The imminent threat of pro-Palestine work being criminalized, & how we can make our orgs survive the purge attempt

When I say the pro-Palestine movement is in danger of becoming illegalized, I’m referring to a category of repression that’s distinct from the one we’re seeing at the present stage. If the crackdown I’m talking about plan gets successfully realized, the state is going to go so much further than arresting people at pro-Palestine protests for petty or construed offenses. It’s going to start raiding and charging people for so much as participating in anti-imperialist political assembly, rather than cracking down on them after they’ve already managed to put together actions. And this next great wave of repression is potentially going to be less easy to counteract than the one the U.S. government carried out in 2010. 

The raids on anti-imperialist orgs from that time were able to be ended through widespread resistance efforts among activist groups. When the government tries this again, it could actually succeed, because there’s now a lack of will among most of these groups to seriously combat the national security state.

This deficiency in today’s civil liberties movement comes from how Uhuru—the first org the state has raided as part of the latest repressive project—is viewed as a pariah among the majority of the organized “left.” Since 2010, the new cold war has become a central issue of contention within leftist spaces, with one camp opposing Russia and the other camp supporting it. Because Uhuru is in the pro-Russia camp, and supports the idea of building an anti-imperialist coalition beyond the “left,” most of the country’s “socialist” groups haven’t been backing Uhuru. They’ve either been ignoring the case, or “supporting” Uhuru only in words, prioritizing their own immediate interests over what’s best for the fight against the indictments. 

Because of this betrayal, we’re now much more likely to see the state’s repressive plans be carried through than we were fourteen years ago. The 2010 purge attempt was only stopped because the people with the resources and organizational strength decided to take the threat seriously. Now that these same people and their successors aren’t taking it seriously, it’s likely that we’re months away from the worst defeat for civil liberties we’ve seen in our lifetime. The trial for the Uhuru 3 is going to be on September 3, and unless the Hands off Uhuru movement sees a sudden rise, the state will get the precedent it so badly wants. It will be able to charge everyone who does international anti-imperialist solidarity work, like how it charged Uhuru with “Russian interference” for combating the Ukraine psyop.

This perilous situation shows us something, though: the first measure we can take to ensure the survival of our organizations is to redouble our agitation on civil liberties. If the main left orgs refuse to replicate the civil liberties movement’s victory from fourteen years ago, then we who are independent from these orgs must be the ones to fulfill this task.

As short as this deadline is, there are things we can do to strengthen our movement amid the growing siege. At the moment, one of our most urgent and useful tasks is to build networks among orgs which are on different ends of the ideological spectrum, but are on the same side in the struggle against the war machine. The more we expand our connections to others who are principled on anti-imperialism, the greater support we’ll have as the state’s next attacks come. 

Constructing this network doesn’t mean taking a pan-leftist stance, because to get support from all kinds of leftists, we’d need to appease the ones who are imperialism-compatible. What we need is pan anti-imperialism, where all who oppose U.S. hegemony are able to join in an organizing coalition. And such principled organizational forces can be found, if you’re willing to look beyond the conventional “left” groups. Writes Peter Coffin about how one of these orgs, the PSL, contrasts with a group which has practiced genuine solidarity:

While PSL professes to stand with marginalized communities, its failure to actively support Uhuru, especially when the group is under attack by the US government, raises questions about the authenticity of PSL’s commitment to solidarity. Uhuru’s struggle against state repression is emblematic of the broader fight for racial and economic justice. Their efforts to address systemic inequalities and advocate for the empowerment of black communities align with the basic principles socialism and anti-imperialism require. However, PSL’s silence on this front suggests a selective approach to solidarity, where support is offered only when it aligns with the organization’s specific agenda or public image…I am a proud member of The Center for Political Innovation (CPI), though I don’t want to actively say, “This is the answer to the critique I have brought forward.” CPI is not a party, nor can it act as a replacement for one. That said, our organization emphasizes moving beyond the spectacle and embracing the hard work of organizing, coalition-building, and engaging with diverse communities. Obviously, I would encourage people to check us out, but people don’t need CPI to do any of this. They just need to be able to identify useful actions and take them.

