By 1965, the old slave power had managed to beat back Reconstruction and establish itself as a constellation of terror-states in the U.S. South. While the capitalist ruling class in the North was content to hide or mystify the national oppression the U.S. system relied on, for the defeated Southern planter class and their petty-bourgeois hangers-on, this sublimation wasn’t enough. They were either ideologically incapable or materially incapable of joining the northern capitalists in adopting grand-sounding language about equality while maintaining the national oppression of New Afrikans and Indigenous Peoples; their deep-seated ideological commitments required them to constantly express their white supremacy in overt and terroristic ways. Sitting atop a semi-colony of brutally oppressed people, the ruling class in the U.S. South had, as the slaver Jefferson said, “the wolf by the ear.” In order to feel safe in that great prison, the Southern ruling class had to maintain absolute, fascistic, political supremacy over the Black population.

Indeed, the southern whites had been more or less permitted to do just that in the long period between the overthrow of radical Republican Reconstruction in 1877 (the period known to the Southern whites as “Redemption,” that is, redemption of the white supremacist power and the defeat of New Afrikan self-governance) and the alliance that emerged between Black World War II veterans returning to the South and the growing Black petty bourgeoisie. This period lasted from roughly 1877 until 1950.

In 1941, the racist policies of the FDR administration were challenged by A. Philip Randolph and his Black March on Washington; in 1954, the Supreme Court ended the legal basis for segregation in public schools when it decided Brown v. Board. Northern capitalists were insistent on bringing the southern slaveocracy into the modern day, not for moral reasons, but for economic ones. In 1957, the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act, the first signed into law since 1875. These decrees from on high were motivated by the need to free up labor in the Black Belt from the regressive agrarian prisons that the colonial relations still kept them in; but none of these decrees changed the balance of power in the South. Black New Afrikans in the semi-colonial states were held in a vice of property and labor theft, rape, arson, lynchings, and undisguised murder. In the U.S. South, the state ruled by terror. Despite the promise of the amended U.S. constitution, Black people who registered to vote took their lives in their hands.

At the end of the 1950s, the militant streams of Black resistance gained more and more currency and began to unite. These were often spearheaded by Black veterans or radical Black students, many of whom were explicitly Communists — Marxist-Leninists or otherwise. This period saw the rise of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act was the result of a tightening labor market in the U.S. at the same time that militancy was increasing and the consciousness was widening for the support of a Black national movement.¹ Economic pressure joined with the Black drive for liberation. There was a real fear in the halls of power that the U.S. state could face a Black domestic insurrection and an increasing desire to see the fragments of the Southern planter class and their dependents defeated entirely, to consummate the triumph of free labor, as opposed to low-productivity sharecropping and semi-slave labor that still reigned in the South. Even the former planters themselves had begun to realize that they couldn’t continue to manage their sections of the country by relying purely on terror. They realized they needed to find a way to accommodate the form and appearance of equality while maintaining the white supremacist content of the slaveocracy.²

The VRA established a relation between the planters and the federal government that was similar to that of Reconstruction. Its general provisions under section 2 of the law prohibit state and local governments from enacting any law or rule that denies or abridges the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language group. Other general provisions outlaw literacy tests and poll taxes. The special provisions granted the federal U.S. Attorney General and the District Court for DC power over Southern elections, redistricting plans, and so forth, that essentially put the Southern states into a kind of federal receivership for the purposes of voting.

The War on the Voting Rights Act

Although the VRA was a necessary concession to save the capitalist state by creating a veneer of participatory democracy in the US South, it wasn’t fully implemented all at once. This gave the ruling class time to find ways to empty the vote of its power. There remained, however, a significant faction within the broader US capitalist class itself for whom the VRA remained ideologically intolerable. Existence of international pressure from the Soviet Union and the national liberation and Pan-African movements forced the US to maintain this veneer. With the fall of the USSR and the declining world-position of the US ruling class, this clique of ideologically devoted racists has gained more and more adherents from their bourgeois colleagues. 

The Federalist Society is one of the bastions of the movement to reverse the changes in the US legal landscape and return to the early 20th century when capital openly ruled the courts.³ In 2013, the US Supreme Court, that bastion of ruling-class power,⁴ nullified the powerful special provisions of the VRA in Shelby Counter v. Holder. In the 2021 decision Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court weakened the general provisions of section 2 of the VRA. Now, the court is poised to rule on the constitutionality of section 2 as a whole. The legal war waged by the growing right-fascist bloc for half a century is nearing its conclusion. We must ask: does it matter if section 2 is struck down? If it does, why and how? Is there any way we can agitate around this issue? Does it mean we Marxists must join hands with Democrats and other fragments of the ruling class?

To briefly answer each in turn: firstly, yes; secondly, it is a sign of how advanced the imperialist decay is; thirdly, yes again; and, finally, absolutely not!

