Today, I gave the following speech at CPI’s Dare to Win conference in Portland, Oregon. This was my attempt to give our movement a better sense of how communists in the imperial center can preemptively defend against the tactics of the national security state.
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To the members of the Center for Political Innovation; of the Party of Communists USA; of the People’s Party; of the Libertarian Party; of all the other organizations that have joined this coalition against NATO and monopoly capital: I want to congratulate you. It’s because of your work that in this last year, we’ve been able to bring communism in this country to a place so much better than I would have expected only last December. Back then, the conclusion my most well-learned friends in the movement had come to was that even though the anti-imperialist cause was hopeful on the international level, our situation in the USA was still bleak. That is no longer true.
Through our rallies, through our information warfare against U.S. imperialism’s narratives, and through our building of new ties between the different parts of the anti-imperialist struggle, we’ve made 2023 into the best year for the antiwar movement in decades. Not only have we made resistance to the war machine a highly relevant part of organizing again; we’ve also made this resistance into something independent from the Democratic Party and its front groups. By expanding the antiwar movement beyond the niche of contemporary left activist circles, we’ve created a force that’s organizationally and ideologically separate from the Democrats.
We’ve established a network for the communist organizations that don’t share the compromised “anti-imperialism” of PSL and CPUSA. We’re not concerned with what the Democratic Party NGOs think. Our goals are to further the fight against U.S. hegemony, and to thereby nurture the anti-imperialist sentiments of the workers. If the liberal tailists won’t accept us because we have these goals, our only recourse is to come together and create our own formation.
And as much as the imperialism-compatible leftists try to make it seem like the cause depends on them, they’re in reality a liability to the cause. It was only until we broke from these leftists, and pursued a project outside the Democratic Party’s influence, that the anti-imperialist movement became a serious threat. That communists became able to reach sections of the people broader than the liberal circles which PSL exclusively seeks to appeal to. The argument is settled: the strategy of the anti-NATO coalition is the winning strategy, while the strategy of the established “leftist” orgs can only bring an endless cycle of defeats. The leftists who’ve tried to censure and isolate us represent the initial stage of the state’s counterinsurgency against revolutionary efforts; and these opportunistic actors have been proven unable to stop what we’re doing.
All we’ve had to do is not be pressured by them into abandoning our cause, which has required nothing more than a strong will. For the next stages of the counterinsurgency, though, a strong will isn’t the only thing we’ll need. Those are the stages where we’ll be having to navigate conditions which resemble those of the tumultuous situations that past revolutionaries have found themselves in. When you become a serious threat to our ruling institutions, these institutions are going to try to destroy you. That’s why I’ve oriented myself around two goals: building the movement in the short term, and preparing to overcome the backlash from the counter-revolutionary forces in the long term.
These reactionary elements are not just the fanatically anti-communist far-righters. At this point, they’re a secondary threat. Such a danger also exists from the radical liberals; the ones in the many branches of Antifa that federal agents have either infiltrated directly, or influenced through targeted propaganda. The feds have been able to radicalize these militant anarchists towards what is, in practice, an ideology of violent anti-communism. By associating existing socialist states with fascism, and by arguing that the Russian state is fascist, the feds have convinced so-called “anti-fascists” to attack communists who support existing socialism and support Russia.
Caleb Maupin is one of the first targets of this tactic; the psyop agents might have even selected him as a subject for testing it. He’s been characterized as a Nazi by BreadTubers with audiences of hundreds of thousands of people, and as a consequence he’s been made to feel unsafe in settings where there might be Antifa nearby. Another person in this movement who’s been targeted in such a menacing way is Alexander Finnegan, the Marxist-Leninist who challenged the Ukraine psyop and then experienced an ongoing series of violent threats. These threats have been the direct product of an orchestrated campaign by the FBI to terrorize Finnegan and his family, meaning his only hope for so much as reducing the horror has been to flee the country. Finnegan is now living in Guatemala, where he says he still often hears gunshots near his new home.
When I came to communism as a teenager in 2019, I was aware that the imperial state and its vigilante allies were going to come after the members of this movement. For years up to that point, I had been researching into the ways big tech was silencing dissent after the 2016 election, and how the media was using the Russiagate narrative to justify this campaign of censorship. This all made sense to me, given what I’d learned as a younger teenager about how Bush launched a war against civil liberties and then Obama expanded this war. But it wasn’t until February of last year, and the dramatic months that followed the Ukraine conflict’s escalation, that I got a clear sense of what kind of path the U.S. war machine is taking in its decline. I had long been hearing the idea that the American empire is turning inward as its global influence shrinks; now we’re seeing what this looks like. It looks like a war waged by our government against its own people, in a way that’s too insidious to fully see unless you hear the testimonies of its hidden victims.
