Antifa wants an insurrection leading to a legitimacy collapse and a communist/left-anarchist revolution. But there's a very basic question: where's it going to find the troops, and how's it going to train them?
In one of my previous analysis posts I identified three overlapping groups that make up Antifa's membership: agents of influence, overproduced elites, and damage cases. At present, the agents of influence are relying on the damage cases as troops, but that doesn't scale up well; they're around 3% of the population, which is enough for a terror campaign and a very low-level insurgency, but not enough to contest ground with formed units of loyalist troops.
This is why it's important to keep an eye on what the John Brown gun clubs, Redneck Revolt, and the Socialist Rifle Association are doing. These are the organizational nuclei for building the militarized formations Antifa would need in the later stages of an insurgency ramping up to full-scale armed revolution on the Castroite or Maoist model.
Specifically, keep an eye on who these nuclei are recruiting. That predicts what the later stages of the insurrection will look like, assuming it happens at all.
An important constraint is that the two pools Marxist theory tells them to rely on - workers and peasants - aren't really available. In the US, their nearest equivalents are the social strata most likely to have Trump flags on their trucks.
Broadly speaking I think there are two possible recruitment strategies. One centers on overproduced elites, the other on nonwhites with racial grievances. Probably both will get tried, but both have serious problems.
The problem with recruiting overproduced elites to be your shooters is that pretty much by definition they think they ought to be running things, not taking lethal risks on somebody else's orders. Also, you're in competition for these people with the Gramscians, who are also offering power via Communist revolution, and with a much lower risk of actually getting shot at.
Recruiting non-whites with racial grievances might seem much more promising, but they're going to have a competence problem. The US Army has figured out the hard way that it can't make effective soldiers out of people with an IQ below about 85. Now go look up the mean IQs for major non-white groups in the US population and estimate the percentage below that cutoff. It is not a happy figure for Antifa recruiters to be contemplating.
I don't know how Antifa is going to solve this problem. I don't know if it's solvable at all. I do know that if I were the counterterror guys in their fusion centers I would be keeping a very close eye on these organizations and their membership growth curves.
In one of my previous analysis posts I identified three overlapping groups that make up Antifa's membership: agents of influence, overproduced elites, and damage cases. At present, the agents of influence are relying on the damage cases as troops, but that doesn't scale up well; they're around 3% of the population, which is enough for a terror campaign and a very low-level insurgency, but not enough to contest ground with formed units of loyalist troops.
This is why it's important to keep an eye on what the John Brown gun clubs, Redneck Revolt, and the Socialist Rifle Association are doing. These are the organizational nuclei for building the militarized formations Antifa would need in the later stages of an insurgency ramping up to full-scale armed revolution on the Castroite or Maoist model.
Specifically, keep an eye on who these nuclei are recruiting. That predicts what the later stages of the insurrection will look like, assuming it happens at all.
An important constraint is that the two pools Marxist theory tells them to rely on - workers and peasants - aren't really available. In the US, their nearest equivalents are the social strata most likely to have Trump flags on their trucks.
Broadly speaking I think there are two possible recruitment strategies. One centers on overproduced elites, the other on nonwhites with racial grievances. Probably both will get tried, but both have serious problems.
The problem with recruiting overproduced elites to be your shooters is that pretty much by definition they think they ought to be running things, not taking lethal risks on somebody else's orders. Also, you're in competition for these people with the Gramscians, who are also offering power via Communist revolution, and with a much lower risk of actually getting shot at.
Recruiting non-whites with racial grievances might seem much more promising, but they're going to have a competence problem. The US Army has figured out the hard way that it can't make effective soldiers out of people with an IQ below about 85. Now go look up the mean IQs for major non-white groups in the US population and estimate the percentage below that cutoff. It is not a happy figure for Antifa recruiters to be contemplating.
I don't know how Antifa is going to solve this problem. I don't know if it's solvable at all. I do know that if I were the counterterror guys in their fusion centers I would be keeping a very close eye on these organizations and their membership growth curves.
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