The U.S. empire is using engineered destabilization to delay its full demise

When it comes to the decline of U.S. hegemony, there are two sides to the story, one hopeful and the other bleak. One pertains to all of the ways that the empire’s power is unambiguously diminishing, and to how this is opening the potential for workers democracy to spread to every part of the world. To how Washington has been unable to use its fascist Ukrainian proxy to crush the independence of the Donbass peoples, how Washington’s subversion efforts in places like Hong Kong have failed, how the 2019 coup in Bolivia has been reversed, and other such positive developments. These factors are accelerating the emergence of a multipolar world, and the contraction of U.S. capital to the point where proletarian revolution becomes possible within the imperial center. 

But the other side pertains to how at the same time the empire is undergoing these losses, it’s in many areas successfully cutting its losses. Which is to say it’s destabilizing many of the places that have fallen out of its grip, preventing them from developing within the new multipolar order and pulling themselves out of the hell that imperialism has engineered for them. By doing this, the empire is largely preventing them from developing independently, which is what would fundamentally threaten the neo-colonial power structure.

In Afghanistan, the people have gained independence from the extremely corrupt neo-colonial regime that Washington enforced upon them through brutal death squads. But they’ve at the same time fallen under the total control of a reactionary theocratic group that the imperialists created, whose retrograde cruelty is providing narrative precedent for the imperialists to carry out further violence upon the country. Washington is doing this not through Washington’s Uyghur separatist terror group the East Turkestan Islamic Movement—whose attempts to destabilize Afghanistan have been thwarted—but through economic strangulation. Strangulation that’s exacerbating every facet of the shortages the country is experiencing, making for a full-on famine as a direct consequence of the U.S. sanctions. 

Yet as the multipolar world continues to rise, Afghanistan is turning into an example of how a country ravaged by the imperialists can build itself up. China has every intention of carrying out development projects within Afghanistan should its criteria of stability be met, and the failure of the ETIM has brought things much closer to that point. As Xinhua wrote this week about the statements from Afghan foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Belt and Road Initiative draws closer to being brought to the country, and to spreading the kinds of benefits it’s provided to so many other places:

Muttaqi thanked China for providing the Afghan people with valuable and the most needed humanitarian assistance that has helped them go through a harsh winter. The Afghan side is confident of improving the country's security and stabilizing the situation, so as to ensure the safety of foreign personnel and missions in Afghanistan, he said. Muttaqi added that Afghanistan would like to make itself a bridge of regional connectivity and a land of prosperity for the people, instead of a hotbed of chaos and turmoil. Afghanistan is ready to work with China to take an active part in the Belt and Road Initiative, and enhance cooperation in trade and investment, said Muttaqi, adding that Afghanistan is willing to deepen friendly exchanges with its neighbors, and jointly safeguard regional peace and stability.

In time, Afghanistan will reach a brighter point. As will the peoples in the other places that have been successfully resisting imperial control, but that currently live under siege from Washington’s economic warfare, proxy war instigation, and destructive political meddling. In the Donbass region, the people have just been pummeled by eight steady years of shelling from a genocidal Kiev regime which has sought to colonize the area’s ethnic Russians. They’ve been ravaged by trauma that will last for generations, and forced into the severe deprivation that occurs when a group is targeted by a government that’s trying to break that group’s collective spirit. Yet they’ve successfully resisted, and the western threat is diminishing as Russia demilitarizes and denazifies Ukraine. In time, they’ll be able to build a prosperous society as well. 

So will be the case for the people of Myanmar, and Haiti, and Libya, and Ethiopia, and Eritrea, and Syria, and Belarus, and Venezuela, and Kazakhstan, and Lebanon, and Cuba, and all the other peoples whose countries are being subjected to Washington’s perpetual onslaught of engineered destabilization. The sanctions, the backing of terrorists, the coups or coup attempts, the sowing of unrest, the corporate theft of resources and ravaging of lands, the stealing of oil by the U.S. military, the CIA disinformation campaigns, will all go away. And these nations will be able to progress, and ultimately undergo proletarian revolutions (if they haven’t already), in a state of total liberation from empire.

The biggest factor delaying this for all of them is the ongoing existence of the United States, which is an empire both externally and internally; the hundreds of occupied First Nations, as well as the Chicano and African nations, are living in continuous chaos as well due to their being occupied by a settler-colonial state. When the U.S. is abolished—and a socialist indigenous confederacy is built in its place—these nations will be fully free, and the other nations victimized by imperialism will at the least be freed from a global imperialist power structure that’s anywhere as strong as it is now. Such a scenario is hinted at by the progress already made by countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, the DPRK, and Cuba to build themselves up in spite of their dire circumstances. 

Two years after Iran famously managed to defy U.S. sanctions by transporting oil to Venezuela, Venezuela has reached a point of independence where Washington has had to start appeasing it in exchange for oil. Cuba, with its world-renowned free healthcare system, has become a global leader in Covid vaccine innovation. Since the socialists took back power in Bolivia in 2020 following Washington’s 2019 fascist coup, Bolivia has been building up its people’s living standards. The DPRK has defied the sanctions to create a society that’s increasingly prosperous within the limitations of its self-reliant paradigm, where the people have workplace democracy, deeply democratic political elections, and a ruling party that consistently does everything possible to provide food, healthcare, and other human rights.

When imperialism has been sufficiently weakened, these and the other besieged countries will be able to reach the heights of China, the anti-imperialist country that’s gone the furthest in its defiance of colonial destabilization attempts by eliminating total poverty. As Jeremy Corbyn wrote last fall after observing the social welfare and labor policies that Bolivia’s post-coup socialists have so far enacted, Global South movements like Bolivia’s ruling MAS party are getting closer towards such prosperity:

There is a lot we can learn from the Bolivian left’s achievements in power — from protecting nature in its constitution, to embracing multiculturalism, to organizing in communities and workplaces for real change. As internationalists, we must continue to show our support for the MAS, the social movements, and the Arce government against any attempts by reactionary forces — inside and outside the country — to turn the clock back and forcefully restore a right-wing regime intent on destroying MAS’s efforts to advance democracy, human rights, equality, and social progress in Bolivia.

