Uprising, Counterinsurgency, and Civil War: Understanding the Rise of the Paramilitary Right

By Tom Nomad

Republished from Crimethinc.

In this analysis, Tom Nomad presents an account of the rise of the contemporary far right, tracing the emergence of a worldview based in conspiracy theories and white grievance politics and scrutinizing the function that it serves protecting the state. Along the way, he describes how liberal counterinsurgency strategies function alongside the heavy-handed “law and order” strategies, concluding with a discussion of what the far right mean by civil war.

Tom Nomad is an organizer based in the Rust Belt and the author of The Master’s Tools: Warfare and Insurgent Possibility and Toward an Army of Ghosts.

The bulk of this text was composed in September and October 2020, when the George Floyd uprising was still unfolding and many people feared that Trump would try to hold on to the presidency by any means necessary. Since then, the uprising has lost momentum and the Trump administration has failed to organize a seizure of power.

Yet the dynamics described herein persist. The uprising remains latent, waiting to re-emerge onto the streets, while the formation of a new MAGA coalition is underway. Since the election, a constellation including the pro-Trump right, conspiracy theorists, the remnants of the alt-right, and traditional white nationalist groups has formed around a belated attempt to keep Trump in power.

This coalition is motivated by conspiracy theories and narratives about Democrats “stealing” the election. An additional segment of the American voting population has connected with the far right, openly calling for their opponents to be eliminated by violent means. This is not just a new right-wing coalition, but a force with the ability to leverage AM radio, cable news, and elected officials to spread racism, xenophobia, and weaponized disinformation.

Trump and his supporters will be removed from office shortly, but this coalition will persist for years to come. While centrist media outlets described Trump as seeking to seize power, his supporters see themselves as acting to defend the “real” America. In response to Trump’s removal from power, they aim to work with the “loyal” elements of the state—chiefly right-wing politicians and police—to eliminate what they consider an internal threat to the US political project. At its foundation, the right remains a force of counterinsurgency.

Introduction

The events of the George Floyd uprising represent something fundamentally different from the convulsions of the preceding twenty years. The normalities of activism, the structures of discursive engagement premised on dialogue with the state, gave way; their hegemony over political action began to crumble before our eyes. The mass mobilizations—with their staid, boring formats, their pacifist actions with no plan for escalation, their constant repetition of the same faces in the same groups—were replaced by a young, radical crowd largely comprised of people of color, willing not only to challenge the state, but also to fight back. Over a period of months, the previous barriers of political identity evaporated—the constructs that distinguished “activism” from “normal life.” This new force ripped open the streets themselves, leaving the shells of burned police cars in its wake.

For some of us, this was a long time coming. The global influence of the US has been in decline since the end of the Cold War; the post-political era that Fukuyama and Clinton proclaimed so confidently has given way to a history that continues to unfold unstoppably. The war that the police wage against us every day finally became a struggle with more than one antagonist. The long anticipated uprising, the moment of reckoning with the bloody past of the American political project, seemed to be at hand. We saw the state beginning to fray at the edges, losing its capacity to maintain control. While we cannot yet see a light at the end, we have at least finally entered the tunnel—the trajectory that will lead us towards the conflicts that will prove decisive.

But, just as quickly as this new momentum emerged, we were immediately beset on all sides by the forces of counterinsurgency. The logic of the revolt is constantly under attack, sometimes by those we had counted as allies. Some insist that we must present clear reformist demands, while others aim simply to eliminate us. All the techniques at the disposal of the state and its attendant political classes—including those within the so-called movement—are engaged as our adversaries endeavor to capture the energy of the struggle or exploit it for their own gain.

From the first days, liberal organizers played a core role in this attempt to bring the revolt back within the structures of governance. Caught off guard, they immediately began a campaign to delegitimize the violence expressed in the streets by framing it as the work of provocateurs and “outside agitators.” They progressed to trying to capture the momentum and discourse of the movement, forcing the discussion about how to destroy the police back into a discussion about budgets and electoral politics. Now, as Joe Biden gets his footing, liberals have completed this trajectory, arguing that rioting is not a form of “protest” and that the full weight of the state should be brought to bear on those who stepped outside of the limits of state-mediated politics.

The truth is that the revolts of 2020 represent a direct response to the failures of former attempts at liberal capture. During the uprisings of 2014 and 2015, liberals were able to seize control and force the discussion back to the subject of police reform. Consent decrees were implemented across the country; so-called community policing (a euphemism for using the community to assist the police in attacking it) and promises of legislative reform effectively drove a wedge between militants and activists. These attempts delayed the inevitable explosions that we have witnessed since the murder of George Floyd, but they were stopgap measures bound to fail. The current revolt confirms that reformism has not addressed the problem of policing. The areas of the country that have seen the most violent clashes are almost all cities run by Democrats, in which reform was tried and failed. In some ways, the narrative advanced by the Trump campaign that cities are in revolt due to Democratic administrations is true—but it is not as a consequence of their permissiveness, but rather of the failure of their attempt to co-opt the energy of revolt.

At the same time, we are experiencing a new attempt to supplement state forces with the forces of the far right. Militia groups that previously claimed to be opposed to government repression are now mobilizing their own informal counterinsurgency campaigns. This is not surprising, given that these militias were always grounded in preserving white supremacy. It is also unsurprising that more traditional Republicans have allowed themselves to be pulled in this direction—ever since September 11, 2001, their entire ethos has been built around the idea that they are the only people willing to defend the “homeland” from outside threats.

Yet it is surprising the lengths to which the state is willing to go to accomplish this goal. Traditionally, the basis of the state has been a set of logistical forces able to impose the will of a sovereign; in America, that sovereign is liberal democracy itself. The continuation of this project is directly tied to the state’s ability to function in space, logistically and tactically; this requires spaces to be “smooth,” predictable, and without resistance or escalation, both of which can cause contingent effects that disrupt state actors’ ability to predict dynamics and deploy accordingly. In calling for para-state forces to confront the forces of revolt in the street, Trump and his colleagues are setting the stage for a conflagration that—if all sides embrace it—could lead to large-scale social conflict. Their willingness to embrace such a risky strategy suggests how near the state has been pushed to losing control. It also indicates the ways that they are willing to modify their counterinsurgency strategy.

The revolt is now under siege. The official state forces—the police, federal forces, National Guard, and the like—are employing a strategy of consistent escalation, which functions both as retaliation and repression. The forces of liberal capture have showed which side they are on, affirming Biden’s promise to crush the militant sectors of the uprising and reward the moderate elements. The forces of the right have received approval to generalize the “strategy of tension” approach that they developed in Portland in the years since 2016. When these newly anointed forces of right-wing reactionary para-militarism are incorporated into an already existing patchwork of counterinsurgency-based approaches, the scene is set for a scenario that can only end in mass repression or mass resistance, and likely both.

The emergence of these converging counterinsurgency strategies has coincided with a rising discourse of civil war. This is not the sort of civil war discussed in texts like Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War, which describes, in hyperbolic terms, a conflict between different “forms of life.” Civil war, as understood in the modern US context, is a widespread frontal conflict between social forces that involves the participation of the state but also takes place apart from it. The idea that this could somehow resolve the core social and political differences emerges from a millenarian vision structured around American civilian militarization, which has emerged in response to the so-called “War on Terrorism,” the realities of social division within the US, and the rising perception of threats, whether real (people of color dealing with the police) or imaginary (“rioters are coming to burn the suburbs”). Though many on all sides embrace this concept, this fundamentally shifts our understandings of strategy, politics, and the conflict itself.

We should be cautious about embracing this concept of civil war; we should seek to understand the implications first. The framework of civil war might feel like an accurate way to describe our situation. It can feel cathartic to use this term to describe a situation that has become so tense. But embracing this concept and basing our mode of engagement on it could unleash dynamics that would not only put us in a profoundly disadvantageous situation, tactically speaking, but could also threaten to destroy the gains of the uprising itself.

Before we can delve into why this is the case, we must review how the framework itself emerged. To do so, we need to go back to the middle of the 20th century.

The Origins of the Push towards Civil War

To consider what civil war could mean in contemporary America, we have to understand how we got here. We have to tell the story of how white supremacy shifted from being identical with the functioning of the state itself to become a quality that distinguishes the vigilante from the state, on a formal level, while operating directly in concert with the state. What we are tracing here is not a history, in the sense of a chronicle of past events, but rather a sort of genealogy of concepts and frameworks.

We’ll start with the shift in political and social dynamics that took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the Civil Rights Movement. Resistance to hegemonic white power began to impact two fundamental elements of white American life during this period: the concept of American exceptionalism—the idea that America is a uniquely just expression of universal human values—and the notion of a hegemonic white power structure. This led to a shift in the ways that white, conservative groups viewed the world. They felt their hegemony to be newly under threat, not only in regard to their control of political institutions, but also in ways that could erode their economic and social power.

Previously, in many places, police had worked hand in hand with vigilante groups like the KKK to maintain racial apartheid. The day-to-day work of maintaining this political structure was largely carried out by official forces, with the underlying social and economic support of a large part of the white population. For example, during the racist massacre that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, many of the white assailants were deputized and given weapons by city officials.

During the fight for civil rights in the 1960s, when the role of the state in the enforcement of white supremacy began to shift in some places, many white residents adopted an active rather than passive posture in supporting the racist aspects of the social order. As resistance reached a critical mass, the issue of racial segregation became openly political, rather than unspoken and implicit, with entire political platforms structured around positions regarding it. In response to the challenge to the hegemony of the white apartheid state, the structure of apartheid came to the surface, and white Southerners enlisted in openly racist political forces on a scale not seen since at least the 1930s. These shifts and the subsequent widespread social response created the political and social conditions for the dynamics we see today.

During that period, the discourse of white supremacy also changed form. As oppressed populations rose up with increasing militancy, the narrative of unchallenged white supremacy gave way to a new narrative grounded in an idyllic portrayal of white Christian America and a promise to construct racial and economic unity around an effort to regain power and restore the “lost” America. This narrative, articulated by politicians like George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, and later Ronald Reagan (and distilled today in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”), was not just a call to preserve white supremacy. Rather, it described an ontological conflict in which the attempt to overthrow Jim Crow and bring an end to structural disparities represented a threat not only to an economic and social structure, but also to white America itself. Further, it proposed that this threat necessitated a response employing informal violence, mobilized across a wide swath of society, with the consent of the state. This narrative portrayed the emerging social conflict, not as a conflict about race and politics, but as an existential struggle, a matter of life and death.

In some circles, the demand for a political and social unity for white America was framed in terms of “civilization”—this is the current from which the contemporary far right emerged. As Leonard Zeskind argues, this shift involved embracing the concepts of “Western civilization,” the need to defend it, and the incorporation of fascist and Nazi tropes into the thinking of the far right. Many of the personalities who were to drive a militant shift in the far right—David Duke, Willis Carto, William Pierce, and others like them—began to publish newsletters and books, finding a home in the world of gun shows and obscure radio programs. This shift, from white populations taking their political and social domination for granted to white populations reacting to a perceived loss of hegemony, also contributed to the rise of armed right-wing groups. The idea of defending Western civilization provided a moralistic framework and a justification for violence, leading to groups like The Order carrying out armed robberies and assassinations during the 1970s and 1980s.

