Above: FBI at the home of African People’s Socialist Party chairman Omali Yeshitela
What’s the strongest piece of evidence that the majority of the American people are capable of uniting behind a revolt against our government? That everyone who’s opposed to the war machine, and the inflation crisis it’s exacerbating, is worth bringing into a united front against imperialism? The strongest indication that most of our society has revolutionary potential is the reality of how many people are going to be left on the side of the have-nots when capitalism’s decline reaches its next stage, and our ruling elites make class divisions even more extreme. This dystopian scenario has long been in the process of coming true, and our recent reminder of the Zionist colonial project’s evils should further our awareness about what our rulers aim to do to us.
The phenomenon where the USA increasingly uses the tools of the Zionist occupiers against its own people has been noticeable for a long time; in 2011, a reporter who was observing the police response to Occupy Wall Street interviewed an expert who said that Israel already largely defined our national security state:
Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security and a leading expert on terror and civil liberties, said the Israeli influence on American law enforcement is so extensive it has bled into street-level police conduct. “After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture,” Greenberg told me. “The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we’re going to spread that into the fabric of everyday American life? It’s counter-terrorism creep. And it’s exactly what you could have predicted would have happened.”…“After 9/11 we had to react very quickly,” Greenberg remarked, “but now we’re in 2011 and we’re not talking about people who want to fly planes into buildings. We’re talking about young American citizens who feel that their birthright has been sold. If we’re using Israeli style tactics on them and this stuff bleeds into the way we do business at large, we’re in big trouble.”
How to respond to today’s situation, where this process has come so far along that the Department of Justice is charging Black liberation groups with speech crimes like how Israel criminalizes Palestinian groups? We must respond by working to build a network between all the elements that share a primary interest in defeating the U.S. empire; build connections with the broader masses outside the activist spaces; and thereby keep up the momentum to be able to outmaneuver our ruling institutions. In order to achieve these goals, we have to recognize just how many allies our cause is capable of gaining, and how many it already has; this is what Uhuru, the liberation group the DOJ is going after, has recognized. And that’s why out of all the other people who call themselves anti-colonial Marxists, it’s the Uhuru 3 who’ve been targeted in this way: the state sees them as genuine threats, as they have the understanding of mass work which can make radical organizing actually effective.
Uhuru, and the demographic of colonized working-class people that Uhuru is oriented around representing, are among many elements of our society that have good reasons to resist the U.S. empire. And I’m not only talking about the average working-class whites; I’m also talking about the types of conservatives and libertarians who’ve broken from the pro-imperialist right. Because coming to be in opposition towards pro-war policies, especially when this involves splitting from the political forces you’ve most been in proximity to, is how to gain an especially advanced amount of anti-imperialist consciousness. It gives you a clear sense of the distinctions between the ideas you have, and the ideas you’ve rejected.
The Rage Against the War Machine organizing coalition—whose members Uhuru works in proximity to—is a product of political actors with integrity breaking from the forces of opportunism. The Libertarian Party, which is part of RAWM, has decided to oppose aid to Ukraine and Israel, even though this has displeased the wealthy donors who used to back it. Caleb Maupin, whose org CPI is also part of the coalition, came to where he is after splitting from the left opportunist World Workers Party (with their dispute having been over whether it’s worthwhile to connect with anyone outside the organizing niche). The Party of Communists USA, another coalition member, was created by former members of CPUSA who could no longer tolerate that org’s opportunism.
These actors have taken the right side of history because they’ve recognized that they must do whatever is necessary to resist the imperial state; the people they used to be connected to think the opposite, because their interests are instead in defending the existing power structure. For the members of this organizing coalition, though, the only rational choice has been to join with forces like Uhuru in resisting the imperial state.
This is the great hope for the people’s victory while we enter into this moment of unprecedented peril for democratic forces in the USA: the reality that there’s capacity for anti-imperialist solidarity among not just the Americans who’ve so far gained anti-imperialist consciousness, but also the majority of Americans. If one bases their view of our conditions upon the pessimistic mindset, they’ll only see reasons to believe the people will betray the cause for liberation; and therefore won’t see any reason to back the anti-imperialist united front. Pessimistic expectations for the class struggle are a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the pessimists experience endless defeats because of their own unwillingness to do what’s necessary for winning.