Despite how well social democracy is working for some Global South countries such as Bolivia, we in the imperialist countries should unequivocally reject social democracy as a route towards fighting imperialism, because in an imperialist country social democracy is inextricably pro-imperialist. Social democracy seeks to preserve the capitalist state, and the capitalist state in an imperialist country will always be oriented around exploiting the Global South.

This is the step that the British social democrat Corbyn leaves out; to defeat imperialism, we must embrace proletarian revolution, with its mandate for overturning the capitalist state and building a workers state in its place. Evolving from social democracy—which currently dominates anti-capitalist discourse in the imperialist countries—to Marxist-Leninist revolutionary socialism is instrumental for those in the imperial center to practice solidarity with imperialism’s global victims. By advancing Marxism-Leninism, we can do our part in bringing about that beautiful future where imperialism is extinct, and can no longer harm anyone.

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The sooner U.S. imperialism gets totally defeated, the less harm it can do in its decline

 

“Smash US Imperialism in a Single Blow”—North Korea Cold War Poster

U.S. imperialism, faced with a decline that’s accelerating with Russia’s growing victories over the Ukrainian NATO puppet regime, is approaching a cornered position. The continued existence of the United States is tied in with the ongoing exploitation of the Global South, which is tied in with Washington’s geopolitical leverage. With this last year’s three great failures for U.S. imperialism in Eurasia—the loss of Afghanistan, the defeat of the CIA coup attempt in Kazakhstan, and Russia’s increasingly likely triumph in Ukraine—U.S. power is being forced to contract. U.S. capital will have to contract along with it, battered by the coming wave of revolutions throughout the exploited world and the rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Many decades ago, U.S. imperialism was able to exist without the U.S. being a global imperialist power. Prior to when Washington began grabbing up additional colonies around the turn of the century, the U.S. was an empire, one that built up its capital through imperialist occupation of indigenous lands and the enslavement of Africans. But as the U.S. empire comes more to resemble this old state of isolated, internal imperialism, where Washington lacks imperial control outside its settler-colonial borders, it becomes apparent that the empire won’t be able to remain stable if it fully returns to this smaller state. U.S. capital has become too big for its own good, and the rate of profits has declined too much. Unlike in the 19th century, the empire is dependent on being global. 

So when it loses too much of its global reach—which will likely occur when it’s almost entirely kicked out of Asia—it will go into a crisis mode. The kind of crisis mode that will cause it to revert to the instability which produced the Civil War. When a state is enslaving or otherwise intensely subjugating a vast portion of its own people, it inevitably encounters armed resistance, which correlates with the kind of destructive factionalism that emerged between the North and the South. This is exactly what the U.S. settler state is bringing itself to as it reacts to its global decline by turning imperialism against its own people. For the last half-century, the U.S. has implemented especially cruel neoliberal austerity policies—more extreme than in any other imperialist country—and has built a mass incarceration system so that the prison-industrial complex can profit from it. And it’s the consequences of these policies—intensified poverty and subjugation that disproportionately impacts the colonized nations—that’s driving the country closer to a new civil war.

If a domestic revolutionary insurgency emerges in the U.S. during the next few decades, its social base will come from the black and continentally indigenous communities which have been ravaged by these dual atrocities of neoliberal poverty and police state violence. These communities’ material deprivation intertwines with the pushing of millions of people into second-class felon status, and with the increase of police brutality amid the last two decades of law enforcement militarization. The fact that this militarization is a symptom of the transferring of excess arms equipment from Washington’s recent wars shows how closely all of this relates to imperial decline. These wars have been another part of imperialism’s reaction to its own collapse, like how neoliberalism has been a reaction to the contraction of capital following Washington’s defeat in Vietnam.

These factors have converged to produce a massive part of the population that would be willing to take part in an internal revolt against the empire, unified by the desperate conditions that the empire has imposed upon them. To survive its decline, the empire has had to push millions upon millions into severe impoverishment and impose an ever-deadlier police state upon them. Which has created a social pressure that can only cease intensifying when the masses see their demands met: an end to the police violence, an end to poverty, and the building of a genuine democracy. Ever more are realizing that reformism can’t deliver these demands. So the masses are being brought closer towards an anti-colonial communist movement, one that abolishes the “United States” and constructs workers democracy on a land where the colonized nations can determine their own destinies.

The peoples of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic, despite having lived under siege from imperialism’s fascist Ukrainian proxies throughout the last eight years, have recently come much closer to achieving the equivalent of this. Putin has granted them independence, creating the appropriate conditions for a referendum to join Russia—and to automatically become part of a reestablished Soviet Union should that goal be realized. As the movements for national self-determination and socialism gather strength around the world, from the victorious Donbass peoples to the Bolivians who are building up their living standards following their 2020 break from neo-colonialism, these ideas for liberation are spilling into the empire’s core. The communist parties within the U.S. are incrementally gaining mass backing for their cause, expanding and training their cadres, and building solidarity with international anti-imperialists.

If communists in the imperial center stay on this course, creating connections with our communities, educating the masses, and cultivating internationalism, we’ll be better equipped to take on the colossal task we’ll be faced with during this next generation. That being harm reduction amid the colossal destruction that imperialism threatens to unleash as its decline continues, and as it lashes out even more. When the conditions for civil war get met, and the empire finds itself threatened from within, it will wage war against the colonized nations foremost, as well as attempt a broader purge of radicals. It will do what its fascist Ukraine regime has done: outlaw communist organizing and speech challenging the anti-communist propaganda, use fascist militias to hunt down communists and other disfavored groups, and use the killing of civilians as a strategy in their reactionary war. The latter tactics, where fascist Ukraine has used bombings, the National Guard, and paramilitaries to commit atrocities against ethnic Russians in Donbass, could be replicated in the U.S. through bombings of nonwhite neighborhoods and massacres of non-combatants.

If the U.S. empire won’t survive, it will try to take millions of lives with it. It’s our job as communists to save as many of these lives as we can, and to navigate our conditions so that what follows the United States is a post-colonial workers democracy.

