If the empire can’t beat Russia or the Axis of Resistance, it can’t beat an anti-imperialist united front in the USA

How have the Russian people, and the many others who are waging military campaigns against the imperial hegemon, all managed to subdue the strongest superpower? The process that led to today’s outcome, where the imperialists and their proxies are losing on all fronts, has been one of correctly assessing the given conditions and then acting in accordance with those conditions. The Russians, the Palestinian resistance, and the Houthis all started out in a place of being subjugated by the imperial beast. Then, by uniting, strategizing, and mobilizing, they found a way to make the oppressors into the losers. 

This is all intuitive when one starts to think about how power balances get flipped, but examining the nature of the path towards anti-imperialist triumph is important. We in the empire’s core are at a stage where it’s more urgent than ever for us to study such struggles. An opportunity is here for us to gain an equivalent victory, one we can win by outmaneuvering the monopoly finance capitalists which run our government.

For the many participants in the class struggle who’ve been paying attention to the Ukraine conflict—and who’ve rejected the pro-imperialist arguments designed to discredit Russia’s operation—these developments have held a special significance. Russia’s victory over NATO is an unprecedented type of event in living memory, where an anti-imperialist force has been able to win on a scale which profoundly discredits the empire. Observed a recent Strategic Culture Foundation editorial about how much the imperialists have narratively invested into this conflict, and how meaningful it therefore is that Russia has beaten them:

The proxy war using Ukraine as a battlefield has reached a historic endpoint. The defeat is due to Russia’s formidable armed forces, Moscow’s political defiance, and the tenacity of the Russian people as seen most recently in the overwhelmingly popular re-election of President Vladimir Putin. The United States and its imperialist minions are in a deep quandary as they are forced to face a historical moment of nemesis. The Western enemies can’t publicly accept defeat – politically it’s going to be hell for these warmongering criminals when Western citizens fully realize the horrific losses and culpability of their so-called elected governments. Russia’s enemies have thrown everything into the Ukraine proxy war – over $200 billion in weapons and financial support – and they have failed to inflict their much-sought-after ulterior objective of strategically defeating Russia. They are the ones now facing strategic defeat.

This triumph, along with the parallel successes of the African, Palestinian, and Yemeni freedom fighters, represent an indispensable part of how the world will defeat international capital. The next big step, aside from the next victories the pro-multipolar forces will win, is a new wave of workers revolutions. Multipolarity is only one stage in the transition towards worldwide triumph for socialism, though multipolarity’s own importance can’t be understated. These great recent events in the shift away from U.S. hegemony have weakened international capital, giving the class struggle greater ability to succeed. They’ve also provided the workers movement with crucial lessons. 

What the last couple years have taught us is that the predominant parts of the socialist movement within the imperialist countries aren’t committed to the anti-imperialist cause. Which means the only way we can contribute to the further weakening of the hegemon, and therefore make proletarian victory possible, is by building a united front against monopoly capital. A front that’s by nature independent from the left opportunist elements, which seek to divide the workers from the anti-imperialist countries while keeping our social movements stuck in a narrow “leftist” bubble.

The Party of Communists USA, one of the orgs that’s been participating in the effort to broaden the antiwar movement beyond that bubble, has been compelled to repudiate the NATO-compatible narratives put forth by many of its “socialist” peers. The party recently wrote about the NATO-complicit role of Greece’s predominant communist formations, which affirm the hegemon’s narrative about Russia being an aggressor:

They practically deny that the main danger today comes from the imperialism of the U.S.A. and its plundering allies from the NATO bloc; they profess a kind of theory of the imperialist pyramid, where all the imperialists fight among themselves. The comrades even claim that they, “the Communist Parties, based on Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, have intensified their anti-imperialist struggle.” What can be said here? The comrades have indeed intensified the noise effects and the flow of verbal accusations, but by not waging a targeted struggle against outright fascism, and the main source of fascism – the reactionary financial capital of U.S. imperialism, they thereby divert the source of fascism from responsibility by their assertions that all belligerents are equally responsible for the war. We assert that on the part of Russia the military actions are largely of a forced, defensive nature against the aggression of the USA and NATO, unleashed by the hands of the Nazis of Kiev. The military defeat and dismemberment of Russia, its repetition of the fate of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya is in no way in the interests of the world working class.

Such tacit defenses of the NATO war machine are connected with the types of practice that take the revolutionary character out of socialism, and reduce it to an appendage for liberal politics. When somebody is operating according to the logic that PCUSA counters here, where all serious anti-imperialist efforts are viewed as threats towards class struggle, then the idea of a united front against the hegemon is easy to reject. A perspective that sees anti-imperialism as secondary allows for the insular practices which define modern “leftism” in the United States, and in places like Greece where there’s incentive to appease the imperial comprador class.

This struggle will be won on the basis of recognizing what our enemy’s greatest strategic weaknesses are. And because the capitalist system in the core depends on the continuation of imperialism, and of the foreign policies which keep imperial extraction possible, these vulnerabilities can be found on the narrative front.