That’s the start of the solution: identify the problem of left opportunism within today’s activist spaces, and build organizations which advance a program that’s not compromised by such opportunistic interests. The present moment, where pro-Palestine civil disobedience is exploding, provides an opening for advancing this alternative organizing project. We should take advantage of these protests, but not by simply showing up at them to self-promote, like the typical left orgs are doing. What the CPI instead advocates for is to go into protests, and find what kinds of ideological differences exist among the protesters so that we can build relationships with the ones who have anti-opportunist leanings. 

There are plenty of actors who’ve come into the protests so that they can promote an imperialism-compatible version of “socialism.” The Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative has been passing out anti-China polemics at the actions, with this only being the most unconcealed example of opportunistic activities. There’s also the problem of groups which promote adventurism. ANSWER, the most prominent organizational manager of protests, engages in the counterproductive tactic of blocking roads. And because ANSWER is run by PSL, it by extension represents PSL’s indifferent attitude towards Uhuru, and its “neither NATO nor Russia” stance. 

The best way for us to engage with these protests is by seeking out the principled elements among them. We have to establish connections with the Palestine supporters who lack an investment in the modern version of “leftism,” so that we can better prepare for the dangers to come.

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The effort to pressure the state into not convicting Uhuru falls within the category of “totally worthwhile, yet we can’t do without a backup plan if it fails.” The momentum behind this purge attempt is massive, if only because of the organized left’s refusal to resist. And should we not be able to make up for the harm these orgs have done towards the civil liberties movement, we’ll find ourselves in a situation where the state is enabled to wage open war against us.

I’m now getting into a territory where I need to write with lots of subtext, because when discussing plans to escape the grip of your own governments, you can’t give away too many details. A good phrase to use for these kinds of conversations is “what’s understood doesn’t need to be said.” It’s safe for me to present details about the history of underground U.S. socialist organizing, though.

During World War I and the time of the Red Scare, the illegalized orgs were able to keep operating through a secrecy for the core organizing activities, and a use of front groups which could draw the public into these efforts. In CPI’s textbook Out of the Movement, to the Masses, Caleb Maupin writes about how this project’s leader William Foster outmaneuvered the state:

Foster and his labor movement allies went to Bridgeman, Michigan for a secret meeting held in a forest. At this meeting the Communist Party, the Communist Labor Party, a faction that had been expelled from the Socialist Party, along with Foster’s trade union allies, all merged into the organization now called the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), which was recognized as the American section of the Communist International. The African Blood Brotherhood, a secret society led by Harry Haywood of Black activists who taught armed self-defense against lynching and racist terror also merged into the CPUSA at the founding unity convention. The convention was raided by the newly formed “Bureau of Investigation” and many of those who participated in it were arrested and charged with state and federal crimes…The Communist Party emerged from the convention as a clandestine underground organization. Messages were sent in code. Meetings were held in secret. The Communist Party operated through a legal party called the Workers Party of America that officially had no ties to Moscow and did not advocate revolution. The Workers Party held public meetings and ran for office, and was secretly controlled by the illegal Communist Party.

This is where it again becomes important to differentiate what the PSL is doing, from what an authentically revolutionary practice looks like. Because the PSL wants its followers to believe that its disavowal of Russia’s anti-fascist Ukraine action is a strategically necessary way for the org to remain legal, in the same way it was necessary for the Workers Party to distance itself from Moscow. What makes the PSL’s compromises a betrayal, rather than something essential, is that there’s no hidden revolutionary operation behind PSL’s liberal face.

The organization isn’t a front for a group that has ties to the globe’s anti-imperialist forces. If anything, it’s a front for the liberal NGOs that it’s dependent on. It’s the CPI that has ties to the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, whose members have gone to Russia to establish connections with officials, and that has allies (such as Uhuru) which have done similar international work. PSL only has relations with Cuba because the liberal NGOs don’t see that country as among Washington’s biggest threats. And by being hostile to Moscow, it’s cut itself off from a vast and crucial section of the global anti-imperialist movement.

I don’t just say this to show which side of the movement is principled on anti-imperialism. I also say it to illustrate that among the orgs which have embraced consistent international outreach, there’s an urgent need to employ the kinds of protective measures the early CPUSA used. Our connections to Washington’s biggest adversaries are out in the open, and that’s a good thing, because it lets us demonstrate that we can be trusted not to sell out to the imperialists. If or when our orgs become illegalized, though, we must do what the CPUSA did, and start relating to the public from behind front groups. One way we can do this is by joining and working in unions, including reactionary unions, so that we can agitate among the most organized workers. 

