Communists, not anarchists, have the right idea about how to defeat fascism

Antifa as a concept was invented by Marxist-Leninists. During the years leading up to the rise of Nazi Germany, when Germany’s social democrats were sabotaging the unity of the anti-Hitler coalition by maneuvering to violently prevent revolution, the country’s Marxists were the ones fighting to prevent dictatorship and genocide. They created Antifaschistische Aktion, an armed organization dedicated to stopping the fascists from terrorizing the people. The treacherous actions of the left anti-communists were too damaging for them to undo the effects of, but like other defeated communists such as the Panthers, what they achieved can still set an example for future generations.

Today’s anti-fascists have access to the historical knowledge that shows us the route towards eliminating fascism, and fulfilling the mission of that original iteration of antifa. The first part of this knowledge comes from the actions of the Soviet Union in World War II, wherein fascist Germany and Italy were successfully defeated. They were defeated because they were fighting against a socialist country, the USSR, that overwhelmingly bore the costs of combating the Third Reich. The USSR won because unlike the non-committal imperial powers that it was temporarily allied with in combating Hitler, or the detrimentally “anti-authoritarian” Spanish anarchists who it was temporarily allied with in combating Franco, it had a serious strategy for bringing down a fascist regime. 

Despite the anti-communist myths about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact having enabled Hitler, it was indispensable in letting Stalin prepare to beat Germany. When the correct strategic time came, and the USSR’s superior strength was clear, Stalin didn’t neglect any of the steps necessary for ending the Holocaust, unlike the United States did. Washington’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz, a decision that these same anti-communists have shamelessly defended the U.S. for, was a mistake that the USSR corrected by liberating the concentration camp.

Another mistake anti-communists made in fighting fascism that the USSR didn’t make was to neglect anti-fascist repression, under the rationale that this would be too “authoritarian.” Whereas the USSR used the war as an opportunity to establish the anti-fascist haven which was East Germany, providing that section of Germany’s workers with decades of superior economic development and democratic rights compared to the West, Spain’s anarchists declined to assert their own authority when given the equivalent opportunity. They had the chance to implement their version of workers democracy—however flawed it was from a Marxist perspective—and then refused to. The consequence was that they doomed Spain to fascist tyranny. 

If this sounds unfair, my assertion comes straight from anarchist thinkers who’ve studied the conflict. As contributor to The Anarchist Library Wayne Price writes about an analysis by another anarchist Chris Day, the Iberian Anarchist Federation and the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo made a fatal error by purposefully disempowering themselves out of a sense of principle:

These anarchist leaders saw only two alternatives: (1) The FAI-CNT takes power by itself. But the FAI was a minority even within the CNT; probably most CNT unionists were not anarchists. There were many other workers and others who did not agree with the full politics of the FAI-CNT. In the country at large, half the working class was organized into the reform socialists union (UGT) and others were not in any union. Therefore, if the FAI overthrew the state and established itself as the ruler, the result would have been a one-party dictatorship. As far as it goes, the logic of this scenario seems correct. (2) Working together with all other anti-fascist forces, including not only the reform socialists but the various capitalist parties and accepting the existing hegemony of the liberal-capitalist state. This started them on a road which led to anarchist ministers in a capitalist government, the defeat of the revolution, and the victory of fascism in Spain (shortly before the start of World War II). Chris indicates that the anarchists should have taken the first alternative.

Today’s anarchists would never admit it (it’s hard for them even to admit their predecessors were wrong about how to fight fascism), but these historical lessons vindicate Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. When Putin took action in Ukraine, he was taking example from the knowledge on anti-fascist strategy that Russia’s communists hold on to. These communists pressured him into starting Operation Z because if they were still in power, Russia would have sought to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine in 2014, right when Kiev’s ruling fascist junta first took power. Washington’s coup installed a regime that began threatening Ukraine’s Russian speakers with ethnic cleansing as soon as it got the opportunity, and there immediately appeared a humanitarian mandate for taking away this regime’s tools for violence. A socialist Russia would have embarked upon Operation Z years earlier both because its foreign policy would lack the opportunistic motives which define Putin, and because a socialist country has the self-sufficiency to be able to better withstand sanctions.

By extension, Marxist education helps one understand why Operation Z should be supported. The essence of Marxism is that it’s a theory of historical development. It’s concerned not with what’s most ideologically or “morally” pure, but with what best transitions society towards revolution. A Marxist who properly understands Marxism is able to recognize the bourgeois nature of the Russian state as the secondary contradiction; the primary contradiction is imperialism, which by the Leninist (i.e. non-liberal) definition does not come from Russia. In the 21st century, the only imperialist states are the U.S. and its wealthiest allies, as they’re the only powers whose economic base resides in extraction from the peripheral countries. Russia’s military countering of imperialism, like China’s economic countering of it, is therefore revolutionary in character. 

This is both because combating Ukrainian fascism is positive for Ukraine’s development towards proletarian revolution, and because combating imperialism brings the entire globe closer towards socialism. Operation Z’s detractors argue that there are “fascists on both sides,” but they leave out crucial context: that whereas the fascists have taken even greater control over the Ukrainian state due to the conflict’s impacts, the fascists on the Russian side have become further sidelined. Russia’s triangulating bourgeois government is increasingly bending to the will of the communists, making Ukraine the only state between the two that has a fascist character.

These three great anti-fascist lessons of the last century—that anti-fascist forces must act strategically, that utilizing authority is the only way to defeat fascism, and that any state combating fascism is the state which should be supported in the war’s context—are disregarded by the younger generation of anarchists. Unlike many of the older anarchists, who’ve learned through social practice that authority is a necessary tool, the most vocal among these new ones have formed their ideas entirely online. Which has led them to embrace an aggressive individualism, viewing everything through a myopic lens in which their own “autonomy” is more important than the class struggle. It’s a corrupt mindset, because its foundation is brazen selfishness. Which, due to the sectarian social media combativeness that their practice revolves around, has led them to aggressively disregard nuance or any elements of a dialectical analysis. As Parenti warned about these types of anarchists long before social media, their goal is to fight against communists more than it is to fight against the ruling class.

From this aggressively anti-Leninist culture comes a “leftist” ideology that’s decisively aligned with the State Department on foreign policy questions. Like the domestically focused right-wingers, they deny loving imperialism, but the mere fact that they promote the State Department’s propaganda makes them pro-imperialist. The impacts of one’s actions matter more than one’s intentions, and the impact of advancing imperialist narratives is for imperialism’s defeat to be made harder. A movement that’s founded upon this disregard for the consequences of the actions it takes, that doesn’t care about how its effective support for things like the Ukraine aid project is assisting in the global rise of fascism, can’t be a proper ideological vanguard for the anti-fascist movement. When the predominant activists who claim to represent “antifa” are the same types of actors who most vocally support Ukraine from a leftist lens, and most vocally attack those who speak out against the NATO narratives, antifa has been co-opted by forces which go against its original mission.

