For The Total Destruction of America

via AMW

For The Total Destruction of America: An Anarchist Perspective on the Upcoming Civil War

“As to the seventy five years [in prison], i am not really worried, not only because i am in the habit of not completing sentences or waiting on parole or any of that nonsense but also because the State simply isn’t going to last seventy five or even fifty years.”

—Kuwasi Balagoon, December 9, 1983

“The government of the U.S.A. and all that it stands for, all that it represents, must be destroyed. This is the starting point, and the end. We have the means to this end; the problem is to develop acceptance of their use.”

—George Jackson, Blood in My Eye

The American nightmare is now nearly over. Built on a foundation of slavery, white supremacy, and genocide, the American state has continuously oppressed black and brown people within its borders with its murderous pig force and prison slavery system. Abroad, America has trained right wing death squads, staged coups to install fascist regimes, and bombed and invaded countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Vietnam (just to name a few). America has maintained a role as a colonial occupier both around the world and within its artificial borders.

As the country veers toward civil war, people will be increasingly forced to choose sides: either you support concentration camps, enslavement, and racist murders or you are willing to fight for the destruction of white supremacy and capitalism by any means necessary. The murder of the comrade Michael Reinoehl by pigs in Washington demonstrates just how serious this situation has become: the state, from its highest level, ordered the execution of an anti-fascist, who, in an act of armed defense, shot a fascist who would otherwise have stabbed a friend of his of color. Those who will not passively watch fascists gun down their friends and comrades will have to accept risking their own lives in this struggle.

America already fits the definition of a failed state. Politicians have encouraged the spread of coronavirus while refusing to agree on a stimulus deal, plunging thousands of people into poverty and homelessness. The Flint and Newark water crises prove that the US government has knowingly poisoned people in two majority-black cities. Now, with the death toll from coronavirus projected to rise above 400,000 by the end of the year, the greed of the American system and its utter disregard for human life has become even more apparent. In the words of Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano, “the current conflict across the entire world [is] money versus life. In that confrontation, in that war, no honest person can be neutral: one is on the side of money or one is on the side of life.”

Internationally, while America has continued to pursue its imperialist intentions, it has become more and more comically inept in its bumbling attempts to pursue its interests. The ridiculously poorly planned coup attempt known as Operation Gideon in Venezuela is a recent example of a humiliating failure for the US in an attempt to install another right-wing regime, as it has in so many places around the world. In the coup attempt, planned by ex-US special forces sergeant Jordan Goudreau (along with US officials and the right-wing Colombian regime), mercenaries tried to invade Venezuela by sea. They were easily repelled by Venezuelan security forces, who killed eight mercenaries and captured the rest– including two Americans.

More evidence of America’s rapid decline in ability to impose its will internationally can be seen in its embarrassing defeat to the Taliban in a war that has lasted for nearly twenty years and cost the US close to a trillion dollars. After all that time, the Taliban currently controls about half of the territory of Afghanistan and have proven its ability to launch attacks anywhere across the country, with ground attacks and bombings in 24 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces in the past several weeks. By adopting guerrilla tactics, the Taliban’s insurgency successfully mobilized support against the US invasion. The US military’s strength is an illusion: all of their “shock and awe” bombings are no match for an opponent that adopts the principles of asymmetrical warfare, and can easily gain support from people whose families have been massacred by American invaders.

“Organize yourself without bosses or parasites among you. If you don’t do that, there’s no reason for us to keep going forward. We have to create a new world, different from the one that we’re destroying. Otherwise, youth will die on the battlefield for no reason. We’re fighting for the revolution.”

—Durutti during the Spanish Revolution, as the Durutti Column traveled to fight fascists in Zaragoza

While there may be fewer anarchists today in the United States than there were in Spain in 1936, there is an opportunity for anarchist ideas to play a substantial role in the revolutionary upheaval that is yet to come. The streets– and the insurgent youth in particular– have advanced far beyond the limits placed on activism by the organized left in the United States. The uprising that began with the murder of George Floyd is quite possibly the largest and longest sustained rebellion in American history. A police precinct in a major US city (Minneapolis) was burned to the ground, an event that was widely celebrated by people outside the activist milieu, while activist leaders continue to preach nonviolence.

Now, with both presidential candidates condemning looting and pledging to increase police budgets, the people who took to the streets to fight for black liberation and the abolition of police will be looking for possibilities outside of the political establishment. By taking an uncompromising position against American democracy, white supremacy, and capitalism, anarchists can propel uprisings further toward revolutionary struggle. Anarchist organizing can take many forms, from political education to support for imprisoned comrades to the formation of defense units.

