The logical conclusion of everything the NATO governments are doing today is a scenario where the opponents of the imperial hegemon are forced to bring their operations underground. At least this is what will happen unless we among these dissenting forces don’t navigate our circumstances correctly. Because there absolutely is a way for us to gain enough strength that the rules the elites are creating for us no longer apply. Where we come to be the ones with the advantage in the class conflict.
The participants in the anti-imperialist struggle are naturally coming to the conclusion that as the war against us intensifies, our only option is to overthrow the states we live under. Those in the Marxist-Leninist tendency of this struggle already know this due to the theory that they’ve absorbed. But more within this tendency are coming to take this piece of knowledge seriously, as opposed to merely being aware of it on an intellectual level; we’re now having to consider, in a more immediate and detailed way, what it’s going to mean to carry out a revolution. And the anti-imperialist struggle’s other tendencies could increasingly come to embrace the ML view on the state, as it’s becoming more apparent that this view is correct.
In a speech from this last week for the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, Joti Brar of the Communist Party of Great Britain articulated how this analysis should lead us to view recent armed anti-imperialist actions:
While preferring peace for the sake of human life, we recognise that the only way out of the ongoing holocaust being perpetrated by the imperialist system is through liberation wars. While the US congress declares that the USA can fight successfully on many battlefields and should prepare to launch a war against China, the truth is that the imperialists are losing their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and will surely be defeated if they dare to launch wars in several major theatres at once. That, refusing to take a pessimistic view of the global situation, we instead look with optimism at the prospects for our movement and for humanity, recalling the words of Che Guevara in his message to the Tricontinental conference of 1967: “How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world, with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world!”
Che is an appropriate figure for Brar to quote in the context of talking about the struggle to overcome imperial violence. His experiences in this struggle let him provide knowledge that we must study in order to prevail amid our present situation. Che left us with indispensable pieces of theoretical guidance for how we in the NATO countries can prevail amid the escalating war which our governments are waging against us.
Che got certain things wrong in regard to how this knowledge should be applied; namely when he assumed that establishing an armed foco group in Bolivia could succeed at seizing land from the government, when that foco lacked sufficient ties to the local people. This doesn’t disprove the correct things he said, it only means we should be careful to avoid adventurism. And if we can exercise this caution in how we conduct ourselves, we can apply these correct parts of his ideas.
One of these presently applicable things he wrote is that when governments give up on pretending to be just—as the imperialist governments are doing today—this creates the conditions for the people to enter into conflict with their rulers:
Barefaced violation of all legislation or of laws specifically instituted to sanction ruling class deeds only increases the pressure from the people’s forces. The oligarchical dictatorships then attempt to use the old legal order to alter constitutionality and further oppress the proletariat without a frontal clash. At this point a contradiction arises. The people no longer support the old, and much less the new, coercive measures established by the dictatorship and try to smash them…In these conditions of conflict, the oligarchy breaks its own contracts, its own mask of “democracy,” and attacks the people, though it will always try to use the superstructure it has formed for oppression. We are faced once again with a dilemma: What must be done? Our reply is: Violence is not the monopoly of the exploiters and as such the exploited can use it too and, moreover, ought to use it when the moment arrives. [José] Martí said, “He who wages war in a country when he can avoid it is a criminal, just as he who fails to promote war which cannot be avoided is a criminal.”
It’s impossible to foretell every detail of how the transition to socialism is going to happen. In the core of imperialism, though, we’ve recently seen a development that’s given us more insight into what kinds of obstacles we’ll need to overcome: the decision by many nominally antiwar conservatives to reaffirm their support for Zionism.
This is such a clarifying moment because it’s shown who our true allies in the revolutionary moment are going to be. Just because these conservatives have opposed the war against Russia, doesn’t mean they’ll side with the effort to liberate the population here from the imperial state. And we now know this with more certainty because at a crucial juncture in the struggle, these actors have sided with the U.S. empire’s most important colonial project abroad. A project that, even moreso than the Ukrainian fascist regime, is strategically essential for Washington in holding back the full emergence of the multipolar world.
They’ve sided with Zionism because they have a fundamental material interest in the colonial project on this continent. They’ve only opposed the Ukraine war because Ukraine is a project of finance capital—the highest level of capital—and these rightist forces represent industrial capital. Industrial capital is based in local extractivism, which in North America is colonial in nature. With “Israel” being an extension of this colonial project, these rightists are incentivized to be just as loyal to it as finance capital is; if not moreso, because even finance capital is hesitant about Netanyahu and his agenda of expanding the settlements.
The partisans of industrial capital profoundly desire to maintain and grow the exploitation of indigenous lands, whether on this continent or in Palestine. Which means they’re able to unify with the finance capitalists on crucial matters, namely when it comes to fighting against efforts to take away colonialism’s assets. That’s one reason why we can’t expect these pro-Zionist right-wing figures to come to Marxism: a workers revolution in the USA would inevitably entail a process wherein the theft against the indigenous First Nations gets rectified. Where the industrial capitalists on this continent lose their ability to continue stealing the resources of these nations.
Because U.S. imperialism is not only external but internal, directed at both the neo-colonies abroad and the stolen indigenous territories in the core, our class enemies are able to create a barrier towards revolution. A barrier which can only be overcome if we take Che’s lessons into sufficient consideration. The events since October 6 have shown how capable our government is of purging the anti-imperialist forces if these forces don’t adequately prepare. That the supposedly counter-hegemonic rightists have sided with “Israel,” and thereby with the efforts to intimidate BDS participants and criminalize all voices for peace, has strengthened the national security state to a degree we can’t ignore. We must adapt our practice to these threats, or everything we’re doing today is going to become a prologue to when our movement gets brutally crushed.
Should we sufficiently prepare; should we train our cadres for a scenario comparable to the one Che faced; then we’ll reverse the power dynamic between us and our class enemies. We’ll make their efforts to wage anti-revolutionary warfare backfire, giving their repressive campaign the effect of turning the population against the government. The essential variable is whether there’s a strong revolutionary movement with sustainable momentum. If we bring such a force into being, we’ll become capable of winning support from not just the people, but the elements within the empire’s institutions which have revolutionary potential. Those being the armed service members who are becoming disillusioned with the war machine, or who have potential to become so. We give them an avenue for countering the power of the ruling elites, and they’ll provide us with the help we’ll need to prevail.
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