Depending on how legal anti-imperialist speech is going to be at any given time, this could involve rallying these union workers towards defying the pro-imperialist, Democrat-aligned politics of the labor bureaucracy. Many within these unions have already been doing this in response to their leadership’s complicity on Gaza. These pro-Palestine union members haven’t needed to establish connections with any foreign government or entity in order to have this revolutionary role, their vocal dissatisfaction is enough. Meaning if we can gain enough of a presence within the unions, we’ll be able to do the equivalent of what the CPUSA did. We can utilize labor-centered orgs which aren’t officially tied to Washington’s adversaries, while maintaining an internationally connected circle in secret. And we can do so both by creating whatever new version of the Workers Party which we may find necessary to set up, as well as keeping a less detectable labor presence through our members in the unions.

This strategy can only go so far, though. What happens if the government starts arresting groups which it can’t even prove has had foreign contacts, whether by fabricating accounts of such contacts or by charging the groups on some other construed basis? What if Washington decides to do what Indonesia’s military dictatorship did, and target not just communists or anti-imperialists but also everybody who’s so much as involved in organized labor? It would make sense for the 21st century’s big U.S. crackdown to go that much further than the 20th century’s did, because today the state has the technology to easily detect covert activities. Should we fail to keep the communications between our front groups and our core groups truly hidden, or leave our organizational structures weak enough to be destroyed as soon as any infiltrators enter into them, the state’s counterinsurgency will succeed. 

This means that though agitating against the Uhuru crackdown is worthwhile, and establishing front groups is necessary in the longer term, we must also think beyond these things. We must prepare for what could happen when the class struggle has escalated to its most intense stage.

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Our great strategic advantage within this power struggle is that should the state start using direct violence against its own people on the same level that it’s used against peoples abroad, it’s going to make its own demise all the more likely. If our government creates an equivalent of the one the Zionist state has created, wherein the existing regime is facing a guerilla revolt with popular support, then it will be even more vulnerable than the “Israeli” settler state is. 

Whereas the Zionist state can at least draw upon a large social base of settlers who have a primary material stake in maintaining Zionism, the U.S. government would be up against a population of workers who share a hatred for it, regardless of their racial backgrounds. Many U.S. soldiers would also be likely to defect in the event of a revolutionary scenario, unlike the IDF soldiers who are almost blankedly going to remain loyal towards Zionism. The Palestinian resistance is on its way to victory, no matter what the settler element wants. How well could our ruling class, which is increasingly isolated due to the shrinking of the bribed “labor aristocracy,” manage to do a domestic U.S. equivalent of what the “Israelis” are doing?

It’s because carpet bombing U.S. neighborhoods would galvanize the people against the state that our ruling class is trying to wage counterinsurgency by every other possible means. Instead of imposing a full military crackdown in 2020, the state redirected the people’s outrage from that moment towards reformist projects, while building “Cop City” militarized police training centers in all but three states. For as menacing as Cop City is, it comes with a risk of provoking the people into a level of revolt which the government can’t manage. Whether a military crackdown comes in the form of the actual military, or police that have been transformed into de facto militaries, the danger of it backfiring is going to be there.

Given how vulnerable the U.S. capitalist dictatorship truly is, the effort to purge anti-imperialists could bring this dictatorship’s end. It all depends on how good of a job we do at outmaneuvering our class enemies.

Should we be prepared to go underground, establish fronts, and use this to buy ourselves time for gaining more strength, we’ll then be able to strategically prevail when the crackdown reaches its most extreme stages. This will mean an effort to rally the people, taking a leadership role in revolts which resemble history’s successful uprisings against dictatorships. (Except we’ll need to make sure to establish a workers democracy, which many of those past rebellions failed to establish.) This effort could purely involve actions which the broad masses can participate in, like strikes and demonstrations. Or it could also involve activities wherein the most trained cadre members do what people like Che Guevara have done. For legal reasons, and because I can’t predict the future, I need to say I’m not advocating for that. I’m only looking at the many potential outcomes which the climax of our class conflict could produce.

