Trump Classifies “Anti-Capitalism” as a Political Pre-Crime
Donald Trump’s new security directive labels anti-capitalist beliefs as a predictor of political violence. The irony: left-wing structural analysis actually pushes people away from lone-wolf attacks and toward mass organizing for change.
Donald Trump’s new national security policy memorandum is a directive for surveillance and tracking of clearly constitutionally protected speech. (Celal Gunes / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s designation of “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” last week was a perfect encapsulation of both the administration’s authoritarianism and its clownishness. Anyone old enough to remember the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 should get a chill when they hear government officials throwing around the word “terrorism.” That term tends to function as an all-purpose hall pass to justify encroachments on civil liberties.
On top of that, “antifa” is not even the name of an organization, although the general label (referring to militant forms of self-declared “anti-fascist” organizing) might describe varied and disparate small groups that do exist. Moreover, there’s no such category as a “domestic terrorist organization” in American law, so it’s unclear what practical import the order will have, if any.
The executive order used a catch-all term to condemn a vague set of actors to an uncertain fate. It was almost as if, with great fanfare, the president had promised to extrajudicially execute vampires by exposing them to sunlight.
A far more serious and disturbing move, around the same time, attracted far less notice. Trump signed a national security policy memorandum called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” known as NSPM-7. Such national security directives are far less common than executive orders. Where the latter tend to direct day-to-day government operations, the former can set sweeping new policies across the federal government’s military, law enforcement, and intelligence bureaucracies. As the name NPSM-7 indicates, this is only the seventh such directive Trump has issued since taking office.
As journalist Ken Klippenstein reports, NPSM-7 “directs a new national strategy to ‘disrupt’ any individual or groups ‘that foment political violence,’ including ‘before they result in violent political acts.’” Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, who’s long been one of the most zealously authoritarian members of the Trump administration, crowed that the moment marks “the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism.”
In explaining exactly why this is so bleak, Klippenstein references the dystopian science fiction movie Minority Report, where people are arrested not for anything they’ve done but for “pre-crime” predicted by people with psychic powers. In this real-world case, the “indicia” (indicators) of future political violence listed in the report are:
- anti-Americanism,
- anti-capitalism,
- anti-Christianity,
- support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
- extremism on migration,
- extremism on race,
- extremism on gender
- hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
- hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
- hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
This is, at the very least, a directive for surveillance and tracking of clearly constitutionally protected speech. Targets would fall under suspicion for simply holding any one of a list of standard left-wing beliefs, subjectively rebranded as extremism, supposedly predisposing them to violence.
Do you think American imperialism is a problem? Do you organize protests against America’s wars abroad? Do you speak out against the American-backed genocide in Gaza? These could constitute “anti-Americanism.” Do you want to abolish ICE? That sounds like what the Trump administration might consider to be “extremism about immigration.” Your opinions are risk factors for violence, and by expressing them, you have committed pre-crime.
Even militant atheism — a position whose most prominent champions have included figures like Richard Dawkins, who are hardly radical leftists — is being classified as a kind of pre-crime presumptively linked to political violence. This is almost cartoonishly authoritarian. And unlike the executive order declaring a nonexistent organization to belong to a nonexistent legal category, it’s all too easy to see the path from this directive to surveilling and squelching speech the administration doesn’t like (and how private employers, too, could take it as a cue to crack down on employees with views in the proscribed categories).
What might be less obvious is how absurd the core premise is here. The directive’s premise is wildly inaccurate. People who hold the views that Trump and Miller might label as “extreme” — on race, gender, family, morality, religion, economics, and foreign policy, for example — are not more likely to commit political violence than anyone else. If anything, the opposite is true.
Structures of Power
In all of these cases, left-wing analysis directs people to think in terms of structures of power rather than blaming individual bad actors. If you blame a health insurance company denying a claim on a particular executive being a monster, for example, you might think a good solution is to shoot that executive. But if you understand that the problems with the American health care system are endemic to the system, such that whoever gets the job of the man you just shot will be subject to all the same horrible incentives and will act in similar ways, you’re more likely to engage in political organizing to change that system.
You can’t kill a bad social structure with a gun. You need mass political action to reorganize society. The pervasiveness of this structural analysis on the Left explains why there are so many more Medicare for All activists and Bernie Sanders supporters than Luigi Mangiones. His violent action was so exceedingly rare that he became a household name overnight. The exception here proves the rule: left-wing structural analysis generally disinclines a person to acts of violence, pushing them instead toward mass campaigns for structural change.
While it can be applied, in different ways, to most of the “indicia” on Trump’s absurdly far-reaching list, the point might be clearest in the case of “anti-capitalism.” If the reason wealthy capitalists exploit people is not because they’re individually evil but because of their particular class interests, then individualistic acts of violence like assassinations are entirely beside the point. You could murder every single person occupying the top positions in the economic hierarchy right now, and if you didn’t change the underlying structure, the army of new oligarchs who replaced them would behave just like the old ones. Changing that reality involves organizing the working class as a whole to take political action.
In case you doubt the deep roots of this logic on the Left, Karl Marx made this very connection in his 1867 preface to his masterpiece Capital:
To prevent possible misunderstandings, let me say this. I do not by any means depict the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.
Leon Trotsky put an even finer point on it in his 1911 essay “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism”:
The murder of a factory owner produces effects of a police nature only, or a change of proprietors devoid of any social significance. The capitalist state does not base itself on government ministers and cannot be eliminated with them. The classes it serves will always find new people; the mechanism remains intact and continues to function. . . .
In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. . . . But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.
Anyone who cares about living in a free society needs to reject the notion that certain ideological perspectives need to be monitored and contained, regardless of the nature of those perspectives. Even genuinely vile ideas need to be fought at the level of ideas.
But it’s particularly absurd to treat “anti-capitalism” and similar structural analyses of power relations as “indicia” of violence. Trotsky and Marx, who were certainly anti-capitalists and probably the epitome of “extremists” in Trump and Miller’s eyes, were perfectly clear: anti-capitalist structural analysis leads to the inevitable conclusion that acts of political terror or one-off violence are worse than useless and should be dissuaded. The more people today encounter their ideas, the more likely they are to agree.
At a moment of escalating politically motivated lone-wolf attacks, the conservatives who rail against “radical Marxist indoctrination” on college campuses frankly should be hopeful that this becomes more than just a hallucination.