To understand why Iran and Hezbollah are now in place to vastly accelerate the deconstruction of the “Israeli” settler state, we need to look at the influences that have made Zionism as weak as it’s become. At the economic shifts, changes in global power balance, and strategic factors that have made Zionism’s collapse inevitable, thereby ensuring Palestine’s restoration. The story of how Zionism came to this fatal point also tells communists in the empire’s core how we can win our own struggle. It shows how to render a state so lacking in its crucial components that it becomes unable to save itself.
For a Jewish ethno-state to exist within Palestine, that state requires a strong economy, constant growth of the settler population so demographic supremacy can be ensured, and sufficient unity between the different elements of the settler society. All three of these things have been made impossible to sustain due to October 7, which sped up a Zionist collapse that had already been in motion.
Because of this last year’s escalations in conflict, the weaknesses in the settler state’s defense systems have been exposed too many times, and crucial amounts of colonizers have been leaving “Israel.” The “Israeli” economy has been thrown into chaos, making the Zionist project all the more untenable. As the prospect of an independent Palestinian state gets closer, the “Israeli” government finds itself cornered, and could soon be forced to comply with the international demands for scaling down the settler project. This would provoke a civil war, because the heavily armed West Bank settlers would start attacking their government if they were asked to give up what they’ve stolen. They don’t want to retreat, even if reality has given Zionism no choice but to retreat.
The establishment of a Palestinian state would also speed up Zionism’s demographic crisis, making Palestinians able to thrive and repopulate their homeland. All that can come from this is “Israel” getting too lacking in colonizers to maintain Jewish supremacy, making Palestinians able to govern themselves after the Zionist state dissolves. Even if the liberal Zionists get their two-state solution, it won’t be the victory they hope for; it will be just another step towards a fully free Palestine, with whatever “Israel” that remains being unsustainable.
The crises Zionism faces will be multiplied when Iran and Hezbollah retaliate for the Zionist state’s recent war crimes. These anti-imperialist forces are going to win this next stage of the conflict for the same reason Russia is going to prevail amid fascist Ukraine’s present invasion of Russia: the pro-imperialist side can only hurt itself. Ukraine and “Israel” have both committed strategic blunders by provoking their adversaries without caution. These fights they’ve picked have been so unrealistic for them to win because the enemies they’re fighting, whether Russia, Iran, Syria, or the Houthis, all represent the same historical trend. This is the trend towards a future in which international monopoly finance capital has been made extinct, and no country can any longer subjugate another. It’s the collective effort by all forces with an interest in overthrowing imperialism, which have gained unprecedented strategic advantages during just the last generation.
Hamas wouldn’t have been able to do such irrecoverable harm towards the Zionist project if Eurasia hadn’t risen. Because China and Russia have taken away the USA’s unquestioned diplomatic, economic, and military dominance, most of the globe has become unafraid to act in solidarity with Palestine. Palestine’s active friends are no longer limited to the countries already fighting the U.S. empire, like Iran and the DPRK; now the bulk of the globe is meaningfully contributing towards Palestinian liberation by advancing the project to give Palestine a state.
This is where “Israel” will come to bring the U.S. empire down with it. Blinken has said Washington will stop funding the UN’s World Food Program if a Palestinian state gets created. This effectively means the U.S. intends to massively expand its starvation sanctions as punishment for the Global South’s working to end Zionism. Should Washington go through with this, it will make itself more isolated than ever, further destroying its own economic and social foundations. Already, Zionism’s decline is carrying over into the United States, like how every other global loss Washington experiences is compounding the empire’s internal crises. Our government’s determination to maintain its “Israeli” West Asian military base is adding to the costs of the Ukraine proxy war. It’s provoking resistance from the USA’s people, and thereby accelerating the crackdown on dissent. Which brings the liberal order closer to collapse, showing that it can no longer afford the flexibility of pretending to be democratic.
The imperial state hopes to psyop the population into centrally focusing on the culture wars again, but our mass consciousness has evolved too far away from that old discourse mode. Our inflation crisis, and the wars which worsen it, have shifted the conversation in a more revolutionary direction. When Washington reacts to its next geopolitical losses by effectively waging war on the entire Global South, all these problems for the empire will get harder to mitigate.
This is why the ruling class seeks to use the 2024 election as a catalyst for escalations in the culture war. As an opportunity to mobilize people, both on the right and the left, towards new January 6-type events. Then the media will be able to create more cultural divisions, and the security state can suppress all who it deems as a threat. The state is preparing for this next stage of the crackdown by raiding Scott Ritter’s home, arresting individuals who associate with insufficiently loyal satellite states, and preparing to try the Uhuru 3. The empire managers have an equation for how they hope to prevent their system’s overthrow, and it involves controlled civil unrest that gets followed by crackdowns. There’s also an equation for how states can be overthrown, though, and the story of the anti-Zionist war’s success helps solve this equation.