In more mainstream Republican circles, these ideas of the idyllic America and its civilizational superiority became policy positions, though they were expressed only in coded terms. By the time of the 1992 George HW Bush re-election campaign, it was no longer possible to leverage overt racism within polite society the way it had previously been. As a result, the right began to frame this discourse in new terms, speaking of “Western” values and civilization, describing a “real” America defending the world against Communism and disorder, which were implicitly associated with racial and political difference. In place of people like Duke or Wallace articulating overt calls for racial segregation, the right began to use a different discourse to call for separation on the basis of the concepts of purity and deviance and the language of law and order.

This served to define a cultural and political space and also the areas of exclusion—not on the basis of overt concepts of race, but around the idea of a civilizational difference. The terms of division were sometimes framed through the lens of religious differences, other times through the lens of a gulf between a rural and an “urban” America. Some within the right at this time, like Lee Atwater, discussed this shift overtly with their supporters (though behind closed doors), articulating how “dog whistle” policies on tax, housing, and crime could serve as replacements for the overt racism of the past. This concept of a Western civilization under threat fused with the fervor against “communism” that was revived under Reagan in the 1980s, along with rising conspiracy theory discourse—a toxic mixture that would explode, literally and figuratively, in the late 1980s.

Meanwhile, the rise of the religious right as a political force added another element to this fusion of conspiracy theories, anti-communist paranoia, and the increasingly armed politics of white grievance. Prior to the Reagan campaign in 1980, the religious right had largely approached politics with suspicion, with some pastors telling their parishioners not to participate in a political system that was dirty and sinful. The Reagan campaign intentionally reached out to this segment of the population, shifting its campaign rhetoric to attract their support and elevating their concerns into the realm of policy. Consequently, anti-choice campaigns and the like became a powerful means to mobilize people. This gave the narrative of social polarization an additional moral and religious angle, using rhetoric about sin and preventing “depravity.” The result was an escalation into armed violence, with the Army of God murdering doctors and bombing abortion clinics around the US.

In this move toward armed violence, right-wing terrorist discourse underwent a few modifications. The first of these was an expansion of the terrain where they saw the “war” being fought. The tendency towards armed violence expanded from focusing on civil rights initiatives and the question of whether marginalized groups should be able to participate in society to sectors that had traditionally considered themselves distinct from overt fascism. As the mainstream right increasingly embraced the concept of the culture wars, they also adopted the implication that there was a fundamental existential conflict. By framing the conflict in terms of purity and deviance, coupled with the idea of civilizational conflict that was already emerging in the right, the construction of an absolute social division around political power came to justify a rising discourse of armed politics. Right-wing attention was concentrated on those who did not share right-wing moral codes; this was framed as a justification to use state violence (in the form of legal restrictions, such as abortion bans) and armed force (in the form of far-right terrorism) to eliminate all groups perceived as threats to moral American life.

In addition to targeting people who were pro-choice, who had different religious affiliations, or who expressed themselves outside of the cis-hetero normative construct, these perceived threats were also directed at non-white people, though this was framed in the language of responding to social and political deviance. The idea of an armed cultural conflict, the targets of which now included everyone outside of white Christian conservatism, began to spread throughout the right wing, as some of the more moderate factions embraced or at least explained away anti-choice violence or the formation of militia groups. However, as the violence became a more significant political liability, conservative politicians began to modify the extremist rhetoric of armed factions into policy, embracing the culture of these political circles while rejecting armed violence, at least in public. This was evident in anti-choice politics, in which politicians embraced groups like Right to Life but rejected groups like the Army of God even as they incorporated their political rhetoric into policy.

The development of this broad political identity based in white Christianity and the attempt to restore and protect an idyllic America from all “outside forces” brought the discourse of far-right organizations into increasingly mainstream contexts starting in the early 1990s. However, while their ideas were becoming more and more generalized, armed far-right groups became increasingly isolated, especially as the Gulf War precipitated rising mainstream patriotism. As allegiance to the state became a default politics on the right, armed violence was increasingly seen as fringe terrorism. In some ways, during this period, the right no longer needed the armed groups, since it held almost unchallenged power, and could implement far-right visions incrementally through policy.

During this period of right-wing ascendancy and lasting until the election of Clinton in 1992, the armed far right became publicly ostracized from the mainstream right, which increasingly saw the indiscretion of the far-right as a liability. Increasingly marginalized, far-right fringe elements kept to themselves, breeding an ecosystem of conspiracy theories dispersed via newsletters, pamphlets, books, and radio. However, with the rise of the Clinton administration and the loss of Republican power in Congress, far-right beliefs were slowly reintegrated into the mainstream right. Publications like American Spectator magazine picked up fringe conspiracy theories from the far right about the Clintons’ financial dealings, the deaths of their former friends and business associates, and Bill Clinton’s supposed ties to moderate left-wing activists during the Vietnam War (never mind that he was an informant while at Oxford). This process accelerated after the government raids at Waco, which were portrayed by many on the right as an attack against a religious community over gun ownership issues, and at Ruby Ridge, portrayed as a state assault on a rural family minding their own business.

The events that played out at Waco and Ruby Ridge, early in the Clinton administration, began to play a role of being points of condensation around which conspiracy theories could form. The efforts to establish global unity under American political norms, which arose at the end of the Cold War, accelerated the emergence of narratives about a purported New World Order—a superficially modified version of some of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that the Nazis had previously advanced. Combined with the narrative of an absolute cultural and political division, this fueled perceptions that the “traditional” America that the right wing held up as an ideal was collapsing. Elements of the racist far-right used these conspiracy theories as openings to enter mainstream right wing circles. Mainstream Republican discourse integrated the former fringes—a move propelled by Newt Gingrich and Thomas DeLay for the purposes of creating a permanent Republican voting block; by pushing the narrative of permanent division and existential threat, they could demonize the Democrats, guaranteeing loyalty among their voters. The popularization of these narratives extended the Overton window to the right in ways that the far-right subsequently exploited to extend its influence and recruitment. Many of these tendencies fuel present-day Trumpism.

Concurrently, in the 1990s, militia movements that had previously been viewed as fringe elements increasingly came to be regarded as necessary to defend America from internal and external enemies. As right-wing conspiracy theories reached a fever pitch and increasingly mainstream Republicans embraced these politics, the militias grew in size. This tendency, coupled with the right’s historic fervor for gun culture, popularized the notion of the “patriot” standing up against “tyranny” to preserve “freedom” and an American (read: white-dominated) way of life. This language was continuously weaponized over the following decades, pulling more moderate conservatives into contact with extreme right-wing ideas, which became less and less divergent from the language of mainstream Republican activists.

Understandings of “freedom” as the preservation of white domination and Christian supremacy continued to infiltrate the mainstream right, fueled by the conspiracy theories about how Clinton was going to destroy the white Christian way of life in America. In this mutation, the concept of “freedom” was modified to represent a rigid set of social norms. For example, Christian groups began to declare that it was a violation of their “freedom” for the state to allow non-hetero couples to marry, or not to force children to pray in school. In the past 30 years, this dynamic has been repeatedly applied to exclude people from society based on sexual orientation or gender identity and to further integrate the language of Christianity into government documents. This notion of “freedom” as the “preservation” of a “way of life” has become so popular with the right-wing that it barely requires repeating when politicians employ it to push policies of exclusion. Combined with the desire to eliminate difference and to preserve social and political inequality, disempowerment, and racial apartheid, the notion of “freedom” has been stripped of any actual meaning. This has set the stage for an increasingly authoritarian posture across the right.

The concept of a culture war, which had become common parlance within the religious right, fused with the widespread conspiracy theory narrative describing the rise of a tyrannical elite. In its attempts to undercut Clinton, the Republican Party created the conditions for a concept of total cultural warfare, which became increasingly militarized and seeped back into the more moderate factions of the Republican Party. Some of these factions still embraced policy-centric positions, but the narratives they utilized to motivate voters were all based on this notion of an absolute cultural threat. Voters were presented en masse with the image of an American culture threatened with extinction, led to believe that they were the only forces that could mobilize against a tyrannical “liberal elite” in order to preserve their “freedom.” As this mentality generalized, the idea of civil war as a horizontal conflict between social factions came to be widely accepted among the right.

The Mentality of Defending the “Homeland”

With the advent of the second Bush administration and the September 11 attacks, the relationship between the state and the fringe far right changed dramatically. The state’s response focused on constructing a national consensus around the “War on Terrorism”—a consensus which was exploited to justify systematic violations of civil liberties, to target entire communities, and to channel trillions into overseas military occupations. The core of this campaign was the construction of a narrative of two elements in conflict (“with us or against us”)—a binary distinction grounded in unquestioning loyalty to the state—and the drafting of the “public” into the intelligence and counter-terrorism apparatuses. The attacks themselves and the rhetoric around them helped to popularize the concept of a conflict of civilizations; the idea of defending the “homeland” from foreign threats that sought to “destroy the American way of life” was increasingly adopted across the American political landscape. A sort of renaissance occurred in the militia movement: no longer alienated from the state, the militia movement started to become a cultural phenomenon. The concept of the citizen defender of the “homeland” entered popular culture, becoming a widespread cultural archetype within mainstream conservatism.

The embrace of the tenets that formed the foundations of the militia movement in the decade leading up to September 11 had profound effects.

First, an ecosystem of conspiracy theories developed around September 11, propelling Alex Jones from the fringe towards mainstream conservative circles. This was bolstered by state efforts to spread the narrative that hidden enemies within the US were waiting for a time to attack. This posture lends itself to justifying social exclusion and validating conspiracy theories; the threat is not apparent but hidden, associated with elements of society that diverge from supposed social norms. As a result, the narrative on the far-right shifted from a framework that was at odds with the state to a framework in which the right targeted others based on race, religion, and politics in order to defend the state itself. Conspiracy theorists were able to exploit increasing Internet use, using online media and the newly formed mass social media platforms—chiefly Facebook—to spread conspiracy theories to new social circles.

Second, the incorporation of far-right ideas and personalities into mainstream conservative discourse brought more traditional conservatives into increasingly close contact with extreme racism and Islamophobia. Before the rise of social media and the right-wing idea of the civilian soldier, many people saw these conspiracy theories as marginal and lacking credibility, or else did not encounter them in the first place. But now, these fringe elements gained an audience within more mainstream circles, hiding their intentions within the parlance of counter-terrorism. As the field of counter-terrorism studies emerged, many of those who initially populated that world hailed from the Islamophobic far right; they were able to pass themselves off as “terrorism experts” simply by presenting themselves as a “think tank” and making business cards. As the right came to adopt the concept of an absolute threat and to identify that threat with otherness in general, the fear of an immediate terrorist threat that politicians had propagated bled over into cultural and political divisions, conveying the sense that the enemy represented an immediate and physical threat to health and safety. The more this mentality spread throughout the right, and the more that this was leveraged to demonize difference, the more the conditions were created for these divisions to be characterized with a narrative of overt warfare.

For more and more Republicans, inclusion in society became conditional, depending on political beliefs; protest activity was enough to identify a person as an external enemy. This is ironic, insofar as the right wing has dishonestly sought to rebrand itself as defending free speech.