At this stage, the most impactful thing we can do is take away the State Department’s ability to define the discourse, because discourse management is how the ruling class can keep the liberal order stable. When the discourse gets to be beyond the State Department’s control, the class struggle can no longer be held back by the pro-imperialist “left” gatekeepers. The opportunistic layer of the labor movement that PCUSA decries loses its narrative dominance, as the empire’s narratives on foreign policy have come to be no longer the default. Beyond the niche spaces that the opportunists can narratively police, the wider discourse has swung towards an anti-imperialist position, making authentic sources of dissent better able to rise.

Already, anti-imperialists in the U.S. have partly been able to achieve that outcome. We’ve done so by building an antiwar alliance which the compatible “left” doesn’t control, and by frustrating our government’s attempts at hiding its Ukraine loss. We’re seeing the shifts in the power balance that such disruptions can bring, and the state’s reactions to these shifts. The FBI just made an effort to intimidate the Libertarian Party over its associations with people who are friendly to anti-imperialist countries. This attack on civil liberties is by extension directed at communists, especially pro-Russian U.S. communist orgs like PCUSA and CPI; as these groups are among the ones with the most direct ties to the hegemon’s challengers. Evidently, the state sees such communists as synonymous with the antiwar libertarians, and is determined to wage war on all of them at once.

After the trial for the Uhuru 3 that will take place this September, we’ll doubtless see escalations in these types of crackdowns on international solidarity work. The state’s goal is to preemptively crush the orgs involved in this united front, making the “neither NATO nor Russia” left opportunist orgs into the only legal entities within the activist sphere. And even the members of those orgs won’t truly be safe, because the state is also coming for those who so much as do pro-Palestine activism. An all-encompassing repressive wave is emerging. But we’re capable of overcoming this next phase in the counterinsurgency, and outmaneuvering the empire like our global allies in this fight have done.

We’ve fulfilled the first steps in our own mission to unite, strategize, and mobilize against monopoly finance capital. What remains in this mission is going to involve fighting for our movement’s survival amid ever-intensifying attacks. If we navigate this situation correctly, though, the way in which we’ll be operating is going to extend beyond the reactive or the defensive. 

There’s an unprecedented opportunity to rally this country’s masses against the imperialist deep state which keeps them under corporate dictatorship, and is determined to fully destroy their economic wellbeing. Should we demonstrate the will and the discipline, we’ll make it so that our organizations keep making progress within this struggle, even if the state decides to drive us underground. The enemy we face is preparing for such an assault upon us because it faces terminal decline. Let’s take advantage of this growing weakness within it.

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Amid its Ukraine loss, the U.S. empire seeks to bring as much destruction as possible. More attacks are coming.

This terrorist attack that Washington has used its proxies to carry out against the Russian people shows what kind of direction our ruling class is going in. With the failure of Biden’s Ukraine proxy war, the imperial system just experienced a loss that it can’t recover from, and that it can only respond to by fomenting more violence.

The plan by the liberal geo-strategic actors to destabilize Eurasia via proxy war in Ukraine has backfired, with the sanctions accelerating the decline of the U.S./Euro economy rather than destroying Russia’s. More of the globe has been forced to choose sides in the new cold war, exposing how isolated the imperialist countries are. Russia’s victory is helping inspire oppressed people from Africa to Palestine to strike against a hegemon that’s been revealed as newly vulnerable. Because it’s been confirmed that Washington can’t win on the Eurasian geopolitical chessboard, it’s shifting towards its next plan: spreading chaos to as much of the globe as possible.

Where the empire can do this, and to what extent it can, depends on how strategically sound it would be to start waging hybrid warfare against a given country. The imperialists evidently see Russia as safe enough of a place for doing this, but Brazil and South Africa still aren’t experiencing such attacks, even though they’re both increasingly challenging both Zionism and advancing BRICS. That Washington is overall losing ground means it needs to be careful who it targets, or else it will experience blowback it can’t afford. 

Throughout the entire globe, the trend we’re seeing is that the hegemon remains able to gain tactical victories in certain areas, while losing strategically. Observed Pepe Escobar last year about a couple parts in this vast story: “Philippines, we all know, it remains an on-off American colony. But the Americans, for instance, have absolutely zero penetration in, for instance, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia…one-third of Syria is still occupied by the Americans. And they are plundering oil virtually on a daily or weekly basis, and wheat. And this disappeared completely from the narrative anywhere.” The conclusion Escobar has nevertheless come to is that:

The Americas are losing terrain everywhere. [The US has] tactical victories in Europe, of course. They managed to get Germany and the EU separated from Russia. But this is not eternal. This is a tactical victory for the moment. This could change in a matter of a few years only. And of course, across Eurasia, we all know what’s happening. Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS+, the Greater Eurasia Partnership conducted by Russia, Belt and Road Initiative…Eurasia now is Eurasia controlled by Eurasians, and without foreign interference. Of course, we still have attempts at color revolutions…Kazakhstan, they are so uncomfortable; they’re trying to hedge their bets, considering that they suffered a color revolution a year and a half ago. And there are sequels. This thing is not controlled yet. So it’s a very mixed picture, guys. I think we all agree that, in terms of tactical victories, the Americans have some serious ones. But in terms of the overall strategy, they are losing virtually in every continent.

