“They say: ‘How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.”
—Aimee Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Monthly Review Press (2001)
There is a war going on within the two great bourgeois factions. Over the last 30 years, since the destruction of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Democrats and Republicans — the left and right wing of a single fascist ideology — have fought ever more acrimoniously over control over the United States Empire. This struggle has occasionally, and now with greater frequency, exploded into outright intraclass violence. Take Trump’s January 6 putsch, for instance, which was not merely a weak last grasp at retaining the presidency, but an early experiment in political maneuver by way of fascist militia terror.
Their relative unity has been shattered with the lack of a clear enemy and the collapse of the U.S. Empire’s foreign prestige. Both camps claim the war between them is something that should concern all of us, the working people of the Empire, rather than merely being a disagreement between the ruling cliques of a rotting state. On the left are the Democrats, the stabilizers, who are attempting to halt the rot that infects the empire and cling to the relatively stable fascism of the past — the Clintonite “Third Way.” On the right are the Republicans, the expansionists, who want to expand the U.S. state’s fascism. This is a disagreement of tactics and strategy, not a disagreement over principle. The Democrats feebly insist their struggle against the MAGA Republicans is a fight for democracy, while the Republicans claim that it is a fight for “Christian civilization,” tradition, morality.
Both Democrats and Republicans are the handmaidens of empire. Between these two camps of vultures, we, the working people, are liable to be torn limb from limb or crushed like a kernel of grain betwixt the grinding stones. It is imperative that we dispel the lies, myths, and half-truths told by both sides in this war. In the final calculation, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have the interests of the working people in mind. To them, we are hapless pawns to be cynically maneuvered upon a chessboard to see who will control the mechanisms of empire and which confederacy of bourgeois vampires will drink our blood and the blood of the world.
Factions have grown up inside each great bourgeois camp. By far and away the largest power bloc within the Democratic Party are the Third Way “centrists” and their far-right allies, the “Blue Dogs.” The leading politicians of the party — Biden, Harris, Klobuchar, Pelosi — are all members of this broad coalition of the center-right and right. There is a small, left-leaning wing of the Democratic Party that is properly called the “progressive” wing, which includes members like Fetterman, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez. While the centrist bloc occasionally trots out the language of social justice like a broken-down horse on its tired way to the glue factory, the progressives dress in slogans of socialism and social democracy — meanwhile voting rank and file with their conservative masters in the center.
For the Republicans, this dynamic is reversed. Their center is weak and has been consistently routed by their far-right elements since the presidency of the center-right Republican par excellence, Bloody Bush II. In recent years, this center has been reduced to a simple “anti-Trumpist” position which has suffered significant marginalization by the party’s continuous march to the far right — Romney, Liz Cheney, Kasich, and their ilk have been sidelined. The dominant factions within the party are the Christian theocrats, headed by Pence and their close allies, the so-called Trumpists like Boebert, Greene, and Gaetz. Where the Democrats are dragged toward the center-right by the gravity of their membership, the Republicans have been falling further and further into the abyss of the far-right, and more extreme fascism has been developing within the Republican cocoon.
The Inter-Bourgeois War
This battle was a long time coming. In any bourgeois republic, where money is the basis of power and where power is used to procure more money, the buying and selling of state power is a kind of property of its own. Senators put in their time on important subcommittees, then go into private business with the very firms that lobbied them. Their time in office is nothing more than an audition for their eventual career in the private sector, and they treat every legislative session as an interview with their prospective bosses. When those businesses need a favor, these same politicians come out of “retirement” to return to “public life” — a life of graft, debauchery, and greed. The elected representatives of the people of the United States live in mansions that would be envied by the mightiest princes of the old world; not from the proceeds of their humble and devoted service to the people, but from their service to capital itself!
Control over government offices have long constituted political spoils in this country, the reward doled out among partisan hacks for their devotion to the party machine. We all know the story. Set it in the 1890s, the 1910s, the 1920s, it comes as no surprise. Why should we be shocked to know that it happens today, exactly as it happened then? Perhaps the politicians have grown a little cannier, learned to hide their theft a little better — but not much. Instead of exchanging money in bags, now there are promises of future employment in lucrative oil company office towers.
While the Republicans and Democrats have slugged it out in public going back to the beginning of the last century, their policies have rarely diverged in significant detail. From time to time a gap has opened between them — Northern Democrats grudgingly supporting the Civil Rights movement, for instance, and driving Southern Democrats into the arms of the Republicans — but only because they were afraid of a riotous second March on Washington and how the movement might affect their voter turnout. Martin Luther King Jr. knew well that Lyndon Johnson was his enemy, a virulent racist. The truth of the matter is that, behind closed doors, the parties have long recognized each other as friends.
What are the real and meaningful differences between the Republicans and the Democrats when it comes to policy? What are the historical differences, and the differences today? Do the Democrats and Republicans differ on militarizing NATO? Will either surrender the U.S. nuclear arsenal, that tool of world destruction? Did either vote against the invasions of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, the greater part of Africa? Will either call off the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine? Will either peacefully end the Cold War with China? In the wake of the 2008 crash, which party opposed bailing out the “too big to fail” banking monopolies?
