Destabilizing Russia is the U.S. empire’s only hope for regaining what it’s just lost

The wheels of history are turning faster than ever in the favor of multipolarity. With Putin’s recognition this week of the independence of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic, and his subsequent willingness to intervene on the behalf of these countries despite Washington’s ultimately empty threats, the imperialists have undergone the biggest setback for their domination schemes since the end of the Cold War. Putin wouldn’t intervene if he believed the imperialists would seriously retaliate, and the liberated peoples require Russia’s help in staying safe from the Ukrainian aggressor. Now he’s able to carry out what he calls a “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, finally enacting some kind of comeuppance against the extreme neo-Nazi movement that Washington has been fostering within Ukraine since the 2014 coup.

The conflict’s bearing upon the global class struggle

The question for Marxists is: how should we treat this situation, since Russia is no longer socialist and Putin himself is an opportunist who’s taken advantage of this crisis to unfairly decry Stalin’s foreign policy? (In his speech on the issue he painted the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as a mistake that enabled Hitler, when in fact it was indispensable for defeating Hitler.) In the face of such reprehensible revisionism, how do we avoid becoming revisionists ourselves? As Lenin wrote in a rebuttal to one of the revisionists of his time: 

Why must “we” “actively resist” suppression of a national uprising? P. Kievsky advances only one reason: “...we shall thereby be combating imperialism, our mortal enemy.” All the strength of this argument lies in the strong word “mortal”. And this is in keeping with his penchant for strong words instead of strong arguments—high-sounding phrases like “driving a stake into the quivering body of the bourgeoisie” and similar Alexinsky flourishes. But this Kievsky argument is wrong. Imperialism is as much our “mortal” enemy as is capitalism. That is so. No Marxist will forget, however, that capitalism is progressive compared with feudalism, and that imperialism is progressive compared with pre-monopoly capitalism. Hence, it is not every struggle against imperialism that we should support. We will not support a struggle of the reactionary classes against imperialism; we will not support an uprising of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism.

This seems like a sign for us not to support Russia’s military operation. But as always with revolutionary theory, things are more complicated than they appear upon minimal investigation. You always need to look into the conditions and context of a given piece of theory, instead of uncritically viewing it as true or untrue. Then you need to compare it with your own conditions, instead of acting like all conditions and eras are the same. It’s this dialectical rigor which shows us that Russia is not an imperialist power, since it lacks the socioeconomic relationship with the exploited countries required for it to meet the criteria for imperialism. 

The same applies to China, the country that this effort to subdue Russia ultimately revolves around; the imperialists seek to paint them both as imperialist powers so that they can sabotage the peaceful, cooperative new multipolar order that China is building with the increasing cooperation of Russia. This is an order that ultimately extends even to India, which has a military alliance with Russia that Washington hasn’t been able to shake it from. It’s in the interests of Marxists to nurture this multipolar transition, because multipolarity weakens the capital of the imperialist countries and weakened capital makes class struggle easier. These are the useful insights that come from properly understanding geopolitics, instead of simplifying them to “both sides are bad.”

This need for proper material investigation of the current situation is apparent from the part in The Foundations of Leninism where Stalin wrote:

...the struggle that the Egyptians merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British "Labour" Government is waging to preserve Egypt's dependent position is for the same reason a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of the government, despite the fact that they are "for" socialism. There is no need to mention the national movement in other, larger, colonial and dependent countries, such as India and China, every step of which along the road to liberation, even if it runs counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at imperialism, i.e., is undoubtedly a revolutionary step. Lenin was right in saying that the national movement of the oppressed countries should be appraised not from the point of view of formal democracy, but from the point of view of the actual results, as shown by the general balance sheet of the struggle against imperialism, that is to say, "not in isolation, but on a world scale"

The fight to keep history from repeating itself

When you put that Lenin quote in its proper context, instead of uncritically pasting it onto the conditions of Russia, you find that it wasn’t even necessarily applicable to modern anti-imperialist capitalist states like Russia or Iran. Lenin was referring not to the modern colloquial definition of “reactionary,” which consists of anything that isn’t socialist, but to those who seek to turn back the wheel to feudalism or pre-monopoly capitalism. And Russia and Iran are monopoly capitalist. 

This doesn’t mean we should see their bourgeois nature as a good thing, but it does mean Stalin’s analysis (which Lenin’s “not in isolation” comment supported within the context that Stalin was writing about) is the one that’s applicable to the current Russia question. Which means we should consistently defend Russia from the false narratives that the imperialists are targeting it with, rather than refraining from defending it regardless of the context. Further, combating NATO’s lies about Russia isn’t synonymous with supporting the counterrevolution that Putin’s camp has been carrying out since the USSR’s fall.

This point is so crucial because if Marxists ignore the importance of geopolitics, feeling content to simplistically call both sides of the new cold war bad while not combating Washington’s propaganda, the U.S. empire’s schemes for a destabilized Eurasia will go less narratively challenged. And in the social media age, narratives are more important than ever for influencing the direction of geopolitics—and therefore of the global class war. This is the nature of our conditions, and it must inform how we operate.

If the imperialists win this narrative battle, they’ll bring about a repeat of history. They’ll create a new Nazi Germany in Ukraine, even moreso than they already have, and they’ll use this to wreak destruction upon the region and the world. Their fascist proxies in Ukraine have found a foothold in exploiting the trauma that Ukraine is experiencing from this conflict, and they’ll continue to rise in the coming years as the CIA steps up its meddling within the new cold war. As NATO continues to militarize Poland, Lithuania, and the other ultra-nationalist Eastern European countries that Russia isn’t able to demilitarize, the prospect of a third world war will grow more likely. But just as alarming is the scenario where Washington successfully destabilizes Russia, and the other Eurasian counterbalances against imperialism. A nuclear war will mean instant apocalypse; victory for the imperialists in the new cold war will mean a slow apocalypse through climatic disaster and unencumbered late-stage capitalist civilizational collapse.

Should Washington’s simultaneous hybrid war against Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan succeed on any fronts, it will leave struggling anti-imperialist countries like Afghanistan and Syria more vulnerable to the final blow that the imperialists seek to deal against them. Should Russia fall to the fascist color revolution that the U.S. seeks to foment within it, this will leave even the great anti-imperialist bulwark of China in jeopardy. 

