The chaotic leader Donald Trump may be about to be replaced with someone who will return American governance to the more competent imperialism of the Obama era, but the empire’s crisis has only begun. In September of this year, professor of international politics at Nagoya University Kobayashi Koichi published an article which concluded that due to the mounting contradictions within American society, the U.S. is very likely to suddenly split up and collapse like the Soviet Union did.
It’s not far off from what Washington’s own intelligence experts are expecting. A Pentagon report from last year said that the U.S. power grid could collapse within twenty years due to climate-related disasters. And a Pentagon training video from 2016 warned of an “unavoidable” dystopian future for the world’s urban areas, with rising unemployment and deteriorating infrastructure causing destabilization even for many places that were previously prosperous. As Kobayashi has written about this situation: “Within 10 years, will the United States go to collapse? This sounds like the conclusion of the Arabian Nights, which makes people feel incredible. Just like the disintegration of the Soviet Union back then, it was far beyond people’s expectations. However, history is like this, always full of uncertainty! You never know what will happen tomorrow.”
The U.S. ruling class hopes to ensure against the possibility that out of all this chaos will emerge a revolutionary socialist movement. Without such a movement, the ruling class will remain secure, because even a severely impoverished and conflict-ridden country is easy for the capitalists and the imperialists to keep under control. If the ruling class gets its way, the poor parts of the U.S. will be turned into new versions of Gaza, the area where hundreds of thousands of destitute people live under fear of the extreme repression and violence of an imperialist-created settler-colonial state.
This is already the case for the poorest sections of the country, which are largely inhabited by Natives and black people. The current conditions of these most oppressed victims of U.S. colonialism and capitalism portend to what will happen to much more of the country’s population as our neoliberal economic deterioration continues, and as worsening natural disasters create more and more climate migrants. Especially in the inner cities and along the coasts, people’s lives are going to be uprooted like never before, even in the core of global imperialism.
But if we Marxists do the work to build up the institutions for class revolt, these dispossessed masses will have a means to fight for their liberation from the ever-growing tyranny of late-stage capitalism. The rich have recently been fleeing to their luxury rural bunkers not just because of Covid-19, but because of the growing fear that capitalism’s victims will finally take matters into their own hands. There’s a sense among the ruling class that these riots we’ve been experiencing this year are just the first hints of a larger coming class warfare effort, one that will actually have the organizational structure to overcome the capitalist state’s forces.
This is shown by the intensifying anti-communist propaganda that the Washington political establishment has been putting forth in tandem with its cold war against socialist China. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien warned this year that “Instead of listening to the CCP’s leaders and reading its key documents, we believed what we wanted to believe: that the Chinese ruling party is communist in name only. Today, it would be a similarly grave mistake to assume that this ideology matters only within China. In fact, the CCP’s ideological agenda extends far beyond the country’s borders and represents a threat to the idea of democracy itself, including in the United States.” This kind of McCarthyist rhetoric portends to the warfare that the U.S. capitalist state aims to wage in the coming years against revolutionary socialism.
Cracking down on the flow of subversive information and demonizing Marxism are the first steps in this war, as reflected by the tightening online censorship and escalating anti-Chinese propaganda that the centers of U.S. power have been carrying out in recent years. This necessitates us Marxists to equip our organizations with tools for sending messages without our modern devices; the Indigenous Anarchist Federation has listed a series of radio devices that we should attain in order to ensure communication between our members should the state cut off the internet within destabilized zones.
Violence from police, the military, and paramilitaries are how the ruling class will next respond to the rise of a revolutionary socialist movement. The tools we’ll need to defend from this can be found on the Federation’s guides to medical supplies, armor, and weapons. In addition to gathering together all of the supplies that these guides mention, we need to read Che Guevera’s Guerrilla Warfare, and have everyone in our organizations read it as well. Guevera explains the tactics we’ll need to adopt in order to overcome the siege from the state, such as gaining the confidence of the local populations and trekking in groups through the wilderness.
These are the things we must prepare ourselves for if we want to come out of our revolutionary crisis alive and on the path to victory over the forces of reaction. We must incorporate the guerrilla methods of past successful revolutionaries into our organizations while working to recruit for these organizations, educate the masses on the need for proletarian revolution, and reach out to the masses through Mao’s mass line approach. As Liberation Road assesses about the latter task: “Our starting point in anything we do is to have faith and rely on the masses. This means that we trust that people can change the world and that while our enemies might have a lot of money, lots of technology and weapons, we have people and rely on them. We have to look at what that means as well.”
If we apply all of these methods, we’ll be able to turn the country’s deteriorating situation to the advantage of revolutionary socialism. If we ignore these lessons from revolutionary theory and history, and blindly charge forth with adventurist ambitions, all our good intentions will be for nought. It’s through intelligence that we can overcome the attempts from the ruling class to make counter-revolution triumph amid America’s collapse.
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