As time passes, and the liberal technocrats scramble to respond to their catastrophic Ukraine foreign policy failure, we’re getting a clearer sense of what it’s going to mean when the United States brings its wars home. This doesn’t just entail the U.S. government using militarized police. And unless the ruling class becomes truly desperate, it won’t deploy a full military crackdown, because it increasingly fears the potential backlash from state violence of that level. The main way we’re seeing the empire bring the wars home is by importing the most insidious kind of modern imperialist warfare: sending shock troops that can be disguised as “freedom fighters.” Because these kinds of troops can be made to look organic, and independent from any government.
This warfare strategy is the one that the liberal order is most comfortable with. It’s what can maintain the illusion that the U.S. government is only a neutral peacekeeper, and that any actions it takes are in response to a mandate for defeating the alleged evils of illiberalism. Think of how the imperialists sold their effort to destroy Libya: they portrayed the violent uprising carried out by jihadist forces as something that was not only entirely justified, but a development which was unfolding completely without help from the extremely powerful governments that had an interest in getting Gaddafi out of power. They took statements from the Libyan government out of context to make it sound like Gaddafi was planning to murder civilians “door to door,” as well as fabricated a story about Libyan soldiers using Viagra to commit sexual assault. This was how they justified the bombing campaign that ensured Gaddafi would be overthrown, and Libya wouldn’t be able to recover from the civil war which they had nurtured.
In the long term, a domestic equivalent of this engineered destabilization is what will come about from the empire’s effort at waging counterinsurgency against its own people. At least this will happen as long as the USA’s people aren’t successful enough at asserting their own material interests. And a crucial part of our government’s war against us is the cultivation of domestic versions of those Libyan terrorist groups. Of counter-gangs that can not only bring violence and chaos, but sell these things as necessary for justice and progress.
This is the true role of the heavily fed-infiltrated groups that we call “Antifa”: to carry out paramilitary attacks against those the state wants to destroy, with the U.S. government’s official armed forces and law enforcement assisting them in this. And like with Libya, Syria, and the other places where the imperialists have marketed their terrorist forces as “rebels,” these attacks can only appear justified through demonizing the targets. Gaddafi, Assad, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Putin, and all the other leaders the empire has gone after are portrayed as so objectively evil, people on both the right and the left should support the U.S. campaigns against them. The regime change propaganda that’s directed at liberals and conservatives has tended to call them “authoritarians,” while the propaganda that’s directed at leftists has been more tailored, calling them “fascists.”
At this stage in the USA’s domestic counterinsurgency, the far left is seen by the feds as a particularly important element to manipulate. Perhaps the most important, because it’s the far left that’s ideologically oriented in a way which can divert the class struggle. Marxism is so mixed in with leftism, and leftism holds such a monopoly over labor and antiwar organizing, that if the feds can get the left to support the counter-gangs then the entire class struggle will be frustrated. And because so much of the left has already been brought towards viewing Antifa’s anti-imperialist targets as “fascists,” the class struggle can survive by either changing the left or building outside the left.
If we don’t change the left, it will remain stuck within the mentality that the federal infiltrators want it to have, and that it’s been defined by since the death of the USA’s original labor movement. This is the mentality of anti-populism, where the bulk of the people are viewed as fundamentally reactionary and therefore we can’t build a mass movement; only build influence within the left-liberal spaces, which are seen as the sole parts of the masses that aren’t fundamentally reactionary. The argument these counter-gangs use is that the groups which reject this anti-populist view (like the Center for Political Innovation and Party of Communists USA) are “fascist” for doing so, meaning we need to remain dependent on the groups that exclusively seek to appeal to left-liberals (like the Party for Socialism and Liberation or the Communist Party USA). Whereas the former groups adhere to the old worker movement’s attitude that the masses are our allies, the latter ones advance the ultra-left attitude that they’re an obstacle to be overcome. Which naturally overlaps with the “State Department socialist” tendency, where left-wing idealism gets turned into hostility towards countries the imperialists want us to view as “fascist.”
What these counter-gangs seek to do is wage war against the same political actors who took the correct side of history during the crucial stages of the empire’s decline, when Washington was pushing for wars to try to regain its losses. And this is what gives me some hope that more anti-imperialists can reject the ultra-leftist dogmas which keep one in conflict with the people, and aligned with Antifa. The ultraviolent Antifa anarchists want to go after everyone who’s sided against the State Department since the fall of the Soviet Union. They consider you a fascist if you were against the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and don’t affirm the false flag atrocity propaganda the CIA directed at Serbia. The same is true if you oppose the false gas attack narratives about Assad, or the destruction of Libya, or the efforts to destabilize Iran. As well as if you challenge the Uyghur genocide hoax, or the equivalent atrocity propaganda about the DPRK’s government, or the lie that Russia’s Ukraine action was “unprovoked.”
Certain “red libs” have tried to keep ties with at least some radical liberals, and to avoid the liberal establishment’s repression campaign, by softening their stances on some of these issues. Because Russia is the country that liberals hate the most, the Ukraine conflict is what they’ve compromised on, with them taking a “neither NATO nor Russia” position. These attempts to appease the enemy won’t work. The Antifa anarchists still want to go after the red libs just for doing the absolute minimum on anti-imperialism. And the ruling class, especially its dominant liberal wing, still intends to target the red libs for the same reason. The logical action is to fully give up red liberalism, and join with the trend in the communist movement that’s willing to build beyond the left if necessary.
The circumstances are increasingly showing that such a break from “leftism” is needed, in the same way that the communists of the early 20th century found it best to stop calling themselves “social democrats” when social democracy showed its reactionary character. This development is neither a good nor a bad thing. It’s simply what’s been revealed to us as our class and geopolitical conflicts have escalated. Now we need to respond to it in the correct way, which is by expanding the class struggle into all elements among the population that are compatible with anti-imperialism. This was always the sensible thing to do of course, but now we know we’ll only be successful at it by ending the communist movement’s investment in the established “left” spaces.
What elements currently within those spaces turn out to be compatible with the anti-imperialist united front, we’ll gladly welcome them. What elements remain invested in the project to tail liberals, we’ll continue to struggle against. And when the latter group inevitably deploys its militant shock troops against us, our cadres will be ready to defend themselves if we’ve committed to our own physical development. The rule of the hegemon isn’t sustainable, Ukraine showed this and “Israel” has further confirmed it. Now as the empire is forced to turn inward, its ruling class hopes to make an unprecedented degrowth plan possible by weaponizing the “left” against the class struggle. Our enemies are in a worsening strategic position, we’re closer than ever to defeating them. And we will defeat them, if we navigate our conditions correctly.
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