However, white supremacists face an immediate contradiction due to the essential role of undocumented labor in the U.S. Some capitalists have already begun to beg the president to scale down the raids, complaining that ICE is taking all their best workers and hurting their profit margins. Every fascist accusation against the Global South is an admission², whether directed at Black people in South Afrika for “white genocide” or undocumented people in the imperial core for bringing violence to a society that seeks to exploit and assault them. 

30 years after apartheid, the 7% minority of white settlers continue to occupy 72% of South Afrika’s farmland. Legalistic mechanisms for land reforms have failed to address the problem; only 9% of the land has been returned to the Black people it was stolen from. Before it can return land, the government needs to provide compensation to the white settler. In other words, the law requires the government to pay thieves to return stolen land. Black South Afrikans can’t get their land back because doing so would bankrupt the country. The result? In 2025, South Afrika has the highest wealth inequality of any country in the world. The average Black household owns 5% of the wealth of the average white household. These statistics alone explain why South Afrikan white lobbying groups — who project false claims of supposed “racial persecution” throughout the world  — have spoken out against relocation to the U.S. Relocating white settlers would only hamper domestic settler efforts towards retaking full political power and overturning the basic legal rights won by the Black majority in 1994. One white pensioner spelled the situation out clearly: “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?” 

Trump’s relocation of white settlers appears to be part of a larger U.S. attack on South Afrika’s government. In 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted the “Land Expropriation Act” —  essentially an eminent domain law which allows the government to repurpose private land for the public benefit. According to the law, land can only be expropriated without compensation in limited scenarios, like when property is unused or abandoned. To this day, no land has been seized in South Africa without compensation. This is the law that Trump claims will cause “white genocide” in South Afrika. The U.S. had already cut off nearly all foreign aid to South Afrika back in February, throwing the country’s healthcare system into a new crisis overnight. 

Although Trump and his imperialist collaborators understand the reformist nature of South Afrika’s government, the country is still centered in the U.S.’ crosshairs because of its rejection of outright western colonial rule. South Afrika has been represented by the ANC (African National Congress) — the party of Nelson Mandela — since the end of apartheid. In all likelihood, the U.S. wants to remove the ANC from power and replace it with one of the more imperialist-friendly parties representing white interests. In its 30 years of rule, the ANC has built strong economic relationships with enemies of the U.S. such as China, Russia, and Iran. The South Afrikan lawsuit against so-called “israel” in the International Court of Justice — supposedly the highest court in the world — continues to isolate the zionist entity, which has lost sympathy even in the West. If the U.S. were to succeed in its regime change effort, they would replace the ANC with a party such as the Democratic Alliance. With its bedrock of white support, this party would be quick to submit to the U.S. by signing extortionist trade deals and dismissing the I.C.J. lawsuit. For Trump, the chance to bully an oppressed country like South Afrika while pandering to the white base at home was too convenient to pass up. 

From within the U.S., we can see how the relocation fiasco is in perfect alignment with the current fascist playbook. The illusions of a multi-racial participatory society in a racist settler colony are dissipating in the face of an explicit preference for white immigration, especially those who show loyalty to the imperial project. I.C.E. agents and deputized local police are snatching undocumented people from their homes and workplaces. The most immediate hurdle to the new terror project lies in the capitalist class itself, who keenly appreciate the essential role of undocumented immigrants in the Amerikan economy. Capitalists in both meatpacking and agriculture economic sectors pleaded directly to Trump that the ICE raids are having a bad effect on business. By working the hardest jobs for the least pay, undocumented workers ensure that Amerikans have access to cheap produce while guaranteeing a steady profit for the capitalist. The class collaboration between these capitalists and Amerikans at large is essential to the arrangement. Without undocumented labor, the already small profit margins in agriculture and meatpacking would vanish, which would then trigger skyrocketing food costs. The takeaway from this is that there was already ample reason to be in the streets before the ICE raids began. Instead of waving the Amerikan flag like the recently-arrived South Afrikan settlers, protesters should agitate based on the general conditions of racial hierarchies in labor. Violent ICE raids will of course continue, although the business enterprises of certain capitalists will now be spared by the Trump regime. The federal and municipal pigs will continue to arrest grandparents, parents, and children. 

