If you’ve been paying close attention to the developments within U.S. radical politics since the Ukraine war began, you’ve seen that our government is now actively working to do away with free speech and assembly as we know them. The FBI and the Department of Justice have used the conflict with Russia as a pretext for pursuing a goal they’d long sought to fulfill: persecuting the African People’s Socialist Party, like it did to APSP’s predecessors the Black Panthers. And the DOJ’s charges against APSP, which the org will be tried for on September 3, double as a means for putting the entire anti-imperialist movement at risk of getting purged. Because APSP (or Uhuru as it’s also called) hasn’t been charged with any existing type of crime, but with a crime the government has made up: using constitutionally protected speech in supposedly the wrong way. With the DOJ’s narrative being that Uhuru carried out election interference on Russia’s behalf.
This isn’t the first time our country’s leaders have blatantly gone against the First Amendment to ensure that imperialist wars go unchallenged. Eugene Debs was arrested for making a speech against U.S. involvement in the first world war, which showed how important it was at that moment for our ruling class to guarantee the success of its imperial project. When Wilson was carrying out his interventions across Europe, the USA had only held a global imperialist role for barely a generation. It was around the turn of the century when the actors who supported further expanding Washington’s colonial project had made their interventionist ideas the dominant ones, and they’d been fighting off a strong opposition from the start. They now felt the need to crush the antiwar element by any means necessary, a project that would ultimately ensure the U.S. took on the role of core imperialist power after World War II.
Today, this project is falling apart, compelling the ruling class to take every opportunity for waging war against anti-imperialists. The only reason why they haven’t yet arrested the members of CPI, PCUSA, KFA, the Libertarian Party, and the other antiwar groups besides Uhuru is because they haven’t so far brought their plans to that stage. The Uhuru raid and indictments are supposed to be the start of a much larger process, one that ends with an unprecedented expansion of repressive policies. But there is a way for those of us within this movement to survive these ever-intensifying attacks, and then bring the country’s people to victory against their capitalist dictatorship. To figure out how we can do this, we have to look for which revolutionary practices the drivers behind the repression want to dissuade us from the most.
By choosing Uhuru as the org they went after first, they showed what traits a group needs to have in order for them to view it as a genuine threat. According to the Uhuru org’s own analysis, the state decided to target Uhuru because it’s centered around ending colonial extraction in particular. Since colonialism is the material foundation of the empire, a pan-African org was logically the target the imperial state prioritized. There are plenty of individuals within Marxist spaces who describe themselves as “decolonial,” though, and who haven’t been made into enemies of the state. So compared to them, what has Uhuru done that’s made it be seen as an existential danger to the empire? The difference is that it’s actually succeeded at doing mass work; at bringing the Black working class into a project for building proletarian power.
That Uhuru supports Russia’s Ukraine action has made it into more of a target, but the org has stated it doesn’t believe its Russia stance was the decisive factor. What’s made Uhuru the first victim of this crackdown is that it’s both anti-colonial, and truly effective at advancing anti-colonialism.
Uhuru’s principled opposition to U.S. hegemony has come from the same thing that’s caused it to be so successful at reaching the people. This thing is not being tied to modern “leftism,” which has many elements that are hostile towards both serious anti-imperialism and mass-centered practice. Because Uhuru hasn’t gone into organizing with the idea that it must appeal towards “leftists” in particular, it’s not felt the need to disavow Russia, nor to reject alliances with groups that are considered untouchable in leftist circles. An example of this is Uhuru’s working with CPI, which has given it greater support amid the attacks upon it during these last couple years.
The non-insular mentality that’s let Uhuru build these organizational connections is the same mentality that’s let it establish such substantial community ties. This mentality has let it have a much greater impact than any of the Maoist or Marcyist organizers who call themselves “decolonial.” By not investing itself in “leftism,” like those less successful organizers do, Uhuru has actually made anti-colonialism mean something which imperils monopoly finance capital.
In terms of mass work, this is the lesson we should take from the Uhuru case: in order to become successful enough at reaching the people for the enemy to see it as threatening, an org has to not fixate on appealing towards leftists or liberals. By not letting its practice be compromised by desire to gain influence within a niche, Uhuru has gained enough strength to provoke the state, and to provide the rest of the communist movement with a positive example. If we follow that example, we’ll be able to build upon what Uhuru and its allied orgs have done.
Getting out of the movement and into the masses isn’t the only part of our task, though. Because the Uhuru case has shown that as soon as somebody succeeds at doing this, the state will try to erase them. What we also must do is equip our organizations to keep operating during even the most extreme moments of this purge.
This part of our mission involves more than survival. There are plenty of movements that have been able to survive while being directly at war with the governments they’re opposing, yet have remained in such a state of conflict for decades without seeing decisive progress. We must both avoid being wiped out, and devolving into another version of the generations-long leftist insurgencies in places like India or the Philippines. To prevent such a stalemate in the class war, we must navigate our conditions in a way that lets us take advantage of today’s unprecedented opportunities to drive the class struggle forward. Imperialism has never been as weak as it is today; we’re not facing an enemy that’s still rising, like it was in the time of Debs, but one that’s struggling to slow its decline.
The immediate task in this effort to outmaneuver the ruling class is to ensure that our cadres keep making progress as the crackdown intensifies. The tasks after that will be mobilizing the people against the state, and providing the people with the leadership they’ll need in order not to be subdued by the state’s counterinsurgency. We’ve never had such potential to be able to break finance capital’s dominance. We have to seize this moment.
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