Zionism’s new strategy: elevate controlled opposition figures, silence those who truly challenge it

What does it tell us that so many prominent “progressive” and “dissident right” figures can make statements which challenge the Zionist entity, without suffering the fate Mahmoud Khalil has? How come Jackson Hinkle has needed to live in Russia for the last year to avoid persecution from his government, while plenty of “alt media” commentators haven’t faced the same kind of situation? It’s because the imperial state is carrying out a diversionary operation, where those who truly threaten the system get targeted while the system elevates controlled opposition figures.

In the case of someone like Hinkle, one of the major factors that’s made him an enemy of the state is that he isn’t just anti-Zionist. He’s also worked to combat the Ukraine psyop and the anti-China narratives, while promoting the ideology of working class revolution; all these things together make him a consistent challenger of the imperial system. With Khalil, though, the state’s motives for going after him come from how he’s an anti-Zionist who’s easy to target. All he did was help organize a campus resistance against the Gaza genocide; every argument about him having broken the law is based in lies. As a legal permanent resident of the country, all of the constitution’s protections also apply to him. But the state has decided to make him an example, because it intends to take away the First Amendment rights of all who oppose U.S. foreign policy. The Trump White House views Khalil and other non-citizens as the best people to target during this plan’s first stage; by attacking the ones who are most vulnerable, it can gain the precedent to attack anyone.

As the state raids, arrests, disappears, or even “suicides” ever more political targets, it’s going to increasingly boost the types of nominally pro-Palestine figures who actually help Zionism. The goal is to rebrand Zionism, and promote covertly pro-Zionist spokespeople who only speak out against certain aspects of the genocidal project. It’s the same strategy that the liberals within occupied Palestine use to try to rehabilitate Zionism: pretend like Netanyahu is the core problem rather than Zionism itself, and argue that if only he got replaced, the genocide would end. (That is if these liberals are even willing to recognize it as a genocide.)

One kind of fake opposition to the genocide is the Bernie Sanders social democrat crowd. They’re the political camp that J Street, the liberal Zionist PAC, has aligned itself with; and they’re the ones who are working to make the Democratic Party appear as though it actually challenges the Zionist entity. That’s the end goal of what they’re doing, even though they try to make it look like they hold the Democratic establishment accountable. Sanders, AOC, and these other “progressive” politicians will criticize AIPAC; they’ll denounce Trump’s Gaza ethnic cleansing plan; they’ll even put forth bills challenging the entity when this is convenient. But they’ll never oppose the Zionist project itself, and during the critical moments they’ll always betray the Palestinians.

Given how much scrutiny has come upon Trump now that he’s the one assisting the genocide, the strategic thing for our ruling class to do is depict the Democrats as separate from this. I believe that AIPAC is going to start exclusively investing in Republicans, and that J Street will gain a much bigger role in the Democratic Party. Then liberals will be able to say that they’re allies to the Palestinians just because they’re against AIPAC. Criticizing AIPAC does not in itself make someone an anti-Zionist; this is something we need to make more people aware of, including conservatives and others who may be attracted to alt media. Because the “dissident right” alt media figures also base their grift off of criticizing AIPAC, while functionally opposing Palestinian liberation. And at this moment, their grift is vastly more effective than that of the Sanders liberals.

“Dissident” right-wing media actually has momentum, and is able to convince significant numbers of the people that it’s something transgressive. The Sanders camp lost its perceived credibility a long time ago; Sanders wasn’t able to gain nearly as much support in 2020 compared to 2016, because the bulk of his base had realized his politics serve the establishment. The dissident right can appear credible much more easily, because it doesn’t need to be tested in the ways that Sanders and the “progressives” have. When Trump, Musk, or any other dissident right-aligned politicians fail to embody the movement’s ideals, it can distance itself from these figures, as it’s a terminally online movement at its core.

This doesn’t mean the movement itself doesn’t have fundamental hypocrisies, ones which we can expose and take advantage of. Hitlerism’s brand has always relied on the idea that it’s opposed to monopoly finance capital, even though Hitlerism was created by finance capital. This is why so many white nationalists, like Nick Fuentes, continue to align themselves with the establishment. 