What Will Be the Outcome?

Despite the fact that the VRA in and of itself cannot guarantee anything, and despite the fact that its passage was an accommodation that was fashioned as part of an overall effort to pacify Black militancy and disarm the Black national revolutionary consciousness of the 1950s and 60s, it is actually of great importance to us whether or not the fascist court strikes it down. Oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais have already signaled that the court does intend to roll back this final element of the VRA. This is part and parcel of the right-fascist drive to restore capitalists to open and undisguised power in all aspects of political and legal life. It dovetails with the same right-fascist attack on the administrative state presently being carried out under the guise of the shutdown, a political “conflict” in which the left-fascist Democrats are playing the role of useful idiot.⁵ Given the disposition of political forces and the economic situation (increasing inflation and unemployment) it is likely that the VRA’s section 2 will be struck down.

The fate of the VRA is a bellwether for the degree of decay of the old US imperialist system that prevailed from 1991 until today as well as the balance of power between the left- (Democratic/Progressive) and right- (GOP and MAGA) fascist cliques within the ruling class. If the VRA is struck down, Democratic Party operatives will ceaselessly and breathlessly fund raise and proclaim their old doctrines about emergency organization in the face of “Trumpist” fascism and the need to permit people from both sides of the color line to participate in and enjoy the capitalist system. In private, of course, they will signal more cynically that it’s just good strategy to give the nationally oppressed the illusion of democracy. After all, they will say to their donors in closed-door dinners, it’s not as if the masses of Black people — or for that matter, any working-class voters — actually have any way to influence the important policies of the US state.

If the VRA is struck down, it signals the right-fascists are extremely advanced on their path toward carrying out the genocide of the nationally oppressed that they have been preparing for Black and Indigenous people in the US.⁶ Striking down the VRA would remove entire layers and battlefields of intra-bourgeois political struggle — layers that are “wasteful” in the eyes of the ruling class, just like the “waste” of the administrative state that they are dismantling — but would also strip away the illusion that the US state can be altered by the oppressed voting in any meaningful way.

What Is Our Task?

If the VRA is defeated, the Democrats will attempt to lead the movement that organically emerges in reaction. Many will rightly be afraid of what the loss of the final provisions of the VRA mean for the nationally oppressed and other groups openly targeted by the right-fascist government. We cannot allow this to happen. Democrats will naturally frame the question as one of government participation. They will start new voter registration drives, demand mobilization to defeat the right-fascists at the ballot box, and exercise a full-court press for the election of Democrats to the Congress and in local government.

We must instead first agitate against the new terror-government directly, then propagandize to expand the consciousness of the masses to connect the striking down of the VRA with the entire rotten system. It will be clear to many that there are no self-correcting measures available. With the open and legal disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South and other right-fascist strongholds, the layer of mystification that promised government responsiveness to the people will be gone.

Now is the time to prepare for the VRA to be removed. Now is the time to lay plans. If it is not, and the right-fascists instead uphold the remaining section to buy more time before carrying out a direct assault on the ballot box, then our preparations won’t have been in vain; we can still carry out agitation and propaganda on the basis that the VRA could have been struck down, and likely will be struck down in the near future. We must broaden the call to include other landmark rulings and laws that were offered during the heyday of empire — Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board, and Obergefell v. Hodges — and warn that they too stand to be struck down by the right-fascists.

The moment is ours; the Democrats must not be allowed to stand at its head.

Footnotes

1. The tightening labor market put the pressure on to mobilize and “free” tied up labor; business interests wanted to draw from the pool of sharecroppers in the Black Belt.
   ︎
2. “By the 1950s the language of white supremacy was gradually softening in some quarters, becoming less shrill in an attempt to gain respectability for racism. Phrases like ‘states’ rights’ and concepts such as the need to protect ‘constitutional liberties’ from communist subversion and federal intervention were becoming stand-ins for raw racial rhetoric.” Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Duke University Press, 2015.
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3. See The Society Behind the Supreme Court’s Fascist Blitzkrieg in the Clarion.
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4. See Capital’s Supreme Defender in the Clarion.
   ︎
5. See This Land Ain’t Your Land: The US Government Shutdown in the Clarion.
   ︎
6. See DC Occupation: Coming to Your City Next in the Clarion.
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Federal government shutdowns are triggered when the federal legislature fails to pass a budget bill to fund government operations. Of course, the shutdown doesn’t actually incapacitate the government — the executive branch (the White House) marks certain agencies as “essential” and continues funding them despite the lack of the funding bill. This reveals what the ruling class actually sees as the “essential” functions of the US government.

The Department of the Interior has furloughed most of its employees, leaving federal parks understaffed but open (64% of staff). National parks also maintain their law enforcement, fire suppression, emergency response, and power maintenance staff. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will furlough all but 33,500 of its employees and those will be working without pay to ensure that air travel remains operational.