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The contradictions within U.S. imperialism that could lead to its final demise

Illustration by Matt Rota for Foreign Policy

The U.S. empire’s hubris, its fundamental opposition towards rectifying the evils it’s built upon, will be its final undoing. This year, around the anniversary of the January 6th storming of the Capitol, Foreign Policy’s Stephen Marche concluded that “The U.S. military isn’t ready for civil war.” Quoting professor of military history at Ohio State University Peter Mansoor, Marche assessed that for the U.S. armed forces to triumph over the anti-colonial domestic insurgency which sociologists have begun predicting, the injustices which are producing this risk of civil war will themselves need to be addressed:

For Mansoor, a successful counterinsurgency is next to—but not quite—impossible, a vital distinction. For one thing, insurgencies fail when they are unpopular with the local population, as in the case of the Shining Path in Peru or Che Guevara in Bolivia. “The most important thing is to get the politics right, and if you get the politics right, you’re going to be able to win a counterinsurgency,” Mansoor said while acknowledging that “the reason these insurgencies occur in the first place is because of politics.” The role of the military, in Mansoor’s view, is to clamp down on violence so that political progress can be made. “If you have so much violence going on, the politics is frozen,” he said. That need for stability to promote dialogue was the assumption behind the 2007 surge in Iraq. And there, an expanded counterinsurgency strategy did make politics possible. It’s just that the parties found themselves exactly where they started before the violence. The solution to the next U.S. civil war would be the solution to the crises America already faces.

That crucial requirement for the state to prevent a successful overthrow by the rebel groups which will emerge in the coming decades, where the conditions driving the revolt get changed, will not be met. This is because U.S. imperialism will never do the right thing, it will only do the profitable thing.

The crises America already faces, & why the state won’t address them

There are innumerable crises in this country. But according to sociologist Temitope Oriola, the crisis that will set off a civil war is our increasingly inhumane police and carceral state. The militarization of police, which continues to accelerate, is subjecting colonized peoples to an ever worse version of the police violence that they’ve always been targeted by. Consistent with the prospect Foreign Policy describes of the U.S. military being unable to build legitimacy at home due to the masses seeing it as an occupier, this amounts to a military occupation of impoverished black communities. 

Just because this is called the “United States,” and the armed forces here are supposedly exercising jurisdiction over the territories they have a “right” to in international law, doesn’t change the material nature of what they do. That nature is aggressive, obtuse, and anti-democratic. And I talk about police as if they’re military forces because with the decline of the U.S. empire, and the subsequent explosion of military aid to police amid an expanding global militaristic reaction, law enforcement here has quite visibly become an occupying army. As if it wasn’t that way from the start, given that all U.S. institutions only exist due to the theft of indigenous land. The occupation is just becoming more noticeable.

This reality of increasing provocations from the police state exacerbating the tenseness of our racial climate is multiplied by the impacts of mass incarceration. Those locked up are just one part of the population in this country that’s living under the thumb of our bloated and tyrannical penal system. Around two-thirds of them are on probation or parole, making for over 4 million overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite people who are subject to the employment obstacles, surveillance, and voter disenfranchisement which come with being classified as a lawbreaker in the United States. 

In the DPRK, those convicted of crimes can live their lives out of prison without any further punishments or discrimination. For this and other reasons, the DPRK is an immovable object on the international stage that will continue to build socialism despite Washington’s inhumane economic warfare against it. Its people won’t rise up, because even though they’re largely deprived, their government consistently shows itself to be on their side, and their problems are therefore clearly the fault of the sanctions. In the core of imperialism, the government can’t gain this kind of perceived credibility, because it consistently acts against the interests of the masses. No amount of propaganda to scapegoat Washington’s rival superpowers can negate this gargantuan trust deficit that keeps growing within its borders. Settler-colonialism has made the colonized masses hate our government from the beginning, and neoliberalism has turned increasing portions of the white masses towards this sentiment of hating the system.

According to Oriola, it’s those millions of persecuted parolees and probation victims who will form the nucleus for the anti-colonial revolt that’s to gain prominence in the coming decades. And the deteriorating living standards of the broader masses will provide the initial rebels with enough public support for the rebellion. Writes Oriola:

Some of these men may gradually be reaching the point where they believe they have nothing to lose. Some will join for revenge, others for the thrill of it and many for the dignity of the people they feel have been trampled on for too long. Although 93 per cent of protest against police brutality is peaceful and involves no major harm to people and property, there is no guarantee that future protests about new police killings will remain peaceful. The legitimacy of grievances of Black Americans among their fellow citizens is also an important variable. Their grievances appear to have found strong resonance and increasing sympathy within the broader population. Many Latino, Native American and white people see the injustices against Black people and are appalled. Black Lives Matter protests are now major multicultural events, particularly among young adults.

U.S. imperialism is cultivating the circumstances for its own ultimate demise, driving its own people to a desperation that can only lead to revolution. The reason I believe the abolition of the United States to be feasible, despite indigenous people being a small minority, is that the United States simply doesn’t have the capacity to function as an entity which most can tie their own interests to. The last half-century’s rise in inequality, due to accelerate unprecedentedly during the coming decades of climatic catastrophe, is reorienting the interests of the majority towards those of the very most oppressed peoples—whether they’re the impoverished First Nations indigenous peoples or the victims of the penal system. Solidarity behind the cause of returning full jurisdiction to the First Nations, and towards building socialism on a post-colonial continent, absolutely can be created under these conditions.

We know this because U.S. imperialism won’t enact the internal reforms which would take away the social backing for such a revolution. It won’t because it can’t, because it’s too overcome by its own deficiencies to invest resources in its own people. Faced with the unraveling of U.S. hegemony and the decline of profits, its only plan is to continue driving the masses into destitution through austerity, and to keep building up the national security state. We can tell this from looking at the ways U.S. military officials talk about the crises the country is facing—and their opinions are so decisive because the U.S. is an imperialist oligarchy that’s effectively run by the military-industrial complex.

