As social inequality has grown, so has state repression. As we stand on the cusp of full-blown authoritarianism and fascism, we face two stark choices.
Tyranny or Revolution – by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
in Mexico City
ScheerPost
There are two ways to confront global capitalism. There are mass movements, especially strikes, which disrupt commerce and government to force the ruling class to create systems of justice and equality — albeit ones where capitalists retain significant power.
The National Coordinator of Education Workers in Mexico (CNTE) — a grassroots union created in 1979 by dissident teachers — is currently attempting this in Mexico. It announced that if its demands for salary increases and job security are not met it will occupy public spaces and shut down the World Cup soccer matches scheduled to take place later this month in Mexico City.
When the teachers went on strike in the Mexican city of Oaxaca in 2006, following the incarceration and disappearances of union leaders, police fired on the protesters. The community rose up and drove the police out of the city. Oaxaca established an autonomous anarchist commune for several months. Although the commune was ultimately crushed by the Mexican government, the uprising spawned popular assemblies, independent media and empowered indigenous communities.
The second way to destroy capitalism is through the nationalization of industries and banks and the seizure of capitalist assets, although this can give rise to an equally pernicious form of state capitalism. This radical route entails — as in the Russian or Cuban revolutions — violence. Capitalists do not part with their monopolies on wealth and power peacefully. They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.
Accommodating capitalists and their institutions, even with high taxation, regulation, strong labor laws and a prohibition of monopolies, means living amid a hostile force. It is a matter of time before this hostile force organizes to dismantle the social democratic state as happened in Sweden, Britain and Salvador Allende’s Chile.
Liberalism, which Rosa Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name — “opportunism” — is an integral component of capitalism. Liberalism ameliorates capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms blunt resistance, but later, when things grow quiet, are revoked. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study of Luxemburg’s observation.
Protests in the center of Oaxaca City, Mexico, on June 22, 2006. (R4che1/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0)
Luxemburg also knew that socialism and imperialism were incompatible. Imperialism, which empowers a war machine designed to enrich arms merchants and global capitalists, is accompanied by a poisonous ideology — what social critic Dwight Macdonald in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” calls the “psychosis of permanent war” — which makes socialism impossible.
The psychosis of permanent war results, as it has in the U.S., in the curtailing of civil liberties and punishing economic austerity. Dissent is equated with treason. State power serves the dictates of empire rather than democracy, which devolves into farce, or in our case, a tawdry reality show.
The rollback of the New Deal, the closest we came to a social democracy, began in the mid-1940s. Cold War anti-communism and corporate opposition converged to make war on organized labor and the New Deal left. This assault culminated in the Second Red Scare.
In 1947, President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835 launched loyalty investigations that purged the left, including public-sector workers and union allies. That same year, the Taft–Hartley Act directly targeted organized labor by restricting strikes, secondary boycotts and union security agreements and by requiring union officers to sign anti-communist affidavits.
The left fell victim to what the historian Ellen Schrecker, in Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, calls “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.”
“In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture,” Schrecker writes.
This crusade, she goes on, “used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.”
The witch hunts silenced communists, socialists, anarchists, pacifists and all those who denounced the abuses of empire and capitalism. The “anti-red” actions dealt devastating blows to the political health of the country. The radicals spoke the language of class war. They understood that Wall Street and the billionaire class are the enemy.
They offered a broad social vision that allowed even the non-communist left to make sense of the predatory nature of capitalism. But once the radicals were purged, once the liberal class took government-imposed loyalty oaths and collaborated in the witch hunts for phantom communist agents, we were robbed of the ability to make sense of our struggle. We lost our voice. We were integrated into the corporate structures we should have been dismantling.
Sen, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, right, with a map of Communist Party organizations during 1954 Army hearings. Joseph Welch, foreground left, chief Senate counsel representing the Army. (U.S. Senate/Wikimedia Commons)
The ruling class justifies its pillage with the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey points out, “had limited effectiveness as an engine for economic growth” but is successful as “a project to restore class dominance.” It transfers wealth upwards. It consolidates power in the hands of the billionaire class. It is an updated version of the divine right of kings.
Wages under neoliberalism stagnate. If the minimum wage kept pace with productivity, it would be at least $25 an hour.
Deindustrialization, turbocharged under President Bill Clinton, sent industries overseas, where workers are paid slave wages and lack benefits. Some 30 million mass layoffs in the U.S. between 1996 and 2023, according to analysis by the Labor Institute, thrust the working class into economic misery. As prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair carried out the same assaults in Britain.
Ominously, accompanying this deterioration is the blocking of peaceful avenues for social change, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which effectively turned elections over to the billionaire class.
As social inequality has grown, so has state repression. We stand on the cusp of full-blown authoritarianism and fascism. If the Trump administration succeeds in rigging or invalidating the midterm elections, the last possible exit door within the political system will be slammed shut.