Within the right, as the idea of a militarized defense of the state against enemies both internal and external took shape, the definition of “enemy” expanded to include not just those of different cultural, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, but also immigrants, Muslims, and “liberals.” As the Bush era wore on, this newly empowered militia movement, increasingly aligned with the white nationalist agenda, began to engage in semi-sanctioned activity, such as the Minutemen patrols along the Mexican border. Republican politicians incorporated the ideals of these militarized groups into GOP policy, both nationally and locally in places like Arizona, where white nationalists played critical roles in drafting SB1070, and later helped to popularize a narrative about the need for a border wall. Following the patterns of past social conflicts, this narrative served to create political conditions that could render increasingly invasive state policies more acceptable and successful—including the expansion of the surveillance state, the militarization of the police, and the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As militarism took hold on the right, the foundations of the contemporary conservative position were laid. The right came to see themselves as defenders of the state, and the state as the force that defends their “freedom”—understanding “freedom” as the preservation of a white Christian conservative society. Consequently, formerly anti-government militias shifted to openly supporting repressive government intervention, and even the supposedly “libertarian” elements of the right embraced the police and the forces of the state.

When Obama took office, the stage was set for the final act, in which the politics of white grievance, the violent preservation of white supremacy, and what would become a state strategy of counterinsurgency came together in a volatile cocktail. Just as they had during the Clinton era, Republican politicians began to capitalize on racism and conspiracy theories as political strategies to regain power—but this time, these conspiracy theories took on overtly racial and religious tones. What had been implicit in the 1990s was now explicit.

The prevalence of conspiracy theories within the Republican Party reinforced the notion of a “real America” protecting the state from internal enemies—which, according to this narrative, had managed to take control of the state itself in the form of the Obama administration. The necessity of portraying the threat as Other, external to a “real America,” is obvious enough in the rise of the “birther” conspiracy. The right merged everything they opposed into a singular force attempting to destroy America: recall the infamous Glenn Beck conspiracy board, according to which the Service Employees International Union was selling copies of The Coming Insurrection to help Obama institute Islamo-Fascist Leninism. This completed the process via which the right had begun to view all who disagreed with their doctrines as the enemy and to consider themselves a distinct political project based around the defense of America.

Paranoia took over in the mainstream right. All sources of information that did not reinforce their views, all policies that could be portrayed as part of a “liberal conspiracy,” all efforts to promote social tolerance were seen as direct attacks against America itself. The conspiratorial tendency that Republicans had incorporated into the party in the late 1990s had metastasized into a belief that Republicans were constantly under assault by enemies that must be destroyed. The entirety of society and politics were viewed as the terrain of an ongoing civil war, conceptualized in increasingly millenarian terms. To those outside the right, this narrative seemed completely divorced from reality—but within these circles, these theories were the result of years of social polarization and burgeoning ideas about cultural warfare, promoted by Republican politicians. Departing from the idea of a lifestyle under threat, moving through the concept of cultural warfare into conspiracy theories and the framework of civilizational warfare, an overtly racist call to “protect Western civilization” became the cornerstone of contemporary right wing politics.

The open embracing of conspiracy theory generated several mutations within right-wing discourse, two of which became prominent.

The first mutation took the form of the Tea Party and the birther conspiracy—from which Donald Trump’s candidacy ultimately emerged. In these circles, conspiracy theories fueled by Facebook and online right-wing platforms spread at an unprecedented pace, generating theories about everything from “death panels” to undocumented immigration and eventually culminating in QAnon. The rapid pace at which these theories proliferated and were adopted by the Republican Party and their attendant media organizations, such as Fox News, created the conditions for these narratives to grow increasingly divergent from demonstrable and observable fact. In these circles, the acceptance of information had less to do with its veracity than with the declared politics of the communicator. This backlash against “liberal media”—i.e., any media organization that did not valorize right-wing narratives—formed the basis of the “fake news” narrative later pushed by Trump.

The second mutation was the emergence of newly empowered militia and white nationalist movements, which had come to exist in close proximity with one another twenty years earlier when they were relatively isolated during the Clinton era. These organizations capitalized on their newfound access to people in positions of power. Narratives about defending the state against “outsiders” continued to spread online, enabling militia groups to capitalize on populist discontent in the waning years of the Obama administration. These elements began to organize through several different channels, including attempts to carry out attacks against immigrants and Muslims, the emergence of “citizen’s militias” in places like Ferguson, Missouri in response to the uprising against racist police violence, and direct standoffs with state forces such as the one at the Bundy Ranch in 2014. These confrontations provided a point of condensation, while right-wing media pointed to them as examples of “resistance” to the supposed internal threat.

Concurrent with the acceleration of activity within conspiracy theory and militia circles was the rise of the “Alt-Right,” which emerged during “Gamer Gate” in 2014. Largely driven by the Internet and misogynist white grievance, this element introduced a new and well-funded influence into the right-wing ecosystem. The Alt-Right is rooted in the white-collar racist right-wing, populated by figures like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimlow who were often seen as soft and bourgeois by other elements of the far-right. Taylor, Brimlow, and similar figures are situated in the universities and think tanks of Washington, DC; they had always operated in a space between the official Republican Party and the Nazi skinheads and racist militias that had dominated the far-right fringe for decades. Flush with cash from tech and financial industry funders and armed with a logic of strategic deception, the Alt-Right gained widespread attention through online harassment campaigns, which they justified by disingenuously leveraging the rhetoric of free speech. Thanks to the developments of the preceding years, the Alt-Right was able to traffic openly in conspiracy theories and disinformation while portraying anyone who opposed them as part of the “liberal establishment”—the groups that the right had convinced their adherents represented an internal threat.

As the online presence of the Alt-Right grew, they gained entry into influential Republican circles by teaming up with older, more traditional racist conservatives who had attained positions from which they could shape policy. This influence was amplified by publications like Breitbart, run by Trump’s confidant Steve Bannon, and funded by the Mercer family, who made billions running hedge funds. For Republicans like the Mercers, embracing the Alt-Right was a strategy to gain power within conservative circles and overcome the power networks of more traditional funders like the Koch brothers. Others recognized the power that they could wield by tapping into the online forces assembling around the Alt-Right. This online presence was supplemented by the mobilization of older conservatives through the Tea Party, rising far-right activist energy, and the construction of a culture around the militia movement.

Many conservative politicians began to embrace this new formation, despite its outright racism and the ways it used confrontational tactics to achieve its goals. In many ways, as with Gingrich and DeLay in past decades, Republican politicians saw this new element of the right wing as a possible source from which they could draw grassroots energy. They hoped to use this energy to compensate for the fact that the Republican Party was becoming a minoritarian party with a voter base that was slowly dying out—just as they used gerrymandering and voter suppression to counteract this disadvantage. They saw an opportunity to construct a voting block that was completely loyal to them and isolated from any other perspectives, beginning with the demonization of the “liberal media” and eventually encompassing every aspect of everyday life—where people buy food and clothes, what kind of cars they drive, the music they listen to, the books they read. The social “bubble” that the right had spent years building crystalized, enabling them to mobilize rage and reactionary anger almost at will. Though this allowed the Republicans to leverage parliamentary procedure to limit much of the Obama agenda, it also created the conditions that led to the old guard of the party losing control over the party itself.

Out of this moment arose Donald Trump, who ran a campaign that was as openly racist as it was nationalistic, as blatantly grounded in disinformation as it was in a politics of social division and white grievance. Even though his candidacy was openly rejected by traditional Republican power circles, they quickly came to understand that their attempts to build a grassroots conservativism had caused them to lose control over the force that they had helped call into being. The Overton Window in the US had shifted so far right by this point that the politics of Pat Buchanan, which the Republican base of the 1990s had rejected as racist, were now firmly entrenched as core Republican beliefs. The Trump campaign set about tearing down the remaining elements of the right that resisted his overt politics of racial division; in the process, it empowered the overtly racist elements within the right that had been gaining influence for years. Many commentators attributed this shift to the rise of the Alt-Right and its internet disinformation and trolling campaigns. In fact, the stage had been set for Trump long before, when the narrative of white communities at risk of destruction gained currency in the years following the Civil Rights Movement.

Thanks to the overt articulation of racist politics, the isolation of the right in a media bubble, and the construction of an absolute conflict between the right and all other political and social groups, the Trump campaign found a ready group of supporters. This mobilization invoked the idea of being under attack by “others,” but it also invited this base to serve as a force in offensive street action. The forces of militarization and social polarization that had been gaining ground on the right for years were unleashed in the street. All around the US, Trump supporters attacked immigrants, vandalized stores and places of worship, carried out mass shootings in the name of ethnic cleansing, and organized rallies and marches during which participants often attacked everyone from organized opposition to random passersby.

This mobilization enabled Trump not only to win the nomination and the presidency, but to marginalize practically all other factions of the Republican Party. This, in turn, created a situation in which normal conservatives were willing to consider taking on counterinsurgency roles on behalf of the state to defend the “homeland” against opposition to Trump, who has become synonymous with the rise of the white Christian “true America” to power.

This popularization of formerly fringe ideas has been widespread and terrifying. On the level of society, this manifests as a sort of cultural warfare, instilling inescapable and constant fear: immigrants fear being rounded up, dissidents fear being targeted by the state or right-wing vigilantes, targeted groups fear discrimination and police racism. Over the past four years, elements of the overtly racist right have openly mobilized in the streets, causing a massive social crisis—yet this has also driven elements of the left and left-adjacent circles to mobilize against rising fascist activity, and they have largely succeeded in driving the far right off the streets again, or at least limiting their gains.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has not hesitated to use the mechanisms of the state to crack down on dissidents and harass populations considered to threaten the re-establishment of white hegemony, while continuously spreading disinformation to construct a parallel reality. The justification for targeting dissidents is descended directly from the concept of defending “real America” from attack by secretive internal enemies. Narratives that reinforce this portrayal of the scenario are promoted, regardless of verifiability, by an entire universe of right-wing media. Trump has positioned himself and the media outlets that support him as the sole sources of truth for his supporters. Consequently, he has been able to frame any opposition—even simple fact checking—as an attack against himself and his vision of America, separating his adherents from all other sectors of the American public.

What emerged is a sort of final act, a culminating move in the construction of the concept of civil war on the right. The right transformed from a force opposing everyone they considered immoral or un-American, including the state, depending on who was in power, to a force that was completely loyal to the state. In this transformation, the concept of civil war also underwent a fundamental shift from a notion of social or cultural conflict between defined social factions, as it was for the religious right, to a strategy of defending the state against oppositional forces. In this transformation, the concept of civil war acquired a central paradox, in which the term came to mean something wholly other than its initial connotations within right-wing rhetoric. It no longer denotes a conflict that occurs between social factions outside of formal state power; now it describes a conflict in which one political or social faction becomes a force operating alongside the state within a framework of counterinsurgency.

The Concept of Civil War

The concept of civil war, in its traditional sense, presumes that there are two or more political factions competing for state power, or else, a horizontal conflict between social factions that are otherwise understood as part of the same larger political or social category. In this framework, the factions that enter into conflict are either doing so directly, with the intention of eliminating each other, or in a situation in which the control of the state is in question, with different factions fighting to gain that control. The horizontality of civil war distinguishes it from concepts like revolution or insurgency, in which people struggle against the state or a similar structure such as a colonial regime or occupying army. To say that a conflict is “horizontal” does not mean that the factions involved wield equal political, economic, or social power—that is almost never the case. Rather, in this sense, “horizontality” is a concept used in the study of insurgencies to describe a conflict as taking place across a society, without necessarily being focused on the logistics or manifestations of the state. In shifting the focus of struggle away from the operational manifestations of the state, this understanding of civil war tends to isolate the terrain of engagement. Rather than centering the struggle in everyday life—in the dynamics of our day-to-day economic and political activities—this understanding of civil war engenders a series of mutations.