Their consensus on how to respond to our society’s collapse can be summarized as one of taking the orthodox military mentality towards defeating an enemy, and applying this mentality to the country’s own people. It’s an approach that’s single-mindedly fixated on subduing some nebulous foe, and that’s not willing to question the conditions behind the potential for unrest. We can see this in the 2019 Pentagon report which is best known for considering that the U.S. military could collapse within 20 years due to climatic disasters, but that should also be noted for the alarmingly myopic attitude it reveals military elites have towards our crises. Nafeez Ahmed, who wrote the Vice article with the title famously describing the “collapse within 20 years” prediction about the military, summarized how much of a hands-on approach the military aims to take on global warming and other destabilizing events:

Their report not only describes the need for massive permanent military infrastructure on US soil to stave off climate collapse, but portends new foreign interventions due to climate change. The authors argue that the Syrian civil war could be a taste of future international conflicts triggered by climate-induced unrest. There is “no question that the conflict erupted coincident with a major drought in the region which forced rural people into Syrian cities as large numbers of Iraqi refugees arrived,” they say. The resulting conflict “reignited civil war in Iraq,” and heightened military tensions between the US and Russia. “The Syrian population has declined by about 10 percent since the start of the war, with millions of refugees fleeing the nation, increasing instability in Europe, and stoking violent extremism,” the report concludes.

The U.S. empire’s attitude towards the crises it’s created is not pragmatism, but reaction. Its strategists are paranoid towards the U.S. population, drawing both implicit and explicit plans for occupying U.S. cities to preempt an internal revolt. This fear of insurrection will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the empire loses the loyalty of its people due to its own propensity towards using mindless violence as a “solution” to problems. The step following the breakdown of national unity, where much of the public turns against the state out of practical necessity, will be a breakdown of unity among the military’s own ranks.

U.S. imperialism cultivates abysmal military morale. Revolutionary guerrilla armies cultivate great morale.

To see what a military with good morale looks like, study a revolutionary guerrilla army. By necessity, they properly balance severe discipline of rule-breakers with a dynamic of warmth and companionship. As Che Guevara describes in Guerrilla Warfare, this can correspond with successful efforts to reduce the morale of the enemy’s military: “It is possible to paralyze entire armies, to suspend the industrial life of a zone, leaving the inhabitants of a city without factories, without light, without water, without communications of any kind, without being able to risk travel by highway except at certain hours. If all this is achieved, the morale of the enemy falls, the morale of his combatant units weakens, and the fruit ripens for plucking at a precise moment.”

But the morale of the rebels can’t depend on such victories. It has to come from within, not from events outside of it. Which is what the Viet Minh’s fighters showed how to do. The Viet Minh achieved superior morale to the U.S. military, and consequently won the war, through:

-Organizing into three-person cells. A minimal number for a guerrilla band that’s coincidentally now more practical than ever, due to how advancements in military surveillance technologies have necessitated smaller, more easily concealable groups of insurgents. But all on its own, this approach serves as a way to maintain unity. A member of these cells said “The purpose is . . . to give constant assistance to each other. . . . It usually unites three best friends.”

-Holding the leaders of cadres responsible for indoctrinating their subordinates, and directing their actions. This responsibility also naturally entails punishing any actions which aren’t sanctioned by democratic centralism. Che says the base version of what these teachers need to impart on their pupils is “elementary notions about the history of the country, explained with a clear sense of the economic facts that motivate each of the historic acts; accounts of the national heroes and their manner of reacting when confronted with certain injustices; and afterwards an analysis of the national situation or of the situation in the zone.”

-An effort to make sure that the party's organizational model and ideology define the army at every level. There was no room for ideological factionalism, any more than there was room for actions which weren’t done with the approval that democratic centralism provides. Everyone shared the same goals, and the teachers made sure there was no confusion about what those goals were.

-Giving anyone of any rank the right to criticize battle plans. This is the “democratic” in democratic centralism; you can’t do what the cadre doesn’t collectively agree you should do, but you can try to persuade the cadre to your opinion if you think their approach is wrong. This way, where arguments must pass a test of popular approval before getting converted to actions, bad ideas have less chance of being put into practice.

-A series of shared philosophical principles that give everyone determination. In Vietnam, a major part of this was nationalism. But a U.S. insurgency that attempts to replicate this aspect of their philosophy would take on the baggage of the colonial contradiction, and therefore come into conflict with the colonized nations. How an insurgency here would avoid this pitfall is by treating these nations as the vanguard of the broader effort to liberate the proletariat. And to incorporate the universally applicable aspects of the Viet Minh’s warfare philosophy. Such as a desire to maintain dignity in the face of extreme challenges, and a fatalistic attitude that detaches one from worry upon taking on a challenge.

Contrast this with the morale of the U.S. military. From Vietnam onwards, Washington has been increasingly unsuccessful in its insurgency efforts, and with the rise of multipolarity, this has come to apply to its proxy wars. Despite assertions that Ukraine is winning, Russia has secured the entire Russian-Ukrainian border, destroyed Ukraine’s air force and navy, and is slowly dismantling the rest of its military. Should Ukraine’s fascist regime be subdued, it will compound the crisis U.S. hegemony has been in since last year’s collapse of the Afghanistan neo-colonial regime. The reasons why the U.S. military would encounter a crisis of unity during a domestic revolt reflects why Washington is struggling in these areas abroad: everywhere, imperialism is divorced from the masses, and subject to the contradictions that come with existing purely to advance capital.

These issues are apparent within the U.S. military itself, which I recently gained special insight into when a military member offered to describe some details about the abusive and ill-equipped environment that the imperialists have cultivated for their cannon fodder. This person revealed a dynamic rife with maddening contradictions, where superiors obsessively bully people for trivial imperfections yet the most egregious problems imaginable are permitted:

Waking up soldiers at 0500 to have their sergeant or other high rank people basically nitpick their living space, write them up for infractions as minor as having a recently used tissue in the trash can or not wiping the sink after brushing teeth. This is in a conventional unit, not training. Sexual assaults galore. Sexual assault causes more military suicides and psychological damage than combat does. It particularly affects women, though men are in no way immune. The sexual assault rate for males in the army is much higher than the civilian population, because it’s tied to hazing rituals.  Diagnoses of alcoholism, substance abuse, and other 'coping mechanisms' are on the rise. When you factor in room inspections and physical training, the average work day of a junior enlisted on a line unit is something like 14-18 hours/day, sometimes as much as 7 days a week. As a supervisor, I get written up if my subordinate gets a DUI. that involves me usually coming in at like 4 in the morning on a Saturday to stand in front of the sergeant major getting yelled at for something I didn’t even do. 