When the groups calling themselves “antifa” are overwhelmingly led not by serious Marxists, nor by politically underdeveloped leftists, but by bad-faith anarchists who have no desire to fix their movement’s ideological bankruptcy, “antifa” ironically can become a force for violent counterrevolution. These are the types of anarchists who represent a step down from their more ideologically competent older counterparts like Chomsky, who merely argue that Leninism “ruined the Russian revolution.” This argument is incorrect of course, but the new generation of radical liberals has taken it to its logical conclusion by normalizing the idea that Leninism is “red fascism.” 

Combine this idea with the eagerness for violent action that street-level movement wreckers share, and you get a perverse iteration of “antifa” that’s been weaponized against the anti-fascist cause. What the feds have done is cultivate a pipeline that starts with absorbing left anti-communist ideas, and ends with the ideological targets becoming radicalized into tools for terrorizing those who actually work to advance class struggle. All under a twisted new definition of “fighting fascism.” Communists must rebuild the true antifa by having our cadres combat fascism, which entails countering fascism’s biggest source of support worldwide: U.S. foreign policy.

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The War on Terror’s evils made the failure of Biden’s Ukraine proxy war inevitable

Art for LA Progressive

With the failure of Washington to achieve its strategic goal in Ukraine—that being the weakening of Russia enough that Eurasia is destabilized and U.S. hegemony is maintained—represents a lesson the imperialists have had to learn over the last generation. This lesson is that actions have consequences. Their decision to provoke Russia into intervening in Ukraine has shown they still haven’t learnt this lesson, and never will.

When 9/11 happened, it was the opportunity that the neoconservative vanguard of the new century’s American militarism had been waiting for. The desire of these warmongers, articulated by their think tank the Project for the American Century, had been a dramatic event. An event that could create popular support for a rebuilding of U.S. arms infrastructure to a level comparable to that of the World War II era. As implied in this think tank’s name, they expected to bring about a solidification of U.S. dominance, so much that a shift towards multipolarity would be made unrealistic.

Yet because they were arrogant in how they acted, because they believed the sudden domestic backing for militarism reflected how the rest of the globe would react to whatever Washington did, they brought about the exact opposite of the outcome they had intended. They invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, their narrative managers insisting that these operations would bring decisive and prompt victory against the terrorists (or against those who they claimed were affiliated with the terrorists). In Afghanistan, their manufacturing of instability and their use of horrific death squads ended up repeating the pattern established by their last involvement in Afghanistan, which was that when the U.S. inserts itself into a situation, it only ends up creating or strengthening its own enemies. In Iraq, Washington’s unprovoked invasion was predicated on a series of lies that would easily be debunked. This help bring about irrepressible armed resistance from those who refused to be ruled by a corrupt neoliberal foreign puppet state, leading Washington to murder hundreds of thousands over a drawn-out conflict. 

The White House’s cynical propaganda campaign to create a narrative of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and the destabilization the war brought, were what created ISIS. This was shortly after the U.S. had created the Taliban and al Qaeda through similar types of imperial blowback. The incomprehensible amount of suffering and death Washington wrought upon the region cultivated the social base for a new generation’s worth of terrorism, inspiring those who lost loved ones or who sympathized with the War on Terror’s victims to carry out retaliatory bombings and mass shootings. 

All the while, questions kept appearing about why 9/11 happened in the first place. Saudi Arabia was found to be tied to the attacks, the Mossad was found to have known the attacks were coming, and the White House was found to have been informed of a risk for attacks. Even a fairly non-conspiratorial analysis of these facts can conclude that the attacks were preventable, and that they were made possible by a network of corrupt ties between the Bush White House and the Saudi terrorist state. They weren’t made possible by a lack of U.S. military involvement. Which was what had produced the entities that had carried out both the terrorist incidents, and the Taliban’s reign of terror against Afghanistan’s people.

All of the evils within this series of events could be traced to the United States. So when Washington decided to perpetuate these evils by refusing to stop terrorizing the countries it occupied, then expanded its violence into five more countries through drone warfare and bombings, then expanded it even further through AFRICOM, most of the globe came to perceive Washington as lacking credibility. The U.S. couldn’t present itself as humanity’s safeguard against brutality and oppression, without being viewed as hypocritical on a cosmic scale. 

If Biden didn’t want almost all the countries apart from Washington’s imperial allies to decline Washington’s request for participating in the sanctions on Russia, he shouldn’t have voted for the Iraq invasion. Biden, and the other politicians who facilitated neoconservatism’s rise to becoming the dominant U.S. foreign policy model, believed they were securing U.S. hegemony. But the confidence they needed in order to have faith in unrestrained military adventurism as a sound strategy was not backed up by material reality. They gained this confidence because the Soviet Union had just been defeated, which gave liberals a sense of invincibility. In reality, even the Project for a New American Century’s pre-9/11 analysis was warning that Washington’s global status could be lost. It considered the possibility that the U.S. may become diminished in its military dominance to the lands within its own borders, in which case the country would become a “fortress America.” An outcome that the think tank did not view as something which could sustain the strength of U.S. capital.

A militarily isolated United States would be weak in its capital because capital requires constant expansion into new markets, and therefore worldwide military might, to survive. This is especially true in a hyper-neoliberalized country like the USA, which adopted its current austerity policies due to the fact that its economy has long depended on global imperial extraction. When this extraction started to lose its reliability as a source for profits, the ruling class implemented a program to progressively redistribute wealth upward. In a system that runs on parasitic exploitation, threats to the maintenance of that exploitation’s global scale can only be responded to by intensifying the exploitation of the home country’s workers. That’s how we’ve gotten the last half-century’s rise in American inequality, and decline in American living standards.

Ukraine is the catalyst for the undoing of this system, which has already been cannibalizing itself for generations. And the hubristic decisions the imperialists made twenty years ago are why Ukraine will prove to be fatal for the empire. Because the imperialists invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the majority of the globe has declined to provide Washington’s war on Russia with the backing it would need to succeed. Because the economic war on Russia has failed, Washington can’t destabilize Russia. Because it can’t destabilize Russia, it won’t be able to leave China strategically vulnerable by taking away the PRC’s most important international friend. Because the PRC will remain strong, its Belt and Road Initiative will continue to be able to weaken U.S. business interests across the peripheral countries, providing these countries with the developmental robustness they need for becoming independent from the IMF. 

Because the IMF will increasingly lose its ability to coerce these countries into acting as neo-colonial exploitation sites, U.S. capital will keep weakening. Which will force the U.S. ruling class to keep refusing to compromise with the workers, further heightening class contradictions. Whether this leads to revolution in America depends on how well the communists here do our jobs.

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Our future was canceled. Yet from this could come the most radical revolution in history.

The reality we inhabit is one where for at least the last generation, the future has been cancelled. This is how the social critic Mark Fisher described what the victory for capitalism in the 20th century has done to our culture and mass consciousness. With the defunding of the arts following the counterculture era, and the broader expansion of corporate control over popular media, entertainment has lost its experimental quality. New movies have largely become repackaged versions of the last century’s genuine artistic projects. Music has stagnated in the equivalent way. Architectural design has been stuck in the same form it was thirty or forty years ago, when the corporate consensus formed around a soulless and uniform series of box-like building models. 

