Above: the National Guard at the U.S. Capitol (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
The force that’s both willing to instigate a conflict on American soil, and logistically capable of doing so, is not the illiberal right. It’s the liberal wing of the ruling elites. This is because the latter element is the one that has an unparalleled amount of power, and whose best interests are in bringing about chaos. The lower levels of capital that MAGA represents have a material interest in greater stability; in the revitalization of the country’s domestic industry. The highest-level elites seek instead to complete the country’s deindustrialization. They’re working to maintain the dominance of monopoly finance capital the only way they can: by destabilizing the United States and degrowing its economy, like how the U.S. empire has done to so many other countries.
The scaremongering over a MAGA-instigated “civil war” is a distraction from this threat posed by the liberal elites. Whereas that type of civil conflict scenario is theoretical, the scenario where capital’s highest levels wage a war against the country’s own people has already come true. It’s only in its early stages. The more advanced our revolutionary crisis becomes, the more bold these elites are going to become in their assaults upon civil liberties, and upon the economic wellbeing of the population. By portraying the political insurgents within the Bonapartist right as the main threat, finance capital’s propagandists are making the elites better placed to carry out this hybrid terror campaign.
They’re diverting people with developing class consciousness towards overwhelmingly emphasizing opposition towards Trump, when Trump isn’t close to being the greatest of dangers. The biggest threat comes from monopoly finance capital, which Trump’s wing of the ruling class isn’t in control of. By extension, they aren’t capable of gaining control over the most important parts of our government.
After generations of growth in the powers of the intelligence centers, and the quiet coup these centers have carried out during the new cold war, the United States has higher sources of authority than the White House or the Supreme Court. There are forces within and around Washington that have the ability to force the executive branch to go along with all aspects of the new cold war agenda. We saw this with Russiagate, wherein the agencies invented a conspiratorial “Putin puppet” narrative to pressure Trump into not adopting an independent policy towards Russia. If he hadn’t complied, there’s no doubt they would have gotten rid of him, like they did with Kennedy.
This is what U.S. communists must understand: it’s not revolutionary to put forth a “Marxist” version of the Democratic Party’s “Resistance” brand, and act like Trump is Hitler. Under our conditions, the closest thing to Hitler is not any individual person, but rather an unelected power structure that exists above all other elements of our government. It’s the intelligence actors who, along with their political and propaganda allies, seek to impose a liberal totalitarianism.
That’s why principled actors within the class struggle reject the idea that we need to vote Democrat for the sake of stopping Trump: Trump is only a symptom of the system, and we need to stop falling for the psyop the elites use to fortify the this system. The psyop that portrays the main fascist threat as coming from the Bonapartist insurgents, rather than from our most established and entrenched institutions. It’s these institutions that perpetuate the cycle which produces demagogues like Trump, and that have potential to bring a society-shattering level of violence and destruction.
We’re already seeing the initial phase of this internally directed warfare. The fusion centers that the FBI uses as hubs for terrorizing those who oppose U.S. foreign policy; the raids and indictments of organizations that get accused of carrying out “foreign interference”; the trend towards wildly excessive charges against illiberal groups for relatively minor offenses; all of these things have become introduced to the counterinsurgency, or at least made much more prevalent within it, during just the last two years. This is in reaction to how much the imperial structure’s collapse has accelerated throughout this time. The Ukraine proxy war was meant to be the moment when the U.S. empire defeated Russia, reversed the transition to a multipolar world, and regained the amount of cultural control it used to have. The more this scheme fails, the more inclined the state becomes to escalate its attacks on the people.
These attacks aren’t just political, they’re economic. The elites now feel a more urgent need than ever to complete their “degrowth” austerity plans, which were greatly advanced by the lockdowns but still are a long way from reaching their end. Reaching that final stage of the engineered collapse, where the country has been reduced to the same poverty level as the empire’s neo-colonies, is an instrumental part of how the elites can make the counterinsurgency succeed. In the long term, our government views the USA’s people the same way it views the Libyan people, the Yemeni people, and the others who it’s fought to prevent from asserting their material self-interests. It’s willing to totally cripple our economy, like it’s done to so many economies around the globe.
This economic warfare is both a means and an end within the counterinsurgency. The elites both seek to politically disempower the people so that degrowth can be made possible, and carry out degrowth so that the people can be disempowered.
The political utility in driving down living standards doesn’t merely come from the greater power imbalance that increased inequality creates. It comes from the ways the elites can use the people’s worsening conditions to hinder their capacity for fighting back. Poverty makes somebody less able to access the resources necessary for contributing to the class struggle. It makes them desperate for an escape from their unacceptable reality, putting them at greater risk of getting addicted to drugs or alcohol. As more people become “lumpenized,” and pushed out of the working class, they can be made into informants for the feds. Or they can be recruited into the “counter-gangs” that the feds use as weapons against authentic sources of dissent.
There are countless crises that the elites can engineer, and countless ways they can use these crises to advance their counterinsurgency warfare. This entire project is an attempt to manage an ever-more uncertain situation, though. The system’s breakdown also creates greater opportunities for the forces of progress to gain victories. And these forces can outmaneuver the reactionaries, should they succeed at fighting off the anti-revolutionary efforts of the ruling class.
During the stage of the class conflict that we’re entering into, the main obstacle we’ll have to overcome are the counter-gangs which claim to have a “leftist” ideological orientation. The anti-communist anarchists within the fed-controlled branches of “Antifa” are one element among these counter-gangs. Another element is the actual criminal gangs, which the feds already use to undermine revolutionary organizing making drugs accesible to activists to activists. As the situation intensifies, we can expect the state to increasingly use these lumpen elements for physical assaults against us.
If you’re committed to the anti-imperialist cause, you need to be putting as much effort into physical training within your cadres as you do into mass work, or into the information war. We need a layer of individuals who are prepared to defend against the ultra-left and lumpen shock troops which the state is readying to weaponize against our cause. Should we prevent these ultraviolent counterinsurgency proxies from halting our progress, we’ll be in place to bring about the imperial state’s final defeat. Because these left counter-gangs represent the only hope the state has for avoiding a scenario where the class conflict has escalated to its most intense phase, and where the state therefore is forced to use its most blatant means of violence.
The elites don’t want to use their right-wing counter-gangs to go after revolutionaries. The vast majority of the people hate the far-right, and would see this as a mandate for joining with the anti-imperialists. The elites also don’t want to use the military against the USA’s own people, as this would create that same risk of provoking an unmanageable blowback. If we navigate our situation properly, the counterinsurgency will be rendered dysfunctional, and monopoly finance capital will be subdued.
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