Our government’s criminal actions, and its schemes to commit future crimes, are of a nature that’s going to require a new strategy from our popular movements. Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that it’s no longer enough to speak truth to power, because at this point our rulers are acting too brazenly for journalistic exposure to have a sufficient impact. In the last week, it’s become clear just how true this is. The president is posting direct evidence of the U.S. military blowing up crowds of civilians, and bragging about it on the basis that these crowds were supposedly enemy fighters.
This was an extremely weak cover story, and it was easy for observers to clear up that the U.S. had actually bombed a Yemeni tribal gathering. But as far as those in power are concerned, that does not matter. They’re now fully comfortable with sharing proof of war crimes that they would have tried to hide in the past; the imperial system has reached a new stage, where it seeks to go on the offensive without any restraint. And this shows that to fight back against the imperial system, we’ll need to come to a new stage in our revolutionary practice. A stage where journalistic or commentary sources, like my own platform, adopt a role of facilitating mass organization and mobilization.
Exposing power is secondary to the work we must do within the class struggle. That’s always been true, but up until the recent developments in global conflicts, our movements had for a long time been largely detached from the struggle’s practical aspects. The communist movement, at least in the USA, had been just talk; then with the Ukraine war, our geopolitical clash reached a critical stage, and suddenly the world’s socialist orgs had an opportunity to impact history’s direction. If they were to be principled in opposing NATO, and in supporting Russia’s anti-fascist war, then they would be able to truly break from liberal reformism. And a great deal of these orgs failed the Ukraine test; which makes it totally unsurprising that they then failed to combat the Gaza genocide.
Now, as the empire and its proxies expand their offensive, we face another decision point. We can choose to tail behind the ruling class, de-mobilize on Palestine, and forsake the class struggle; or we can wage the next stage of this fight, refusing to be compromised by reformism and opportunism. So much momentum is building for the global proletarian movement, and we could soon bring about unprecedented workers gains. Pambis Kyritsis, general secretary of the World Federation of Trade Unions, has assessed how much strength we’re seeing emerge from the working masses:
The encouraging and hopeful element in the depressing picture of today’s world, is the fact that workers do not passively accept the neoliberal capitalist, anti-popular, and anti-labor offensive. Millions of workers around the world are choosing the path of struggle to defend their trade union, social, and political rights. With militant mobilizations in every corner of the globe, they are demanding work with rights that ensures the satisfaction of their contemporary needs. The WFTU members or friends are always on the frontlines of these struggles. The response of bourgeois governments to the just popular demands is the sharpening of state repression and authoritarianism…But we also have weapons. Strategically much more powerful than theirs. We have our ideology and our class orientation, our history and our action, our militant spirit, and our moral advantage. But to utilize these weapons, we need good organization, enlightenment, and ideological and political education.
The effort to crush worker struggles is intertwined with the effort to persecute Palestine supporters. This is one reason why the pro-Palestine movement’s only viable future is in organized labor: for our free speech to survive, we’ll also need to preserve the right of the workers to defy their employers. The deportations and disappearances of pro-Palestine activists are partly about making labor defenseless; about establishing a precedent for targeting labor organizers through the same means. In this new phase of repression, the only labor figures who aren’t at risk are the ones which side with capital.
With the White House’s campaign to dismantle unions, there is growing potential for polarization inside organized labor; for the labor elements which support the imperial state to expose themselves, and for the principled elements to revolt. More unions keep speaking out for Palestine, and now they’re voicing solidarity with the students who’ve been targeted by ICE. The anti-imperialist movement, the civil liberties movement, and the other parts of our revolutionary struggle have a significant pull within unions, because the most advanced among the workers are not fooled by ruling class propaganda. The question is whether we’ll be able to build an independent workers force; one that can keep agitating for the revolutionary positions inside the unions, leading and assisting the workers in their struggles, and defending the workers against the crackdown.
This is where we come to the pivotal question in this era of our political practice: how to respond to the state’s efforts at crushing us? How can we keep our operations going as the repression gets worse, and more organizers get subjected to the fate that Mahmoud Khalil has? The history of counterrevolutionary violence shows that to overcome this threat, we’ll need to avoid relying on any wing of the ruling class. It’s the working masses who are our most important friends amid this crisis, and we have to lead the masses towards defeating the state.
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Ernest Mandel, one of the authors of the 1966 book The Catastrophe in Indonesia, diagnosed why Indonesia’s communist party had failed to defend against the previous year’s political mass murder campaign. It was because the party felt it could depend on the allyship of President Sukarno, and on the national bourgeoisie that Sukarno represented. Mandel observed the ineffectual nature of the warnings the party had issued about the coup, which didn’t come with the actions that would have given the people a real chance for fighting back:
These warnings, voiced on the very eve of the country’s counterrevolutionary coup, then already in full preparation, came without any previous or accompanying measures for broad mass mobilizations, without preparation for a general strike, without preparation for arming the masses, without concrete warnings about the impending army coup. The warnings could only heighten the determination of the counterrevolutionaries to strike immediately. They could not create adequate means to prevent or to reply to the counterrevolution. It is not surprising that under these conditions the only response this belated warning evoked was the desperate action of a small group around Lieutenant Colonel Untung and not a mass uprising…they relied on Sukarno instead of mobilizing the broad masses in defense of the revolution and the PKI, not only before the reactionary coup of October 1-2, but even after the coup.
