The rise of BRICS, China, and multipolarity is a major reason to celebrate; yet there’s a risk that this optimism will lead to hubris. For those of us in the United States, where the imperial enemy’s forces will ultimately become concentrated the most, to overestimate the strength of the revolutionary forces is particularly foolish. However, if we study the lessons that have been left behind by past American revolutionaries like William Z. Foster, our path to victory will become far clearer. A key thing Foster’s experiences teach us is that to defeat American fascism, one must truly commit to the proletarian struggle, and put their faith into the power of mass organization.
The biggest threat to the American anti-imperialist movement is the widespread lack of awareness about the threats which it faces. The greatest danger towards our cause is not any of our enemies, but our own potential to commit fatal errors. And the erroneous thinking that’s pervaded throughout far too many dissident or antiwar spaces is the thinking which encourages hubris. Which tells us that our victory against the imperial system is assured, just because the international situation is increasingly in favor of the anti-imperialist forces. The great peril in this attitude is that it will leave us unprepared for when our enemies strike inside the United States.
The coming war against the USA’s people, & its basis in historical repression
The reality is that the more wars the U.S. loses, the more of the imperial state’s resources will be redirected towards crushing dissent within the U.S. itself. We must support the defeat of our imperialist government in all of these wars, as that’s both the only morally correct position and an essential part of how we’ll get revolution. But this revolutionary defeatism must come with a serious program for defending the American people against their government’s violence, or the outcome will be that we truly do get crushed. Our ruling class is going to attack America’s popular movements on the same level that it’s waged war against such movements worldwide, and the weaker our organizations are, the further our enemies will be able to take their offensive.
To understand how to fight back, we need understand how instrumental it’s historically been to center the proletarian struggle while resisting American fascism. As William Foster wrote in 1922, what we know doesn’t work is to try to win the favor of any wing within the capitalist class, which was the strategy of the opportunistic union leader Samuel Gompers:
All over Europe the workers have been able to wring one political concession after another from the capitalists, whereas here the capitalists have stripped the workers of many of their most fundamental rights. Free speech and free press have been largely abolished by the multitude of anti-syndicalist laws, and hundreds of labor men, arrested merely for expressing their opinions, have been given prison sentences so severe as to shock the civilized world. The right of assembly has degenerated into little more than a privilege, dependent upon the whims of the American Legion, the Ku Klux Klan, or corrupt local officials. The right to strike has been abridged by Esch-Cummins laws, industrial courts, and the injunction abuse, which flourishes now as never before…Almost any one of the workers’ political rights may go next. And in the face of all this disaster, the labor movement flounders around helpless to stop the rout. Mr. Gompers’ pet policy of rewarding the workers’ “friends” and punishing their “enemies” has made a political nobody of American Labor.
The great mission of the ruling class was to make it so that this reformist, class collaborationist strategy won out within the labor movement, as well as the organized left. The U.S. government felt the need to go so far in attacking the people during those decades because it hadn’t yet managed to sufficiently neutralize the working-class, revolutionary forces; the Gompers camp was strong, but so were the genuine sources of proletarian power. So the USA experienced the Palmer Raids, the deportation of political troublemakers, the imprisonment of antiwar citizens like Eugene Debs, the deployment of armed forces against the workers, and many other aggressive counterrevolutionary measures.
These kinds of policies have only been relatively absent since then because of how good our ruling class has gotten at mowing the grass of dissent; and certain old practices have been making a comeback, as we’re seeing with the recent deportations and raids of Palestine activists. We can probably expect this next wave of repression to go further than the ones from a century ago, because now our ruling class is desperate in a way it wasn’t back then. U.S. capital has staked so much into the project for continued American hegemony; this is because the U.S. is now the center of global capital, and therefore the only true modern imperialist country.
The shift away from unipolarity imperils capitalism’s future, so our rulers are intensifying the repression in ways that are preemptive; it’s not like today’s U.S. has revolutionary orgs that are as strong as the old workers movement, yet the system is preparing for unprecedented attacks on the USA’s people. This is because our government will need to fight multiple, long-term wars in order to keep the USA’s status as the hegemon, and these wars will require the successful crushing of dissent.
These developments present many opportunities for the revolutionary forces, as they mean our enemies are dependent on a risky plan and are frightened of a renewed proletarian movement. To bring about such a movement, though, we will need to forsake all illusions of being able to win through reform, or through gaining the favor of bourgeois “populist” figures.