The perfect environment was created for the atomization of society, the closed-off nature of daily life, that our paradigm of austerity would progressively bring. This is apparent in my hometown, where a long row of chain restaurants have come to dominate the main street in between expanding suburban sprawl. Outside of this are the neighborhoods that capital has thrown aside, where semi-rural poverty perpetuates drug addiction and a steady beat of violent crime.

It’s this synthetic societal layout, where one’s surroundings feel fake due to their being the optimal model for advancing profit, that the decline of capital is taking place within. The shine of the corporate outposts, maintained by workers whose wages get effectively cut more every year, hide a constantly growing decay. Surrounding them is infrastructure that still isn’t getting adequately updated, a population that’s now living paycheck to paycheck in a proportion of nearly two-thirds, and an ever-expanding periphery beyond the absurd excess of the suburbs. It’s in these neglected spaces where those who’ve been forced out of a prosperous lifestyle have been relegated to, doomed by the dismantling of American industry and the wider disappearance of a functioning society. 

This hollowing out of civilization is happening all across the country, in feedback loops of destruction that have only started. The north midwestern area traditionally known as the “Rust Belt” is to become a prime location for climate refugees, which is sure to exacerbate its existing inequality. That’s what happens in a system that makes someone go into irrecoverable poverty as soon as they experience any kind of major crisis. When this system has been engulfed in one long depression that started fifteen years ago, on top of decades of rising inequality, the outcome is misery and disarray. Even in the most “prosperous” areas. 

In the supposed examples of American robustness like the Bay Area, a de facto new rust belt is forming, the economy descending into stagnation outside the enclaves of the rich. Los Angeles has become infamous for its homelessness crisis, correlating with the city’s explosion in violent crime since the pandemic started. This is what the collapse of a society looks like in realistic terms: not anything spectacular or cinematically entertaining, aside from the grimly apocalyptic kind of cinema. When an economy loses the crucial mechanisms for running, the most vulnerable are the ones who suffer the most, and their experiences are ignored by a mass culture that’s designed to comfort the elites. Collapse looks like garbage piling up in the streets, people not being able to house or feed their families, increasingly militarized police acting as intimidators for a growing underclass.

Our society’s crisis, writes Phil Neel in his 2018 book Hinterland, “is a social terror made of masses of machines and animals, yet not in any way kin to these components. And what we sense of it today is merely one of its many limbs extending backward from its true body writhing somewhere just out of sight, at home in our own incomprehensible future.” Regarding his own experiences as an American worker, Neel recounts how “In Winnemucca, the hotels were all sold out indefinitely because a natural gas pipeline was being built somewhere out there in the trackless waste, this one small capillary opened by the Crisis flooding the worthless dust with gold…The sparse character of the desert seemed to draw the Crisis so much closer because it stripped away everything but this ritual, making peoples’ orbits around the invisible gravity of capital discernible against the desert’s flat plane.”

Under these conditions, the task of building a revolutionary movement is faced with a thousand obstacles that need to be taken into consideration when trying to rally the people. Even though most of society is the poorest it’s been in a lifetime, everyone is still expected to work within the same kind of intensive routine which was established decades ago. This routine has gotten filled with more working hours over time despite wages going down, making for select amounts of time in which the average person can do organizing and educational work. The default is for a working person today to think of their survival above all else, in accordance with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It was intended for things to be this way. Workers who are overwhelmed have less capacity to devote themselves towards education, community organizing, or personal training.

That’s the reality I’ve encountered in my social practice. Yet what I’ve also learned is that these experiences of the modern worker educate someone about the essence of what revolutionary organizing means. It gets demonstrated to them, every single day for years or decades of their lives, that the present economic order is cheating them out of the life they deserve. From this idea can be drawn the rest of the knowledge that’s needed for aiding in the overthrow of the capitalist state.

Assisting the workers in reaching this education is the essential step for bringing about the escalation in class struggle which we’ll need to defeat the state. Lenin concluded that the average worker needs to be lifted up to the level of a profoundly informed cadre member because spontaneous revolts, on their own, aren’t capable of bringing victory to the workers. The organically arising passions of the people need to be guided in a coherent way, or whatever uprisings the people carry out will fail. Inverse to this reality is the fact that unless the educated cadre members have won the people to their side, those cadre members will fail. The proletarian movement can do without neither its initiators in the minority, nor the majority who haven’t happened to join in on the struggle initially.

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To break out of our present reality, to transform the working class from being thoroughly demobilized to a force that can challenge the state, the work of our cadres needs to have in mind a certain set of end goals. End goals that pertain to the nature of our conditions. Our conditions are of the kind that when class conflict intensifies enough, the outcome will be civil conflict, civil conflict that can either crush the revolutionaries or bring them to victory. Therefore it’s not enough for us to do physical training purely with the expectation that we’ll need to use it in response towards threats. 

Responding to the crisis we face is only part of what we’ll need to do with these skills. There’s a difference between survivalism and revolutionary work; whereas the former has the mindset of prey that’s seeking to evade being overcome by the predator, the latter has a proactive mindset. Not a reactive one. Revolutionary work is based on the idea that in order to win power, one must to a certain extent assume the role of a predator. One must become an active agent in influencing history, not somebody who simply tries to stay alive while letting history happen to them. 

The enemies of proletarian revolution realize this reality about what it takes for a political group to prevail within a situation of failing state structures. Their militias are carrying out the community aid work required for showing themselves to be stable alternatives towards disappearing public services. Neel writes about these paramilitary organizations:

The thing that makes the Patriots unique, then, is their recognition of the need to build power within these wastelands, and their surprising ability to outcompete the dwindling state and local progressives in this endeavor. These groups are essentially engaged in a battle for “competitive control,” a term used by the Australian military strategist David Kilcullen (a senior adviser to General Petraeus in 2007 and 2008 and then special adviser on counter-insurgency to Condoleezza Rice) in describing the rise of guerrilla forces within the interstices of failing states. Kilcullen argues that the success of insurgencies such as the Taliban in Afghanistan as well as the rise of expansive criminal syndicate in places like Jamaica can both be explained by the ways in which such groups succeeded in providing “a predictable, consistent and wide-spectrum normative system of control” that helps to win over a population buffeted by the chaotic inconsistency of economic and cultural collapse.

By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions. In fact, Kilcullen points out that in such situations (epitomized by all-out civil war), support for one faction or another simply does not follow ideology. People don’t throw their weight behind those they agree with, and often many in a population can’t be said to have any deep-seated ideological commitment in the first place. Instead, support follows strength, and ideology follows support.

