This is the second in a series on the counterinsurgency that the movement for justice faces. Here’s the link to the first part of it.
To get a sense of how our government is going to use the lumpenproletariat in its counterinsurgency against the anti-imperialist cause, we can look at Washington’s color revolutions. As revolutionary politics gains strength within the imperial center, the state’s counterinsurgency is going to adopt more aggressive tactics. But it’s still going to try to maintain plausible deniability, and portray the lumpen counterrevolutionary terror as being detached from the government.
To do this, it’s going to use the same public relations maneuvers from destabilization efforts such as 2014’s Euromaidan. Like in those operations, the imperial state will recruit from the highly alienated element of society that Marx and Engels observed can be made into a “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” The “lumpenproletariat” can easily be swayed towards assisting the feds, because it lacks proximity to the means of production and therefore an innate incentive to be loyal towards the workers. Which means the worst thing Marxists could do is dilute the proletarian character of our movement, and let it be guided by whoever from this element approaches our cadres.
Using the lumpen and the lumpen-adjacent to wage war on behalf of monopoly capital
As Bay Area Revolutionary Union’s Bruce Franklin concluded about the lumpen: “The lumpenproletariat know what it is to be on the bottom, to be mashed into the gutter by the whole weight of an imperialist structure. They share the degradation of the wretched of the whole earth. At every moment two paths are possible for them. One is to turn their hatred against other victims, against each other, against themselves. They can put on the uniform of the U.S. Marines and butcher Vietnamese peasants, they can prey on their brothers and sisters in the streets, or they can shoot their own veins full of poison. The other path is the path of their own liberation.” The imperialist institutions are capable of taking these elements which they’ve pushed to the margins, and making them into soldiers in the first wave of counter-gang anti-revolutionary violence. Then, as these elements are waging their violent campaign, the highest levels of capital will portray their actions as heroic.
The history of color revolutions shows what this narrative manipulation is going to look like. The essential story the empire’s propagandists have needed to keep up about Euromaidan is that its outcome—in which a government that upholds the ideology of Ukraine’s World War II Nazi collaborators got installed by the Obama administration—represented the will of the country’s people. To strengthen their argument for this, they point to how many of the country’s people supported the Maidan demonstrations; it wasn’t a niche protest movement, they say, so it had to have been entirely organic.
Aside from the litany of evidence that the protests received U.S. support, and that the shootings which catalyzed the transfer of government were a false flag by Washington, this argument is still misleading. Just because the Maidan protests received mass backing at a certain point, doesn’t mean Maidan represented the interests of the people; it only means the people were subjected to a fairly successful psyop. A psyop that was able to resonate due to the same poor economic conditions which were created by western capital’s looting of the post-Soviet countries.
The only way NATO’s psyop machine could convince a large proportion of Ukraine’s people to support the protests, or to support the EU deal which would make the country fully subordinate to Euro-American capital, was by appealing to their sense of discontent about how things had become. The Ukrainian masses overall aren’t able to benefit from the EU’s agenda for privatization and austerity; in fact, there’s evidence that most Ukrainians have a conscious interest in restoring socialism. Within two decades after the USSR’s fall, more than half of Ukrainians had come to view the dismantling of socialism as an overall negative, even though most of them had welcomed it at the time. As in most countries, the majority of Ukraine’s people are not fascists, so the fascists had to sell their agenda to the people under the guise of supposedly representing things the people wanted.
Like how the agents of international capital did in 1991, they weaponized the idea of hope, portraying the changes they brought as necessary for resolving society’s contradictions. Because these changes only made things infinitely worse, in the end the people would see through the deception. In the moment, though, even many of the Ukrainians who wish for a return to Soviet times were persuaded to support Euromaidan, because it looked back then like a way out of the country’s bleak political situation.
