(August 8 Speeches)

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As American imperialism turns from one theatre of intervention to the next, Cuba is once again restored to its traditional place in American propaganda as the archvillain menacing the supposedly otherwise stable bourgeois society. As it prepares for the coming confrontation of world capitalism between the U.S. and China, the bourgeoisie revives the familiar spectre of Stalinist communism and adventurist terrorism while preparing its State for more intensified internal repression directed at the proletariat. Meanwhile, the recent strengthening of the social-democratic current within the Democratic Party furnishes the opposing bourgeois faction with another occasion to resurrect the anti-communist mythology through which the American State has, for generations, stirred up its own capacity to direct intensified violence against the proletariat, while its reformist political programs cloaked in socialist rhetoric, offer nothing but a program to stabilize the very capitalism it is supposedly corrupting. Both parties profit from this spectacle. One inflates the menace; the other invokes the violated conscience of democracy. Each strengthens the State, while the false opposition in the streets pleads only for the restoration of a more humane administration of the same bourgeois order. Against this entire comedy, the communist position remains one of complete indifference. The proletariat has no democratic rights to recover, only the dictatorship of capital to smash through the reconstitution of its independent class movement.

The bourgeoisie proclaimed the "end of history" after the dissolution of the USSR. For Marxists, this was never a historical turning point, but merely another episode in the development of world capitalism. The Russian counter-revolution had long ago consummated its developmentalist regime of State capitalism beneath socialist phraseology; the collapse of its State form altered nothing fundamental in the global domination of the totalizing capitalist relations. Bereft of its traditional ideological adversary, American imperialism discovered another in "international terrorism", around which it organized two decades of military intervention, patriotic mobilization, and domestic repression. Today, as the contradictions of capitalist accumulation sharpen and inter-imperialist antagonisms once again dominate the world horizon, the old anti-communist vocabulary is restored to service. The spectres now invoked are not revolutionary communism, but the harmless shadows of bourgeois radicalism, social democracy, and anti-fascism, all denounced as "communist" precisely because genuine communism has remained absent from the historical stage for decades. It is easier for the bourgeoisie to prosecute one faction of capital under the name of communism than to confront the spectral reappearance of the proletarian movement that lurks on the horizon.

These currents constitute the indispensable street appendage of the democratic wing of capital. Their incessant appeals for activism, participation, electoral mobilization, and "community organizing" merely reproduce the oldest illusion of bourgeois politics: that the contradictions of capitalism may be resolved through a more democratic administration of the existing order. Their practical function is to dissolve the proletariat into the amorphous category of "the people", subordinating class antagonism to the perpetual regeneration of the democratic State. As the contradictions of capitalist accumulation sharpen and preparations advance for a new cycle of inter-imperialist conflict, this democratic mobilization becomes the necessary complement of an expanding repressive apparatus. The bourgeoisie prepares at once for external war and for the inevitable return of internal class conflict. In the temporary absence of an independent proletarian movement, it manufactures substitute antagonisms, moral panics, and fictitious enemies, rehearsing in advance the ideological forms through which tomorrow’s class struggle will again be mystified.

The bourgeois State has never waited passively for its enemies to appear. It manufactures the conditions under which repression presents itself as an obvious necessity. During the years of the so-called War on Terror, hundreds of FBI informants and undercover agents penetrated mosques, community organizations, and online forums, not merely to uncover conspiracies but to provoke them into existence. In one widely reported case, an informant entered a California mosque offering access to Tomahawk missiles and other military-grade weapons in the hope of identifying willing participants. In Portland, federal agents spent months cultivating Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a nineteen-year-old, before supplying him with what he believed to be a functioning explosive device for the city’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony, arresting him only after every essential element of the supposed plot had been furnished by the State itself. Scores of similar sting operations followed the same pattern: targets selected from politically isolated or vulnerable individuals, plans suggested by informants, weapons supplied by the authorities, and spectacular arrests presented afterward as proof of an ever-present terrorist menace. These were not exceptional abuses but ordinary mechanisms through which the capitalist State enlarged its police powers while cultivating public consent for their expansion. To imagine that such methods have disappeared because the designated enemy has changed would be to mistake a permanent function of the bourgeois State for a passing historical episode.

The same operation now reappears under a different ideological banner. According to the bourgeois Center for Strategic and International Studies, "left-wing extremism" accounted for thirty-five attacks and thirteen fatalities between 2016 and 2025, with 2025 identified as the first year in which left-wing attacks supposedly exceeded those of the right. Yet the report itself records one hundred and fifty-two right-wing attacks resulting in one hundred and twelve deaths over the same period, while further separating jihadist and ethnonationalist violence into distinct categories, an accounting procedure that artificially narrows the apparent disparity, lending statistical weight to the political narrative being constructed. The figures themselves are of secondary importance. Their purpose is not scientific inquiry but ideological preparation. Just as yesterday, every social contradiction was subsumed beneath the universal category of "terrorism", today an eclectic assortment of anti-fascists, social democrats, anarchists, environmental militants, and imaginary communist conspiracies are assembled into a new internal enemy against which the State’s coercive apparatus may once again be enlarged. Genuine communism, absent from the historical scene for decades, is invoked only as an empty name beneath which the bourgeoisie prosecutes conflicts internal to its own social order while preparing the instruments that, tomorrow, will be directed against the re-emergence of the independent proletarian movement.

