Note from the Editorial Board: This article appears in full on our online edition. It is our intention to reprint it serially in the next several print editions. It should shortly also be available in handbook format, along with our other revolutionary handbooks. We have removed the supporting footnotes in this version, but they will be included in print.

We are faced with a world that, we are told, bears little resemblance to the crucible of the 19th and early 20th centuries from which came the most valiant fighters of the class struggle. We are told that the world of today is not one where where the proletariat has any power, where we are no longer the makers of the world. We see, at every turn, the breakdown of the workshop and factory floor — the growth of the “gig” economy, designed to circumvent worker solidarity and ensure continued precariousness, to prevent the growth of social and economic bonds between workers by shuttling them from one job to another.

We have been told these things, and we, for the most part, grow up believing them. But who told us? The bourgeois ideologists, textbook writers, journalists, and academics whose access depends on parroting the systemic “truth.” Why should we take their words for granted? Is the world more decentralized than ever before, or is this a bourgeois lie? Is the workplace atomized, or is that merely what we are shown? We must remember that the apparatus of cultural production has never been as powerful, and has never been as subject to the whims of its bourgeois owners. We cannot trust the mythmaking of bourgeois culture, we must investigate for ourselves! This means not only gathering data from bourgeois sources, which can be useful, but social investigation on the ground.

This document represents only the first step in a plan to ground our analysis, as a movement, firmly in reality, and to depart from the bourgeois mythmaking. As someone who does not live in New York City, I do not have continuous first-hand access to the conditions on the ground; however, as someone close enough to go there periodically, I hope that this document provokes a series of investigations through which we — Marxists — can collate sufficient data with which to forge a city-wide league of Marxists engaged in collective struggle against the imperialist state.

To begin, then, we must perform a class analysis of the enormous urban site of New York City, including not just Manhattan but all its boroughs. We must also take the measure of the advantages and disadvantages of the urban environment of New York City. While many of us across the U.S.-Canadian empire are organizing in second- and third-tier cities or what is effectively an imperial countryside, we must not lose sight of the special conditions present in built-up urban centers. These include a very large and densely situated population (among which it should be easier to locate radicals), a well-developed system of public transportation, etc. but also includes a large presence of the old, revisionist-opportunist-tailist parties (which Cde-Editor Myrrh has given the clever acronym ROT) as well as the most developed groups of social democrats, all of which work to demobilize and neutralize potential Marxists and redirect popular discontent.

Using this analysis, I suggest a number of measures that can be undertaken to help create local organizations within the city; these organizations can gather more information, study, prepare, and deepen connections with their communities to act. They can publish this information with Unity–Struggle–Unity to share experience with siblings in struggle across the continent and together we can refine our understanding. We must establish not only local organizations, but meetings between them. We must establish not just letters and correspondence, but standing conferences to discuss conditions.

We propose the foundation of a non-sectarian New York League of Struggle, in which many primary organizations act as the cells of membership. We also hope this document may help others outside of New York City perform their own analyses by serving as a model. Obviously, we are in no position to lead the formation of these primary organizations — where USU members exist, they are already doing what they can to do so. Should any of the analysis be mistaken or the recommendations be unrealistic, we urge readers to inform us and help correct the movement.

Class Analysis

Before we can attempt to determine a course of action, we must first analyze the locality in which we intend to act. Historically, the proletarian movement has not emerged in the rural districts, but in the urban centers where manufacturing gathered together thousands of workers, placed them in close confines, and forced them to cooperate by the design of the machinery and workshops.

As mentioned in the introduction, we are often told that the world today is basically different from the world of the 19th century factories. We certainly do not see the same explosions of spontaneous, militant worker’s power that were the hallmarks of the half-century between 1870 and 1930. But has the basic condition of the proletarian changed so much in that time? Essentially, we are tasked with answering the following questions:

1. Is there still an urban proletariat in New York City?
2. Has the system of imperialist spoils established by the U.S.-NATO alliance made class-consciousness of the urban proletariat impossible?
3. If the answer to the first two questions are yes and no respectively, then we must determine i) to what extent the imperialist system has “bourgeoisified” the New York City proletariat, ii) the current consciousness of that proletariat, iii) the allies of that proletariat, and iv) the size and location of that proletariat.