This was how the color revolution network marketed its project to instigate chaos, then install a far-right regime that would seek to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers. After their initial efforts to agitate in favor of the EU deal provoked police repression, public sympathy for their cause naturally went up. They then used this PR success as a way to escalate the protests into riots. These final waves of the siege against the government were mainly participated in by members of Ukraine’s ultranationalist parties, with Right Sector and Svoboda affiliates making up the bulk of those within the violent protests.
These fascists couldn’t have gotten in place to prevail without the assistance of the lumpen or lumpen-adjacent elements, which joined the Maidan protests under the belief that this movement would rectify their increasingly alienated situation. Students had an instrumental role in bringing the protests to success, and as Franklin wrote about students in relation to the lumpen: “As neither workers nor owners, living under coercive rules without even the illusion of having chosen the authority over them, students share some of the experience of the more clearly classless elements of society, the true lumpenproletariat. This experience has at least some effect on their consciousness. They know what it is to be considered a parasite and to live like one…the most striking phenomenon is that of the dropout, who slides directly from an existence with some superficial resemblances to the lumpenproletariat into becoming a bona fide member of that class. And during the present period, the beginning of the final collapse of imperialism, that is becoming a mass phenomenon.”
By funneling these students into an effort that was led not by any workers movement, but by the imperialists and their pro-EU compradors, the color revolution in effect made them more lumpenized. The imperialists directed the students away from their potential path of aiding the class struggle, and towards the vandal tendency within history’s reactions to the contradictions of capitalism. This is the tendency that’s based not within constructive plans for bringing society to its next developmental stage, but within destruction and personal catharsis.
Manufacturing consent for lumpen counterrevolutionary terror in the empire’s core
The sniping false flag let the coupists maintain the perception that they were simply fighting for “freedom,” and soon the White House was able to select the most anti-Russian new leadership that it could find. (Which turned out to be a leadership that would soon call to forcibly relocate the Donbass Russian speakers into “filtration camps.”) The “this is the beginning of a better era” narrative got shattered within only a few months, after the coup regime used its fascist death squads to burn pro-Russian demonstrators alive inside a building. It’s not like those kinds of realities create doubt among the partisans of the liberal order, though, so they could celebrate it as a victory for “democracy.”
A decade later, after countless revelations showing the Ukrainian government’s Nazistic nature have strengthened the case of the pro-Russian separatists, Washington has failed to fulfill the ultimate goal behind the color revolution. It’s lost to Russia not just militarily, but more importantly in the economic war. And this has ensured Russia won’t be destabilized, which means Washington will continue to be unable to subdue China. It’s because of this defeat the imperialists have experienced internationally that they’ve come to see crushing dissent within the core as more urgent than ever. Now we must do the equivalent of what the Russians have done, and win against the internal color revolution which our government aims to use against us.
As the state directs its counter-gangs to assail anti-imperialists, it’s going to need to do so in a way that doesn’t alienate the public. Which means relying on the types of counter-gangs that represent a “left” orientation, rather than a right-wing one. If the state were to use the right as its primary means for counterrevolutionary terror, this would destroy its perceived credibility, revealing its fascist nature too clearly. It needs to nurture a type of fascism that appears to be the opposite of fascism; that claims to be what we need in order to defeat fascism.
Essential for this psyop has been the redefinition of fascism in the imagination of the American left. No longer does it mean a practice in which finance capital wages war to try to protect the existing social order; according to today’s conventional left, it simply means any ideas that are socially conservative. By shifting fascism’s perceived nature from being economic to social, the narrative managers have primed the anti-imperialists from the “left” orientation to be made hostile towards many of their own allies. There are plenty of anti-imperialists who don’t share the social views which are particular to American leftism, often because they haven’t been brought up in parts of the globe where U.S. culture war issues are relevant. To label them all as fascists is to negate the possibility for a united front against fascism, which is to say a united front against the interests of international monopoly capital.