Since 2008, when the U.S. entered into an ongoing depression for its working-class people, the country has been a powder keg for social unrest. The ruling class has been able to manage the revolts from this time well enough that the U.S. empire can carry on its foreign policy designs, as shown by how the Ukraine proxy war soon followed the 2020 revolt. It remains to be seen, though, whether the system can absorb the pro-Palestine uprising. This unrest, and the events which provoked it, represent potentially catastrophic developments for the imperial order. 

The imperialists weren’t able to anticipate the October 7 maneuver by the Palestinian resistance, like they had anticipated Russia’s Ukraine action. (Though the “Israelis” knew about the plan Hamas had, in their hubris they dismissed it as impossible to put into practice.) As the imperialists have continued failing to subdue Russia, they’ve since been throwing even more money at an additional fight which their “Israeli” proxies can’t win. Now they’re needing to try to divert the energy of a domestic anti-imperialist rebellion, one that could catalyze unprecedented advances in our class struggle.

Should we defeat the initial, co-optation focused part of the counterinsurgency, and separate the pro-Palestine movement from the Democratic Party, the state is going to utilize its violent tools more substantially. And regardless, it’s going to do all it can to make the Uhuru case into a precedent for disregarding freedom of assembly and expression. At every stage in this repressive creep, we should do all we can to resist the state’s maneuvers. But even if the crackdown gets fully implemented, we’ll have a way to win.

Whether we can come to victory amid these obstacles depends on how secure, well-connected, and physically equipped we make our cadres. It also depends on how intelligent we are at discerning who are friends and foes will be as the class conflict escalates. Because even though these protests are definitely worthy of support, there are many left-wing counter-gangs which are trying to gain influence within them. We need to fortify the struggle against these forces.

When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. The types of radical liberals who consider pro-Russia and pro-China communists to be “fascists” aren’t compatible with the anti-imperialist united front we’re trying to build, and they certainly can’t be counted on not to sabotage short-term actions. Such ultraviolent elements within the left are going to be a major part of the counterinsurgency, acting as substitutes for the state’s official armed forces. And they’re the most glad to help undermine solidarity with Uhuru. 

The good news is that given how peaceful these protests have been (despite the efforts by police to provoke violence), and how the left anti-communist sentiments within them appear to be relatively rare, the left counter-gangs don’t control these actions as much as they would like to. This uprising isn’t a psyop, however much the psyop agents are trying to manipulate it. It is a real threat to the ruling class, both because it’s disrupting the imperialist order and because it could bring a strengthening for the anti-imperialist orgs. The students within the protests are just one small part of the masses, but we should connect with the ones among them who are open towards a principled anti-imperialist agenda. Then we need to keep expanding our reach, while providing the people with a leadership that’s capable of surviving the imminent purge attempt.

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Zionists show their desperation by using leftist cancel culture tactics, which render an ideology isolated

Many are pointing to the hypocrisy of how the Zionists, despite their movement being led by the right wing, have been utilizing the same cancellation rhetoric and tactics that they’ve decried leftists for using. There’s an additional part of this, though: by aligning themselves with the narratives and mentality that today’s “leftism” represents, the Zionists have culturally isolated themselves in the same way that the “left” has.

This was not the Zionists’ ideal option. Up until this last year, when the pro-Palestine side gained an unprecedented advantage in the narrative war, “Israeli” PR managers were able to simply keep the majority of people unaware of the horrific Palestinian reality. Then the Zionist state escalated the genocide to the point where most people, even in the United States, couldn’t help being disgusted by what the settler state is doing. In the last month, a majority of U.S. Americans have been found to be against the military actions of “Israel,” which means Zionism’s defenders can now only argue from a place of minoritarianism. From a perspective of rejecting the majority of the people, and openly antagonizing that majority.

That’s what we see from how Zionists are only becoming more aggressive in their statements about Palestine supporters, rather than trying to act more diplomatically. The predominant narrative within their rhetoric is that being against the genocide makes somebody a Jew hater, leaving no space for dialogue or attempts at winning the opposition to their side. By doing this, “Israel” supporters have put themselves in a box, one they can’t escape from. Because they’ve already in effect declared war on most Americans.

This has always been the direction where Zionism was headed, at least in the United States. In “Israel,” where the vast majority of the settler population supports their government’s Hiterian policies and the rest of the people aren’t given real political representation, the architects of the genocide manage the discourse differently. They can take on a populist orientation, as shown by how Netanyahu’s career has been based on rallying land-hungry settlers around expanding the colonization project.