Fuentes praised Elon Musk for his Nazi salute; this revealed how much of a tool for capital he really is, and how fraudulent Hitlerism’s “dissident” identity is. When Musk showed his alignment with Hitlerism, he exposed Hitlerism’s nature as something totally compatible with the liberal order, which Musk has made clear he represents. Musk assists Zionism, he advances the H-1B immigration visa program, and his puppet candidate was allowed to win because the liberal technocracy views him as useful at this moment. There’s a reason why Netanyahu and the ADL defended Musk over the salute. That the dissident right largely continues backing him, even if just for the sake of memes, shows this movement and its ideas don’t genuinely challenge the centers of power. 

The dissident right presents the “Jewish question” as if it’s the highest mode of analysis, and the ultimate explanation for Zionism; but the JQ isn’t just ahistorical, it’s also currently being used by the Zionists as a psyop. Elon Musk’s Twitter has so heavily boosted Hitlerites because it’s in Zionism’s interests for JQers to be the main representatives of the pro-Palestine side.

The hypocrisies of the “progressive” leaders show that when somebody is getting boosted by the imperial system, any correct things they may say are for performative purposes. And the hypocrisies of many within the broader left show that even when someone calls themselves an anti-Zionist, they can still act as a ruling class tool; they’re just a tool who’s more sneaky. The “pro-Palestine, pro-Ukraine” crowd is purely hurting the Palestinian cause. Likewise, the crowd within the right that postures against U.S. foreign policy while promoting the JQ only hurts the antiwar cause. 

These figures are loyal to capital, and in the end they’ll always side with the imperial state, because those are the terms of the tacit agreement they’ve made with this state. With the crackdown on dissent, our ruling class is revealing which dissidents are real and which are fake. We need to form a united front among the authentic rebels, and bring in those who’ve been tricked by the controlled opposition forces.

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Proliferating labor Zionism, enforcing imperial control: how the U.S. workers movement became co-opted

This is from Chapter 3 of the book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: How the U.S. Pro-Palestine Movement Failed to Stop a Holocaust, & How it Can Still Win.”

When I set out to tell the story of the U.S. pro-Palestine movement’s failures, I knew this would involve delving into history. But I didn’t anticipate how far back I would need to look, or how relevant events from several generations ago are to the developments within the movement today. 

For the anti-Zionist struggle to recover and succeed, it will need to progress towards a stage beyond campus organizing, and become primarily based within the workers movement. We face major obstacles to this, though; and to overcome them, we must look at how these problems came into being. This means investigating the history of how the U.S. labor movement became co-opted, and how the union bureaucracy got turned into a weapon against the anti-imperialist cause. Which is what let the imperial state isolate our social movements to the student element, then manage these movements through the NGOs and their affiliated orgs.

The launching of U.S. labor’s war against anti-imperialists almost perfectly matches with the timeline of the Zionist state’s creation. This is because both events were causally related to the start of the new cold war, and the ascension of the United States to global hegemon status. They also can both serve to teach us a crucial lesson: we must not embrace labor Zionism, or legitimize the destructive arguments that its proponents utilize.

Labor Zionism’s purpose was to divert the class struggle towards a project to steal land, and to advance imperial geo-strategic goals at the Palestinian people’s grievous expense. It employed a linguistic manipulation that’s historically quite common within politics, where the leaders of an ideological movement use the word “socialism” even when their beliefs have nothing to do with proletarian liberation. This is what the Nazis did as well; but the labor Zionists had a different goal with this rhetorical tactic than the Nazis did. They sought to win over people who had already come to communism, and they were greatly successful in this. 

Many communists of the World War II generation embraced Zionism, which is the inverse to today’s situation; now, anybody who calls themselves a communist almost certainly abhors Zionism. But initially, the labor Zionist psyop was tremendously effective. And it paralleled the other psyops that our ruling class would target the workers movement with.