Barracks commonly have faulty plumbing with undrinkable, exotically colored water. I’ve seen black mold. I’ve seen the Department of Public Works refuse to turn on air conditioners when it's ilke 90 degrees indoors on the 3rd floor of a barracks room. Work orders to repair these things go unfulfilled for months, and even then, the only reason they get attention is because the soldier happens to find one of maybe two senior leaders in an organization of 3,000+ who gives enough of a shit to fix it. Did i mention sexual assault? Soldiers rape soldiers. There were more people who died at the Fort Irwin National Training Center than there were deaths in combat. Soldiers will oftentimes be forced to drive incredibly dangerous training missions with broken and/or faulty equipment, such as driving around steep cliffs at night with no headlights and busted night vision goggles, all while they're running on maybe 2 hours of sleep the past 36 hours. One egregious incident I vividly recall was at fort hood, where the NCO in charge of the installation sexual assault prevention program ended up using his position of authority to manipulate vulnerable women into becoming prostitutes and pimping them out to senior leaders on post.

This is a military that’s literally decaying, that’s fundamentally unable to overcome its internal dysfunctionality despite the endless excesses of funds that the government throws at it. A guerrilla force, at least one that follows the parameters laid down by Che, doesn’t have any of these defects. Its very nature as a tight-knit camping setup makes sexual assaults behind closed doors impossible, its members deal with issues like heat through stoicism without having to rely on air conditioning within the claustrophobia of being indoors in hot weather, and it’s designed to manage sleep efficiently rather than haphazardly coercing people into working while severely sleep-deprived. In guerrilla warfare, even the discipline improves morale when done right, as opposed to serving no other purpose than petty torment. 

Che describes how imposing punishments like ten-day deprivation of the opportunity to study or work, enforcing a severe boredom, ultimately lifts morale when applied in response to serious offenses: “This was the grade of revolutionary morale that our troop achieved through the continual exercise of armed struggle. It is not possible to achieve it at the outset, when there are still many who are frightened, and subjective currents serve to put a brake on the influence of the Revolution; but finally it is reached through work and through the force of continual example.” This grade being one where everyone in the unit is motivated to follow their duties, and to correct their failures to follow their duties should they receive punishment. Because what’s immeasurably worse than bruised egos for cocky individuals is a dynamic where not everyone is operating according to protocol.

Advantages like this could draw many U.S. soldiers to defect to the rebels, and could therefore gain the rebels territory. This is made more likely by that reality about how U.S. military strategists view the country’s internal population not as victims of a capitalist humanitarian crisis who must be rescued, but as a threat to be subdued.

Treating the U.S. population like an enemy will make the U.S. population respond in kind

These strategists imagine a scenario where the military defeats the rebels by carrying out surgical operations, designed not to impact any non-combatants. They talk about evacuating the affected areas so that they can engage the rebels in “high-intensity combat” with special ops, so as to avoid alienating the population. But this is pure fantasy in a scenario where the rebels have gathered enough military strength to pose real potential for taking entire urban centers. When the moment of confrontation comes, the military will have to resort to the same kinds of measures it applies to insurgents abroad. 

Which will incentivize the population, as well as the many military personnel who come from the working class, to help the rebels. Che observed about his Cuban experience that “There are, of course, individual cases of military men who break with the past and enter into the new organization with a spirit of complete cooperation. These persons are doubly useful, because they unite with their love of the people's cause the knowledge necessary for carrying forward the creation of the new popular army.”

We see potential for this in countries that are further along the path towards capitalist collapse than the U.S., like India. A major reason why India’s military remains unable to totally subdue the Naxalite guerrillas is because the country’s military strategists know that if they start effectively waging war against India’s own people, sacrificing civilian lives to go after the guerrillas, the population will turn against the government. Which would lead not just to greater numbers for the insurgents, but to factionalism within the ranks of the military itself. Soldiers, especially ones who come from lower class backgrounds as is largely the case for the ones within the United States, become uneasy when they’re ordered to start killing massive amounts of their fellow community members. And history has shown this kind of crisis of conscience to be especially prevalent among military personnel, at least relative to the police; in innumerable examples of revolutions, it’s been the military members who’ve turned against the threatened regime, with the police remaining obstinate.

For this mass switching of allegiances among both civilians and military personnel to occur, there will need to be a widespread distribution of information about the war crimes the state will inevitably start committing against its own people. The military strategists are aware of this, with their plans including the shutdown of internet and cell phone access within the zones the military will occupy—as well as the direct suppression of online journalists who have potential to expose sensitive information.

The state is conscious that should it lose control over the flow of information during the moment of revolutionary confrontation, the revolution could win. That the masses, seeing evidence of the state’s brutality, will be turned in sufficient numbers towards participating in the tipping point that analysts like Monsoor and Oriola believe to be possible within U.S. borders. The tipping point where the cadres which are prepared to serve the desire of the masses—that being the kind of “social reform” which Che described within a revolutionary context. And where the many U.S. military members with potential to defect can observe a viable alternative to their dysfunctional and abusive imperialist military structure. The state is not an invincible monolith, it’s an institution made of people. And the way people act can rapidly shift from the norm under the kinds of extreme circumstances which our conditions are taking us towards.

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To win the masses, revolutionaries must properly study their conditions

There’s a big qualifier to all of the tactics described by Che’s Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare: that without sufficient support from the masses, none of them can be applied, and if one tries to apply them they’ll at best end up running in an endless circle of skirmishes with the state. To gain this level of support, we must understand the conditions that we’re operating within. Which is tied in with that requirement of avoiding adventurism, because both adventurism and poor understanding of conditions stem from the same error: lax theoretical study.

