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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