The Zionist entity, which had already existed in the form of a settler proxy force for the British, was able to gain official statehood in 1948 because of the possibilities the cold war had opened up. Now that the U.S. had become the hegemon, and had shifted from allying with the Soviet Union to waging war against it, the interests of the Soviets were in geopolitically outmaneuvering Washington. This was the primary factor that led the USSR to support the creation of a Jewish state: the Soviet leadership wanted a way to gain a strategic advantage, and assisting in the project to create “Israel” would let the Soviets better counter U.S. influence as Britain’s retreat left a power vacuum. I say “the Soviet leadership” because Stalin was not the one behind this idea; he recognized the reality of what Zionism would entail. Stalin was out-voted on the question of a Jewish state, though, and the USSR remained pro-Zionist until the 1967 land grab. 

This detail is important to emphasize because left anti-communists often portray Stalin as a Zionist, when in fact his will was overridden by the historical momentum which Zionism had gained. Prior to World War II, Zionism had been a fringe ideology, predominant among the Jewish bourgeoisie rather than the Jewish workers. Then, when European Jews faced extermination and the imperialist countries refused to given them refuge, it came to appear to many of them that Zionism was the solution. The main element within the USSR’s government went along with this narrative, able to convince itself that using Palestine as a geopolitical pawn would be compatible with progress.

Regardless of the intent behind the decision, or the fact that Stalin himself couldn’t be blamed, it was an error. And the Zionist movement took advantage of this error to market its genocidal goals towards class-conscious people. 

The USSR’s pro-Zionist policy had an ideological rationale behind it, wherein supposedly a Jewish ethno-state would evolve into something socialist; or at least this was the belief of the actual communists who’d bought into labor Zionism. The leading labor Zionists were the ones who had founded “Israel,” and therefore were directly behind the campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine. They knew exactly what Zionism meant, and didn’t hold any illusions about it being compatible with racial equality.

At first, labor Zionism’s argument convinced many people who genuinely believed in the working class cause; it looked attractive to plenty of communists, including Jewish communists. But inevitably, this psyop would run into trouble. Since then, a cultural shift has occurred, and these manipulations no longer work on the most class conscious elements. Zionism’s dominance over the Jewish community is increasingly being threatened, with many Jews in the younger generation helping lead the pro-Palestine struggle. This is because the logic of labor Zionism, where supposedly an ethno-state is reconcilable with proletarian liberation, has been exposed as totally counter to reality. Since the Zionist entity was created, the Palestinian cause has gone from marginal to mainstream within American discourse, which is why there’s now such a big ruling class effort to co-opt this cause. 

The Zionist project was undertaken at such a late point in history that colonialism’s barbaric thinking could no longer be accepted by the bulk of society, forcing the Zionists to constantly struggle against progress. And they likely would have lost this struggle by now, if the pro-Palestine movement had  a substantial infrastructure within organized labor. But at the same time when “Israel” was founded, our ruling class undertook a sabotage campaign, one that ensured the U.S. workers movement would be separated from the world’s anti-colonial struggles.

The first step in this scheme was to divide the imperial center’s labor orgs from the unions of the colonized and formerly colonized world. This was what the Congress of Industrial Organizations did in 1949, when it initiated a split with the World Federation of Trade Unions. In 1945, the WFTU had been created with the purpose of giving representation to the union workers who were fighting against colonialism. Therefore the CIO–a union federation that encompassed not just the United States, but also Washington’s imperial partner Canada–had been looking to break ties with the WFTU as soon as possible. And when it did, this had a deeply damaging structural impact on the global workers movement, which won’t be healed until this division gets repaired.

It always hurts the workers movement when there are different unions trying to do the same job, or when unions that are supposed to be working together have lost their cohesion. In this case, it had a crippling effect, both inside the United States and worldwide. And this was just the prelude to the next step of monopoly capital’s destructive plan. Now that the ruling class had the USA’s unions isolated to the imperial sphere, it could psyop the country’s workers movement into becoming a tool for imperialist war, and for the domestic attacks against dissent.

