The Mask Comes Off

The Neutering of Working-Class Threats and the Necessity of Organized Armed Resistance

Morning Comrades,

We are not living in a “new” phase of capitalist rule, we are living in the phase where the ruling class no longer cares to lie to us. Their theft, their violence, their genocides, their ecocidal extraction, they don’t even bother to explain it anymore. They don’t need to. They think we won’t stop them. They are confident we can’t stop them. And for now, they are largely right.

Across the Western world, the ruling class has entered what can only be described as a “mask off” phase: the pretence of democracy, social justice, and concern for the well-being of the general population has been openly abandoned. Their NGOs, media outlets, parliaments, and “democratic” states now operate with unmasked imperial violence, extraction, and domination.

But it is essential to clarify: this is not a new reality for the world. This is only new for the comfortable layers of the white working and middle classes in the imperial core. For colonized peoples, for Black, Indigenous, migrant, and oppressed communities inside these same imperial nations, the mask was never really on. The police were always violent. The welfare state was always conditional. The wars were always waged on their backs. Palestinians, Congolese, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Venezuelans, Yemenis, Haitians, for any marginalised group, there has never been a mask for them. The mask was for us. And now that they don’t fear us, they don’t bother to wear it anymore.

The historic problem is that the white sections of the Western working class were for decades bribed, lied to, and comforted into complicity with imperialist order, tricked into mistaking proximity to the boot for freedom. Now the boot is on their neck too, and many of them, bereft of solidarity, paralyzed by decades of propaganda, are looking for enemies in the wrong places. They turn to nationalism, racism, or libertarian fantasies because the idea of a revolutionary working class has been scrubbed from their consciousness.

Why this brazenness, and why now? The answer lies not in a sudden mutation of ruling-class character but in a historic collapse of organized working-class resistance. Fear of the masses once forced concessions, compelled rhetorical humility, and preserved liberal facades. That fear is largely absent today, replaced by disdainful indifference. The combination of ideological capture, organizational defeat, psychological demoralization, and active self-neutering of workers has opened the door for capital to behave as it always wished to: cruel, extractive, and openly supremacist.

Today’s dispatch expands that argument historically, philosophically, and materially, culminating in the reality that not only must the working class organize once again, but that it must do so with the necessary seriousness and force to meet the open violence of capital with disciplined, militant, and armed resistance. Without an organized, fighting working class, the capitalist predators are free to ransack the world. Seeking only to avoid personal involvement or complicity in the world’s evil is not virtue, it is self-indulgent narcissism, masquerading as pacifism, serving as complicity.