The Department of Education will continue to collect student loans and send out billing statements.

The Pentagon will be unable to pay over one million people serving in the US military, to award new contracts, or to start new programs. Elective surgeries and procedures in military medical and dental facilities are being postponed. If the shutdown is not resolved by October 15, troops will miss their first paycheck.

The IRS will keep all of its employees.

The Department of Health and Human Services is sending 40% of its workforce on furlough. The National Institutes of Health is putting three quarters of its staff on furlough and stopped basic research. Two-thirds of the CDC is being furloughed. The FDA will continue to function, but its staff will work without pay.

The VA (Veterans Affairs) has separate money available that was provided by Congress.

All workers tasked with processing oil and natural gas drilling permits and coal mining operations will continue to work. Regulatory and enforcement work of the EPA will cease. The FTC, which is currently overseeing the prosecution of big cases against tech companies, will furlough all but its commissioners and a small pool of staff. Lawyers who are litigating must request suspension of dates in cases like the FTC’s antitrust case against Amazon. Wall Street regulators are suspended with only 9% of the Securities and Exchange Commission remaining in place and 6% of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission workers remaining on the job.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will continue to employ less than 900 of its 2,500 people.

HUD’s Section 8 housing budget will rapidly be depleted. All processing will be halted at HUD. SNAP and WIC will continue to run until the end of October, when the funding for those programs is in question. When they will cease is not yet public.

Why Did the Government Shut Down?

The Democrats have finally taken a concrete action “against” the MAGA government — or at least, so it would appear. The bourgeois news media has announced the loggerheads between the GOP and Democrats over the past few weeks, ostensibly over extending healthcare tax credits (which makes health insurance cheaper), reversal of cuts to Medicaid, and opposition to spending cuts in health agencies.

This disagreement, with the Democrats loudly proclaiming they will not fund the government unless the GOP makes concessions here, is the public reason for the budgetary fight. The Democrats claim they will not agree to any budget bill that doesn’t address these three concerns.

What, however, is the material result of the shutdown? The Trump White House has been slashing government spending and firing federal workers since the beginning of the term. The GOP brought in private capitalist and apartheid billionaire Elon Musk, along with a hit squad of finance and business children, to attack the bottom line of many executive agencies. The shutdown is an exercise in “belt tightening” of a kind that the right-fascist coalition has been craving since the beginning of this presidential term.

Why would the GOP cave on any budgetary issue when the president is attempting to dismantle the federal executive agencies anyway? This is the culmination of decades of “lawfare” and legal maneuvering by the Federalist Society, a clave of lawyers and judges that seeks to return more direct power to the ruling class capitalists by dismantling the safety rails constructed over the 20th century and bring the US back to its early 20th-century roots, before the triumph of the Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions made waves around the world, forcing the imperialist countries into a stage of imperialist bribery for portions of their populations.

Any and all “temporary” measures taken by the White House during this “crisis” stand a chance of becoming permanent. The Democratic Party will eventually capitulate in the face of the shutdown, funding the government without winning any significant reforms. They will then turn around and try to fundraise on their “bravery.”

Organize Mass Meetings

As a result of the shutdown, the government will at least temporarily cease issuing reports on market data, which will cause confusion among its central bankers and may lead to sharp declines on the stock market. If the shutdown goes on for long enough to cause furloughed government workers to miss pay day on October 15th, we should expect a sharp contraction in the economy. Many families and individuals will be unable to secure Section 8 housing or other federal benefits and the strain on local social services will increase, requiring extra help that Communists should stand ready to provide. Federal workers will be in a state of emotional and economic vulnerability and shock. Ideologically Democratic workers will be confused and angry. Petty-bourgeois and small-time government contractors will begin to fail as their sources of income dry up. This will free at least some of these petty-bourgeois workers and small owners from their present ideological shackles. They too easily slide into reaction, but this can be overcome if there is a Communist movement present to educate them.

This is the time to vigorously attack the legitimacy of the government in which this kind of disarray is a regular risk, but even more it is the time to expose the logic of class warfare that underlies government action. The main questions that present themselves are:

1. Why is this (the shutdown) the only option to get the kinds of change the Democrats are trying to get? That is, why is the US government structured in such a way that this can happen, and why are regular working people shut out from any means to influence its outcome?
2. What is the strategic reasoning behind this shutdown? It intensifies the contradiction between the capitalist and the workers.
3. What can we do about it? Why are the corporations and capitalists organized to achieve political ends in this fashion, but we are not organized enough to have our needs met?

Organizations should be agitating on these lines among their communities. This is the time to call mass meetings to help address the problems that will begin to arise as a result of the shutdown, as well as to answer the questions the shutdown presents. Literature should be distributed on street-corners and government offices. Meetings should be held about the failings of the federal government and both bourgeois parties that led us to this impasse.

