The destruction that our government inflicted upon the country’s workers movement during the 20th century was always only a temporary way to prevent proletarian victory. At some point in the engineered decline of living standards that began during then, interest in communism was going to rise again; and most importantly, communist organizations would emerge that the ruling class couldn’t control. The elites would be able to weaponize their counter-gangs against these orgs, as they’re now doing; this wouldn’t stop these orgs from growing, though.
This is because the controlled opposition groups are designed to only be able to influence the minds of those within the leftist niche, which most people will never become part of. So the communists who operate independently from the Democratic Party are inevitably going to see their base within the broader masses expand, as long as they commit to their organizational duties.
Though combating the elements of the left that gatekeep the struggle is an indispensable part of winning, the next stage in the struggle is going to be one where our primary obstacle changes; changes from being saboteurs who assail anti-imperialists from the arena of discourse, to violent agents of the state who exact brutality upon those working to bring history forward. If you’ve broken from the imperialism-compatible left’s anti-China, anti-Russia, and anti-united front orthodoxy; if you’ve shown yourself to be dedicated towards building institutions for the struggle which further our connection to the masses; then you’ve made yourself into someone the state has serious reason to target. And you need to prepare for the moment when our rulers activate all of their tools for waging war against our cause.
This moment doesn’t need to be something we fear, because when it happens, we’ll know we’ve already gotten far enough for the elites to see their own defeat as an immediate possibility. The only way our enemies are going to take their tactics this far is if they see declaring war on the country’s own people as their only option; if they genuinely believe the revolutionary organizations have become strong enough to represent the most substantial threat possible.
That’s because the U.S. government is not like the Israeli government; it doesn’t feel like it can get away with bombing entire neighborhoods filled with civilians every time it wishes. Whereas Israel has a high proportion of citizens who won’t object to such atrocities due to their material investment in settler-colonialism, the USA is more fragile. Unlike in Israel, in the USA the descendants of the original settlers have in great part become members of the proletariat; they’ve evolved into a vastly diverse array of communities that are largely living in poverty, and that aren’t pampered by the kinds of comforts which the Israeli labor aristocrats enjoy. The U.S. military is also vastly more diverse than the Israeli army is; the people who join the U.S. armed forces tend to be part of the working class, and therefore include high proportions of not just white proletarians but also Black, Brown, and Native workers.
Whereas the British colonial offshoot of “Israel” is a narrow strip of land that acts as a U.S. military base, and whose ethnically favored citizens enjoy free healthcare from Washington’s massive funds; the U.S. is a geographically massive area where the colonized and the settlers have largely found themselves sharing a highly exploited class status. And with our government’s globally infamous refusal to give us services that are considered the bare minimum throughout the modern world, there are tens of millions of U.S. Americans who’ve come to view socialism favorably during recent decades. Whereas even during the post-war era, only a bit over one-tenth of the country’s people had a positive view of socialism, today it’s close to one-fourth.
The new cold war’s rightist shift within the Democratic Party has brought down support for socialism among liberals, which has for the moment made socialism less popular as a whole; but this represents nothing more than communists getting a better sense of who their true friends are. Plenty of the liberals who’ve claimed to like socialism in the past are naturally going to shift right as the struggle escalates; sometimes extremely to the right, as we’ve seen with how Bernie Sanders is supporting Ukrainian Nazism and Zionist genocide. At the same time that this liberal migration towards fascism has occurred, support for capitalism has gone down; and more relevantly to our purposes during the struggles’s present stage, antiwar sentiments have gone up. Most of the country’s people, including a majority of Republicans, want a ceasefire in Gaza; which comes after most of the people turned against the Ukraine proxy war.
In the scenario that our rulers are presently using their counter-gangs to try to prevent; the scenario where communists have built a relationship with tens of millions of the people by appealing to their anti-imperialist impulses; the elites are going to intensify their attacks. And these attacks are going to go beyond the point where they subject numerous orgs to the Uhuru treatment. Our government could start blowing up its own people with drones, like it does to its targets abroad; and it will certainly start launching more campaigns of targeted harassment against dissenting individuals, as well as expand Ukraine’s assassination list to numerous more U.S. citizens. Alternatively, it will create its own versions of the list, ones that incentivize both right-wing vigilantes and ultraviolent “Antifa” anarchists to assist the state with the purge.
This campaign of violence is going to be directed towards our movement—and by extension towards the families and communities of our movement’s members—no matter what we do. However good we are at avoiding adventurism, the state will respond to us with violence simply for being too successful at mass work and information warfare.
By committing to today’s tasks within the fight, we’ve also committed to tomorrow’s tasks, which are going to be of a different nature where our environment has become much more perilous. And the way we can overcome this peril is by taking the ideas we’ve embraced to their logical conclusion; by using the relationships we build with the people, and with the revolution-compatible elements in the armed forces, to outmaneuver the state and its proxies. The people are already growing ever-more hostile towards their government; should we give them the avenues for revolt, they’ll react to the government’s coming war on the public by joining us in even larger numbers.
This is the component that the ultra-lefts don’t want to take into account: the building of a network that’s not confined to a “leftist” clique, so therefore has a serious basis within the people and the armed forces. Fitness and tactical training needs to be only one part of how we prepare for the decisive moment; without sufficient momentum in our movement, we’ll be fighting a series of battles that we can’t win, and it will be our fault. It’s absolutely possible for the workers to prevail in this country, the conditions get more favorable towards that outcome all the time; it’s our responsibility to do all that’s necessary for winning. Which means to establish both sufficiently trained cadres; and a network that’s strong and diverse enough to let us keep making progress while we’re under siege. Everything we’re seeing now is only a lead-up to that stage when the greatest of our obstacles need to be overcome.
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