It is clear, from the experiences of Occupy and the 2024 student revolts that, at the very least, a stratum of radical students still exists and is capable of mobilization. Thus, we should also attempt to account for the student movement, and analyze the current position of the student stratum in regard to the U.S. imperial project.

This section relies almost entirely on data gathered by the federal government. It must be supplemented with interviews, examinations, and social investigation. This data is not differentiated for our purposes. While the listings for number of employees in each sector does not include the “managerial” layer (that is recorded separately), distinguishing between petit-bourgeois workers, labor aristocrats, and true proletarians is a task that must be undertaken by Marxists and gathered from more accurate data. The capitalist government simply does not care to record class-status.

New York City: the Epicenter of Haute Bourgeois Power

The largest financial firms in the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire are headquartered in New York City, and the largest among those is BlackRock, Inc., but the city also houses the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, the Goldman Sachs Group, and Morgan Stanley. JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley are the first, third, fifth, and sixth largest banks in the United States by market capitalization; between them, they account for roughly $870 billion — more than the other six banks combined. In assets, these four banks command $1 trillion (one thousand billion) in owned assets while the remaining six top U.S. banks own a mere $700 billion. It should come as no surprise that New York is also the seat of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, two of the largest financial institutions in the world. Every bourgeois economist agrees: New York City is the financial center of the U.S. Empire and the world.

The nerve center of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire — the corporations that run the chief bourgeois institutions throughout the world — is located in New York City alongside these banks. This makes it one of the chief seats of the imperialist haute (big) bourgeois of the U.S.-Canadian empire. It is the center not only of banking, finance, and communications, but has offices from many of the largest corporations in the world. As a result, New York City has the largest urban economy in the empire. This has an effect on the class structure of the city and its boroughs.

If we failed to take the time to examine this economy closely, we might easily be misled by the rhetoric of the bourgeois economists and politicians and believe that there is essentially no productive work done in New York City, that it is merely a parasitic entity living from the blood absorbed by the banks. However, despite the fact that the city employs around 498,000 people in finance, 300,000 people in the tech industry, etc., it also employs 200,000 people in manufacturing jobs. This will be discussed in more detail below. Most of those 200,000 people are nationally oppressed.

The fact remains that the imperialist haute bourgeoisie — the leaders of finance capital — cannot physically do away with the necessary workers to support their financial machinery. Thus, the presence of these enormous offices and management centers necessitates and calls into being the existence of custodians, paper manufacturers, logistics systems to truck in food and fuel, the staffing for grocery stores, restaurants, department stores, warehouses, docks, public transport, and all the other systems that represent the essential arteries of a city.

Decaying Finance Capital and the New York Economy

According to the New York State department of labor, 498,000 people are employed in the financial sector, whereas the total labor force in the city consists of 4,705,000 (four million, seven hundred five thousand) people. Direct support for finance capital accounts for roughly 10% of the overall labor performed in New York City. In 2000, there were 481,000 people employed in the financial sector against 3,640,000 (three million, six hundred forty thousand), or 13%. In 1990, that number was 525,000 against 3,562,000, or nearly 15%. In other words, finance capital in New York City is beginning to decay.

Despite the fact that financial services accounts for a mere 10% of the total employment, it provides 6% of total city tax revenues, 17% of the statewide tax revenue, and 20% of the city’s total wages. The average salary in the financial services sector was $398,000 a year in 2018. The average industrial salary in New York City is $41,000/year. Those employed by the financial bourgeoisie make 9.7 times that average.