These strengths of the reactionary movement would make it appear that the prospect for revolution in this country is hopeless, if not for a certain reality about guerrilla warfare that Mao pointed out. As Mao Tse-tung: On Guerrilla Warfare describes the lessons Mao learned from his experiences in China’s civil war, and from studying other civil conflicts:

There is the question of whether it is possible to create effective counterguerrila forces. Can two shoals of fish, each intent on destruction of the other, flourish in the same medium? Mao is definite on this point: he is convinced they cannot, that “counterrevolutionary guerrilla war” is impossible. If the guerrilla experiences of the White Russians (which he cites) or of [victorious revolutionary Russian commander] Mikhailovich are valid criteria, he is correct. But, on the other hand, the history of the movement in Greece during the German occupation indicates that under certain circumstances, his thesis will not stand too close on examination. This suggests the need for a careful analysis of relevant political factors in each individual situation.

What does a careful examination of our conditions say about how able the revolutionaries are to defeat these militias, which have already gained so much power in the rural areas? It says that the militias can be defeated, except not right away. They’ll be the last forces of reaction to be subdued.

For rural or semi-rural American communists like myself, understanding this is crucial to our survival. The hinterland that Neel refers to is not the same as rural America, because whereas the hinterland is the growing series of neighborhoods that have been discarded by capital, the rural areas are dominated by the petty-bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats. The countryside’s land is owned mainly by the white ranchers in the upper income strata of their counties, who’ve been leading the last decade’s movement to stage dramatic occupations of federal land. 

I see them around my area, driving nice big pickups with Three Percenter logos or Blue Lives Matter stickers. This place has plenty of people with revolutionary potential, as everywhere there are working class individuals who are essential for keeping things running. But however successful I am at organizing, it would be especially foolish for me to try an adventurist project here, as those on my side will be outnumbered and outgunned. During the moment of revolutionary confrontation, these well-armed fascists and the militias they’re aligned with will try to purge their areas of revolutionaries. And they’ll succeed, unless we’re smart in how we navigate our surroundings.

These reactionary local elites are contrasted by a great rural poor population, who liberals have infamously been ignoring. The rural fascist militias are trying to hold these increasingly struggling working class people hostage, making those in need dependent on their services. When the majority of the country’s land comes under the de facto control of these militias upon the escalation of the class conflict, they’ll be able to use terror to control the population as well. Before the fascists take such actions, we need to do all we can to organize these facets of the rural population who lack a material stake in defending our socioeconomic order. Then we’ll be in the best possible place to carry out the maneuvers necessary for bringing workers democracy to the entire landmass.

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The cities are where the class revolt of this generation will be concentrated, and where the revolutionaries will initially gain ground. There are too many people in the cities for the capitalist state’s law enforcement and military strategists to be able to control. If only a tiny percentage of a megacity’s population is won over to the revolutionary side, that will represent hundreds of thousands of allies for the guerrilla fighters which may appear. When the skinhead-type urban fascists start to lose in the cities, they’ll retreat to the countryside, where they’ll join their rural counterparts in trying to fortify land dominance for the forces of counterrevolution. 

In these rural spaces, it will from a humanitarian perspective be ideal for many in our cadres to stay, and to act in defensive fashion (despite what I said about defense being only one necessary component). This is because the fascists will exploit the conflict to try to terrorize the communities of color and LGBT people in these towns with impunity, prompting us to start building networks of defense now. We also must not abandon the community aid networks (also known as dual power) that we’ve built up in our communities. Yet for the cadre members whose roles are in aiding the struggle’s expansive progress, rather than protecting those in the rural areas most vulnerable to the chaos, the metropolitan areas are where their fate lies.

Migrating to the cities will be the same kind of tactical retreat that Russia has been carrying out in its war against NATO. The Ukrainians have been gaining a territorial advantage because Russia’s goal has never been to gain as much territory as possible, but to exhaust Kiev and Washington’s resources. And that’s what it’s now successfully doing. The equivalent will be the case for America’s communists when they largely concentrate within the cities, allowing the movement’s members safe zones. Within these enclaves, they’ll be able to coordinate towards an attrition strategy against American fascism.

The first stage of this attrition will have to be oriented around the metropolitan zones, because these zones are where the link within capital’s social control is weakest. The Pentagon itself has said so about the country’s cities, assessing that it’s the most densely and numerously populated places where U.S. counterinsurgency strategy lacks a coherent plan for operating within. Speaking to the same trend of imperial weakness, the Pentagon has also said that U.S. war industry is increasingly unable to produce enough weapons for sustained military campaigns, citing the pandemic’s supply chain crisis and the decades of American deindustrialization. Which makes the U.S. vulnerable to defeat via a war of attrition.

The Pentagon reported on this crisis for the military in 2021. Now, at the end of 2022, this exceptional threat that wars of attrition pose to U.S. military strength has been exposed in spectacular fashion. By holding back the use of its military capacity in Ukraine during the first half-year or so of the Ukraine conflict, only transitioning into waging an actual “war” during this fall, Russia has exhausted both Kiev and Washington. The arms capacity and armed forces personnel math is now hopelessly slanted to Ukraine’s disadvantage. Ukraine expended far too many of its resources during its campaign to gain land. For this reason, Russia won months ago. It’s guaranteed that Russia will neutralize the fascist menace in Kiev, because not only has Ukraine’s military been drained, but NATO’s reserves of aid have as well. And Washington can’t make enough weapons to keep up with Ukraine’s needs, because corruption has rendered the U.S. arms industry dysfunctional. 

In contrast to the entirely profit-oriented U.S. military industrial complex, Russia’s arms companies are primarily state-owned, giving them the advantage of not being handicapped by executives who can compromise arms manufacturing quality for monetary gain. Right before the Ukraine conflict started this year, the Pentagon warned about this as well, observing how the consolidation within the country’s arms companies has crippled its ability to mobilize during a situation of urgent need for weapons flow. Russia’s war industry is coordinated and disciplined in a way that the USA’s by design can’t be, now Washington is seeing the consequences of this.

These costs go beyond military humiliation during Washington’s latest proxy war. Washington always knew Ukraine was going to lose, and has only backed Kiev in the hope that this will destabilize Russia. Collapse for the Russian Federation hasn’t materialized due to the sanctions being far less effective than anticipated, and that’s made for an outcome in which the U.S. suffers greater losses than gains. Because U.S. imperialism can’t destroy Russia, it can’t weaken China. Because it can’t weaken China, its capital in the peripheries will continue to diminish, forcing capital in the core to keep contracting. With the stagflation and financial crisis that’s starting off, this will accelerate the collapse, and bring closer a scenario where the people rise up in the form of insurgency. 

Upon observing how Washington’s Ukraine maneuver has backfired, Russia’s Deputy Chair of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev has predicted that civil war is coming to the United States. There’s no doubt that an upheaval is soon to happen in America, the government officials closest to the recent geopolitical developments are now openly anticipating this. What we don’t know yet is what form this civil upset will take. Will it be allowed to act as a spontaneous, incoherent series of revolts? Or will communist organizers put in the work to ready the people for a coordinated mass mobilization towards workers revolution, one that proceeds with proper understanding of how a revolutionary conflict in America would need to be led?

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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.

