The purge against dissent, the expanding extermination effort, & what’s at stake in this phase of the struggle

In this third world war, we’ve reached the phase where the U.S. ruling class has begun carrying out its plan for a direct, dictatorial crackdown. If this plan succeeds, our government will be able to launch its next genocidal warfare projects without meeting any serious challenge, at least not from inside the U.S. itself. As the Trump White House subjects Yemen’s people to a massive bombing campaign, this is what our rulers hope will happen: that the antiwar movement can be neutralized through making an example out of certain individual political targets. If that doesn’t work, the government will start making entire organizations illegal.

Our enemy has committed to a project of repression that could get exponentially more wide-ranging, depending on how urgent the permanent security state feels this task is. We must mobilize an emergency response to these attacks, or the imperial state will be able to take millions more lives than it could if we’d intervened. These are the dire stakes of this stage within the struggle: either we’ll succeed, or the extermination against Gaza will intensify, and the Gaza mass murder model will be applied to numerous other places. If we do prevail, though, the world’s liberation struggle will make a series of unprecedented breakthroughs. And there is real hope for bringing about this outcome, if we look for hope in the right places.

Carrying out an anti-repression campaign is extremely urgent, and insofar as we can frustrate the crackdown’s progress, we need to put serious effort into doing so. Every remaining moment of relative civil freedom is valuable, and we have to buy ourselves as much time as possible. Already, the crackdown has been able to get quite far quite fast. During the first stage in this anti-democratic assault, the state’s tactic is to weaponize ICE, using it as a tool for disappearing the purge’s targets. That’s what’s happened with Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestine activist who got put into an immigration detention facility earlier this month. Khalil’s offense was to break the rule that non-U.S. citizens in the United States can’t become too politically vocal; which isn’t a rule that’s officially stated, thus why the government couldn’t point to any law that he’d had actually broken.

That there’s no clear idea of which actions will get somebody detained serves the goal of this policy, which is to create a climate of fear. For non-citizens, it’s hard to tell exactly what statements will get you in trouble, and how loudly you can make these statements before things become risky. This is a repressive system that our government has always had in place. Now, with the escalations in the global geopolitical conflict, the state is using this system to start off a purge that no one will be safe from.

The plan is absolutely to expand the criminalization of political speech to U.S. citizens. This is what the Department of Justice has been trying to do all throughout the new cold war, and throughout the War on Terror. When the FBI raided the African People’s Socialist Party’s headquarter building in 2022, and three of its members were then charged with foreign conspiracy, the goal was to create a precedent for illegalizing all international anti-imperialist solidarity work. That particular plan failed, but now the state is pursuing its repressive mission on other fronts; it’s charged Cop City protesters with racketeering, and classified the Palestinian prisoner network Samidoun as a terrorist organization. The persecution of Khalil, and of foreign students who’ve protested for Gaza, is about creating an environment where these kinds of spurious charges can actually result in conviction.

When there’s a substantial mobilization to stop the crackdown, like there was with APSP, then our constitutional protections can be made to work. As long as there’s a robust network of organizers who aren’t afraid to speak out, such efforts can be effective. So the state is making political targetings much more widespread, with the first victims being the ones who don’t have constitutional rights. With this new stage in the crackdown, though, the civil liberties movement has an advantage that it didn’t have when APSP was the main target. Today, there’s immediate widespread attention being placed upon the persecution efforts. This is because the new crackdown has to do with Palestine.

The empire’s narrative managers weren’t able to push the Gaza genocide out of the discourse, like they’ve done with Libya, Yemen, and so many other victims of imperial aggression. TikTok made it inevitable that the bulk of our society would see Zionism’s atrocities, which is why Washington is trying to ban the platform as fast as it can. Since October 7, there’s been an irreversible shift in mass consciousness, and from here on there’s always going to be widespread support for the Palestinian cause. The pro-Palestine struggle will keep attracting more participants, no matter how severe the crackdown gets. And figures like Khalil will keep getting substantial solidarity from the people, because many of the people are looking for fellow Palestine supporters who they can assist. The masses are largely already on the side of our cause. If we give the masses the means for revolt, we’ll be able to mount an effective counter towards what the state will do next.

Key to this task are the unions, which already have a strong anti-imperialist element. This element isn’t as visible in the USA, where unions experienced major setbacks decades ago; but when you look at worker organizing on a global scale, you’ll find that there’s a great proletarian united front against imperialism. This front’s membership is encompassed by the World Federation of Trade Unions, the formation which was created to represent the interests of the workers throughout the colonized world.

This month, the WFTU stated that “The class-oriented trade union movement denounces the years-long aggressions and the violations of international law by the USA, EU and their allies in their attempt to destabilize countries, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands, millions of refugees and the destruction of infrastructures. The World Federation of Trade Unions, on behalf of its more than 105 million members in 133 countries of the world, militantly stands in solidarity with the victims of the economic wars, blockades and sanctions, and struggles for the right of the peoples to decide for themselves, freely and democratically, about their present and future, without the intervention of the imperialists.” The 20th century’s anti-colonial workers movements were not killed when the Soviet Union fell; in the WFTU, the revolutionary global structure from that era has been able to survive.

Now, with the rise of socialist China, communism is coming to reshape the world again. And there are numerous other anti-imperialist forces which have been disrupting U.S. hegemony, from Ansarallah to the Palestinian resistance to Russia’s anti-fascist struggle. One essential aspect that’s so far been missing from this revolutionary upsurge, though, is a strong proletarian movement in the heart of the empire. By linking with the global counter-hegemonic forces, we in the U.S. can strengthen the liberation struggle on all fronts. That’s the second most important part of our mission: to connect with our international allies. But to stand on our own, and to be effective allies ourselves, we also must fulfill our most important task: to build an independent organizational structure for the USA’s workers, one which lets us operate outside the constraints of union organizing.

Just as it’s essential to strengthen and expand the unions, it’s essential to construct a workers party. A year ago, I was imagining that the foundation for such a party would come from the parts of organized labor which have been defying the liberal union leadership over Gaza. I still believe this, but since then we’ve seen the formation of two actual parties, which provide a means for the disillusioned union workers to gain their own institutional power. Last summer, the American Communist Party was created, and already it’s provided considerable material support and leadership to worker struggles. Then after the election, the great Amazon union leader Chris Smalls started the U.S. Labor Party. When it comes to good parties like these ones, the point is of course not to compete over who gets to become the vanguard; we need a united front between those who are committed to fighting for this country’s workers, and by extension for all who U.S. imperialism targets.

For every task that we take on as part of this mission, we need to make sure these tasks will keep getting carried forth, however advanced the state’s repression becomes. We have to make it so that every member and leader of our organizations is replaceable, meaning that if they’re taken away like Khalil, somebody else will be there to fill their role. In this more intense phase of the class war, the environment in which we’re operating is going to become more and more like an actual conflict scenario. And the responsibility to continue the revolutionary task is on us. We have a lot of global allies, and they’ll be instrumental in this effort to overthrow the empire from within. The question is whether we’ll fulfill our own role, and carry on even as the government does all it can to crush us.

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