Fair Warning
Notes on Developments in Counterinsurgency
The Bewitched Man (c. 1798) by Francisco de Goya
Note: Following a comrade’s critical insight regarding this post, it is important to note that this piece is addressing a problem of liberalization that is occurring within certain milieus of long-time militants. There are many currents of the militant left outside of these that have never had any pretense of antagonism with NGOs in the first place, and will have to be guided in learning this. Likewise more recent events, such as the mobilizations following October 7, 2023, have produced both brand new militant tendencies in some places that do not have much, or any, continuity with preexisting milieus and have a fairly organic antagonism with NGOs, as well as wholly non-profitized mobilizations in other places with no militant presence at all.
The essential point is that what is written here is not to be taken as comprehensive, much less the last word on this matter. This post constitutes an attempt to signal caution to all about such dynamics that can take many different forms, according to the uneven development of the class struggle in its many different contexts. My hope is that this warning inspires critical reflection amongst those that read it regarding the social and class compositions of organization that they engage in and develop, and to more proactively identify elements antagonistic to the development of the communist movement.
In moments where the class struggle reaches an acute intensity, it becomes appropriate to return to the repertoire of tactical knowledge accumulated from its past experiences. People with the potential to become new communist partisans may have entered the fray and require guidance and mentorship. Many that have been persistent fixtures in appearing or commenting upon such moments may trot out old lines that were denounced before and must be delegitimized again. Some long-time communist partisans may have forgotten, or even softened to that which they once held a line fiercely against. For any number of reasons, the historical continuity of revolutionary communist development must be established in an active process, unrelenting in its pursuit of the ruthless critique of all that exists.
At this time, the reactionary lurch that has, for the moment, overcome the momentum of the George Floyd Uprising of 20201 has made itself apparent in politicized circles through the emergence of a position of rapprochement with elements that were then, and in the cycle of struggles preceding the Uprising, recognized to be its internal antagonists. We speak here of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) or Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) sphere, the haven of soft counterinsurgency with which street mobilizations must so often contend. There are many reasons given for establishing or renewing engagements with this sphere, but they are often simply the pleas of the bad conscience resigning itself to its own lack of initiative; we must work with what “we” have, or so it goes. Though the defeats of the Uprising and successive moments of mobilization in subsequent years have sharpened some and driven them towards more serious and critical considerations on the question of organization, for others it produces a sense of futility in that which had been pursued, and here their anxiety is but an indirect recognition of the danger to which they have become exposed. Accommodation becomes the order of the day for some, though efforts are made to give these reconciliations with the Party of Order the veneer of radicalism.
A dispatch from ostensible partisans in Minneapolis demonstrates the error:
“Donald Trump is not wrong to cast blame upon the state and local governments for enabling this insurgency to unfold. A previously inconceivable complicity, from the governor down to the local officials, by way of just about every NGO, has made resisting ICE in meaningful and practical ways the most popular path for every citizen to take. Every yard sign or bumper sticker signals a willing accomplice and potential combatant.”2
Why is this not only stupid, but dangerous? In this formulation we are treated to a vision of popular revolt that has cast anyone from Democratic Party officials and middle to upper class liberals in the guise of partisans of insurgent developments. It would be laughable were it not such a dangerous position to strike in the present moment. Every articulation of this kind of imaginary popular front is a statement made from a position of incredible weakness. The novelty of the mobilizations in Minneapolis against the federal deployment’s surge operations is not to be found in the current administration’s extension of the repressive dragnet to such “citizens,” but in the further divergence of strategic and tactical considerations displayed between different elements of these insurgent developments.
The motivations are readily apparent. Where it may have appeared to be the case that the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota refrained from deploying police or the national guard themselves out of an act of resistance, this was far more likely done out of an interest of containing the spread of activity from rapid response mobilizations to a general revolt throughout the metropolitan region. Overt repression by local forces could have easily incited such an escalation and given street mobilizations cause to respond in kind, or attracted more unruly class forces. Memories of 2020 are still fresh for them, as these are the same officials who endured that test of their legitimacy and state capacity to suppress proletarian insurgency. However, even this concern did not prevent the eventual movement of Hennepin County Sheriff’s deputies and Minneapolis police officers to specific sites to support ICE and CBP capacity, whether it was escorting their vehicles from the sites of their deployment or containing the perimeter of noise demonstrations outside the hotels in which they were staying. The solidarity of the armed forces of the state cannot be said to have been absent, simply more concerned with tact.