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For the Axis of Resistance to have strategically gotten where it is now, in which its next military action against “Israel” will leave the Zionist entity devastated, it needed to first make sure Zionism’s foundations would be this weak. The alliance’s members needed to help nurture the transition towards multipolarity, partnering with China and Russia so that these countries could better assist in Zionism’s weakening. Because of how this global partnership has built up a new economic system, one that’s independent from the hegemon and able to back up anybody who challenges the empire, “Israel” is becoming untenable. The counter-balance Eurasia provides has made countries like Colombia confident enough to economically withdraw from “Israel,” taking away the crucial areas of trade that the settler society requires.
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and these next great acts of resistance that Hezbollah and Iran will carry out, represent a moment in history when the balance of power has reversed. Hamas and the Axis wouldn’t have had such success twenty years ago, when Eurasia and multipolarity were just starting to threaten the hegemon. The way global power relations work had to change. Only then could the armed part of the resistance strike a fatal blow.
It’s this reality about warfare, where you need to take into account all the different factors that could decide how a conflict unfolds, which we must consider while advancing our own class war. Our imperialist ruling class has as much potential to fall as Zionism does, and like the Zionist state our imperial state depends on certain factors to be able to remain strong. We can do the equivalent of what the Axis of Resistance has done, and make it so that whatever war maneuvers our government carries out can only ensure its demise. The essence of our task is to change the power balance so that we’re no longer the ones needing to defend ourselves from the state, but rather the state is the one needing to fight for its survival.
The U.S. government has plans for using the armed forces against an uprising. We know of these plans from the dystopian civil conflict scenario speculations that military academics have written out over the last decade. But anyone can make a plan, the question is whether that plan would be achievable and work in their interest. These national security strategists know that if they were to start bombing the USA’s own people, it would come with risk of provoking mass backlash, and making far more of the people side with the rebels.
One of these pieces of academic military fiction says the army can avoid public relations problems by shutting down internet and cell service access in the conflict zones. But for such a clean and controlled domestic intervention to work, the state will need to be facing off against revolutionary forces that are totally disadvantaged. That have utterly failed to maneuver their conditions, and fallen for the bait which the feds are presenting them with. The security state hopes the country’s political dissidents will be led towards participating in the false flag actions the feds plan to stir up; then the state will be able to wage war from a position of advantage, because its enemies will have just made a grievous mistake.
Without a doubt there will be at least some people who make this error, and show up to these events. In this respect, the counterinsurgency is going to gain a victory, because the state will always be able to find plenty of individuals who can be used as pawns within its repressive designs. This does not mean the state will take things to the point of imposing a full military crackdown, though; that’s something our class enemies will only realistically do if they’re facing a scenario where the revolutionary forces have already made serious gains. Where the anti-imperialist actors have built substantial connections among the people, and made their internal cadres and networks strong enough to survive the counterinsurgency.
It’s in this future, where the empire’s most strategically intelligent internal foes have overcome every other attack the state has directed at them, that the counterinsurgency could actually take on the form of a military intervention. We’ll likely see things get part of the way there during this next half-year, but it’s going to be a balancing act for the state. An operation where the ruling class can take its liberal fascism much further, but must be careful not to take things too far. That’s the larger context around the crackdown that’s happening right now, and that’s soon going to escalate with these next January 6 events: it’s a way for the state to try to avoid using the most extreme repressive measures, and creating a situation that’s unmanageable.
Like how “Israel” finds itself making strategic blunders out of fear, our monopoly capitalist dictatorship is going to get to that point. The thing we can do to make such a defeat for our enemy inevitable is continue on the good path which we’re already on. In the last few years, the forces within the United States that oppose the empire have been making gains, ones they haven’t been able to make for a long time. Amid the formation of our cross-ideological anti-NATO coalition, the rise of an alternative to the ineffectual organized left, and the narrative threats towards the empire posed by figures like Ritter, those who are paying close attention feel optimistic. Caleb Maupin—who ideologically leads the org I’m part of CPI—has been saying that within the next couple of years we could reach “strategic equilibrium.” This is the stage where revolutionary organizations can thrive inside the political ecosystem. We can get the struggle to this stage, then to the next stage (called “strategic offensive”), by navigating the situation correctly.
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A crucial part of going from strategic defensive (where the revolutionary forces must foremost fight to survive) to strategic equilibrium is taking advantage of the divisions within the ruling class. This is the only realistic way for the revolutionaries to gain such equal footing with the mainstream political elements, because if the ruling class is unified then it can quite easily drive the dissenting forces underground. If the different factions within the government and the capitalist class are battling among each other, we have greater flexibility. We can avoid the worst repression and build power above ground, at least so long as we don’t forsake the opportunities which these circumstances represent.