What to expect from an imperial state that’s been weakened enough for its decline to be terminal, yet remains strong enough that it can keep holding these areas of colonial military control? We can expect terrorism and other forms of asymmetric warfare. Which is going to be aimed not at every country challenging the hegemon, but certainly at the places it can get away with targeting. These places include the core of the empire itself, where our ruling class faces a population with growing revolutionary potential.

Since the 2020 revolt, our government’s strategy for waging war against its own people has become more apparent. The highest levels of capital have made it clear that the counterinsurgency method they prefer is not a military crackdown, as this would discredit the government in the people’s eyes. So would using the right-wing militias as the main types of anti-revolutionary counter-gangs. The most culturally palatable forces that the elites could deploy are the “Antifa” milltants, who claim to be leftist or even “Marxist” yet support the campaign against the communists who’ve been seriously supporting multipolarity.

Inevitably, radlib and adventurist ideas come to dominate a loose leftist formation like “Antifa,” as you need ideological discipline to keep a cadre safe from such corrosive influences. And the prevailing attitude within radlib circles is that any communist group which doesn’t conform to the orthodoxy of modern “leftism” is a fascist group. The outcome of this aggressively sectarian culture is that all the orgs in the U.S. which have supported Russia’s operation against Ukrainian fascism are labeled as “fascist,” simply because leftists are supposed to distance themselves from Russia. (It’s also because these orgs seek to reach the broad masses, rather than the left-liberal niche. But the question of Russia is fundamentally tied to that debate, so being pro-Russian essentially signals support for a mass-based practice.) The feds seek to nurture the violent impulses of these radlib sectarians, and provide them with the assistance needed to attack the authentic sources of dissent.

On a broader scale than this surgical effort to sabotage mass movements, the chaos that our government seeks to inflict involves lumpenization of the working class. As monopoly capital responds to imperialism’s decline by degrowing our economy, and more people get pushed either out of the workforce or into financial precarity, the state is working to draw them into counter-gangs that are specifically lumpenproletarian. That are based within efforts to find alternative means of subsidence to wage labor, as their members have been driven to the economy’s peripheries. 

There’s an overlap between the “Antifa” groups and the lumpen, as is predictable for a political tendency that claims to be revolutionary yet isn’t connected to the proletariat’s interests. And aside from the lumpen or semi-lumpen individuals, who get drawn towards such ultraviolent leftist groups out of societal alienation, there are lumpenproles who take on counterrevolutionary roles out of monetary incentive. The feds are glad to either pay people from the lowest rungs of the economy to work as organizing infiltrators, or supply gang members with narcotics from the CIA-managed international drug trade. 

As our class conflict escalates, we can expect the counter-gangs which the feds cultivate through these practices to increasingly come into conflict with the communist movement. (Or rather the part of the communist movement that’s serious in its practice, and doesn’t enable the lumpen and radlib counter-gangs.) They’ll act as paramilitary forces on behalf of the counterinsurgency, whether out of material incentive or genuine ideological opposition towards anti-imperialists.

These tactics that we’re seeing the state employ represent a miniature version of the warfare methods imperialism is using across the globe. Like Rome during its decline, the American hegemon is increasingly resorting to proxy forces, substitutes for a real army that the imperialists can pay. The men who murdered those Russians at the concert were famously motivated by a promise to transfer tens of thousands of dollars to their accounts, with whatever extremist beliefs they may have held apparently not being enough to convince them. They were like the private military company contractors who’ve been slaughtering civilians during the War on Terror.

There are imperialist proxies whose members fight out of genuine beliefs. For instance, the Ukrainian Nazi militias that intend to carry on the war in a smaller form as Ukraine’s official armed forces get rendered ineffectual. As we see, though, even these true reactionary fanatics are unable to reverse the progression towards a post-American world order. And if we work to build the USA’s anti-imperialist movement into something that can withstand the counterinsurgency, we’ll be able to bring about the next step in this process. We’ll win victory for the proletariat in the core, defeating the monopolist forces behind all of this chaos.

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Deep state aims to pit “Antifa” & “trad” color revolutions against each other so that imperialist wars can continue

Photo mashup by Salon

The discourse psyop that I’m describing isn’t just about managing the narrative. It’s about ensuring that as capitalism in this country declines, it will be able to take on a form that lets it sustain itself. In the United States, what we’ve traditionally called fascism—where monopoly finance capital wages warfare to preserve itself—needs to take the form of two different synthetic ideological camps, not one. Our society is too divided for just one kind of fascist doctrine to be effective, so the optimal strategy is what we’re seeing now: the manufacturing of two color revolutions, one “trad” and the other one liberal or radical liberal. The latter group reinforces the former group, cultivating “Antifa” counter-gangs that act as intimidation squads on behalf of the Democratic Party. Its efforts to escalate cancel culture towards targeted stalking, and its hypocritically selective definitions of what constitutes a “fascist,” work to drive more people into the right.