This was the goal of the CIO, as well as the American Federation of Labor, when the two organizations merged in 1955. As William Foster observed, the merger had potential to bring great positive developments for the working class, as it represented a mending of a decades-long conflict between the two labor forces. But Foster was also looking at the sentiments expressed by George Meany (the leader of the new AFL-CIO), and by Walter Reuther. (Reuther was the president of the United Auto Workers, which at the time existed under the AFL-CIO umbrella). And what Foster saw was a plot to rally U.S. workers around the McCarthyist agenda, under the guise of saving organized labor from state attacks. 

He noted that there was “A belief on the part of reactionary forces that if the workers can all be combined under one head, it will be much easier to cramp them into the service of American imperialism’s warlike foreign policies. In fact, according to the joint statement of Meany and Reuther, the united purpose of the new organization would be to mobilize the working men and women of this country to fight against ‘the challenge of Soviet Communist totalitarianism,’ i.e. to support the truculent foreign policies of the U.S. State Department.”

Proliferating labor Zionism was only the first stage in the effort to make the U.S. left compatible with Zionism, and with the broader imperial project. At the time when “Israel” was founded, there was a major effort to sell Zionism as being compatible with communism. This wasn’t just about dividing the communist movement from the Palestinian struggle; it was a covert way of getting communists to support the project for U.S. dominance. And this trick was extremely effective. 

Even the Soviet leaders came to mistakenly believe that backing Zionism was the correct decision, and not even necessarily because of influence from imperialist psyops; these leaders had effectively tricked themselves. The USSR backed the Zionist project not because of “Stalinism,” or any other left sectarian scapegoat, but because it appeared to most of Stalin’s colleagues that the communist bloc would strategically benefit from leveraging the Jewish state’s creation. In the long term, this instead benefited the imperialists, giving Washington the geographic foothold that it needed to secure its hegemony. 

The lesson from this is that if you’ve set yourself up against imperialism, forsaking solidarity with others who are resisting imperialism will only ever hurt you. It was always going to be that the global workers movement would either act in solidarity with the Palestinian people, or suffer catastrophic setbacks. The failure by many of the mid-century communist forces to oppose Zionism greatly contributed to the weakening of the U.S. labor movement, undermining the internationalist spirit which this movement depends on. 

In 1945, William Foster observed just how instrumental solidarity would be to the proletarian movement’s success in the post-war era. He did so while arguing against the policies of Earl Browder, the CPUSA chairman who had acquiesced to the bourgeoisie’s liberal wing:

In the postwar world, which will face gigantic problems of industrial reconstruction and development, the United States, with its tremendous economic resources, is bound to play a very important role. What Comrade Browder does not see, however, is that if the role of the United States is to help in the realization of the programs of Moscow, Teheran and Yalta, this can only be accomplished if the broad masses of this country, especially the trade union movement, are very much on the alert to see to it that imperialist trends upon the part of our Government and the great capitalists are curbed and democratic policies imposed. The great goals of victory over fascism and the achievement of a lasting peace, laid down at Moscow, Teheran and Yalta, can be realized, but only upon the basis of eternal vigilance by the combined democratic forces of the world. Browder, contrary to this, is quite willing to leave the whole matter to the “intelligence” and “enlightened” self-interest of the big capitalists.

This was the essence of why McCarthyism could succeed: due to Browder’s influence, the U.S. communist movement was left unprepared for repression, even relatively mild repression. Browder had represented the practice of liquidationism, where a communist party gives up its role as a working-class force and becomes just another appendage for capital. Foster explained that Browder’s CPUSA had “habitually failed to criticize adequately the Roosevelt Administration for its shortcomings and to come forward boldly with its own proposals,” and “refused to criticize sharply the reactionary policies of the A. F. of L. Executive Council, except in the most flagrant cases.” Foster also decried Browder for “picturing the National Association of Manufacturers, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Bankers Association and other reactionary employers’ associations as progressive bodies and as qualified therefore to lead the nation in various branches of its economic and political policy.”

 

It was this capitulation, this willingness to pretend capital is our ally, that made the USA’s workers unable to defend against the schemes our ruling class then carried out. To regain what we lost, and become able to fight for the Palestinians effectively, we must learn from that great error. We cannot give into the temptation of opportunism, and make ourselves reliant on those whose interests are in defending capital. 