ICE and Border Patrol agents fire pepperballs on Jan. 24 in Minneapolis following the killing of citizen Alex Pretti. (Chad Davis/Flickr. Wikimedia Commons)
The evisceration of the rule of law at home is accompanied by the evisceration of the rule of law abroad. The U.S. Empire is a rogue state.
It issues bellicose threats to all who defy it, braying like a wild animal. It carries out “preemptive” wars and imposes sanctions on nations that are defiant. It assassinates and kidnaps foreign leaders. It abducts foreign nationals and transports them to black sites where they are tortured and sometimes murdered. It uses its navy to seize merchant vessels and resell their cargo. It bombs nations in open violation of international law. It funds and arms Israel to carry out genocide. It ignores and humiliates its allies and alienates and enrages most of the global community.
This mounting oppression, advanced but not begun by Trump, means we face two stark choices.
Tyranny or revolution.
I loathe violence, even when it is exercised in the service of what is seen as a just cause. No one escapes its poison. But it is the oppressor, not the oppressed, who determines the mechanisms of resistance.
The numerous revolutions and insurgencies I covered, including in El Salvador, Guatemala, Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine, saw nonviolent protests met with brutal state violence. Resistance movements had no option but to pick up arms.
The nonviolent revolutions I covered in Eastern and Central Europe succeeded not because they were nonviolent, but because the capitalist class benefited from them. The capitalists and oligarchs bought up state industries and assets, as they did after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at prices far below their actual value.
The global capitalists permitted the transition to power by the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa if the ANC abandoned its Freedom Charter, which called for the nationalization of state industries and land redistribution. South Africa today has the highest income inequality in the world.
Revolutions that enhance the wealth and power of the capitalist class thrive. Revolutions that do not see blood run in the streets.
Relatives of Palestinians who died in Israeli airstrikes gathering around the bodies taken from the morgue of Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir el-Balah, Gaza, Nov. 6, 2023. (Ashraf Amra / UNRWA /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0 igo)
We also face a dilemma earlier generations did not — the climate crisis.
The global ruling elites are determined to keep us chained to fossil fuels. They are determined to commodify and exploit the natural world, as well as human beings, to expand profit. They are determined to reconfigure our societies so workers are immiserated and shorn of all power while our masters live in unparalleled luxury and opulence.
The inevitable breakdown of the climate will make larger and larger zones, especially in the Global South, uninhabitable. The waves of climate refugees will become a flood. There will, in response, be no limit to the industrial violence used by the ruling global elites to protect their interests.
The genocide in Gaza is an unequivocal message sent from the industrialized nations of the north, which spent billions to sustain Israel’s mass slaughter, to a global population that subsists on a few dollars a day:
We don’t care about humanitarian law. We don’t care about human rights. Your lives mean nothing to us. We will use any tool, including genocide, to protect our monopoly on wealth and power.
What do we do? How do we resist? Can we halt this descent into madness and mass death?
I am not optimistic.
Those who live in the climate fortresses in the Global North have a material interest in this project, although we are all headed for extinction. Those in the Global North will, I fear, accept a species of totalitarian capitalism in exchange for a degree of security and stability, however temporary.
But this will not be true in the Global South where the ecological crisis and the rule of the global capitalist class pose an existential threat. The Global South will mount insurgencies and revolutions. It will replicate its rebellions of the past, some of which were successful, and some of which, including the insurgencies I covered in Guatemala, El Salvador and Algeria, were crushed.
Revolution, and the possibility of a world freed from the iron grip of global capitalism, will come from these acts of resistance. Let us hope they prevail.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
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Revolution seems a bit fanciful to me. Especially with the power held by today’s governments/police:
“Revealed:
the ‘less lethal’ weapons Australian police don’t want you to know about”
Xxxs://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/09/australia-police-less-lethal-weapons-tasers-pepper-spray-crowds
I doubt we will ever see another Mahatma Gandhi.
I agree, Valerie … I think this “revolution” will only succeed when people simply tune out of obedience and stop playing the game. The younger generations are doing this to an extent but not entirely, shackled by their attachment to handheld minders. But there’s hope …
As Friedrich Engels pointed out, “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.”
And there’s the rub. No existing ruling class has never surrendered its power peacefully, and will do everything in its power to regain it. The armed supporters of the vanquished rulers (ie, the fascist bands, klansmen, the cops, secret police and those in the military who haven’t gone over to the side of the uprising) must be neutralised or physically eliminated. The old state machine of repression (the cops, courts, military, bureaucracy) must be shattered and replaced by another reflecting the material interests of the insurgent masses.
Otherwise, the old rulers will unleash a civil war bloodbath if their state and armed supporters aren’t eliminated. In particular, for any uprising to have any chance of success, the military must be split and the majority of enlisted men/women and NCOs go over to the side of the uprising. This will begin to happen when they’re ordered to shoot their own.