While fascists balance the contradictions between their rhetoric and reality, they still agitate their base by attacking a sovereign nation with racist dog whistles. On June 2, 9 more settlers from South Afrika arrived in the U.S, and more will be on the way unless South Afrika bows under the pressure. We must never forget that Land Back is as desperately needed here on Turtle Island as it is in South Afrika. Amerikan fascists feign horror at Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of land repossession. Imagine their response to a real campaign for Land Back on what they consider to be their home territory. 

Spend these summer months engaged in social investigation or engaged in study. USU and the All-Empire Workers’ League are here to join you in struggle with materials and assistance as we work on tangible projects in the real world. Whatever you do, don’t let the summer pass you by as white supremacists continue their push to convert the mass fascist state into its final, deadly form. 

1.  The term “global flea market” is borrowed from George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye (page 118)  ︎
2. For further discussion of colonial psychology, see Chapter 2: The Historical Background in Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, with special attention paid to page 32 (local page source) ︎

“The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty for a few pence. They cravenly preached ‘social peace’ (i.e., peace with the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the ‘sympathising’ intelligentsia.”

Perceptions of material and social precarity in the middle classes (principally settlers, petit bourgeoisie, and the imperialist working class) tend to produce two outcomes, both a product of the heightening of the international class struggle. In the first case, middle class precarity can produce real class consciousness, that is, proletarian consciousness. In seeking answers to the problems faced by the middle classes, a small contingent of radicals emerges who seek education on matters of class conflict, imperialism, colonialism, settler occupation, racism, patriarchy, and the international Marxist-Leninist, Decolonial, Indigenous, and National Liberatory traditions. In the second case, a broader movement of false class consciousness, that is petit bourgeois consciousness, emerges. The latter is what we’re going to look at here. What is false consciousness? This broadly refers to all forms of middle class consciousness which purport to be liberatory. Because of the diversity of interests represented within the middle classes, these forms of consciousness are equally diverse in content, though in practice they all point in the same direction:  continued bourgeois supremacy over the whole world. 

Contemporary liberalism for instance can be analyzed as a form of middle class consciousness: extolling the supposed intrinsic virtues of order and procedure, universal equality before the law, freedom of expression, and “non-violence” as a central tenet of political activity. In false consciousness, the individual begins with the assumption of an ideal reality towards which to strive, and through political action attempts to shape material reality according to these ideals. In actual practice, this produces a dogmatic approach to political activity where these central tenets of Liberalism are more important than the material outcomes. Why is this? Attempts to label liberals as unintelligent, misguided, or otherwise unaware of the contradictions within their approach to political activity are unsatisfactory, as can be quickly seen when these contradictions are pointed out in discourse, and liberalism demonstrates its boundless capacity to deny, distort, and excuse. What then is the material outcome of liberal political activity? Social and institutional inertia, the preservation of the status quo, and ultimately support for and defense of oppressive white supremacist regimes of settler-colonial occupation, and imperialist exploitation of the global south. It’s important to note here that these patterns are not necessarily inherent to any particular ideology, but to the class itself.

The professed ideals are a smokescreen for the material outcome, which is the real intended function of the ideology. This smokescreen serves mainly for the benefit of the ideology’s adherents, who easily learn to live with its contradictions by rationalizing their ideas as being broadly “correct” on the basis of their own material concerns. If they are comfortable, they feel their worldview is approximately correct. It is only when they experience or expect discomfort that they begin to change their worldview, and usually only by demanding the restoration (or increase) of privileges. This additionally serves the interests of bourgeois rule by keeping the politically active sections of the masses debating and disputing one another’s ideological conceptions — conceptions rooted in the material interests of different strata of the middle classes. These debates, while sometimes incredibly lively, all operate within the bounds of the overarching middle class interest of the continued maintenance of the settler empire, and at their most intense represent conflicts for control over the levers of imperial power, but never stray into the realm of revolution. While the right wing of the settler empire is happy to experiment with new methods of control and dominance in the face of crisis, the imperial left wing can only debate and denounce, or at most occasionally roll back or delay particular reforms taken by the right. This leads to a circular process, a sort of political holding pattern that can only react to events and retroactively justify inaction and passivity in the face of crises, rather than actively struggling to change reality. 