An example of this is the failed insurgency of the Shining Path, Peru’s Maoist guerrilla organization. What led to the excessive violence that lost the Maoists the support of the masses, and that gave anti-communist propagandists an opportunity to believably exaggerate the abuses of the guerrillas, was the dogmatic approach that they took in attempting their People’s War. They sought to impose an inflexible governing model upon the zones they controlled, which led to avoidable clashes with people they could otherwise have gotten on their side. Their insistence on replacing tribal governing structures, despite these structures having worked for millennia beforehand, provoked indigenous opposition. This helped undo their insurgency.

A current example, not coincidentally, also comes from Maoism: in the Philippines, the Maoist guerrillas stick to an outdated line which claims that communists should only ally with the rural population and ignore the urban proletariat. This approach was arguably defensible in the 60s, but as is so often the case for Maoists, they’ve remained entrenched in a decades-old series of stances that lead to unnecessary antagonism. Their organization has experienced schisms specifically over this debate of whether to reach out to the urban proletariat. People within the zones they’ve “liberated” often betray them out of self-interest, because their narrow approach has made it needlessly hard for the guerrillas to earn the loyalty of much of even the rural population.

Their related hostility towards China’s supposed “social imperialism” has led them to start attacking the Chinese firms which are helping the nation develop a new level of infrastructure, further setting back their potential to bring the masses demonstrable material benefits. There’s a reason why it’s Filipino communists who’ve won me over towards not supporting their country’s guerrilla forces: these forces may have military power, but this turns into a double-edged sword without proper ideological guidance. The same is being proven by the Naxalite Maoist guerrillas in India, which have embraced a parallel adventurist approach and have also found themselves fighting an unwinnable war.

To avoid such a fate, we must learn to discern between the helpful parts of Che’s guide to guerrilla warfare, and the parts that can lead us astray due to their omitting the theoretical details required for gaining adequate mass backing. An example of the latter is this section:

At the outset there is a more or less homogeneous group, with some arms, that devotes itself almost exclusively to hiding in the wildest and most inaccessible places, making little contact with the peasants. It strikes a fortunate blow and its fame grows. A few peasants, dispossessed of their land or engaged in a struggle to conserve it and young idealists of other classes join the nucleus; it acquires greater audacity and starts to operate in inhabited places, making more contact with the people of the zone; it repeats attacks, always fleeing after making them; suddenly it engages in combat with some column or other and destroys its vanguard. Men continue to join it; it has increased in number, but its organization remains exactly the same; its caution diminishes, and it ventures into more populous zones.

Che was correct in this assessment, but he then went on to carry out Focoism, a model that lacks the mass basis which is required for such a revolt. Like the approaches of the Shining Path, the Philippine Maoists, or the Naxalites, Focoism is an angle that’s encouraged the guerrillas to act out of step with the masses. Its assumption that an army from a foreign land can win a revolution, despite being made up of fighters who haven’t had time to directly study the conditions they’re operating within, is self-defeating. As Lin Piao wrote in Long Live the Victory of People’s War: “The liberation of the masses is accomplished by the masses themselves – this is a basic principle of Marxism-Leninism. Revolution or people’s war in any country is the business of the masses in that country and should be carried out primarily by their own efforts; there is no other way.” In his 1969 critique of focoism, Jim Dann says about that quote:

The truth of this statement becomes clear when we examine the relative forces in a revolutionary situation. The class enemy retains superiority in numbers of armed men and in weaponry until the last battle. Despite serious study of military tactics, the enemy may often prove superior in his knowledge of the purely military aspects of war – he’s been at it longer. To this “superiority,” the revolutionary forces answer with the inexhaustible power of the working people. Their labor, organized into a fighting force behind the revolutionary outlook of seizing state power and establishing the dictatorship of the working class, can bring down the entire imperialist structure. Their strength is crucial. This means that no outside army can make a socialist revolution for the masses, or sustain it for very long if it attempts to. Unless the masses themselves make the revolution, it will eventually fail. Working people throughout the imperialist world are taught that they are powerless, cannot think, and must depend on “great leaders.” But the workers will learn to produce their own leaders, to rely on their own resources and labor, and to make their revolution.

But it’s not just outside guerrilla armies that can make this mistake of fighting without adequately knowing the conditions, then consequently failing. Communists from the given region’s local areas can commit this error as well; what undermines them is unwillingness to sufficiently study their own conditions. This is proven by all of those examples of homegrown Maoist guerrillas who’ve acted dogmatically. And in the imperial center, there’s even more of a danger of those who seek to become the revolution’s vanguard falling into this trap. We’re in a country that’s not only the prime benefactor of global imperialist extraction, but a settler colony that only exists due to the continuation of a colonial occupation and a refusal to pay back the African nation. Consequently, we have organizations like the Center for Political Innovation mixing communism with the U.S. flag, and with fascist rhetoric about “international bankers.” These kinds of factions may as well be foreign, because they seek to impose a reactionary-adjacent governing model that’s modeled after Europe onto the territories of hundreds of indigenous First Nations.

The proletariat will not win here if these chauvinistic and ahistorical ideas dominate the socialist movement. They’ll alienate the colonized proletariat, just as the Shining Path’s dogmatism did. Which will produce antagonisms that sabotage the revolution. We must study decolonial theory to avoid the chauvinistic errors of groups like the CPI, and we must do so while avoiding the ultra-leftist errors of the Maoists. The revolutionary program that will work on this continent is going to have to be a new one within the history of communism. One that throws out the innately reactionary patriotism towards the country it exists within, and embraces a post-colonial paradigm to replace one of settler-colonialism and empire.

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Ukraine’s descent into fascism shows what happens without a communist resistance army

What Ukraine has taught us is that when a society’s conditions get worse, it doesn’t necessarily bring proletarian revolution closer. Without a sufficiently strong network of revolutionary cadres, ones which are prepared to defend themselves from reactionary violence, counterrevolution can find ways of continuing to prevail. Which is what the oligarchs in Ukraine have achieved since the 2014 coup, the event that’s greatly exacerbated capital’s contradictions within the country.