The peril of rejecting class struggle, & the strength that comes from embracing it
The modern equivalent of the Gompers strategy looks like trying to appeal towards any of the imperialist politicians who claim to be on the side of the people. The Democratic Party tailists who vote blue out of hope for “pushing the Democrats left” are an infamous example of this; there’s also a version of this opportunism that seeks to appeal towards the right-wing “populist” leaders, though, and this version is more able to gain mass momentum. It’s the type of politics that aligns with the vulgarized types of dissident thought, and it majorly overlaps with the kinds of wishful thinking which promise imperialism will be defeated merely by the onset of multipolarity. The underlying problem is a lack of understanding about the class nature of the antiwar struggle, or the fight against the deep state, or any of the other battles we’re engaged in.
Foster and the other principled U.S. communists of his time were faced with the same kinds of problems, where the “right” tendencies within populist or labor politics would work to obfuscate the class struggle’s importance. A key part of the problem, concluded Foster, was the myth about America existing above the rules of historical conflict: “Lenin, in fighting for a correct political line, fought on two fronts. That is, he combated both the right danger and all forms of pseudo-leftism. This two-front fight was particularly necessary in the United States, with its ingrained historical right weakness of American exceptionalism and its long affliction of ‘left’ sectarianism.”
Foster knew that to combat these errors, there would need to be a serious effort at educating Americans about the nature of imperialism. Something we need to clarify, wrote Foster, is the fact that imperialism isn’t a policy choice; it’s an inseparable part of the global capitalist system, and therefore won’t be ended until the capitalist state is overthrown:
Highly important from the American standpoint was Lenin's scientific analysis of imperialism. With powerful emphasis, Lenin pointed out the qualitative differences that develop within the whole structure of capitalism with the growth of monopoly. Previously, without clearly differentiating itself from the right wing on this question, the left wing had tended to consider the growth of monopoly as merely a quantitative development of capitalism, and its "expansionism" (imperialism) as simply a secondary policy manifestation, instead of a basic expression of monopoly capitalism. This error led to a profound underestimation of the aggressive character, reactionary aims, and war-making potentialities of imperialism. Lenin cleared up all this confusion. Lenin also made clear the road of all-out political mass struggle to socialism. In so doing, he annihilated for Americans the prevalent De Leonite, syndicalist ideas that the workers would win their way to power by "locking out the capitalists," or by means simply of a general strike, and other kindred illusions.
Today, one of these kindred illusions is the idea that we can end the wars, defeat deep state corruption, and win other major victories if we support the “right” populists, or try to push these populist leaders in a better direction. The only thing that can come from this is the de-mobilization of our popular movements, to the effect that our government can advance its schemes with even greater impunity. This is the cycle our ruling class aims to maintain by propping up right populism, and the long-term goal is to leave us helpless amid the security state’s clampdown. It’s likely that Washington will lose its present wars, like has happened with essentially every other U.S. war for several generations now. But without an American popular movement that stands on its own, these developments are going to mean a strengthening of our enemies on the domestic front.
The positive aspect is that even if this is where we’re headed, the international anti-imperialist forces are guaranteed to keep growing in their power. This is where the truth can be found within the hyper-optimistic “multipolarist” analyses that are so prevalent throughout alternative media. These arguments get their strength from how movements like the Palestinian resistance, the Yemeni resistance, Latin America’s proletarian struggles, and the Sahel revolutionary project have been making great gains throughout this last generation, adding an additional level of impact to the Eurasian economic explosion. What these analyses miss, though, is that those victories have only come because of the efforts by those who’ve engaged in collective mass organization. They haven’t come simply because of the emergence of BRICS; if anything, the successes of BRICS are downstream from the gains made by these popular struggles.
Everything truly positive that we see in today’s global anti-imperialist struggle is a product of revolutionary fights across the Global South, and of the historic gains communists have made throughout Eurasia. For one example of this communist connection, Russia is fighting NATO because of the anti-imperialist movement that the country’s Marxist-Leninists have built; yet the right populists who speak positively of Russia hate Marxism-Leninism, and ignore its role in the recent victories against finance capital.
If we want to win against our imperialist dictatorship, we’re going to have to do away with the concepts of dissident politics that disregard class, and that pretend we can reform our way out of this dictatorship. The realities that a capitalist state exists to prevent the people’s victory, and that America’s capitalist state will always be imperialist, are going to keep being proven to catastrophic effect. We can expect Washington to continue expanding its genocidal destruction, and we can expect our own society to keep becoming destabilized as the economy gets worse. We must not expect these catastrophic events to bring revolution on their own, that kind of thinking has always been a cope. Our only option is to provide the people with the means to overthrow the imperial state, building up the collective organization which makes for dual power. There are prominent actors who seek to obscure the need for class struggle, but we can overcome them by showing what a real dissident movement looks like.
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