How can we ensure our movement survives these attacks? Firstly, by remembering that whatever ways our enemies retaliate against us, that’s simply the cost of our doing the right thing. Akile Anai, the Director of Agitation and Propaganda for the African People’s Socialist Party, stated as such while responding to the FBI’s raid on her organization last year. Said Anai: “I joined this struggle voluntarily, recognizing that this is the history of what this government does to people who struggle for its freedom, and for true democracy. This is what it does to the people. So I did not enter this work being afraid, or thinking that this was a bad decision.”
That is, in essence, the same conclusion the majority of the Russian people came to when they were confronted with the violent campaign which U.S. imperialism is waging against their civilization. They see that regardless of the power the imperialists have to sanction, menace, and assail them, they must act offensively against the empire. That an oppressor or aggressor will retaliate against you is a given; at a certain point you have to stop caring about how they may strike back, and resist the evils they’re inflicting upon you. It’s the same mentality that’s motivated the Palestinians to strike back against their oppressors the Israelis, even when they’ve known the Israelis will retaliate; and the efforts of the Palestinian fighters are not futile. As Scott Ritter has pointed out, even when Israel has employed the maximum level of violence, the Palestinians have maintained some key strategic advantages.
The Zionists have gotten so used to brutalizing unarmed bystanders that they went into this recent confrontation unprepared, and the Palestinian resistance is able to take advantage of this. The crucial thing the militants have done is make themselves well-prepared to keep fighting the oppressor, even after the oppressor’s retaliation has come; and because the oppressor has acted with hubris, because it’s made itself feel so strong by seeking out targets who can’t defend themselves, it’s now in danger of losing everything.
Likewise to Palestine with Israel, Russia has been taking advantage of the growing strategic weaknesses of the U.S. empire. The anti-imperialist minded Russians; through their representatives in the country’s communist formations; have pressured their bourgeois government into taking away the Ukrainian fascist regime’s tools for further harming the Donbass Russian speakers. By doing this, these Russians have applied the same reasoning behind Mao’s statement: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.” This argument about the need to be proactive while fighting an enemy applies to any type of struggle, not just armed struggle; whether the tactic that’s best for your conditions is to strike, or to demonstrate, or to wage information warfare, you’ll have to employ some form of offensive maneuver in order to win. That’s the broader reality Mao was speaking to.
There is an irony to this. Because in the imperial center today, most of the socialists who claim to share this sentiment from Mao at the same time join their imperialist government in condemning Russia for taking action. The thinking of these socialists is based in an infantile, ultra-left way of interpreting the world, one that disregards Mao’s analysis about there being primary and secondary contradictions. These unserious leftists argue that we should oppose Russia’s effort to combat the primary contradiction in this situation, that being U.S. hegemony, because of the secondary contradiction, that being Russia’s capitalist state.
It’s this failure to understand the practical realities of what we need to do to resist imperialism that also drives these leftists to shun Maupin and his org, which have put on this quite important event. Unlike the African People’s Socialist Party, which has come to work with CPI despite not sharing CPI’s patriotic socialist stance, there are many on the left who view secondary disputes as sufficient reason to reject alliances.
That many of these ultra-lefts recognize the violent power of capitalist reaction, and the likelihood of tumultuous events during the coming years, doesn’t make them strategically placed to be defining players within the struggle. As long as they reject the strategy of the anti-NATO coalition, they and their cadres will remain too weak to challenge the state. You can recognize the correctness of Mao’s analysis about war, and do firearms or fitness training, while still undermining yourself by embracing ultra-leftism. Doing the right things in the physical realm isn’t going to make you effective unless you also do the right things in terms of coalition-building.
If we follow the advice of the ultra-lefts, whatever efforts we make to physically prepare ourselves will not be enough to save us. As Lenin warned in his polemic “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” for socialists to assume they can win against a superior enemy while rejecting substantial coalition-building is a fatal act of hubris. Should our present crises bring about a worst-case scenario, such as a civil war, the leftists who’ve chosen to remain insular will have a low chance of survival. That is unless they become converted into proxies for the counterinsurgency, in which case the state will protect them.
Even if civil war isn’t something we’ll encounter, fascism is something we definitely will. This is because fascism, the practice in which finance capital wages war to try to maintain the existing social system, is already being carried out by our most powerful institutions. These institutions especially include the Democratic Party, which has come to be the main political tool finance capital uses to advance its cold war goals.
Social media is what the liberal fascists will use to manipulate public opinion in their favor when they intensify their repression, and when they need to sell an unprecedented assault on democratic freedoms. They’ll try to purge all who oppose the war machine from our political and discourse arenas, then portray this purge as necessary for combating fascism. Because as we’ve learned, when you control the flow of information, it’s easy to convince many that even the most anti-fascist people are actually fascists. Just look at how they’ve portrayed Caleb.