Because the majority of “Israelis” are conscious of and glad about the ethnic cleansing they’re complicit in, their leaders feel comfortable with making openly genocidal statements about Palestinians. U.S. Zionists usually stay quieter about these kinds of sentiments, and that continues to be true (though more of them have lately been stating their true beliefs). During this moment of escalation in Palestine’s anti-colonial struggle, the main rhetorical strategy they’ve adopted is to try to stigmatize those who speak out against the genocide, rather than take the greater risk of outwardly saying Palestinians deserve to be murdered.

The success of this strategy depends on the pro-Palestine majority becoming alienated from the minority who are actually involved in anti-Zionist activities. And the propaganda machine has been trying to isolate the activists in this way, partly through the present narratives about the student protesters being motivated by hate. 

How likely is the typical Palestine supporter to fall for this lie, though? For all the efforts to hyper-focus on isolated instances of protesters acting badly, or to portray “from the river to the sea” as a call for violence against Jews, most people aren’t going to be receptive to having their views being called bigoted. And that’s absolutely the accusation the “Israeli” spokespeople are making towards most Americans when they smear pro-Palestine activists. Like how “leftism” as we know it today has isolated itself by excluding all social conservatives or non-“left” people from the class struggle, Zionists are isolating themselves by demonizing the bulk of society.

Another way the discourse managers are trying to separate the pro-Palestine movement from the masses is through keeping this movement dominated by the “left.” ANSWER, the organization that’s been mainly managing the protests, is a “pan-leftist” entity—meaning its goal is merely to gain support among “leftists,” as opposed to the broader masses. To establish itself as a faithful upholder of “leftism,” ANSWER’s source org the PSL has taken a “neither NATO nor Russia” stance on Ukraine, and has attacked the Rage Against the War Machine coalition for not being pan-leftist. It’s also abandoned the effort to save the Uhuru org from state persecution, since Uhuru operates beyond the “left” niche and is therefore seen as expendable by PSL. This has made it more likely that the DOJ will succeed at setting a precedent for criminalizing international anti-imperialist solidarity work, especially pro-Palestine work.

The state hopes that by nurturing a pro-Palestine leadership which is divorced from the people, it will be able to crack down on anti-Zionists following the Uhuru trial in September. If the Zionists can’t keep most of the people on their side, their best long-term option is to politically disempower their opponents. To manufacture confusion and division among different activist groups, allowing for a great repressive campaign. And it’s appropriate that leftism, the same ideological orientation which Zionists are presently echoing, represents the best means for sowing such conflict between Palestine supporters. 

It is possible for us to overcome these efforts at sabotaging our cause. We can partly do so by recognizing that if we want to win, it’s not a good idea for us to embrace the same anti-popular attitude which our enemies are increasingly displaying. Whether this attitude manifests in Zionism, or in a bankrupt version of “leftism,” it represents an admission of cultural defeat on the part of the ones who are pushing it. Demonizing the people is the tactic of somebody who’s already lost the narrative war, and knows they’ve lost it. 

Writes Caleb Maupin about why Marcyism—the driving ideology behind PSL and ANSWER—isn’t capable of winning this struggle:

The Marcyites will never take on this task because deep down they do not love the broad masses. Much like Hillary Clinton who dismissed all of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” the late Marcyites view average American working people who aren’t as “woke” as they are with contempt. During the Cold War, it certainly made sense for Communists to retreat into the labor movement or hippie counterculture as the comfortable lifestyle of many US workers was a basis for the chauvinism, racism and anti-communism among a big layer of the country. But the Cold War is long over and the labor aristocracy is being eroded. Living standards are falling. The Center for Political Innovation seeks to reorient socialism away from the New Left’s distortions. Demands for jobs, housing, and schools have potential to take hold among the broad masses, as do anti-imperialist sentiments. However, in order to reach the broad masses, a solid break with the toxic, middle class, pro-imperialist “woke” left and its liberal cultural atmosphere must take place.

Reject the anti-popular thinking of the Zionists, and embrace the mass-based thinking that can let us prevail. Our enemies have already shown that they’ve lost hope for gaining back majority support for “Israel,” and the Ukraine psyop is experiencing a parallel defeat. Let’s seize this opportunity to mobilize the people against colonialism, imperialism, and our dictatorship of capital.