Even if this increasingly implausible scenario doesn’t materialize—declining empires like the U.S. rarely realize their fantasies of sudden recovery—the empire has the potential to inflict much more damage upon the people of Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere. To minimize the tragedy Washington is manufacturing, we must combat the lies that make the tragedy possible. Foremost among these lies are that Russia has taken this action unprovoked, and that it’s an imperialist power.

—————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

American Jakarta: the settleristic origins of our rising reactionary violence

Whenever the reactionaries carry out a terror campaign, they utilize the applicable social base within the society where the killings take place. In Indonesia under the CIA-installed military regime, this base was found in the Muslim communities, which could be persuaded through anti-communist atrocity propaganda to assist in the extermination of dissidents and ethnic Chinese. Under the European fascist states, the base for the concentration camps and mass executions was found in the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats, who could crudely be called the “middle class.” In the United States, the base supporting all of the reactionary terror campaigns of the past, present, and future is centered around settlerism.

This base can be considered distinct from that of European fascism because though the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy are also instrumental parts of U.S. fascism—the Capitol Hill rioters were predominantly petty capitalists, law enforcement members, armed forces members, and sheltered suburbanites—settlerism is a trait that’s particular to reactionary movements within the settler-colonial countries. Whereas the capitalists and capitalist lackeys in Europe are fighting to preserve their status within an oligarchic system which exists on their own homelands—with the exception of the part of Ireland that’s still ruled by British settler-colonialism—those tied to U.S. capital are fighting to preserve not just the bourgeois state, but the colonial occupation this state is built upon. Capital only has a presence on this continent because of the genocide of the indigenous peoples, the use of free African labor that still hasn’t been paid back, and the construction of a global empire on the foundations of this ill-gotten territory and wealth.

Integral to this empire has been the sharing of its stolen land and wealth with the whites, at least in select amounts and among the whites who’ve been lucky enough not to get pushed to the destitute peripheries of capitalist society. This engineering of scarcity, even among the most favored group, has conditioned the settlers into a mindset that’s perfectly aligned with fascism: racially based social darwinism, where the whites are incentivized to ruthlessly compete with each other for imperialism’s spoils while keeping down the colonized peoples who rightfully own the foundations for this wealth. Under settler-colonialism, the fascist is preoccupied not just with crushing the working class movement, but with crushing any movements that may bring about the end of settler-colonialism—and therefore the basis for the existence of capital. Which is why the decolonial struggle is so crucial for communists here to study and fight on behalf of.

It’s this dual agenda of colonial and class warfare that produced the Ku Klux Klan poster which said: “Negroes beware—do not attend communist meetings. Paid organizers for the communists are only trying to get negroes in trouble. Alabama is a good place for good negroes to live in, but it is a bad place for negroes who believe in SOCIAL EQUALITY. The Ku Klux Klan is watching you. Take heed. Tell the communist leaders to leave. Report all communist meetings to the Ku Klux Klan.”

Such is the agenda behind the U.S. version of Jakarta. The Jakarta Method, consisting of carrying out a coup and terrorizing the communist movement into submission, was replicated across the Latin American settler-colonial states throughout the Cold War. The name Jakarta became associated with the CIA-facilitated extermination campaigns throughout the region, where reactionaries in different countries tailored the term to fit with their own projects for mass murder. The only reason Jakarta still hasn’t come to the U.S.—and I say this in a purely literal sense, as governmental killings of black liberation fighters in particular have absolutely taken place—is because the U.S. empire hasn’t yet reached the point in its decline where it sees such drastic measures as necessary. When the empire does reach such a stage, it will fully employ Jakarta.

And the Klan’s rallying cry towards terrorizing colonized peoples for the purpose of eliminating communism will reflect how the empire goes about this, because it’s in settler-colonialism that the social base for an extermination campaign exists. In 1995, Umberto Eco wrote: “Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old ‘proletarians’ are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” In the settler-colonial context, this can be translated to a scenario where the settlers, particularly the ones with a little bit of capital or a job that’s tied to capital, embrace white supremacist paranoia.

Kyle Rittenhouse is a good example of this. At under 20, his personal net worth is known to be around $50 thousand, not rich but also a vast step above what most people own in the neoliberal era. This is in spite of him having only ever worked as a fry cook and janitor, aside from his attendance of various local police cadet programs. These are the comfortable conditions that incentivize the reactionary settlers in this country to fight for the preservation of capital, whether so that they can continue enjoying these comforts or so that they can attain them. The logical conclusion of this is the militaristic, ultra-nationalist, and anti-intellectual obsessions that Eco described in his analysis of the fascist mindset. The logical conclusion of which is mass murder against the undesirables.

When Jakarta comes to America, it will be carried out by settlers who seek to fortify the occupation of Native lands, the ongoing marginalization of the African communities so that slavery reparations can continue being avoided, and the exploitation of the Global South. All of which are integral to the petty wealth of people like Rittenhouse, and the towering wealth of the capitalists whose interests are adjacent to theirs.

These are the social factors that just led to another one of the settler reactionaries shooting into a crowd of racial justice protesters in Portland, killing one and wounding several others. The recent political factors no doubt have to do with the settler state’s justice system having found Rittenhouse not guilty, accepting his claim that he shot the 2020 Black Lives Matter protesters in self-defense. This latest participant in the country’s rising fascist terror campaign will no doubt claim the same, and will likely be let off as well. Over the years, these kinds of killings will get more frequent, their participants emboldened by an empire that’s eager to use them as footsoldiers for its collapsing capital. They’re who we’ll have to defend from as we fight to abolish the United States, return full jurisdiction to the occupied indigenous nations, and build workers democracy on this continent.

—————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

The Houthi insurgency shows how Che Guevara’s military theory must be updated for the modern era

Since Che Guevara wrote Guerrilla Warfare, his findings on how an irregular army can wage war against a conventional army, military technologies (as well as civilian technologies) have changed in ways that render his conclusions in need of being updated. His strategic ideas are still broadly correct, but if he were to write Guerrilla Warfare today, he would need to alter its tactical details. Such is the assessment that can be gleaned from studying recent successes in irregular warfare, such as the victory of the Houthis in Yemen over the Saudi coalition.