The Democrats, of course, spin their public relations story that they stand up for labor, for the oppressed. But look back at the history: when did they do this? Only when they were forced to. What happened when the rail unions threatened to strike in late 2022? Which president, remind us, was enshrined in the White House as the most progressive and pro-labor candidate since Roosevelt? That’s right, President Biden, the corpse propped up by the Democrats during the last election. This very same “pro-labor” president sided with the rail bosses and crushed the strike. With just a brief look beneath the peeling blue paint, we see the Democrats’ actions are not those of a party meant to oppose right wing attacks on workers. In fact, the parties have historically been not in opposition, but in alignment.
In 1991, after nearly a century of choking trade sanctions, starvation, brinksmanship, infiltration, war, and near-war, the USSR was finally destroyed by the United States Empire and its flock of depraved NATO allies. The feast that followed, that wild frenzy of capital investment, theft, and outright brutality, slaked the lust of western Capital for a time. From the former Soviet territory they carved great hunks of flesh. These were the days of the prospering empire, its last glory days, the vaunted “end of history.” One third of the earth, which had been taken away from the capitalists, which had been beyond the reach of exploitation of the West, was suddenly and awfully exposed once more. The Democrats were dressed in their finest Republican suits — the Clintonite Third Way — and across the aisle they joined hands to rule the world. What need had United States Empire of diplomats in the 1990s? After all, it had a ready supply of cruise missiles.
That has been changing. The extreme wing of the Republican party, the class-conscious wing of Capital, the wing that has provided the studious adepts and acolytes of the intelligence services and assassination bureaus, has slowly but steadily gained control of the ship. For this far-right coterie it isn’t enough to sit atop the mountain of bones that forms the foundation of the bloodiest empire in history. They demand the U.S. Empire let more blood, steep itself in more crimes, sink down ever deeper into the mire. These are the men who pushed for the Bay of Pigs invasion, who carried out Project MK-ULTRA; these are the men, and women too, who forged ties with the vilest religious zealots, who speak in awe-struck tones of the days of the rule of the white man, as though such days have ever truly passed.
Then came the lean times. After every capitalist success, there is the inevitable capitalist collapse. The burst of the dot com bubble was a hiccup, but the 2008 crisis was a sledgehammer. It struck at the foundation of all this new-found wealth and glory, and the party was, abruptly, over. No more Democratic warhawks gleefully joining with the death merchants of the Republican right to dismember oil-rich states; no, the hour of the wolf was at hand, and the rangy beast came prowling for its meat.
The first sign of this coming battle was the formation of the ultra-right Tea Party in 2009. The inevitable crash produced Occupy Wall Street, but it also produced its opposite. Unlike Occupy, which held neither capital nor the power to disrupt it, and was neutralized by the state’s counterinsurgency tactics, the Tea Party has never really gone away. No, it has gained ground, grown strong, and in 2016 it took control of the entire country with President Trump acting as the embodiment of the whole incoherent movement.
We have thus seen the bourgeois consensus fracture in two. On the left hand sit the conciliators and on the right the maximalists. The Democrats want only to hang on, to hold the Empire in their bony grip for a few decades more, to bring about the “end of history” in which Capital only climbs. The right-Republicans, however, are no longer content with just hanging on. They correctly estimate that a capitalism that fails to constantly expand its blood-drenched reach is doomed to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Unlike the Democrats and the moderate Republicans, this clique is driving the country further and further toward crisis fascism. At this moment, they are engaged in a political war. They are pushing to conquer state power entirely, on the grounds that their extreme crisis-fascism is more fit to govern the dying Empire than the left class-collaborationism of the Democrats.
Here we stand, as both enemy parties try to convince the working people that the long and hungry snouts we see are merely the cute muzzles of friendly sheep. The Democrats promise the rising tide that lifts all ships (but somehow always seems to leave behind the working classes) and the Republicans promise a return to bloody conquest and white anglo-saxon “glory,” but the tacticians of these great parties consider their enemies to be not the working classes they exploit, but rather each other. We working people are mere dupes in their game — draftees in their war.
Fortresses of Fascism
A terrorist dictatorship is not built all at once, does not spring fully-formed from the brow of Steve Bannon. Open (rather than the old covert, class-) dictatorship comes in fits and starts. It is constructed piecemeal. The U.S. Empire is a federated state; the right-Republicans have used this to their advantage. Although they had conquered and maintained a tenuous grip on federal electoral power for four years, they were unable to convince the majority of the ruling class that they were good for the job. Still, they dug their trenches and worked on their fortifications. They captured the Supreme Court for the rest of our lifetimes. Appointments were made to the executive agencies and the judiciary that would send their effects cascading down to us forty years hence — but still, in 2020, they lost at the federal level.
The same cannot be said of all the individual states that comprise this federated, constitutional empire. The right wing of the GOP, its dominant wing, has been building up fortresses in the south and west of the empire. Florida, Georgia, and Washington state have all become bastions of reaction. We are watching as advanced elements of the fascist counter-insurgency experiment with methods of control. The recent surge of anti-LGBT and forced-birth anti-abortion legislation represents only the outriggers of the movement.