This is the mistake that labor’s leaders have continued to make since then; and the solution is not simply to educate these leaders, because from their perspective it’s not a mistake at all. It’s the policy that serves them as members of the professional managerial class. Therefore we can’t enter into labor organizing with the mindset that the unions will be able to win us this fight, or at least all of it. We must work in the unions, but this tactic must merely be in service of the end goal, which is proletarian revolution. For our work in organized labor to be revolutionary, we have to use unions as an avenue for bringing the most advanced workers into independent worker institutions. And to do this, we need to understand exactly how our class enemies psyoped the workers movement; how they sold the idea that fighting on imperialism’s behalf would be in the proletariat’s interest.

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This genocide can only be ended through class struggle, & alt media is leading the people away from this

Above: Service Employees International Union members march against the Palestinian genocide; photo by Purple Up for Palestine

How come speaking truth to power keeps failing to be effective? Why is it that even after our society has undergone an unprecedented shift in consciousness, where the bulk of the masses have learned of Zionism’s inhumane nature, the Palestinian genocide only keeps accelerating? Because when a government acts as brazenly as ours now is, “truth to power” on its own doesn’t work. The pro-Palestine movement has so far failed to end this holocaust due to fundamental structural problems; it lacks the basis within organized labor which it will need in order to change the power balance. 

Crucial to rectifying this problem is education; in addition to awareness of the genocide itself, there must be knowledge about the need for a strong workers movement. And the predominant parts of the “alt” media are actively leading the people away from that movement.

In more ways than one might assume, alt media impacts how people think and act. When the majority have become so heavily disillusioned with our government and media, it’s the alternative voices which are now seen by many as a source of guidance. So what happens when these voices get compromised, or when they were always compatible with the system? What happens is that much of the public stays de-mobilized, even when this same public has already become quite conscious about the realities of power.

The biggest problem isn’t the alt media figures who’ve been turned into explicit promoters of Zionism, like Russell Brand has. This is because it’s become easy for most people to see through Zionism’s most blatant lies, and a growing part of the conservative base has woken up in this way. The main danger comes from the kinds of “dissident” commentators who will explain the evil acts our government is committing, and then not provide any practical path towards combating these actions. As long as the bulk of the masses stay disconnected from the workers movement, they won’t have the tools to translate their discontent into tangible revolutionary gains. Which means many of them will react to this information about genocide, war, and corruption by simply becoming pessimistic.

We’ve seen this type of self-destructive cycle before. For a while, especially in the early 2010s, the legacy media was intensely focused on the idea of climate apocalypse. Many of the popular climate narratives from around this time were exaggerated, and this exaggeration’s psychological effects were compounded by how none of the doomists offered a practical plan for preventing doom. Capital’s narrative managers were determined to keep communism from re-entering the mainstream, and they succeeded in doing so throughout the Occupy era; what they did was propagate New Left ideas about protests in themselves being enough, de-emphasizing unions and party-building. The left-leaning people who these psyops targeted were directed away from the workers struggle, and from anti-imperialism. Today, the same tactics for managing dissent are being used again, this time against not just the left but also conservatives.

The path forward is a united front between all parts of the masses which have revolutionary potential, mobilized to defeat the war machine via class struggle. And there is a growing current of people who understand this. At this stage, the main obstacle towards bringing the rest of the masses to this understanding is the conservative alt media, which has been able to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Obama-era politics.

The other big problem with these right-wing alt media types is that they mix truth with wrong information, much like the liberal corporate media did when it was heavily focused on climate. Joe Rogan has recognized the basic truths about the Gaza genocide sometimes, while acquiescing to the statements from Zionism’s defenders at other times. Tucker Carlson counters the anti-Russia narratives, while pushing anti-China psyops. Candace Owens mixes truthful anti-Zionist statements with anti-communist atrocity propaganda that falsely ties Lenin to the Zionist project. These kinds of distortions are certainly part of how audiences can get led away from the class struggle; but the larger issue is that these figures never call for people to get politically involved. 

