democracy, etc, or just replace them by more appropriate words⁴. These linguistic alterations are done with the goal of making it difficult for people to dissent against their implied moral value system, for who would risk being called racist, sexist, white supremacist, fascist, nazi, neocolonialist, homophobic, transphobic, etc, for expressing thoughts that we, progressives, have deemed unacceptable. 

The point of all this, of course, is not that we care about the new imaginary value system we helped put in place but rather that we have been able to 1) undermine both the traditional Judeo-Christian and the current liberal democratic ones, 2) separate people into followers and dissenters, those useful to us and those whose reactionary influence we will have to suppress and eventually eliminate. 

As a consequence of our relentless anti-religious, anti-traditional, anti-western and anti-capitalist propaganda, our young are now more prone to believe that their society is racist, that Western civilization is intrinsically evil, that the traditional notions concerning family, gender, marriage, merit, etc, are nothing more than socially constructed fictions designed to enslave them. Most importantly, by cleverly using the language of “human rights”, we were able to drastically alter the relation between civil society and state. Through our relentless criticism of the inequalities inherent in capitalist societies we have significantly weakened the first while vastly enhancing the latter. We helped create an irreversible downward spiral in which demands for new equity or safety-driven rights lead to new entitlements and ever larger bureaucracies to manage them. These, of course, fail to eradicate the alleged inequalities (as they are intrinsic to the liberal democratic order) thus generating calls for even more progressive initiatives. To pay for the growing entitlements required to implement the new rights, the states have to constantly raise taxes which inevitably hurts the self-dependent, working population. These, combined with civil rights mandates, meant to extirpate any residual inequalities, inevitably expand the reach of the state while degrading civil society. The cycle plays, of course, in our favor, for one of the necessary conditions for the Revolution to take place is a large, ineffective and corrupt state bureaucracy combined with a powerless and disaffected population. 

As we take stock of how much has been achieved already, we recognize that a lot more remains to be done. It is incumbent on us to continue the glorious long march initiated by our older comrades. To do this successfully we need to carefully identify what are the remaining obstacles towards achieving our glorious revolution and how best to overcome them:

1. Despite the deep penetration of our ideas throughout liberal democratic societies, we are still being confronted by a minority of powerful voices opposing our agenda. This is particularly true in the United States where freedom of speech, enshrined in the first amendment, is still taken seriously. As long as the main opinion forming institutions, universities, schools and the media, were not yet in our hands the 1st amendment was extremely useful. Today, when many of our ideas have become mainstream, it is more advantageous to silence those of our adversaries. In the name of combatting hateful ideology we should thus resort to censorship to forcefully repress opinions we disagree with, while continuing to use free speech only to affirm and defend our own progressive ideas. The momentum is strongly on our side and it will continue to be so as long as they, conservatives, are stuck to their old-fashioned notions of truth. The poetic beauty in all this is that they cannot adopt our methods of truth falsification in the name of a higher truth and still remain conservatives.

2. The right to bear arms, enshrined in the second amendment of the US constitution, is particularly dangerous to our plans. As long as reactionary citizens remain armed, our coming revolution can be stopped in its tracks. There is, unfortunately, little to be done about this now, as there are simply too many weapons around. We need therefore to be prepared to encounter armed resistance from the population if and when we will take full control of the state. Meanwhile, at least in between elections, we need to support all government initiatives which restrict the right to bear arms, as they inevitably weaken our adversaries.

3. Beyond the 1st and 2nd amendments, the U.S Constitution is a powerful defender of the present state of affairs and, as such, it is the main obstacle to our vision of a truly egalitarian society. As long as the Constitution is taken seriously, as long as its original rights are respected, still revered by a large majority of people as if given by “their Creator”, our march forward can be delayed, stopped or even reversed. Fortunately this state of affairs does not have to be permanent. Thus, for example, none other than the reactionary constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, in a recent WSJ article, decries what he calls “The Left’s Assault on the Constitution”. His article offers a useful summary of how far our side has been able to subvert in theory, if not yet entirely in practice, the principles which have guided the framers of the Constitution. More, of course, needs to be done. Recent proposals of top Democrats to pack the Supreme Court, as well as get rid of the Senate filibuster and the electoral college, thus eliminating the republican foundations of the Constitution, go in the right direction and, of course, we have to do everything in our power to make sure that the Democratic party wins the next and all future elections until we ourselves take power. Democrats act according to their own interests, ignorant of the fact that they are in fact mostly doing our bidding. We will, eventually, have to deal with them too.

