Above is a shot from A24’s upcoming film Civil War.
This is the final part of a series on the counterinsurgency that the anti-imperialist movement faces. These are the first, second, third, and fourth ones.
To ensure that the counterinsurgency wins, and prevents an effective revolutionary movement from emerging, the ruling elites need to convince enough developing radicals of a certain idea: that only those on the “left” are capable of being allies to the revolutionary cause, or of coming to socialism. The logical conclusion of this notion is that when our society’s crises intensify enough, the inevitable outcome is the country getting violently and totally divided between the “left” and the “right.”
A year ago, when I was still being guided by the insular strain of leftist thinking, I accepted this premise. The premise that our society’s future can be determined as easily as looking at who has a Black Lives Matter flag and a Trump flag in their yard, and expecting the Trump flag people to start shooting at their neighbors. With the implication being that communists should isolate themselves from all parts of society outside the “left,” as supposedly this is the only place where we can expect to find anyone trustworthy.
Then the Ukraine conflict taught me two crucial lessons: 1) many of the people who identify with the “left” have become so pro-imperialist that they’ll only ever accept a “socialism” which reaffirms their anti-Russian biases, and 2) that many of the MAGA and libertarian types have revolutionary potential. Over the last decade, and especially over the last couple years, we’ve seen a political realignment. One where liberals and radical-liberals have chosen the side of obstinate, obsessive anti-Russian hatred; while a growing amount of conservatives have become compatible with the resistance against NATO, big tech censorship, and the intelligence agencies.
This doesn’t mean we should become rightists, it only means the Marcyist strategy of centering liberals within communist outreach has come to make less sense than ever. If we operate according to that scaremongering notion of a near future where America becomes cleanly divided in a civil war between red and blue, we’ll only end up reaching stubborn liberals who aren’t compatible with anti-imperialism. We’ll be able to bring in neither the conservatives and libertarians who are revolution-compatible; nor the even larger element of people who are presently apolitical. Catering to the sensibilities of the liberal minority, as if this minority represents the most advanced element of the people, can only bring failure to build a movement that wins. This has been proven by how the predominant “socialist” orgs have been following that model for decades, and they’ve kept failing to take advantage of our society’s intensifying class conflict.
How to convince developing radicals that left-liberals are the most conscious element? By selling them a story about how everyone who leans right is a ticking time bomb for white supremacist terrorism, and will try to slaughter non-rightists as soon as tensions in this country become severe enough.
Of course, there are far-righters who pose such a threat. Except they’re not as likely to be found within your local church, or within the Trump-supporting family in your neighborhood, as radical liberals believe to be the case. Violent right-wingers exist most prominently within the Nazi militias that our government has been backing, and that the imperialism-compatible left has been assisting by proxy. There are Ukrainian Nazis that the imperialists have been priming to travel to America so that they can commit terrorism against anti-imperialists; as well as white supremacist U.S. citizens who’ve gone to Ukraine to get combat experience, and will be used for this same purpose.
When this terror campaign comes—or rather gets more pronounced than it already is—the media will try to distract from Ukraine’s role in making such violence possible. Our ruling institutions, along with the imperialism-compatible leftists, will focus instead on attacking anti-imperialists as “fascists.” Even as anti-imperialists are being targeted by the Nazis, our enemies can be expected to try to connect us to Nazis.
Because this is the optimal narrative strategy for the elites to pursue, where they posture as fighters of “fascism,” the Ukraine-aligned Nazis aren’t even going to be the first counter-gangs they use. Those will be the “leftist” groups that either viciously hate Marxism-Leninism, or claim to be “Marxist” while attacking everyone who supports multipolarity.
The latter element is going to be complicit in the ultraviolent activities of the former. These types of U.S. socialists oppose Russia and multipolarity out of a single-minded desire to distance themselves from anything considered “right-wing,” with Russia and multipolarity now having that association. Consequently, they’ve separated themselves from the forces that are opposing Ukrainian fascism, while putting themselves in closer proximity to the radical liberals who side with Ukraine against Russia.