How can all this come about? The prospect for any uprising to succeed, as is becoming painfully evident in Bolivia today, is that it must not stop at strikes, general or otherwise, but strike organisers must organise the taking over of the means of production, utilities and the banks in order to feed and provide services to the general population who won’t be able to withstand lack of food, transport, etc, for very long from a general strike. If this isn’t done, the uprising will lose support from the general population and will be defeated.
Committees, and ultimately workers’ and soldiers’ soviets, with elected representatives recallable at any time under the watch of an armed workers and soldiers, must be formed to organise all this and they will need to be defended by organised detachments of red guards, to eliminate the armed remnants of the old rulers. Violence can be minimised with an overwhelming show of force that makes the cowardly vassals of the old rulers flee (as happens often with cops in revolutions).
These committees and the organised militias will form the core of the new state to replace the old. In a setting where the working class forms a large portion of the population (unlike in 1917 Russia or 1949 China), democratic soviets have a much higher chance of surviving when scarcity doesn’t create queues administered by unaccountable and corruptible bureaucrats, doesn’t kill outright the initiative of the insurgent working classes, and where these classes, arms in hand, form the majority.
And then what? When the capitalist class and their banks are expropriated (without compensation) and their enterprises taken over under the control of their workers, higher level soviets, as in a collegiate electoral system, would be formed to come to decisions on how to get the economy moving and how to run, and devise a detailed, rational plan to produce and distribute goods and services to satisfy the needs of the majority.
This is no utopia, it can’t and won’t be achieved without violence, and it will use terror to prevent any counterrevolutionary uprising fomented by the vanquished rulers. This dictatorship of the proletariat, with its socialised means of production and economic planning, will be the midwife for a future classless society and is the only way capitalism, and the violent imperialist system it spawned, will finally be eliminated.
Nobody ever seems to see a revolt coming. It is usually as surprising to the people who thought themselves as radical leaders as to the leaders of the security services. Usually, the leaders of the revolution are scrambling just to keep up while the revolt is actually occurring. It only sounds better decades later in their memoirs.
Revolts seem to come from large numbers of people all getting fed up at the same time and saying “Enough!” and that this has to change. Popular revolts do not come from some great plan by a group of revolutionaries. They are instead an occurrence where a significant amount of the people get mad at the same time, then more join them as the existing abusive system run for the benefit of Elites has earned their opposition instead of their support over the years prior.
Just saying, this could happen tomorrow. Such events usually surprise almost everyone, while simultaneously appearing as a response that obviously must occur to such a long train of abuses and tyranny. Keep your powder dry.
During the Cheney/Bush war on Iraq, America had a very successful Anti-war Movement. As a protester who was used to being in the 10% opposed to say Clinton’s bombing of the Serbs, I felt it was a noticeable success when the anti-war movement convinced some 60% of American to oppose these wars.
In a democracy, that would matter. 60% opposed would matter in a democracy. This let me to a firm conclusion. That America did not really need an Anti-war movement, but what America really needed was a Democracy Movement.
What every movement opposed to the actions of this government needs to do is to combine together to form a Democracy Movement. That is the first step to what any of them want … making America once again into a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That has to be “Step 1” to anything you want to change about America. Its either that, or you set your own personal “Step 1” as “become richer than Elon Musk.”
$ can only buy propaganda, not votes. The Epstein class has the $; we lack the votes because of fear & the sweet, sweet lies, so wonderful that many want more than anything for them to be true.
Capitalism is not the problem – it no longer exists. All the ills laid at its doorstep here are caused by its replacement: corporatism – government of the people, by the lawyers, for the benefit of the soulless corporate.
Caused me again to read the last page of The Stand. I too am not optimistic.
Well knapped obsidian point, spear, bow and arrow, (transition from hunting to warfare) bronze weapon, iron and steel weapon, cross bow, siege tools, gun powder, cannonry, rifled shoulder arm, TNT, rapid firing arms, tanks, poison gas, aerial bombing, rockets and missiles, atomic weapons. There is an unmistakable progression here; a dominate focus of human ingenuity and invention….all in the space of a few thousand years, a blink of the evolutionary eye!
This is a history that matters, not the parsing of the individual motivations; following the steps, for example, leading to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand explains nothing that the maxim gun doesn’t presage. This is the momentum of change that we must realize and mitigate.
That our species can do what we do to each other and still exist in such deep levels of empathy and compassion requires greater understanding and proposed actions than Hedges’ laudable efforts at making sense of our predicament.
If it’s any consolation, we know from history that top heavy regimes, whether they be royal, aristocratic, religious, military, communist or ‘democratic’ all have a ‘use by’ date.
Unfortunately, it’s always those at the bottom of the heap who pay the highest price prior to the use by date.