The Houthis: a case study in irregular warfare against a modern conventional military

Two years ago, it was already apparent that the Houthis were on their way to victory. And Michael Horton of the Jamestown Foundation observed the ways that in order to reach these advantages, their tactics have had to differentiate from the tactics used by guerrillas in previous eras. As he observes, they’ve even seemingly thought about what the future of warfare will look like:

Force mobility has been—and remains—fundamental to the Houthis’ success in battling elements of the Saudi and Emirati militaries as well as those forces they support. These forces include Yemen’s internationally recognized government-in-exile, led by President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, which is allied with Saudi Arabia, and a panoply of militias and armed groups supported by the UAE. The Houthis understand and readily apply what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley explained in 2016, “on the future battlefield, if you stay in one place longer than two or three hours, you will be dead.” General Milley made his comments in light of the widespread use of drones and other rapidly developing battlefield technologies.

These technologies aren’t just aerial surveillance devices. They extend all the way down to mobile phones, tablets, landlines, and the other everyday items that governments can use to intercept communications. In places like Israel’s imprisoning barrier around Gaza, and the U.S. settler state’s border with Mexico, governments also use surveillance towers that monitor anyone outdoors within a radius of several miles. Horton describes the tactics the Houthis have adopted in response to these new warfare tools as:

-The extensive use of highly mobile units of combat. These units are small, consisting of no more than 20 fighters in two or three light trucks and/or technicals. Because these vehicles are easy to disguise, and can easily traverse Yemen’s most difficult roads and tracks, they’re essential for the Houthis’ ability to evade and harass the enemy. The truck models they use are extremely common throughout the region, and they don’t have to conceal their weapons since guns are a typical item for men in Yemen to carry.

-Even smaller groups of fighters to go along with the main ones. They’re the equivalent to a fire team—typically four soldiers—and they’re tasked with harassing the enemy as well as collecting intelligence. They’re relatively independent, able to operate for weeks with minimal resupply and not typically assigned with daily or even weekly orders from their superiors. Therefore, they usually rely on the creative instructions of their own commanders. They’re given a remit—a task broadly assigned to them—that lasts until it’s canceled. Within these parameters, they take advantage of whichever opportunities for harming the enemy that they can find, operating in clandestine and therefore not easily detectable ways when necessary.

-A policy of keeping electronic communications to a minimum, or using alternative tools for exchanging information. The electronics they do use are not ones that the enemy can intercept. A common Houthi communications device is the phone from the company Thuraya, which says about its product: “With no fixed infrastructure or user configuration mandates, the portable solutions ensure flexibility and can automatically establish an encrypted, secure-link connection within minutes.” They’re a more long-reaching version of items like Beofeng radios, which could theoretically be useful tools for guerrillas but which only offer signals over a few miles depending on the terrain.

-Exclusively uniting their units into a mass when a threat appears that requires the combined strength of more than one unit. They’re only able to coordinate such operations through an extensive intelligence network whose members gather information on enemy movements, proposed routes for counterinsurgency attacks, and other targets. They then pass this information on to Houthi commanders charged with carrying out the attacks, and the units use a combination of human intelligence and drones to track what they aim to attack. When the targets reach an optimal point for attack, the units converge to subdue the enemy, then immediately go their separate ways.

-The use of semi-autonomous units, at least when operating deep in the enemy’s territory. The units in these areas operate their own human intelligence sources, tasked with identifying those targets. Their autonomy makes them nimble, and able to minimize electronic communications (the Thuraya phones are mainly reserved for the highest level Houthi leaders). It also lets them carry out a given attack while requiring little or no chain of command.

This human intelligence aspect is crucial to the success of the Houthis, because as Horton assesses:

Via their extensive network of informants, the Houthis often know more about the location and capabilities of enemy forces than the general officers charged with commanding them. Despite their enemies’ superior weapons, air support, and persistent overhead surveillance, the Houthis routinely anticipate and thwart offensives and counter-offensives. This is primarily due to the human intelligence that they receive from informants across Yemen. The Houthis’ use of numerous types of modified and indigenously produced UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] allows them to confirm and augment the intelligence generated via informants. The pairing of human and UAV generated intelligence combined with the Houthis and their allies’ intimate knowledge of Yemen’s rugged mountains and canyons, acts as an effective force multiplier. The Houthis often anticipate the moves made by their foes and respond with deadly force. The accuracy of their responses means they are often able to “arrange the minds of their enemies” by eroding morale and undermining trust in the officers and commanders who lead the opposing forces.

This is consistent with Che’s recommendation that irregular forces carry out sabotage of infrastructure and assassinations of prominent counterinsurgency figures to demoralize the enemy, and to shake the people’s faith in the enemy’s authority so that a transfer of authority can be made easier. But if the Houthis were to simply replicate Che’s tactics, they wouldn’t be able to achieve these ends.

Keeping Che’s strategy, changing his tactics

The Houthis follow the broad strategy explained in Guerrilla Warfare: the rebels work to keep their units perpetually hidden from the enemy so that any conventional battles are avoided, prepare themselves to relocate their camps at any given moment, use ambushes and sabotage to always take their enemies by surprise, and break up their units so that the enemy can’t so easily subdue them. One of the major strategies Che took from this model was to send around six fighters each to surround the enemy from the four points of the compass, then alternately engage the enemy from these points so that they can exhaust the enemy with minimal losses for themselves. This can still work for the Houthis, and for any other given guerrilla army. But the new tactics the Houthis have had to adopt in order to survive show that Che’s military theory must be modified according to the technologies which have appeared since he wrote Guerrilla Warfare in 1961.

