This is the first in a series on the counterinsurgency that the movement for justice in the USA is going to need to overcome.
We’re not just seeing evidence of the American people’s revolutionary potential in the pro-Palestine demonstrations themselves. We’re also seeing it in the shift of public opinion against “Israel” among not only the people to the left, but also the ones within the MAGA base. The majority in both demographics oppose the Gaza genocide, representing an extension of the rise in anti-imperialist consciousness that we’ve seen throughout the Ukraine conflict. By the end of this summer, more than half the country had come to no longer want more Ukraine aid. And a few weeks earlier than October 7, the public was enraged over Canada’s honoring a World War II Ukrainian Nazi fighter.
The people of the empire’s core have been growing more compatible with the anti-imperialist cause for a while, starting with the elite’s engineered destruction of their living standards and the post-9/11 forever wars. These pro-Palestine protests are so substantial because of how ready the people have become to join with the fight against their government’s global evils.
In a situation like this one, where the pro-imperialist views of the labor aristocracy have declined in popularity along with the shrinking of the labor aristocracy itself, the ruling class needs a different kind of domestic counterinsurgency from the ones it’s waged in the past. It needs to do all it can to avoid a scenario where a modern equivalent of the Black Panther Party emerges, and this country’s communist movement regains what it once had. Because if such a strong revolutionary force comes into being under conditions where the people have become so much more open towards socialism, the class conflict will intensify to a degree it never has in this country. And the state will be forced to wage a more direct kind of warfare against its own people, making the revolution’s victory all the more possible. As a counterinsurgency is never in a good spot when it’s no longer able to work covertly, and has to involve a government attacking its own people.
Therefore, our class enemies are going to try to maintain the present dynamic. The dynamic in which the state’s counterinsurgency strategy is dominated not by bombs on neighborhoods, but by counter-gang sabotage of the genuine revolutionary efforts. Counter-gangs are groups that a government creates in order to divert discontent towards controlled opposition, wherein those the gangs manipulate are directed to attack the authentic sources of dissent.
In today’s era, when the U.S. public overwhelmingly dislikes reactionary terrorists, the most strategically useful counter-gangs are not the right-wing militias. They’re the groups on the “left” that are either ultraviolent, and willing to physically harm anti-imperialists, or simply able to act as agents of liberal gatekeeping within activist spaces. And these leftist ruling class weapons are able to gain supporters for their activities by appealing to the same anti-popular ideology which the ruling class promotes. Their goal is to get developing radicals to view the masses as fundamentally reactionary, no matter how much evidence we see that proves this to be untrue. And the way they’re doing this is by promoting philosophical irrationalism, the central ideology of the elites.
As the Marxist Georg Lukacs observed, this ideology was created in order to let capitalism’s defenders obscure material reality during a point in history when capitalism had lost its original revolutionary character, and needed to justify its own continuation:
The polemics of bourgeois science and philosophy were increasingly directed against the new enemy, socialism. While on the upsurge, bourgeois philosophy had challenged the feudal absolutist system, and the interpretation of this challenge had occasioned its controversies over objectives, whereas the chief enemy now was the proletarian world-view. This, however, changed at once the subject and mode of expression of each and every reactionary philosophy. When bourgeois society was a rising force, reactionary philosophy had defended feudal absolutism and subsequently the feudal remnants, the restoration. As we have noted, Schopenhauer’s special position stemmed from the fact that he was the first to proclaim a markedly bourgeois-reactionary world-view. But at the same time he remained on a par with the feudal reactionary, Schelling, inasmuch as what they both considered the chief enemy were the progressive tendencies of bourgeois philosophy: materialism and the dialectical method.
The way the elites have made this anti-materialist view translate into the predominant thinking of today’s activist spaces is by normalizing a pessimistic iteration of leftism. By convincing so many of modern America’s communists that they’re incurably in conflict with everybody who either isn’t in the left-liberal demographic, or seeks to expand the movement beyond that range of the population. Philosophical irrationalism says that objective truth doesn’t exist, which somebody needs to believe in order to have the anti-popular mindset. Because especially now, after the heroism the people have displayed over these last several months, one needs to fundamentally reject materialism in order to maintain such hostility towards the masses.
The sentiments that have compelled the predominant elements of the U.S. left to attack the Rage Against the War Machine coalition, and then reject solidarity with the Uhuru movement, are based within the idea that only those in the sanctioned parts of the “left” deserve respect. These authentic sources of anti-imperialist organizing have sought to grow the movement beyond this exclusive club, so the purveyors of the anti-popular mindset have viewed them as a threat.
Prior to the recent developments with Ukraine and Israel, these attitudes had already been normalized among 21st century American communists. They’re simply what a disillusioned person tends to embrace when they live under conditions in which a substantial workers movement hasn’t existed for decades, leaving the masses without the leadership needed to sustain a revolt. Without sufficient avenues for advancing the struggle, the default impulse of developing radicals who come from the leftist orientation is to adopt pessimism, and blame the people for the struggle’s stagnation.
I point to leftism as a particular ideological source of this trend because what we today call “leftism” is designed to take on an insular nature. Since the Frankfurt School replaced Marxism in the United States with identitarian academic theories, wherein the interests of different proletarians are portrayed as at odds depending on their backgrounds, it’s become easier for the elites to fracture the workers movement. Or rather to make it so that the movement itself no longer exists in a serious sense, as “Marxism” has come to be represented by leaders who only want to build influence within the leftist political fandom. What these leaders do is appeal to the alienation from society which leftists tend to feel, nurturing their impulse to prejudicially distrust anybody who doesn’t embrace their critical theories.
This is where the dogma that modern American conservatives and libertarians are all fascists comes from: a feeling of dependency on the left clique, wherein this clique is seen as the only space that’s safe. Which implies that those outside this clique should be viewed through a paranoid lens, even when they’ve shown themselves to be willing to aid the anti-imperialist cause. Our class enemies need us to believe that the American masses are fundamentally incapable of being raised up in their revolutionary consciousness; or at least that only the parts of the masses on the “left” are capable of this. And they’ve made such beliefs into what centrally drives the way the established U.S. communist orgs think and act.
Due to this migration of U.S. communism away from the masses, and towards the niche of petty-bourgeois radicalism, newcomers to socialism typically come to experience burnout. They’re not presented with the kinds of tools that U.S. communism could give them prior to the liberal co-optation, so they don’t see any progress. Naturally, an organizing environment like this one stays small in its reach, and subject to a cycle of failures. There’s always an element of individuals who stay committed to aiding the goals of the counter-gangs, though. Because unlike the earnest people who end up getting discouraged from helping liberal tailist projects, these actors are cynical in their motives, and glad to engage in any manner of underhanded tactics for the sake of winning this game.
Beware of the actors within Marxist spaces who spread falsehoods about those who threaten the organizing monopoly of the liberal tailist groups. Who place their personal interests above the interests of the struggle, and do things like sabotage efforts to protect antiwar organizing from state repression. Who model their rhetoric off of the Democrats, and vilify anybody who engages in dissent outside the parameters of the established “left.” These operatives represent the first stage of the counterinsurgency, the stage where the state uses its counter-gangs to dissuade developing radicals from supporting the construction of an authentic anti-imperialist movement. We’re in the process of overcoming this obstacle; after this, the obstacles we face will get progressively more ferocious, but they’ll also indicate we’re coming closer to victory.
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