Rotating Villain

I just wouldn't want one marrying my daughter

Image Credit: The California Worker: Rotating Villain digital illustration, 2026. Archive reference: watermarked_img_12016637267044144364.png. Published under editorial license for The California Worker.

We at the California Worker are involved around the state on the ground, in the air and in your pocket. We travel the internet, talking with all the workers of the world to find out what exactly we need to do to accomplish the real American Dream. We came to this Party from various parts of the American workforce, among us are the usual suspects, tradespeople, service workers, a few full-time revolutionaries as well. We represent a wide cross-section of the country. Truly the widest tent. Doesn’t every Party pretend at this though? It all sounds exactly like something the CIA would present with their narrative and is a widely shared criticism of the Party. Throughout the internet, folks who consider themselves whatever shade of leftist attack the American Communist Party (ACP), having heard inflammatory speech by its members.

Look again, potential Comrades. Casting the widest possible tent will absolutely cover folks who still use reactionary language, have reactionary beliefs, say gross, reactionary shit. It’s bad, and that is exactly the point of the ACP. Communists in America have no idea how to combine theory with praxis and it has (ironically) permitted the CIA’s perception of Communists to permeate our culture so thoroughly that the actual performance of building Communism looks too messy to engage in.

Okay my snarky internet leftoid friend, you may argue that we cannot find common cause with racists, sexists, homophobes and the like and we have only to make a cursory Google search to find clear examples of each on an official ACP channel. We would ask this question of you when you next prepare to denounce the ACP for this, tell us what your plan is for the current reactionary population? The workers who would need convincing if the chosen one finally found whatever magic ring in the cave of wishes and made it so we were done with capitalism and everyone knew it, tomorrow. Many of them believe that we would intend to line them all up on the Great Wall of China and perform the largest, (physically) longest massacre in history. The way some of you denounce them and us with them, I’m beginning to suspect that may be your plan. I’ll publicly denounce that as does the Party. We will need to educate them and there is no point in educating from the beginning the already educated. We can’t kick students out of the class for not knowing the material, we at the ACP understand this and believe that it is currently the job of the Communist Party to be that teacher. They’re vulgar. They believe nonsense. Expelling them from school for disrupting class will only lead to shitty halls.

They, as we, have been propagandized so heavily that there survives a great cold war era joke about it. A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink:

“I have to admit, I’m always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up,” the CIA agent says.

“Thank you,” the KGB says. “We do our best but truly, it’s nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them.”

The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. “Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There’s no propaganda in America.”

Unfortunately both Liberal parties in the US with their own color coded echo chambers have been able to easily replace the Soviet with the other American party and make the scenario real. A simple swap and our old Comrade now works at the New York Post. Our CIA agent is actually Cenk Uygur suddenly, but the rest works just fine. Why? Well it’s just built into our national character. Brought along with an economy that at once respects the ability of people to generate wealth independently (they find work individually and secure wage that way) and removes the humanity from the same endeavor so totally that it begins to make sense for mammals to forgo reproduction. I know you’re happy without kids, it’s still a rare choice among species.

In order for a system which will disallow any expression of humanity that does not generate wealth to make sense to people about whom it is understood will never experience wealth, they must not be made aware of what wealth actually is and from this basic principle, we come to understand the Rotating Villain.

The specific verbiage I use is that, “capitalism requires a permanent underclass.” Consider a few types of people that you may be familiar with. Economic struggles among Republicans mirror those of Democrats. Work is hard to find, hard to keep and always pays just under enough to keep you running after the next paycheck, but consider comfort. What would you do with the ability to sit back, take a breath and do a thing that you aren’t required to do to be here?

Recall instead that we must always be at the ready. All of our time must be consumed either generating wealth or generating data, which we do when we pop around the internet, watching babies mumble swear words on Facebook.

The absence of class consciousness leaves plenty of room for different solutions to what we perceive as problems and to whom do we turn to find our solutions? American media is all either under capitalist control, or enjoys only very limited exposure. Most receive only what they are mass fed and even those who are still able to conclude that the society is broken can only choose conclusions based on what they know. Well what do they know? We know that racism has been used since before the formal founding of this country to convince non-Black people that they could receive respect and privilege, so long as they remained unmarred by the Black germ. An even further correct analysis reveals that this was and remains false. Whether the Cherokee fight with the Confederacy, the Black kids fight the Puerto Ricans at the flagpole after school or a cohort of Asians take up the fight against affirmative action, non-whites who fight for the white supremacist cause only tokenize themselves for the only real player, and tokens are made to be spent.

The idea of societal distraction isn’t novel or at all unique to American life. We recall the fall of the Roman Empire was accompanied by the massive spectacle on display at dozens of places like the Colosseum. Cheap and regular merriment walked hand-in-hand with rot so public that they entirely stopped hiding slavery and predation that formed the basis of their prosperity. Not that it would have been possible given the overspread nature of the empire. Bread and Circuses as governance during the Imperial Fall is Biblically old so when I tell you that it remains the only way to ride a falling empire, perhaps you can understand why it is best to eschew the game.

The difference between the reactionary Liberal position on these matters and that of the ACP is that where their solutions to societal ails center around removing the offending people, the correct Communist line must be to develop them into better people. In this way, we then disagree on who the offenders are. Recall that reactionism is based around responding to incorrect information. If we can be convinced that I can’t keep a job because they hired a Mexican for cheaper, I can be convinced that Mexicans are the problem. The correct analysis proves that the penny-pinching employer shutting off my livelihood to save money is the culprit. But in our new times, such blatant racism cannot exist on only one Liberal side. Conservatives have begun to recognize just how many minorities will sign on to their puritanical control program if only they could join the oppressor side as well. With increasing questions around white blood purists and their ethnic wives, talking directly about race is passe because the transgender community sure are weird aren’t they? The focus shifted. We saw it happen and can indeed point to other groups that were auditioned to be the new, Rotating Villain that we should all pay attention to and discuss at length, despite being at most like .002% of the population. No, you probably don’t know whether you’ve seen one irl, but you statistically have never met one and won’t. It’s literally impossible for the entire transgender community to destroy civilization so why did Dave Chappelle perform 3 whole hour “comedy” specials and why did we need to vote on whether to hire people to look at penises at restaurants? This is a side-show. Not transpeople. They are valid. They’re having some trouble and the least a decent human can do is leave them alone. The circus has shifted. Now a Party dedicated to growing class consciousness through organizing and building bridges by displaying Community power to the lumpen and reactionaries is having to explain to so-called leftists that gross language is needed to speak to the gross. They will not listen to your well-reasoned, 12-point plan to feed the homeless. They are convinced all women are generally against them and THAT’s why they have no sex. Not the fact that their rugged individualism has rendered them personally repugnant.

The words are rough, but the language is sound. When they rotate to the next villain, someone must be ready to talk with the disaffected in language they know so they can learn better ways to speak.