Whether their words say so or not, the liberal does not want to solve homelessness, because to do so would require the overthrow of the regime of private property which is fundamental to imperial land speculation, the surest path to “financial security” (that is, upwards class mobility) available to the middle class individual (which most commonly takes the form of “homeownership”). The liberal does not want to free Palestine, because to do so would be to shatter the legitimacy of the institutions which actively maintain the occupation of Palestine, and which at the same time actively maintain the occupation of stolen Indigenous lands inside the borders of the U.S. empire, and which actively maintain the continuing flow of inexpensive commodities and superprofit-inflated worker wages into the empire. 

The liberal may go as far as to couch their demands in radical language, but the demands remain reactionary nonetheless. In the case of homelessness, liberals will advocate for jobs programs, or zoning reform, or expanded homeless shelters, and so on, measures which may or may not produce improvements in the conditions of the homeless population, but which are ultimately aimed at maintaining homelessness as an institution by providing a harmless outlet through which to redirect any resistance against the private property regime. At the same time, the victims of housing exploitation are corralled along lines amenable to the bourgeois/settler state, and violence is employed against them should they resist or fail to comply with the measures imposed. The language may say “end homelessness”, but the demands say “the homelessness regime is in need of maintenance”. In the case of Palestine, the most popular of such liberal measures is the two-state “solution”, which seeks to divert the struggle for national liberation into a formalized acceptance of the occupation by Palestinians, and a concretized formalization of apartheid by the occupation. The language may say “Free Palestine” but the demands say “the occupation has a right to exist”.

With this analysis in mind, let’s now turn to the issue of middle class “communism”. On the 22nd of May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two staff members of the Palestine occupation regime, shouting “Free Palestine!” during the act. In doing so he tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the U.S.-israeli empire. This was, first and foremost, an act of radical love for and solidarity with the Palestinian people, the victims of the occupation’s genocidal onslaught. At the same time, this was an act of political desperation, a refusal to accept the normalization of genocide, whatever the personal costs may be. In doing so, Rodriguez called direct attention to the failure of the “Free Palestine” movement within the imperial core to heighten the struggle and bring tangible consequences to the perpetrators of the Gaza Holocaust. In one stroke, Rodriguez demonstrated that resistance is absolutely possible, and that those of us who have so far failed to organize militant violent resistance to imperial genocide are failing in our duty to uphold and defend the oppressed.

Seemingly frightened to the core at the dreadful thought of militant struggle against the state, the so-called Party “for” Socialism and Liberation, and the so-called “Communist” Party USA both immediately leapt to denounce this heightening of the struggle. Professing a commitment to “peace” and “non-violent struggle” these organizations have eagerly demonstrated in action the real aim of their respective programs: maintenance of imperial rule and the bourgeois monopoly on violence. We already knew this was the case, but the discussions erupting around these revisionist statements point in the direction of the future of this movement, and where the red line of class allegiance is to be drawn. Remember to ask: what is the material outcome of their political practice? This will inform us as to their actual goal, and in turn the outcomes of their practice will inform us as to their class allegiance.

The goal of the settler Communist, as a member of the international middle classes, is to leverage their material and social privileges in the interests of the international proletariat, with the aim of the liquidation and abolition of the settler class. The goal of the settler “communist” is to claim to fight for liberation in word while obstructing liberation in practice. They will therefore wield whatever institutional power they possess to effect this desired outcome. The CPUSA claims to fight for liberation in word, but in practice they canvass for bourgeois parties, instruct their members to “call their senator” in response to genocide, platform and defend zionists, and denounce violent struggle. These proponents of watered-down and sanitized “communism” are not doing this because they are unintelligent or ignorant or otherwise unaware of the aims of Communism, but because these actions serve their real material interests. During the First Inter-Imperialist War (1914 to 1918) the leadership of the Second International famously betrayed the aims of the Communist movement in favor of backing their own respective national bourgeois formations, not because they misunderstood the aims of Communism but because their aims were the interests of their own class, which at the time was benefitting tremendously from the expansion of imperialism and the intense exploitation of the colonized world. Today this opportunistic betrayal of the proletarian struggle repeats itself, as it has for most of the past century, in the settler-run “communist” and “socialist” parties. 