Reportedly 113 billionaires — members of the country’s monopolists — live in New York City. One in 24 residents in the city, nearly 350,000, are millionaires. The next-wealthiest city in the U.S. domestically is San Francisco, with 52 billionaires. By far, New York City is the residence of the most concentrated elements of the ruling class.

The Monopolists

Michael Bloomberg, the world’s seventh wealthiest capitalist, not only calls New York City his home, he also owns one of its largest businesses and served as its mayor for a decade between 2002 and 2012. He was a law-and-order mayor, increasing sentences for gun crimes, and lending his name and support for the racist, fascist, “stop-and-frisk” policy, helping it expand and lending it credibility. He supported George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, Obama’s re-election in 2012, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. In March of 2019, despite his claim to support trans rights, he said that “If your conversation during a presidential campaign is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people.”

In this way, Bloomberg stands as the archetypical member of the monopolist class as represented in the capitalists of New York City. A political weathervane. He and the bourgeoisie as a whole are interested only in the protection of their class and expanding their profits. These monopoly capitalists have battled for control of the city for the past five years, since the mayoral races were opened to Super PAC money. Although U.S. social democrats and “Communists” (the Working Families Party, the CPUSA, the DSA, etc.) claim that there are “right wing” and “left wing” billionaires fighting for the soul of New York City, in fact the debates being held amongst the monopoly class are between the left and right wings of capital, between two different camps of billionaires debating the best way to crack down on crime and choosing between subsidizing labor aristocracy and breaking the city’s unions and public services. In other words, the debate occurs ultimately between the right and center right.

The monopolists are the primary enemy of the working and oppressed classes in New York City, but their influence is mediated through their lackeys in the labor aristocracy and their petit-bourgeois foot soldiers on the one hand and the city government on the other. That is, the big monopolists generally do not have their hands directly on the wheel of government or repression, and therefore may be somewhat obscure, their position mystified. Outside of billionaire mayor Bloomberg, the big bourgeoisie act through their economic and political agents. In the workplace, these are the labor-aristocrat or petit-bourgeois managers and professionals. In the political arena, these are the city employees: the tax assessors, permitting officials, police force, and judiciary.

The monopolist class also includes the city’s primary landlords whose incomes have catapulted them into the ranks of financial bourgeoisie. Many of what would, in a second- or third-tier city merely be regional or even full-scale non-monopolist bourgeoisie with industrial concerns, are able to become monopolist bourgeoisie in New York. The profits they obtain  in New York City selling their commodities to their haute bourgeois fellows can catapult these otherwise small-scale bourgeois onto the world stage and allow them to invest in multinational corporations through the stock market and investment banks.

New York, therefore, serves as the nerve center of the world-imperialist empire.  Although Washington runs the political machine, the financials that drive it are, to a great extent, concentrated in New York City. The imperialist haute bourgeoisie are vulnerable to attacks here — witness Occupy — and we can reckon that this accounts for the extremely violent responses of the NYPD to all students and workers movements in the city.

As a result of this confluence, and because the bourgeoisie of the zionist state are by and large also members of the U.S. ruling class, we have seen the similarly brutal police response to solidarity organizing in the defense of Palestine. The ruling class cannot afford to permit insurrection in the heart of their financial fortress, which is uniquely weak to such insurrection. Flow of goods and information to and from Manhattan, their world headquarters, must pass through a handful of narrow bridges, wires, and cell phone towers.

If our analysis proves it possible to organize a revolutionary league within New York City, it is most certainly desirable; as citizens in the heart of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire, close to its pulse, we would be a dagger clasped at the breast of U.S. world imperialism. It would be our moral duty and pride as true proletarian internationalists to chance it.

Real unrest here would threaten the entire fabric of the world-empire.