First, it forces a sort of calcifying of the way the conflict is understood. Rather than the dynamic, kinetic conflicts that typify contemporary insurgencies, in which conflict manifests as a result of and in relation to everyday life, this way of seeing approaches social divisions as rigid forms. If we begin by assuming the existence of a fundamental social division preceding any questions about contextual political dynamics—as in the concept of cultural warfare embraced by the right—this will cause us to identify both the enemy and our “friends” as permanent and static entities. In this conceptual framework, these identities necessarily precede the conflict—they form the basis of the conflict within the original category of unity—and remain static throughout the conflict, as they are the terms that define the conflict itself. Consequently, partisanship becomes a sort of ideological rigidity in which actions are driven by a purely abstract definition of friendship and enmity.

There are clearly elements of the aforementioned “horizontality” in the current uprising and the reaction to it, and concepts of identity have played a key role in the way that the conflict has emerged, but the reality is more complex. If the social struggle that exploded into the streets in 2020 had simply been a conflict between right-wing social and political factions and their anti-fascist opposition, then the characterization of civil war might have been apt, just as it would have been if it were simply a conflict over who controls the state. But the actual scenario is profoundly more frightening than the clashes we have seen in Charlottesville, Berkeley, and Portland since 2016. In 2020, we have seen political factions functioning as para-state forces aligned with the state, working in concert with the police and openly engaging in counterinsurgency measures employing extralegal violence. The state is no longer simply refusing to act in response to violence between fascists and anti-fascists, as it had since 2016. Starting in summer 2020, factions within the state actively began to call these right-wing forces out into the street, while at the same time promoting conspiracy theories to legitimize militias and expand their reach within the moderate right, modifying DHS intelligence reports to justify the violence, and using the Department of Justice as a legal enforcement arm. Between August and November, all this took place in coordination with the messaging of Trump’s reelection campaign.

The traditional understanding of civil war implies a conflict between two distinct factions within a wider unity that defines both, as argued by Carl Schmitt. For example, a civil war would be an apt description of an open fight between fascists and anti-fascists over control of the state. The current scenario does not match that narrative. One element of the conflict is openly identifying as an element of the state itself, however unofficially; the perceived legitimacy of the right-wing position derives from their claim to be working in the interests of “America,” even if that involving opposing certain elements of the state. Describing the defense of the state as civil war creates the illusion of a horizontal social conflict, when in fact what we are describing is nothing more than informal policing.

This explains how the contemporary right wing embraces the police, soldiers, and murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse in the same breath. They understand themselves as fighting alongside the state to preserve it. It is not just that Trump has leveraged them for this purpose; their entire narrative propels them in this direction, rendering them willing participants in the establishment of authoritarianism under the banner of “freedom.” All the state has to do to mobilize them is to conjure an enemy and legitimize extra-legal action.

In calling them forward and sanctioning their actions, the state has employed a strategy with two clear objectives. First, to compensate for the state’s failure or hesitance to mobilize enough force to contain the uprising. Giving leeway to vigilante forces, the state enters a zone of exception that allows for violence not subject to the constraints that ordinarily limit what the state can do by force. Second, to construct the uprising as a threat. Taking advantage of widespread xenophobia, racism, and citizen militia mentality on the right, the state presented the uprising as something outside of America, posing a threat to America. This mentality is clearly confined to one segment of the American population, but that segment is all that is necessary for the operation to succeed.

For these moves to be effective, it was necessary to construct a threat that was both outside and internal. The narrative of “outside agitators” was mobilized to delegitimize Black resistance by denying that it ever actually occurred, insinuating that “outside agitators” drove the local rebellions. This narrative has been deployed across the political spectrum, from conservative Republicans to progressive Democrats, in a flagrant attempt to decenter the idea of direct, localized resistance. This served a number of different agendas. In cities governed by Democrats, it enabled local administrations to deny the failures of reformism; in more conservative areas, politicians used it to deny the profound racism at the core of the American project and to preserve the narrative of American exceptionalism. This effort to conceal Black resistance was easily debunked, as arrestee statistics around the country repeatedly showed that the majority of people arrested in local protests were from the immediate area and were hardly all “white anarchists.”

When the falsehood about “outside agitators” collapsed, Trump turned to defining whole cities as outside the realm of American legitimacy. This included threatening local officials, declaring that they had lost control of cities, and ultimately designating those cities as “anarchist jurisdictions.” This successfully mobilized right-wing groups to go into some of these cities and start conflicts, but ultimately, the reach of this ploy was limited. For counterinsurgency to succeed, it needs to employ narratives that are widely accepted—and uncontrolled “anarchist jurisdictions” failed this test. This narrative has been most effective when it focuses specifically on “anarchists,” defining the term as anyone involved in any sort of direct resistance, including marches. By promoting the idea that Americans face a dangerous adversary bent on evil, the Trump administration tried to construct the terms of a horizontal social conflict in which elements of the right could play a direct role in fighting the “anarchists.”

Calling the militia movement into the streets via a narrative of total conflict shifted the terrain of conflict itself. Where previously, the unrest emerging throughout society was directed at the state, suddenly those in revolt were compelled to contend with two forces, the state and the paramilitaries. In this mobilization of social conflict, the state was able to not only gain force in the streets, often leveraged through threats and direct political violence, but was also able to decenter the focus of resistance away from the state, and into the realm of social conflict.

In mobilizing paramilitaries, the state both leveraged and incorporated the social polarization of the past decades. This provided the state with a mechanism outside of the structure of law through which repression may take place. In embracing this informal force, the state adopted a strategy similar to the approach seen in Egypt and then Syria during the so-called Arab Spring, in which reactionary social forces were mobilized to attack uprisings.

When this took place in Egypt in 2011, the rebels in the streets did not allow this strategem to divert them from focusing on bringing down the Mubarak regime. But in Syria, the introduction of paramilitaries into the conflict not only hampered the uprising from focusing on the state, but also restructured the conflict along ethnic and religious lines, diverting the uprising into sectarian warfare and enabling the state to ride out the ensuing bloodbath. These scenarios were similar in that forces outside of the state were mobilized for the purpose of counterinsurgency, even if the kinds of force involved were different. As in Egypt and Syria, the struggle in the US could be diverted into sectarian violence. If this takes place, it will be the consequence of a fundamental misunderstanding of how the state functions and what the role of paramilitary forces is.

Though these situations differ in many ways from the one we find ourselves in, there is one common thread that ties them together. In Egypt, Syria, and in the current American context, the narrative of civil war initially developed specifically in communities that were aligned with the state. These communities conceive of civil war in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, there is a narrative describing a conflict between social factions, a “with us or against us” mentality. On the other hand, these social divisions are drawn along the same lines that define loyalty within the political space. The factions that see themselves as aligned with the state shape their identity largely around some sort of ideological project (such as right-wing Christianity in the US, for example) that they seek to implement through the state, leading them to see all opponents of the state as social enemies. In this framework, the concept of civil war becomes an analogue for a fundamentally different phenomenon, the voluntary involvement of those outside the state in its operations as paramilitary forces.

So the question confronting us is not whether to engage in civil war. Rather, the concept of civil war, as popularly understood in the contemporary United States, is a misnomer.

Law and Liberal Counterinsurgency

The emergence of this paramilitary phenomenon must be understood in the wider context of the development of counterinsurgency strategies as a response to the George Floyd uprising. Counterinsurgency theory is a vast field, emerging from colonial powers’ attempts to maintain imperialism in the wake of World War II. Beginning with British tactics during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, the model provided by those attempts to maintain colonial power came to exert profound influence on subsequent military and policing theory. Both “community policing” and the approach that the US military took during the later phase of the occupation of Iraq derive from thinking that originally emerged at that time. The primary goal of contemporary counterinsurgency, at its most basic, is to separate the insurgents from the population, and to enlist, as much as possible, this same population in initiatives to eliminate the insurgency. As French military thinker David Galula wrote in the 1950s, “The population becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy.”

Unlike the traditional understanding of warfare, which assumes a frontal conflict between identifiable, organized forces and the control of territory, counterinsurgency engages at the level of everyday life, where material action is taken and politics occurs. The terrain of the conflict is not space, necessarily, but rather security—the participants seek the ability to contain crisis in a given area, and then to expand that area. This has taken many forms—from the British brutally relocating entire populations to camps and the Americans napalm-bombing Vietnam to the softer approach of buying loyalty seen in the Sons of Iraq program during the Iraq War. However, the core of this approach is always a system that creates incentives for loyalty and negative consequences for disobedience, resistance, and insurgency. As many historians of US policing have pointed out, there is a cycle in which tactics developed in foreign conflicts are integrated into American policing and vice versa. Counterinsurgency is no exception; the earliest domestic appropriations of this approach were used to provide political victories for the moderate elements of political movements in the 1960s, followed by the emergence of so-called “community policing.”

The important thing here is to understand how this approach has been modified during the uprising that began in May 2020. In some ways, the response to the George Floyd uprising employed longstanding techniques—for example, the attempt to recuperate moderate elements. In other ways, we have seen a dramatic break with the techniques that the state relied upon until recently. To understand these differences, we can begin by tracing where they originate.

The discourse of law and order has formed the foundation of the contemporary prison-industrial complex and the explosive rise in prison populations—paving the way for “broken windows” policing, the militarization of police forces, mandatory minimum sentences, and the expansion of the prison system. This discourse relies on two fundamental elements: the state and the law. Following Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, we can describe the state as a formation through which the will of sovereignty is expressed, with the primary goals being the projection of sovereignty and the continuation of that projection. Within this construction of the state, law exists as an expression of sovereignty—but it is not the only possible expression. The state can suspend law, or supersede law, in an attempt to perpetuate itself.

We saw this play out during the George Floyd uprising, as elements of the state abandoned the framework of a police force limited by law, along with the idea that laws against assault, threats, and brandishing weapons apply equally to everyone. Though we often think of the state and law as phenomena that imply each another, the state exceeds the structure of law. When liberal activists wonder why cops appear to be above the law, it is because they literally are. The state is not premised on the construction and maintenance of laws—Stalin’s regime, for example, was often utterly arbitrary. The construction of laws necessitates the existence of the state, but the converse is not true.

Philosophically, the structure of law functions to the extent that there cannot be exceptions to the law—in other words, to the degree that the law is enforceable and that there are no moments outside of law. Yet laws—or, to be precise, the dictates of a sovereign structure—do not function simply through declaration; a Bill in Congress is just a piece of paper. Both the law and extra-legal impositions of sovereign will only take force via mechanisms that can impose them upon everyday life. The police are one such mechanism.

Understood thus, law exists as a sort of aspirational totality intended to cover all time and space and to regulate the actions of all citizens. Within this construct, any attack against the police is in some sense an attack upon the state itself. Attacking police, building barricades, and other such disorderly actions all serve to prevent the police from projecting force into an area. Even outside the framework of law, in a state of emergency and in open warfare, the structure of the occupying force and the ability of that force to impose the will of the occupiers functions only to the degree that they can crush resistance within that space. Accordingly, any illegal activity, from unpermitted street marches to open rioting and looting, must be stopped at all costs—otherwise the hegemony of law will degrade, eventually leading to the disorganization of the police and the breakdown of the state.

The narrative of “law and order” presents this concept of law as the absolute definition of life and existence. The formal argument in the US political context is that law must apply to all people in the same way all the time, though we all know that this is never the reality and that in fact, the administration itself does not adhere to the law. Under the Trump administration, the state takes the form of a traditional extra-legal sovereignty structure, via which the will of the sovereign imposed through force and law serves as a convenient mechanism to criminalize any form of resistance.

