Long Island Red Rose

We Will Not Reconcile With Collaborators

After Italian partisans shot Benito Mussolini, his mistress, and other high-ranking officials in the small village of Giulino, their bodies were taken some 70 kilometers south to Milan and dumped in the Piazzale Loreto.

It was April 28, 1945. Milan had suffered under fascism for over 20 years. It was here where Mussolini held his first rallies and where the Blackshirts set out for the March on Rome. Here, too, would be the heart of Italian resistance. 

Strikes and guerrilla warfare were constant features near the war’s end. Just eight months earlier, fascists executed around 15 partisans in the same city square where Mussolini’s fat, rotting body now lay. Prophetically, Mussolini had warned that the fascists would one day pay dearly “for the blood of Piazzale Loreto.”

The choice for his resting place was deliberate. And not even in death had he finished paying. 

The liberated Milanese populace came out early in the morning to find their tormentor naked in a heap in the plaza. For a man whose capacity for torture and cruelty was infamous, they had no mercy. They bludgeoned his body, spat on it, pissed on it, and shot it again for good measure. Once they had their fill, they strung up the dictator and his companions, feet first, like St. Peter.

To this day, when Alessandra Mussolini, his far-right politician granddaughter, posts a picture online, you can rest assured that somebody in the replies will send it back upside-down. 

Milan’s revenge is a tale of triumph. But for many, the city’s industrial power and its status as the birthplace of Italian fascism served them well under Il Duce. All over liberated Europe, fascist collaborators in business and government would have to be dealt with. When the people got to them first, that justice was swift in coming. But before too long, with the Cold War looming, our political betters began offering amnesty to anyone willing to turn a trick for NATO.  

Perhaps it was the mercy of the post-war years that put us in our current predicament.

Jackbooted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have spent every day these past few weeks terrorizing Long Island. Unmarked officers have kidnapped children and adults, separated families, and sequestered immigrants to unknown detention centers without the slightest pretense of concern for their rights or basic human morality. 

Such tremendous evil cannot be accomplished alone, and ICE has had no shortage of help on Long Island. Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County Police Department, Hempstead Village Mayor Waylyn Hobbs, and the Glen Cove Police Department, among many others, have either invited ICE to torment their constituents or materially aided them in doing so, often both. 

Anyone, from your boss, your doctor, your county executive, your kid’s school nurse, may be hedging to give themselves an out for ICE while letting themselves sleep peacefully at night. Look at any Facebook comment section lately for News 12, and it’s a wonder we closed Camp Siegfried.

As the good people of Long Island have strained to respond to the invasion of America’s Gestapo, struggling against powers far better equipped than they just to keep families together, our elected representatives on both sides of the aisle have lauded the efforts of the Nazis. Long Island’s own Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen were among 75 Congressional Democrats who signed a resolution expressing “gratitude” for ICE’s work.

This is America. This is Long Island. Capitalism and our sham democracy, founded on stolen land, have empowered fascism once more to rise, just like it did in Europe after World War I. 

The same liberal order that let this world come to pass tells us that these things are “un-American,” and asks us to protest with images of Americana at our side. Our immigrant neighbors and comrades are just the latest to face the lash of fascism after years of persecution for crossing an arbitrary border to seek opportunity after American imperialism devastted their homes. 

Fascism is just capitalism under crisis. The same way that capitalism requires an underclass to exploit for labor and profit, fascism requires an underclass to scapegoat, brutalize, and still exploit for labor and profit. 

If it’s your immigrant neighbors today, it’ll be you tomorrow. And the people claiming to represent you will sell you out just as quickly as you’re seeing right now. You're experiencing, in real time, how you and others would have acted in 1930s Germany. 

Bruce Blakeman is a fascist collaborator. Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen are fascist collaborators. Waylyn Hobbs is a fascist collaborator. From your neighbor who calls in a tip to your uncle who cheers them all on, all of them are the lowest scum of the Earth. 

These dark days will pass, because nothing is stronger than the might of the people. When they do, we will not forget who was on the side of righteousness and who was on the side of evil.

Personally, I don’t like their chances.

Wait, What the Fuck is Actually Going On? 

Bear with me for a second.

We live in a capitalist society. Capitalism’s highest purpose is generating profit. Profit is generated through the value produced by labor. Deportation targets and removes immigrant laborers. 

…So where is the profit? 

On its face, the question seems absurd. We’ve all heard the refrain that “the cruelty is the point.” We know a fascist regime like ours requires scapegoats to brutalize. Maybe that’s enough of a reason on its own to explain why this moment has come to pass, but I’m not sure.

Think about it: we’re watching corporations allow government mercenaries to kidnap their workers from their places of business. Strip everything else away for a second but the profit motive under capitalism. This is a move that robs businesses of their labor (their cheapest, most easily exploitable labor, mind you) and encourages people to stop showing up to work. On a large scale, it is well understood that mass deportation could shrink the U.S. GDP by as much as five percent. That’s one sixth of the contraction produced by the Great Depression, to say nothing of the knock-on effects.

Without much strain, we’ve arrived at a situation where our profit-motivated corporate overlords are aiding and abetting a state-sponsored economic collapse. Basic class consciousness and knowledge of socialism has led us into a blind alley. It seems absurd, doesn’t it? 

