Above image was made by Karl Paine of the Center for Political Innovation
Since 2008, when the U.S. working class entered into an ongoing depression, our national security state has been vocally worrying about an uprising. To see these admissions of fear from the highest levels of government, you only need to know where to look.
A 2016 U.S. Army War College study speculated about armed anti-government groups recruiting young people who’ve been dispossessed amid declining socioeconomic conditions, with the study outright listing numerous U.S. cities as being among the places where the armed forces may be confronted with such insurgents. A Pentagon training video from that same year predicted an “unavoidable” dystopian future where the biggest cities become strategic challenges for the armed forces, with the voice-over describing expanding poverty zones as being able to produce those kinds of guerrilla enemies. A 2018 Pentagon training resource told a fictional narrative about Generation Z using hybrid warfare tactics to rise up against our ruling institutions in response to growing inequality.
When these officers and military academics have warned about the prospect of a threat coming from the country’s own people, though, they’ve been able to do so with a degree of hope that this type of threat won’t truly emerge. Because the only way the people of the United States could come to immediately endanger the rule of monopoly finance capital is if they were to unify behind an agenda of principled anti-imperialism. And the state has a way of preventing such an anti-monopoly alliance from winning; one which doesn’t involve the armed forces or the police.
This way is by cultivating an imperialism-compatible “left” whose job is to gatekeep the struggle, and stop socialists from expanding their cause beyond the spaces which the Democratic Party controls. Its role is to keep the individuals who’ve learned Marxist theory held back by an aversion towards building anti-imperialist coalitions beyond the “left,” and connecting with the broader masses as opposed to the activist subculture. The state doesn’t feel threatened by the Marxists who’ve been absorbed into this insular way of thinking, because whatever progress they may make is undermined by their unwillingness to construct an effective movement. They can take the most radical positions, and they’ll still be viewed as an asset to the state so long as they do the state’s work of dividing the struggle.
They’re allowed to praise the Houthis, praise Hezbollah, praise China and the DPRK, and even praise Russia if they wish, because at the same time they’re acting to undermine unity among imperialism’s enemies at home. If somebody is only willing to connect with the small minority of the people in the U.S. who are already part of the “leftist” niche, or who will accept the theories of this niche, then they won’t become a meaningful contributor to the class struggle.
This synthetic, compatible layer of the left is instrumental to the capitalist dictatorship’s survival. Because if the compatible left were to become unable to do its job, and the struggle were allowed to advance, the state would be forced to use counterinsurgency methods that are far less safe. If the scenarios of domestic military intervention that these security state documents describe were to become real, the revolutionary side wouldn’t be the one desperately fighting for its survival; the reactionary side would be.
This is because the only way the struggle could ever advance to such a stage is if monopoly capital’s enemies were to have already in great part won the narrative war. To have gained enough perceived credibility among the masses that they’ve outmaneuvered all the obstacles the reactionaries have so far created for them, and become a source of leadership among significant amounts of the people. In a situation like that, where the people already know the revolutionary organizations and in large part love them, for the government to use force against the people would be wildly risky. As the people, seeing their government’s unrestrained vileness, would come to have a massive incentive to start supporting the revolutionaries.
Governments that have found themselves trying to crush a greatly inferior rebel force—especially one whose cause is sympathized with by vast amounts of the people—are always in a perilous place. When you’re the strong one, and you’re unleashing your forces upon the weak one, many are inevitably going to see you as being in the wrong. And the more excessive and disproportionate the response of the superior force is, the more condemnation it’s going to receive.
The imperialists constantly try to exploit this principle by nurturing rebellious groups within the countries that challenge the hegemon, then trying to get their governments to react rashly. But because these governments don’t share the inherent bloodthirstiness of colonial states, this rarely works. Why have the Russian government’s responses to the recent protests failed to bring about any serious mass momentum behind Washington’s regime change goals for Russia, whereas the responses by “Israel” to Palestinian protests have created enough blowback to endanger the Zionist state’s future? Because Russia has been reasonable in its responses, while the Zionist state’s responses to even peaceful dissent have been nothing less than genocidal.
When a government is doing things that can’t be justified under any circumstances, even a violent resistance is going to be able to get substantial support. Given how willing the oppressors are to use violence, the rebels using violence is in this context seen as admirable. This has been shown by the story of Hamas in its struggle against Zionism, of the Houthis in their resistance to the U.S./Saudi genocidal alliance, and of Hezbollah in its defenses against imperialist aggression. All of these forces have great mass support, because what they do is self-evidently righteous from the perspective of the oppressed.
There’s a kinship between the USA’s people and the peoples behind these anti-colonial forces, in that Americans also have a history of confronting colonial oppression during the Revolutionary War. What the security state fears is that Americans will do the equivalent of what these global anti-imperialists have done, and defeat their monopolist government like how the early Americans defeated the Crown.
Why do you think the compatible left cares so much about upholding the ahistorical theories of Gerald Horne, who twists the facts to argue that 1776 was a reactionary event? The compatible left’s monopolist backers need to cultivate a false “Marxism” that tells the people it’s impossible for them to unify against the ruling class, because supposedly anybody who sees 1776 as progressive is nothing more than an irredeemable reactionary.
The accusation is that the communists who reject Horne’s theories are defending colonialism, yet these communists and those aligned with them are the first ones to support Palestine’s anti-colonial struggle. Which absolutely translates to opposing the colonialism that Native American communities are still being subjected to on this continent. As the struggle develops, these mass-focused parts of the communist movement are naturally going to establish greater connections with the indigenous movement, as indigenous people are part of the masses and their interests must be accounted for.
The way to rectify the colonial contradiction, as well as monopoly capital’s other contradictions, is by building an anti-monopoly alliance. And monopoly capital’s survival depends on the anti-populist ideas promoted by Horne, whose ahistorical statements about 1776 relate to a more presently related goal. This goal is to depict working class whites as fundamentally reactionary, and thereby divide the movement which proletarians of all colors depend on. Such a Sakai-esque perception of the white working class is what one inevitably gets from accepting his analysis, which implicitly denies the reality that the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberal policies contributed to Trump’s rise.
This is the idea conveyed by Horne’s statement that “when Euro-Americans vote across class lines for faux billionaires, we are instructed that the reason is that the opposition did not meet their exacting progressive standards.” It leads developing radicals to blame their neighbors for the left’s failings, and to continue on the insular path.
The more successful we become at building a communist movement that’s independent from the Democratic Party, the closer we get to that most intense stage of the class conflict which the security state anticipates. We shouldn’t assume that this stage will involve as much bloodshed as the security state says it will, though; in fact, we should do everything we can to reduce how much violence and destruction happens during the revolutionary process. Only our enemies wish for there to be violence, we simply seek to defend ourselves and the people from their aggression. They’re hoping for us to use our physical training in foolish ways, and turn to adventurism so that they can discredit our cause. We can’t embrace an ultra-left policy that goes ahead of the people and alienates them, that’s what comes from embracing the anti-popular dogmas. If we keep on our present path, in which we do everything with the goal of uniting the people against monopoly capital, we’ll be unstoppable.
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