This tendency to employ the state as an extra-legal apparatus for imposing sovereignty has manifested itself in a variety of forms—including the argument that people who attack property should spend decades in jail, the use of federal law enforcement to protect buildings from graffiti, and the use of federal charges against protesters, often for actions that local officials would not have deemed worth prosecuting. The goal is clear: to suppress the uprising in its entirety, rather than to regulate or channel its energy. This approach largely failed, often provoking severe reactions in places like Portland, where the presence of federal law enforcement on the streets energized the uprising and inspired some interesting tactical innovations.

The other side of this counterinsurgency puzzle is an emerging form of liberal counterinsurgency. Liberal counterinsurgency is nothing new. We can trace it to the attempt to moderate the labor movement after World War II and subsequent efforts to contain the Civil Rights Movement; the current strategies are familiar from the later days of the Iraq occupation. The fundamental move here is to provide an access point through which elements of a political faction or movement can get involved in the state. Sometimes this is through the mechanism of voting and the channeling of resistance into electoralism. If that fails, or if the crisis is acute enough, the state will attempt to incorporate these moderate elements directly by appointing them to government positions, including them in committees and in the constructing of policy. Arguably, the beneficiaries of previous applications of this technique form the core of the contemporary Democratic Party, which is comprised of the moderate wings of various political initiatives, all of whom were given access to some element of power. The final move in this strategy is to delegitimize or crush the ungovernable elements that refuse to compromise.

At its core, liberal counterinsurgency relies on fracturing political initiatives, uprisings, and organizations, sorting the participants into those who can be recuperated and those who must be eliminated. We saw elements of the state and various aspiring state actors employ this strategy in response to the George Floyd uprising. Early on, this took the form of conspiracy theories about outside agitators and agent provocateurs; eventually, it progressed into discourse about the importance of peaceful protest, a focus on defunding the police rather than abolishing them, and calls for people to follow the leadership of community organizers who were attempting to pacify the movement.

Liberals have attempted to completely reframe what has occurred in the United States since May within the context of acceptable politics. They have worked tirelessly to produce studies showing that the majority of the demonstrations were “peaceful.” They have spoken in the media in support of the uprising, but only mentioning elements adjacent to the uprising who were already associated with the electoral system, such as the various candidates and politicians who got tear gassed for the cameras. They have condemned the actions of the police, but only as violence perpetuated against the “innocent.” The move to glorify peaceful protest implicitly excludes and condemns those who do not fit this narrative of legitimate resistance.

Once the most radical elements are delegitimized and excluded, liberals move to criminalize them, even going so far as to justify police force against ”rioters,” often in the same cities where politicians started by condemning police violence. To hear them tell it, legitimate “peaceful” protests were hijacked by violent elements and outside agitators: illegitimate participants undermining the goals of the protests. Those of us who were in the streets at the end of May know that this narrative is absurd—people were fighting back from the moment that the cops shot the first tear gas—yet it has gained favor in liberal circles. This narrative is an attempt to hijack the uprising, to draw what was an ungovernable, uncontrollable element in direct conflict with the state back into electoral discourse.

Regarding the narrative that focuses on defunding the police—a proposal that means different things to different people—the liberal political class immediately began to insist on articulating demands that could be addressed to the state. This follows a pattern familiar from the Occupy movement and the rioting after police murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Structurally, the act of formulating demands suggests that the state is a legitimate interlocutor; it frames an uprising as a sort of militant lobbying directed at the state. By insisting on a model that centers demands, liberals position the state as the chief mechanism through which “change” occurs, ruling out the possibility of fighting against the state and the police themselves. The purpose of the demand is not so much to “win concessions” as it is to force potential uprisings back within the bounds of “acceptable” politics mediated by the state; this is why politicians always insist that movements must articulate clear demands.

By framing the discussion around demands to defund the police rather than attempts to abolish or eliminate them, liberals shifted the discussion to the less threatening arena of policies and budgets. This also enabled them to provide the moderate elements involved in the uprising with access to political power, in order to channel that energy into the formal legislative process. The irony is that the George Floyd uprising is a result not only of the long history of racism in the United States, but also the ways that prior attempts at liberal reform have failed.

This liberal counterinsurgency led to an inevitable conclusion: in August, Joe Biden directly declared that riots are not “protests,” essentially asserting that only attempts to engage in dialogue with the state are acceptable and that the full force of the state should be used to crush whatever ungovernable elements of the uprising remain. Biden combined both approaches—both repressing and coopting—by separating “peaceful” protesters from “rioters” and “anarchists,” then speaking directly to the most moderate demands for police reform.

Biden expresses the other element of the core paradox within state strategy: the state will allow protests, but redefines protesting to eliminate resistant elements. The goal is to provide an outlet, to allow people the opportunity to express complaints about particular state actions as long as no one challenges the state itself or the bureaucracies and parties that interface with it. This approach is fundamentally grounded in the concept of containment, according to which the state does not necessarily attempt to eliminate crisis, but rather aims to keep whatever happens under control via management and maintenance.

In the response to the George Floyd uprising, these differing approaches to law and security functioned to undermine each other; this is what set the stage for the emergence of para-state forces in response to the uprising. The “law and order” approach, based around imposing sovereignty through force, created a situation in which the forces of the state were empowered to employ increasing levels of violence to suppress the uprising. As we have seen in the streets, the use of impact munitions, beatings, arrests, and tear gas in 2020 has far outstripped any precedent in recent protest history. In response to these tactics, we saw an escalation on the part of the rebels in the streets, increasing numbers of whom began to form shield walls, bring gas masks, throw stones, and set fires, occasionally even employing firearms or Molotov cocktails. These were not aberrations, but common tactics emerging across a wide geographical area, fundamentally endangering a liberal counterinsurgency strategy based around containment.

As conflict escalates, containment-based approaches encounter two difficulties. First, it becomes increasingly challenging to identify more moderate or “innocent” elements and to isolate them from rebellious elements. Likewise, as state violence intensifies, it becomes harder to make the argument that reformism is valid or effective. Rebels on the street became more uncompromising as the uprising stretched on, seeing how increasing police violence indicates the failures of reformist approaches. Second, containment-based approaches reveal a fundamental contradiction. These approaches necessitate legitimizing some element of the uprising, which means acknowledging the legitimacy of the critique of the American political project it articulates. Yet as an uprising becomes increasingly uncontrollable, legitimizing these criticisms is tantamount to legitimizing the violence of the uprising itself.

As the liberal approach to counterinsurgency contributed to legitimizing the narrative of the uprising, it came into conflict with the law-and-order approach. The law-and-order approach drove militancy in the street, which in turn drove increasingly egregious police responses, rendering it increasingly difficult to contain the crisis. At the same time, because liberals took the position of supporting the core criticisms articulated via the uprising, they could not easily abandon those assertions, even as it became difficult to find elements that would abandon those who remained active in the street. This is what created the situation in which elements of the state were compelled to exceed the bounds of the law. In this context, the state resumed its essential nature as an imposition of sovereign force, in which law is only one of several possible manifestations, but at the same time, it also began to make space for extralegal para-state forces. This, in turn, created the conditions for far-right elements to receive leeway to operate outside of the law.

The inclusion of social forces from outside of the formal state structure in counterinsurgency strategies contains in microcosm several dynamics that have always been latent in US politics. It is from this perspective, in view of the contradictions latent in the counterinsurgency strategies deployed against the uprising, that we should understand the emerging discourse of civil war.

Social War, Not Civil War

The mobilization of paramilitary forces outside the limitations of the law points to a core element that is essential to this specific counterinsurgency operation as well as to the state in general. Throughout the Trump administration, we have seen the norms that formed the foundations of the perceived legitimacy of the democratic state erode. As this veneer has worn away, the state has also lost the ability to confine conflict within the bounds of the legislative process. Over the past three years, the relationship between the state and society has become increasingly characterized by material conflict. The Trump administration has used executive edict and raw violence to impose an image of America derived from the far right. This is the state as material force, pure and simple. Under Obama, repression was associated with failed compromise or the surgical precision of surveillance and drone strikes; under Trump, the naked repressive force of the state is laid bare for all to see.

Inherent in the functioning of the state is the defining of what is inside it and what is outside of it. According to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for example, what is outside of the state is described as the “state of nature” in which life is allegedly “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This account of the “outside” justifies the existence of the state as a mechanism to prevent what is outside from manifesting itself. Inside the state, the sovereignty of the state is considered to be total, while the outside is understood as any situation in which the sovereignty of the state is absent, or at least threatened. In US political theory, the concepts underlying the state are held to be universal, supposedly applicable to all humans. Therefore, anything outside of the state—even if that outside is geographically internal—is considered an absolute other that must be destroyed.

Consequently, in the US, the paramilitary is constructed both as a force in social conflict with any geographically internal enemy defined as outside of the American project, and as a force inherently tied to the preservation of the state and the prevention of change. Until recently, the concept of the enemy was tempered by self-imposed limitations, which served to reintegrate rebels through liberal counterinsurgency methods or to concentrate state action chiefly within the legal system. Today, these limitations have outlived their usefulness and right-wing militias are eager to eliminate the “outside.”

Now that the state has dispensed with the niceties that served to conceal its core as a logistics of raw force, a few things have become clear. First, the structure of law as a concept that theoretically applies to all people equally was based in the assertion of a sort of universal inside that included all within the purview of the state. Dispensing with law except insofar as it can be manipulated to serve as a weapon, the administration has opened up a space outside of law, a terrain formed by the state of emergency. Second, the paramilitary is no longer a force separate from the state. From the perspective of the uprising, there is no distinction between struggle against the far right and struggle against the state. This is not a horizontal conflict on the level of society—that would assume that all the forces involved were part of the “inside.” Rather, this is a material conflict between the state and all those defined as outside and against it.

With the elimination of the universality of law, framed through the concept of equal protection, and the overt incorporation of the paramilitary into state counterinsurgency strategy, the language of civil war loses its usefulness. Civil war is fundamentally a conflict between social factions, but that is not what is occurring here. That framework actually distorts the current dynamics of engagement. We are not experiencing a conflict between social factions, regardless of how the right conceives of the conflict. Rather, by incorporating the defense of the state into paramilitary doctrine and framing this around a rigid set of ideological commitments (termed “freedom,” but which really represent forms of social control), the right wing has given rise to a political conflict about the state, its role, and the structure of state and police power.

If we embrace the concept of civil war as it has been constructed in the contemporary US context, we will find that this generates tactical problems. Embracing civil war as a strategic posture could cause us to neglect the terrain of everyday life, where the state actually operates and most conflicts play out. If we understand ourselves as contending in a civil war, we will likely look for a linear conflict between two identifiable forces fighting each other without regard to the material terrain.

What is at stake here is not just a conceptual distinction or a question of semantics. The core of the distinction is important to how we think of conflict in relation to the wider anarchist project.

Structures of law and capital always function to regulate and channel actions toward specific ends according to the will of those who wield sovereignty. Resistance is a concrete question of how to act to disrupt the operational logistics of the state—i.e., the police, in the broadest possible sense of the term, which is to say, all those who regulate behavior according to these dictates. If we embrace the posture of civil war, the conflict becomes conceptually displaced from the terrain of everyday life, in which the state and capital operate, into a zone of abstract opposition.

