Graphic by the creator Gabo
To find out who will be enemies and who will be allies in the next stage of the class conflict, look at who’s supported Russia’s anti-fascist Ukraine action, and who’s helped NATO vilify it. These last few years since the action began have been a test of integrity for communists, and for the political actors who are adjacent to communists. Whereas the great majority of global communist formations have backed Russia, a minority of them (mainly in the core imperialist countries) have blamed Russia for responding to fascist provocations. As the struggle escalates, we’re finding the latter side to not be trustworthy in carrying the struggle forward. Which means that for us, the communists who align with the Global South on multipolarity, the best option is to enter into an anti-imperialist united front. One that extends beyond the left.
I figured this out last year, when (to the concern of the imperialist narrative managers) such an alliance came to be clearly formed. But as October 7 has opened up new fronts in the anti-imperialist struggle, and our ruling class has intensified its war on dissent, I’ve been coming to see an additional part of our strategic situation. This is that the same elements on the left which reacted to the Ukraine action by labeling Russia a “fascist” state, and by therefore labeling Russia supporters fascists, will be an instrument part of the state’s proxy fighting forces. All that needs to happen is for the struggle to escalate by a few more steps, or even just one more step, and the left counter-gangs will be mobilized in this way.
This is the lesson that’s crucial for U.S. communists to internalize at this moment: the “Antifa” anarchists, and the forces aligned with them, were never our friends. It was always the logical outcome for them to join with the liberals in this century’s geopolitical conflict, which means they were always going to forsake solidarity with communists. And given how useful of a cover the “Antifa” label provides, the imperial state has the incentive to turn these left anti-communist forces into the primary vigilante weapons. Narratively, these counter-gangs are more useful than the Ukrainian Nazi ones or the Zionist ones, simply because of the confusion the “Antifa” brand can create even among many Marxists.
Marxists who’ve embraced the strategy of pan-leftism are inclined to stand by these ultraviolent anarchists in the interests of “left unity.” Which means these Marxists will either become unprepared targets for the left counter-gangs, or be manipulated into joining with the counter-gangs in targeting the “bad” communists. The communists who’ve embraced the anti-imperialist united front strategy, and are therefore stigmatized as agents of a “red-brown alliance.”
This is modern COINTELPRO’s strategy for breaking solidarity among anti-imperialists, and thereby enabling the state to carry for its next fascistic policy plans. Marxists choose left unity over unity among anti-imperialists, and the opposition towards the state’s counterinsurgency will be left shattered and ineffectual. The urgency to choose the side of the anti-imperialist united front, and to fortify our struggle against the fascist threat, grows greater every day.
We see signs of such intensifying peril in the ways the imperialists have been reacting to their loss against Russia. They’re preparing for nuclear strikes on Russia, engaging in the escalations they’ve they’ve accused Putin of carrying out. This escalation comes after a year of increasing efforts by the imperial powers to bring as much destruction as possible within the conflict. Britain has supplied Ukraine with depleted uranium, leading to long-term misery and death for the Ukrainian people who NATO claims to care about. The U.S. has used its Kiev proxy regime to give terrorists the intelligence they needed for perpetrating a massacre at a Russian concert. These efforts to compensate for Washington’s permanent loss of Eurasia by shifting towards pure terrorism are indicators of things to come within U.S. borders.
The architects of this war, and of the genocide in Gaza, are going to blame U.S. communists and antiwar figures for their defeats against the anti-imperialist forces. It will be another version of the “stab in the back” narrative, which said that “Judeo-Bolsheviks” made Germany lose World War I. When the U.S. empire’s collapse reaches a certain stage, they’ll try to eliminate us, like how past fascist states have purged communists. In order to do this, they’ll first need to silence the voices which can expose their planned atrocities. Which is why they’re now using standard fascist police tactics against antiwar speakers who aren’t even communists; the U.S. government just forced former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter off of a plane while he was on his way to Russia. It also seized his passport.
This incident is especially ominous, given that Ritter is among the U.S. citizens who’ve been put on the Ukrainian government’s assassination list. The idea our fascist state seeks to convey with this latest repressive act is that Ritter, and the other Americans who’ve set themselves up against the empire, exist at the state’s mercy. The fascists hope to prevent these targeted individuals from fleeing to Russia or other international havens, and attaining asylum like Edward Snowden did. With this power flex against Ritter, they’ve shown that they can indeed trap many of their targets in the United States. The question is whether the anti-imperialist struggle’s participants will put in the organization-building, network-building, planning, training, and mass work we’ll need in order to overcome the planned purge.
At this stage, the most impactful thing we can do is advance the information war. The ones in charge of our ruling institutions have admitted that their war machine won’t be able to keep functioning if they lose dominance over the discourse. We’ve overall taken this dominance away from them when it comes to Palestine, and the Ukraine psyop has been largely losing potency on its own. What we must do next is ensure that Washington can’t sell its war campaigns in Taiwan, Korea, and elsewhere, while making sure the ongoing struggles against the existing wars don’t get suppressed. Crucial to this is refusing to let these struggles be divided from each other.
In order to convict Uhuru, and set the precedent for raiding all pro-Palestine groups, the state needs to kill solidarity with Uhuru and other pro-Russian orgs. When we’ve seen all the biggest left orgs forsake Uhuru due to their opportunistic stance on Ukraine, this has represented a victory for Zionism and imperialism. As in order to succeed at crushing the pro-Palestine struggle, the imperial state needs its opposition to be divided.
There’s no way to turn unprincipled elements into principled ones, so we need to gain new allies for the anti-imperialist cause. We need to find new support for Uhuru, for free speech on Palestine, for the struggle against the war machine, and for the fight against monopoly capital. Many supporters or potential supporters of these things exist, but they’re outside the established activist spaces. Many of them are conservatives or libertarians; others are people who presently aren’t political, but will join with us if we show them a way to advance their working class interests. The sectarian attacks which we’re seeing from the imperialism-compatible left can’t defeat a mass struggle. We have to make our base of power much bigger than the spaces these forces control, and overwhelm the counterinsurgency.
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