At the moment, we’re seeing an effort to make American fascism’s traditional cultural symbols and ideas into the dominant parts of the fascist project. The Republican Party’s Project 2025 aims to define being publicly transgender as promoting pornography, increase “abortion surveillance,” and consolidate legal authority within the executive branch so that these and other Christian nationalist policies can be implemented without any challenge. It’s important that we respond to this properly, though, and not be frightened into aiding the liberals. The liberals want socialists to either vote blue, or pursue a broader program of liberal tailism, where we only try to reach liberals while blanketly vilifying the “deplorables” outside the left-liberal camp.

We must refuse to help the liberals because the problem with them goes far beyond their being “lame” or a poor opposition to the right, as the weakest left-wing critiques of liberals say. The problem with liberals is that they’re advancing another type of fascism, one which has the primary backing of finance capital. This is because their brand of fascism is the one that’s most culturally palatable. Caitlin Johnstone warned about this type of fascism in 2017, when the Democratic Party had established a narrative about it being the “resistance” which anti-fascists must unify with:

Christianity and flag-waving patriotism still hold value in red states, but they’ve become largely invisible to the major culture factories of New York and Los Angeles, and thus to the dominant culture of the greater United States. If fascism came to America wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross today, it wouldn’t have enough broad public support to implement its agendas, because crosses and flags don’t hold that much sway over America’s dominant value system. In order to rope in those who don’t value the old cultural value symbols, something more is needed. So when fascism came to America, it came wrapped in a rainbow flag, and wearing a pussyhat…[liberals] collaborate with the deep state’s world-threatening scheme to take down Russia, because the idea of Russia has been successfully married to the idea of Trump. One of the ways that they have done this is to demand a drastic increase in online censorship to protect them from Russian propaganda and fake news, and a drastic increase in online censorship is exactly what they are receiving. Trump fear was used to manipulate rank-and-file Democrats into asking for this fascism, while cheering for the US intelligence community to keep fighting America’s enemies.

By tailing the liberals, this is what “Antifa” is assisting in: an effort to destabilize the globe with proxy wars, inhumane sanctions, drone warfare, and terrorist attacks like the one Washington just subjected Russia to. This goes along with a campaign to destabilize the United States as well, because U.S. imperialism’s wars increasingly bring economic chaos and blowback violence to the American people. The liberal tailists argue that we must enter into a united front with liberals against fascism, yet it’s these supposed anti-fascist allies that are doing the most to advance fascism’s goal: wage war on behalf of the monopolists. 

This reality about the nature and role of liberals isn’t the only reason why we must reject an “anti-fascist alliance” with them. Because during the last year, the “trad” forces that Project 2025 represents have come to have a new role. This is the role of carrying out a controlled anti-woke backlash, managed by the same deep state forces these rightists claim to oppose. Therefore, to react to Project 2025 by allying with liberals is to fall for an intelligence manipulation tactic, one where the intel centers are using the far right as a tool to sway leftists.

When Project 2025 was revealed last fall, I was hesitant to say it was a project by the deep state to drive leftists towards liberal collaboration. And I still believe it was originally something independent from the deep state, because its source org the Heritage Foundation isn’t funded by State Department-tied NGOs. (Its funders are mainly the right-wing elements of capital that aren’t necessarily invested in liberal geo-strategic goals.) Since then, however, a shift has occurred: the escalation of the Gaza genocide has made wokeness less useful of a discourse tool, since wokeness isn’t compatible with the genocide’s clash-of-civilizations rationale. The psyop agents are now promoting faux-dissident right-wing figures, like Elon Musk and Javier Milei, that reinforce Zionist narratives while portraying themselves as anti-establishment. And Project 2025, along with its candidate Donald Trump, have by extension become connected to this psyop.

Trump isn’t in the same category as the “dissident” rightists who’ve been getting promoted by the intelligence centers, as the intelligence-tied media is now avoiding coverage of his campaign. He and the far-right Christian operatives who are driving his agenda have a particular kind of use within the anti-woke psyop, though. For one example, this usefulness of Project 2025 is apparent in how certain leftists are reacting to it: by concluding that they have no choice but to vote blue, since the threat from the right is now more extreme than ever. The Democratic Party sees Project 2025 as something it can take advantage of; Biden recently linked to the Project’s text to try to scare the left into voting for him. Heritage responded by taking the text off of their site, now seeing how unpopular the Project’s ideas are.

If Trump wins, the liberal establishment is going to mobilize its counter-gangs, and these gangs will try to get developing radicals to join them by invoking Project 2025. Is it possible that the first day of Trump’s presidency will indeed consist of unprecedented strong-arm efforts by the executive branch? It is, as the U.S. has regularly been seeing such White House power grabs since the War on Terror especially. The Democrats and their radical liberal allies will assert this means we need to forsake resistance to the deep state and the new cold war, since supposedly these things will be irrelevant amid what Trump is doing. The context they’ll be leaving out is that the geo-strategic intelligence and foreign policy actors who make up the deep state will still be the ones predominantly driving our ruling institutions. 