The Non-Monopolist Bourgeoisie

The transitory, smaller-scale bourgeoisie in New York City are a vanishingly minor class. There is simply no room between the petit-bourgeois strata and the monopolist stratum. The gap is too great. For instance, over the course of 2000-2022, “small” landlords were replaced primarily by corporations, and almost all landlords in Manhattan own at least 30 buildings. Data maintained by the New York City government indicates that some 98% of businesses in the city are “small” (employ fewer than 100 employees). These are the owner-operated small businesses of the petit-bourgeoisie.

A random sampling of medium-sized businesses bears this out: DO & CO, a 500-employee catering business, is actually a branch of a global restaurant group headquartered in Vienna. The small luxury soda company, Boylan Bottling, was purchased by Emigrant Bank in 2002 and is now part of their portfolio. Altronix Corporation, a small Brooklyn electronics manufacturer, is owned by Alan Forman, who has a net worth of $6.5 million dollars.

The 350,000 millionaires in New York City in fact compose what we might think of as the pre-monopoly bourgeoisie. They are the haute bourgeoisie that are not yet directly involved in monopoly finance. However, because they are entirely funded by monopoly finance in the form of the big banks, because they purchase raw-material inputs from the third world, and because they sell commodities directly to corporations owned by monopoly finance (like Altronix, which supplies other commodity-producers) they are inextricably linked to the monopoly bourgeoisie such that they cannot be separated in interest. The non-monopolist bourgeoisie therefore, can be said to barely exist; they are a passing phase of the growth of the bourgeoisie.

Every non-monopolist is on their way to being either entered into the monopolist category, or altogether expelled from the bourgeoisie. They are a transient class, almost totally adhering to their “big brothers” in the imperialist ranks.

The Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie — Parasitic Professional Class

As we have seen, there is a huge layer of petit-bourgeoisie in New York City. Small businesses and professional services, the remora of the empire, make up the absolute majority of businesses in the city. We can further divide this group into the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie, who service empire directly by providing the big bourgeoisie monopolists with necessary professional services, the non-imperialist petit-bourgeoisie who generally find their clientele among the petit-bourgeoisie and working classes, and the imperialist labor aristocracy, who are technically proletarians but who work directly for imperialist big bourgeoisie and receive enormously inflated compensation as a result of their position relative to the colonized periphery.

The imperialist petit-bourgeoisie is primarily composed of professionals working in large firms whose primary clients are the imperialist bourgeoisie. It’s worth noting that the corporations employing this strata are generally owned by the imperialist bourgeoisie themselves. For instance, the imperialist international law firm Shearman and Sterling, with offices at 599 Lexington, is run by senior partner Adam Hakki who, although he still practices law, makes a $20 million/year salary from his position, not as a practicing lawyer but rather from his “work” as a capitalist.

Top-flight doctors who make their living treating the wealthy and the trained accountants at firms like Deloitte also fall into this category, as do the many cold warrior academics still employed at the city’s universities. These last are ideological support pillars of the ruling class, endlessly churning out a nauseating anti-Communist bile.

The “professional and business services” sector of the New York City economy employs a huge number of people — 776,000. If we take the 498,000 people employed in finance who are not themselves bourgeois (a vanishingly small number) or labor aristocrats (for instance, certain banking positions), we can estimate that there are around 1 million of the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie in the city. We may also mark the 75,000 people employed as “management” as petit-bourgeoisie. Whether they are imperialist or not depends on what they manage.

These petit-bourgeois workers do have class interests that are in contradiction with the interests of their bourgeois employers. Like all petit-bourgeois professionals, they are subject to profit maximization (theft of surplus value), a certain amount of precarity or fungibility in their positions (although this is, by necessity, less than the fungibility of a proletarian worker — petit-bourgeois professionals are harder to replace, and their skills are more individualized and unique), and the generalized need for the bourgeoisie to realize their profits by the sale of commodities to their own workers, whose pay they minimize.

However, unlike proletarian workers, the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie are consciously cultivated by the haute bourgeois class. This means they intentionally suppress the contradictions that arise between their classes. The imperialist petit-bourgeoisie is excessively overpaid, they are granted political and economic participation in the imperialist project, and they are lauded with social rewards for their complicity. They are the managers of the empire, without whom the empire cannot function.