The bottom line is that the country — the US and all its legal forms and structures — doesn’t exist to help the working class; it exists, at bottom, for the wealthy. It takes its shape from the needs of the wealthy, the capitalist class, and whatever is agreed upon is best among them. This land is not “our” land. In a very real sense, it’s theirs. It is the task of the decolonial Marxist-Leninist to ensure that “they” — the ruling class — no longer controls it and the land itself is rematriated to the Indigenous peoples through a comprehensive system of land and political reform: the social revolution. We can make ideological inroads on this process now.

When the ruling class is flush and internationally powerful, it sends its client politicians to dispense largesse. When, as now, it is embattled, its politicians push austerity and white nationalism, which is the semi-concealed principle upon which the US state is built.

As the capitalists attempt to reorganize their imperial system, they are uniquely vulnerable. The working people of the US are primed to accept arguments that will break them away from the labor-aristocratic or petty-bourgeois class standing that leads them time and time again to align with their own ruling class against the world in the hopes of receiving good jobs, artificially cheap televisions, computers, and cars, and all the other fruits of empire. If we build this subjective consciousness now, while the iron is hot, we can temper it to resist later reversals and blandishments.

Sample Literature

Understanding the Shutdown

The federal government has been shut down by an apparent disagreement between the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. After ten months of lying down in front of the MAGA agenda, the Democrats have chosen to take a stand to help Trump and his White House dismantle the federal government by shutting it down.

This government isn’t by the people or for the people. That’s a misunderstanding, one that the ruling class is only too happy to perpetuate. When the founders of this country said that, they meant it was a government by and for white settler land-owning men. Not much has changed!

When the ruling class is strong and successfully bleeding the world, it is “kind” to us — out of self-preservation! When it’s weak, like today, it takes that kindness away.

Come to a mass meeting! We will ask — and answer — the most important questions about the shutdown and all the schemes of the ruling class:

1. Why is this (the shutdown) the only option to get the kinds of change the Democrats are trying to get? That is, why is the US government structured in such a way that this can happen, and why are regular working people shut out from any means to influence its outcome?
2. What is the strategic reasoning behind this shutdown? It intensifies the contradiction between the capitalist and the workers.
3. Why are the corporations and capitalists organized to achieve political ends in this fashion, but we are not organized enough to have our needs met?
4. Most importantly: What can we do to fight back?

Although it is the Republican Party carrying the flag of extermination, the Democrats consistently enable it to continue by failing to act to prevent it. The fact is simple: the ruling class endorses the murder of trans people. This endorsement is manifest in both Republican and Democratic policies — in the one as the active engine of legislative extermination, the other as passive cover for this heinous program.

No, even the “Democratic” states are not safe.

The capitalists are attempting to reinforce their control over social reproduction, to drum up hatred and division in the working class, and, more importantly, to secure the heteronormative patriarchal regime through which capitalist society exerts its power. Whether they recognize this as their conscious objective is unimportant; whether they are driven by ideological commitments to half-baked religious theories or by fascistic concerns with “degeneracy,” whether they are acting out of self-conscious economic motives or whitewash their material concerns as being driven by some “nobler” form of debased ideology, we do not care.

We say, they will stop.

The attacks will stop.

To our unorganized trans comrades: now is the time to join together in armed self-defense organizations. To our trans comrades in organizations other than ours: the League and its members stand with you. We are prepared to fight fire with fire and to bodily defend you. Should you need aid of any type, we urge you to reach out through USU or other League organizations.

Only through armed power will we repel the enemy.

And indeed, only the complete triumph of the social revolution can bring about trans liberation. Now is the time to raise the flag of revolution, to stand against patriarchal capitalism, to build our fighting force so that we may tear down our enemies, overthrow their barricade, and storm their fortress!

A luta continua!

Signed,
All-Empire Worker’s League
Cincinnati Community Aid & Praxis 
Connecticut Radical Reading Group
Red Help ATX
Unity-Struggle-Unity Press

At a time when the fury of the popular classes has manifested such actions as the daring execution of Brian Thompson, it is curious that the many leaders of the two hospitals have not considered what is happening right now in homes across Connecticut. Parents are being told that their children are likely to suffer, perhaps even kill themselves in the coming years. There are names and faces associated with this suffering, and they aren’t some distant faceless bureaucrats in Washington, protected by the many miles and layers of red tape.

Oh, yes, the executive order that set this tragedy in motion came from Washington. It was drafted by some staffer in some back room. It was signed by the inhuman flesh-puppet Donald Trump. The blame for his election can be equally shared between GOP members and Democrats. So yes, there is plenty of blame to go around.

