On April 19, 2024, after receiving a press release from Dare to Struggle CT, the Red Clarion published that press release unedited and unchanged. However, as with all socialist organizations whose material we publish, the Editorial Board attached a statement about who Dare to Struggle was and the Pressworkers’ opinion of the organization. This brief paragraph contained some rather mild critiques, but overall “encourage[d] comrades to work with their chapters” and congratulated the organization on its “good work.”
Statement from the Editors: Dare to Struggle is an organization that professes to follow in the Black Panther Party’s footsteps and has taken several major strides toward engaging with the masses. USU encourages comrades to work with their chapters, even where they tend to exhibit a general formlessness and anarchist elevation of practice over developing principled membership and theory. It is the position of the USU Press Organization that Dare to Struggle should continue their good work, but make serious efforts to formalize their structure and lay down Marxist principles of organization, strategy, and programmatic commitments that will enable them to continue to heighten the struggle.
The response from Dare to Struggle could be typified as childish, explosive, and utterly without merit — more typical of a screed released by Austin Red Guards, the fictional John Horse III and his Swamp People’s War, or Chairman Gonzalo. It is reproduced here in full, for the reader to comprehend the effect of even the most toothless and gentle criticism on the self-conscious Dare to Struggle communications team.
Thank for putting out our press release but your editors note is a complete distortion of who we are, and we’re not sure where you got any of your information from considering nobody we know of from your editorial staff has extensively talked with us or worked with us before, outside one person who we spoke to briefly when they presented at our event.
professes to follow in the Black Panther Party’s footsteps. We simply look to previous groups like the panthers, the young lords, CPUSA before it turned into full-on revisionists (before WWII), etc. to synthesize lessons out of their experiences. Not in our documents nor does anybody in our chapter profess to simply follow in the footsteps of the Black Panther Party.
tend to exhibit a general formlessness and anarchist elevation of practice over developing principled membership and theory. We don’t put practice over theory or avoid it all together, we read theory that informs our strategy and tactics alongside going out and building inroads with the masses week after week. Principled membership has been built through engaging in the work, dedicating ourselves and new members to the struggle all while yes, engaging in reading that directs our work and orients us around a line. Again how would you possibly know how we function internally? Unless, of course, this was written by one of the cowards who left our organization a month ago.
has taken several major strides toward engaging with the masses. Via social investigation we have had success at mobilizing and even recruiting some of the lowest and deepest section of the masses to work with us, namely homeless and formerly homeless people. So we have not simply “taken several major strides toward engaging with the masses”,
We’ll make the same suggestion to you that we make to the cowards, opportunists, dogmatists, and online leftists who have come around us, read our materials before taking a snipe at us. Some suggestions: our mission statement, principles of organizational function, and requirements / readings for becoming a member. There is also a public summation from NYC about their work. If you already looked at those, then re-read them.
As a side note please don’t encourage any of your “comrades” to work with us, the ones who sit behind a keyboard and make shit up about a group they’ve never sat down with. We don’t need internet leftists around us telling us we need to spend a year reading before we ca start talking to people on the street.
We will be making a post sometime this week which will be a public version of our internal summation.
We, of course, immediately instructed all of our affiliate organizations and connected membership of this reply and of Dare to Struggle’s desire that we cease all coordinated work with them. Despite the numerous organizational bridges that had been built, out of respect for Dare to Struggle’s demand, our membership began the process of withdrawing all further aid.
This is precisely the kind of useless sectarianism that keeps our movement divided, and against which this Press has repeatedly set itself. It was to combat exactly this type of reaction that we released Constructive Struggle. This type of toxic inter-organizational relationship is dangerous to the movement.
Had it been only this single experience, it is likely that, despite the implicit threat from Dare to Struggle to publish a scathing press release (which has not yet materialized), we would not have ventured to publish the current piece. However, in the period after we received this fascinating piece of hate mail, the Editorial Board was made aware that Dare to Struggle NY (which, we were told, was not a central body for the organization, which did not appear to have a central body, but merely one of its “chapters”) was hosting a conference for other organizations. In violation of their own dictate that our affiliates and members cease work with them, Dare to Struggle reached out to one of our affiliates about attending the conference.
It was made clear to us that Dare to Struggle NY was seeking grant money to fly organizers into their June conference in an attempt to convert other groups along the line of the Dare to Struggle model (which, to date, has appeared to be little more than a circle of vaguely anarchistic “socialists” who use the words of Mao Zedong and the BPP but the practice of the Narodniks). When we were made aware of the fact that grant money was going to be involved, we determined that we were bound by our duty to the movement to release this piece.
Not only is Dare to Struggle a dangerous organization to struggle with, as evinced by their response to criticism, they are a dangerous organization to organize with. If they do obtain grant money, it will come with the strings that all NGO-aligned money comes with: the necessity to keep strict receipts, account for all their spending in accounting statements, and submission to oversight by bourgeois committees of well-meaning but destructive liberals.
Further, we cannot escape noticing the insistence on action, even in this rebuke delivered by the organization, which demonstrates the exact issue we criticized in our statement. Marxists cannot respond to criticism this way, particularly when that criticism comes from other Marxists engaged in revolutionary work, nor should Marxists presume to know the revolutionary credentials of others. Humility is required in the period of uniting the movement. Although it is possible that Dare to Struggle may overcome this juvenile posturing and engage productively with other organizations, it will take a significant amount of personal work among its organizers.
The insistence of the Dare to Struggle Organizers that reading their materials would somehow dispel the criticisms we have levied is also misguided. Before we criticized them, we conducted a thorough review of their publicly available materials. Nowhere do they contain a program, articulated principles, or ideological commitments. Nowhere do they make any effort to lay out a Marxist organization. Nowhere do they enumerate bylaws or structure. They are mere puffery, absolutely devoid of content, and we urge our readership to review each of the listed documents for themselves before drawing any kind of conclusion. You will see what we saw: an organization that is still coming into being, a great potential, but something unfinished, unformed, and without serious consideration to basic questions of Marxist strategy, tactics, and organization.
We must therefore urge all organizers who read the Red Clarion against the kind of explosive, “my way or the highway,” responses to other organizations. Even if the initial statement made by our Press was incorrect, it would have been exceedingly trivial to correct it through collaborative struggle. Unfortunately, the outburst that we received, rather than disproving our criticisms, makes them all the stronger. Secondly, we must urge our readership never to accept grant money of any kind. This is a poison pill. Communists cannot be beholden to bourgeois bookkeeping, and there is no more invasive kind than that which accompanies grant and non-tax status. Nor should any Communist organization be too eager to work with any org that does accept grants, because they put themselves at risk.