The most obvious difference between what worked for him and what works for modern guerrillas is the frequency with which the insurgents need to change their location. Even though Che stated that guerrilla bands must always be ready to move, he left room for the idea that guerrillas can establish static bases in the right conditions:

In the first place, there are only elastic positions, specific places that the enemy cannot pass, and places of diverting him. Frequently the enemy, after easily overcoming difficulties in a gradual advance, is surprised to find himself suddenly and solidly detained without possibilities of moving forward. This is due to the fact that the guerrilla-defended positions, when they have been selected on the basis of a careful study of the ground, are invulnerable. It is not the number of attacking soldiers that counts, but the number of defending soldiers. Once that number has been placed there, it can nearly always hold off a battalion with success. It is a major task of the chiefs to choose well the moment and the place for defending a position without retreat.

This is arguably still true, but it’s now far less often true. In the new era of warfare that Milley described, static warfare is less of an achievable task than ever for guerrillas, and at a certain point it will become essentially impossible—at least in the stages where a guerrilla force hasn’t yet gained control over the state and its military bases. This is the implication of the trend that the European Army Interoperability Centre has assessed is coming about from military drone advancements, and from progress in remote control ground vehicles:

UAVs/UGVs [unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles] are currently deployed mainly for intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance (ISR) missions. Systems such as the “Ironclad (UGV)” or the “Black Hornet” (UAV), are notable examples of this use. However, some are used for combat missions such as the “MQ-9 Reaper/Predator B” (UAV) used mainly by the United States of America (USA) and Israel. Collaboration between these systems in Land Forces is growing closer as UAVs and UGVs are armed progressively. While UAVs assist ground forces by attacking high-value, fixed targets, UGVs can transport explosives and supplies such as heavy weapons or additional ammunition for ground troops, and by providing real-time video surveillance capabilities. This increases the combat power of ground troops by reducing their physical load. Currently, UGVs are not as well-known as their UAV cousins, but they are acquiring more importance as time passes, and their equipment improves. As stated by Major David Moreau of the US Marine Corps, “armed UGVs will one day fight alongside war-fighters during combat operations”.

These new factors—nearly limitless potential for surveillance in warfare and greatly reduced need for humans in combat—have changed the tactics that are appropriate to practice alongside Che’s strategy. The irregular forces of the near future will need to go into battle with a mindset of intensive mobility, even compared to the one that Che recommended. The Houthis have pre-empted the scenario Mills described—of constantly having your operations urgently jeopardized—by changing the fundamentals of how they play the game. They’ve taken Che’s statement that “As the circumstances of the war require, the guerrilla band can dedicate itself exclusively to fleeing from an encirclement which is the enemy's only way of forcing the band into a decisive fight that could be unfavorable,” and applied it proportionately to the circumstances of modern military surveillance technology.

This sounds like modern warfare tools have purely made irregular warfare harder. But there’s another side to the story: it’s also given irregular forces more tools to utilize. The only reason why a guerrilla force is technologically inferior to a conventional force is that it hasn’t yet had the time to seize the territories, and therefore the weapons, of the conventional force. Che explained that the weapon supplies of the guerrilla are sustained through its enemy, and that tools like the bazooka aren’t attainable for the guerrilla until they can get seized from the enemy. Irregular warfare is not a game of trying to destroy society through a limited supply of weapons, but a game of taking control over society’s facets—whether its armaments, its infrastructure, or its informational sources. Che describes how the guerrillas must seize the enemy’s radio networks of a given area in order to provide information about the war to the locals, and to therefore ensure social cohesion within the liberated zones. In the modern era, the equivalent must be done when it comes to the enemy’s military technologies, allowing the irregular forces to themselves utilize drones for surveillance and attacks.

Such is the new language that today’s military analysts must translate texts like Guerrilla Warfare into. A language that accommodates not just the invention of drones, the emergence of monitoring tools like the Gaza towers, and the imminent advancements in remotely controlled ground vehicles, but the invention of the internet, mobile devices, and social media. With these factors, insurgents have many more vulnerabilities towards surveillance to avoid, especially if they operate in a clandestine fashion. 

In his section on suburban warfare, about the prospect for insurgents to infiltrate the communities controlled by the enemy, Che describes a lifestyle that was naturally difficult to maintain: “If there is more than one guerrilla band, they will all be under a single chief who will give orders as to the necessary tasks through contacts of proven trustworthiness who live openly as ordinary citizens. In certain cases the guerrilla fighter will be able to maintain his peacetime work, but this is very difficult. Practically speaking, the suburban guerrilla band is a group of men who are already outside the law, in a condition of war, situated as unfavorably as we have described.” Today, when the internet is integral to academic work and professional life, such a balance between civilian life and insurgency life is even less feasible. Therefore this kind of approach needs to be reduced, as attempts at static warfare need to be reduced. The Houthis have shown that suburban warfare and spy work are still doable, but that those involved must forsake the tools that make modern life functional.

The qualifier is again that this new technological context doesn’t necessarily make irregular warfare harder, as the internet has given unprecedented weapons to insurgents. If Guerrilla Warfare were written today, it no doubt would delve into hacking, online informational warfare, and cybersecurity tools, like the ones the Houthis use. Insurgency hasn’t become harder, it’s just become more complicated.

Like how pieces of military theory must be interpreted while acknowledging that different places have different social, cultural, or geographical conditions, the differences in eras must be taken into account. Technological progress has fundamentally recontextualized what Che’s theories mean. He wasn’t wrong in his historical context (at least outside of his mistaken conviction that Cuba’s insurgency model could be replicated throughout the rest of Latin America despite the differing conditions). But faced with these changes to how war is waged, even his most useful insights need to be read through an updated lens.

—————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

NATO’s Nazis in Ukraine, anti-Russian war propaganda, & our human crisis

As I watch the U.S. imperialists manufacture a crisis in Ukraine, putting forth fabricated accounts of Russian provocations so that further military buildup throughout the region can be justified, I think of what Albert Camus said about humanity’s capacity for evil in the modern era.