We should look at them as an inveterate enemy class. The risks of agitating among this class are very high, and there is very little chance that such agitation finds any success.

The Imperialist Labor Aristocracy — “White Collar” Financiers

Legal secretaries at Shearman and Sterling make, on average, $88,000 a year. At Deloitte, the salary for a secretary is $60,000 a year. The average salary in the city is $41,000 a year. The median secretary’s salary is reportedly $51,000 a year in the city. What is the difference between an “average” secretary and one who works at Deloitte or Shearman? Deloitte and Shearman benefit directly from their connection with the imperialist bourgeoisie, and purchase the loyalty of the proletarian workers in their employ. That is to say, these workers are compensated at far higher rates — and thus suffer far less exploitation than other workers in the same position at companies that do not directly service the imperialist bourgeoisie.

This class strata of essentially bribed workers includes functionaries who manage paperwork; “number crunchers” and “spreadsheet miners” as the joke goes. These white collar desk workers, when in proximity to the imperialist bourgeoisie and working to maintain their empires of finance, are, like the secretaries at Deloitte, exploited at a rate far less than their peers in other branches of industry.

We can estimate the numbers of this group roughly by looking at the employment data for administrative and support staff (244,000). The average income of administrative support staff in the metropolitan area is $80,000 a year. This places most administrative support at the very high end of the proletarian wage scale. But we can and must be more precise. A great deal of this money is made by brokerage clerks, office supervisors, executive secretaries, legal secretaries, and desktop publishers (who should fall under the petit-bourgeois heading). This accounts for twenty percent of the support staff workforce, or approximately 50,000 workers.

Like the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie, this strata of the proletariat is dangerous to the revolutionary movement. While the contradictions between the interests of the imperialist labor aristocracy and the entire bourgeoisie are much more acute than that between the petit-bourgeoisie and their haute bourgeois siblings, this doesn’t mean that they are currently aligned with the revolutionary movement. Individuals, or even small groups, in this layer of the proletariat may have revolutionary potential, but the effort required to reach or convert large segments is not, at this stage, worth expending. There are many groups that we can reach, many with high degrees of revolutionary potential or material resources; these labor aristocrats on the balance, have neither.

Non-Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie

The remainder of the petit-bourgeoisie are not the direct servants of imperial power. This includes fractions of the already-listed 700,000 petit-bourgeoisie professionals above, as well as a large percentage of the 1,209,000 private education and health services professionals (private educators at colleges and universities across the city number about 150,000 while an enormous 968,000 work in health care and social assistance).

This group should be divided into strata — upper, middle, and lower — based on income and precarity. The entire class, excluding those directly attached to the imperialist project mentioned above, are typified by having interests that sometimes are aligned with the big bourgeoisie and sometimes are in contradiction with them. This is why, as a class, they have a vacillating or uncertain consciousness that often demands socially progressive policies from the state while at the same time being generally unwilling to attack the root cause of reaction, namely capitalism. The anarchist and social democratic movements are the result of growing petit-bourgeois consciousness: highly individualized on the one hand (anarchists), and unable to confront capital on the other (social democrats).