The followers of Marcyism believe that they can turn the anti-communist anarchists who dominate today’s branches of “Antifa” into Marxists. These radlibs are going to turn their weapons against revolutionaries, in the same way that the Marcyists expect all of the MAGA people to do. And they’ll ironically commit this counterrevolutionary crime even sooner than any right-wing elements will, because at this stage, the state has a greater incentive to weaponize the left. If the state were to make the far-right counter-gangs into their initial fighting force against revolutionaries, the state would lose its credibility, as the majority of Americans are opposed to the reactionary right’s ideas. The best option of the elites is to direct the radlibs to wage war against the counter-hegemonic forces, while selling this war as “anti-fascist.” It’s the same way they’ll sell the unconstitutional indictments and extrajudicial executions that the state intends to use to crush anti-imperialists.
For this war against the people to not provoke too much resistance, the state needs to convince us that all non-“left” sources of dissent are fascist. It’s how the state can get even those who consider themselves socialists to unite with the liberals in waging war against all illiberal forces: by making us believe that an anti-fascist united front looks not like an alliance against monopoly capital, but like an alliance with monopoly capital.
Should this narrative be sufficiently successful, it will keep the counter-hegemonic forces divided, allowing for the state to crush them. To defeat it, we need to spread awareness about what fascism truly is. And why the fascist threat we’ll face is going to come not in the form of a bottom-up insurgency waged by MAGA, but of a top-down counterinsurgency waged by the liberal elites. One where our rulers continue with their plan to degrow the economy, while rendering those who oppose this plan too fractured to effectively resist the monopolists.
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Even though our ruling institutions are increasingly pushing fears of civil war, when you look at the content of their most widely directed propaganda on this topic, you find a hesitancy to make it too explicit in its ideas.
Civil War, the film that the studio A24 will release next year, is an example of this. Obviously the project was undertaken with a desire to influence the beliefs of the audience; simply because of its subject matter, it’s one of the countless military-related films that’s needed to go through a process of scrutiny and alteration by U.S. intelligence to be approved for mainstream distribution. So which ideas have the CIA and the Pentagon wanted Civil War to communicate?
From what we can tell so far, what they’ve mainly done is reduce the amount of ideas the film includes. There’s no indication that the separatists within the story, who’ve formed a coalition between Texas and California, are supposed to be seen as the heroes. The fictional president is portrayed as tyrannical, but because of the desire to make the film maximally apolitical, he’s not signaled to be an obvious stand-in for an Obama-Biden type, nor even a Trump type. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong when the film comes out, but his politics seem to simply represent a vaguely sinister aberration from what’s “normal.” The only thing the characters are seen saying against him in the trailer is that it’s not good how he’s willing to bomb civilians. That’s the deepest concept the film appears to want to get across: that war is bad. The rogue “western forces” will likely be depicted as also in the wrong for failing to grasp this, with them perhaps being chastised for not defying an oppressor in the right way.
Amid all these efforts to be provocative without saying anything, there is one idea Civil War has already made unmistakably clear it wants to put in our minds: that illiberal ideas could easily make our neighbors turn against us. This warning against deviations from liberalism may only vaguely apply to the film’s president, but where it depicts the regular Americans who are seeking to disrupt the traditional paradigm, the illiberal image it invokes is apparent from the trailer. Jesse Plemons plays a guy in camo who’s clearly supposed to be a typical right-wing military enthusiast, and is living out his fantasies of hunting down undesirables. Because this portrayal of American fascism was approved by today’s central fascist forces—those being the institutions of monopoly finance capital—there’s no way Ukraine will come up in the scenes involving this fascist faction. Fascism can only be seen as something that exists in spite of liberalism, not because of it.
The reason I spent the start of this essay describing the liberal-adjacent elements of the socialist movement is that even if these elements recognize the reality of Ukrainian fascism, they think they can put trust in the liberals who are committed to assisting it. All of the narratives the liberal elites are putting forth get enabled when Marxists accept the basic premise of these narratives, which is that MAGA is the primary source of fascism. This idea is based within an ahistorical notion of what fascism is. If we reinforce the liberal framework about how to view the masses, where around a third of the country revealed themselves as fascists in 2016 by supporting Trump, we’ll end up making a united front against monopoly capital unachievable.
What the liberals have done is separate fascism from its economic character, so that they can portray fascism as something which can only be fought by defending liberalism. They act like “fascism” simply means social conservatism. The reality is that fascism is the liberal order’s tool for self-preservation, a means through which the highest levels of capital wage war against those who seek to end the rule of the monopolies. By blankedly portraying the non-left elements of illiberalism as fascist, they’re priming socialists to do what the most committed Democratic Party loyalists have done: become enamored with the idea that every MAGA voter is essentially a Nazi, while minimizing the unparalleled threat which the intelligence centers pose towards democratic freedoms.
