To properly respond to these civil conflicts over ICE, we need to recognize the parts of this story that are being hidden from view. I’m not just talking about how the DNC has been managing the L.A. protests through the mainly Democrat-funded Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which has added inorganic elements into the authentic local resistance efforts. I’m not just talking about the confrontation that’s emerging between the California government and the White House, which is revealing deep contradictions in our present governmental structure. These things are crucial to draw attention to, but there’s another aspect that we need to account for: the scheme by our ruling class to isolate and target our social movements, thereby letting the imperial state advance its schemes without any democratic constraints upon it.
That’s the larger context behind this latest campaign to mobilize the left-wing counter-gangs: our ruling class is carrying out an operation to weaken the popular revolutionary forces within the empire’s heart, one where all our remaining semblances of liberties have been taken away and the war machine can continue unimpeded. We should expose how the established left groups, especially the Party for Socialism and Liberation, are working to funnel people into the traps that the Democratic Party is setting; but we can’t put too much focus on the left itself, because the left no longer has the narrative pull which it enjoyed during most of the Biden era.
The role of the compatible left now is to manage one specific element of our society, that being the types of Americans who are interested in organizing. And as the DNC lures these targets into the same streets where agent provocateurs have been set up, the plan is to orchestrate a crackdown which comes with zero strategic benefit for the immigrant rights movement, or for the broader pro-Palestine element that this movement is tied to.
Ultimately, PSL and all other pro-Palestine orgs will face repression, even when they’ve made an alliance with the liberal establishment like PSL has. These orgs are honeypots to rope activists into legal trouble, and the ruling class views them as disposable in the long term; the way that they’re acting during this moment, it’s as if they’re embracing such a sacrificial role on behalf of the state. As part of its nationwide plan of action, the PSL has brought the protests into Columbia Heights, a Latino neighborhood in DC that will come under entirely unnecessary danger due to PSL’s decisions. ICE will respond by targeting the local families, like it’s targeted the activists who PSL has been needlessly putting in harm’s way. We’re going to see a repeat of the pointless action that was recently carried out at Trump Tower—where participants got led into being arrested while not even narratively helping the cause—except this time it will also hurt numerous bystanders.
PSL and its adjacent orgs are certainly useful for the state, as these examples show; but the state doesn’t plan to let them exist forever. They’re now coming under great repressive threat from the Zionist lobby for the same reason the empire has been defunding many of its global NGOs, and the Trump White House is trying to dismantle the unions: the hegemon is increasingly doing away with the old appendages of liberal “democracy,” taking off the republican mask that’s concealed the imperial reality.
A source of hope is that our ruling class is not unified, and we can take advantage of the elite infighting that’s breaking out due to the immigration dispute. This fight is happening because when the United States was in its settler-colonial expansionist phase, it built itself in a way that disregarded the civilizational realities of the lands it so hastily grabbed up. Mexican civilization had already been thoroughly established in the southwest, so ever since the USA took control in that region, its empire has needed to reckon with the repercussions from stealing it.
The liberal wing of our ruling class wants to keep importing slave laborers from the south, while the American nativist wing wants to reverse this process as part of its plans for intensified war on Latin America. The conflict over this issue is not going to subside, because these two wings can only become more determined about trying to steer imperial strategy in their preferred directions.
This is a symptom of the crisis the empire is experiencing, where it’s been unable to stop China’s rise or defeat the growing global revolutionary movement. The Trump White House has shown that it can’t beat China on AI or on trade, can’t subdue Yemen, can’t make the Zionist occupiers eliminate the Gaza resistance, and can’t reverse the revolution which Africa’s Sahel region has undergone in these last couple years. The U.S. also keeps finding itself unable to strong-arm Russia into accepting its terms for “peace,” making its neocon posture backfire. That the empire continues suffering losses abroad is a key reason behind why the second Trump White House has been going so far with its repression and anti-immigrant policies, surpassing Trump 1.0 in the aggressiveness of these projects.
Due to the severity of this reaction from the Trump wing, the liberal technocrats have begun their counter-strike. And when the technocrats fully activate their attack plan, they’ll hit back in ways we can’t imagine. The danger to the revolutionary movement is that this elite wing will take advantage of all the ways civil liberties have been eroded, greatly accelerating a repressive campaign that’s already reached a serious stage. But if we take advantage of these divisions in the ruling class, and build up our popular power, we’ll create a force that our enemies can’t crush. Which is where a communist party comes in.
Not all of the people in my audience are Marxist-Leninists, but seeing the capitalist state’s repression and violence was what convinced me Marxism-Leninism is the right path. It’s the theory that provides a route towards creating military-level strength for the workers, and gaining that strength starts with building a workers party.
I’ve rejected the PSL and the other pan-leftist organizations because even though they claim to be communist parties, in practice they’re appendages to capital’s liberal technocratic wing. Because of this tailism of the Democrats, they’ve adopted a simplistic and anti-materialist view of this civil conflict, one that casts the MAGA base as an irredeemable enemy of progress. In reality, the MAGA base is responding to actual crimes that our ruling class has committed against the working class. Capital’s ultra-nationalist wing has sought to get white MAGA workers to blame Mexican workers, and PSL’s response is to demonize the MAGA workers. But serious communists have a real solution: overthrow our capitalist dictatorship, and thereby free this continent’s people to resolve their civilizational contradictions. This is what the American Communist Party proposes:
The American Communist Party regards the real roots of the conflict to lie in the systemic dysfunction of the United States itself and incompatibility of the rapacious, imperialist appetites of the monopoly capitalist class with the popular sovereignty of the American people. The contradictions of imperialist hegemony — a hegemony that has taken hold both among Democratic state governors and the administration — can no longer be sustained or disguised by our Republic. Not since the first civil war have the American people been as divided as they are now. Only the American Communist Party is guided by the necessary foresight and principles to reunify and reconstitute the American nation on the basis of popular sovereignty.
The Trump wing is going to do all it can to get a war with Mexico, which means communists must advance solidarity with Mexico in every way we can. The white nationalists will try to steer MAGA’s base towards the race essentialist view on this, and say Mexico’s civilization has no place within U.S. borders. But the reality is that Mexican civilization was in the southwest prior to the founding of the United States, and this reality will keep clashing with the goals of the imperial state’s supporters. The way communists can help Mexico’s people defeat these aggressions is by supporting the organic resistance from within the Latino community, while combating the Democrat efforts to meddle in this struggle.
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