By hollowing out civilization, U.S. capital has cultivated the conditions for a civil conflict scenario

Capital has created the conditions for a revolutionary class confrontation, of the nature of civil conflict, within the core of imperialism. Such an upheaval is possible in the USA, despite the country being the hub of global capitalism, because this unparalleled strength for capital is only selectively present inside its borders. With America’s deindustrialization and deepening austerity paradigm over the last half-century, the country’s robust facets of capital are concentrated in the centers of its urban areas. Outside of these tiny zones where a labor aristocracy still exists alongside an oligarchic elite, there’s a growing landscape whose people have been relegated to the peripheries of the economy. They’re unable to join the status of the diminishing minority who have a primary material interest in maintaining imperial extraction, the younger people among them being fated for a future with far lower living standards compared to past generations.

Somebody who’s trapped in this socioeconomic situation, and has no perceptible escape from it, can respond by either finding a purpose or becoming broken. This is why suicides have been rising since the beginning of the long depression in 2008, most of all among the youngest of men. In the face of the bleak reality of their conditions, they haven’t seen a point in living. This is what comes from a society where the workers are cut off both from the opportunities for a prosperous life, and from the revolutionary theory that can show them their path towards power. This theory can save lives, because it demonstrates to those who’ve been forced into the margins that they have the ability to assert agency over their surroundings. And that the fact they’re on these margins is what gives them such potential to gain leverage over the ruling class.

With theoretical knowledge comes the realization of the importance of arming oneself, or one’s personal circle. Not for the sake of some reactionary individualist survival project, but for a collective effort towards advancing society to its next stage of development. Capitalism became an outmoded system generations ago. It created the conditions for a worker-controlled paradigm by the end of the 19th century, and has only survived so long through neo-colonization projects and genocidal counterrevolutionary terror. 

Since World War II, the capital of the imperial center has lost its ability to expand into new markets, forcing it into a state of inescapable contraction. The ruling class has foisted the costs of this contraction onto the workers, intensifying the exploitation of them and dismantling their social service protections. In the core, this has come along with a systematic closing down of the factories that used to provide so many jobs. These industrial centers have been relocated to the peripheries and semi-peripheries, which themselves have been subject to the processes in which rust belts get created and slums get expanded.

The first step towards revolution that this endlessly expanding divide creates is spontaneous urban uprisings, which we’ve seen in increasing frequency during the last decade. The 2020 Black Lives Matter revolt represented a cyclical peak in American unrest, but new revolts will no doubt emerge as living standard decline continues. And these revolts are only a precursor to the next insurrectionary stage anyway. As Phil A. Neel writes in Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict: “For the liberal urbanist, this paralysis can appear only as the death of politics, since politics is for them simply a more participatory version of city administration taking place within the sphere of civil society. A central thesis of this book, however, is that urbicide as the product of insurrection is the point at which those excluded from the urban core and thrown out into that hinterland beyond suddenly flood back into it— this leads to the overloading of the city’s metabolism, the death of urban administration, the local collapse of civil society, and therefore the beginning of politics proper.”

This politics begins in a disorganized, unguided form. As long as it stays in this infantile developmental stage, the state can successfully wage counterinsurgency against the liberation struggle. Spontaneous revolts can’t defeat the state, they need a revolutionary party to direct their energy towards a coherent, theoretically informed type of mass mobilization. Therefore as these urban uprisings continue to batter civil society, and graduate to armed insurgencies, the job of Marxists is not to sit back and say “it looks like the system’s overthrow is coming.” Our job is to carry out the educational programs, organizing efforts, and physical training programs which are indispensable to the people’s victory. Only when we do our duties can we truly say the overthrow is on its way.

This is the aspect of theory that clarifies how to translate popular discontent about our conditions into a force which transfers authority from one class to another. The mission of the communist is to wrest state authority away from the bourgeoisie, and put it into the hands of the proletariat. Not to try to put it into the hands of the lumpenproletariat, which inevitably brings about a victory for small capital over big capital; when the criminal enterprises in Haiti have gained territory, they haven’t created workers democracy, they’ve created breakaway authorities for the benefit of rival bourgeois factions. The fact that the gangs hold great armed capacity doesn’t give them credibility in itself, because this armed force will be used against the revolution when the gangs judge that the workers movement doesn’t align with their distinct lumpen interests. The workers movement’s armed force will have to come from the trained cadres that we build ourselves.

With the expansion in the resources of our parties, and the victory for the revolutionary forces, the social base for the gangs will be made to shrink and disappear. Gangs are a spontaneously arising response to poverty. As poverty gets addressed by a revolutionary party, the people in disenfranchised communities will gain alternatives to joining the criminal element. Recognizing this practical reality will allow us to unite the different types of economically marginalized classes, and make Marxism a friend to the millions of felons who hold special potential for joining an armed revolt. 

Felons in the U.S. have been disenfranchised by a cruel mass incarceration system, in addition to the socioeconomic inequality that drove them to be persecuted by the state. From a sociological perspective, this is a factor with high potential for producing such a revolt as our police state grows more militarized and brutal. The state has created a huge facet of society that would have nothing to lose in a conflict scenario. At some point, law enforcement will take its inhumanity too far, and provoke an uprising that the state has to try to put down with domestic military interventions. Which would involve further governmental atrocities, provoking the people further.

In the time between now, and the moment when this escalation in the class conflict starts, communists must work to fulfill the revolutionary potential of the hinterlands, which grows more substantial the bigger the hinterlands become. Capital’s peripheries are not yet an immediate threat to capital because they’re demobilized, and not connected to the education needed for getting large sections of society to apply revolutionary theory. Should this force within the periphery be activated, the state will face a serious challenge to its existence, and those who’ve been robbed of a purpose by their conditions will have found a purpose.

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21st century fascism is more dangerous than its predecessor, because it has the tools to inflict unprecedented harm

Above: one of the U.S. border patrol’s surveillance blimps

With the advent of colonialism, the state’s capacity for control was made far more wide-reaching, and far more intensive. This was by necessity, because the level of repression that had been normal under feudalism wasn’t adequate for the task which Europe’s bourgeois new ruling class had taken on. That task was to assimilate as much of the globe as possible into their extractive arrangement, which with the development of capitalism would require unprecedented proportions of exploitation in order to survive. Relative to the nature of the state in this new era, the medieval state had been extremely limited in its capacity to exercise sovereignty. 

The rulers of the ancient slave empires shared the absolutist impulses of modern dictatorships, but they lacked the technical means—mass record keeping, propaganda that could reach all of society with speed, law enforcement that could easily reach across entire regions—to be able to apply these impulses into practice. With the coming of new technologies like the printing press, and the unparalleled capacity for uprooting society that capital represented, states established new control systems that got more effective as innovations advanced. While the colonial powers expanded their reach, these systems became the dominant paradigm for global civilization.