We know a second Trump term won’t truly make the deep state lose its power because for all his anti-establishment posturing, Trump remains a Zionist. He’s also now fully pivoted towards a pro-Ukraine stance, after having initially used some hollow antiwar rhetoric on the Ukraine conflict. This shows he’ll repeat his first term’s provocations against Russia. The only threat Trump poses to the deep state is in how he’s a bad figurehead for liberalism’s fascist agenda, as he puts forth the outdated Christian nationalist program. The lie the trad side tells is that defeating the deep state means getting wokeness out of government. This idea is absurd; wokeness didn’t become the country’s dominant cultural force until the 2010s, and the deep state was able to operate during the decades prior to then. 

The whole reason why the deep state exists is so that it can enforce the system of imperialism. No one is actually willing to combat the deep state unless they’re an anti-imperialist, which Trump and his Heritage backers absolutely aren’t. For the element of conservative-leaning people who’ve been convinced by the radlibs to join the “trad” tendency, or who could be brought to that point in the future, there is an alternative to Trumpism’s fundamentally liberal brand. There’s the element of the U.S. communist movement that’s authentically communist, because it cares to differentiate itself from the liberalism-tied “leftist” brand. Not every illiberal individual is willing to join this camp within the class struggle, but if we put in the work to build it, enough of them will.

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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 pressures amid 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. 

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A massive wave of repression is coming. We can survive this, then overthrow the imperialist deep state.

Prior to the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s, where the CIA installed a military dictatorship that took the lives of millions, the country’s communist party technically did warn about the peril. The problem was that this warning had been made in a reactive way, and therefore wasn’t nearly enough to prepare the people to fight back. Concluded Ernest Mandel in his 1965 essay Lessons of the Defeat in Indonesia:

These warnings, voiced on the very eve of the country’s counterrevolutionary coup, then already in full preparation, came without any previous or accompanying measures for broad mass mobilizations, without preparation for a general strike, without preparation for arming the masses, without concrete warnings about the impending army coup. The warnings could only heighten the determination of the counterrevolutionaries to strike immediately. They could not create adequate means to prevent or to reply to the counterrevolution. It is not surprising that under these conditions the only response this belated warning evoked was the desperate action of a small group around Lieutenant Colonel Untung and not a mass uprising.

As the U.S. government prepares to use Indonesia’s “Jakarta Method” of counterrevolutionary violence against its own people, communists here cannot repeat this mistake. If we don’t respond to this threat in a serious way, we’ll be purged like so many communists of the 20th century were, and the North American continent will descend into the barbarism which a collapsing capitalism brings. We can overcome the American Jakarta, but we’ll need to navigate our conditions correctly.

Firstly, we need to understand what we’ve been doing right lately, and then build on those gains. The reason why the Jakarta Method has come to be closer than ever to the United States is the same reason why we now have such potential to win: recently, there’s been an escalation in the country’s class conflict. The ominous acts of repression our government has carried out in recent years, where it’s raided the Uhuru organization and sought to create a precedent for criminalizing all anti-imperialist organizing, have been in reaction to the progress our cause has made. 

I’m not just talking about the gains made by revolutionary orgs in the United States itself, because the actions of Washington’s geopolitical challengers have been instrumental in getting us to this point. China has been economically defeating the imperial hegemon, while Russia has been militarily beating it. As Washington’s Russia sanctions and Ukraine proxy warfare have failed, it’s become apparent that the hegemon is getting easier to beat. Global anti-imperialist forces have been further strengthened and emboldened, making it easier to imagine a future where international monopoly capital no longer rules.

This trend towards final victory against the monopolists has carried over into the empire’s core, to the extent that’s possible at this stage in the struggle. The organizations that stand with Russia in its anti-fascist action have been growing, gaining more members, allies, and discourse prominence. The Uhuru indictments have backfired on the state in certain ways, getting the org attention from major voices across the ideological spectrum. There’s increasing momentum behind the effort to abolish NATO, thereby giving the movement against Zionism a greater chance at success. 

That this is happening at a moment when compounding crises have provoked widespread discontent, and an unprecedented economic meltdown is due to come, means the revolutionary orgs could become a serious threat. The state doesn’t believe they’re guaranteed to remain marginal, which is why it’s trying to establish that precedent for targeting all of them. Our ruling class aims to pre-empt a scenario where we’ve managed to gain a leadership role among large numbers of the people, because it knows we could fill the great political vacuum that’s appeared.

The disadvantage we have compared to Indonesia’s communist party is that our orgs are small, and our numbers likely won’t have become huge by the time the purge has fully begun. The big advantage we have compared to that party, though, is we have an ideological flexibility which it lacked. 