Marxism-Leninism has been proven, time and again through the history of the last century of class struggle, to be the most potent ideological tool wielded by the revolutionary proletariat. In this sense it is a dire existential threat to the continued privileges of the imperial middle classes, whose comforts are predicated on the very system which Marxism sets out to defeat. Despite this, it does not require any greater degree of cognitive dissonance (compared to adherents of liberalism) on behalf of the middle class radical to claim adherence to Marxism while rejecting it in practice. It is equally as trivial to wield the phraseology and aesthetics of Communism in the interests of the settler middle class as it is to wield liberalism for the same. The difference is that while liberalism is at present a decaying order, increasingly seen as obsolete by the masses, Communism is, after decades of decay and decline, currently on the ascent in international power and influence. It is therefore more urgent than ever that committed revolutionaries study Marxism. It is the development of mass consciousness which is the antidote to the opportunistic poison of middle class radicalism. Don’t just accept what we tell you to be the truth! You have to study, learn for yourself, and develop yourself and your understanding. Settler radical “communists” prey on youth and ignorance, turning potential budding revolutionaries into the footsoldiers of the perpetual counter-revolutionary holding pattern. Marching in cop-approved circles waving signs and decrying “violence” in word while supporting it in action as colonized people are actively being exterminated with your tax dollars feels wrong because it is.

Equally as urgent is the need to recognize the direction that settler “communism” is developing. No ideology is static while it has living adherents, and the ideologies of the middle classes are no different. As mass consciousness has developed and grown, the settler “communist” parties have been forced to take up the increasingly radical and revolutionary language of the proletarian struggle and distort it in order to adapt it to their aims. In recent years these parties have started talking of issues like settler colonialism, decolonization, national liberation, gender liberation, and so on. When they think they can get away with it, they denounce these issues as “un-Marxist”, “revisionist”, “ultra left”, etc. If they feel they can no longer hold back the tide of consciousness this way, they may adapt by accepting these ideas in theory while continuing to struggle against them in practice. Beware of “communists” who claim settler colonialism is no longer an ongoing structure, but an event of the past, or “communists” who promote a workerist agenda to the exclusion of Indigenous, Black, Queer, and women’s issues.

The old adage that if you “scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds” holds truer than ever today. Faced with culpability in the extermination of the Palestinians, liberals have roundly demonstrated their commitment to upholding the imperial order no matter the human cost. This development does not create fascists out of liberals, but exposes the classes invested in liberal ideology as being committed to the same interests as fascism. This commitment is inherent to the class, not to the ideology. Though liberalism is fundamentally incoherent, this is owing to its idealistic character which it draws from its reactionary class representatives. Marxism is not fundamentally incoherent, but middle class “communism” only superficially resembles Marxism, and in practical character functions identically to liberalism.

Does this mean that the so-called “communist” parties of the middle classes have more in common with fascism than proletarian Marxism? In most cases this still remains to be seen: will the settler “communists” change their allegiance when a really revolutionary international proletarian party emerges? For many, particularly among the disillusioned youth of the movement, the answer is certainly yes! For many others however, their commitment to the imperial order will win out. With the undeniable necessity of Marxism-Leninism becoming clearer by the day, many middle class radicals are even now preparing to either stem this tide for as long as humanly possible, or to subvert it to their own ends. “Marxism” which openly upholds such reactionary and counter-revolutionary values as US nationalism, the patriarchal family, “anti-woke ideology”, queer/transphobia, zionism, etc, has been emerging. And while the left wing of the middle classes can only hand-wring over the (potential) loss of their privileges and otherwise maintain the counterrevolutionary holding pattern, the right wing is openly preparing to mount a renewed offensive against the proletariat by consolidating the middle classes under the banner of “Marxism”.

We’ve seen reactionary middle class revolutions before. It bears reiterating that the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) called itself a “socialist workers’ party” because it was drawing on popular radical ideas of the time, portraying itself as a “sensible” third way alternative to radical Bolshevik terror and failing capitalism. In our time the ideas have changed somewhat, but the processes of class conflict are very similar in many ways. When our own NSDAP emerges it will drape itself in both the red flag and the U.S. flag.