In today’s USA, there are plenty of political actors who want to get dissident organizers to subordinate ourselves towards a certain wing of the ruling class. Among these actors are the leftists who tail after the Democratic Party, and who’ve been trying to build an “anti-Trump” movement. These radical liberals do pose a threat, in that they’re working to advance the NGO infiltration of the pro-Palestine movement. But this element lost its cultural relevance a while ago, when the Obama-style political brand collapsed. At this stage, by far the biggest ideological threat is the “dissident right,” which tails behind the Elon Musk wing of monopoly capital.
The message this element puts forth can be summarized as: “trust the plan.” Which is the same attitude that was held by Indonesia’s complacent socialist leaders: supposedly, the people will be able to gain victory if we put our faith within a specific procedure, one whose success depends on the goodwill of those in power.
It’s a mechanistic way of thinking about political struggle, where somebody believes everything will simply fall into place if we stay on a predetermined path. And as our rulers keep going on a rampage, it’s becoming clear that not too many people are willing to embrace this kind of thinking. This is what I saw when I found a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff tried to present Trump’s uncritical appeasement of “Israel” as being the guaranteed route to peace; and he avoided answering Carlson on the question of what Israel’s long-term plans for occupation are. Witkoff insisted that if we can just get rid of the “terrorist” groups which are resisting Zionism, then all countries will normalize with the Zionist entity, and “peace” will be achieved. This level of lying was too much for the majority of viewers to overlook; the video’s comments were filled with people who saw how absurd these arguments are.
Across the ideological spectrum, the people are realizing the malign nature of their government. They’re seeing that our rulers are determined to carry out an ethnic cleansing, and to destroy entire countries for the sake of protecting this crime’s perpetrators. They see more and more opponents of this plan being disappeared, putting everyone’s freedoms under threat. They’re also experiencing the economic catastrophe that’s come about from Washington’s war provocations. A consciousness shift has occurred; there already is a widespread mass will to fight back against these schemes. Now we must give the people the means to overcome the crackdown’s next stage, and overthrow their imperialist dictatorship. We will need a collective, mass organizational force, one that can keep going forward no matter how severe the repression gets.
The parts of the U.S. communist movement that have broken from liberalism are making good progress in building this force. The American Communist Party has been meeting the practical needs of the masses, and leading the struggles of the workers, in ways that have gained it great momentum since its founding last summer. And given the African People’s Socialist Party’s success in beating federal charges, the ACP will be able to defend itself should the state target its members in the same way. There will come a point, though, when the ruling class runs out of patience for years-long legal efforts, and tries to destroy us through swift violence.
There are forces in our government that don’t want to wait another moment until they can attack freedom in unprecedented ways. Forces that are even more dangerous towards liberty than the Trump officials behind the ICE detentions. In the long term, the Trump wing is not the biggest threat we’re going to face; the even bigger danger comes from the liberal wing, which is right now planning its revenge. There is a growing conflict within the ruling class, and though we can take advantage of this conflict, it’s leading the most aggressive and powerful elements of the bourgeoisie to carry out recriminations. Recriminations that will be vastly bigger than the Russiagate censorship, which was how the liberal monopolists reacted to Trump’s first term.
They’re much madder now, because the tariffs have broken the neoliberal doctrine’s cultural grip. The guardians of the traditional liberal order see this as unforgivable; and their wrath isn’t even mainly directed at Trump himself. Their biggest fear is that the people will take advantage of the possibilities Trump has helped open up, and replace neoliberalism with socialism. As the ACP’s chairman Haz Al-Din has written:
TRUMP TARIFFS ARE THE BIGGEST ASSAULT ON NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC DOCTRINE in American history. They have begun a REVOLUTION in economic thinking. Regardless of your views on them, they have now opened the door to all manner of heterodox, unconventional economic theories that lack ‘expert’ approval. The institutional academic ‘experts’ are reeling, crying, panicking. They are broken and humiliated. It is good to see them brought down, broken, and trampled underfoot popular political will…There must be immense short-term sacrifices to make our country industrially self-reliant. It is time to stop plundering developing countries, and work ourselves to make our country great…While the neoliberal ‘experts’ lie defeated on the ground with a boot on their neck, the door is open to begin advocating construction of Socialism with American Characteristics. Trump will not do it. What America needs is a mass popular movement that will push this revolution to its conclusion, toppling the neoliberal hegemony entirely.
This development has empowered the people, while driving the most zealously liberal elements of the deep state insane. Or rather more insane than they already were; we can’t forget that they tried to assassinate Trump twice, which could have sparked a civil conflict and vastly accelerated the country’s collapse. These two attempts failed because they weren’t organized by the dominant parts of the deep state; only by certain rogue actors, who were willing to defend neoliberal dominance at any cost. As the security apparatus mobilizes to crush the people, it will be much more unified. When these forces next hit back, they’ll hit back in ways we can’t imagine. We can guess large parts of how the counter-attack is going to look, though, and we must prepare accordingly.