Resolving this contradiction, finding the profit motive behind letting the Gestapo run wild in the warehouses of America, requires a couple basic assumptions. 

First, we have to dispense with the notion of stupidity. An apparatus as large as the American empire does not move on stupidity alone. The flailing beast at the heart of capitalism can only be motivated to action by some form of raw gain for its stakeholders. Myopic and brutish as these people often are, there is rationality at play here.

Second, we have to accept the premise that the American capitalists act in largely uniform ways as a class. The hyper-exploiters and genociders that claw their way to the top of the social hierarchy in 2025 have not gotten there by accident. We’re sold the myth of capitalist competition, but at this level of industrial organization the competitive forces of capitalism’s early years have largely been squashed out. Monopoly capitalism, imperial capitalism, runs largely on consensus and collaboration between the profiteers, whether they meet openly or reach independently towards the same ends. What dissent exists within their ranks is practically nonexistent when you pull back far enough.

These assumptions resolve a lot of the apparent confusion of our moment. How can a millionaire winery magnate like Gavin Newsom realistically situate himself as the man of the nation at this moment? Someone has to be full of shit.

It’s Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom is full of shit. He isn’t even opposing ICE actions, he’s abetted family separation for years, he just doesn’t like the National Guard crackdown on the protests. The “optics” of it—a word we’re hearing a lot from the supposed opposition. Preserve our precious norms. Don’t burn Waymos, don’t do anything to shut off the money machine, just lay down and get the piss beaten out of you. The uniform lack of substantial resistance, the halfhearted rhetorical counters and even outright support, shows us our Democratic oligarchs are just as unbothered as the Republicans. 

But again we arrive at the contradiction. How in God’s name is the ruling class so aligned on kneecapping its own economic engine? The backbones of agriculture and the service industry, of all things. If even Liberal Patrick Bateman is just playing the heel, where on Earth is the gain?

What the fuck is actually going on here?

In reality, there’s profit for the bourgeoisie in quite a few places. ICE jobs are jobs like any other, and potentially a source of political support from the beneficiaries. Agents are outfitted by handsomely-compensated subcontractors. Private detention centers generate hundreds of millions in revenue. Airlines hired to fly people out of the country are making billions. 

Every article about the cost being borne by taxpayers is really just revealing the sleight of hand that corporate America is using to rip the copper piping out of the walls of the nation. It’s a basic law of Marxist economics, value lost in one realm is value gained in another. 

Besides the raw capital to be extracted, as always, there’s a class war dynamic at play, one which explains some of the supposedly self-destructive acts of corporate power. 

Capitalism requires exploitation. Maximum profit can only be achieved through exploitation. Costs of materials, of labor, of production, must be driven as low as possible, which requires weakening the bargaining position of the agents behind those competing interests. It is for these reasons that capitalists financed colonialism, and neocolonialism after, to cut out the middleman in siphoning mineral wealth from the very Earth. When the stewards of their land have been robbed of their leverage, dispossessed or exterminated outright, the middleman in that extractive process is cut out in the name of cold efficiency. 

Every action of the capitalist class contributes to the devaluation of labor. The working class, and their collective labor power, represent to this point the only immutable counter to capitalist power outside the laws of nature and physical matter. Worker power is attacked on multiple fronts, our current circumstances being no exception. Even if losing immigrant workers hurts in the short term, companies like Amazon stress compliance because they know it forces the rest of their workforce, and the pool of potential labor to replace them, into an even more precarious position. 

Fascism is just capitalism in crisis; its circle of exploited populations growing wider and wider as its privileged class retreats with its hoarded millions. Already we’ve seen colonial tools employed domestically with the instruments of Palestinian genocide being loosed in Los Angeles. The rhetoric that defends it is easy to dismiss as ideological, and therefore meaningless, but the mental subdividing of the working class is a timeless tool for capitalist dominance. Immigrants, people of color, and trans people today, whoever else you love tomorrow. The fewer people recognize the common struggle we all share with our undocumented comrades, wrecked and strained by the same forces as the rest of us, the easier it becomes to stamp out any scant revolutionary currents. 

A scared working class, a divided working class, is a working class that lacks power. All of this contributes to what Aime Cesaire called the “progressive dehumanization” that accompanies bourgeois interests: 

“Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is-there can be--nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism.”

This barbarism that ensnares more and more people will always further the bourgeois agenda, because violence against workers weakens us all as a class. And all the while Peter Thiel strives to create the perfect digital panopticon with the data Elon Musk’s lackeys ripped from government hard drives to cow us even further into submission and sell the last bit of our lives back as a monthly subscription. Paired with the massive ruling-class push for AI, which CEOs salivate over as the final solution to labor, and the rhetoric that blinds us all to the thief behind our walls, our would-be feudal lords see this moment as their shot to snatch victory in the class war for the dominators. 

The planet is getting hotter, the drones are getting deadlier, and everything you need to survive is getting more expensive. This is not the time to let the Walton children dictate our protest tactics. We have to fight like hell, right here, as a unified working class, or risk the ruination of all of us. 

Other Lefty Links