The killing of Charlie Kirk, the assassination attempt against Trump, both which left many questions unanswered and the transformation of Luigi Mangione into the latest commodity of individualist political spectacle serve as pretexts for a renewed bourgeois offensive against the chimera of "far-left terrorism". As such on July 16th, the U.S. State Department convened a conference of over sixty countries to combat “left-wing terrorism”, despite political violence from the left being significantly less than that of the right, let alone that of any proletarian or faux-communist tendency. The opening of the conference invokes the long-extinct Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof, Weather Underground, Tupamaros, and Shining Path, so as to evoke, in the mind of the world’s bourgeoisie, the terror of "communism" or a conspiracy to undermine Western civilization and civilization as such. It works well for the bourgeois in the larger preparation for war against a false communist rival imperialism and against the domestic working class it wants to keep from affiliating with a real communist party above all else.

The American State has designated four European anarchist and anti-fascist groups as global terrorist organizations: Antifa Ost in Germany, the Informal Anarchist Federation in Italy, and Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Self-Defence in Greece. The Department of State has offered a reward of up to ten million dollars for information on these groups to disrupt their finances and operations. This coincides with the regime’s order designating "Antifa" a domestic terrorist group at home, and with the signing, the previous year, of NSPM-7, which creates a federal task force to combat what it calls domestic terrorist groups characterized by "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government".

While, yesterday, the administration was focused on combating street anarchists and anti-fascists, today, the focus shifts to the electoral war with the Social Democrats and to red-baiting, drawing up battle lines ahead of a potential move on Cuba as preparation for war with China continues. Mirroring the McCarthyist "Godless Communism" mania of the second Red Scare, the regime of capital has increased its anti-communist rhetoric under the guise of protecting civil and religious liberties, with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick declaring on camera: "We know what communists do around the world. They remove God. They close the churches. They punish the believers". A paper released by the U.S. State Department on Cuba’s "communism" names the DSA, BLM, the Amalgamated Labor Union, and Code Pink as exports of the Cuban regime’s supposed communist revolution, subverting American capitalism from within. The Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) has been sanctioned, and three Cuban nationals connected to the institute are held in federal custody awaiting deportation on the charge of having "ties to the transnational communist subversion network". This coincides with the U.S. government increasing spending, by hundreds of millions of dollars, on programs to combat China’s imperialist influence in the Caribbean and Central America, being chiefly concerned with underwater telecommunication cables and ownership of trade ports along the Panama Canal, and with an internal State Department document, obtained by the Associated Press, proposing to spend upwards of half a billion dollars on disrupting Chinese influence worldwide to secure American capitalist imperialism against its Chinese rival.

The Red Scare Has a History

American anti-communism is not a method born of the Cold War, nor of any electoral season. It is, first and foremost, the domestic policy of American capital toward its own working class, a policy that predates, by decades, any State abroad against which it could later be pointed during the cold-war period. This domestic policy became a matter of international strategy the moment the Russian Revolution gave it a State to strike at: American troops landed at Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok, and American capital funded the White counter-revolution. The same logic later governed the decolonized world, where Washington fought to bring each newly independent State into its financial orbit and to forestall any proletarian revolution within it, collaborating, where useful, with the forces of global Stalinism toward that same end, as the two carved the planet into rival imperialist blocs. The turning of this strategy on Cuba, Vietnam, or Venezuela does not mean these States embodied the workers’ power it claimed to fear, only that each is a national capital administering its own proletariat, that Washington wishes can capture a greater share of the surplus extracted from the proletariat in these countries. This is the same discipline it has always applied at home.

Long before Lenin, before any Cuban had ever heard of Marx, the American bourgeoisie had already built the physical apparatus of class war against labor on its own soil. After the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 spread across a dozen States, which had to be put down by federal troops and State militia, cities across the country raised fortress-like armories in their own downtowns to house National Guard units for the suppression of labor. The Great Railroad Strike and the Paris Commune, both erupting in the same decade, already prefigured the panic the bourgeoisie would later attach to the name of Bolshevism; but the armories themselves were not raised against a specter. They were the infrastructure the bourgeoisie built in direct response to a real uprising of American workers, and the ideology of anti-communism was fitted to that infrastructure only afterward.

The pattern repeated with the Espionage and Sedition Acts and the Palmer Raids after the first imperialist war, when the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was crushed for refusing the nationalist intoxication, and again in 1947, when the largest strike wave in the country’s history was answered by the Taft-Hartley Act, compelling every union officer to disavow communism under the threat of losing legal recognition. In each case the repressive apparatus preceded the threat it claimed to answer.

The fear behind these episodes has never been feigned; the domestic press erupted in panic about "Communists" a full fifty years before the Bolsheviks existed to be blamed for anything. But the same class also fears something nearer home: the historical instability of its own position within production. Marx showed, in the twenty-seventh chapter of the third volume of Capital, that the joint-stock company already accomplishes, within capitalism itself, "the abolition of capital as private property", turning the owner into a mere claimant on interest, a "self-dissolving contradiction" that hollows the bourgeoisie out from within. Layered onto the present crisis of overproduction, this old fear and this newer unease fuse into a chronic readiness to see danger everywhere, in a mayor’s rent-control bill as much as in a picket line, in a DSA canvasser as much as in Antifa Ost. But the true, real, and pressing “red terror” is that of the bourgeoisie—whether democratic or fascist—that the working class, instead of submitting to preparations for capital’s broader confrontation with China, will organize itself and rise up in every country in defense of its class interests, all the way to the revolution for communism.