While the future is uncharted, the demise of America is now a sure thing; and whether the civil war begins next week or in a few months, we can see the clear trajectory of escalating white supremacist violence on the one hand and revolutionary liberation on the other. Even if Biden wins the election and Trump concedes, the fascists and pigs will continue murdering black and brown people unabated. Liberal reforms will do nothing to satisfy the revolutionary militancy that continues in streets around the country in response to police murders. Anarchists cannot sit on the sidelines of the civil war, but must instead take an insurgent position, fighting alongside the oppressed for the total destruction of the United States.

With liberal politicians increasingly discredited, anarchists can find many people open to the possibility of a world free from prisons, police, and capitalism. With the death of America, a thousand new possibilities for liberation will spring forth.

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There are 11 Comments

Ah yes, just like how the Spanish Civil War abolished the Spanish State and they lived in an anarchist utopia happily ever after.

It might be kinda tough to fight against capitalism when you can't offer a clear definition of what it is.

"Anarchists cannot sit on the sidelines of the civil war, but must instead take an insurgent position, fighting alongside the oppressed for the total destruction of the United States."

Forbidding and obligating is not the most persuasive want to get anarchists to do what you want, specially when what you want is for them to be your cannon fodder and kamikaze (or should i say jihadist since you mention the taliban?) on command.

"As to the seventy five years [in prison], i am not really worried, not only because i am in the habit of not completing sentences or waiting on parole or any of that nonsense but also because the State simply isn’t going to last seventy five or even fifty years.”

—Kuwasi Balagoon, December
Sooo, not completing sentences, like umm, dying in prison?

A civil war in the USA? Seriously? Well, even if the wet dreams of these frenetic wannabe insurgents even partially materialize, the position for conscious and principled anarchists should probably be something like belligerent neutrality. Being sacrificial shock troops for some newfangled state with a different flavor of government is a sadly consistent history for anarchist fighters (with the notable exception of the Makhnovists), abd as soon as those new governors consolidate their bureaucratic power, anarchist fighters are among the first to get put up against the wall. Let's not have that happen again, okay?

Anarchist media companies must be loving all the propaganda they can spread about, there will be no Civil War mainly because U.S anarchists are cowards, there are groups of us who laugh at the U.S anarchists in my anarchist circles

every four years anarchistss and communists adopt this electoral virtue signalling about building a better world with anarchist scoieties and speand the rest of the time doing their own police work and talking about mutual aid and community service

U

stop pretending you're an anarchist, no one is buying it.
your goading and taunting is self-serving, and no one cares about your motives.
anarchists have nothing to do in determining whether a 2nd americancivil war happens or not. the first (and for the foreseeable future, the only) american civil war came and went having nothing to do with anarchists.
i don't see how anyone can look at something like the Rwandan Genocide and think it holds any liberatory potential.
This article was an abolitionist appeal to anarchists, and a poor attempt at that.
It calls itself anarchist to avoid initial knee-jerk rejection.
I think it's better to acknowledge this is what we're facing in this context and put it out in the open that pretend it doesn't exist.

Many factions will wave the anarchist flag to gain supporters to their cause, whether it be factions against the current State, or counter-insurgency efforts put forth by the State itself, or even different interest groups. These will present clear paths to channel reformist enthusiasms. At the same time different factions may receive aid from other States, trying to promote further fracturing along pre-existing lines and tensions.

it may not get that hot, those looking for reparations or repatriations may get it in the form of reforms or even a relabled UBI. those looking for "change" and "hope" may get a green (or orange) new deal. afro-futurism will be apple's next product line, ICE, prisons, and police are many of the services to be privatized ("abolished" and "defunded") and offered by amazon and alphabet (google) subsidiaries.

This is a much more clever analysis than the tuff insurrecto braggart above you.

A civil war is more likely to get pushed (as it's been already, in a bloody way) by the neofascist reactionaries, and it's not exactly in any anarchist interest to fight such a war.

Even anarchist fighters aren't interested in such warfare, not because they're "cowards", but because the end goal of a civil war is to replace, or restore, a gang to power.

At best a civil war can be a destabilization of a country, but in the case of the US, in the current context of China's hegemony and Russia also pulling the strings, it's pretty fucking dumb to be thinking of the US as a "separate issue". If the US gets destabilized, as it was already, this means "opportunity" for any invasive foreign force. That was the great mistake of the Communards in Paris, as the brutally reactionary enemies at the gates were also German, not just French, as they did their revolution in the context of a military invasion by Bismark's forces.

What is needed as an anarchist insurgency is a pervasive opposition to the tech industrial complex, that is really the superstate currently in charge atm.

Is criticizing liberal politicians really the way to bring down the US?

Is this... Harry Potter?

“the state, from its highest level, ordered the execution of an anti-fascist, who, in an act of armed defense, shot a fascist who would otherwise have stabbed a friend of his of color.” There we go with the blatant lies again. This is not how anarchism gains credibility, folks.

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