In North America one of the most widespread issues we face are reactionism and counter-revolution - along with white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism, it has come to create an active base among the population which consistently turns away from its own interests, fights against the masses of oppressed peoples, and struggles towards the wants and interests of those who rule us all. We have a general tendency towards what can be called "class collaboration", wherein a section of the people is dedicated to constantly seeking a seat at the table with their masters, and the masters of the world. They seek wealth accumulation, land, power for themselves; they want to recreate a society such as that in the beginning days of the colonial enterprises on Turtle Island. The Ruling Class wants free labor, or as cheap to it as they can get. They want cheap, easy to manufacture commodities, along with minerals and resources, control over the banks, the seas, the air, and even space. They want more land, they want more consolidated power, they want to be able to act without restraint and independently. They want to be able to rule without any fear of other nations, other people, and especially oppressed people groups here in North America.
So, what is "Counter-revolution"? What is "reactionism"? And what is "class collaboration?"
Counter revolution is not only the time after the revolution, uprising, or rebellion, when former ruling class bribes large numbers to take back what land, wealth, power and control they had previously, and when new heads at the table throw in their hats. It is also the active struggle, during and before any upswing in the people, against the will of the people: two-faced, suspicious and nefarious people, intelligence agents, police forces, militias fighting for the ruling class, the military, the national guard, and then there are the ideas, social norms, habits, and patterns which are also beaten into the people to try to convince them to follow suit. Reactionism, or reactionaries are the organizations, people, ruling class interests, armed militias, ideas, etc. that work AGAINST the general tendency of working and oppressed people to struggle for their own destiny, their own history, their own nation-state, and their own power. Reaction then is the opposite of revolution, in that, its goal is to move backward, or to stay steadfast in the oppression that exists now, and fights against any upheaval or attempt to change or advance the level of productive forces or take control of production, land, and power for the workers themselves. Counter-revolution wants to stop all of that, it wants nothing to change from how it is now unless it is in the favor of the ruling class and their allies.
Class collaboration is when those who theoretically could fit into different designations of "working class" or "oppressed people", "exploited", etc. in fact work against their own interests and the interests of their supposed class for the benefits that come from working hand-in-hand with the ruling class. Whether they take up arms, spread false information, form organizations, take over unions, help to imprison other trade unionists, community organizers, land + water protectors, etc. or they just simply act against the general needs of the people by taking on the persona, ideology, and lifestyle that the ruling class wants them to: subservient, obedient, ignorant, backward and reactionary.
In the world stage there have been plenty of places and times where counter-revolution has won out over the revolutionary forces, parties, and movements of the people, where crushing blows have been made, massacres carried out, mass arrests, and further, more advance forms of subjugation and suffering for the people, and especially the revolutionaries (if they are not outright imprisoned or executed for treason).
But there are also places where the inverse is true, where the revolutionary people or "Red Armies" overcame the "White Armies" as they are commonly called (red for revolution, white for counter-revolution), and turned the tide in the favor of the working and oppressed peoples, giving them a key and a chance to control their destiny and future, themselves.
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We must look at the United States as an arbiter of this counter-revolution around the world, the same goes for Europe. One only needs to look at the huge number of occupying forces, police, military and underground/clandestine militias, political parties, fascist groups, business interests, imperialists, banks, and others who receive and put to good use the money, training, arms, and people they are sent for this particular cause to understand why. But they do not stand alone. They train, indoctrinate, enslave and manipulate the population to produce its own grotesque class of collaborators with imperialism. In many countries around the world, portions of their population develop into a "comprador bourgeoisie" that plays its part for reaction, and counter-revolution.
We can look to Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Angola, Portugal, France, Britain, Ireland, Russia, and many other nations to see many examples of brutality, murder, rape, piracy, and enslavement of peoples for US and European capitalist and imperialist wealth and land accumulation. But also, for our purposes, we cannot and must not ignore the massive role that a section of the people in the US have played as counterrevolutionaries, state actors, intelligence agents, and class collaborators. The forces that overtook Turtle Island through settler-colonial genocide had shock troops- they had settlers. They had colonists. They often went even further than their colonial masters through power hunger, raw rage, inhumane and rabid disregard for life which came as training for the new burgeoning ruling class. In the colonial enterprises in Florida, the Carolinas, New England, and even through Mexico and Canada, there was a battle for supremacy, for power, for control, between the empires themselves and the front men on the ground. There were many conflicts, cracks, and contradictions, one such being the crises leading to the "end" of the formal Atlantic slave trade, which therein lead to the counter-revolution veiled as a "revolution" in 1776, where a class of slave owning Capitalists fought, killed, enslaved, and destroy for what they wanted: land, cheap resources, free labor, and to break off from their current masters to become masters in their own right - this is the origin of the United Snakes of Amerikkka.
Among this history there are many stories, examples, and other histories about revolutionary movements, revolts, rebellions, upheavals, and attempts to expel, permanently, the white hordes of European settlers, the capitalist class, imperialists, and their supporters. This history has led to the development of a State meant to stop revolution in its tracks, and a class collaborationist portion of the population which consistently throughout history has at the last moment, or from the jump, fought AGAINST the liberation of African, Indigenous, Latino, Chicano, Mexican, and other peoples here in North America, for the chance to oppress people themselves.
This is the issue many organizations, movements, and struggles are facing today. The hypocritical, two-faced, devious, malicious, ignorant, and even unintentional in some cases, participation with or support for the ruling and exploiting class.
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In order to combat this, we must not only join and develop new organizations, united fronts, struggles, unions and parties, but we must educate ourselves, study history, look at documents, newspapers, video footage, photographs and talk to people! We cannot always learn from materials, we must also always learn from the people! But through learning from the people, we must also educate the people, by bringing their issues, causes, struggles, and suffering into the light of day in a comprehensive, understandable way and include them in every we want to do.
If our struggle isn't based in the oppressed people and nations of the world, if it doesn't learn from the history, if it doesn't study the present, and if it doesn't reproduce this all into an organizing effort to rid the world of this oppression and of this set of relations, it is doomed. If we do not rid ourselves of the reactionism ingrained in our psyche, if we do not free our organizations of bad actors and counterrevolutionaries, and if we do not build up our forces to bring down the rising tide of fascism, we will not be able to stand strongly against that tide and it will come crashing down on us, and those around us.
We must fight, learn, meet one another, grow our organizations above and below ground, train, prepare, study, and develop ourselves so that we cannot simply wait for that time to come, but fight now, struggle now, so that it never does.
All power to the People
Long live Revolution