The Indonesian communists had a leadership that was committed to a particular, narrow path, one which made it unwilling to equip the masses to physically resist the state. The party was invested in the strategy of a united front with forces inside the bourgeois state, preferring to work within the system. And in the years leading up to the massacres, the party was focused not on agitating among the masses but on defending this reformist strategy. This is why its warnings were so lacking: it had gotten far too comfortable with a way of operating that rejected armed struggle, assuming it could keep making progress by gaining favor among the national bourgeoisie. This strategy was successful during that particular moment, as Indonesia had come to have one of the world’s biggest communist parties. But at a certain point, the reactionaries would take advantage of their opposition’s self-imposed weaknesses.

We’re in place, though, to become a force that can overcome the state’s coming attacks. Because whereas Indonesia’s communist leadership had a material interest in reformism, as it was already entrenched within a powerful position, the only path we can practically take is a revolutionary one. Every communist organization that’s followed Uhuru’s principled anti-imperialist strategy has no choice but to confront our perilous reality, and prepare to defend against the state and its counter-gangs. If you’re a political actor right now who’s supported Russia in its anti-imperialist actions, are aligned with antiwar groups which extend beyond the insular “left” niche, and isn’t undermining your own cause with petty infighting, then the state has every reason to target you. Therefore the logical action for yourself, your cadre, and your organization is to train in anticipation of an unprecedented escalation of this country’s class conflict. For us, the threat is imminent. Taking our situation seriously is the only way we can survive.

The biggest socialist orgs in the United States are following in the reformist path. The PSL has primarily invested in electoralism, which means it’s been too afraid of offending the liberal establishment to support Russia’s Ukraine action, join with the new antiwar united front, or be more than a fair-weather friend to Hands off Uhuru. The rationale behind this strategy is that this will supposedly protect its members from repression. But if Uhuru gets convicted, the state will be able to charge all pro-Palestine activists, including the ones in PSL. And as history shows, imprisonment isn’t the worst thing a state can do to its targets during a counterrevolutionary purge. 

The next wave of attacks from the state is imminent, and joining the liberal wing of the state in a united front against the right wing isn’t going to make the liberals not target us. It’s only going to leave us more vulnerable. The united front we need is not with the deep state, but with the forces that share our opposition to the deep state. (That excludes the parts of the right which claim to be against the deep state, but have reaffirmed their support for Zionism.)

For somebody who’s entered into the anti-imperialist movement to any capacity, it’s not in one’s best interests to try to appease the state. It’s in one’s best interests to commit to the revolutionary path, and continue expanding the cause into the broad masses. Their support is going to be at least as important to our success as our internal trainings will.

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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 pressures amid 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. 

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Ukraine catalyzed an escalation in our class conflict, & our government is desperate to crush the groups that could defeat it

Out of the many decades in which the Uhuru house has carried on the legacy of the Black Panther Party, why has the U.S. government only decided to raid it and indict its members during the last two years? Because it’s only recently that the class struggle has become advanced enough for the ruling elites to see suppressing dissent as highly urgent. 

This isn’t just about the decline of U.S. hegemony, because on its own the transition to multipolarity isn’t capable of bringing proletarian victory. It’s also about how an element within radical U.S. organizing still exists that’s capable of taking advantage of these global developments. That’s genuinely focused on winning the broad masses of people, like the Panthers were. Uhuru represents this authentically revolutionary element, therefore it’s seen as the most important org to suppress.

This is how the Uhuru org’s web admin has described the true motive behind the government’s decisions to target their group in particular:

What I’ve been trying to expose for the longest period of time is the centrality of the African Revolution and the African People’s Socialist Party as the vehicle to make the African Revolution. We must recognize the centrality of African people and African internationalism as a philosophical guide for where it is that we want to go…This will help us understand that this is an entirely different place from 1969 with the Black Panther Party. This is entirely different from just trying to crush dissent in the United States. This is different from anti-war protests being crushed, or some assumption that the reason they attacked us is because of our understanding on Russia, the Ukraine war, something to that effect. It is much different. It’s much bigger because there are all kinds of people in the United States who are opposed to this war and some of them are in support of Russia, but the African People’s Socialist Party bore the brunt of this assault and I just tried to lay out what I believe is the political historical basis for that. This should inform how we move forward.

That the ruling class chose to begin its suppression of pro-Russian communists by targeting an org that’s not just in support of Russia, but also specifically pan-African, is no coincidence. As Uhuru’s Chairman Omali said this week in his interview with Tucker Carlson, part of it is that the government assumed the racial prejudice within our society would make the org less able to gain public support amid its persecution. The main reason, though, has to do with economics; with the foundational role that colonial labor and resources have within the imperial order. If the ability of the imperialists to extract from the colonies and neo-colonies is threatened, then the empire’s first priority is to try to ensure it maintains access to these crucial assets. Material interests are at the core of what drives any empire, and they’re directly related to why we’re now seeing Black nationalists get attacked In this way.