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Beaten by imperialism’s foes, U.S. elites intensify their war on Americans’ liberties & economic wellbeing

To keep waging war against the Palestinians and the Russians, our government needs to keep intensifying its economic attacks on the people of the USA. And the reverse is true as well, because the rule of capital depends on imperialist wars. Since the 1970s, when capitalism reached a point in its decline where perpetually increasing austerity became the way to keep profits up, we’ve been seeing this process advance. Our ruling class has been progressively sacrificing the people’s living standards in the imperial center, while redirecting ever more funds towards slaughtering peoples abroad. 

With this week’s package for $95 billion in aid to Ukraine and “Israel,” though, this two-pronged war which our rulers have been waging has reached an unprecedented stage. A stage where the people of the United States are feeling the injustice of the situation more acutely than ever, and there’s therefore come to be an unprecedented risk for the rulers in carrying on this destructive project.

That most of the country’s people are now against the Ukraine and “Israel” proxy wars is one sign of how much the war machine has lost its dominance over the narrative. Another indicator is the evidence that our society feels increasingly upset about the austerity which these wars involve. The inflation crisis, which Biden’s proxy wars have greatly exacerbated, is a major reason behind why the Democratic Party’s working class base has been abandoning Biden. Another development that shows the people’s growing disillusionment is how the right has been able to capture mass momentum simply by talking about inflation, our declining infrastructure, and other obvious realities the liberals want to ignore. 

These trends, wherein more people are becoming either politically apathetic or receptive towards rightism in reaction to their conditions, are set to accelerate as the public reacts with disgust to the $95 billion package. And as long as things stay the way they are now, with there being a lack of a popular and highly visible united front against monopoly capital, then these trends are all we’ll continue to see. This is why our ruling class feels confident enough to pass this bill at a moment when most of the people are against the proxy wars, and are showing clear signs of disaffection. The elites have sources of controlled opposition, both on the right and the “left,” that are capable of redirecting revolutionary sentiments and keeping the system safe. The danger they’ve created for themselves with this new step in war austerity, though, is that it’s created greater potential for the authentic sources of opposition to gain serious mass support.

We’re seeing one of these genuinely revolutionary groups, the Uhuru org, get a growing amount of attention—ironically because of the civil liberties outrage brought about by the effort to illegalize Uhuru’s operations. Americans across the ideological spectrum, from far-left to rightist, are coming to be aware of this imminent threat towards our constitutional freedoms. And with further work by Uhuru and its allied orgs to build an anti-imperialist movement, we’ll be able to take this consciousness shift to its next step: a dynamic of mass solidarity between Americans, and all the peoples who are resisting imperialism abroad.

The gatekeepers on the “left” side of the controlled opposition say this goal is unrealistic, deciding instead to disavow Russia’s operation against Ukrainian fascism and U.S. imperialism. We shouldn’t listen to this argument, because in addition to its denying the American people’s capacity for international solidarity, it acts to divide the anti-imperialist movement. These two proxy wars depend on there being a dominant element on the “left” which supports Palestine but not Russia, and a parallel element on the “right” that supports Russia but not Palestine. We can overcome these discourse manipulations, if we properly navigate the conditions we’re facing.

These are conditions where our government is, in terms of economic warfare, police militarization, mass surveillance, and psychological operations, intensifying its assaults upon us. And where not in spite of the growing peril, but because of it, there’s growing potential for us to unify our domestic workers’ struggle with what the globe’s anti-imperialist forces are doing. Which is something that the ruling class has a great desire to prevent from happening, and is devoting great resources to ensure doesn't become reality.

Right now, this country’s people are reacting to not just the manufactured economic crisis, or the evidence that their government is facilitating mass murder in Gaza, but also to the growing threats towards their liberties. As knowledge of the Uhuru case spreads, Biden has signed a bill that lets the NSA spy on any business or individual it wants, giving the president the ability to go after journalists and political opponents with impunity. Like with the persecution of Uhuru, this is something the majority of Americans are capable of rallying against, should they become informed about it and connected to avenues for revolt. And that’s going to continue to apply regardless of which party is in power, because neither major party is liked by the majority of the country.