To frame the current conflict as a civil war is to describe the state as a secondary element, rather than the focus of action, and to conceptualize the conflict as a linear struggle between two rigidly identified factions, both of which are defined prior to the opening of hostilities. This approach would produce a social conflict in which the state will inevitably play a role, but in which we will fundamentally misunderstand the terms. Rather than seeking to understand the shifts that have occurred on the level of society and the ways in which the uprising has been successfully defined as an “outside” by the state, we would end up concentrating on only one element of the collaboration between the state and para-state forces. Essentially, we would replace a struggle for everything—for the whole of life itself—with a far less ambitious struggle against other elements in the social terrain.

Seeing things that way would end up limiting our tactical options. If we base our understanding of the terms of conflict around broad conceptual categories, it will be harder for us to strategize for a kinetic conflict with the state that is in a constant process of change. In fact, adopting a framework of rigid linear conflict tends to produce conditions in which popular resistance becomes impossible. Contagious popular resistance presupposes the breakdown of the limits of the political; it manifests at the moment that the distinction breaks down between those who define themselves and their actions “politically” and those who do not. This was what made the uprising so powerful, unpredictable, and transformative, enabling it to exceed the state’s capacity to impose control. Constructing a linear conflict between predefined factions according to the framework of civil war, we would reduce those currently outside of the self-identified political movement to bystanders, lacking agency in the conflict yet still suffering its side effects. Reducing our understanding of the social terrain to the task of identifying who is “us” and who is “them” would ultimately distract us from everyone who is not already tied to an identifiable faction and from all the ways that we could act to transform that terrain itself.

The George Floyd uprising has shown us the power latent in this concept of popular resistance, understood as a dynamic resistance. Over the past several months, the limits of the political have fundamentally ruptured, as popular understandings of the possibilities of political action have expanded to include all the elements of everyday life alongside traditional forms of activism. In this rupture, we can glimpse the dynamics of successful uprisings: the breaking down of the limitations that confine conflict within particular bounds, the generalization of this expanded sense of political conflict throughout everyday life, and the abolishing of the distinction between political spaces and other spaces of life. To embrace the framework of civil war in this context, in the ways that this concept has been defined and manifested by the right, would be to abandon the possibility unleashed by the uprising. It would mean turning away from a dynamic conflict that has been opaque in its sheer complexity and awe-inspiring in its scale. It would mean abandoning the social terrain, and, as a result, the dynamic, kinetic possibilities of popular resistance.

Firm Level Price Determination: A Comparison of Theories (Perfect Competition, Imperfect Competition, and the Theory of Real Competition)

By Ezra Pugh

“The best of all monopoly profits is a peaceful life,” (John Hicks, 1935).

“The division of labor within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition…the ‘war of all against all,’”      (Karl Marx, 1867)

George Stigler defines the term competition as “the absence of monopoly power in a market,” (Stigler 1957, 14). This could seem a curiously narrow definition to the businessperson or the worker. But this notion has been ubiquitous in the teaching of economics for decades. It originates, of course, from the Neo-Classical theory of perfect competition. Abstraction is necessary to any theoretical investigation. Assumptions must be made for the purpose of conducting analysis. But in flattening the meaning of a term like competition in such a way, is there a risk that some essential insights may be lost?

Perfect Competition

Perfect competition is the foundational parable of orthodox economics. A perfectly competitive market is an abstract ideal with a number of specific attributes:

•          There is a very large number of firms, such that no single firm can affect the overall market for its product.

•          There is a very large number of buyers for the industry’s product.

•          Each firm produces exactly the same undifferentiated product.

•          Firms, and their consumers, have perfect knowledge of all relevant economic information related to their industry and its product.

•          Firms have unrestricted power of entry and exit in their industry.

•          Firms are entitled to a ‘normal rate’ of profit, which is included in its operations costs.

• ·         Marginal costs drop at first then eventually increase with each unit sold. As a result, average cost is also upward sloping.

From its perspective, a firm in perfect competition is just a speck, dwarfed by the size of the market it competes in. The market can absorb whatever the firm can produce, provided it is sold at market price. The firm’s perceived demand curve is horizontal, or perfectly elastic. As a result, the demand curve is identical to its supply curve. The overall demand curve of the market, however, is downward sloping.

The firm must accept the prevailing market selling price for its good. If it sets its price above the prevailing price, even by an iota, the firm will lose all of its sales to the myriad other sellers. If it sets its price below, it will not be able to make enough profit to survive. A firm in a perfectly competitive market is therefore known as a price-taker, as it is powerless in the face of market pressures. Consequently, “a perfectly competitive firm has only one major decision to make—namely, what quantity to produce,” (Greenlaw 2018, 189).

Being rational, the firm’s motivating goal is to generate profit. Its profit (r), is defined as total revenue (TR) minus total cost (TC). Total revenue is made up on the products price (P) multiplied by the quantity produced (Q) minus the average cost per unit (AC) multiplied by the quantity produced. This can be written as:

To maximize its profit, the firm must continue producing more output up until the point its marginal revenue equals its marginal cost – the point where an additional unit of output contributes no more profit. Marginal revenue (MR) and marginal cost (MC) are defined thus:

Because the market price the firm experiences does not change based on its output, the firm’s marginal revenue is a constant. Each additional unit sold adds the same value, which is equal to the price of the product. If marginal revenue is equal to price, and profit maximization occurs when marginal revenue equals marginal cost, the firm should produce up until the point where its marginal costs equals the price of its product.

The firm’s average cost is its total cost divided by quantity produced, and is assumed to initially fall then eventually be upward sloping. Because innumerable sellers all sell the same good, in the long run (which generally does not have a specific definition), all ‘economic’ profits—those which are above the assumed ‘normal’ profits—are eventually eroded completely away. If positive economic profits existed, more firms would enter the market, increasing supply and lowering price. If economic profits are negative, firms would leave the market, causing the opposite effect. As a result, in the long run perfect competition causes sellers to produce their goods at the lowest point on their average cost curve.

“When profit-maximizing firms in perfectly competitive markets combine with utility-maximizing consumers, something remarkable happens,” we are told, “the resulting quantities of outputs of goods and services demonstrate both productive and allocative efficiency,” (Greenlaw 2018, 206). Productive efficiency is attained because in the long run, firms produce at their absolute lowest cost. Allocative efficiency is achieved because the resulting goods’ price is equal to its marginal cost—precisely the value of the ‘social cost’ of producing it.

Imperfect Competition and Monopoly

But of course, this state of affairs does not resemble the world in which we live. This utopian optimality, we are told, is distorted and mutated by the anti-competitive behavior of firms and government. Due to that meddling, we live in a world of imperfect competition—monopoly, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly. Paradise lost. In monopoly, a firm is the lone provider of a good, in monopolistic competition many firms produce differentiated products, and in oligopoly a small cabal of firms control the marketplace and exert price pressure.

The culprit which creates each of these distorted market types is barriers to entry. Whether natural or legal, barriers to entry prevent firms who would otherwise enter a market from entering. The few firms which are active in the market have control of too large a slice. As a result, they can affect the market price based on how many units they produce. Instead of a horizontal perceived demand curve, the firms in imperfect competition face a downward sloping demand curve.

To maximize its profit, the imperfectly competitive firm still produces at the level where MR = MC. But because of its outsized effect on the market, P no longer equals MR. With each unit produced, the increased supply exerts downward pressure on the price, which effects the price of all other units produced by the same amount. If such a firm produces too much, it can hurt its own bottom line. Because it supplies as much as it wants and not what consumers want, a true monopoly will have perpetual positive economic profits at a level which depends on the elasticity of the product’s demand schedule. Monopolistic competition, however, will in the long run result in a total erosion of economic profit as firms enter the market, all producing at a point on the AC curve, albeit not at its minimum point. As a result, none of these markets is productively or allocatively efficient. The amount of goods produced is below what consumers would have wanted under perfectly competitive conditions, they are more expensive than they are socially worth, and firms inefficiently do not produce at their minimum average cost. Customers are robbed of potential utility. Such markets are sadly the norm, because, we are told, “firms have proved to be highly creative in inventing business practices that discourage competition,” (Greenlaw 2018, 220). This is a great state of affairs for the firms, however, because “once barriers are erected, once a barrier to entry is in place, a monopoly that does not need to fear competition can just produce the same old products in the same old way,” (Greenlaw 2018, 229). Managers can kick back and watch the profits roll in.

Historical Overview

Sketched out above is the dominant parable in economic thought and teaching. Interestingly, almost none of this resembles the real world. How did we get here? An outline is sketched below.

Adam Smith is generally credited with establishing economic thought, or Political Economy, as a distinct field of study. His work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) is regarded as the first modern work of economics. A key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith was interested in observing economic phenomena, describing them, and discovering the hidden patterns within. David Ricardo furthered and built on Smith’s ideas, advancing theories on rent, trade, and value. Over the course of the three volumes of Capital (1867), Karl Marx extended this theoretical framework even further with sharpened historical and class analysis, building a signature value theory in the process. Along with others, these thinkers are referred to as the Classical economists.

But in the 1870’s there occurred what is known as the Marginalist Revolution. The Long Depression (1873-96) caused a crisis of confidence in the capitalist world. Interestingly, it was during this period that the most utopian theoretical depictions of capitalism were popularized. W.S. Jevons (1871), Carl Menger (1871), and Leon Walras (1874) independently and almost simultaneously developed this new theoretical paradigm. They perceived fundamental flaws in the theoretical framework and methodologies of the Classical economists and sought to “pick up the fragments of a shattered science and to start anew,” (Jevons 1879/1965, Preface lii). The Classicals believed that the ultimate source of an item’s value was the amount of labor embodied in it and that market prices were connected to costs—prices of production. The Marginalists vehemently disagreed. “Value,” wrote Jevons, “depends entirely upon utility” (Jevons 1871/1965, 1). Echoing this sentiment, Menger wrote “there is no necessary and direct connection between the value of a good and whether, or in what quantities, labour and other goods of higher order were applied to its production” (Menger 1871/2007, 146). Value then stemmed from a buyers utility gained from a good; that utility being an index of the good’s scarcity.

Jevons and Walras both used advanced mathematics to express their ideas. Adopting algebra and calculus, they could express complex ideas with greater accuracy than was possible previously. "Why should we persist in using everyday language to explain things in the cumbersome and incorrect way, as Ricardo has often done,” wrote Walras, “when these things can be stated far more succinctly, precisely, and clearly in the language of mathematics?" (Heilbroner 1997, 226). Walras pioneered what is known as general equilibrium theory—the notion that a complex balance of supply and demand can exist in and between markets.

It is during this period that supply and demand curves and the modern theory of perfect competition are introduced. In order to make their highly abstract models functional and defined, economists had to make assumptions that did not necessarily fit with, and often outright contradicted economic reality. "The pure theory of economics, it must precede applied economics,” wrote Walras, “and this pure theory of economics is a science which resembles the physic-mathematical sciences in every respect," (Heilbroner, 224). Actual people and actual societies faded from the picture in favor of platonic ideals. This fundamental methodological shift opened up many new avenues of exploration for economists, but the descriptive and predictive usefulness of the new models was not necessarily clear. Perfect competition became the theoretical jumping off point for all ‘rigorous’ analysis, and Marshall (1890) systematized the theoretical structure into what would recognize as modern Neo-classical economics. Dobb notes, "at the purely formal level, there can be little doubt that the new context and methods, with their mathematical analogy if not mathematical form, resulted in enhanced precision and rigor of analysis…the cutting knives of economic discussion became sharper -- whether they were used to cut so deeply is another matter" (Dobb 1973, 176).