January 6 is an example of how the psyops behind this narrative work. First, the Democratic Party, the intelligence agencies, and big tech interfered in the 2020 election, orchestrating a coverup on Hunter Biden’s corrupt ties within Ukraine during the campaign’s final weeks. Then the Bonapartist MAGA wing of the ruling class exploited this situation to spin a narrative of mass voter fraud; which was obviously incorrect, yet it had an element of truth that the liberals didn’t want to recognize.
Following the attacks on press freedom and internet openness which the Russiagate psyop made possible, the intelligence agencies had successfully carried out a slow coup within our governmental institutions and avenues of discourse. Yet the Democrats weren’t willing to talk about this largest of threats towards liberty, even as they decried the democracy-hostile tactics of the Bonapartists. More importantly, the predominant strains of American socialism weren’t willing to take that bigger threat seriously either. They endorsed the measures that the dominant wing of the ruling class used against the insurgent wing, even while aware that these measures would enable the suppression of radicals.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation, the great purveyor of Marcyism, has continued to say about January 6 that big tech and the security state were justified in their response to it. As hard as PSL has tried to claim it opposes the censorship of anti-imperialists, in practice it’s advanced the opposite position. Wrote the party last year:
Of course, the PSL opposes the aggregation of power by private technology corporations. This power has already been used to suppress people on the left from using Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms. We believe that these private capitalist corporations should become public utilities subject to democratic control and regulation.
Trump and all others who were involved in the fascist-led assault against the seat of Congress in order to prevent the lawful certification of the election results on Jan. 6 should be arrested and face heavy charges for their crimes — including seditious conspiracy. It would be natural that as part of this process the conspirators would lose access to social media. When a rampaging racist mob is actively using violence and intimidation to overturn an election by disenfranchising millions of Black and Latino voters, the top concern of leftists should be how to stop the mob — not whether the mob’s inspirer has the unlimited right to social media.
Why is this stance incompatible with opposing the security state? Foremost, because it frames the efforts by finance capital to police the narrative as fundamentally justified. Christian Parenti warns that “You can call corporate censorship ‘content polishing’ or ‘informational cleansing’ or ‘message smoothing’ or ‘ideological right-sizing’ or ‘happiness making curation for social harmony,’ but the PR-style language will not alter the reality.”
The other reason why PSL’s argument is wrong is that it’s based within a fundamental acceptance of the narrative that the break-in happened without direction from the FBI. Despite the PSL statement’s recognition of the FBI’s beforehand knowledge about the Capitol Hill riot, the statement acts like it’s impossible that the FBI’s plants within the crowd could have been responsible for escalating the situation, and instigating the illegal activities. As Parenti has observed about Ray Epps, the individual among these FBI assets who had a pivotal role in making the Capitol’s storming possible:
Both the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—two groups crucial in planning Jan. 6—were heavily infiltrated by the FBI…Characters like Ray Epps—the ex-military rancher filmed urging protestors to invade the Capitol, who also bragged in a text message to his nephew that he “orchestrated” the invasion—have been largely ignored by the FBI. Just after the riot Epps landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. But then his name was quickly dropped and he was never even interviewed by the FBI even as the bureau has hounded plenty of Jan. 6 attendees who never got past the edge of the crowd.
Whether we regard the riot as a dangerous conspiracy to overturn the election or a justified protest that got out of control, we should take into account mounting circumstantial evidence of FBI infiltration, incitement, and entrapment. Yet my radical and progressive comrades more often wave away the growing list of peculiar and difficult facts with vague suppositions about bumbling bureaucratic screw-ups.
The liberal-aligned media has since sought to discredit the idea that the FBI was influencing Epps. These outlets have done so by pointing to instances where one among the countless online rumors surrounding Epps has been rebuked, like when a January 6 committee staffer said there’s “zero evidence that Ray Epps was a federal agent.” This is misleading. None of these observations represent conclusive proof about the nature of the situation; they’re all distractions from the strong evidence that Epps and the others who planned the break-in were assisting with an intelligence operation.