In North Carolina, abortion after 12 weeks has been banned. In Kansas, a law requiring bothrooms, locker rooms, prisons, domestic violence shelters, and rape crisis centers recognize “distinctions between the sexes” based on “reproductive anatomy at birth” passed at the end of April. And the fascist stronghold is not only in the “deep” South; anti-LGBT and anti-women bills describe a north-south belt across the center of the country from North Dakota and Minnesota down through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, with another bastion in Texas. That’s only looking at the violently bigoted bills now making their way through state governments. The fact is that, using a strategy laid out by the group REDMAP, an initiative funded by the GOP in 2010, aggressive state redistricting has led to powerful enclaves of anti-democratic forces throughout the southern, central, and western U.S. Empire. Critics have noted that this string of fortress-legislatures has established the ground for a kind of permanent minoritarian rule.
Georgia’s Cop City is a prime example of this fortress fascism that now threatens to swallow the U.S. Empire whole. This megaplex in the heart of Georgia, funded by JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, WH Capital (which owns the Waffle House), Axon Enterprises (which manufactures body cameras and Tasers), the Cathy Family (who own Chik-fil-A), Delta Air, UPS, Home Depot, Inspire Brands (which owns Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Jimmy John’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Baskin Robbins), and other large, all-empire corporations, is designed to provide the U.S. Empire with the latest in counter-insurgency training and technology.
[T]he real piece de resistance is the simulation city… [the] “Mock Village.” This is a four-block square containing a convenience store, a hotel, a nightclub, houses, residential apartment buildings (low and high-rise), and a warehouse. This is the plan for training a domestic occupation force. In the early 2010s, U.S. army intelligence built fake “Middle Eastern” villages to train its imperialist occupation forces…. “In the emerging world of 21st century conflict, the battlefield is no longer the countryside but the city…. stores, a gas station, school, soccer field, church, mosque tunnels, subway platform…. The subway trains look exactly like that of the DC Metro’s, down to the logo.”
Each of these stronghold states is advancing and testing fascism in its own way, according to its own, localized plans. The most aggressive campaigns are being tested in Florida under the DeSantis regime and in Georgia under Kemp. Readers will recall the December, 2020, deployment of a SWAT team to raid and arrest a data scientist in Florida who was tracking the COVID-19 pandemic against DeSantis’ wishes. The latest attempt to establish a permanent terror-dictatorship in Georgia this past week made use of similar tactics. As Georgia marches toward the creation of Cop City — and make no mistake, the completion of the Cop City project will mark a sea-change in the entire empire, a new phase of domestic police terror — the state government has escalated its attacks from direct murder of the protestors like Tortuguita, who was shot 57 times in a police execution to the arrest and detention of bail fund activists.
Georgia’s Bureau of Investigation is also pursuing tactics similar to those used in the 1960s and 1970s against Black and Indigenous Communists. On Wednesday, May 31, police in Atlanta arrested three organizers — Marlon Scott Kautz, Savannah D. Patterson, and Adele MacLean — and charged them with money laundering and charity fraud. MacLean, Kautz, and Patterson are respectively the CEO, CFO, and secretary of the Network for Strong Communities, the corporation that runs the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, spurred on by Kemp and his network of sycophants, has already arrested over 40 people on charges of “domestic terrorism” for their efforts to put a halt to the construction of the Cop City terror-complex in Atlanta.
The plan of a large clique, the ruling clique, within the Republican party, is to establish these fascist strongholds throughout the country and use them to launch an all-out assault. But we cannot afford to lose sight of the fact that the execution of this plan requires the complicity of identifiable individuals that work on the ground. The “cogs” in the machine are not “just doing their jobs” any more than the agents of Hitler were merely following orders. This is no defense. The warrant, for instance, was signed by Judge Shondeana C. Morris, a former state attorney. There is no probable cause stated in this warrant. The statute cited by the affiant (§ 7-1-915 of the Georgia Code) does not even set forth the elements of the crime of money laundering — it’s the penalties section. Everyone involved in the prosecution of these three organizers is either an ideological fascist or materially serves as the tool of ideological fascism.
The Ghost of Fascism Yet to Come
From these strong points, the right-fascists intend to launch renewed attacks on their left-fascist bourgeois rivals. Part of their strategy, and a not insignificant part, requires the Republican fascists to proclaim an ever-escalating war against a shadow enemy: Communism, radicalism, and anarchism. The fact of the matter is that there are no organized Communist or anarchist forces capable of standing up to the state; we pose, at this juncture, no real threat. The right-fascists are not afraid of a resurgent Communist or anarchist movement, although they may be on their guard against the kind of spontaneous class- and national-liberation violence that spurred the 2020 June uprisings. No, for the right-fascists, Communism and anarchism are merely a stalking horse. By pressing against targets that many center- and even some left-liberals will agree are valid and dangerous — the Communist, the anarchist — the far-right can tighten its grip in the fortress-states it has captured. By the time the left wing of the bourgeois camp wakes up to the danger, it will already be too late for them.