We cannot become proxies for any one wing of the ruling class, and do something foolish like show up at a January 6-type event. We can’t refuse to make any alliances with the rogue factions of the ruling class; if any figures with the ability to divide the ruling class show themselves to be potentially friendly towards us, or at least opposed towards monopoly finance capital, then we must help them further the inter-elite divisions.
There are major ways we can do this at the moment. The dominant wing of monoply finance capital, which hopes for Kamala Harris to win, is worried that the MAGA politicians will obstruct their agenda for continued war escalations with Russia. Trump is planning to increase oil drilling in Alaska, which would further obstruct the new cold war agenda; it would create Arctic industrial developments that help ensure peace between the superpowers. Trump intends to put Libertarians in his cabinet, which would be especially good for us since the CPI is allied with the LP. If Trump wins, diplomacy with the DPRK will start happening again, which is an idea that the Harris wing of the ruling class finds extremely upsetting. None of these things mean Trump wouldn’t repeat the overall highly pro-imperialist policies of his first term; they simply represent openings for communists to exacerbate inter-elite conflicts. And whatever progress may be made in the next four years towards building diplomatic ties with Washington’s adversaries, we’ll be able to build on these gains when we’ve overthrown the imperial state.
These are the most promising factors right now when it comes to our tasks of furthering ruling class infighting, and of making alliances with elements in this class which may assist us. There are limits to how far we can go in these tasks, though. There are variables that can set us back within this area, and make it so that we won’t be able to lean onto the LP or any other governmental ally for protection. The Harris wing could succeed at rigging the election, and make Harris “win” so that it can advance repression with maximum effectiveness. Too many people could fall for the next January 6-type traps, and empower the deep state to vastly intensify its counterinsurgency.
We shouldn’t see these outcomes as inevitable. I’m doing all I can to discourage adventurism and combat the Kamala Harris psyop, and so is the CPI as a whole. But our path to victory may not be as easy as we hope, and we need to prepare for things to go worse than we’d prefer. Even if they don’t manage to install Harris, they’ll have a plan for Trump’s potential second term that’s almost as effective, with their strategy being to further MAGA’s pro-imperialist and culture war aspects. Finance capital hopes to prevent the losses it could experience under a second Trump administration, whether by forcing through Harris or by pulling MAGA in a direction that benefits the monopolists.
They overall hope for Trump to lose, but they have powerful tools for inflaming the culture wars regardless of which candidate prevails. And both the Harris and Trump wings of the ruling class are seeking to expand repression. With a Harris victory they’ll orchestrate another right-wing provocation, and with a Trump victory they’ll do a leftist version of this; whichever of these scenarios comes to be, we’re about to see our government stage a Reichstag Fire operation.
There is a way to reach strategic equilibrium and strategic offensive, no matter what maneuvers our class enemies carry out. We can win, even if we have to go underground or deal with every anti-imperialist org getting Uhuru’s treatment. The key is to orient our strategy around taking the supporting factors away from our enemies. We need to learn from Zionism’s resistors, who’ve struck at the time when their adversary has already gotten weak enough.
Eurasia’s rise is making the imperial state vulnerable, like it’s been doing to the Zionist state. The Belt and Road Initiative has lessened the reach of U.S. capital, and the reactive efforts by our ruling class to destroy China are having great blowback. The Ukraine proxy war has worsened every contradiction within American capitalism, while accelerating the rise of anti-imperialist consciousness. The fall of “Israel” will be one of the next great blows towards monopoly power, leaving Washington strategically crippled and letting BRICS gain even more influence. All of these global shifts act to undermine the imperial structure, and they’ll get incredibly far in doing this. The next and final step in U.S. hegemony’s downfall is one that we within the core must bring about.
It’s us who can take away the next crucial part of the imperial structure after the globe’s anti-imperialist forces have defeated it economically and militarily. This additional source of strength is the imperial state’s internal social control, which comes from its narrative control. If we can bring the broad masses of people into our campaign against the imperial system, then we’ll be in place to overthrow our ruling class, even if it has forced us underground.
In this scenario, the imperial state will have to wage war against not just us, but the population as a whole. And it will encounter the same issues it did while trying to suppress the people of Iraq, where the popular will towards freedom made the revolt impossible to crush. I don’t prefer for our class conflict to take on such a deadly and destructive form, and I’m doing all I can to help us make progress through more desirable tactics. In this most dire of scenarios, though, it’s a connection to the popular masses that will let us overcome these obstacles.
There are no shortcuts to getting this mass backing. Understanding that there are no shortcuts is crucial not just to succeeding in this goal, but to avoiding the adventurist activities that the feds hope to soon bring us into. If people are under the impression that they can achieve their political aims through some big dramatic action, then they’ll gravitate towards the self-defeating behaviors that the feds want them to pursue. If they have perspective about what it will truly take to win the class war, then they’ll instead follow the path we’re on. The path where we’ve committed to patiently building the strength required for victory.
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