This ubiquity of severe repression under capitalism and colonialism is why in a settler-colonial outgrowth like the United States, the essential policies of the capitalist repressive tool now known as fascism have always been in effect. All of the most necro-political policies that fascist states carry out—the deportation of entire populations, the enslavement and forced sterilization of targeted groups, the enforcement of racial hierarchies—have always defined the colonial powers. In the places where colonialism took on a localized form, in which settlers and their descendants were benefiting from the imperial extraction that took place on the same lands they lived on, these practices were taking place in the same vicinity as the ruling state. Therefore the state functioned virtually the same way a fascist state would. When the theories of fascism were written in the early 20th century, they naturally came to be incorporated into the U.S. political culture and governance. The only difference these theories made was that they provided ideological guidance for many of the state’s assistants, like the Nazis who were recruited to work for the military and the white supremacists who served as the state’s paramilitary fighters.

The more severe capital’s crises become, and the more U.S. imperialism declines, the more the ruling class makes alliances with fascism’s modern adherents. Washington has normalized a partnership with Ukrainian National Socialists, spreading Nazism across the U.S. and elsewhere. Reactionary politics is embracing an aggressive agenda targeting LGBTQ rights, women’s reproductive rights, and contraception, advancing a long-standing theocratic campaign to enforce puritanical values. Ethnic and religious nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, antisemitism, and other fascist ideas are proliferating as the ruling class comes to see them as useful weapons against the class struggle. Yet these developments being recent doesn’t mean that fascism is a new force in the imperial center. The basis for fascism has been here since before the USA’s founding, so its upsurge represents only an increase in the fascistic violence that our social system was founded upon.

This is a violence that’s developed accordingly with the rise of settler-colonialism. After the original imperial powers ceded most of their original colonies, four new benefactors of imperialist extraction were created, those being Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Because these places were founded on the dispossession of the indigenous peoples whose land they exist on, they’ve built upon the innovations in repression made by the European powers that produced them. It was the U.S. that perpetrated potentially history’s biggest genocide in the process of its colonization of Native lands, and that’s perpetuated a genocide against the descendants of its African slaves. In a more recent development for how settler-colonialism creates innovations in necro-politics, Australia has built some of the world’s most inhumane migrant camps, rivaled in their abusive caliber by the ones of the U.S.

These practices set an example for the first of the fascist dictators. The principal crimes of the Nazis, such as the Third Reich’s concentration camps, wars of aggression with the aim of seizing territory, eugenics sterilization campaigns, and creation of an apartheid system, were directly modeled off of what the U.S. did to indigenous and black people. Zionism, the newest facet of European settler-colonialism, has since provided the same type of guidance for today’s fascist and proto-fascist regimes. More than that, it’s directly provided the military and surveillance equipment that these regimes use to keep their people subdued. Israel’s project to annex and occupy Palestinian land has prompted it to create a new system for social control, one that’s placed the Palestinians in the most thoroughly constrained lifestyle that an open-air population has ever been subjected to. This system’s police training models, mass monitoring technology, and equipment for inflicting state violence have been exported to numerous governments, including that of the imperial center.

Zionism’s social control model is structured the way that a molecule is structured: an immensely complex array of particles, even the most minute among them playing a vital role in letting the wider body exist. Every detail in the routine of a Palestinian under occupation is carefully controlled and recorded. They need to pass through ubiquitous checkpoints in order to get to each end of the space they inhabit, which is severely limited. Everything they write and engage with on social media is watched by Israel, which prosecutes political offenders more severely the more clicks their posts get. The amount of food and water they can access is entirely up to the mercy of the Israelis, who use resource cutoffs as an unrelenting collective punishment. Their children are imprisoned by the occupier, and are even more often extrajudicially executed by the occupier’s military. In both the occupied Palestinian communities, and independent Palestinian states like Gaza, Israel is capable of watching very square foot. And freedom of movement doesn’t exist for the Gazans either, who are confined to their blockaded and routinely bombed city by surrounding militarized barriers.

The Israeli occupation is the model that’s incrementally being replicated by all of the imperialist states, and by all of the states that act in subservience to imperialism. Ukraine is advancing a plan to directly re-create Israel’s police state, allowing Kiev to maintain social control after Ukraine’s military exhaustion, economic shrinkage, and loss of its eastern territories. Repression intensifies in the places where the state has a war mentality towards the people under its jurisdiction, which grow more widespread as capitalism’s crises escalate.

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This repression is not applied equally, nor to the same consequence, among the different sections of a population. This disparity is most obvious upon looking at a colonial country. The Israeli settlers also live under a police and surveillance state, but unlike the Arabs, they aren’t prejudicially treated like a dangerous element. They’re instead protected by the legal system, among the numerous other benefits of being settlers. 

They broadly embrace the mentality that someone has nothing to fear if they have nothing to hide, and that a strong police presence is necessary for keeping society safe, because of these advantages. They have their homes because the houses of the Palestinians whose land they live on have been demolished, and those original residents have been ethnically cleansed. They receive medicine and treatment in vastly greater amounts than Arabs do. They enjoy abundant access to the agricultural and irrigation systems that those under the occupation are barred from. A section of Israeli settlers are negatively impacted by neoliberal austerity, but they still don’t live on the side of the border that’s dominated by destitution and irreparable rubble. And poverty within Israel is overwhelmingly concentrated within the Palestinian communities.

Because this divide is so great, the Israelis as a whole lack revolutionary potential. Israel is not only a settler state, but a Nazi state, a state whose citizens have their economic interests built upon the forcible seizure of the colonized group’s land. A social base for overthrowing this state can only exist within the colonized population, and its tools for liberation can only be effective if the state becomes militarily overwhelmed and economically exhausted. In isolation, Zionism is a perfect social control system, because its basis in a proportionally large group that materially benefits from the subjugation of the colonized group provides it with insurance against the popular outrage of the subjugated group. As well as against any contradictions within the internal capitalist system of the occupier state. Zionism’s strength comes not from the sophistication of its policing and surveillance methods, but from how it cultivates a demographic that, by its nature as a social class, will never act in solidarity with the underclass who these repressive tools were created to contain.

The equivalent dynamic is present in all the other places where there’s an element which benefits from imperial or colonial extraction. The ruling class has prevented revolutions from happening in the imperialist countries, even after many generations of capitalist crises, by displacing the bulk of the poverty capitalism creates onto the peripheries. And in the settler states that benefit from imperialism, this displacement of capitalism’s costs is also applied to the indigenous first nations whose resources they exploit. In Canada, this combination of external and internal imperialism is the most effective at ensuring against the destabilizing impacts of capitalism’s contradictions. These contradictions are concentrated among the indigenous people, who are targeted by white supremacist police, disproportionately poor, and see their lands extracted from by corporations. Because these Natives were virtually exterminated, they make up a small minority, and lack the numerical advantage that would make them an immediate threat to the state. Inequality has been decreasing in Canada, even as it’s been going up at an accelerating pace virtually everywhere else, because the dominant white demographic has been provided with increasing extractive benefits from internal imperialism.

What threatens the imperial power structure, and compelled the countries throughout it to adopt Zionism’s coercive tools to a rising degree, is that Israel and Canada don’t exist in a vacuum. Neither do the United States, Canada, Britain, or the other places where the bourgeoisie have been able to cultivate a labor aristocracy. They’re all surrounded by an exploited global majority, which constantly threatens to throw off imperial control and make the existence of the oppressor countries untenable. 

