My advice for everyone involved in dissident politics right now is to fortify their organizations against repression, including extreme kinds of repression. To put focus into “secret work,” where organizers build cadres whose activities are known only to those involved. This is separate from the mass work aspect of the struggle, where we involve as many of the people as we can; it’s a way of ensuring that the people will be able to have revolutionary outlets even if dissent gets criminalized. It’s so important to emphasize this in the present moment because our ruling class views the 2024 election’s aftermath as a unique opportunity for cracking down. For instigating chaotic public spectacles that the state can use to entrap unsuspecting people, and create new legal precedents which will force us underground.
The first things to know in order to survive this purge attempt are the basic rules for avoiding police entrapment. If law enforcement contacts you, you’re not obligated to talk to them, and it’s never in your interests to talk to them despite what the officers will tell you. If your only response is “I don’t want to talk until I consult with a lawyer,” and you follow your lawyer’s advice of not talking, this will save you crucial time; time until the crackdown escalates, and the state uses more aggressive tactics.
These implicitly threatening “we just want to chat” kinds of manipulation methods are what police use when they find that you’ve been to an event, and want to make you feel intimidated. Expecting unrest after the election, this is something that the local police departments especially have reason to do right now. Another kind of psychological warfare is when the state tries to persuade you to carry out illegal acts; to not feel intimidated, but rather overconfident. That’s the kind of thing the deep state specializes in: sending infiltrators into activist spaces, and getting people to be reckless. The fingerprints of FBI operations were all over the January 6 organizing process, with federal informants having been key to making the Capitol Hill protest escalate. Police will of course try to take advantage of any event which involves illegal acts, and entrap as many of the surrounding people as possible. But when infiltrators have been able to steer an event’s direction from the start, it’s even easier to make the participants into targets.
To make sure that more January 6 events happen, the feds plan to activate the counter-gangs—the groups a state cultivates in order to divert revolutionary energy. They’ll encourage both the right and the left to engage in adventurism, selling each side the same narrative: that the enemy is mobilizing, so you must get in the streets to fight back. Like last time, major targets of this agitation propaganda will be the most conspiratorial elements within MAGA; the ones who believe in QAnon, or in the psyops that have replaced QAnon. This time, though, the feds will also focus on agitating another element: the “antifa” anarchists. The psyop directed towards the left will be that a unique fascist threat has arisen, and that we have to resist it through violence if necessary. And an inverse psyop will be directed towards the right; ultraviolent leftist groups, cultivated by the intelligence agencies, will be used to demonize Palestine supporters while spreading anti-communist paranoia.
These counter-gang psyops will be not just an excuse for more repression, but also an attempt to pull our society back into the culture wars. The ruling class wants us to view our neighbors as the enemy, and to focus all of our energy on fighting this supposed menace. To succeed in both secret work and mass work, we must resist this mentality. We must build connections with every part of the masses which shares hostility towards monopoly capital.
The events we’ve seen since January 6 have made Americans far more willing to unify than they were four years ago. When our government committed to a proxy war against Russia, instead of handling the fentanyl crisis, the inflation crisis, or the other dire problems impacting people’s lives, the culture wars came to feel less important. Whereas in 2020 the American people were intensely angry at each other over that moment’s culture war disputes, just a few years later there emerged a new kind of anti-establishment energy; one which transcended the old ideological divides. And as time keeps passing, the trend continues to be towards people gaining this kind of clarity. There’s too much anti-war, anti-monopoly sentiment for the narrative managers to overcome; not enough of the masses are interested in petty fights, which means the system needs to pivot towards new strategies.
The U.S. empire is going to escalate the war against its own people, massively expanding its persecution of all groups which the three-letter agencies target; from MAGA activists to Libertarians to communists, nobody will be spared. This will be true if Trump wins, which at the present moment looks quite likely. Trump being the next president will offer some protections from repression, but not much, and the intelligence forces will react to any defiance from him by becoming even more aggressive.
The truly decisive factor behind how things go next in the United States is the geopolitical conflict; as Washington intensifies its provocations against China, the incentive becomes larger for the state to crush dissent. Conflict with Iran, which many foreign policy elites fear but Trump’s team is committed to, will be another influence on the domestic counterinsurgency. The deep state’s dominant wing prefers for war with Iran to be avoided so that Washington can pivot to China, but if the escalations in west Asia persist, this wing’s best option will be to intensify the crackdown. The plan will be to steer MAGA in a direction which aids the permanent security bureaucracy; to inflame the anti-China, anti-Muslim, and culture war aspects of Trump’s politics. Then the deep state, despite having not gotten its preferred outcome of a Harris victory, will at least be able to work in unison with Trump on the most important goals: creating a new big war, and terrorizing the people.
This is a compromise for these deep state actors, and for the monopolists they serve. Because if Trump wins, he’ll be allowed to fail, and the establishment will lose its most important controlled opposition source: the MAGA movement. When Trump doesn’t fulfill his mandates to end the wars, and to re-industrialize America, MAGA is going to lose momentum like how the Bernie Sanders movement did. A vacuum will appear within anti-establishment politics, one which communists will then fill if we navigate our situation correctly.
We have to employ the tactics for clandestine organizing, establish ties within the above-ground labor organizations that won’t be outlawed, and also prepare to protect ourselves against whatever attacks may come from the counter-gangs. The “anti-fascist” types are who we particularly need to watch out for, especially if Trump wins. Ultraviolent actors within the left are going to see our MAGA outreach, and label us as “fascists” who must be neutralized by any means necessary. This is the nature of our conflict’s next stage: monopoly-aligned proxy forces working to eliminate anti-imperialist organizing, and to spread chaos that keeps the people immobilized. Through building a force of hope and unity, we will overcome these attempts at stopping progress.
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