But gunmen and bombmakers aren’t likely to be interested in them. At least, not for now. The untold legions of parents that found out on July 24 that their children have been sentenced to suffer and perhaps to die aren’t likely to be hunting for figures in Washington to punish.

They will be looking for the people in their community that caused this tragedy. And they will find them.

Curious that these people haven’t built bunkers, hired private security, and gone off the grid.

Because they should.

1. CEO: Christopher O’Connor. ︎
2. CEO: James E. Shmerling. ︎
3. YNHH Board Members: Thomas Balcezak, William J. Aseltyne, Gail W. Kosoyla, Pamela Sutton-Wallace, Alan Friedman, Anne Diamond, Frank Ciminiello, LIsa Stump, Michael Angelini and Pam Scagliarini; CT Children’s Board Members: Bill Agostinucci, Jonathan M. Carroll, Bob Duncan, Paul Dworkin, Matthew Farr, Bridgett Feagin, Christine Finck, Paulanne Jushkevich, Sarah Matney, Lawrence Milan, James E. Moore, Deb Pappas, Lori R. Pelletier, Juan C. Salazar, and R. Moses Vargas. ︎

The plan has ignited an uproar among liberal media outlets. In an analysis piece, CNN senior reporter Stephen Collinson called the proposed ban “a crackdown on academic freedom”, while the New York Times ran an opinion column by Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology titled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” about Donald Trump’s bizarre obsession with the university. Neither the prim moralizing nor the attempted psychoanalysis understands the true nature of the Trump administration’s decree. The move is just another instance of squabbling among factions of the coalition running the United States government.

The Republican wing of the U.S. government believes (or at least claims to believe) that all non-U.S. citizens are leeches on U.S. society and must be rooted out and removed. In a remarkable show of obviously transparent projection, Republicans consider the very presence of non-citizens in United States society to be an existential threat to the sovereignty of the United States. Thus, they view the removal of such “undesirables” as a necessary inoculation against the chaos of a world gone mad.

Harvard and other elite universities have long been bastions and promulgators of United States soft power. The elite university boasts the scion of power holders from around the world among its alumni and student body, as well as the best and brightest students from around the world, incorporating the fruits of their labor into the U.S. empire and depriving so-called “developing” countries from researchers and innovators of the future. While on campus, students rub shoulders with the next generation of U.S. business leaders, intelligence officers, media executives, and politicians. These relationships further the United States’ expansion into every nook and cranny of the planet.

Massive resource extraction deals and colossal concessions, counterrevolutions and covert operations, the wholesale mortgaging of the future of entire nations in the interests of United States capital — the bonds formed between ruling class members at universities for the privileged run like veins throughout the capitalist world, sending blood money back to the heart of empire.

The revocation of the privilege of elite education for the foreign bourgeoisies will shake networks of power that keep capitalism going. Cooperation across international borders is seen as weakness by chauvinistic, vapid U.S. politicians, who seek a greater consolidation and concentration of power among themselves and their allies, even at the expense of alienating the very facilitators of the imperial riches and success they enjoy. Members of ruling classes in the periphery judge strength among themselves by the level and quality of their connection to foreign capital and imperial power, and even a nonessential change in the dialectic of imperial oppression will prove to be a severe shock to them.

Base infighting for power is nothing but a flailing attempt by the ruling class to preserve a past that is slipping through their fingers like sand through an hourglass. They are losing control, and while they may not foresee the tailspin into which they are headed, the brutish, panicked actions undertaken by the Trump regime should not be seen as anything other than desperation. The ruling class’s own greed is knocking out the foundations of the very state that provides them with the power they crave. 

Mahmoud has not been charged with any listed offense; his crime is his support for the Palestinian national liberation movement. Mahmoud stood against the slaughter of his people and the ongoing theft of their homeland. The fascist Empire is committed to worldwide terror and the enslavement of humanity. The state would rather us remain silent, going about our cleaved lives apathetic to genocide — this is vile and unacceptable. 

Free speech is dead. Did it ever exist in the first place?

Our free speech rights go about as deep as a puddle on the side of the road. The American Fourth Reich, aided by the skeletal Democratic party, has gutted what little was left of so-called “civil liberties” in this country. The U.S.’s liberal democracy was founded on the “rights” of only the white, slave-owning, and propertied classes, leaving everyone else, especially enslaved peoples, grasping for the shards of a deadened life.

Regardless of what the slave owners who founded this country may have intended when they wrote the Constitution in 1791, the settler-imperial government has never meaningfully valued free speech. Just seven years and one president later, the John Adams administration would pass the Alien and Sedition Acts: the Sedition laws criminalized any negative speech against the government, while the Alien Acts let the president deport any foreign nationals. Adams, who was a federalist, used the Sedition Acts to arrest journalists supporting his political opponents, the Democratic Republicans. The minute differences between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans are not terribly significant — (both supported the slavery of New Afrikans and the genocide of Indigenous Turtle Islanders) — suffice to say they were the two dominant tendencies of early USian politics. Adams lost the political battle; the Democratic Republicans won the next election and repealed the Sedition Acts. And the Alien Acts? They remain in effect to this day. The president may therefore deport any foreign national they consider to be dangerous, based on this 225 year old law.  In essence, dystopian state repression is one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy.