Washington’s post-2014 puppet governments have facilitated gargantuan corruption that’s wrecked the economy, enacted extreme neoliberal shock policies, and created harrowing costs for the country’s people by consistently provoking more conflict. This came after two decades of neoliberal social collapse and power grabs by oligarchs, which by 2011 had reduced Ukrainian public support for a multiparty system to one-third. The vast majority of the country’s people did not believe in liberalism, because liberalism had caused their living standards to plummet and the deterioration was greatly accelerating. Yet a return to Ukraine’s socialist past has since become more remote of a possibility than ever. The U.S. proxy regime has avoided a rise in communist influence by preemptively suppressing communist organizing, and has done so despite Ukraine having descended into a failed state since the coup. This has been achieved through paramilitarism, where the state has enabled the CIA to support neo-Nazi terrorist organizations within the country.

Could this have been avoided if Ukraine’s communist party had sufficiently armed and trained its members in guerrilla warfare beforehand? Of course, but whatever mistakes its leadership made came within the context of an unprecedented anti-communist coup two decades prior, and of a government that had been on the verge of again taking away its legal status the entire time. The party had to choose between gaining electoral seats, which were its most tenable path to power for the foreseeable future, and investing in a kind of armed revolt that communists simply can’t win without the emergence of the right conditions. 

The increasing disillusionment of the masses with capitalism wasn’t enough, there also had to be a revolutionary crisis that would have made guerrilla actions in step with the masses. And since this wasn’t the case, the party felt it had no choice but to continue entirely investing in electoralism, despite the horrific history of what’s happened to communist parties when they’ve declined to arm themselves in the leadup to coup scenarios. I’m not saying it was correct in how it went about this, but these are the sensitive circumstances that can lead a communist party to steer away from militancy.

This underlies what should be our ultimate takeaway, despite these pieces of context behind the party’s lack of guerrilla preparation: the forces of counterrevolution in Ukraine would now be defeated, or at least seriously challenged, if there had been a communist army prior to the coup. This sentiment about communist parties always having responsibility to make the correct steps, and about counterrevolution’s triumph always at least partly being the fault of the revolutionaries, is reflected in Jim Dann’s critique of the failed “Focoism” guerrilla strategy by Che Guevara:

In countries throughout the world the people can overthrow the oppressive rule of imperialism and seize state power to build a bright future under socialism. Despite inevitable twists and turns in the struggle, the working class will eventually win victory. Defeats, in general, cannot be explained by an extraordinary series of accidents or because “adverse factors unbelievably built up” (as Fidel says in the introduction), but by defects in the political line. Many people around the Left have wishfully thought of Che as one of the foremost practitioners of People’s War. Unfortunately, this was not the case, as we shall show. “The liberation of the masses is accomplished by the masses themselves – this is a basic principle of Marxism-Leninism. Revolution or people’s war in any country is the business of the masses in that country and should be carried out primarily by their own efforts; there is no other way.” (Lin Piao, “Long Live the Victory of People’s War”)

Indeed, more could have been done to prevent or mitigate the violent anti-communist purge that’s been occurring these last eight years. Whereas Che’s error was in assuming he could kickstart a revolution in Bolivia without sufficient backing from the masses, the error of Ukraine’s communist party was in assuming it could survive without investing in any sort of guerrilla warfare strategy. These errors were inverse, in that one went too far while another didn’t go far enough. The party didn’t have to jump ahead of the masses by prematurely starting a guerrilla war; it only had to have a plan in place for physically protecting its members when a violent anti-communist purge started.

And it’s not like Ukraine’s present fascist nightmare was impossible to have foreseen prior to 2014. The party seemed aware of the risks of a fascist coup beforehand, as evidenced by its speculations about the 2011 unrest in Kazakhstan having been orchestrated by U.S. imperialism as part of a regime change attempt. But when NATO’s regime change network successfully absorbed Ukraine a few years later, the party was unprepared for what would follow. In the summer of 2014, only several months after the coup, the party’s leader described the direness of the situation:

After the coup d’état, we witnessed the formation of illegal armed militias that imposed their rule through violence and political terror. Opposition candidates were banned from campaigning and the media were severely censored. In Odessa, the arson that killed more than forty people rocked the whole world. In Mariupol, the regime opened fire on those celebrating the 9th May (marking the victory over Nazism). There has also been anti-Communist hysteria since the coup d’état. Comrades have been assaulted. Some have been taken into the woods and beaten. Party buildings have been damaged or requisitioned by the regime’s fascist militias. A few days after the presidential poll, there is even a procedure for banning the Communist Party; this was initiated by Ukraine’s attorney general, Oleh Makhnitsky, a member of the far-right Svoboda party. For all these reasons and in the name of the Ukrainian Communist Party, I call on France to take stock of what is really going on in my country.

Then the next year, that ban on the party happened, along with a law that imprisons people for ten years if they display communist symbols. Since then, as state services have further deteriorated, the fascist militias have filled the power vacuum within the most lawless places. This has occurred not in spite of the government, but because of it; even the administration of the Jewish Zelensky has had extensive ties to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and has let neo-Nazis infiltrate every level of the government and military. This has allowed the government to make what would be a problem for it—the loss of law enforcement control within increasing amounts of the country—into a win for the government’s counterrevolutionary goals by letting fascist paramilitary violence run rampant. And now that Ukraine’s crisis has reached a breaking point, the neo-Nazi movement is able to scapegoat Russia for the situation and use it as a rallying cry for expanding the influence of racist ultra-nationalism.

As collapse scenarios become increasingly likely across the rest of the capitalist world, communists can’t win by sitting back and waiting for the system to fall apart. We must strike a balance between the two dangerous extremes of going on the offensive when the masses aren’t yet ready, and neglecting the base militancy preparations necessary to keep our movement in existence amid a fascist purge.