Somebody can enter into organizing with wrong ideas, and then come to give up these ideas, or end up doing good work regardless of how they ideologically label themselves. It’s through political practice that the masses can gain the experience to fight the ruling class effectively. But as long as the “dissident right” perpetuates a culture that’s detached from class struggle, many of the people won’t advance in this way. 

To rectify this problem, we must recognize that the USA’s people can be raised in their consciousness to the same levels as that of trained Marxists. As Lenin concluded: “every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of ‘literature for workers’ but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say ‘are not confined’, instead of ‘do not confine themselves’, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough ‘for workers’ to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.’” We need to apply Lenin’s advice to our technological era, where the working class overwhelmingly gets its ideological guidance from online media sources.

That so many of the people have sought out alt media proves Lenin’s point about how the workers wish to advance towards a higher intellectual level. They want to become knowledgeable about their conditions, and so have been drawn to voices that offer perspectives which go beyond the legacy media. For the educators and commentators who provide a class-conscious perspective, there is a model to succeed in the social media age. And as I’ve come to realize, this model for algorithmic and narrative success has been pioneered by Jackson Hinkle, who’s gained mass popularity in ways that alt media has failed to do. Another example we need to follow is Midwestern Marx, whose contributors have brought proletarian education to a substantial audience.

These figures, along with the comparatively successful Leninist source Infrared, have partnered to form the American Communist Party. And given how well they all understand the task of reaching today’s masses, it’s no surprise that the ACP has been able to get so far in its on-the-ground worker organizing efforts. They grasp the power of speaking to audiences in a way that the average person can relate to; of synthesizing revolutionary ideas with mass dissemination in mind, and communicating them in a digestible manner. And the successes from this have translated into organizational mobilization efforts, which is the other essential ingredient. The path to victory, both on Palestine and in all the struggle’s other aspects, is becoming clearer. We must continue on this path, and keep bringing more of the people along with us.

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This is just the start of the crackdown. How we respond now will determine how ready we’ll be for what’s coming.

Art by Debashish Chakrabarty

What do you do when your government has shown it only intends to keep attacking the people more viciously as time goes on? When the assaults on freedom, and the methods of these assaults, are going to get exponentially more extreme with every step? That’s the nature of our situation in the United States, and it’s crucial that we respond to this situation in a way which ensures the survival of our revolutionary organizations.

There’s already widespread understanding of the criminal and dictatorial actions our government is taking. The bulk of the people have been exposed to the atrocities against the Palestinians, and even on the right, there’s growing opposition to the Trump White House’s war efforts. The administration’s use of ICE to attack the First Amendment is there for everybody to see, and our society isn’t simply accepting this as normal; Mahmoud Khalil, and the other pro-Palestine activists who’ve been persecuted, have become major parts of our discourse. These are evils that can’t be ignored, because they represent an extremely clear threat to our liberties. And there is a growing awareness about the connection between this repression, and the third world war which our rulers are determined to advance. 

Just because there’s widespread consciousness about these things, though, doesn’t mean the people are equipped to respond to them. One of the biggest dangers is that mere knowledge of today’s ruling class activities will become seen as a substitute for revolutionary action; that “speaking truth to power” will be what dissident politics overwhelmingly focuses on, as opposed to building collective organizations and actually mobilizing the masses. Given how much our society has become disillusioned, it’s now the best option of our ruling class to propagate such attitudes; to encourage complacency among the people, even though many of them have actively rejected the ruling class ideology. 

This is the attitude that’s propagated by the types of “alt” media which have been captured or compromised. The core problem is that these sources don’t emphasize the class struggle, which is the only means through which we’ll be able to overcome these attacks from our imperialist dictatorship.

Much of the masses already understand that class is at the essence of our society’s problems; the popular support for Luigi Mangione has shown this. There’s already such widespread consciousness because for the last two decades, this country’s working class has been living in a perpetual depression. The question is whether the reaction to these conditions will lead to a sustained, cohesive mass mobilization against this campaign of war and repression. 

