The role of the left-wing counter-gangs—and of the lumpen counter-gangs that often make up their ranks—is to give the state a way to avoid utilizing its most risky means for suppressing dissent. If the state were to impose a full military crackdown, like Trump wanted to do in 2020, this would provoke too big of a mass reaction for the situation to remain manageable. So would be the case if the state were to try to use its right-wing counter-gangs too extensively. Should our ruling elites resort to such overtly fascistic forms of violence, they’ll lose the battle for the people’s hearts and minds, creating a widespread sense that the government must be overthrown.
The liberal totalitarianism that these elites are in the process of implementing depends on an equilibrium between oppression, and an illusory “freedom.” They must maintain the perception that the liberal order represents the best and only way to have a society with human rights. Which isn’t compatible with imposing military rule, or with using white supremacist militias to massacre people in the streets. Therefore, the state’s ideal option for responding to the rise in class struggle and anti-imperialist consciousness is using the “left” wing of its ultraviolent proxy forces. As most of the people are socially progressive, making these kinds of counter-gangs culturally palatable.
These forces have already been well built up, mainly in the form of the fed-controlled branches of “Antifa.” What the feds have done is recruit from the types of anarchists who are inclined towards obstinate anti-communism, radicalize them into viewing anti-imperialists as “fascists,” and supply them with the means to target their enemies in the model of intelligence agencies.
The culture of doxxing, stalking, and cancellation efforts within such radical liberal groups is a product of this influence from federal agents, which involves both direct infiltration and ideological manipulation. When radlibs or potential radlibs get funneled into a counter-gang, they’re conditioned to adopt a mentality in which anybody who challenges NATO is seen as fair game for “anti-fascist” attacks. It’s a violent version of the liberal-adjacent thinking that’s become the default within the modern U.S. left, including the most prominent “Marxist” organizations. Such an impulse to be hostile towards all things illiberal is already normal within conventional leftist dogma; all that “Antifa” has done is guide one element of leftists towards embracing a role as mafia-style political intimidators.
The other big force within this part of the counterinsurgency is the lumpen. Namely the members of the lumpen who are part of gangs—which are already in essence violent cults, and therefore easy to be weaponized—or who are aimless due to their dispossession, and looking for a purpose. The motivations of these lumpen reactionary terror agents aren’t necessarily political, with many of them simply doing the state’s work because the feds pay them. But where they overlap with the radlib counter-gangs is when they come to develop an actual political ideology, one designed to rationalize waging war against the working-class cause.
There’s already such a thing as gang ideology, which is the black market version of capitalism’s standard mindset: cynical self-interest, without a sense of obligation to contribute towards society’s collective wellbeing. This obviously primes lumpen movement saboteurs for the job that the feds employ them to do. What makes activist circles vulnerable to such sabotage operations, though, is the ultra-left ideology. The belief system that instructs its followers to enable undisciplined, reactionary, and harmful habits among people they’ve let into their spaces, or put trust into gangs, out of a confused sense of moralism.
The theoretical error this comes from is believing that socialism means not worker control over the means of production, but rather a broad uplifting of people who are dispossessed. It’s a vulgarization of Marxism, one that leads to acting like drug dealers and gang members are as valuable to the revolution as workers. When an organizer thinks like this, they’ll refuse to expel men who pay for sex, people who start pushing narcotics onto their members, hyper-macho aggressors who carelessly resort to violent threats, and others who perpetuate the destructive habits that have been made widespread by capitalism’s social crisis. And this lack of willingness to enforce essential rules is rationalized as being righteous, simply because the ones engaging in these habits are among the dispossessed.
In the ultra-left worldview, there can’t be such a thing as a lumpen counter-gang, since the differences between the lumpen and the actual proletariat are seen as irrelevant. That the lumpen lack a connection to the means of production, and therefore can easily be brought into reactionary projects, is considered offensive simply to point out. This is because ultra-lefts believe that the more dispossessed someone is, the more trustworthy they inherently are, placing somebody who’s lumpen above someone who’s working class.
When somebody thinks like this, at best they’ll get nowhere in their organizing, as their cadre discipline will be destroyed by a culture of reckless sexual promiscuity and adventurism. Or worse, they’ll be made vulnerable to infiltration by bad actors who seek to undermine orgs using drugs as psychological manipulation tools. Worst-case scenario, they’ll be betrayed by gangsters and other criminal elements which they’ve trusted without question, and have their members murdered or coaxed into doing something that puts them in prison.
If you want to beat the state’s counterinsurgency, reject the lumpen fetishization that’s become the default on the left, and instead work to build a defense force within our movement. A defense force that’s both built with the intent of protecting our cadres from the attacks of the lumpen and left counter-gangs; and with the ideological training needed for making sure those ultraviolent forces can’t hijack our efforts.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from organizing is what when you go into the class struggle with the intent to make this struggle’s participants physically strong and trained, inevitably you’ll be approached by actors who seek to promote an ultraviolent practice. And because ultraviolence and adventurism are intertwined with ultra-left, vulgarized iterations of “socialism,” the ideological angle they’ll use is one of appealing to the left-wing impulse towards romanticizing lumpenism. They want us to disregard what we need to do to build an effective mass movement, in favor of a “revolutionary” gang ideology which justifies counterproductive violence.
It’s the same dynamic that’s made the decades-long, ultra-left armed struggles break down into criminality: fetishizing violent action for the sake of it. If we prioritize winning over the radlibs, or the ultraviolent lumpen elements that overlap with them, that’s where we’ll end up: fighting in a conflict that we can’t win, because we’ve been led down an ideological path that makes us ineffectual.
The security force that we create needs to be guided by the opposite of gang ideology. As well as by the opposite of pessimistic leftism, which views most of the people as fundamentally reactionary and thereby comes to glorify non-worker elements such as the lumpen. Our fitness and firearms training needs to be driven by a militancy that’s specifically working-class in nature. That’s informed by optimistic socialism, where one has faith in the great majority of the people and seeks to ally with them against monopoly capital. When you have this much confidence in your movement’s ability to have an impact, you won’t feel the need to gain the support of radlib and lumpen individuals who don’t care about your cause. You’ll be able to reject them and their arguments without compunction, and defend yourself and your friends from them should they then try to get revenge. This is the mentality that’s going to let us overcome the more direct violence that the state will use against us once the counter-gangs have failed to stop our efforts.
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