What are the hallmarks of an organization which upholds false consciousness?

• Attempts to control members, rather than empower them. Members are isolated from their community rather than supported as Communists within their community.
• Stifles development through repetitive tasks and overbearing bureaucracy, rather than making development and the carrying forward of the struggle the key priority.
• Education takes a lower priority to “action”, rather than practice and study being treated as equally important aspects of the dialectic of development. Members are taught what to think rather than how to think.
• Opaque and/or impenetrable internal organizational functioning, instead of clearly defined rules which everyone follows and which everyone has a voice in the drafting and implementing of.
• Communications with central leadership are limited to commands that are carried down the line, rather than a dialogue.
• Leadership is upheld on the “strength” of their ideas, rather than on their contributions of labor to the struggle.
• Decisions are justified by appeals to the authority of leadership, “The Party”, etc. rather than democratic accountability. 
• Leaders are treated as rulers to be obeyed, rather than servants of the membership and the people.
• Ossified leadership structures, leaders are not subject to recall, elections do not happen or are designed to reproduce leadership power rather than empowering the general membership.
• Historical revolutionaries (particularly Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao) are treated as infallible prophets whose word cannot be challenged, rather than regular human beings whose ideas should be studied and understood holistically and within their particular historical contexts.
• Contradictions in the ideology, outlook, organizational functioning, decision making, theoretical disagreements, etc, are resolved with appeals to “faith” in the organization’s mission or leadership, or the words of the aforementioned “prophets”, rather than constructive struggle.
• Attempts to engage in constructive struggle are shut down, treated as “wrecker” behavior, or ignored, rather than embraced as necessary to the development of the proletarian party.
• Finances are kept hidden from the membership, and/or spending decisions are made without the consent of the membership, rather than being open and democratically accountable.
• The voices and contributions of members from oppressed populations (women, Indigenous, Black, Queer, disabled, etc) are dismissed, excluded, minimized, or otherwise disempowered or decentered, rather than being held as central to the proletarian struggle, and empowered and uplifted by the organization.
• Discussions with or about other organizations are discouraged or silenced, rather than being considered essential to the task of building unity among the Marxist movement.

If you feel like you or someone you know may be involved in an organization which upholds false consciousness, we have several articles which can provide further guidance:

• From USU: Cadre Development Literature, Organizing Theory
• On the Cult Form: The Cult Building Tendency
• On CPUSA: A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words, Against CPUSA’s Colonizer “Communism”
• On PSL: Revolution in Our Lifetime
• On FRSO: Colonizer “Communism” in the FRSO, The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO
• On DSA: Organize Within the DSA!, Uncommitted: A Lesson in Counterinsurgency

The struggle for the Party is at times a bitter one, and promises to only grow in contention as the proletarian movement builds momentum and begins to truly challenge the established “communist” institutions. Already many middle class “communists” resort to increasingly coordinated campaigns of harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence in order to assert the “legitimacy” of their particular organization. Committed revolutionaries must understand the backwardness of this approach: To assert authority without the backing of the proletariat, or to attempt to cudgel the proletariat into submission to “the party” can only ever at most postpone the emergence of the Party of the revolutionary proletariat. 

The Party will form the vanguard of the revolution only when the masses of the most oppressed internationally recognize it as their representative and their weapon in the class struggle, wielded by and in the interests of the international proletariat.

Even before the settler-republic declared independence, slave patrols were organized to deal with the ever-growing population of enslaved African labor and the threat of rebellion. Hired guns would patrol the property, investigating and brutally punishing dissent, the possession of weapons, and attempted escapes. As far back as 1643, the English colonies were organizing themselves into confederations, pledging to enforce each others’ “right” to the return of fugitive slaves and indentured servants:

It is also agreed that if any servant run away from his master into any other of these confederated Jurisdictions, that in such case, upon the certificate of one magistrate in the Jurisdiction out of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proof; the said servant shall be delivered, either to his master, or any other that pursues and brings such certificate or proof.

Following the establishment of the United States, plantation owners quickly began entreating state legislatures to form standing patrols, as well as laws that explicitly targeted all Black people — regardless of their legal status. These fugitive slave laws and the patrollers enforcing them curtailed Black freedom of movement and assembly, subjected them to constant questioning, and inflicted unspeakably violent punishments. These practices spread throughout the colonies, and the institution of policing as a means of oppressing Black and Indigenous populations went from ad hoc posses to state machinery.

