Cartoon from The Clarion Call
In the long term, the biggest goal of our ruling elites is to succeed at crushing all the political elements in the USA that have revolutionary potential; those being the illiberal elements. Not all illiberal groups and people are contributing to revolutionary progress at present, and not all of them will choose the revolutionary side; yet though not all non-liberals are allies of the class struggle, all allies of the class struggle are illiberal. And the struggle has far more allies (or potential allies) in this category than today’s insularly focused “left” believes; there are plenty of individuals in the armed services, the religious communities, and the libertarian or conservative elements which are open to at least assisting the antiwar movement. Which is enough of a reason for the state to view them as an existential threat.
Some of these forces have already been getting consistently anti-imperialist enough for the imperial state to view them as decidedly threatening; the antiwar wing of the Libertarian Party has made the organization opposed to aid for both Ukraine and Israel, angering the org’s former big donors and those who want to make libertarianism into a pro-imperialist ideology. At some point, our government is going to come to see this wing and the other illiberal elements as big enough of a threat that they must be destroyed by any means necessary; including through the kinds of violence that the empire has used in its drone wars.
We know that such escalations in the class conflict are inevitable because the rise of this movement can only continue. This is the start of a process where the same ideological and cultural groups that modern leftists often blankedly dismiss increasingly embrace the fight against U.S. hegemony. Most of the MAGA base supports a ceasefire in Gaza, which represents a break from the Ben Shapiro types who seek to get all conservatives behind Zionism’s genocide. There’s emerged a current of Christians who’ve embraced socialism and anti-imperialism, as represented by Caleb Maupin’s project to bring more religious people into his socialist organizing operation.
When combined with the work that the Uhuru organization is doing, wherein the org is bringing members of the Black working class into the struggle, these projects are capable of building a sufficient mass base for revolt. This is because all the orgs I’ve talked about are operating in unison; they’re either directly part of the same coalition, or in Uhuru’s case adjacent to that coalition. They aren’t able to be broken up from each other, like the state wishes were the case; so the different demographics they’re reaching out to are being brought increasingly together.
That these developments represent so much hope for the cause is the same reason why we can expect our government to intensify its war on dissent. The DOJ’s indictments of Uhuru on “Russian interference” charges are supposed to create the precedent for unconstitutionally crushing all the formations that share Uhuru’s commitment to the cause. And as these attacks intensify, they’ll be sold to the people through the same mass manipulation methods that our government has used while justifying its “war on terror.”
The insidious thing about these manipulation methods is that they don’t primarily consist of attempts to get the people to believe our government’s victims deserve to be tortured, unjustly incarcerated, or murdered. Those arguments work on the types who will listen to Shapiro-style genocidal propaganda, but most people have too much humanity to be receptive towards ideas so heinous. The main trick the elites have used is to instill those with a great capacity for caring about justice with a sense of apathy; apathy towards the same evils they ought to be doing the most to resist. The goal is to get them to selectively focus on certain injustices (or on injustices that our government has fabricated), while forsaking solidarity with certain victims out of political expediency.
Ten years ago, the way they were doing this was by diverting attention from Obama’s war crimes by accusing Washington’s target countries of committing evils. Gaddafi’s supposed use of sexual assault in warfare; Assad’s supposed use of chemical weapons; Putin’s supposedly unprovoked intervention in Ukraine; these stories all gave the unprincipled parts of the U.S. “left” justification for not seriously fighting the empire. These leftists reinforced the atrocity propaganda against Washington’s challengers, and assisted our government in exploiting the people’s capacity for empathy. Today, though; after most U.S. Americans have become fatigued over the Ukraine narrative, and their empathy has become instead focused on the people of Gaza; the most effective way the elites can dissuade people from committing to the anti-imperialist cause is by discrediting this cause’s key allies.
Essential for this new propaganda campaign is the furthering of an attitude of unseriousness within the left; an attitude which gets even self-described Marxists to uncritically accept all the most damaging lies liberals put forth about the anti-imperialist movement. This is the kind of anti-solidarity manipulation that turns good people into agents for counter-gangs, taking on a role as gatekeepers on behalf of a controlled opposition.
Uhuru has been able to avoid this grave error by keeping itself focused on the right priorities; Uhuru’s goal is not to monopolize leftist spaces, but to do what’s strategically necessary for defeating the state. And that’s why it’s allied with orgs that have been targeted by the anti-solidarity psyops—like Maupin’s org—and hasn’t joined in on this last year’s scramble by leftists to disavow antiwar orgs like the Libertarian Party. Uhuru knows that if you let your practice be defined by whatever is considered acceptable within the imperialism-compatible “left” spaces, you’ll be complicit in the purge of dissent which our enemies seek to carry out.
If we want to resist the war that our government aims to wage against the country’s own people, we have to act principled on opposing the judicial maneuvers that are being used in the attacks on illiberalism. The lawfare against former president Trump; the operation by FBI agents to instigate the January 6 Capitol break-in so that those who followed the FBI’s lead could then be prosecuted with extreme severity; the disproportionate recent conviction of anti-abortion activists; these things haven’t hurt reactionary politics, they’ve only put radicals at greater risk of state persecution. And every Marxist in the country must recognize this, or else assist with their own demise.
The most institutionally powerful wing of reactionary politics at present—that being the Democratic Party—is creating the precedents for an unprecedented assault on civil liberties, while marketing this as essential for fighting reactionaries. And the dominant leftist orgs are narratively assisting this repressive campaign, which in time will turn into something more dangerous and deadly. The elites aim to re-create the dynamic of apathy and complicity that allowed for the drone wars to happen, except this time the victims of the violence will be in the USA.
Every day, this moment of escalation comes closer, so every day we have to become better prepared. Should our movement’s organizations have to go underground, we’ll have to be ready to do so only as a tactical retreat, where we can then work towards resurfacing stronger than ever. Whether going underground will be necessary depends on how well the domestic war’s architects manage to solidify their control over society; should we fail to sustain enough momentum for our movement, the situation will become too perilous, and we’ll have to become hidden for the moment.
Given the will I’m seeing in this movement to reach and rally the people, though, I think there’s a good chance the state will be the one which comes to be overwhelmed. Even in that scenario, the state will still attack us with desperate ferocity. So we had better have enough allies among the revolution-compatible members of the armed services, and enough training within our cadres, to be the ones who prevail.
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