It’s the working-class response to Luigi that’s personally given me much more hope for such an endeavor to succeed; the workers have come to so strongly reject the ruling system, with a large percentage of them openly supporting a man who’s taken extreme measures to combat this system’s violence. The masses absolutely can be mobilized, because they have a desire to fight back in ways which often go beyond anything the controlled opposition voices talk about.

This is the limitation on the state’s efforts to manage dissent. And should we sufficiently build up the institutions for popular revolt, this will let us guide that mass energy in a way which overwhelms the crackdown. Among these institutions, there’s absolutely a role for orgs that are specifically focused on antiwar activism, the civil liberties struggle, or other particular aspects of this fight; but to overcome the state’s attacks, it’s essential that we also build independent worker organizations. Ones that give the workers their own source of power, beyond the unions. Making the unions stronger and more populated is one aspect of this task, but for the workers to gain victory, they’ll need an organizational force which the proletariat fully controls. I’m certainly not talking about dual unionism, which only sets back the cause; I’m talking about building a modern Bolshevik party.

That’s the logical conclusion of the desire to combat our government’s fascistic activities. George Mavrikos, former General Secretary of the World Federation of Trade Unions, observed that “The struggle of the workers’ movement against the fascist formations is an indispensable condition for the workers’ counterattack…With this perspective, the class-oriented trade union movement must realize that fascism is synonymous with capitalism, ‘flesh of its flesh’ and its gold reserve. Then, the authentic anti-fascist struggle is also an anti-capitalist struggle.” This is the practical reality that’s being obscured by many of today’s “dissident” voices; there’s an absence of emphasis on the class struggle, and this leaves us unequipped to combat the war on dissent. There is a popular desire to fight back against the destruction of our liberties, and to defeat the war machine. But this energy needs to be channeled towards the workers struggle, rather than being redirected into discourses which are detached from this struggle.

A force that’s been greatly furthering this effort is the American Communist Party, which has become a notable source of material support and leadership for workers. ACP of course isn’t the vanguard yet; but it’s building ties with the unions, and guiding the workers movement, in ways that U.S. communists haven’t done for decades. For this reason, it’s most certainly on the list of orgs that the repressive apparatus seeks to make illegal. The state has as much of a reason to go after ACP as it does the Cop City or Gaza protesters, which it’s already quite far along in persecuting. The main reason why ACP hasn’t so far been subjected to the same treatment is that COINTELPRO hasn’t had enough time to build a case against it. Because at least at this stage, our ruling class at least needs to have some sort of pretext for charging political targets, even if that pretext comes from total lies.

The other big threat to our orgs is violent vigilantism, cultivated through efforts to radicalize individuals into physically assaulting designated enemies. This is an idea that certain detractors of the ACP have felt comfortable openly discussing, and we should take these statements seriously. It’s a form of terrorism where the state weaponizes anarchists or “communists” against the people who are doing the most effective work. And it’s an example of how the most sectarian forces within the left can come to collaborate with fascists during the class struggle’s most pivotal moments.

There are countless other weapons our enemies could use, including ones that involve importing the same violent methods which have been employed abroad. I’m talking about bombing residential areas, or actually using snipers instead of just putting them on rooftops as a warning. These most extreme dangers should be treated seriously too, and within our training and studying, we must account for the risk that we’ll be faced with them. Should we reach a stage where state violence on that level becomes normal, though, it will mean the ruling class has exhausted its other options for fighting the people. It will mean the state, in its desperation, has decided to take actions which will turn more of the masses against it.

If our revolutionary orgs have gained enough mass backing by then, and have become internally trained to a serious degree, then we’ll be in place to outmaneuver our foes. As we advance these projects, all the while we must make sure to create backup structures; to establish clandestine networks that can keep our operations alive, even if we get forced underground. For the time being, though, we must put all we have into fighting for our freedoms. However intense the enemy’s offensive becomes, we must never simply surrender, and assume we can win while neglecting crucial areas of the struggle. We’ll only prevail through principled, consistent solidarity, assisting all who our enemy targets and always working on behalf of the masses.

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