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“ANTI-CAPITALISM” AS A POLITICAL PRE-CRIME  
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Ben Burgis
October 2, 2025
Jacobin
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_ 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
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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
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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
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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.

Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at
Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give
Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently
Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He
Still Matters.

_Jacobin_‘s fall issue, “Borders,” is out now. Follow this link
to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly.
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* Free Speech
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* anti-capitalism
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