The Alien and Sedition Acts would be the first major crackdown on free speech, but they are not the last, nor the most recent. The Democratic-Republicans had their own opportunity to silence mass dissent a few decades later when the abolition of slavery became a contentious issue. In 1836, an Andrew Jackson-controlled Congress ratified a gag order banning any mention of abolition in the halls of Congress. 

In light of the modern national security state, first amendment rights are shallow.  With state surveillance and a history of interference in liberation movements, an American citizen’s speech may be free, but only so long as their words remain barren and removed from action. The Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement: when nationally oppressed groups peaceably assemble, we can see time and time again that the First Amendment often has a selective application. Perpetual surveillance, state assassinations; sharpened knives which they are ready to use against any defiant organization. 

Before the regime will criminalize your collective expression, two circumstances must generally be met. 

1. The expression must be dissent, i.e., it must go against the regime’s foreign or domestic policy.
2. The expression must be popular. The degree of popularity can vary, but generally, the dissenting speech or collective expression must be popular enough for the regime to consider it a threat to its rule or the implementation of its policy. 

Popular dissent is forbidden.  

If this clownish blockheaded President is trying to weaken free speech rights on campus, he is late to the party. Colleges and universities across the Empire beat him to the punch by launching a full scale offensive against the right to protest before the Fall 2024 semester. Protests now have formal time limits. They are banned in popular gathering spots. Fascism on the Amerikkkan campus is objectively bipartisan. Trump’s threat is a promise to build upon the groundwork that was laid last year. Do not be scared. For fear is your greatest enemy. Now, we’re all able to see clearly without the blinding, twisted distortions of Democrats who use identity essentialism as bait in order to duplicitously rally support for their graveyard of a party, and therefore gut the very undercarriage of revolutionary understanding and action of the mass of vexed workers.

Saturday’s attack on student resistance was orchestrated by the regime’s use of the word “terrorist;” it is, by all means, a propagandistic term in the modern U.S., the same way “communist” was in the past, and is in the present. The state of course uses the veneer of a mythical “antisemitism” to justify its draconian measures. Claims of a phantasmal antisemitism from the very same administration that goes around giving Nazi salutes. Remember, the Trumpian gendarmes are the very same ilk that said “Jews will not replace us.” The very same people whose base committed a massacre in a synagogue,  now want to wage a “holy war,” which they pretend is for the very Jewish people they tried to mass murder. 

However, we must recognize that we’re in the depths of a revolutionary moment. The inflection points of class war are nearing a breaking crescendo, and it is up to us in the anti-imperialist movement to understand this dialectic of intense struggle and form a clear and firm guide to action. Now is the time to unite with left and progressive forces (While not compromising the proven Marxists analysis) to defeat the fascist juggernaut. In the age of techno-imperialism and the mass slaughter of our people, we must do away with the muddled Trotskyist tendency of splintering into groups of 50 (that has historically gutted the left in this country) and form a temporary alliance to defeat the strangling repression of the Trump regime. We, the mass reserved army of labor must pick up the red banner and fight for the liberation of all those colonized, imprisoned, and hyper-exploited. 

Through it all, the Democratic Party and its cowardly leadership has done nothing apart from throwing out a few vacuous platitudes and empty threats on Sunday morning talk shows. And how could they do anything else? The thread of oppression runs throughout the history of the republic, back through the Biden and Obama administrations, back through Reagan and Carter and beyond living memory. Deportations, the “tough on crime” agenda of the Clinton 1990s, concentration camps along the border — all featured heavily in Democratic administrations, despite hypocritical screeching about the supposedly unique evils being visited upon their fair land by the Trump administration. The legacy of the Democratic Party — even among liberals — is far more than tarnished; it is irrecoverably soiled. Whatever shred of decency Democrats could clutch to themselves has vanished. 

Two groups are facilitating this hostile takeover: fascist Christian nationalists and the highest ranking members of the capitalist class. The former hungers for cultural domination and the chance to establish a religious nation based on vaguely representative and specifically theocratic principles, while the latter thirsts, as it always has, for astronomical profits and oligarchy. They have already solidified their control of the state (they were voted in), and now they are moving to install as many party loyalists as they can in government positions until the sheer mass of fascist flunkeys is too great to oppose. Behind the wave of functionaries march the new-generation propagandists, proclaiming Trumpian visions in both official and unofficial outlets, and shouting down any opposing views. The old order is dead and dying; career politicos and CIA station chiefs, newspaper editors and diplomats, graduates of prestigious universities and longtime regulars at the most prestigious parties are all being muscled unceremoniously out the door. The most rightward agents of capital, working side-by-side, are systematically dismantling the last vestiges of the post-WWII white settler coalition.