The prevalence of these expectations among so many communists in today’s America isn’t an unsolvable problem, though; it’s a symptom of the conditions we’ve long been living under. Conditions wherein our capitalist dictatorship has acted without effective opposition ever since the authentic workers movement got destroyed in the late 20th century. Though this problem can’t be solved by convincing the members of the insular left, it can be solved by defeating the system that produced the insular left.
The challenge we must take on now is one of rebuilding an entire long-lost movement, and so many of the communists who get confronted with this challenge get too overwhelmed to commit to it. They take the easier option, and join with the institutionally backed forces on the left in attacking anyone who truly wants to reach the people. This is why almost none of the left has sided with Uhuru amid ANSWER’s recent efforts to render Uhuru’s struggle invisible: the Uhuru case isn’t trendy, so giving it attention won’t help anyone in the project to hold a monopoly over leftist circles. And when you’ve seen all of our society’s popular movements so starved of any kind of influence for so long, it’s easy to invest yourself in anyone who appears to offer your cause a substantial amount of power. Dominating a niche isn’t where the real power can be found, though; the real power is in a project that gets out of the movement and into the masses; or as Lenin phrased it, that goes lower and deeper to find the real masses.
Uhuru has aligned itself with the antiwar united front because its leaders understand that many among these real masses include people from ideological orientations which aren’t on the left, or at least the conventional “left.” The biggest sources of anti-imperialist sentiment; of opposition towards the proxy wars in both Israel and Ukraine; are within demographics that today’s prevailing activist mentality discourages its adherents from trying to reach. There’s appeared organic mass opposition towards aid to Ukraine, as well as support for a Gaza ceasefire, among the majority of the MAGA base. Which makes MAGA one among a series of elements from which progressive thinking and action can come out; despite the efforts of the Ben Shapiros to instill a blind desire for anti-Palestinian violence among conservatives, most of them are coming to the conclusion that any decent person would come to.
It was inevitable that this revolutionary potential would emerge from places outside the left; both because what we’ve come to know as the “left” has become much more aligned with imperialism than it wants to admit, and because the collapse of the U.S. empire was always going to prompt many Americans to shift their thinking. In a society where the need for an effective opposition towards our imperialist government is getting ever more acute; and the ones who claim to represent this opposition are too prideful to actually do their jobs; the people who get excluded from the left have to find alternative avenues for advancing their material interests. So many are feeling a growing need to resist the security state that’s destroying our liberties, the corporate designs for destroying our living standards, and the war machine that’s threatening to destroy our entire world.
And for as many of the obstinate rightists who’ve reaffirmed their support for Israel, there are also individuals who’ve aligned with conservatism but are increasingly choosing the correct side of history. Individuals who, as history keeps presenting them with higher-stakes decisions, find themselves unable to side with those who use the idea of conservatism to argue for war. The next thing that plenty of these disaffected right-wingers do is come to Marxism, and if not all of them come to Marxism, plenty of them at least become willing to collaborate with Marxists on resisting the imperial state. RAWM proved this.
The process we’re witnessing among many of the American people who don’t come from colonized backgrounds; yet keep showing signs of breaking from the colonialist ideology which the empire propagates; is a battle between two opposing forces. The forces of imperial domination, and the forces of progressive liberation, are growing more clearly distinct as our power struggles escalate. And ever more people are picking which one of these forces they want to align with.
Like how the example of the Black Panthers was able to bring whites who used to be racist towards anti-racism; teaching solidarity to minds that used to be so closed; the efforts of today’s liberation fighters can help heal divides in our society which today seem hopelessly deep. Racial resentments created by centuries of systemic violence; heightened ideological polarization brought on by an intensifying imperialist crisis; needless infighting among anti-imperialists that gets nurtured by our enemies; these things can be overcome. So much progress could come from the necessity our conditions are creating for us to unify, and to mobilize against the imperial state. This is a menace that threatens us all, in a way which grows more urgent all the time. Any future we have is one that will be based upon building a diverse network of those who oppose this greatest threat towards peace and prosperity.
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