As he observed in his 1946 lecture The Crisis of Man, the conditions of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism have produced a paradigm of amorality. One where what’s “right” is considered synonymous with what advances the interests of the conqueror, since the conquerer and his subordinate authorities are presumed as righteous simply because they’ve won. In this mentality, there’s nothing to believe in, just a nihilistic philosophical void that permits all atrocities imaginable—because as long as those atrocities are committed by history’s victors, they’re not horrors to be condemned but phenomena to be passively observed. Camus assesses that the logical conclusion of this is a worldview that can easily accept, and even praise, someone like Hitler:

If one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense and one is unable to affirm any value, then everything is permitted and nothing is important. Hence there is neither good nor evil, and Hitler was neither wrong nor right. One could lead millions of innocents to the crematorium as easily as one may devote oneself to curing leprosy; one can tear a man’s ear with one hand and soothe him with the other; one can clean a house in front of men who had just been tortured; one can honor the dead or throw them in the garbage. It is all the same. And since we thought that nothing made sense, we had to conclude that the man who succeeds is in the right. And this is so true that even today plenty of intelligent skeptics will tell you that if Hitler had by chance won the war, history would have paid him homage and consecrated the hideous pedestal in which he perched. And there can be no doubt that history, as we conceive of it today, would have consecrated Hitler and justified terror and murder just as we all consecrate murder and terror when we have the temerity to think that everything is meaningless.

Aren’t current events proving this right? Since the Obama administration covertly maneuvered to install an ultra-nationalist regime in Ukraine eight years ago to counter Russia, our institutions have been engaged in a virtual blackout on the rampant human rights abuses which this regime has committed. Politicians, the media, and “human rights” organizations haven’t drawn any attention to the Ukrainian government’s ethnic cleansing and anti-democratic actions, despite claiming to care about human rights and democracy when it comes to Washington’s adversaries. 

When the Ukrainian National Guard has committed war crimes, the Ukrainian military has regularly massacred hundreds of civilians as part of its warfare strategy, Ukraine has tortured dissidents, and Ukrainian forces have shot at refugees, the world’s supposed voices of moral authority have been silent. Even when Ukraine has fostered neo-Nazism, to the point of allowing fascists to march in praise of Nazi collaborators, the cold warriors have ignored it under the rationale that the explicit Nazis don’t represent the government itself. In spite of the ample evidence that the military is entangled with the fascist paramilitaries and their ideology, and the on-the-ground realities of what’s been perpetrated against marginalized groups.

The consequences of this negligence have been pogroms and other forms of terror, directed at Jews, Romas, the LGBT community, those who engage in speech that’s perceived as challenging ultra-nationalism, and the country’s one-third of Russian speakers. As corruption from intensive neoliberal policies has devastated the economy, the breakdown in state functionings has created a power vacuum, which the fascist militias have filled. For the victims of the Nazi terror, it hasn’t mattered that Ukraine’s president is Jewish, or that NATO claims to be backing Ukraine in the name of “democracy.” The terror has come all the same. This is precisely what the prevailing forces within Euromaidan, the ones that Washington backed and put into power, have wanted from the start. After the coup, the new Kiev regime expressed intentions to forcibly relocate the Russian speakers throughout the Donbas region, which would have been a blatant violation of international war crimes laws. 

Following the 2014 statement from Ukraine’s Defense Minister that these groups ought to be transferred into “filtration” camps, Voltaire Network’s Andrew Korybko observed about Washington’s reaction:

This choice of words not only wasn’t condemned by Kiev’s American patrons, but was actually defended by State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki, who strangely said that Yatsenyuk “has consistently been in support of a peaceful resolution.” Raising concerns even higher that a full-fledged cleansing is being planned, Ukraine’s land agency said that it will be giving “free land” from the east to the military, Interior Ministry, and Special Services troops battling the federalists. With Ukraine on the verge of large-scale ethnic and cultural cleansing, it is little wonder at whose expense this Lebenstraum-like “free land” will be given….Perhaps because Yatsenyuk and others in his administration believe the protesters in the east to be “subhuman”, they do not feel that “human rights” apply to them. Accordingly, these “sub-humans” won’t have the right to their former property as well (due to the forcible resettlement), so it is likely that their homes and businesses will be the “free land” that Kiev has promised to its militant henchmen deployed in the east.

Such is the punishment that Ukraine’s ruling faction seeks, and has been carrying out within the fullest extent of its territorial access, against the ethnic Russians who seek to liberate their communities from a genocidal regime. If Crimeans hadn’t voted to join Russia, they would have been subjected to the same horrors that the regime has been visiting upon their relatives elsewhere. 

And the cultural hegemony within the U.S. has no problem whatsoever with the regime’s Hiterian solution to what can be called the “Russian question.” Top U.S. neocons met with the Ukrainian fascists after they came to power. The Biden administration has refused to condemn Kiev for facilitating official celebrations of Ukrainian Holocaust perpetrators, who the regime considers the country’s heroic “founding fathers” and criminalizes any denunciations of. The U.S. media gives praise to the Ukrainian armed forces despite these forces blatantly displaying Euromaidan’s variation of the Nazi insignia, and prominent U.S. intellectuals dehumanize the ethnic Russians by casting them as bad actors simply for evacuating their women and children.

How many times can the U.S. empire prove Camus right? The foundations for this revival of state power for Nazis, and normalization of Nazism within the liberal sphere, have been getting laid down since the end of the Third Reich. NATO was founded in collaboration with a number of Nazi war criminals, who were appointed by the imperialists to continue their war against Russia from a new, more advantageous position: one of unity with all the imperialist powers that had opposed Germany. The U.S. shielded Nazi scientists from justice by using them for the CIA’s Cold War operations, and Washington would later collaborate with the members of a Chilean Nazi colony to recruit torturers for the CIA-installed Pinochet dictatorship. 

All throughout this time, and even prior to World War II, the U.S. media has been promoting the lie from Goebbels that Stalin engineered a famine in Ukraine—the atrocity propaganda story that the Kiev regime is now using to justify its banning of communist organizing, persecution of Russian speakers, and characterization of Russia as an aggressor which has historically victimized Ukrainians. The ultra-nationalists have turned reality on its head to portray themselves as the victims, when they’re the perpetrators.