In the 1920s, unease with the dominance of perfect competition was growing. Sraffa (1925) aimed a potentially devastating critique at the then-dominant Marshallian partial equilibrium theory, demonstrating that the theoretical structure was not capable of dealing with non-constant returns (increasing or decreasing costs) adequately (Mongiovi 1996). The next year, Sraffa (1926) suggested a solution might be found using the lesser utilized monopoly theory as a starting point. Even in competitive markets, monopolistic tendencies could easily be observed because 1.) firms can exert some control over their own prices, and 2.) they frequently experience increasing returns (decreasing costs). Sraffa argued that these circumstances are not the exception, “rather they are normal and persistent features of the economic landscape, with 'permanent and even cumulative' consequences for market equilibria. When these influences are operative, each firm is to be viewed as having its own distinct market; prices are set so as to maximise profits on the supposition that the relevant demand curve is not perfectly elastic,” (Mongiovi 1996, 214). Building on these ideas, Robinson (1933) and Chamberlain (1933) independently, but simultaneously, developed the theory of imperfect competition that is taught today. Eventually abandoning Marshallian theory altogether, Sraffa’s publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960) is credited with establishing a distinctive Sraffian or Neo-Ricardian school.

Real Competition

In Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (2016), Anwar Shaikh erects a theoretical framework independent of perfect and imperfect competition. Formalizing insights developed by the Classical economists, a theory is built which is both analytically sound and corresponds to observed economic phenomena. The theory of real competition, as it is called, “is as different from so-called perfect competition as war is from ballet,” (Shaikh 2016, Ch. 7.I.). The classical economists stressed themes that were either diminished or omitted completely by Neo-classical economists, including conflict, class, and temporality. In Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx writes that the economic realm is bellum omnium contra omnes, ‘war of all against all,’ (Marx 1867/1990, 477). All evidence of this is lost in the parables of perfect and imperfect competition. But in Capitalism, the theory of real competition “pits seller against seller, seller against buyer, and buyer against buyer. It pits capital against capital, capital against labor, and labor against labor,” (Shaikh 2016, Ch. 7.I.). Abstracting away from the essentiality of conflict to capitalist production and distribution makes Neo-Classical analysis not only unrealistic, but totally misleading.

But even on pure theoretical grounds there are issues with the theory of perfect competition. For one, there is a fundamental contradiction within the assumptions. Firms are assumed to have perfect knowledge of the market in which they are competing, yet their perceived demand curve is assumed to be flat. These two assumptions cannot hold at the same time. “If firms are assumed to be sensible in their expectations, then the theory of perfect competition collapses. More generally, even mildly informed firms would have to recognize that they face downward sloping demand curves under competitive conditions,” (Shaikh 2016, Ch. 8.I). If a firm in a perfectly competitive market has perfect knowledge, it would quite easily deduce that the market signals it is receiving are being received by every other firm, and those firms will react in a predictable manner. As a result, the firm would know that it does not face a flat, perfectly elastic demand curve, and would act in exactly the same manner as a monopolistic firm, with just the same results.

Another problematic assumption within the orthodox framework is that firms are entitled to a normal rate of profit, which is included within its cost structure. The action of competition completely erodes excess profits away but leaves normal profits intact. This, of course, is wildly unrealistic because “no capital is assured of any profit at all, let alone the “normal” rate of profit. Indeed, all capitals face losses at some point, and a certain number drown in red ink in every given interval. It is therefore completely illegitimate to count “normal profit” as part of operating costs,” (Shaikh 2016, Ch. 7.I.). The prospect of making a loss is the dark cloud that hangs over every business manager, driving them unceasingly into conflict with agents both inside and outside the firm. Abstracting away from this motive force fundamentally misdiagnoses the motivations of economic agents.

In the theory of perfect competition, a firm’s only decision is how much to produce. Likewise, in imperfect competition, pricing and quantity decisions are mechanically connected. But in the works of the Classicals and in the theory of real competition, firms are active price setting, cost cutting entities. Neo-Classical theory stresses that firms will flock to higher profit rates at a given price. But once firms have the power to set their own price, the picture becomes more complicated. In their endless search for higher rates of return, firms cut prices to attract more buyers and increase market-share. In the process, “the advantage in this perpetual jousting for market share goes to the firms with the lowest cost,” (Shaikh 2016, 7.II.). If firms have the power to cut their own prices, they have the power to starve out other firms—even ones that are potentially more profitable at initial prices. Neo-Classical theory stresses that firms will adopt whatever method yields the highest profit at a given price, but “when costs differ, there is always a set of prices at which the lower cost firm has the higher profit rate. This does not mean that [it] has to drive the price down to that level. It has only to get the message across to its competitor that the future has arrived,” (Shaikh 2016, 7.VII.). This is demonstrated in Table 1 below. Pricing wars, which are extremely common occurrences in the real economy, highlight the conflictual nature of economic relations—"these are the operative principles of warfare: attackers try to impose greater losses on the other side. We will see that such behavior is the norm in the business world. It follows that the highest profit that is sustainable in the face of price-cutting behavior is generally different from the price-passive profit assumed in theories of perfect and imperfect competition,” (Shaikh 2016, 7.II.). Only the theory of real competition deals with this common behavior adequately.

Conclusion

Contrary to Hicks’ assertion, a peaceful life is not included in a firm’s profit—no matter their degree of monopoly. There is perpetual conflict generated both inside and outside of the firm that must always be contended with. For real firms, “price is their weapon, advertising their propaganda, the local Chamber of Commerce their house of worship, and profit their supreme deity,” (Shaikh 2016, 7.II.). Abstraction is a necessary tool for analysis. But the specific method of abstraction used in the theories of perfect and imperfect competition does not serve to elucidate truths that would be otherwise unattainable. Neo-Classical economics was formulated during a crisis of capitalism to create a utopian vision in order to justify capitalist social relations. Capitalist relations have been shown to be the most powerful and productive in history, but that does not justify obscuring their fundamentally destructive and chaotic elements. Competition is not merely the absence of monopoly power—it is the struggle of all against all.

References

Dobb, M. (1973). The ‘Jevonian Revolution’. In Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory (pp. 166-210). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511559457.007

Cohen, A. J., & Harcourt, G. C. (2003). Retrospectives: Whatever Happened to the Cambridge Capital Theory Controversies? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 17(1), 199–214. doi: 10.1257/089533003321165010

Greenlaw, S. A., Taylor, T., & Shapiro, D. (2018). Principles of Microeconomics. Houston, TX: OpenStax, Rice University.

Heilbroner, R. L. (1997). Teachings from the Worldly Philosophy. New York: W.W. Norton.

Hicks, J. (1935). Annual Survey of Economic Theory: The Theory of Monopoly. Econometrica, 3(1), 1-20. doi:10.2307/1907343

Jevons, W. S. (1965). The Theory of Political Economy (5th ed.). New York, Ny: Augustus M Kelley.

Marx, K., Fowkes, B., & Fernbach, D. (1990). Capital: a Critique of Political Economy; vol.1. London New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.

Menger, C. (2007). Principles of Economics. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Mongiovi, G. (1996). Sraffa’s Critique of Marshall: a Reassessment. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 20(2), 207–224. doi: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.cje.a013613

Sen, A. K. (1977). Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6(4).

Shaikh, A. (2016). Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises [Kindle version]. New York: Oxford University Press.

Smith, A., Heilbroner, R. L., Malone, L. J., Smith, A., & Smith, A. (1987). The Essential Adam Smith. New York: W.W. Norton.

Sraffa, P. (1926). The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions. The Economic Journal, 36(144), 535. doi: 10.2307/2959866

Sraffa, P. (1960). Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory.

Stigler, G. J. (1957). Perfect Competition, Historically Contemplated. Journal of Political Economy, 65(1), 1–17. doi: 10.1086/257878

Beneath Conspiracy Theories, the Class War

[Illustration by Anastasya Eliseeva]

By Aragorn Eloff

It is unsurprising that, as we confront the black swan event of the global pandemic, there has been an upsurge in the spread of conspiracy theories. Historically, narratives around malevolent, all-powerful forces controlling reality in various ways have often emerged in times of social unrest and uncertainty, where large numbers of people find themselves socially adrift or unable to control fundamental aspects of their lives.

While the typical response to conspiracy theories is to view them as the product of ignorance or delusional thinking, this is complicated by the fact that history is full of many real instances of powerful people colluding in secret at the expense of society. The numerous price-fixing scandals uncovered in South Africa in recent years surely also constitute conspiracies, as do corporate cover-ups around the world, many of which we know about only as a result of people questioning the presentation of reality and correctly connecting the dots to map out underlying truths.

It is clear though that what we more commonly describe as conspiracy theories – exemplified in the current period by the linking of 5G networks to Bill Gates, vaccination and microchip implants, for instance – are markedly different from these real-world examples. As social and psychological research has shown, conspiracy theories of this kind are not amenable to empirical enquiry and subsist for long periods of time in the absence of any reasonable evidence. Those adhering to such theories tend to exhibit little interest in testing their underlying claims and will often simultaneously believe in conspiracy theories that outright contradict each other.

As The Conspiracy Theory Handbook published by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication observes, this suggests that conspiracy theories function in a similar way to ideology, with belief being more a case of underlying psychological motivators – dealing with feelings of powerlessness, coping with threats or explaining confusing events – than the result of careful research and reflection. If this is true, it becomes important to understand these drives and the social contexts within which they tend to arise. This is especially vital when we acknowledge that many conspiracy theories contain, albeit figuratively, a kernel of intuitive truth.

Indeed, as Marxist group Aufheben writes in an article titled “The rise of conspiracy theories: Reification of defeat as the basis of explanation”, conspiracy theory, like left politics, often has a sense “that the world is structured by unequal power relations, and that the powerful act in their own interests and against the interests of the majority”. Distinct from the kinds of concrete political analyses that are able to explain these unequal power relations in terms of complex dynamics involving myriad social, political, economic and historical forces, however, conspiracy theories operate with a highly simplified understanding of these aspects of social reality, turning social forces into individual Bond villains and systemic conditions into cabals of all-powerful evildoers. This simplified narrative structure, which tellingly reflects dominant modes of subjectivity and the cult of the personality that has arisen under neoliberalism, also partly explains the appeal of conspiracy theories for large numbers of people looking for a stable foothold in an increasingly complex world.

As simplistic as they may be, it is through empathetic and nuanced engagement with conspiratorial narratives that we can perhaps best grapple with, and nurture meaningful collective responses to, the problems conspiracy theories suggestively outline. For instance, while casting Gates as an evil billionaire who wants to control people with 5G networks via microchips implanted in their bodies through mandatory vaccination is clearly absurd, there are many legitimate reasons to be concerned by the technocratic and paternalistic approach of the Gates Foundation towards addressing malnutrition, malaria and viral pandemics in Africa and, more broadly, the lack of control we have over the actions of the plutocrat class.

Anxieties around being controlled by technology may also be based on intuitions about the extent to which states and big technology companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon and so forth – have infiltrated, influenced and benefitted from our private lives while remaining almost entirely unaccountable, something researcher Shoshana Zuboff explores in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Similarly, the recent fears expressed by people who are convinced that the Covid-19 pandemic is part of a nefarious plot by global leaders acting in unison to push agendas that diminish our freedoms have at least some basis in what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism. Here, we would be quite unreasonable if we weren’t acknowledging that numerous states and corporate actors have leveraged the crisis to push forward anti-social agendas, the recent spate of illegal evictions of shack dwellers across South Africa and the loosening of environmental laws around the globe being just two examples.