What the Ukraine proxy did was make the threat of colonial extractive cutoff more palpable than ever. Provoking Russia into challenging Washington was a gamble. One that had clear risks, even earlier than when it started to become apparent that Washington couldn’t win the war. Throughout the last decade of U.S. cold war provocations, insiders of the imperial apparatus have been coming to recognize that U.S. hegemony has a growing risk of being defeated. In 2017, a Pentagon report admitted that American power is waning, and recommended militarized “solutions” to this supposed problem. Said the report:

While the United States remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” the report laments. In brief, the sta­tus quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing…states and traditional political authority structures are under increasing pressure from endogenous and exogenous forces…The fracturing of the post-Cold War global system is accompanied by the in­ternal fraying in the political, social, and economic fabric of practically all states…the post-primacy reality demands a wider and more flexible military force that can generate ad­vantage and options across the broadest possible range of military demands. To U.S. political leadership, maintenance of military advantage preserves maximum freedom of action

Though the empire’s strategists of course believed that instigating a proxy war in Ukraine would be a beneficial maneuver, these growing sources of instability were at the same time bringing great anxiety to the ruling class. More anxiety than when they started the wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, or the other countries Washington has brought destruction to in recent memory. Uhuru wasn’t put under siege during those moments, even though it was opposing such past war efforts as much as it’s opposing this one. So what’s changed?

What’s changed is that the system has entered into an unprecedented phase of crisis, prompting it to resort to old tactics. The last time the U.S. government was this intent on imprisoning anti-imperialists, and on imprisoning them explicitly for their opposition to a wars, Woodrow Wilson was president. We’re now seeing an equivalent of the repressive effort where they arrested Eugene Debs for making a speech against U.S. involvement in World War I. 

The Department of Justice hasn’t invented murder charges against the Uhuru 3, like it did to justify incarcerating Mumia. All it’s essentially accused them of is making statements that hinder U.S. foreign policy, albeit while filling the indictment with many false accounts that make the story look more suspicious. As Omali also said in the Tucker interview, the DOJ’s case is too weak to pass constitutional scrutiny, even if it were true that Uhuru put forth “disinformation.” Which means these indictments are intended to create a precedent for expanding the repression to more antiwar groups, subverting the constitution so that freedom of speech is made to no longer exist how it used to. The outcome will be that anyone who does international anti-imperialist solidarity work—especially with major targets of the day, like Palestine—can be gone after as well.

The U.S. government has done this in the 2020s, instead of in the other recent decades where it’s launched imperialist wars, because this was the decade when the elites could no longer afford to let the Uhuru house exist in peace. Or, by extension, to let the other authentic sources of dissent exist above ground. Perhaps the other pro-Russian groups won’t start facing repression until after Uhuru’s trial this year, when the DOJ will likely convict the Uhuru 3 unless there’s great public backlash. Or maybe this next stage in the purge will begin earlier, and we’ll soon see Uhuru’s collaborators CPI and PCUSA get targeted too. 

Should we within this alliance get driven underground, though, remember that it’s because we’ve come to represent a serious threat towards the state. That what we’ve done during the last couple years, wherein we’ve put together a coalition among numerous antiwar tendencies, has further accelerated the class struggle. And if we manage to sustain our operations amid whatever the state does to us next, we’ll be able to keep this positive trend going.

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How the discourse psyop machine has turned “Land Back” into a weapon against anti-imperialism

Above: a display put on by NDN Collective, the Bezos-funded NGO

To understand why and how the concept of anti-colonialism has come to be pitted against anti-imperialism, one needs to understand the historical context in which the elites have done this. For such a piece of discourse manipulation to have been possible, the U.S. left needed to become detached from the actual class struggle, and from the masses which are crucial towards driving this struggle. The elements of the left that we today see attacking anti-imperialists, under the belief that this is necessary for advancing “anti-colonialism,” are functioning in a different situation from that of effective anti-colonialists like Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré. Traoré is winning because he’s not advancing the ultra-left version of “anti-colonialism,” which places anti-colonialism as in conflict with anti-imperialism by taking out the former’s anti-imperialist elements. He’s embraced multipolarity, building a relationship with Russia; which is what his people want, as the bulk of them have intuitively recognized Russia is their friend in the anti-colonial struggle.

This goes against what the imperialist academic institutions, and by extension the many compromised parts of the “left” within the exploiting countries, claim to be anti-colonialism. According to them, being principled on decolonization means wanting to break Russia up into numerous new ethnic nation-states, which would ironically let Washington recolonize that part of the world. Like how the Zionists call their settler state a “Land Back” project simply because Jewish people have historically lived in Palestine, the new cold warriors are abusing history for their own malign purposes, selling colonization as decolonization. Any successful anti-imperialist disregards these twisted “decolonization” theories from the imperialists, and recognizes that there’s no conflict between anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.

The problem faced by the class struggle in the empire’s core is that since the death of the old left, the default elements of “Marxism” here have adopted the equivalent of these misleading bourgeois “decolonial” theories. They’ve repeated that same practice of taking key parts of anti-imperialism out of anti-colonialism, and then portraying anti-imperialists as being opposed to anti-colonial liberation. 