On every level, at every step of the way, the imperialists have worked to ensure that Hitler never died. And the most important part of this has been the cultivation of the mentality Camus described. The mentality where evil isn’t recognized for being evil, but simply gets rationalized as the natural aspects of how history progresses. When you believe conflict is the unavoidable order of things, and one side always has to subdue the other, you can come to approve of endless atrocities as long as they help your side. Human beings are no longer seen as human beings, but as resources that can be casually sacrificed and abused. Torture, murder, persecution, forced relocation, and deprivation aren’t worth raising issue with, since morality is irrelevant. All that’s relevant is the war. This is the crisis humanity faces, the crisis that Camus said is

...about replacing real men with political men. Individual passion is no longer possible, only collective, that is to say, abstract passions. Whether we like it or not, we cannot avoid politics. It no longer matters that we respect or prevent a mother’s suffering. What counts is ensuring the triumph of a doctrine. Human suffering is no longer considered a scandal, it is merely one variable in a reckoning whose terrible sums has not yet been calculated. It is clear that these different symptoms can be summed up by something that might be described as the cult of efficiency and abstraction. This is why Europeans today know only solitude and silence. They can no longer communicate with others through shared values. And since they are no longer protected by mutual respects based on those values, their only alternatives is to become victims or executioners.

This is how the U.S. empire’s propagandists want you to think. They promote a view of the world that excuses the worst depravities in the interests of advancing the doctrine of Washington’s hegemony, which the imperialists and their proxy regime have sold to Ukrainians as a route towards Lebensraum. And given the origins of the United States itself, we can see why it’s made the theft of land into its core basis for driving Ukraine towards war. The U.S. settlers murdered nine out of ten Natives throughout the land, using warfare means ranging from the sabotage of crops, to the massacring of children, to the deliberate spreading of disease, to the forced transfer of entire indigenous nations. And because they won, the country they’ve built on the stolen land is not condemned, but celebrated.

U.S. settlerism, with its land theft and genocide under the rationale that these things are crucial for building a superior nation, is where Nazism originated. Now U.S. settlerism is taking its doctrine into Ukraine, to the effect that our human crisis may soon produce a repeat of the last time it plunged the world into war.

—————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

Dialectics, the masses, & what U.S. communists must learn from history’s successful revolutions

Without a material basis, revolutionary militancy is only adventurism. To rush into the class and anti-colonial conflict with eagerness for war, without considering what preparations war will require and whether the given moment calls for it, is counterproductive. Ultra-left strains of the communist movement, like the Naxalite Maoists in India, have committed this error and consequently found themselves in a never-ending cycle of guerrilla warfare. In even worse cases, like the Maoist followers of Chairman Gonzalo in Peru, they’ve been totally defeated. As Mao himself said, to go on the offensive when the masses aren’t ready is adventurism.

However, even more dangerous is the other error that Mao described: refusing to engage in militancy when the conditions demand that communists protect themselves from counterrevolutionary violence. He described this as right opportunism. When communists have committed this error, like was the case for the PKI in Indonesia (which refused to arm its members during the leadup to the 1965 anti-communist coup), they’ve neen exterminated or terrorized into submission. Crucial for our success is finding a balance between these two extremes of overly eager militancy, and neglect towards militancy. Pivotal towards this are knowing how to gauge when the conditions necessitate action, and knowing exactly what will be required to mount such a defense against counterrevolutionary terror.

I’ll make this into a guide for how to do so within the United States. But the reasoning behind what I’ll describe can also be utilized for tactical decisions by liberation movements outside the imperial center. In fact, it’s from the exploited country of Peru that I’ll be drawing my prime example of tactical maneuvers done wrong. And it’s from the formerly colonized countries Vietnam and Cuba that I’ll draw my main examples of militancy done right.

Gonzaloism: when communists fail to win the masses

Last year, one Medium columnist (who’s interestingly named me as an example of someone who goes boldly far in my willingness to talk about militancy) put forth an analysis of the mistakes that Gonzalo and his Shining Path made. Their conclusion was Gonzalo followed the dogmatic logic behind Mao’s Cultural Revolution: that proletarian revolution must follow a linear path where after the Communist Party comes to power, a purge of what the Party’s leadership judges to be “reactionary elements” must follow. The way Mao’s camp went about this, which today’s Communist Party of China has rightly disavowed, was to unleash insufficiently disciplined violence so that the “capitalist roaders” (or rather the communists who properly understand how to develop an impoverished country) could be crushed. As this columnist assesses, what Gonzalo did was take these incorrect ideas of Mao’s, and magnify them:

Gonzalo — not anymore Guzmán [Gonzalo’s original name] — had a flawed understanding of strategy, to say the least. If one is to look at the other important “kindred” regime of the era — Democratic Kampuchea — one can easily see the same linearity I mention: the KR had de facto control over the country at the time their most well-known policies were implemented. At their greatest power, SP [Shining Path] held significant power over the forests of central Peru — the modern San Matías San Carlos reserve — and its influence or areas of operation extended from Lima to the Brazilian border, and from San Martín to Puno. Yet, it had no absolute or significant control over these territories — no “forward bases”, as the guerrilla term goes, not even the support of the majority of the population. Which brings me to another point. SP had an infamously strong perception of indigenous and rural communities. Their ideas somewhat mirrored those of the Democratic Kampuchea regime: “everyone must embrace our ideology, and if they don’t, they are our enemy”. 

Why were the SP adventurist? Because ironically just as their idol Mao warned against, they acted out of step with the masses. They ignored the reality that they lacked the popular support required for a guerrilla army to exercise sovereignty, which naturally led to conflicts between them and the masses—especially the indigenous masses, who are the people that communists throughout the Americas should be especially careful to respect. As the Medium columnist assesses, “SP clearly lacked either the ability to bribe their way to acceptation — to earn the ‘hearts and minds’ — or the strength to chronically subjugate the communities they alienated. Precisely because of this was how its arguably biggest enemy was created: the ronderos.”

The ronderos were a militia movement that fought against the SP. And due to Gonzaloism’s adventurism and chauvinism, the social factors which produced them weren’t necessarily reactionary. The SP failed to respect the self-determination of the indigenous nations whose lands it was operating within, and this strengthened the support for the ronderos. It replaced the tribal power structures with the structures that the Gonzaloists decided were best, without adequately considering the traditions of the Natives (or the fact that these practices have been effective governing models for millennia). The consequence was failure to gain the social base required for a sustainable guerrilla insurgency. The equivalent has happened with today’s Maoist guerrillas in India and the Philippines, which are locked in an endless cycle of costly struggle due to their ultra-leftist and adventurist approach.