I am not optimistic, either.
How many more cycles of oppression and revolution will the human race go through before it destroys itself?
The cycle is not new; the behaviour is not new – but the weapons are.
This could well be the last one, since we now have numerous ways of global self-destruction and more and more madmen willing to use them.
The people of Bolivia are shutting the country down. There have been many setbacks in their struggle for justice, but they never surrender. Hint to those still too comfy to rise up in the global north. Solidarity with the oppressed is the key to our survival. Time’s awaisting.
Thank you for an on point comment. You are right and there are organizations like Progressive International that lead the way and must be supported. Our struggle against capitalism, imperialism and its environmental destruction must be global and based in global working class solidarity. We need to work not just to defeat the monsters of nationalism and capitalism but to build a post-national order.
Yet, while we need to defeat the monsters of nationalism and capitalism, the Progressives in America support both nationalism and capitalism. Millionaire Bernie’s speeches to America’s company unions regularly are as nationalistic sounding as Trump, with ‘foreign workers’ being blamed for bad wages and everything else. ‘Damn foreigners’, just like Trump. Nothing about workers joining together across a map’s boundary lines to fight together. Every ‘Democratic Socialist’ starts their campaigns by declaring their support for capitalism and their opposition to real socialism. Thus, in America, the left is told that to defeat nationalism and capitalism, we must support nationalism and capitalism because there is no alternative. Gee, I wonder why that is not working?
“… we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. ” — Dr. Martin Luther King, ‘Beyond Vietnam’
Progressives firmly support a thing-oriented society, but say a few changes might keep the ordinary people from revolting against it.
What difference will the midterms make if the dems are on board with merging the IDF and Pentagon?
None. This is some of the darkest news I’ve read, along with the passage of another $70 Billion for the private militia by the Congressional reconciliation trick and tacitly supported by the Dems…the damn Dems.
I keep trying to tell you all that the Ds are Cons, just more moderate than the radical extremists in the other faction. How many poisonous policies enacted by Rs have they repealed when given the chance? None – because they’re owned & controlled by the same entities that paid to have those policies implemented. They only promise good thongs for the middle class when they know they can’t deliver. There’s always enough Manchin/Sinema types (by design!) to prevent it.
Politics is not limited to two parties. Think bigger.
Step one is accepting that the Democratic Party is not your friend, and is instead your enemy. To someone who grew up listening to chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ!, How many kids did you kill today?” this is not a great leap for me.
The big problem is that even after the Mega-Donors publicly took control of that Dem party and named its nominee without democracy, people failed to organize an alternative for these mid-terms. That total denial of democracy should have been the starting gun for an exodus. Instead, they stuck with the party of the Mega-Donors, and thus are likely to have no real alternatives on this upcoming ballot. At this point, alternatives could be organized, but it is very late. However, beginning alternative campaigns and movements for these mid-terms would be “Step 1” towards organizing real alternatives in future elections. It would be a good first step to get the @#%$ out of the Mega-Donors War Party,
Millionaire Bernie and the rest of the fake-left are the ones who have maneuvered you into this predicament.
“Don’t follow leaders, Watch the parkin’ meters.” Bob Dylan, America’s Nobel Prize winning poet. ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’
I, too, abhor violence in any form. What has transpired to date, with what appears to be the full support of the military coupled with those who are in leadership positions creating cadres of seudo-military (ICE, local police) leave the public in a very fragile, intimidating set of circumstances. As you indicate, it is the oppressor who uses violence leaving the oppressed what appears to be no choice but to respond in kind. As I ponder this imbalance I wonder: is there a way that – as but one example – the Pentagon and White House (wherever the President is residing) be surrounded. Cut off completely from the outside world (how to do this now that cell phones exist?). Essentially, incarcerated. Provided a minimum of nourishment, water. Ultimately brought to trial. As I contemplate the cruelty lhat these people have become capable of, and in attempting to bring about restorative justice, perhaps we need to separate, men from women; create small self-contained ‘villages’ similar to those that interned the Japanese during WWII. Provide only the absolute necessities. Task no one with overseeing or maintaining the boundaries. Yet make the boundaries impenetrable. Could this extinguish the capacity for cruelty?
Some good ideas Deborah, but (there has to be a but of course), the Turds at the Top have so much weaponry at their disposal it would probably be a lost cause.
I wonder: Is tRump having an escape tunnel built under his new ballroom?
King George and his aristocracy of elite Turds at the Top would have looked equally powerful. That changed because a group of people were willing to …. “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The problem today is that so many people say they want something to change, but then are willing to pledge nothing at all to their own declarations of independence. Independence is never cheap, as there are always Turds at the Top who want you to be their slave.
“… our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”
Tyranny in Cuba was overturned by a small band survivors huddled in the mountains after the shipwreck of the ‘Granma.’