When applied to the conditions of the United States, this manipulation strategy has involved more than vilifying U.S. imperialism’s geopolitical challenges as colonizers. U.S. ultra-leftists often repeat such propaganda about countries like China and Russia, but they also promote an ahistorical narrative about the society in which they themselves live. This is the narrative that the masses within the core of imperialism are fundamentally reactionary, and therefore Marxists must isolate themselves to left-liberals (which are seen as the safest parts of the masses). If anybody challenges this self-constrained mode of operating, and tries to build a real relationship between Marxists and the masses, then they’re labeled a reactionary and cast out. 

What modern U.S. leftism and “Marxism” have done is standardize the same ultra-left ideology that Henry Winston observed the bourgeoisie were inserting into radical thought during the 1960s. This thinking ignores the differences between the conditions of foreign colonies, and the conditions of oppressed peoples in the empire’s core. Which, as Winston concluded, leads radicals to reject the alliances with the white workers that have historically been necessary for building effective movements in the United States. (Note that though Winston is here discussing the country’s Black population, his point about how minorities can’t win by isolating themselves from the majority applies to any other given minority group, and to political minorities such as Marxists.) Wrote Winston:

For colonial peoples, liberation starts with rejection of the myth that their fate can be determined “jointly” within the framework of the tight controls that link it to the U.S. economy. For the Black people in the US, on the other hand, liberation is realizable only on the basis of overcoming exclusion and inequality through an anti-monopoly movement, in which the Black people and all who are exploited by the common corporate enemy seek to establish joint control of the country’s economy, It is within such a revolutionary process that Black people will gain full and equal participation in the entire economy, and equality of representation in all aspects of the social, political, economic and governmental life of the country. The ideology of separatism, of determining “Black destiny” on a go-it-alone path—rejecting united action with non-Black opponents of monopoly power—is in today’s context equivalent to the idea of emigration to Canada or Africa counterposed by some as an alternative to Douglass’ strategy of forming an anti-slave power coalition—the strategy which did ultimately bring an end to chattel slavery.

That’s how leftism in the U.S. has been eating itself over the last half century: by wilfully cutting itself off from the broad masses. From not just the bulk of the white workers, but anybody who doesn’t accept the dogmatic theories which leftists often latch onto. This makes it so that the “left” can only exist as a space of opportunism and sectarian infighting. There is a solution to this, but it’s not a solution that will be embraced by the actors who’ve invested themselves in the New Left’s concept of “Land Back.” 

The old left, and the modern carriers of its traditions, are totally compatible with African and Native liberation. Black and Native peoples are part of the masses, therefore their particular interests and needs are part of a mass-centered practice. The reason why Marxists who seek to escape New Left dogmas don’t represent themselves with the “Land Back” label is because elite capture has rendered it counterproductive to use that label. Because even if it’s not one’s intention to portray the people as fundamentally reactionary, using this label reinforces such ideas. It’s the elites and their “decolonial” NGOs that have come to define the discourse within this arena, so we must be careful not to unwittingly aid in their discourse psyops.

The solution to this issue of co-optation is a return to the old communist strategy of centering the masses. Which means building alliances with groups that represent parts of the masses outside the “left” niche, including and especially when those within that niche get upset about us doing so. When the actors with an interest in gatekeeping the class struggle dislike what we’re doing, that’s a good sign, not a bad sign. They’ll use scandal-mongering about “red-brown alliances” to try to convince you that deviating from their insular model is wrong, and that they’re the authorities you should defer to without question. But if they were worth taking advice from, their mode of practice wouldn’t be the thing that’s kept the class struggle stagnant for decades. 

The PSL, the CPUSA, and their adjacent groups are the predominant socialist orgs during this era because they’ve designed themselves to perpetuate an inward focus within organizing. Which has kept them safe from the intense degree of state repression and smears that the liberal establishment would otherwise be directing towards them. This is why when they present themselves as the ones which are capable of bringing anti-colonial liberation, it’s an empty promise. They’re entities of managed opposition, not willing to do anything that upsets the liberal NGOs they get their funding from. 

By using the idea of anti-colonialism to sell their opportunist projects, they’re carrying on a century-long tradition by revisionists of peddling “decolonization” theories that are compatible with imperialism. As the Soviet authors from this compilation of resources on “decolonization theory” observe about how the imperialists have historically distorted anti-colonialism:

Decolonisation is a false apologetic “theory”, advocated by bourgeois and opportunistic economists and politicians, who maintain that imperialism contributes to the industrial development of colonies and thus, allegedly weakens their dependence on the metropolitan countries, or “decolonises” them. JV Stalin exposed the reactionary nature of these fabrications [Vtoroe Izdanie]…The real purpose of the decolonisation theories is dictated by the social task of the imperialist bourgeoisie: to promote the preservation of the economic dependence of the developing countries, to keep them within the framework of the world capitalist economy, and to influence the path of their development, thus extending a new form their colonial domination [Soviet Encyclopedia]

By portraying hostility towards the majority of the people as the only true kind of anti-colonialism, modern U.S. leftism is using that same tactic of disguising reactionary politics as something progressive. To win, Marxists are going to need to embrace the path of Douglass and Winston, in which those fighting for justice form alliances with all the elements that are compatible with their goals.

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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 pressures amid 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. 

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