As numerous U.S. backed coups show, what will follow the fascist takeover is a wholesale pillaging of everything that isn’t nailed down. The hyperrich have their eye set on the biggest plunder imaginable: that of the imperial core itself. The core is the last orange that hasn’t been squeezed — the petit-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy have grown fat and happy off their share of the spoils extracted from the rest of the world, and they’re about to be put in the juicer. Every service, agency, function, apparatus, every conceivable benefit given to everyone from the settler “middle class” on up will be sold at auction to the highest bidder (see former Soviet government enterprises) or simply eliminated (see the post-coup killing of the Guatemalan land reform initiative). Every shred of value that can be appropriated will be appropriated, and the capitalist ruling class, together with its church-and-state allies, will rise to dominate the United States like the United States has dominated the rest of the world since the end of the Second World War. The boot of oppression is coming for all who thought they were comfortable, secure in an idyllic existence, sure the class struggle would never reach them, insulated from all upheaval and tumult.  

The recently-passed Trump administration policies are very unpopular now, and their unpopularity will only grow as the months and years pass. So this new ruling class coalition has ensured that units of force stand by to enforce the will of the state wherever the will of the masses is found lacking. Local police departments have been equipped with military grade weaponry and tactical assault vehicles, massive training complexes have been built to train them in their use, and multiple letter agencies have been deployed with specific instructions to wear insignias and identification on flak jackets at all times during an operation. ICE and Border Patrol are arresting entire families, congregants during a church service, legal residents who were simply overheard in public speaking Spanish, and even Indigenous people. The message being sent is loud and clear: this is the way things will be, and these are the consequences for those who don’t obey. 

The historical position of the Democratic Party has been to serve as the brake on the one-way ratchet of U.S. politics. Republicans move the dial to the right, the Democrats stop any backsliding to the left, and little by little the window of the possible lurches into the burning hellscape where we find ourselves today. The Democrats are actually paralyzed by their class position; they cannot take even the most moderate actions in their own self-defense, because to show the capacity to effect change would open the floodgates of demands from their so-called base. In reality, the Democrats don’t represent the interests of the working people of any stripe; they were, are, and remain one wing of the business party. They are the wing that, during the 20th century, sought to consolidate the members of the ruling class with those members of the bourgeoisie subject to any social oppression — all while leaving the economic oppression that underlies those social oppressions in place.

As the party runs down and its supporting coalition collapses, so does the support the Democrats generally garner among the big bourgeoisie. George Clooney, who hosted the single largest fundraiser ever held for a Democrat and raised $28 million for Biden on June 20 of this year, just published an op-ed in the CIA’s paper of choice, the New York Times, calling for Biden to stand down. This level of turmoil at the upper echelons of the party, between donors and the party’s leader, Biden (when a Democrat is in the White House, they control the Democratic National Committee), merely demonstrates a truth that we have all known: the rot of the party is so great, that even its own fiercest exponents smell it.

In practice, this means that Donald Trump is already the victor of the 2024 presidential elections and the entire state apparatus will now pass into the hands of the rabid racists on the far right of the capitalist-imperialist spectrum. This is actually the preferred position of the Democrats and part of the double-game they play while holding the working class hostage with the threat of hostile Republican victories. While the Republicans are ascending, the Democrats can fundraise off of the latest open provocation from the right.

Worst of all, the failed assassination attempt on Trump and the resulting media blitz, the photographs of the bloodied ear and the defiant fists, mean that the party technicians attempting to boot Biden have lost their internal battle. The ruling class has informed the rest of the party and its apparatus that the time has come to “keep your powder dry,” and save the push against the Republicans for after Trump has been elected, for 2028. This means the Democrats will be forced to field a dying octogenarian against the invulnerable anti-politics Trump show and his Nazi support machine. The question of the election has now been made practically unimportant, because it is a foregone conclusion. The ruling class has chosen Trump.

Beyond fundraising, the Democrats generally benefit from being the off-footed party because they are unable to offer anything to the people when they are governing. Thus, while they are out of power, they are free with their promises. They will say anything during their out-of-power hiatus. Cancel medical debt; direct payments to working class people during the pandemic; close Guantanamo Bay and stop the war on terror; codify Roe v. Wade; the list of promises never delivered upon goes on and on. This is a ploy to position themselves as the leaders of a valiant resistance against Republican depredation. They wave the flag of progressivism as soon as their stay in office ends; when it comes time to take up appointments, they fold the flag of progressivism again and put it in a drawer. They then soberly tell their constituents (the dupes they’re trying to pacify) that it wouldn’t be pragmatic to enact any of the reforms they’ve promised. They give grim speeches about sacrifice and the nature of politics in a democracy, and the adult and reasonable thing to do, which is to slaughter the interests of the working class on the altar of Moloch.