In his essay “Lies You Will Be Told,” Phil Neel offers a useful summary of the now-classic discursive tactics of this hard counterinsurgency’s softer partner, the velvet glove that covers the iron fist.3 A corrective addendum is subsequently issued in “Proto-Politics in Purgatory”4 stating that in the case of the Minneapolis of 2026, these lies did not need to be told. Rather than offering assurances that the killers will be prosecuted, that the current administration is looking for an excuse to enact brutality, that we must be on the watch for agents provocateur, the lie that has instead been insisted upon is that “we are winning, and that what we are doing is working.”5 The media image is created of a popular resistance that engaged in legal acts of resistance, from the documentary observance of federal agent operations to the permitted marches of a single-day “general strike,” and that these peaceful people suffered murder for their efforts. They then cease to be represented as self-consciously transgressive acts of resistance that defy the legal order.
As is the case with any fabrication, it can only take hold if there is in fact a kernel of truth to it. These mobilizations did interrupt the stability of surge operations, but themselves were unstable in a manner that prompted factions of the Party of Order to appear to offer them sanction. Rather than the rapid response networks or filter blockades themselves eliciting a drawdown and changing of the guard, the proletarian looting and seizure of occupational forces’ vehicles on January 14 in North Minneapolis following the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis appears to have been the turning of the tide.6 Where to that point insurgent capacities had been cultivated in a popular legal register, just as in 2020 that very infrastructure now threatened to give cover to less obedient or quiescent class forces. The media’s constructed image of a forced retreat then at the same time conceals real tactical advances that are made by both the proletariat and the Party of Order. Instead of legally documenting abuses for NGOs, racialized proletarians pinned officers to the scene, surrounded their vehicles, and expropriated the contents, revealing paperwork documenting plans for surge operations and hotels in which federal agents were staying. The integrity of the entire operation’s security was compromised in a small, localized action. Likewise, the media image of the drawdown obscured a transition to a more tactful strategy in federal forces in the increasing coordination of law enforcement activity across federal, state, and local jurisdictions, including the local assumption of immigration enforcement duties, the heightened presence of federal personnel growing the capacity to sustain itself in multiple cities simultaneously, and the legal sanction granted by the courts for these operations. Even now, as the federal officers who committed the murders are being prosecuted by local authorities, it is a formality that is being undertaken with the utmost concern of preserving the stability of these mutations in U.S. federalism occurring through this political recomposition of the policing institutions of the capitalist state.
Rather than any simple question of whether “we” are “winning” or “losing,” this is a matter of intensifying antagonisms in the class struggle’s direct confrontations with the capitalist state’s array of aligned forces. The soft side of counterinsurgency can then be said to be adapting to not only post-2020 Uprising conditions, but the general crisis of the second coming of the current administration that has more directly placed its organizational infrastructure in its sights. The defenders of liberal democracy then compete with their more forcefully reactionary counterparts to be the most competent stewards of Order. They then make overtures to renew the collaborative relationship they view as lost and essential to the continuity of the imperial project.