The lowest strata of petit-bourgeoisie are barely distinct from the proletariat and are being proletarianized. Who are these downwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie? They are the lowest ranks of professionals who do not serve the imperialist bourgeoisie, as well as small-time bodega owner-operators and the owner-operators of restaurants and failing businesses. Obviously certain positions, such as owner-operators, will be more prone to reactionary politics. Since at least 2019, the real median household income in New York City has been falling. Severe rent burdens have increased among middle-income households. Half of all families in New York City cannot afford living expenses without government assistance. For instance, in 2000 the average annual cost of living in South Manhattan was calculated at $76,000 a year while the same cost of living was calculated at $152,000 in 2023. Across all boroughs, cost of living has increased by 131% on average, while the median earnings have increased only 71%. This is a 60% rise in the city-wide average cost of living between the years of 2000 and 2023. The percentage of families making over $250,000 a year increased by 1.2% between 2000 and 2021; the percentage of families making $60,000 – $100,000 a year decreased by 1.5%; a similar decrease occurred in the families making $40,000 – $60,000; however, families making the lowest wages increased by 2.6%. This represents a marked pressure on petit-bourgeois incomes. Calculated at today’s population, this would be approximately 210,000 families at the lower-end of the petit-bourgeoisie being shifted downward, potentially out of the class altogether.

This year, the New York Times reported a drop in overall city-wide population by 78,000 but the city government added the reservation that this does not account for increased “migrants.” We can see, then, that petit-bourgeois positions have been vacated and transformed into proletarian or sub-proletarian positions throughout the city’s economy.

The result of this economic pressure is that the lower ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie are essentially becoming working poor despite their access to professional training, a process that has a long historical precedent and is most visible in the deteriorating incomes of teachers and the creation of an underclass of adjunct professors at the university level. We can demonstrate this in the labor data quite easily: the decline in self-employed workers from 10% in 2003 to 8% in 2021 agrees with the sharp drop we have seen in the “middle income” group. The city government compiled data relating to jobs lost during the early phases of the COVID pandemic, and not regained; there are losses across all sectors, proletarian and petit-bourgeois, that were never regained except in health care and information services. The unemployment rate in New York City stands substantially above that of the rest of the state and the U.S. as a whole.

As a result of this pressure, the petit-bourgeoisie are faced with loss of station and even, in some cases, loss of self. They are increasingly shut out of the electoral processes held out by the ruling class as the bounty of imperialist participation — big money, in the form of Super PACs and dark campaign donations clearly and evidently plays the deciding factor in most important U.S. elections, and the petit-bourgeoisie (with its thirst for rules-based decisions, order, and boundaries that are clearly set out) have watched as the last several empire-wide election cycles for Congress and the U.S. presidency have been essentially stage-managed behind the scenes with a total disregard for any perception of process.

All of this is to say that the downwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie should be fast allies. They can be educated out of social democracy as they come to understand the true nature of the system that is destroying them. This, of course, has generally been true.

It is likely that even the middle strata of the petit-bourgeoisie in New York City can be mobilized for generally progressive issues (such as the support of public transportation and public assistance programs or ending the genocide in Palestine) and, given the pressures currently exerted by the bourgeoisie, won over to the side of Communism in large numbers, should a sufficiently organized formation exist to educate them and bring them into its ranks or its orbit little by little.

City Government — the Pig Class

The ranks of the city government are divided between the various classes. There are proletarian city workers, bourgeois politicians, etc. However, a specialized “guardian” class also works in the city government. We must take special effort to point out the danger of this pig class: cops, prosecutors, judges, magistrates, department of corrections guards, etc.

These are the ground soldiers of the enemy. They are the forefront of reaction. Not only can they not be organized, their organizations are our enemy. In every case, and in every way, we should be oppositional to the pig class. We must not cede an inch of rhetorical ground, but rather pick out the most egregious abusers of this class and hold them up to the community and demonstrate that these creatures belong to the forces oppressing us.

There are city politicians that we should be able to work with, but not under. However, all consideration of any such tactics is premature before there is a city-wide league, as will be discussed further. Therefore, all basic organizing at this time should avoid the government altogether. The risk is too great to organize government proletarians, the organization does not exist yet to meet bourgeois politicians on their own terms, and any interaction with the pig class would spell disaster for a nascent movement.

There are 36,000 police employed in the city, by far the highest police-to-civilian ratio in the entire United States. There is a reason for this — this is the seat of imperialist power.