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There are dozens of countries that the U.S. empire has invaded, destabilized, and kept under dictatorships or occupations; therefore, we can look at these countries to get a sense of how our ruling class will treat us. We can study Indonesia, and Palestine, and Yemen, and Iraq, and numerous other cases. It’s essential for us to study these things, and to take seriously the prospect that our government will apply the same methods from these foreign projects to the United States itself. There’s another aspect of this history, though, that we can’t afford to overlook. This is the part where the U.S. government has used psychological tactics, from propaganda to actual mind control, in order to proliferate ultraviolent mindsets among Americans.
These types of manipulation don’t just have the potential to mobilize anti-communists towards violence. They can also draw members of the struggle into the same perilous state of mind, where somebody has been persuaded to wantonly use violence or promote violence. There’s a difference between this kind of foolish behavior, and doing something like voicing support for Luigi Mangione; when communists support Luigi, or Hamas, or anyone else who’s used violence to combat oppression, it’s for principled reasons. Our class enemies want us to use the idea of revolutionary violence in an unprincipled way, and embrace ultraviolent practices that will alienate the masses from us.
Great numbers of the masses already support Luigi; that’s part of why we should support him. If a group that claims to represent the masses starts embracing behaviors which are objectively anti-social, though, and entertaining elements which don’t have the proletariat’s interests in mind, then this group lose. The danger is that in our desire to fight back against the state’s violence, we’ll fall into these self-destructive habits.
One of these habits is the act of fetishizing gang culture, and acting like the lumpenproletariat’s interests are synonymous with those of the workers. Another one is the glorification of drugs, which is quite prevalent within the New Left. Another one is to simply say things that you cannot say, and make threats of terrorism. The ACP has fostered a culture that firmly rejects all of these left-wing deviations, so in that area our movement has already won. But there are plenty of ostensibly communist orgs in this country that absolutely help cultivate such dangerous stupidity. It’s within the PSL’s membership where we’ve seen individuals who are willing to post some of the most explicit threats of violence that ACP has been subjected to. Though the left has become irrelevant in terms of its potential for mass pull, its ultraviolent elements continue to pose a security threat, and we need to pay close attention to this danger.
As we keep building this movement, and working to keep ourselves safe, the strategy we must adopt is one of maintaining a balance. A balance in all areas of how we think and act, where we avoid falling into any counterproductive pitfalls. It’s easy to react to something you experience in a way that ends up hurting you, at least if you haven’t yet been trained in how to stay grounded. Both the left-wing and right-wing deviationists have done this. And as our ruling class reacts to today’s crises by spreading ever-more chaos and fear, many people will be susceptible to this error. But when one has come to understand the nature of this conflict, and the role that revolutionaries have within it, they can gain clarity in what their task is. And they can stick to this task, via the guidance and support which a party provides.
What we are fighting against, in strategic terms, is the effort by our rulers to bring civil war upon the USA’s people. A civil war in which chaos and violence become ever-more prevalent, and the people are made into the victims of this engineered insanity. Our class enemies are mobilizing all the different ultraviolent societal elements, from radical liberals to neo-Nazis to criminal elements, as part of a project to terrorize and paralyze the masses. They see that the system is collapsing, and they want to inject reactionary violence into this process so that any revolutionary effort gets thwarted.
Part of this involves manipulating leftists into exacting violence against their fellow organizers; part of it involves recruiting alienated men into assassination efforts, like happened with the 20-year-old who put a bullet through Trump’s ear. Whichever elements the feds are targeting with this manipulation, the goal is to bring strategic chaos, which the state hopes it can manage.
We can make this project backfire, but we must be willing to change our tactics as the conditions keep evolving. We cannot be mechanistic, which means we can’t treat the chaotic events our society is experiencing as simply being all bad. It’s quite possible that the killing of Brian Thompson will be an early part in an American Years of Lead, where the country experiences a series of political attacks. Should a Years of Lead come, we won’t be able to stop it from happening; we’ll only be able to take advantage of it, and rally the masses as it further disrupts the liberal order.
Another development that we can’t overlook the value of is the tariffs, which have come precisely because the ruling class thought it could create managed chaos. Trump was allowed to win because the elites wanted to enact radical reforms, ones that could save the system. Now that they’ve gotten these reforms, it’s come with costs they didn’t anticipate, and the country’s revolutionary progress has been accelerated. It doesn’t matter that Trump has backed down by temporarily pausing most of the tariffs; there’s no reversing these gains they’ve brought for our cause.
Now the elites are going to unleash hell upon this country’s working class, pursuing even greater economic shock policies and carrying out an ever-more violent purge. We can overcome these attacks, but we can’t let the enormity of our task lead us to lose our balance. We will outmaneuver our class enemies, if we can navigate the next crises with flexibility. Like our allies abroad have done, we have to turn the tools of our enemies against them; this is how we must respond as the onslaught gets directed towards us.
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