It’s November 2024, and the country has reached a point similar to the one it was in four years earlier. Except now things are even more tense. Threats of political violence, enabled or even nurtured by our national security state, have created a widespread sense of fear. The polarization has been exacerbated both by a series of revelations about Joe Biden’s indefensible actions in relation to Ukraine; and by the Biden campaign’s colluding with big tech to suppress knowledge about these things. The period of transition towards inauguration day is troubled by a feeling that nothing has truly been resolved, and with the latest economic disasters, there’s a lack of confidence that society is going to remain stable.
Regardless of which party wins, finance capital and its agents within the Democratic Party, the unelected intelligence apparatus, the tech industry, and the corporate media are in place to exploit the moment’s crises. What they’ll aim to do is implement what Edward Snowden called “turnkey tyranny,” where the state attacks civil liberties after having already made these liberties conditional long ago.
It was during the Trump presidency, when the media could use a sensational White House drama to distract the public, that finance capital created the precedents for the assaults upon democratic freedoms which it aims to soon carry out. The national security state had already used Bush and Obama’s war on terror to normalize the persecution of whistleblowers, unconstitutional mass surveillance, negation of due process, torture, and the assassination of U.S. citizens. It wasn’t until Trump, though, and the “Resistance” color revolution which finance capital organized in response to him, that the state further expanded this repressive campaign into the anti-imperialist movement. The strategy which finance capital’s agents adopted was to use fighting Trump as a rationale for censorship, lawfare, and McCarthyist smears against those who are fighting NATO’s war machine.
The latest precedent the national security state has established is the one which allows any anti-imperialist to be arrested, as shown by the raid and indictments of the members of the African People’s Socialist Party. The drivers of this coup against civil liberties are only waiting for justification to do the same things to the other anti-imperialist orgs; as well as to pass the RESTRICT act, the bill which would make the anti-democratic logic behind the Uhuru indictments codified into law. We’ve already experienced a power grab by the intelligence centers; the next stage is one where these centers fully exercise their influence. Yves Smith describes how extensive and insidious the erosion of any true semblance of “democracy” has gotten during the new cold war:
If you’re a regular reader, you know that one of the sub-themes at God’s Spies is “The other coup,” the one that no one in the mainstream wants to acknowledge. Even those moved strongly to decry the fascist Trumpian party (which certainly exists) and fear the coup it certainly represents, find themselves hard-pressed to decry the other coup, the ongoing one by our National Security State. Truth be told — and I mean that literally — one reason that some encourage the “other coup” is that the NatSec State is working to benefit them … for the moment, at least. No one in the establishment wants Trump to be president again, including the CIA. Hell, they didn’t want him to be president the first time around. Sen. Chuck Schumer, speaking in January 2017, after Trump’s election but before his inauguration, made this unforgettable comment: “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.” [Comment transcribed by me.]
This other coup is by far the more effective coup, and therefore the one we should take the most seriously. The purpose of the “ResistanceTM” psyop was to make it look like our ruling institutions represent an essential source of protection against an imminent fascist takeover. The narrative managers want us to focus entirely on a hypothetical scenario where the Trumpists become the equivalents of the Nazis, when fascism is already here and has backing from the most established centers of power.
It’s the threat towards democracy, workers rights, racial equality, and peace that goes unnoticed and unchallenged by what we conventionally consider the “left;” this is because the left today is focused on building a following within the Democratic Party’s core base, rather than on winning the broader masses. (That’s what’s behind their disavowing Russia’s anti-fascist action in Ukraine, as the liberals they seek to appeal to will never accept that Russia is in the right in the conflict.) As a consequence of these leftists embracing this opportunistic strategy, they’ve in effect aligned themselves with the same Democrat policies that are instrumental for suppressing opposition towards austerity, war, and the police state.
That’s the insidious nature of the anti-democratic campaign the Russiagate psyop has facilitated: its been able to gain the support of the primary parts of the country’s socialist movement by convincing leftists that all of the Democratic Party’s recent repression has acted only to harm the reactionary right. This absurdly naive reasoning is why the most prominent types of American socialists have criticized Biden’s response to January 6th for supposedly being too lenient on those who were arrested. This is the mentality of “socialists” who don’t know what’s in their own best interests, because they don’t know where the main fascist threat is. With finance capital’s shift towards primarily using the Democratic Party as a political tool, the main fascist threat is now in the Democrats, in the intelligence community, and in the corporate entities which seek to crush all anti-NATO voices.
The January 6th response, the recent lawfare against Trump, and other recent judicial overreaches that have been rationalized via a “progressive” ideological angle are nothing more than precedents for repressing radicals. They don’t represent progress under a capitalist state, like the passing of the Civil Rights laws did; they come not from any organic mass movement, but from an effort by finance capital to create the conditions for an anti-revolutionary purge.
The thing finance capital has been able to gain from this McCarthyist campaign is the loyalty of the predominant parts of the “left.” What it’s lost, though, is significant enough to potentially bring our class struggle towards victory for the workers. Because of Russiagate, there’s been a political realignment; one where at the same time that liberals and leftists have come to a neocon stance, or at least to a broadly anti-Russian stance, conservative workers have become far more anti-NATO. Which means that if communists are willing to adapt their practice according to this realignment, they’ll be able to build a movement with too much mass backing for the state to subdue it.
Doing this does not mean tailing the right. There are right deviationists within Marxist circles who do tail the right, but there are also more serious people who’ve been able to avoid the errors of both the right and left opportunists. It’s absolutely possible to stop excluding conservative workers from your outreach; to combat the state’s efforts at creating precedents for anti-communist repression; and to build a coalition with anti-NATO forces which exist outside the left; without adopting reactionary stances like the right deviationists do. I’ve been trying to fight the Russiagate psyop and its related narratives for six years, ever since I became aware of the pro-imperialist intent behind the media’s focus on Trump and Russia; yet it wasn’t until this year that I learned of this anti-monopoly coalition, and how effective it is at combating these schemes of finance capital.
The FBI is going after Uhuru, a pro-Russian org, because it’s a group that opposes NATO in a principled way. And that Uhuru has decided to ally with the other pro-Russian orgs, rather than shun them like the compatible left wishes it would, has made the org even greater of a threat to our ruling institutions. We must follow its example. We have the ability to make the national security state’s turnkey tyranny provoke an uprising, grow the membership of the pro-Russian orgs, and greatly spread revolutionary consciousness. This is going to have to involve making the people into our allies within this fight, which means rejecting the New Left’s insular way of operating. Building a relationship with the workers—who have a primary material interest in ending U.S. imperialism, and thereby in combating the Russiagate psyop—is how we can survive this.
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