Our Boundaries Are Not Their Walls

The above image comes from an incredulous amerikan reactionary posting from the safety of his facebook page. He just can’t believe that there is a left wing movement that intends to establish a boundary and enforce it. Isn’t that exactly like Trump and the wall? Aren’t armed guards in autonomous left encampments the same thing as police and military?

The answer to all of this is “no,” if you have a clear political analysis. Now, let’s not debate what is going on in CHAZ because I don’t know, and you likely don’t know, what is going on there. I wish them the best at holding their ground. But given the entire history of left movements – national, or local – during the period of US hegemony, we know that any attempt to establish independence from the US will be met with soft power (“diplomacy,” subversion, coercive sanctions that kill people inside the independent nation) and hard power (assassinations, bullets and bombs).

Elements of the US “left” that decry firearms’ presence or application are not prepared to defend anything gained. Tendencies unprepared to defend territory never liberate territory. Tendencies that would allow free passage into and out of revolutionary territory come immediately into conflict with counter-revolutionaries, provocateurs, saboteurs, and militant reactionaries. Tendencies that do not maintain internal discipline are easily susceptible to strife and ruin.

If the US state and all its functions were to dissolve today, many of those functions would be deemed necessary and new institutions would pop up quickly to fulfill that supposed need. The only alternative to this inevitability is to build something new, with a primary task of educating those it serves in a manner that prevents false necessities from becoming the end goals of the new project.

We have an obligation if we seek to change systems not to shame leftists who choose to protect themselves against certain conflict, in the spirit of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Principled revolutionaries know that the US government and its client state governments enforce their rule. They murder powerful organizers like Fred Hampton, imprisoning dissidents like Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal. They destroy radical safe havens, economic bastions, and community centers, as they did to Wounded Knee, Black Wall Street, or in the Philadelphia MOVE bombings. They send infiltrators into our movements, undercovers, COINTELPRO operatives, and the faux-Black Panthers whose photographs cozying-up to police circulated during the May 2020 uprising. If the cops come to your door without a warrant, you have a right to refuse entry. But property system logic so mystifies many in the US that they can not imagine a liberated commons, an entire geography beyond the political violence of the settler state. And it takes a boundary to make

No, an autonomous zone with borders and armed guards is not a decolonized utopia free from the social ills of late capitalism. Decolonization of lands will necessitate deep relationships with Indigenous people that most left alignments lack. Yet imperialist colonization will come for the zone no less, as it did Cuba and continues to do in Venezuela. The zone will come under fire, as Fred Hampton’s house, or the Church at Wounded Knee. They will bomb us if we get too powerful, too free. If you aren’t pretending to be a revolutionary, you’re going to be defend any territorial gains you make and scrutinize whoever wanders in from outside. If you’re up against capitalism and not defending yourself constantly – securing your communications and information, practicing clear boundaries and security culture, and doing everything you can to avoid infiltration and splintering – the capitalists will tear you apart. The US state is well-practiced in settler colonial subjugation. The more vocally unwilling to participate in global capital and US hegemony you are, the more visible the target on your back.

There’s a difference between fascists erecting walls to keep non-whites from receiving the socioeconomic status they protect, and revolutionaries erecting checkpoints to be sure police and CIA aren’t entering their headquarters. If you don’t understand that difference, I invite you to study more. Here’s a select quote reading list:

In any case the hired worker will be an object of exploitation. Successful struggle against exploitation requires that the proletariat be free of nationalism, and be absolutely neutral, so to speak, in the fight for supremacy that is going on among the bourgeoisie of the various nations. If the proletariat of any one nation gives the slightest support to the privileges of its “own” national bourgeoisie, that will inevitably rouse distrust among the proletariat of another nation; it will weaken the international class solidarity of the workers and divide them, to the delight of the bourgeoisie. Repudiation of the right to self-determination or to secession inevitably means, in practice, support for the privileges of the dominant nation.

Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self Determine, ch. 5

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism -not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience-could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not.

Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, Ch. 3

Don’t get captured.