This danger posed by the anti-imperialist struggle applies to Israel, which isn’t an imperial power but still depends on the prevention of global workers revolution to keep its capital strong. The more U.S. hegemony declines, and the less effective Washington becomes at carrying out counterrevolutions across the peripheries, the less the core countries can manage their internal contradictions. The more they become subject to capital’s crises, and can no longer act like they’re immune to the laws of history. Unemployment, inflation, worker discontent, and other potential revolutionary catalysts keep becoming more prevalent. Including within Canada, whose stability is dependent on the effectiveness of the United States as an imperial partner. Canada is only an appendage of the United States, which unlike Israel is too geographically and numerically large to maintain a vast proportion of people who benefit from the system. Whenever an economic shock happens in the center, it’s also felt to the north. The fragility of imperialism and colonialism has tangible material consequences, which magnify with each decade.

These contractions of capitalism, and the popular dissatisfaction that comes about from the resulting austerity policies, can be prevented from bringing an end to capital. By employing repressive means that are either intentionally modeled after those of Zionism, or reached simply through innovating in the ways of state violence, even states that govern overwhelmingly impoverished populations can maintain their rule. The essential goal of these tools is to break the wills of those who’ve set themselves up against the system, or who are part of the groups that have a material interest in joining the resistance effort. 

With the last generation’s introduction of unprecedented technologies for war and repression, such as military drones and border surveillance blimps, the state has gained the best tools for counterrevolution it’s ever had. The biggest among these tools is a digital surveillance apparatus that’s capable of monitoring anyone at any time, allowing for them to be targeted with ease and for their past mistakes to be readily weaponized against them. These mistakes can also be fabricated into existence by the intelligence centers, which are partnering with Ukraine’s terrorists to list U.S. anti-war figures as targets for assassination.

The essential goal of every aspect of counterrevolutionary warfare is to keep the people demobilized. Or in instances where liberation struggles are strong, to make the people newly demobilized, after which the focus shifts to perpetuating this situation of popular inaction. The most bloody examples of this destruction of revolutionary politics are found in the history of global imperialist interference. In Indonesia during the Cold War’s geopolitical turning point, a CIA military coup happened in response to the influence that the country’s communist party had gained. The party’s members, and everyone else who was identified as potentially having socialist leanings, were then exterminated, bringing about the deaths of at least one million. 

This model of installing juntas that terrorized the populations into submission was then applied within many of the other peripheral countries, letting capitalism win the Cold War. After Ukraine’s own coup at the start of the new cold war, U.S. imperialism facilitated a parallel terror campaign, backing the new fascist regime in burning protesters alive and unleashing Nazi militias against the communists. Shortly after, the communist party itself was banned, before eventually every other one of the country’s opposition parties became illegalized. The imperialists seek to prove Ukraine’s fascist takeover as the moment in history that lets them win the 21st century’s geopolitical competition as well.

Even though communist parties still operate underground in Indonesia and Ukraine, they have marginal hope for victory unless the imperial center undergoes revolution, and there’s no longer a hegemon to defend these regimes from revolutionary efforts. Until then, the workers of these and most other peripheral or semi-peripheral countries will continue to live under deteriorating conditions. As Ukrainian repression gets more thorough, the imperialists exploit its conflict to impose further neoliberal shock policies. As inequality in Indonesia keeps rising, and the climate crisis grows so severe that the country is relocating its capital due to rising sea levels, the government has again formalized the criminalization of pro-communist sentiments. 

Parallel examples of these combining factors—intensification of necro-politics and policies that make revolution even further from reach—can be found everywhere from Ecuador, to India, to the imperialist countries themselves. In Peru, where a counterrevolutionary coup has prevailed as it presently stands, the country’s Israeli-trained military officials are advancing a terror campaign. Protesters are being massacred, and anyone who speaks out against the coup is being targeted with cyberattacks and death threats.

In Colombia, where the repressive state has been strengthened by both Nazi ideology and Israeli military technology, the fascists who’ve guided the war against the people have come to a theory on how a population can be suppressed. This theory is that whenever resistance to capital appears in any form, no matter how peaceful, those participating in it should be placed in the same category as military combatants. The ultra-nationalist security strategists behind this idea support their argument through a broader narrative, which is that the culture is fundamentally under attack from the LGBT community. “Gender ideology” is the label they use for this alleged social threat. All of these measures—the construction of a maximally thorough repressive system, the weaponization of paramilitaries, the manufacturing of crises blamed on targeted groups—make up the process unfolding within the imperial center.

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Imperialism’s ideal outcome is that the seven Latin American governments which have decried the Peru coup will also be replaced with ones that are loyal to the U.S. But this isn’t any more realistic than a victory for Washington in the Ukraine proxy war, or a reversal of the BRI’s progress in undoing neo-colonial inequities. A fascist coup may still succeed in Colombia due to its new leftist government’s deals for disarmament with the revolutionary militias, but even that isn’t guaranteed, and the other disobedient countries pose too much of a challenge. Despite imperialism’s momentary triumph in Peru, which may be reversed should the coup government be pressured into holding new elections, the empire’s decline can’t be stopped. It still won’t be able to expand into new markets, forcing a contraction that’s accelerating as the economy unravels. This is why the U.S. ruling class is orchestrating a campaign to instigate reactionary paranoia in the same vein as that of Colombia’s, which entails a fortification of the repressive state.

In the United States, fascism doesn’t need a coup in order to activate its designs. A successful fascist coup may or may not happen in the U.S. during its imperial decline, but fascism will successfully come to dominate its bourgeois political system in any case. Unlike in pre-coup Indonesia, the presence of a brutally reactionary state structure is already normal for the USA. The country in itself has always been an occupation of forcibly annexed land, and it’s always enforced a paradigm of violence against the descendants of the African slaves. This paradigm has evolved from chattel slavery, to apartheid laws, to a modified version of apartheid in the form of mass incarceration. During the War on Terror, with the transferring of military equipment to police departments and the Israeli training of U.S. law enforcement, the existing routine of racial police brutality has been made more frequent. As the flow of arms to police accelerates, so does the thickening of this occupation of nonwhite neighborhoods.

These steps to strengthen the racial repressive apparatus extend to the criminal justice system. The War on Drugs continues to expand, the government regularly making it easier to target the social class that the war was intended to contain. Which makes it even easier for the state to employ its regular practice of framing those in the black and indigenous resistance movements, and incarcerating them for life. The war against whistleblowers, and the use of torture techniques like solitary confinement against these political prisoners, has involved methods that have been directed towards black and indigenous people for generations. With the newer suppressions of journalism, free expression, and reproductive liberties, the vastly excessive imprisonment standards that were already there are becoming more wide-ranging. Like how the construction of the Guantanamo torture facility after 9/11, and the indefinite detentions of spurious “terrorism” suspects it involved, took place after mass incarceration had normalized these kinds of practices.