Following the U.S. civil war, despite the legal end of slavery, slave patrols prowled the countryside. Anti-Black violence, once perpetrated by pre-war slave-catching squads, took on the same form as anti-Indigenous violence: it shifted to the domain of terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. These vigilante terror organizations were, in many cases, composed of the elite of Southern and Western U.S. society: plantation owners, former Confederate officers, and ex-slave-catchers. Not only were these men enlisted by the secretive, semi-legal terror societies, but they also joined the rush of explicitly authorized “Indian fighters” – U.S. soldiers and cavalrymen, hired guns, and bounty hunters that poured into the Indigenous lands still left west of the Appalachian chain that the young settler-republic had determined must belong to white men.

To support this new drive, laws were carefully rewritten to empower police to enforce the political and economic repression of non-white people. This fundamental principle of U.S. settler law laid the foundation for the white-supremacist laws of today. The disproportionate impact of law enforcement on racialized populations has been thoroughly examined and excoriated for decades. The verdict is clear: law enforcement is systematically constructed to perpetuate white supremacy.

Since the creation of municipal and regional police in the 19th century, they have not only targeted Black and Indigenous persons. The police were not merely the enforcement arm of the theft of Native land and the suppression of Black labor; they have been the armed fist of capital, serving to break strikes, attack unions, and halt the labor movement in its tracks. Capitalists have consistently called upon police, private security, and the military to break strikes, often with deadly force. Under the guise of “peacekeeping,” cops respond to mass demonstrations by cracking skulls. Since the cold war, the intelligence wing of law enforcement has used the specter of communism to harry and infiltrate militant labor movements. With the blood of thousands of workers on their hands, the presence of police “unions” in labor federations like AFL-CIO is a grotesque mockery. The police are not workers: they are our most violent oppressors.

Cops are not simply hapless mercenaries, selling their labor as cogs in a repressive machine. They are not blameless workers caught up in a Kafkaesque machinery beyond their capacity to change. They are active participants in murder, genocide, labor suppression, and all the heinous acts for which they were created. They are the active agents of colonial and imperialist oppression. Indeed, the nature of policing as a tool of enforcing white supremacy and capital hegemony makes it especially appealing to a particular class of ideological actors. Police forces are staffed by the most motivated white supremacists. Fascist militias are largely populated by cops (active and retired), military veterans, and small business owners, as well as those with aspirations to law enforcement. They dedicate huge amounts of time, money, and labor to organizations designed to enforce white supremacy – all while comfortably employed in service of an empire built on those ideals. Many such groups paint themselves as “anti-government,” because they believe the U.S. government is holding them back from their fascist aims. That is, they resent the fact that the state has itself attempted to regulate white supremacist violence into a form it can control; they long for the early settler-republic, when any white man could wreak his will with a riding crop, a fist, or a Colt and no one would gainsay him.

State-sanctioned violence and extrajudicial fascist terrorism cannot be so identified as pointing out a badge.  In a recent database leak, exposing membership lists of the fascist Oathkeepers, numerous high ranking officers and sheriffs were identified among the hundreds of law enforcement officers on the books. One such lieutenant — who signed up for the Oathkeepers with the promise to use his position to recruit for the organization — was transferred to administrative duties upon knowledge of his involvement. Months later, he was back to his normal duties, as if nothing had happened. The police are police whether they wear their badges or not.

Law enforcement often dedicates some labor toward monitoring white supremacist extremism, although this is vastly overshadowed by its investment in tracking and attempting to entrap leftist organizations. Undercover agents and confidential informants insinuated into fascist groups often fail to report vital information, use their position to testify in defense of these groups, or are simply ignored by their handlers. The FBI, generally tasked with handling these investigations, are simply uninterested in the incrimination of fascists, instead instructing their informants to gather intelligence on the opponents of fascism. Law enforcement is deeply invested in the project of maintaining a white supremacist status quo. It has a long history of surveilling and violently repressing those who seek liberation, while giving unending leeway to those who attempt to heighten that oppression.

