13. The removal of (government-backed) drug pushers in the Chicano community. The link between the government and the drug pushers is indisputable. The CIA's involvement in the drug traffic in Vietnam has been exposed. The bourgeoisie promotes the use of drugs in the Chicano and other minority communities in an attempt to keep the people passive and to undermine their striving for revolution. Chicanos like Los Tres del Barrio have fought to get the drug pushers out of their communities and are now facing repression from the police.
The debate within the Chicano movement over whether to incorporate gangs into the struggle is tied in with the larger debate, prevalent within both the Chicano and African liberation movements, over whether a racial supremacist ideology is correct. This is because the reactionary position that an oppressed nation should replicate colonialism, elevating itself to the disadvantage of other groups, naturally finds ideological support within the gang-fetishist stance. Gang fetishism promotes an in-group/out-group mentality, a macho obsession with pure physical strength, and an anti-intellectual rejection of the theory that's required to achieve socialism. Because if militancy alone is achieved, it says, victory is assured regardless of what a dialectical analysis says needs to be done. The bourgeois class character of gangs, and their assimilation into reactionary intrigue, aren't worthy of concern. Everything can be simplified to a compelling story of the gangsters harnessing their masculine strength and changing the world.
In other words, such strains align with the psychological patterns explained by Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, which diagnoses the fascist mindset as one of intellectually closed off, warlike tribalism. It's what's behind the Aztlan model for "decolonization," which argues that national liberation will be achieved simply if Mexico gains back the territory that the U.S. empire took from it. The grievous contradiction that this argument entails, where Mexico would be exercising jurisdiction over hundreds of indigenous First Nations without the consent of these nations, is deliberately ignored by the position's driving logic. Like the white supremacist "patriotic socialism" argument, which says the United States should be maintained in a "socialist" form, it embraces the preservation of colonial borders through a demagogic romanticism of "national unity." And unsurprisingly, this vision for a recolonization of the First Nations by Mexico was another idea that was pushed by that individual my cadre encountered.
Incidentally, it's these kinds of mentalities that are extremely useful for movement wreckers. Which is the lesson that I've picked up on from my personal experiences with these types.
Rejecting the attempts by wreckers to exploit contradictions
What I've learned about movement wreckers is that they don't have to be feds to act as wreckers. Even if you're dealing with a wrecker who believes their own rhetoric, and is acting out of their genuine convictions, you should treat them as if they're a fed, because they're functionally the same as a paid agent provocateur. This is because the route for destabilization used by all wreckers, feds or not, takes the same insidious form: exploiting contradictions to sow discord and division within an organization, and promoting reactionary ideas like gang fetishism or racial supremacy. It's this nature of movement wrecking that makes the non-fed wreckers dangerous, because a bad actor who sincerely believes they're fighting for a good cause is as impossible to reason with as an actual clandestine agent.
In their findings on how movement infiltrators operate, Media for Justice describes a sabotage approach that indeed could be utilized just as easily by a true zealot as by an agent:
Because they make use of legitimate concerns to push their destabilisation agenda it is very difficult to stand up to them. They know there is an outrage and fundamentalist moralism that comes with certain topics and anyone who challenges this approach will be called an apologist or denialist or an assaulter. This is called the weaponization of legitimate narratives for ulterior motives and agents receive training in this field because it is so effective in breaking up unity in movements. This is an injustice to those who developed sound theory which is then warped for maximum negative impact and sold to young minds as truth. No matter how many authentic overtures you make to them to engage on the contentious issue, workshop it, write manifestos and codes of conduct to deal with the issues they will all be turned down. It does not suit this agenda to solve the issue. The mandate is to make sure the problem is perpetual until it breaks the movement. Their methodology is to spread chaos as widely as possible not to create harmony. They have a clear adversary and everything they do, or ask you to do, is to discredit or destroy their targeted adversary.
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