National Bourgeoisie and Petit-Bourgeoisie

There is another lateral division among the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie between the dominant national groups and the oppressed nations. 3% of businesses are  Black-owned, 6% are “Hispanic”-owned, and 18% are “Asian”-owned. For our purposes, the categories of Hispanic and Asian are more or less useless, as they do not describe actual national origins, but rather agglomerations of many national origins. However, for the purposes of estimating the revolutionary potential of the national bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, we can see that there is a substantially larger Black and “Asian” bourgeois/petit-bourgeois population in New York City than in the country at large (+0.6% in the first instance and +5.3% in the second).

Whether or not these groups are truly “national” (that is, capable of being played against the big imperialists) or comprador bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie (that is, serving as the agents of the imperialists in controlling and managing the national markets) remains to be seen and is beyond the capacity of this investigation. Real data must be gathered about attitudes and information must be collated about community involvement before such a question can be answered.

Suffice to say that there is at least the theoretical potential for the nationally oppressed in these classes to be maneuvered into an antagonistic relationship with the dominant imperialist bourgeoisie, and thus, at least for a time, temporarily allied with the Communist movement. 

The Urban Proletariat

Is there an urban proletariat? Let us examine the data: there are approximately 200,000 manufacturing jobs in New York City, primarily employing the nationally oppressed. This is, in absolute numbers, equivalent to the amount of finance jobs in the city. Some of these manufacturing jobs are actually petit-bourgeois (for instance, technical workers at Bristol Myers Squibb), but this doesn’t change the fact that hundreds of thousands are employed as manufacturers. There are 131,000 employed in mining and other extractive industries. There are 84,000 specialty trade contractors, who may be petit-bourgeois or proletarian, depending on the degree of technical skill and the degree of restrictions on practicing the trade. 42,000 are employed in building construction. 580,000 are employed in trade, transportation, and utilities, almost all of which are proletarian labor. 417,000 people work in the leisure and hospitality industry.

The myth that proletarian labor has vanished is exploded by this data. From the above sectors, we can see 1.454 million proletarian positions in New York City, which is one third of the entire reported labor force in the city. The actual ratio of proletarians is undoubtedly higher and could be reckoned by a more careful calculation of the available labor data, but even in that instance it would be higher still to account for unreported nationally oppressed and migrant labor.

The bourgeois financial company SmartAsset calculated the average salary to live comfortably in New York City at $138,000 for a single adult and $318,000 for a family of four. The salary of an average machinist (of which there are 9,900 in New York City) is $27 an hour, which works out to $56,160 per year. By every measure, these are proletarians struggling in an economy that leaves them insufficient income to cover their basic necessities.

Comparing neighborhood incomes throughout New York City reveals the most firmly proletarian neighborhoods are, unsurprisingly, the Bronx, East Harlem, Flushing, Astoria, and the waterfront on the Lower East Side. It should perhaps also come as no surprise that NYU and Columbia University are the most well-positioned schools in Manhattan in terms of solidifying a link between the student movement and the proletarian communities.

The city itself has also designated areas for manufacturing, what it calls “industrial business zones” (IBZs). These are located in Brooklyn Navy Yard, East New York, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, North Brooklyn, Southwest Brooklyn, Bathgate, Eastchester, Hunts Point, Port Morris, Zerega, Jamaica, JFK, Long Island City, Maspeth, Ridgewood, Steinway, Woodside, North Shore, West Shore, and Rossville. The city provides a tax credit of $1,000 per employee and up to $100,000 to industrial and manufacturing firms that work in these IBZs. Because firms are economically incentivized to move into these areas, and because these firms are more likely to require the government support offered, it is likely that they have high concentrations of highly exploitative industrial production. This would seem to present the perfect opportunity for organizing.