Turning to another pivotal moment in this development, the events of the Prairieland case are instructive. The confusion of prospective alliance on common concerns of protecting constitutional rights persists amongst some of the case’s commentators. One such study of the case attempts to make this connection between militants and liberals, stating that “it is an attempt to use cultural hysteria to further restrict First Amendment rights—to make a No Kings demonstration tantamount to Antifa direct action because it had to have been organized by some group of people.”7 We are fortunate, however, that the very people behind such efforts as the No Kings demonstrations clarified the reality for us, as the project manager of 50501 testified for the prosecution in the case to distinguish their movement from the alleged actions of the defendants. As Zohra Ahmed writes:
“The demonstration on the night of July 4th, 2025, was the second of the day. That afternoon, the group behind the nationwide No Kings protests, 50501 (“50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement”), had organized its own demonstration. The DOJ’s lawyers built its case around the contrast between the two protests, good and bad, peaceful and violent. Indeed, the DOJ elevated 50501’s protest as an exemplar for proper political action and even called one of its project managers to testify at trial. Nelida Frias, the afternoon protest organizer, characterized 50501 as so anodyne and nonconfrontational to render its activities almost nonsensical. On the stand, Frias appeared to deny that the No Kings Protests were directed towards anyone in particular, like Trump. She also explained how she had worked closely with local law enforcement in planning the event and that the group had chosen July 4 to celebrate a better version of America.”8
To the question of what to make of the potential for engaging the No Kings demonstrations of the past year, such a moment would make it very clear what kind of situation awaits revolutionary partisans in doing so. The heightened antagonism between the current administration and the institutional forces of popular mobilization that were, until fairly recently, bolstered by the administrative state as the means of legitimizing it and politically acclimating its subjects to ongoing austerity has not necessarily made this an occasion for alliance. The NPIC has made what appear to be significant adaptations since the Uprising that are not limited to facilitating the prosecution and incarceration of those that exceed the boundaries of prescribed political activity (or even simply letting it happen through deliberate non-engagement). As funders have either dried up, preserving capital in the uncertainty of the post-COVID economy, or switched political allegiances, these institutions are constrained in their activity. They then refine their focus and seek to prove their worth to those within the Party of Order that may have need for their services.
It is significant then that the No Kings demonstrations happen months apart, with a great degree of coordination across the country, taking registries of participants and operating in cooperation with law enforcement agencies. Where in 2020 the sheer quantity of NGO actions and the proximity of these to each other created the kind of cover where masses gathered in day-time demonstrations could divert police attention and capacity from other places, or themselves become something else as night fell and others arrived, the No Kings actions are curated to provide no such opportunity to participants that might aspire to escalation. Where such action is attempted, it is quickly isolated, condemned, and those captured left to fend for themselves, the same as it ever was in such relations. Do not be surprised if the “peace police” create shock troops of their own.
This fog of NGO mobilization now takes on a distinct qualitative shift in its overt complicity with facilitating the intensifying repression on militant anarchist, communist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist actors. The extent of repression that has developed since 2020 through the Stop Cop City and Palestinian solidarity movements has created a high degree of dependency on legal defense infrastructure by partisans of these movements. NGO capacity then becomes vital in this capacity, and through this relationship it once again aims to set the terms of political engagement. Lawyers are essential, but they cannot be relied upon to dictate political content. As such, supporting people who cooperate with the state becomes a question, as do the very terms of what counts as cooperation. Militants and partisans of communist revolution find themselves fighting to gain a foothold in a movement that is not their own and relates to them as an opposition to be suppressed. Such capitulations could be called tailism, but there is no such organization that exists to the extent that the charge would be coherent. It is, rather, simply a recognition of a subsumption from which a break must be made.
This very struggle demonstrates in its negativity that from which we must aim to develop capacities of our own. The course of Party formation will be circuitous, and it will proceed by way of who coheres in the fractures that must be made with the Party of Order. The strategic and organizational acumen that must be developed requires the recognition of the needs created in the course of the struggle, and self-consciously directed experimentation towards the end of satisfying these needs. Communist development involves the cultivation of the skills required to maintain and expand a political line within and through successive waves of repression that can set the terms of tactical decision. It will only do so through efforts to spread this knowledge and capacity within the masses of proletarians from which revolution draws its strength, and communism’s necessity finds its substance. This substance in motion is at once subject, the very purpose to which this mounting objectivity of counterinsurgency is drawn to suppress. In turn, communist development is the task of realizing the proletariat’s means of suppressing these antagonistic class forces.
Policing the Crisis 2020-2025
Note: This essay was written over the course of the last few months as an exercise in attempting to reconstruct the conditions of the class struggle in the U.S. over the past 5 years. As the title suggests, I was motivated to do so after reading the book
https://illwill.com/lies
https://illwill.com/proto-politics-in-purgatory
Ibid.