In a highly thorough report on the saga Epps was part of, Revolver describes the history of one off Epps’ associates: John Sullivan, the man with a history of getting kicked from left-wing activist spaces for acting like an infiltrator:
Taking a closer look at the above clip [of a group of Trump supporters assembling], some careful readers might note that the man standing next to Ray Epps, who appears to say Epps sounded like “some Undercover Agent type shit,” is a man named John Sullivan…John Sullivan was not exactly a BLM or Antifa activist in good standing. Amazingly, Sullivan had been kicked out of and permanently banned from multiple Antifa communities because Antifa cell leaders suspected John Sullivan of being an undercover FBI-handled agent provocateur sent to land them in jail…Republicans, despite being brutalized repeatedly by sociopathically corrupt FBI factions within the counterintelligence bureau at least dozens of times during Trump’s tenure in office, never seemed to ask themselves, until Revolver’s June 14 report, this question: What if the provocateurs, infiltrators and escalators of illegal activities weren’t coming from Antifa or BLM? What if they were coming straight from the FBI? As Revolver has repeatedly stressed: unlike Antifa or BLM, the FBI has actually done all of this before.
This is the context that the left’s predominant elements are ignoring: the intelligence agencies are working to make it look like a MAGA vs leftist civil war is plausible by sending agent provocateurs into the MAGA movement. It’s now not even controversial to recognize that the supposedly organic October 2020 plot to kidnap a governor was FBI entrapment. Because January 6 is a crucial piece of territory within the narrative war, though, the liberal-aligned media still refuses to recognize the same thing about the Capitol Hill riot.
The narrative managers need the targets of this infiltration to match with Jesse Plemons’ character; to look like living proof that populism is inherently dangerous. After January 6, the elites used this anti-popular psyop to censor anti-imperialists, with big tech increasing its suppression of Palestinians. The next false flags are going to precede attacks upon anti-imperialists that are all-encompassing, and that will represent an unprecedented escalation in our class conflict.
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These attacks aren’t just going to be political, they’re going to be economic. The state intends to let the same thing that’s happened to places like Flint and East Palestine happen to the rest of the country, abandoning the people who can’t absorb this century’s intensifying crises on their own. This plan to make us permanently poor and imperiled is something that’s common knowledge in progressive thinking, yet there’s a part of the story that left-right polarization has made leftists overlook: the assault on economic prosperity and civil liberties is intended to target not just the underclass, but also the lower levels of capital. Which means the intensifying rivalry between the lower and higher wings of our ruling class represents an opportunity for weakening the system, and even for swaying certain elements of the elites to the anti-imperialist side.
That’s the scenario which monopoly finance capital’s elites truly fear when they talk about the supposed danger of a civil war. They need to prevent the different elements with a material interest in defeating the monopolies from uniting, so they’re acting like the most reactionary elements in capital’s lower levels represent more of a threat towards freedom than the intelligence centers which already dominate. This narrative also seeks to portray all illiberal elements as synonymous with the Proud Boys, so that the left-leaning antiwar people will be too scared to build any real anti-monopoly coalition.
Like the Ukraine-aligned Nazis, the Proud Boys are essentially feds. January 6 exposed how deeply the organization is connected to intelligence activities, with its leaders and collaborators being either past or present informants. These groups aren’t products of populism, at least not of the kind that hasn’t been heavily managed by the feds; they’re tools of finance capital, controlled opposition agents that the feds have cultivated in order to perpetuate the chaos which the elites want. The purpose behind this chaos is to harm illiberal forces of all kinds, so that these forces don’t come to effectively resist the agenda for degrowth and continued imperialist war.
This is what Marxists must understand if we want to win the class war: when the highest-level elites suppress illiberal forces that aren’t us, it isn’t a win for Marxism, it’s only a win for finance capital. The only way a Marxist could consider it a victory is if they in effect abandon revolutionary politics, and come to adopt a liberal version of “Marxism.” That’s what PSL was doing when it supported the January 6 response. Such a stance depends on the idea that it’s possible for socialists to form a united front with finance capital, and remain revolutionary.
