As the forces of capitalist reaction expand their terror campaign on all fronts, we must draw the people’s attention to the revolutionary forces which are still on the advance. In a place like the United States, where fascist terror is closing in on the people and rapidly quickening the pace of political killings, the people must be made aware of who’s been successfully beating back this monstrous machine.
They need to know about the gains by the Palestinian resistance, and by Yemen’s anti-imperialist revolt, and by Haiti’s armed revolutionary movement. They must know of how several African countries have broken from neo-colonial control, a development that’s partly come from the morale boost that Russia’s anti-fascist resistance has provided. They must be made aware of the recent mobilizations by Latin America’s anti-imperialist militias, which are a critical defense against Washington’s attempts at destroying Venezuela. These popular struggles represent today’s biggest counter-balance against our government’s genocidal global offensive, and against the domestic mass murder campaign that we’re also experiencing.
Focusing on today’s active revolutionary advances, and on how they can be expanded to more fronts, is essential towards guiding our popular movements. It’s also essential towards the success of Marxism in particular; because though Marxists are the ones who’ve already gained knowledge about proletarian theory and history, we are useless unless we apply this knowledge to what’s happening within today’s conditions. In response to the ICE killings, the expanding global bombing campaigns, the starvation of Gaza, and all of this moment’s other assaults from the enemy, we have to bring the lessons from history’s other dark moments into our modern revolutionary practice.
One of these critical learning moments is 1965, the year when the CIA installed a dictatorship in Indonesia that would murder hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers. This was the event that let Washington win the Cold War, and establish the “Jakarta method” for political mass murder which became used by Latin America’s dictatorships. We are still far from recovering the losses that these catastrophes represented, and the present genocidal terror is proof of this. But at the same time that the imperial enemy was enacting its big counter-offensive, the recent gains by the global working class had provided practical lessons which would be forever useful.
Wrote Lin Bao in 1965 about what everyone could learn from the model of people’s war, which had just been put in practice to unprecedented success:
The essence of Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s theory of army building is that in building a people’s army prominence must be given to politics, i.e., the army must first and foremost be built on a political basis. Politics is the commander, politics is the soul of everything. Political work is the lifeline of our army. True, a people’s army must pay attention to the constant improvement of its weapons and equipment and its military technique, but in its fighting it does not rely purely on weapons and technique, it relies mainly on politics, on the proletarian revolutionary consciousness and courage of the commanders and fighters, on the support and backing of the masses.
Owing to the application of Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s line on army building, there has prevailed in our army at all times a high level of proletarian political consciousness, an atmosphere of keenness to study the thought of Mao Tse-tung, an excellent morale, a solid unity and a deep hatred for the enemy, and thus a gigantic moral force has been brought into being. In battle it has feared neither hardships nor death, it has been able to charge or hold its ground as the conditions require. One man can play the role of several, dozens or even hundreds, and miracles can be performed. All this makes the people’s army led by the Chinese Communist Party fundamentally different from any bourgeois army, and from all the armies of the old type which served the exploiting classes and were driven and utilized by a handful of people. The experience of the people’s war in China shows that a people’s army created in accordance with Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s theory of army building is incomparably strong and invincible.
Through the political genocides and working-class defeats that the global proletariat endured during the 20th century, the organizations that had internalized these lessons would carry on the revolutionary offensive. They would maintain a chain of victories for the liberation forces, one that today’s successful Global South struggles are a part of.
Vietnam’s people would use the people’s war model to defeat the empire. Iran’s people would defeat the Shah, and create a government that’s socialist in many respects. Palestine’s people would start up an unprecedented offensive against settler-colonialism with the Intifada, which began its first major wave in the 1987 uprising. Nicaragua’s masses would win, then Venezuela’s people would establish a revolutionary government, then Yemen would start upon its own popular anti-imperialist revolt. There have also been recent setbacks, of course, but even in these setbacks we can glean critical insights about which revolutionary paths are proving to be sustainable.
What we see from the destruction of Libya and Syria, as well as the color revolution in Nepal and the defeat of Bolivia’s socialist party, is that the masses prevail only when their revolutionary project has kept building on its defenses, and moving forward in the effort at strengthening workers power. There is a reason why the DPRK, the proletarian state with nuclear weapons, has endured while many other small anti-imperialist states have been defeated. This is a part of our revolutionary education that will become more applicable after we’ve actually begun building a workers state, but it’s worth mentioning even for those who are far from revolution in their own countries. As the overarching lesson is that one cannot overcome a superior enemy without consistently attending to defense, and to the proper organization of this defense.
How do we apply these insights to conditions where the people are disorganized, and where the reactionary state is working to re-create the “Jakarta method?” There are many countries right now that fit this description, because the workers movement hasn’t yet been restored; and within these countries, the movement’s participants will need to find the right path for their particular conditions. What I’m certain of as someone in the United States, though, is that my country will only be able to defeat international bankers’ power by reconnecting with its past revolutionary struggles.
Something critical to understand about America’s campaign of state violence is that even though it is an American Jakarta method, it’s not simply an “imperial boomerang,” where an empire’s violence abroad becomes directed at its own people. The real basis for the ICE murders is America’s own history of genocide against indigenous people, Africans, and immigrants, as well as our government’s extremely violent assaults against workers who’ve fought for their rights. We have to apply the tools which the targets of this past violence used to resist, delving deep into the histories of these efforts. This is how we gain an essential kind of strength within our work to combat the state’s terror; this, along with our studies into the methods of the present-day Global South resistance efforts.
To the greatest extent that it’s safe for us to do given the threat of repression, Marxists must bring these insights to the broader masses, who are increasingly united in opposition to ICE and are looking for direction on how to resist. If we can connect all of these things—the present to the past, America’s struggle to the Global South’s struggle—we’ll be equipped to keep pushing our own lines forward.
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