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The denial of Ukraine’s Nazi problem & the complacency of the pro-imperialist “left”

Ukraine’s internal political situation throughout the last decade has been a story that haunts the imperial center left, because it exposes the utterly weak and self-defeating nature of the left’s approach. It shows, whether these leftists want to admit it or not, that a lack of principled opposition to U.S. imperialism—and a willingness to give in to theoretically deficient narratives which paint Washington’s rivals as “imperialist”—inevitably leads to the triumph of fascism. Because fascism is what’s utterly dominated Ukraine since the violent 2014 overthrow of the country’s democratically elected government, which these unprincipled leftists have insisted was a “revolution” despite direct evidence linking Obama’s team to the transition process.

Post-2014 Ukraine has been likely the most brazen example of fascism that’s existed in the 21st century. It’s outlawed the communist party, tortured dissidents, institutionalized the glorification of Nazi collaborators, and criminalized any attempts to expose the crimes of these collaborators. With the government therefore effectively enforcing a paradigm of Holocaust denial, it’s no surprise that neo-Nazi militias have been allowed to thrive, working with the National Guard, the police, and the military in committing atrocities. Pogroms have been normalized, with Jews, Romas, and ethnic Russians being the primary targets. There’s been discrimination against blacks and other ethnic undesirables throughout the recent refugee crisis from within the country, and the country’s armed forces have shot at migrants attempting to come in. 

President Zelensky, despite being Jewish, has facilitated an infiltration of all levels of the military and the government by the neo-Nazi movement. Which is the factor that discredits the attempts to portray Zelensky and his regime as separate from the Nazis, as if the regime’s unambiguously fascist policies weren’t a red flag for such ties being there.

“Behind the corporate media spin lies the complex and increasingly close relationship Zelensky’s administration has enjoyed with the neo-Nazi forces invested with key military and political posts by the Ukrainian state, and the power these open fascists have enjoyed since Washington installed a Western-aligned regime through a coup in 2014,” assess Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal. “In fact, Zelensky’s top financial backer, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, has been a key benefactor of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and other extremists militias….Incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, the Azov Battalion is considered the most ideologically zealous and militarily motivated unit fighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region. With Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel insignia on the uniforms of its fighters, who have been photographed with Nazi SS symbols on their helmets, Azov ‘is known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology…[and] is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing U.S.-based white supremacy organizations,’ according to an FBI indictment of several U.S. white nationalists that traveled to Kiev to train with Azov.”

The campaign to “stand with Ukraine,” obnoxiously embraced by “leftist” commentators like Vaush, is entirely predicated on a NATO media campaign to obfuscate these realities. To utilize Zelensky’s Jewish identity as a shield against all information about the institutionalized Nazi presence within Ukraine. This narrative is the only thing the imperialist left, with its opportunistic online influencers and its forsaking of actual revolutionary theory, can use to rationalize its allegiance towards NATO’s stance on the crisis.

The vapid praise towards “Ukraine” (free from denunciations of the country’s ruling Nazi strains) that’s being heaped by the entirety of the mainstream political spectrum masks a deep rot not just within Ukraine itself, but within our own society. Fascism is on the rise throughout the imperial center, destroying our educational institutions through book bans, enacting extreme anti-LGBT and anti-abortion legislation, and threatening to become more severe amid pro-coup reactionary insurrection efforts. With a “left” that only focuses on performative outrage against whatever enemy country the media puts in front of it, and that’s therefore uninterested in analyzing our own conditions, we’re ripe for a dark turn in history.

And when you’re in the imperial center, failing to analyze your own conditions is pivotal in enabling fascism. The U.S. left, sharing the national chauvinism of its European counterparts, is unwilling to properly reckon with the settler-colonial nature of the country it exists in. It doesn’t question that the settler state has a right to exist. With indigenous perspectives on potential futures for land relations being utterly marginalized in the U.S. cultural hegemony, and U.S. discourse therefore lacking any tangible visions for what could exist in alternative to settler-colonialism, of course the left here is like this. It can’t imagine a scenario where all the land has been returned to the jurisdiction of the tribes that got their territories stolen from them, any more than it can imagine a scenario where the capitalist state has been overthrown. In a paradigm where post-colonial theory is totally suppressed, and where history’s examples of socialist revolutions are all portrayed as nightmarish “authoritarian” states, there’s no room for a coherent alternative to the present order.

Within this fundamentally anti-communist, colonial chauvinist framework, becoming radicalized as a leftist ultimately leads to reactive and idealistic ideas about solving all the world’s problems in one adventuristic swoop. This was the thought process behind the armed band of self-identified anarchists who ended up fighting with a fascist militia in Ukraine out of pure convenience. Their radical liberalism told them that the best way to help the world is to fight “Russian imperialism”—despite Russia not even being an imperialist power by an assessment of its capital’s strength—so they found themselves on the side of Nazis. When class analysis is reduced to a blanket opposition towards all forms of “authority,” regardless of the fundamentally different roles that today’s two great opposing geopolitical blocs play in relation to imperialism, you don’t need principles. All you have to do is fight against whatever example of “authority” is perceived at the moment to be bad, which invariably gets decided by what the media says.

I see these noxious types of individualism throughout the left in the imperial center, and I realize what drastic breaks from the norm are going to be required to defeat the massive fascist movement that’s rising around us. Revolutionary cadres cannot entertain ideas that are currently showing to lead to self-described “leftists” joining Nazis. As Ho Chi Minh said, we need to combat individualism, which entails ultimately transcending the self-defeating philosophical framework of “the left.” Lenin didn’t describe himself as “left-wing,” he described left-wing communism as “an infantile disorder” that reinforces undialectical practices. “The left” is a big tent label for all of the chauvinistic, self-invested, and otherwise counterrevolutionary strains that are detached from scientific socialism. The agenda of people like Vaush does not include principled opposition to fascism, nor to fascism’s settler-colonial origins within the United States. Because they don’t have a coherent program, they just follow whatever momentary trends that will get them praise from the others in their imperial center discourse communities.

To defeat fascism, we must defeat capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Which for us in the imperial center means the formulation of a revolutionary program that bases itself off of the model for proletarian revolution, and gets adequately modified to fit our conditions of settler domination and global imperial extraction. Only then can we avoid the ideological confusion that’s letting fascism strike through our hypocritical facade of “liberal democracy” like a hot knife through butter.

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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.