The overlap between fascist groups and law enforcement is sporadically reported on by bourgeois institutions, including media exposes, academic reviews, and even intelligence reports. Like all liberal exposes, however, these serve a dual purpose; by presenting the information, they defang it. The framework of these reports usually presents the presence of “bad apples” and promises that the issue merely needs some pressing reform. Thus, these liberal bourgeois reports disguise the fundamental nature of the white supremacist violence that pervades settler society. Through the lens of liberal “analysis,” all social ills are the result of scoundrels sullying otherwise valorous institutions. However, this misunderstands not just the material base out of which these very institutions were crafted in the first place, but also the insidious ways in which they get continuously reproduced, refined, and made more suitable to their primary purpose: maintaining the particular property relations of capitalism.

Policing presents its semi-legitimate face as “protecting the people,” originally with an explicitly racialized definition of “the people,” then retreating into implications and dog whistles. To bolster the white supremacist mythos that paints racialized populations as the source of civil strife, the ruling class has spent centuries pumping money into bad studies and employing racist professors to espouse the theory that certain populations are inherently “criminal.” Every new measure passed to empower the police has come with corresponding narratives stoking the fascist flames: “superpredators,” “crack epidemic,” “migrant caravans”. This has served to simultaneously drive recruitment and political support for the police from among the beneficiaries of white supremacy. The attractiveness of law enforcement to today’s fascists is unsurprising, given this historical context.

Law enforcement itself serves as a crucible of fascism, concentrating the most destructive aspects of the ideology into a superheated core. Its role as the violent arm of the state provides fertile soil for recruiting, training, and organizing nascent white supremacists into capable, radicalized cadres, indoctrinated with fascist ideology and inoculated against empathy. Combined with the tendencies of groups toward polarization (a meta-analysis of which can be found here), the overtly oppressive role of law enforcement creates an environment that drags its members toward fascist radicalization. This radicalization happens in much the same way that all institutions (fascist or not) mature into hegemonic forms, through the mutually-reinforcing processes of selection and intensification.

Selection is the process of sorting masses of individuals based on their demonstrated values and selecting the “best” — i.e. most well-suited to the group’s aims — for promotion, deeper into the institution. Although this can be a rigidly-defined process, as in the case of deliberately constructed organizations (such as workplaces), selection also takes place constantly throughout social life. Friend groups, community associations, activist circles, and more are constantly going through a loose process of selection; those who best fit in with the group and its purpose tend to find themselves more deeply involved in it, encouraged by those already integrated within it. The values being selected for vary from group to group, and can cover an immense range of criteria: specific skillsets, existing social ties, resources, even fashion sense or humor. The most common value being heuristically screened for, across all social structures, is how well an individual “clicks” with the existing group: like selects like. “Promotion,” of course, can also be a spectrum: anywhere from simply spending more time with like-minded individuals to actively being given more responsibilities and privileges within an organized structure. As specific traits get selected for, the individuals exhibiting those traits become better positioned to do the selecting, bringing in other individuals who share those same traits that brought them through the process themselves.

Intensification is the deepening of existing values, making individuals that move through an institution become more suited to the institution’s purpose. Again, this process can be explicit or informal, depending on the specific context. Individuals can be formally trained in specific skills, subjected to exercises designed to impart values and lessons through experience, go through rituals to promote group cohesion, or simply be subtly influenced by existing members of the group in a passive process of socialization. The more formally-organized a group is, the more explicit the programs of intensification that tend to be employed, but the social aspect is always present, and is often of the most relevance. As social creatures, humans are primed to modify our own behaviors and ideals to best integrate into our particular social environments. Over time, whether through passive or active means, groups tend to engender in their members deeper commitment and competence. Whether as education, radicalization, or collegiality, intensification works to define the character of both a group and the individuals within it.