As we keep building the movement towards educating and mobilizing people around these grievances, the international aspect of this struggle is going to hold an instructional role. Because the American people can learn from the ways the empire’s foes abroad have succeeded. Why do the empire’s propagandists try to portray Iran’s recent retaliation as a failure, Russia’s anti-fascist Ukraine operation as imperialistic, Hamas’ October 7 action as unjustified, etc? Why do they keep pretending like the Kiev fascist regime and the Zionist settler state can win against Russia or Hamas, when in both cases the USA’s proxies have long been trapped in a cycle of military futility? It’s not only to justify U.S. foreign policies, it’s also to demoralize the people who seek an end to our capitalist dictatorship. 

As the communist Andre Vltchek has written about this element of the effort at smearing China, which often includes portraying the PRC as not truly socialist:

The Western demagogues know: China robbed of its essence – and the essence is “the Socialism with Chinese characteristics” – is China which cannot inspire, cannot offer alternatives to the world. The most effective way to smear China, to silence it, is precisely to convince the world that it is ‘capitalist.’ Such techniques were used, for instance, by German Nazis who claimed that resistance against their occupation actually consisted of a bunch of terrorists. The U.S. is known to do the same. Or the British Empire, which christened rebellious local people in its colonies as “hordes of savages.” Just reverse the truth and win! Twist things shamelessly, turn them upside-down, repeat your lies thousands of times, print them in all your mass media outlets. Chances are, your fabrications would be eventually accepted by billions of people. In the case of China, West is trying to convince the world that PRC is the same type of gangster states like the United States or Great Britain, France, or Canada. It is doing it by calling China capitalist, by calling it even imperialist. By ridiculously equating China’s behavior to the behavior of the Western colonialist powers. By declaring that China is oppressing its own minorities, as the West has been doing for centuries.

These lies, the ones designed to manufacture a narrative about China committing a “genocide” in Xinjiang, have lately come to prominence again as the empire has scrambed for a distraction on Gaza. And this has failed to direct attention away from the actual genocide that the United States is perpetrating against the Palestinians. With further education, the people who share anti-imperialist impulses could gain a complete understanding about the deceptions our rulers are employing. Many of them could come to be in solidarity with not just the Palestinians in general, but with the leaders of the anti-colonial movement Hamas. As well as with the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and all the other peoples who share our need to end U.S. hegemony. Our fight is the same, and the sooner we in the USA start acting like this, the sooner we’ll win.

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If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here. 

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The globe’s anti-imperialist forces have made the U.S. empire retreat. Its final war will be against its own people.

Contrary to what the world was expecting, Iran hasn’t responded to the latest attack by “Israel” with massive retaliation, and has instead indicated it seeks not to carry on the cycle of counter-attacks. This is because the strikes “Israel” just carried out were so absurdly tiny and unable to do damage, it’s apparent that the Zionist state has done what the imperialist media accused Iran of doing: taking military action purely for the sake of political theater, rather than for genuine deterrence. 

Many are surprised that the Zionists have acted this timidly, given that Netanyahu is a desperate politician who needs endless war to stay in office and avoid prison. And I was surprised too when I learned about the de-escalation yesterday; the other night, when the reports of the new “Israeli” strikes came out, it felt like this was the beginning of a gargantuan explosion. Yet peace has been reached in this respect, which shows just how weakened the Zionists and the imperialists have become.

This is a repeat of the story that we’ve been seeing unfold throughout more and more fronts of international tensions over the last couple decades. This is the story of Washington and its proxies posturing menacingly towards one of the countries which challenges international monopoly capital, then that country gaining too much leverage for the imperialists to want to provoke them. It’s happened on the Korean Peninsula, where the DPRK’s attainment of nuclear weapons has made the U.S. and so-called South Korea unable to follow through on their threats. It’s happened in Ukraine, where the imperialists in the long term have no choice but to let Russia hold onto the lands it’s captured. We’re likely seeing it happen in Taiwan, where Washington has good reason to expect it would lose a proxy war with China (especially now that it’s been unable to beat Russia). 

That Iran has managed to outmaneuver the U.S. and “Israel” in this way, despite it being the only one among these anti-imperialist countries which lacks nuclear weapons, further shows the constraints the hegemon finds itself in. Though this certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen a non-nuclear country deter a U.S. invasion, with Washington having been forced to give up its plans for aggression against Cuba. More recently, the empire has had to let its hopes for invading Venezuela die as well. The factor that’s made even these countries so easily able to dissuade Washington from destroying them is the rise of multipolarity. The emergency of an international order where Moscow and Beijing can act on a relatively equal footing with Washington, and thereby normalize acts of defiance against the hegemon. 