The narrative and cultural basis for these civil and social freedoms crackdowns mirror the ones within Indonesia’s recent repressive tightening. To set a precedent for further human rights abuses, the Indonesian state has instituted an operating procedure of denial when responding to the bulk of accusations about past rights violations. It’s worked to minimize the true scope of the military dictatorship’s actions, allowing for lack of democratic accountability as the country again shifts away from open society. In another step towards a fully “closed” societal paradigm, Indonesia has also criminalized sex outside of marriage, a policy that targets the LGBT community since gay marriage is illegal.

These developments parallel how the U.S. fascist movement is working to suppress material documenting the history of systemic racism, and to suppress contraceptives, abortion, and gay or transgender freedoms. Fascism seeks to fully enforce sexual control over society because sexual control is a mechanism for making its policies of class warfare practicable. With the destruction of social freedoms comes the destruction of civil freedoms, allowing for socialist and anti-imperialist thoughts to be criminalized. Attacks against the decolonial liberation effort are enabled by this as well, shown by how the Supreme Court’s recent repeal of nationwide abortion protection has gone along with a ruling diminishing tribal jurisdiction.

With the expansion of Washington’s wars to the European front, the criminalization of dissent against imperialism has been allowed to grow more pronounced. This doesn’t look like the old practices of jailing anti-war speakers for interfering with military recruitment propaganda, because conscription was abandoned after Vietnam and the military now relies on the neoliberal era’s “poverty draft.” Instead, it looks like raids against black communist organizations in retaliation for their taking substantial steps towards countering the Ukraine psyop. This repression applies whether or not the FBI is using its “black identity extremist” label, which is more associated with Republican administrations. Because the Democratic Party uses the FBI to target black liberation movements for being anti-imperialist, both parties in effect enforce the same racially focused political repression policy. Just like how they both advance austerity, the suppression of unions, Zionism, and the war against immigrants.

The way the U.S. ruling class is making neoconservatism fully bipartisan is by cultivating a synthesis between the Democratic neocon militarist mentality, and the Republican “gender ideology” paranoia. The electoral psyop machine is doing this by campaigning to elevate Ron DeSantis, the anti-LGBT governor whose history as a War on Terror torturer by default gives him militaristic credentials. Whatever happens in the next election cycle, the outcome of these trends will be a solidification of fascism within the American political system, and within the states that act according to imperialism’s interests. Eastern Europe, the Latin American countries that can be maintained or regained as neo-colonies, eastern hemisphere neo-colonies like Indonesia, new cold war proxies like India, and all of the imperialist countries can only continue to grow more fascistic. Their states view the mobilization of the bourgeoisie’s fighting wing as the only defense against growing crises, and against a rising potential for global class conflict.

These measures don’t make the ruling class invincible. The clandestine revolutionary forces will continue to operate, and will have potential to gain leverage over their bourgeois dictatorships as global warming weakens states worldwide. Until such a switch in the power balance comes, the capitalist state will be able to use the climate crisis to fortify its control. The influxes of refugees are becoming perpetually larger not only because of the global destabilization from Washington’s recent wars, sanctions, and coups. It’s also because the climate is all the time having a more destructive impact on the livelihoods of those within the places where this chaos has appeared. Imperialism has produced a feedback loop of necro-politics, where more and more inhabitants of the peripheries are forced to seek asylum in the imperial center. Because the center is itself becoming ever poorer and less stable, it keeps getting easier to instill anti-immigrant resentment in the social elements that are most susceptible to fascism. The xenophobic argument in the age of climate crisis and neoliberal decay is that resources are becoming ever scarcer, mandating that the people of the peripheries aren’t allowed to partake in the core’s wealth.

Like the War on Drugs, the border enforcement effort is presented as an operation by professionals to ensure safety. In practice, it’s an engineered humanitarian crisis, where adults and children alike are detained in facilities that lack proper sanitation, food supplies, or systems for stopping abuse by the guards. The network of camps is always growing, and is used to hold not just undocumented immigrants but many U.S. citizens. Activists and journalists are among the detainees, making for an expansion of the secret prison system established during the first years of the War on Terror. The war against immigrants has placed many others under severe state control by proxy, particularly when Gaza border technologies have been incorporated into the process. Israeli surveillance towers, capable of detecting any outdoor movement within a radius of several miles, have been placed along the border. This has altered the daily lives of the local communities, including the indigenous ones. Ultimately the chain of towers will be expanded to the northern border, and to the ports.

The purpose of these and the other aspects of the surveillance state is to allow for the detention of any person who’s been judged as a threat to the social order. The aim is to systematically break the capacity of these targets to mobilize against the system. Whether or not they’ve committed a political offense, they’re treated like a political offender, because breaking the state’s conduct codes is enough to reveal oneself as part of a social element that poses risk to the state. Abortion, gender nonconformity, sexual practices that go against religious orthodoxy, and the other acts that illicit anger in the reactionary mind are to be suppressed with increasing severity. As are the acts that directly challenge the social order, whether exposing governmental abuses or teaching school material that reveals systemic injustice. In American fascism’s propaganda campaign, these types of offenses—cultural and political—are portrayed as among the same category, the category of crimes against the very basis of civilization.

The purpose of the prison, when it applies to political prisoners, is to set an example of the persecution victims. The same is to an extent true for the moral offenders, who are political prisoners in a broader sense. But for those who’ve directly set themselves up against the ruling class, when the state incarcerates them, tortures them, and subjects them to slow executions by prolonged bodily mistreatment, the aim is entirely to make it apparent that this can be done to anyone who challenges the social order. And for both the political and cultural criminals, the nature of the persecution is that of maintaining power for those now in power. The ruling class, and the relatively comfortable wider minority that makes up fascism’s social base, hold the power in society because they believe they’re deserving of it. Those they believe aren’t deserving of it need to be shown where their place is.

Reversing the decline of the U.S. empire is no longer a practical goal for the ruling class. Its fate is to diminish in its reach, mandating that the conditions of the core become more like those of the neo-colonies. This is true in both an economic sense, where the exploitation of the core’s proletariat is intensified, and in a political sense, where the repression of the peripheral dictatorships is directed towards the core’s people. Though the militaristic projects will continue to the greatest extent possible, the rational maneuver for the elites is to solidify their social control in the empire’s interior. Militarized local law enforcement, the secret police of the intelligence centers, mass surveillance, paramilitarism, the carceral state, private military companies, and the immigrant detention network are the mechanisms that will be used to wage war against a society whose living standards continue falling. 

One of the major social elements with potential for revolutionary mobilization is the felons, who live surveilled and disenfranchised lifestyles in the millions. They have the least to lose from waging a revolt, and they’re the hardest to assimilate into the Democratic Party due to their detachment from bourgeois interests. Which is why domestic counterinsurgency is to increasingly rely on COINTELPRO organizational disruption tactics, mercenary policing, and militarized police. Ultimately, military interventions within U.S. borders are what the effort to prevent revolution will look like. Should this counterinsurgency succeed, like how the bourgeoisie won Peru’s civil war, what follows will be more thoroughly repressive than ever. As the critical theorist Walter Benjamin said, behind every fascism is a failed revolution.

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