For the Gonzaloists, these problems with Maoism were made doubly self-detrimental due to their exacerbating the colonial contradiction. If you try to dictate policies without following the leadership of the indigenous and otherwise colonized peoples, you’ll place yourself in irreconcilable conflict with the masses, making it all the less likely that you’ll win. This combination of adventurism and chauvinism isn’t exclusive to Maoism, but extends to every strain that doesn’t understand dialectics, whether anarchism or the “patriotic socialist” faction of U.S. Marxist-Leninists. As an indigenous communist I know has said to me about one adventurist anarchist group in our area: “White guys taking armed control over indigenous land without taking care to consult the First Nations? That’s colonialism.”

As Che Guevara wrote in Guerrilla Warfare, “Conduct toward the civil population ought to be regulated by a large respect for all the rules and traditions of the people of the zone, in order to demonstrate effectively, with deeds, the moral superiority of the guerrilla fighter over the oppressing soldier.”

Revolutionaries in the U.S., and in every other settler-colonial state (which as we’ve seen includes places like Peru), must not neglect the preferences of the nations whose land they live on. We must place the abolition of the United States, and the full returning of land jurisdiction to the indigenous nations the United States occupies, as equal in priority to building socialism. Because socialism can’t develop here, or in any other corner of the Americas, as long as its representatives perpetuate the colonial contradiction. Such is just one of the many dangers of adventurism, which will always cause one to act out of step with the masses and therefore out of reach of revolution.

Ho Chi Minh Thought: when communists successfully apply dialectics to act in sync with the masses

Communists in the imperial center shouldn’t try to replicate an approach which worked within a formerly colonized country, that would be committing the same kind of error of the Maoists here who think they can simply copy China’s specific model for People’s War. But we should study why revolutions like the one in Vietnam succeeded so we can apply these lessons to our conditions.

In 2020, the Communist Party of Vietnam assessed what Ho Chi Minh Thought says about the masses:

In each historical period of revolution, the Party's mass mobilization work have different contents and methods, but the most important goal is to strengthen the close relationship between the Party and the people, to firmly consolidate the people's beliefs in the Party and the State, to mobilize and widely attract people of all strata to actively participate in revolutionary movements, patriotic emulations and to strengthen the great unity bloc of the entire nation. In the time of the resistance war, the national construction was still full of difficulties, in "Mass Mobilization", Uncle [Ho] had foreseen the cause of reform and pointed out the source of strength to carry out the reform: "Reform and construction work is the responsibility of the people”. In fact, the cause of reform is also initiated from the people, as the 8th National Party Congress document affirmed: “It is the people's opinions, aspirations and initiatives that are the origin of the Party's line of renovation. Thanks to the people's response to the renovation policy and bravely striving and overcoming many difficulties and challenges, the renewal can obtain achievements today".

How does this statement apply to our conditions? For one, it doesn’t mean we ought to promote patriotism for the United States. Whereas Vietnam is a cohesive nation, one that’s been unified through the mutual struggles of its ethnic groups against colonialism and imperialism, the “United States” is like Israel: a colony of settlers whose existence is irreconcilably in conflict with the colonized peoples. Thus the need for adequately addressing the colonial contradiction. But we should apply Uncle Ho’s practices of strengthening the relationship between the Party and the people, and of mobilizing and attracting people of all strata.

What does this mandate we do? That we let the masses be our leaders, instead of trying to dictate what the masses do as the Gonzaloists did. This means continuously investigating what the material needs of the masses are at a given moment, and addressing those needs. If the masses need food, or other mutual aid items, we’ll provide them. If the masses need protection from fascist violence, we’ll provide this as well. These are the services the Black Panthers made available to their communities, and the masses of the imperial center increasingly need such help. So we must equip and train our cadres to deliver them.

Principled anti-colonialism fits into this strategy of making the people’s opinions and aspirations the origin of the revolution’s actions. Just because most within the U.S. currently have a sense of patriotism for the colonial identity, we shouldn’t blindly share this opinion; most in this country also believe the imperialist propaganda about Chinese “human rights abuses,” but no serious communist shares this incorrect opinion on China. People are shaped by their conditions, and if we change the conditions from a settler-colonial state that’s the center of global imperialism to a post-colonial workers democracy, these backwards sentiments will diminish and eventually go extinct. When we return all of the stolen land to the tribes, and build socialism within the pan-indigenous confederacy that will then likely form, most people won’t cling to the colonial identity, nor to xenophobic the lies that the imperialists have put in their heads. That identity, and these hateful attitudes, will no longer be nurtured by their conditions. 

Such an approach is different from the dogmatic commandism of the Gonzaloists; it’s akin to what every successful socialist revolution has done, which is combat backwards sentiments by abolishing the power structures that reinforce reactionary thinking.

What’s most important is that we fulfill the people’s material needs, which are shared by proletarians both from the oppressed nations and from the settler demographics. Regardless of someone’s skin color or ethnicity, if they’re poor, they aspire to be freed from their scarcity (though those from the oppressed nations experience poverty in higher proportions than whites). And if we satisfy this aspiration, they’ll reward us with their support. 

Given those fatal complications that have come when communists in the Americas have failed to respect the self-determination of the colonized nations, embracing “patriotic socialism” in a settler-colonial state won’t win us the masses. It might win us some support from the white labor aristocrats, but they’re some of the last people we should be appealing towards, since a white person who seeks to preserve settlerism has their interests not in the proletariat but in petty-bourgeois white landowners. Which obviously isn’t where the revolutionary struggle is going to stem from; a sociological analysis of today’s United States shows the colonized nations to be the societal facets most likely to start off that revolt.

If we address the colonial contradiction by opposing settlerism, while fulfilling the material needs of the people, we’ll bypass the two big pitfalls of the Gonzaloists: conflict with the colonized, and lack of ability to win the backing of the broader masses. It’s regarding the latter challenge that we can look to Che Guevara’s account of how revolution won in Cuba, which provides details on what it will mean to address the material needs of the masses in the long term.