Writes Hugo Dionísio about how the power balance has shifted:

Iran’s response signaled that it is prepared to give a decisive response to what it considers to be an escalation of abuses by Zionism and its supporters, and that it will not continue to tolerate genocidal disrespect from the Zionist entity that controls Israel. This behavior on the part of Iran, previously unthinkable and intolerable by the “international community”, now finds a space of legitimacy that is absolutely revealing of how the world has changed in these years of growing multipolarity. Sanctions no longer carry the same weight, since Iran — like Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua — has learned to be self-sufficient, transforming aggression into a force of opposition; nor does the West now dominate the global South with the force it used to; nor do the U.S. and its vital space still constitute that military power that everyone was afraid of. Today, powers like Iran can afford to raise the stakes and corner the arrogant West.

Faced with this overwhelming reality of an anti-U.S. bloc that’s capable of existentially threatening the Zionists and imperialists, the “Israelis” have effectively announced a surrender within their battle against Iran. Like would have been the case for a wider conflict with Iran, this has accelerated U.S. hegemony’s decline, except in a different way. 

But just because a wider war has been averted, we can’t expect the remainder of the empire’s collapse to not involve massive violence. Because at the same time that the “Israelis” were coming up with such a restrained plan for Iran, they invaded Rafah, and did so with the tacit support of the Biden White House. No one should take seriously Blinken’s token words of pseudo-opposition towards the invasion, as the administration’s actions say the opposite. Says the leader of Hamas Ismail Haniyeh: “Israel did not agree to a ceasefire, and what it wants is to retrieve its detainees then resume the war, which will never happen. Washington's position regarding the invasion of Rafah is deceitful, and we will not fall into the trap of job exchange between Americans and Israelis.”

In immediate terms, this obviously means an historic amount of bloodshed and mass trauma for the Rafah population which the “Israelis” are collectively punishing. In the long term, that Washington has been willing to back this latest genocidal crime is an extremely ominous sign for the future of the broader U.S. sphere of influence. It means our government intends to respond to the decline of U.S. global primacy by escalating its violence against the peoples who it can still get away with waging war against. 

As we see our government’s proxies deliberately murdering non-combatants, we need to keep in mind the historical phenomenon where the means of violence which a given empire commits abroad ultimately come to be used against that empire’s own people. Zionism’s innovations in police repression have already been brought to U.S. law enforcement, and there’s precedent for the U.S. government bombing entire neighborhoods in response to political threats towards it. We can’t just resist the invasion of Rafah; we need to act as if such a threat of state violence exists towards our own communities. Because it absolutely does.

What should we do with this information? We can’t fall into pessimistic leftism, where somebody who’s learned about the brutal realities of systemic injustice can only think about what to lament and to fear. We need to do the equivalent of what the global anti-imperialist forces have done, and render our enemy unable to subdue its targets. We have to preemptively make our organizations unable to be shut down by the next counterinsurgency maneuvers the state is going to direct towards us. Then we need to use these orgs as a means for freeing the country’s people from the rule of our capitalist state, whose dictatorial nature can only get more brazen as this process advances.

The Zionists and the imperialists haven’t decided against provoking Iran into war because they care about peace. They’ve done so because they’re cowards who only want opponents that can’t defend themselves. The slaughter of Rafah civilians that they’ve perpetrating at this moment is their way of trying to get this sadistic kind of satisfaction. But even as they expand the genocide against Palestine to an unprecedented scope, the enemy they’re fighting on this front isn’t truly helpless. 

The Palestinians have Hamas, and the other armed organizations that make up the anti-Zionist resistance coalition. The “Israelis” haven’t managed to destroy Hamas, because Hamas and its partners have been able to take advantage of the innate strengths that a guerrilla movement has when it acts with strategic ingenuity. Like the Russians, the Iranians, and the other victors against the empire, these fighters have outmaneuvered the hegemon. Their stories show that the USA’s people can prevail in our own struggle against the imperial state, even when that state has come to fully import its tools from abroad.

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