Covert agendas

More broadly, we can discern the vague stirrings of a genuinely radical politics in some conspiracy theories. As Aufheben observes, these theories often express a genuine sense of estrangement from – and dissatisfaction with – capitalism, the state and other dominant social forces. While the world is not, of course, completely controlled by the Illuminati, the Rothschilds or lizard people, it’s not difficult to see the hints of a class analysis here. And when the staggering inequalities of wealth and power in the contemporary world have allowed the ruling class to live fantasy lives so utterly alien from our own, is it any wonder some of us have come to see them as almost inhuman?

Whatever truths they may loosely allude to, however, it remains the case that conspiracy theories, whatever short-term existential relief they may provide by assuring us that everything is easily understandable and under control, even if not in our interests, are deeply disempowering. If we set out with an incoherent understanding of how the world works, we quickly find ourselves unable to take much effective action to tackle its fundamental injustices or equalise its vast disparities of power, which is why the spreading of conspiracy theories usually results in apathy and fatalistic resignation.

More concerning, the same psychological drivers that make conspiracy theories so appealing also leave people susceptible to the influence of anyone – fascists, sociopaths, corporations and insincere spiritual gurus among them – offering an easy, comforting narrative that explains how things are and what we can do to make them better, usually in ways which, ironically, serve covert agendas.

Our approach to conspiracy theories should therefore be at least twofold. On the one hand, we can gently challenge the fallacious elements of conspiratorial thinking and encourage a more thorough interrogation of those aspects that correctly intuit real problems in the world. In practice, this takes the form of political outreach and radical pedagogy, the creation of collective spaces of learning and teaching through which we can tackle the problems we face at their roots without becoming tangled in them. The more we empower ourselves and each other with knowledge about how science, medicine, technology, politics and so forth function, the more we simultaneously hone our critical thinking skills, in turn cultivating personal agency – the sense that we can be meaningful participants in creating social change.

On the other hand, there is the more difficult task of offering assurance and support to those who find themselves drawn to conspiracy theories to make sense of a reality that seems to be slipping through their fingers. Here, we need to develop frameworks that offer sustainable forms of material, psychological and spiritual care. That the world is increasingly complex and uncertain means that very little is, or ever could be, orchestrated in the contrived ways conspiracy theorists propose, but it also means we have to become better equipped to deal with that complexity and uncertainty. While this may seem like a relatively solitary existential pursuit, a genuine sense of security is grounded in healthy, thriving communities of friends, lovers, families and comrades.

Building such communities is no simple task: they are at odds with the alienated and impoverished forms of social belonging that have become so prevalent in capitalist society and they require patient and careful interpersonal and political work. However, if we commit ourselves to learning more and communing more, we can slowly build herd immunity to the impoverished thinking of the present, whether it takes the form of conspiracy theories or dominant ideologies, and begin to cultivate something stronger than the multiple pandemics we currently face.

Covid-19 is a virus that attacks the lungs and many of those infected with it struggle greatly to breathe. Capitalism is an economic relation that attacks the social body and most of us forced to participate in it struggle greatly to live. The deep sense of existential disempowerment wrought by these conditions, especially when experienced together, renders us highly susceptible, however rational we think we are, to conspiratorial thinking and noxious ideologies.

When those around us fall prey to these insidious but increasingly endemic forms of magical thought we should, instead of ridiculing, judging or chastising them, remind ourselves that the word “conspiracy” comes from the old Latin term conspiraire, which means, simply, to breathe together. Breathing together, conspiring, we can create something far better than what currently passes for life.

This article was originally published at New Frame.

Conspiracy Theory vs. Socialist Logic

Originally published by Socialist Standard.

Conspiracy-theory, or conspiracism, has it that much of the world today is to be understood in terms of ‘conspiracy’ be it by scientists, extra-terrestrials, masons, or whoever.

Currently gaining credence among many is the idea that all accepted science is a conspiracy, for relativity theory and quantum physics are specialised subjects. Einstein is difficult to understand and the majority of us are not astrophysicists, or other types of scientist, but that is no reason to dismiss these theories.

Many in society seek solace in pseudoscience, and therefore in conspiracism, whereby they can feel in control over what they cannot understand. Conspiracism absolves you from having to undertake painstaking research where you are not willing to trust those who actually have expertise in a difficult subject. Conspiracism attracts people from an entire spectrum, eager to feel that they belong to something: right or left in their leanings, dependent on what they were before becoming conspiracist. The phenomenon appears to attract ‘truthers’ – those who know the ‘truth’ despite the facts. Some are avowedly Christian, others not. Some dally with other rehashed mythologies, interpreted to fit in with their modern conspiracism. Many are, in fact, as members of the working class, confused and vulnerable, and want to feel significant; which they feel modern scientific thinking cannot help them with.

It is tempting to draw some similarity in all of this to the declining years of the Roman Empire, so brilliantly shown in the film Agora, about the last days of the great Library of Alexandria. Science and learning were then the property of a privileged few, and this is largely how they are seen today by many attracted to conspiracism and ‘truthism’. Today we are bombarded, flooded, with ideas and theories via the internet, whilst actual reading has declined.  Some conspiracy theorists tend to deride books which contradict them, dismissing them as the propaganda of those ‘in on’ the ‘great conspiracy.’ Book-learning becomes associated with closeted academia and so is deemed irrelevant. So refutation of a conspiracist’s ideology from facts outlined in books is futile.

With many people feeling disenfranchised from intellectual life, as they are in fact disenfranchised economically (being born in the wage-slave class), old and new-style forms of fanaticism win converts. Conspiracism is an obstacle to socialist awareness. Vital to the spread of socialist awareness is the materialist conception of history and recognition of human scientific progress.

Marx knew this when he wrote welcoming and applauding the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, recognising science as the necessary ally of socialism. Above all, the scientific study of history is vital and paramount, as history is an evolutionary process.

Capitalism is not a conspiracy. It is a system that evolved through social and economic processes, just as socialism will have done. Capitalism, and class societies as a whole, do by definition encourage ‘conspiratorial’ behaviour, but they are historically, not ‘conspiratorially’, produced.

Everything grows from an antecedent and does not appear out of the blue.

Conspiracy theory backs up the bourgeois myth of an evil human nature (‘Original Sin’ rehashed for the modern age). To paraphrase Karl Marx, the morality of a given age is the morality of its ruling class. The cut-throat values of the capitalist class have us believing in a human cut-throat nature in which everyone is a potential conspirator, a potential thief, a potential brigand. Thus an ideology of brigandage, sustained by the viciously competitive nature of capitalism, leads people to see their fellow beings as either real or potential brigands.

Conspiracism reduces everything to a school playground view wherein everything is viewed as the machinations of some cartoon-like gang independent of history. Those who attempt to spread conspiracy theory do a disservice to the cause of achieving a better world, by further confusing already confused workers and by giving ammunition to those who label socialists as cranks and claim capitalism to be the end of history.

We urge our fellow workers to face reality, embrace knowledge, and recognise for what it is the ridiculous zealotry known as conspiracy theory. Emancipation from the system of wage-slavery, poverty, prices and profits requires a grasp of social history and of social and natural realities.

Imperialist Propaganda and the New Cold War With China

PHOTO CREDIT: FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSTRATION/MADOKA IKEGAMI-POOL/GETTY IMAGES/DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

By Matthew Dolezal

Originally published at the author’s blog.

On January 24, a headline in the right-wing Washington Times read, “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” The claim was largely debunked and ignored. However, the story was then notably resuscitated by Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin in April. By the end of the piece, Rogin admitted, “We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab.” Shortly thereafter, the claim spread to Fox News and other mainstream outlets. Soon enough, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump publicly promoted the unfounded conspiracy theory.

According to prominent sources within the scientific community, the virus in question almost certainly has natural origins. For instance, an article featured in the prestigious scientific journal Nature explained:

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. […] Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.”

Furthermore, The Lancet published a letter signed by 27 public health scientists from eight countries who “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The letter continues by clarifying that “scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”

In short, the sensational claim that the virus originated in a Chinese lab has absolutely no supporting evidence. This specific case of anti-China propaganda is simply fuel on the pre-existing fire of unfounded Western smears against this rising power in the East. For instance, in August of 2018, prominent Western news media outlets began claiming that the United Nations had compiled reports of Chinese government “internment camps” in which as many as one million ethnic Uyghur Muslims were being held. However, upon further inspection, the claim deteriorated. It turned out that the U.N. as a whole had made no such statement, and that the explosive assertion came from a single individual, Gay McDougall, who was the sole American member of the independent Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

According to the Associated Press, McDougall “did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the [U.N.] hearing.” Despite the complete absence of evidence for this serious charge, more propaganda subsequently surfaced from other dubious Western sources, including a U.S. government-funded “activist group” called the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). According to The Grayzone, “ the board of the organization is a Who’s Who of exiled Chinese anti-government activists.” The CHRD has even endorsed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, a neoconservative who has expressed racist views toward Chinese people and supports colonialism.

During his recent trip to China, journalist Danny Haiphong didn’t see “internment camps” in Xinjiang Province. Haiphong further explained that “it is difficult to walk more than a mile without running into a mosque. Every street sign in the city is translated in both Mandarin and Uyghur languages. Security is more plentiful in Ürümqi than in Beijing or Xi’an, and for good reason. Most Westerners are unaware that Xinjiang Province is the site of numerous terror attacks that have taken the lives of hundreds of people.” Due to the ongoing threat of Islamist terrorism, Xinjiang “has set up vocational and training centers in accordance with the law to provide courses on Mandarin, laws, vocational skills and deradicalization programs for people influenced by religious extremism and terrorism.”

Nevertheless, relying heavily on unsubstantiated Western propaganda of the aforementioned variety, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act late last year. The bill, which includes additional economic sanctions, is part of a larger pattern of new Cold War-style escalations between the two powerful nations. With these tensions comes a surge in Sinophobic hate crimes buttressed by bipartisan, racist rhetoric from American politicians, replacing the hysterical Russophobia of yesteryear. As noted in the New York Times, this onslaught is “reminiscent of the kind faced by American Muslims, Arabs and South Asians in the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

After its “breathtaking” response to the recent coronavirus outbreak, China has found itself further entrenched in a hybrid war with the American empire. As journalist Pepe Escobar explained, “For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the U.S. as a threat…” It is certainly true that China is undermining America’s global hegemony by engaging in international solidarity efforts with nations that have historically been in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism (Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc.). Due to the evident domestic decline of American society, this ongoing cooperation between those consistently demonized, sanctioned, invaded, or otherwise targeted by the West could become a model for a multi-polar global future. 

On October 10, 1990, a shocking testimony was given to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus by a 15-year-old girl named Nayirah. The distraught teenager recounted an event she said she had witnessed as a volunteer at a Kuwaiti hospital after the Iraqi invasion earlier that year. “While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying,” the girl proclaimed. Although it was partially used to justify the Gulf War, the story turned out to false, just like the narrative that was used to justify the subsequent 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

Iraq is not unique. Imperialist lies have also been used to justify American aggression in Libya, Syria, Venezuela, and countless other sovereign nations around the world. Even the justification for the Vietnam War turned out to be fabricated. Such falsehoods have allowed the American empire to violently ravage the globe for decades to protect its so-called economic interests. Now that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is providing a viable alternative to the battle-scarred neoliberal capitalist model, the imperfect, yet successful economic power that lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty is being maligned with spurious propaganda. Don’t believe the hype.