These two processes act in concert, at all levels of institutions, playing into each other to best adapt a group to its niche. Selection elevates those individuals best adapted to modulate the intensification of others: the most charismatic speakers, the most skilled leaders, the most committed to the cause, inevitably find themselves brought up into a position to bring up their like-minded compatriots. Intensification serves as an indicator for selection, with those for whom the process yields the most favorable results increasingly demonstrating their fitness. Those who fail or refuse are seen as poorly-suited to the group and become ever-more estranged, if not outright ejected from the group. As an institution takes shape, these processes can cause it to calcify and regiment its process. Selection becomes increasingly based on set criteria, with explicitly delineated measures of promotion. Intensification practices become standardized trainings and rituals aimed at achieving specific results. But even in the absence of formal protocols, the social structure itself continues to set the pace of its own development, through the placement and shaping of its members.

Nowhere is this more typified than in the crucible of fascism. A new recruit on the force has already gone through several steps of selection and intensification that are adapted to the niche fascism aims to occupy. To even want to join, an individual must already believe in the myth of police as “peacekeepers.” They must ignore the blatant violent excesses of the institution. They already have an instinct toward protecting capitalist, white supremacy hegemony — whether they fully realize it or not. In other words, the police recruitment process itself has already selected for people who tend toward violence, chauvinism, ego, and myopia in service of capital (even if these traits are not always fully-formed in the novice). These traits are intensified during training, where recruits are taught laws, practice with firearms and other weapons, learn interrogation tactics, go through drills on handling “hostiles,” and more. Every step of the training serves to viscerally engrain in these recruits that they are the last line of defense for society against a violent, degenerate, implacable enemy, that their fellow brethren are comrades-in-arms, that the mission of the police is pure and righteous, worth laying down their very lives. They are taught that violent confrontation is not only inevitable, but righteous. In short, by the time they even become a full member of the force, people who were already filtered for traits suitable to fascism have already begun being radicalized into an ideological resentment toward the communities they police.

And then the process really gets started.

When that recruit walks into headquarters, he is entering a building absolutely packed with people who were just like him when they were recruits. Some were simply idealistic and justice-minded, without much regard for the obvious systemic horrors of the institution. Some were white supremacists from the beginning, and saw those horrors as noble. All of them went through a refinement process, and all have been modified by it in some way. They may have nervously laughed off bigoted comments, or they may have made some themselves to fit in. They may have seen squadmates commit acts of brutality, and thought to submit an official complaint — provoking the ire of their compatriots — or they may have eagerly joined in. They have spent every working day being exposed to propaganda, both informal and officially-sanctioned, about crime rates and the dangers of their profession and the fundamental threat posed by “certain communities.” They are promoted officially based on their arrests, tickets, experience, and the approval of higher ranking officers. They are promoted socially based on their cohesiveness within a group that has gone through these same radicalizing processes.

Those who couldn’t cut it — those who were too turned off by the systemic abuse, casual chauvinism, and blatant lies — are not in the room when that recruit walks in. Those who have best embraced that regressive atmosphere are introduced to him as mentors. In a radicalizing environment, the least radical have the least influence and the most radical dominate. In the case of police specifically, fascists find themselves easily making friends, enforcing “law and order,” and rising through the ranks, both institutionally and socially. They find themselves in positions of influence, and continue to shape the process that helped shape them. This attracts more of their ilk to the force, further impacting its development — and theirs. The state gains ever-more violent and rabid enforcers, while the fascists gain ever-more combat experience, fresh recruits, and institutional backing.

Whatever the particular proclivities of that recruit, he will find himself either becoming more immersed in the fascist milieu, more aligned with their ideals, tactics, and even extrajudicial organizations — or he will find himself ostracized, friendless, demoted, fired. The more the members of fascist militias integrate themselves into the (already fascistic) institution, the less common that latter outcome occurs. The initial selection process becomes implicitly more discerning, with potential recruits needing to meet a higher and higher threshold for what level of brutality they think is justified. The training and propaganda become more intense, directed as they are by those already selected for fascist allegiance. The distinction between state-sanctioned violence and paramilitary formations becomes more and more irrelevant.

This is the real reason all cops are bastards: all cops are subjected to a potent, omnipresent bastardization apparatus. They are recruited by fascists, trained by fascists, mentored by fascists, promoted by fascists. If they happen to join another fascist organization, that’s simply them branching out. And when they do, they bring with them tactical training, weapons proficiency, social prestige, state support, and an intensified clarity of purpose. The enemy of the working class is an active army: well-armed, well-resourced, well-organized, and highly motivated. They can be met with nothing less.