By assisting in the war against illiberalism, these socialists have only made the monopolists better placed to fortify the system. This practice has both strengthened the intelligence apparatus, thereby ensuring that the new cold war agenda will continue to be implemented regardless of which party wins next year; as well as made the Zionist, imperialism-aligned types of conservatives better able to advance their austerity agenda. This is the conclusion Christian Parenti has come to about the Covid lockdowns, another aspect of the war on illiberalism that the left has uncritically supported:
Where I live in rural New England, I know many level headed people who voted for Bernie Sanders but are now so outraged by the Covid lockdowns that they are prepared to vote Republican just to send a message…There is a real risk that reaction to Covid hysteria will help usher in a long period of ironclad minority rule by the GOP. It is now not entirely impossible that the GOP achieves trifectas in two-thirds of the states and passes constitutional amendments to abolish the income tax; privatize Social Security, the Post Office, and public schools; gut environmental regulations; make it almost illegal to organize a union, and so on…And Covid repression, overreach, and fanaticism will be partly to blame.
The situation is even bleaker than this, because implementing extreme austerity is a bipartisan goal. If the Democrats win in 2024 instead—which will likely depend on more intelligence interference—then the same amount of austerity measures will be enacted. The only difference is that these measures will be targeted at the parts of society which finance capital wants to destroy, rather than at the ones which lower-level industrial capital hates. That’s what finance capital tried to do in 2020 with the lockdowns, which were designed to push the restaurant chains, the local businesses, and the other parts of lower-level capital out of the economy.
The true goal of the USA’s lockdowns was not to protect from the virus—which would require a workers state like in China—but to provide a cover for the bailout of the biggest companies. It was a project to fortify and expand the dominance of these corporations, which is the only way to ensure that they keep making profits as capitalism’s crises become ever larger.
If this wing of the ruling class had gone unchallenged, this power grab would have been far greater, and managed to fully destroy the parts of the above-ground economy other than the monopolies. The highest levels of capital have always experienced some amount of inter-capitalist pushback though, so for now the monopolies have only been able to partially crush these businesses. The next attempt at completing this process will be degrowth, which the elites are increasingly going to promote as our ecological crisis worsens.
The degrowth program’s economic attacks against the people could be as devastating for humanity’s wellbeing as the climate crisis itself. Or rather these attacks are the factor that gives the climate crisis the potential to take tens of millions of lives. We can save these lives by utilizing technology in a way that provides safety and prosperity to the broad masses of people, but our system of production-for-profit makes the poorest seen as expendable.
If the elites get what they want, those on the economy’s margins will be sacrificed, while even capital’s lower levels lose what they have. We’re going in the direction of an economy that’s been fully hollowed out, making it possible for the monopolies to maximize exploitation. And when this means for keeping profits up gets exhausted, the elites will launch a new big war, likely against Mexico. The United States will be completely robbed of its productive capacity, its industries even more thoroughly destroyed. All that will remain are the financial institutions, merged with destructive industries like big tech, for-profit prisons, and private policing.
This existential threat towards everything other than the super rich has the potential to unite the majority of the people around the anti-imperialist cause. This includes those within the system—non-monopolist business owners, military officials, soldiers—who historically have shown potential to turn against monopoly capital. Many of these individuals could join with us, and thereby make our victory possible, because communism has some crucial alignment with their material and ideological interests. Communists who properly understand their task are not trying to cancel everyone who deviates from the conventional left, or to shut down the operations of every business. We’re working to bring an end to the power of the monopolists in particular; to end the international financial system that’s impeding progress.
Whereas the monopolists benefit from degrowth and imperialist war, the smaller business owners and those aligned with their interests do not. Their interests are more closely aligned with communism, because communism is capable of establishing an economy that’s state-controlled yet provides overall greater advantages for such businesses. With the defeat of the monopolies, and the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative to the entire North American continent, the lower-level industries here will be helped.
This is something we in the workers movement need to recognize in order to achieve our goals. Capital’s highest levels are in the process of intensifying their counterinsurgency against not only communists, but every other force that has potential to challenge the rule of international finance. The decisive factor will be the unification of these forces, which is going to let them effectively fight back against the state. We must combat the psyops finance capital is creating to try to sabotage the emergence of such a coalition.
The threat of great violence comes not from the prospect of a civil war instigated by MAGA; but from the prospect of our most powerful institutions orchestrating economic chaos and domestic warfare against liberalism’s challengers. The job of Marxists is to protect society from this elite-created harm, whether by rebuilding our monopoly-ravaged economy, cultivating organizations that provide the people with community, or defending against the state and its counter-gangs. Then we can construct a new system, one that utilizes production not for profit but for the wellbeing of the people.
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