4. Science, with its old-fashioned belief in “truth” or “objective reality”, and respect for standards of excellence, creates a serious dilemma to our plans. We need it for its technological goods, the golden eggs it systematically produces, but we fear the independent platform and stature which scientists achieve. Here, I am afraid, we have to err on the side of equity and attack the meritocratic standards of science as being more directly inimical to our goals. That will certainly lead, in spite of our DEI propaganda, to scientific and technological decline. Some will say, for good reasons, that this will benefit China, but what is so wrong about that? China, with all its defects, all its current deviations from Marxism, is closer to our ideal of a perfect society than the U.S or Europe. Moreover, if China becomes the dominant economic and military power, we will hear more and more voices suggesting that the current liberal democratic order in the US, and all western democracies, has failed, which can only hasten our coming revolution. Besides giving our unconditional support for all DEI initiatives meant to replace merit with identity considerations, we have to continue pretending that climate change is an existential threat and that transgender policies save lives, both useful, noble, lies that empower state bureaucracies and weaken civil society, and thereby advancing our agenda. 

5. An increasing number of billionaires and leaders of industry are supporting progressive causes, mostly because of fear of going against the prevailing opinions of the educated elite and often because they believe a strong activist state can better insulate them against competition. They know that progressive democrats are far more capable of hurting them than those who still believe in a competitive market system. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that a competely unqualified San Francisco progressive has been able to rake in more than a billion dollars for her presidential campaign, all in less than four months. The vast majority of small businesses continue to oppose us and so do a small number of powerful billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. The strategies that work to deal with this remain the same: 1) keep pretending that the rich don't pay their fair share in taxes, but make sure that only the rich who oppose us are really penalized, 2) use the judicial system to go after prominent troublemakers, in the spirit of Beria's “Show me the man and I will find you the crime”. Alas the judicial system is not yet controlled by us, despite the fact that we do effectively control most of the elite law schools in the country. The problem is that we have less control on the legislative bodies that appoint judges. Moreover the Federalist society, that abominable conservative organization, has been very effective in blocking our agenda. We need fresh new ideas on how to combat both these problems in the future.

6. Our most serious obstacle is the “people”, that is the working class and small business entrepreneurs, those that “cling to their guns and religion” and have a reactionary resistance to the authority of the state and its experts. As long as elections remain democratic, that is they reflect the will of the majority, this large group of people can seriously damage our cause. Fortunately we have at our disposal a series of effective tactics, such as: 1) making more and more voters dependent on the bounties of the state, who would have a vested interest to vote for progressive causes, 2) squeezing the class of voters who insist on remaining independent through higher and higher taxes, mandates and regulations, 3) subverting elections, in the name of making them more “democratic”, by systematically eliminating the traditional guardrails against fraud. Lax registration procedures, deliberately confusing and innaccurate voter rolls (which do not discriminate against illegal immigrants or dead people), early voting, widespread mailing ballots, vote harvesting and the clever pretense that ID voting requirements are discriminatory, have done wonders to advance our cause. 

Comrades, everything I outlined in my talk points to the fact that our beloved revolution is a lot closer than you think. It is however important to remember that the revolution can take many forms and shapes and that if we really want a successful one, one that avoids the mistakes of the past and leads to full, unconditional, equality among people, we need not only communal education of children and a total ban on private property, as called for in the Communist Manifesto, but also to adopt the reverse eugenic part of my humane proposal. Many of you appear to get cold feet when hearing the word eugenics. Yet, instead of the old reprehensible attempts to enhance human characteristics considered desirable and repressing those deemed otherwise, reverse eugenics would instead level off inborn biological differences which unjustly favor a few people while grossly penalizing many others. This vision comrades is what I urge you to adopt as the manifesto of our movement.

1. Also a possible allusion to that “not to be mentioned” right of the people to revolt against their own government, if they perceive it to be unjust.

2. The full quote is: “the purpose of philosophy is not simply to analyze or understand the world as it is, but to actively work towards transforming it into a better state; it should be a tool for social change, not just intellectual reflection.”

3. Nietzsche's full quote is: “That it does not matter whether a thing is true, but only what effect it produces - absolute lack of intellectual integrity. Everything is justified, lies, slander, the most shameless forgery, if it serves to raise the temperature - until one believes”. It is irrelevant whether Nietzche endorsed this statement or not, it encapsulates precisely our view.

4. Partner instead of husband and wife, or parent instead of mother and father.