That escalation of the attacks against our cause is coming, and it could happen as early as the 2024 election cycle; all the narrative managers need to do is fabricate another story about Russian meddling, and they could be able to both expand their repressive campaign and pass the RESTRICT act. After which the state could easily start applying the precedents established within the war on terror, where U.S. citizens can be labeled “enemy combatants” who no longer have any rights.
Do not let these realities about our situation instill you with pessimism. After witnessing the gains our movement has made during this last year, I can’t help but be optimistic. It’s undeniable that the majority of this country’s people have a primary material interest in ending the U.S. empire, and that this makes even many conservatives potentially able to come to Marxism. Should we build a relationship with the people fast enough, we’ll be able to lead a sufficiently strong resistance against the state’s next repressive measures.
The methods behind these measures were developed by the CIA, conceived during its attacks upon the anti-imperialist movement across the Global South throughout the Cold War. Of course, the CIA’s maneuvers have since been proven unable to hold back the progression of history; so soon after Washington seemingly won the great-power competition with Russia, Russia re-asserted itself, and the anti-imperialist forces regained their strength more broadly. The reactionaries who oppose multipolarity have found they can’t stop the transition towards the post-American global order; not even when they carry out numerous coups that install brutal anti-communist dictatorships. So the only thing they can do next is try to prevent revolution in the center of imperialism the United States, and apply their methods from those coups to here.
What is the equivalent of these coups going to look like in the modern USA? It’s going to look like the state fully exercising its powers for repression, powers that it’s long had but only wants to use during an emergency. This is the phenomenon that Edward Snowden described as “turnkey tyranny,” where those in power create the precedents for violating civil liberties so that they can later wage war against their own people with impunity. The war on terror let the national security state normalize torture, lack of due process, indefinite detention, and drone assassinations of U.S. citizens. Then the Russiagate psyop created a narrative pretext for censoring and prosecuting anti-imperialists. Our counter-revolutionary coup became complete years ago; the Uhuru indictments are an early part of when this coup’s full effects become apparent.
Obviously I don’t advocate for an adventurist response to these threats. If our response is passive, unfocused, and uncoordinated, though, we lose. That’s exactly the kind of error we can expect an org like PSL to make during the coming moment of peril. PSL only says or does things that are palatable to the Democratic Party’s core base; so of course it’s going to put out an insufficient warning far too late into the crackdown. The conventional activist mentality in modern America is one that makes movement leaders scared to actually lead. That incentivizes a passive way of operating, where the leaders hesitate to take any actions that may not get the approval of the liberal NGOs.
Our side in this ideological conflict has won the debate against PSL’s side because we’re willing to do what’s required for building a relationship with the people, and for rallying those people against the imperial order. The next step is to inform them about how the state is going to react to their gaining this revolutionary consciousness, so that we can mobilize them towards preemptively defending themselves. Russia’s military operation has taught us that when the opponents of international monopoly capital defend themselves, it looks like something quite aggressive. It’s not a polite request for the enemy to grow a conscience, it’s an effort to subdue the enemy by any means necessary. If the circumstances make us need to take our operations underground, we’ll have to be ready to do so only as a temporary measure; one that precedes a moment where we re-emerge with the people’s backing, and with the backing of those in the armed forces who might join us during a revolutionary moment.
That is the logical conclusion of everything we’ve so far been doing: a project to outmaneuver our opponents, where we take away the enemy’s ability to wage war against us. The domination which monopoly finance capital holds over the state we live under is perhaps stronger than in any other country, because the USA is the center of that worldwide structure. For as long as the present state exists, it’s going to continue acting as a vehicle for counter-revolution. The liberals, and their Nazi allies, are willing to take this effort at holding back progress to its extremes. Our only recourse is to put an end to the present state, and establish a new workers state.
This is going to require personal commitment from all who’ve gotten involved in our coalition, but you know that; Caleb has lately been making it clearer than ever to those who listen to him. It’s possible for those on the right side of history to overwhelm the forces of empire; the recent military successes of Russia and Palestine have shown this. The ones fighting for the right side only need to act with strategic intelligence, and figure out how to take advantage of their enemy’s weaknesses. That’s going to be the nature of our next tasks now that we’ve brought the anti-imperialist movement to success, and thereby escalated the class conflict.
You’ve taken on a special role in history; a genuinely transgressive role, where you can change the relations of power to a degree that no radicals in this country have yet been able to. We are going to do the rest of the work needed to shift the power balance; to make our ruling institutions extinct. Then we will build a socialism as beautiful, as prosperous, and as strong as the socialist projects that past freedom fighters have built.
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