The other outcome of using this liberal definition of fascism is that one becomes willing to align with the radical liberals who assist international monopoly capital, simply because these radlibs have socially progressive views. That way, as these counter-gang footsoldiers distribute CIA-provided narcotics to impressionable organizers, mix sex with political work while never taking accountability, and counterproductively vilify every formation that seriously prioritizes anti-imperialism, their destructive activities are seen as acceptable. Because within the insular mentality that today’s conventional leftism represents, somebody is judged to be inherently more valuable simply by virtue of being on the “left.”
As federal infiltrators seek to lumpenize the movement, and replace its working class members with elements that aren’t invested in proletarian victory, this mentality is quite useful for that goal. It’s a way of thinking that encourages organizers to enable lapses in disciplinary standards, simply for the sake of maintaining a vulgar kind of “radical” aesthetic. It’s no coincidence that the elements of the U.S. socialist movement which disavow Russia’s anti-fascist military operation are the same ones which foster an environment of lax sexual discipline within their cadres. They’re willing to sacrifice the interests of actual anti-fascist struggles for the sake of appealing to the ultraviolent, hyper-individualistic anarchists who dominate most branches of what we call “Antifa.”
These elements are not compatible with the revolution, because they’re committed to advancing a reactionary agenda. And therefore they’ll react to any pushback we give them by turning against us, and trying to manipulate those among our own ranks into joining with their campaign of violent sabotage. There are elements of the lumpenproletariat which are compatible with us, but we ironically will only be able to bring them in by adopting a hard stance against the undisciplined habits which the bad-faith lumpen elements insist in practicing. Somebody who’s serious is going to be attracted to an organization that can give them food, security, and clear guidance; which is impossible if you entertain unserious people who don’t want to grow out of their selfish ways of operating. These actors are the enemies of both the workers, and those who’ve been pushed out of the proletarian realm but seek to become proletarianized.
While these vandal elements begin inflicting violence upon the state’s targets, they’ll sell this as necessary for protecting society from “fascism.” And their marketing campaign will work to an extent. This is evidenced by how the majority of the U.S. public supports actions against Trumpism, including ones with troubling anti-democratic implications. A little more than half of Americans think it’s a good thing that Colorado has banned Trump from the 2024 election ballot, even though the insurrection which this decision is predicated upon was able to escalate into a break-in because of instigation by federal infiltrators within the crowd. In the war against illiberal political forces that our government is waging, the narrative managers have to obscure the role which the federal agencies have in manipulating events to fit a certain story. Or, in the case of a target like the Uhuru org, in outright redefining the meaning of the law so that the feds can accuse dissidents of “foreign interference.”
Most Americans aren’t going to be brought towards liking Trump; nor does he deserve to be defended, beyond the false charges against him that the feds have concocted for strategic purposes. The real reason why the majority of Americans support the Colorado decision—and thereby are at risk of being persuaded by the narratives justifying the coming lumpen anti-revolutionary campaign—is because they recognize Trump as another part of the imperial system which opposes their interests. The media is avoiding discussion of the Uhuru case because unlike Trump, the indicted members of the Uhuru org represent true hope for the people. They’re a committed and effective force within the movement to defeat U.S. hegemony, and to liberate us from our capitalist dictatorship.
The gang members, drug dealers, disaffected students, and other lumpen or lumpen-aligned individuals who the state will recruit into its war against orgs like Uhuru do not represent the people. They represent a minority that has an incentive to aid the counter-gangs, as these counter-gangs provide them with an avenue for ultraviolence. (Or, in many cases, simply avenues for getting paid to do mercenary work.) The more we work to build this movement, the more people we’ll encounter who reject the scandal-mongering propaganda which the state and its counter-gangs direct against us.
There are many people within the “leftist” spaces who are compatible with the agenda of the counter-gangs, more than one would like to think. But the majority of the people lack the incentives which these leftists have to embrace sectarianism, and will be receptive to an anti-imperialist platform should we expose them to it. If we overcome the state’s attempts to destroy us, we’ll be able to provide the people with a means for advancing their interests.
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