Above: police indiscriminately attacking Stop Copy City marchers with tear gas last year
While our government works to build its massive “Cop City” police training system, as well as tries to set the precedent for criminalizing all international anti-imperialist solidarity work, we need to understand that we have much more leverage over this situation than one might assume. That is if we decide to exercise this leverage, and take advantage of the unprecedented opportunities we have at this moment for advancing the class struggle.
In order for the counterinsurgency our government is waging to work, the psyop agents need to succeed at making developing radicals unable to properly navigate their conditions. The narratives that portray all the pro-Russian orgs as “red-brown” have been central to the first stage of this psyop campaign, that being the one where the state seeks to prevent the rise of an effective anti-imperialist alliance. And when these orgs get targeted the same way Uhuru has been, the red-brown smear will be used to endanger the cause in a more serious way, with numerous dissidents on trial getting accused by the “left” of being fascists. Should these orgs successfully transition into going underground, though, and manage to keep up their operations during the struggle’s most perilous stage, then the state will use its more direct means for warfare. If lawfare and character assassination don’t work, violence will become the state’s only option.
The great risk in this is that with how severe our society’s inequality has gotten, there’s a greater chance than ever of a crackdown provoking unmanageable backlash. The state wouldn’t be able to win in the narrative realm if it were to start waging open war against its own people, especially not when these people are already experiencing the turmoil of our inflation crisis. That’s why the state is only going to be able to afford to use its Cop City army if it keeps that army’s activities relatively minimized, while largely outsourcing its violent tasks to proxies. Proxies that are more culturally palatable than the right-wing militias, which would appall the great majority of the people if they were deployed. Instead, the state’s best option is to use the types of counter-gangs that present themselves as “anti-fascist.” With the “red-brown” narrative justifying their mission of crushing anti-imperialist orgs.
On an immediate physical level, we within the orgs they target can overcome this obstacle by getting ourselves trained and equipped for defense. If we want to do more than survive, though, and win power for the workers, we’ll need to gain the mass backing required for overpowering our class enemies. Which means combating a psyop that’s even more important to the counterinsurgency than the red-brown one. This is the psyop that seeks to divide the urban and rural populations, mainly by portraying the rural as fundamentally reactionary.
This psyop is so useful to the state because it can keep the people too separated from each other to gain a strategic advantage. If the people don’t even understand each other, then they’re going to remain weak against the state’s attacks. That’s how the ruling elites hope to neutralize the recent rise in anti-imperialist sentiments across the ideological spectrum: by keeping prospective revolutionary organizers in a mindset that views many of the people who could become their allies as enemies. As the class struggle advances, and we get closer to that point when Cop City and “Antifa” become the main counterinsurgency tools, we can expect to be assailed with more narratives pushing this way of thinking. Which is really just a larger-scale version of the paranoid narratives within leftist spaces about how everyone who challenges insular “left” politics is a fascist infiltrator.
Consistent with how the U.S. ruling class has kept us largely detached from regions outside our hometowns by not letting us have transportation infrastructure that’s normal in many other countries, these elites seek to engineer a lack of popular unity at the moment when we’ll need to unite the most. In the context of Cop City, this social engineering project functions as a trap. A trap both for the left-leaning people already in the cities, and for whatever rural left-leaning people who view the cities as the only places with revolutionary potential. By painting the cities as the best locations for the popular movements, and the rural areas as hopelessly perilous for socialists, the controlled opposition “left” is leading impressionable radicals into a place of maximum vulnerability towards Cop City’s coming siege.
If this psyop is successful enough at fooling developing radicals, the elites will better be able to afford to use Cop City, as their enemies will have made themselves strategically weak. And should too much of the left fail to adopt a different mindset, communists will need to give up the expectation that the “left” is where revolution is going to chiefly come from. Which many of them have already done, especially now that the main left orgs have failed so badly on Ukraine.
If we beat the anti-rural psyop, the state will become more limited in its options. Should the communist movement break out of the liberal attitude towards the rural, and expand the class struggle into all places where revolutionary potential exists, a police or military crackdown will become much more costly. The state’s enemies will have great amounts of more flexibility and support than they would if they were to stay within the comfort zones of modern activism. They’ll be able to regain the mass support that the communist movement lost with McCarthyism and the suppression of the Panthers, because they’ll no longer be dependent on the liberal NGOs which have dominated organizing since then. In this scenario, whatever atrocities our government commits against the people will act to strengthen the revolutionary forces, because there will be an infrastructure for these forces that’s actually capable of making progress.
We didn’t have this infrastructure in 2020 during the George Floyd uprising, and we still don’t have it yet. Since then, though, authentic opposition groups such as Uhuru have made gains. Gains which can be leveraged towards changing the balance of power. That the state has decided to launch a crackdown on the pro-Russian orgs, starting with the one that’s most outwardly anti-colonial, shows the system has come under greater threat. If the Democrat co-optation tactics that the ruling class used in its 2020 counterinsurgency had truly been effective, the FBI wouldn’t have raided the Uhuru house only two years later. And if the ruling class felt like this action came with no risk, the media wouldn’t be trying to avoid covering the Uhuru case. Imagine how much risk would come with a military crackdown, or an unprecedented mobilization of militarized police.
Cop City is a paper tiger, a reactive domestic warfare effort that can only succeed at holding back revolution if U.S. communists continue to fail in their tasks. And should things keep going as they are now, the movement is indeed going to correct itself, and become a sufficient threat. Uhuru’s allies within the other pro-Russian orgs are expanding the ties between each other, strengthening their connections abroad, and growing their mass support. The latter is happening slowly, but the trend is towards them getting the defining role within the class struggle. So long as they do what’s necessary to keep going, they’ll come to be in place to win this power struggle.
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