State and repression
In December 2025 a military court in Yekaterinburg sentenced five members of a Leninist study circle including a pensioner, from Ufa, the capital and largest city of Bashkortostan, Russia, to between sixteen and twenty-two years in prison. Their activity was as a study group specifically reading Lenin’s State and Revolution. No acts were committed or violence planned, but they were sentenced for terrorism and plotting a coup. Thought alone was treated as a seditious act.
In the US at Texas A&M University, a philosophy professor was barred from teaching Plato because he allegedly advocated particular views on race and gender. Two-thousand-year-old texts, including Aristophanes’ myth of the split humans and Diotima’s reflections on love, are no longer permitted to be read . Students were treated not as thinkers but as ideologically empty vessels.
Two hundred courses in the Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences have been flagged or cancelled by university leaders for gender or race-related content as the university undertakes its review of all course syllabi, faculty members told Inside Higher Ed. This review is required as per new rules instituted by the university Board of Regents after conservatives waged a harassment campaign against faculty members who taught race or gender-related subjects.
As Gyorgy Lukacs wrote, ‘Ideology functions effectively only so long as it remains unconscious of itself.’ When ideology is exposed, it must be defended by force or ritual. Lenin had observed that ‘the State is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.’ Both the Russian state and the university act to preserve the dominance of the master class, only telling truth when it’s convenient.
Plato’s dialectical method encourages dialogue, reflection, and contradiction. Gramsci noted in the Prison Diaries that the master class secures dominance by shaping civil society and consent. The repression of readers and students prevents the proletariat from thinking independently and undermining hegemonic authority.
Such systems do not defend meaning. They defend the conditions of their own performance. They are nihilistic not because they believe in nothing but because they cannot tolerate the process by which meaning is made.
Paranoid ideology and its violent political theatre
A woman was shot in the head three times by an agent of the United States in front of her wife. This was violent ideological theatre, not law enforcement. On January 7 in Minneapolis an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, a poet and a U.S. citizen, during a federal immigration enforcement operation that had already brought thousands of armed agents into the city.
The federal response was instantaneous and unapologetic. Homeland Security officials and President Trump rushed to frame the killing as a response to ‘domestic terror’ and defend the agent’s actions as self-defence, claiming Good ‘weaponised’ her vehicle and tried to run down officers. Local officials, video evidence, and human rights groups reject that narrative; footage and eyewitness accounts show her attempting to drive away, not attack, and the domestic terror label has no basis in law. The FBI immediately seized control of the investigation and cut out Minnesota state investigators, deepening mistrust and raising fears of a cover-up. The killing has sparked large protests in Minneapolis and solidarity demonstrations nationwide, and it has intensified debate over ICE, federal power, and accountability in law enforcement.
The political response to this isn’t a botched PR afterthought like the Met’s handling of the Mark Duggan or Jean-Charles de Menezes shootings, where Blair and Cameron let police take the heat and preserved an appearance of separation of powers. This is different. Trump and his cabinet turned a street killing into ideological propaganda, weaponising it against large parts of the working class and their allies, and signalling that dissent and community defence will be cast as terrorism. That escalation, and the fact that a significant slice of U.S. society is willing to accept these justifications without evidence, tells us something grim about the shape of social conflict under Trump’s second term, conditions that eerily echo the pre-Civil War debates over Bleeding Kansas, where political violence became embedded in national policy and identity.
A.T.