For years leading up to this moment — half a century or more — we Communists have been too weak to push the Democrats out of the way and wave the flag that would never be put in the drawer. Now, on the eve of the second triumph of Trump, we are strong enough to stand our ground and lead the resistance to the fascists from the front. The first Trump presidency created the conditions of 2024; the 2020 June Rebellion in the wake of George Floyd sparked more class consciousness. The genocide in Palestine has further fueled the creation of new organizations or galvanized Marxists and spurred them into fresher action. Primary organizations are more solid now than they have been, more prepared to act, and the masses of the working people are at a higher resting state of class consciousness. Dissatisfaction with the state of the empire has never been greater. Now is the time for the red flag to advance.

The Democrats have been doing a marvelous job of discrediting themselves for us, but we must help them into the grave. That is, we must consistently and credibly thoroughly expose them as worse than useless; as hostile to the working classes, as warmongers, as genocidaires, and as racists. Only when their position has been completely debunked among the working people can we raise the red flag and march forward.

Then, we must advocate for the only resistance that can weather the storm of active, crisis fascism: Communism. Communism must become the name of the resistance against Trump and his Nazi cabinet. Resistance must be red.

This doesn’t mean underground terror acts, but rather the establishment of community self-defense networks among the nationally oppressed, copwatch schemes, red aid stations, unemployment councils, tenants councils, and all the other means of the Communist attack on the authority of the enemy state. We must at the same time spark or crystallize primary organizations in the workplaces of the working class that can coordinate actions, disseminate literature, and raise class consciousness. This is our historic task. If we succeed in denouncing the false resistance of the Democrats and in associating the advance of the red flag with the advance of the working class, we will succeed in establishing the preconditions for the emergence of the vanguard party.

Nonetheless, liberals are broadly treating the verdict announcement as a holiday — practically christened by the fact that it’s already been used as cover for imperialist war crimes, as the U.S. and U.K. empires bombed the Yemeni capital Sanaa during the same news cycle, hiding in the shadow of the verdict, and killing at least 16 and wounding 30, with more expected to die from critical condition. The capitalist mass media is flooded with inane updates on all things Trump, with virtually all social media sites replacing trending topics of Rafah, Palestine, Sudan, or Yemen (if they were ever even trending) with “TRUMP IS GUILTY” or “TRUMP IS NOT GUILTY.” Both sides have committed to the belief that whether Trump was found guilty or not, whether this represents an overdue triumph of justice, or a cynical sham, the trial and its consequences are very important. 

But we can’t accept this at face value. The question is: is this true? Will this alter the course of life for the millions of working class people within this country, the millions of colonized and imprisoned trapped in this prisonhouse of nations, and the billions more held at gunpoint by the same empire where such absurd soap operas play out? The answer is, of course, no.

What is this trial? It is the spillover of a protracted fight between factions in the ruling class. It is the brawl in the country’s high-end country club that has just happened to spill out onto the street. Yes, they often bicker over the little details of which method to use to maintain their power. What’s different about yesterday’s display? Merely that they’re using the very public machinery of the state, rather than backroom double-dealing. The faction of our enemy that currently holds power is the side that emphasizes decorum and state legitimacy, and is excited to give Trump his slap on the wrist and claim it as a symbolic victory. Extra emphasis on symbolic, as Justice Juan Merchan, the judge in charge of Trump’s sentence, has already admitted he won’t deliver any sentence that could impact the former president’s ability to run a campaign, like travel bans, house arrest, or a prison sentence. It’s more likely that Trump will receive a fine (the maximum amount he could be charged with is $170,000, or $5,000 for each charge) and be barred from voting for himself — though even that remains to be seen. 

The figurehead of the “Democratic” faction, Joe Biden, is likely to hammer the fact that his opponent is a “criminal” in the upcoming election. Yes, one becomes a criminal for embarrassing the “sanctity” of this country by financially silencing a porn star, but the gleeful commission of genocide goes unpunished by bourgeois law. That makes sense, as it is only the latter that is the sworn duty of all true presidents of this country. 

With all this in mind, what do we do? Ignore the pageantry of our enemies. Focus all attention and energy on what really matters. Condemn and organize against the imperialist war machine that such pointless noise exists to distract us from. Fortify the ranks of the student movement this summer, join it to the growing militant labor movement, form organizations of community awareness and education, and know now and forever that our salvation will not be won through an election between two fascists. 

Fight real battles. 

Seize real justice.  

“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.”

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.