Che Guevara’s approach: when the revolutionaries win by fulfilling the material needs of the masses

When studying Che on militancy, it’s important to note that we shouldn’t adopt his doctrine of focoism, which is adventurist in that it uncritically applies Che’s statement that “It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.” Just because this was true for Cuba during Che’s time, it isn’t necessarily true for your location during your time. As Mao was right about many things while wrong about others, so was Che. But we should learn from what he was right about.

And what he was right about is that for revolutionaries to liberate territories, they must gain the backing of the locals. Which is how to practically apply the truism that revolutionaries must let the masses lead them; we can’t act until the masses have given us permission to act. We can’t practice the tactics detailed in Che’s Guerrilla Warfare until we’ve built a relationship with the masses deep enough for the locals to provide us with the shelter, logistical support, and democratic legitimacy to liberate a given piece of territory.

To find this out, it’s best to read all of Guerrilla Warfare. But here’s a summary of Che’s advice in the area of winning the people’s hearts and minds, along with Che quotes that pertain to this issue:

-Don’t try to trample over the cultures and interests of the colonized peoples you’re operating among. This is crucial for establishing the perceived right to govern that’s essential towards mass consent for the tactics Che describes. The context of Che’s statement about respecting the traditions of the locals is the assessment that “A fundamental part of guerrilla tactics is the treatment accorded to the people of the zone. Even the treatment accorded the enemy is important; the norm to be followed should be an absolute inflexibility at the time of attack, an absolute inflexibility toward all the despicable elements that resort to informing and assassination, and clemency as absolute as possible toward the enemy soldiers who go into the fight performing or believing that they perform a military duty.” Avoiding the SP’s errors in relating to the colonized nations is instrumental for fostering the social factors that make these policies effective at gaining and retaining territory. In the case of the U.S., this means following a model of fully returning the stolen lands to the tribes.

-Inform the masses about what the revolution is fighting for, and why it’s in their immediate interests to support the revolution over the oppressor. Che writes that “along with centers for study of present and future zones of operations, intensive popular work must be undertaken to explain the motives of the revolution, its ends, and to spread the incontrovertible truth that victory of the enemy against the people is finally impossible.” The latter can’t come until after the revolution has gained enough strength to shift beyond its initial stage of concealed operations, and can hold jurisdiction over a given locality. Essential towards the leadup to this point is making clear to the masses that the revolutionaries aim to free society from the systemic evils that the masses are most desperate to be freed from. In the U.S., some of these most pressing evils are the racist militarized police state, the carceral state that keeps millions imprisoned or stripped of their rights, and the settler state that deprives colonized peoples of clean water (whether in Flint or at Standing Rock) for the benefit of capital.

-Disseminate propaganda to the locals through channels that the revolutionaries have either seized or set up. It’s important to put forth the pieces of information that pertain to the struggle, which Che describes as follows: “The great watchwords of the revolutionary movement, the watchword of a general strike at an opportune moment, of help to the rebel forces, of unity, etc., should be explained. Other periodicals can be published; for example, one explaining the tasks of those elements in the whole island [or region] which are not combatants but which nevertheless carry out diverse acts of sabotage, of attempts, etc. Within the organization there can be periodicals aimed at the enemy's soldiers; these will explain facts of which they are otherwise kept ignorant. News bulletins and proclamations about the movement are very useful. The most effective propaganda is that which is prepared within the guerrilla zone. Priority will be given to the diffusion of ideas among natives of the zone, offering explanations of the theoretical significance of the insurrection, already known to them as a fact. In this zone there will also be peasant periodicals, the general organ of all the guerrilla forces, and bulletins and proclamations. There will also be the radio.” 

Che describes the radio as the most important tool for propaganda in such a scenario, and this will likely be true for our conditions as well; the U.S. military has plans to shut off internet and cell phone access in parts of the country should an internal revolt occur, so seizing and making use of the local radio apparatuses will be essential.

-Establish a sustainable social contract between the revolutionaries and the locals. This process Che describes as one of consistently acting in good faith. Act selflessly and with perpetual consideration of the needs of the masses, and the masses will reward you: “The first task is to gain the absolute confidence of the inhabitants of the zone; and this confidence is won by a positive attitude toward their problems, by help and a constant program of orientation, by the defense of their interests and the punishment of all who attempt to take advantage of the chaotic moment in which they live in order to use pressure, dispossess the peasants, seize their harvests, etc. The line should be soft and hard at the same time: soft and with a spontaneous cooperation for all those who honestly sympathize with the revolutionary movement; hard upon those who are attacking it outright, fomenting dissentions, or simply communicating important information to the enemy army.” This hardness is different from the approach of the SP in that it’s willing to compromise according to the conditions. It isn’t excessive in its rule, being careful not to alienate the masses as the Gonzaloists did.

-Set up a new economic system that doesn’t conflict with the interests of the masses. The bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, who will be the ones leading the charge of violent counterrevolution, will naturally get penalized through the redistribution of their material possessions, and through the returning of their stolen indigenous lands. But as Che describes, the broader masses should be treated with friendliness: “Raising supplies, as we explained in a previous chapter, can be carried out in various ways: through direct or indirect taxes, through direct or indirect donations, and through confiscations; all this goes to make up the large chapter on supplies for the guerrilla army. Keep in mind that the zone ought by no means to be impoverished by the direct action of the rebel army, even though the latter will be responsible indirectly for the impoverishment that results from enemy encirclement, a fact that the adversary’s propaganda will repeatedly point out. Precisely for this reason conflicts ought not to be created by direct causes. There ought not be, for example, any regulations that prevent the farmers of a zone in liberated territory from selling their products outside that territory, save in extreme and transitory circumstances and with a full explanation of these interruptions to the peasantry.” The revolutionaries shouldn’t become bandits as far as the people are concerned, or the people will reject the revolutionaries.

If we apply these lessons, victory will be ours. If we ignore them in any capacity, and be tempted by adventurism, dogmatism, opportunism, commandism, or chauvinism, we’ll be unable to win.

—————————————————————————

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.