The urban proletariat should form the basic material of any movement. It is among the ranks of this group that the advanced workers will emerge in numbers. Their interests are irreconcilably opposed to the big businesses and capitalists that live in the city. The price per square foot of real estate in Manhattan was $329 in 1997. By 2019, property was worth $1,657 per square foot on the island. A rising trend can be seen in the other boroughs. As of January 2024, the price of the consumer price index goods and services had risen to 1,000 times what it had been in 1967 in the city, about double what it was throughout the rest of the U.S.

It’s worth noting that union membership is down across the country, but New York state consistently has the highest union rates among all states. Of the 14.4 million union members in the U.S., 1.7 million reside in New York state. This indicates that contradictions are still sharp in New York and that basic trade union consciousness persists in millions of workers, even as it is decaying across the country.

There are millions of proletarians in New York City. Let us assume that agitation might be able to reach and draw in approximately one tenth of one percent of the proletarian population. That number, relatively miniscule as it is, is still 1,000 workers in absolute terms. There is no reason that 1% of all workers in the city shouldn’t be class conscious. There’s no reason why 10% of all workers in the city shouldn’t understand the proletariat not only as a class-in-itself, but as a class-for-itself. The fault doesn’t lie with the intermediate workers who are not yet conscious, but with the advanced workers who have achieved a degree of class consciousness but have failed to agitate and educate among their fellow workers. The working classes have not vanished in New York City, they are right in front of us. Advanced workers need merely begin the process of organizing them!

Students

Students are not themselves a class, but generally form a strata, like intellectuals, who can come from many class backgrounds. The majority of students in New York University, for instance, come from the upper 20% of income brackets. Students in the city are thus primarily drawn from the petit-bourgeois and bourgeois class, but their relations of production are suspended while they study. They are themselves more often lower petit-bourgeois, unable to access the wealth of their parents directly, despite being provided its benefits.

Students cannot form the basic material of revolutionary organization for many reasons, but they are extremely active and easily organized into militant formations. Students, while often eager, focused, and able to dedicate more time than other classes, generally are aware of the fact of the class they hope to eventually enter. This makes arrests, publicity, and other exposure more dangerous for students than for other proletarians in the same way that these things tend to be more dangerous for petit-bourgeois professionals. Students also “phase out” of the movement; their residences aren’t settled, and they tend to move without much notice. Lastly, students have a built-in deadline for their organizing, for relatively few will remain in the region or remain radicals/organizers after they graduate.

A 2003 estimate, by now woefully out of date, gives a total of roughly 600,000 college students in the city. If the ratio remains the same as 2003 (7.5% of the city population in that year), there should be around 620,000 students today. They are concentrated in a small geographical area with a broad public transportation system, enabling student activists to easily concentrate and disperse their numbers.

As we have seen throughout 2024 in the form of the student revolts, New York City is roiling with student discontent. This is the same discontent that fueled the 2008 Occupy protests in the city. The police and other pig classes (prosecutors, judges, etc.) are terrified of the potential for an organized student movement, and make every effort to crush any that seem to be arising. This partially accounts for the brutality of the arrests at Columbia over the past April. The students are a powerful force. The student movement must be joined to the worker’s movement. Historically, in most revolutionary situations, students are at the forefront of class consciousness.

The Sub-Proletariat

Over 350,000 people in New York City are homeless. Of these 350,000, approximately half are Black. This is an enormous number of nationally oppressed people without homes. They fall into the strata of the sub-proletariat, the lowest ranks of the proletarian class — those who are generally expelled from the labor force and act as the last ranks of the reserve army of the unemployed. It is important to note that a not-insignificant portion of this population may actually be the working unhoused, who can be reached through workplace organizing.

Like students, the sub-proletariat cannot be the basic material forming Marxist organizations, but they have suffered the most under capitalism and are prepared to despise and attack the bourgeois masters most of all. At this stage, it is too early to begin attempting to organize the sub-proletariat. A sufficiently advanced core of cadre must first be developed; local organizations must be formed on the ground, and a city-wide league must be proposed and carried out. Only then will survival programs yield anything more than the most basic agitation among the sub-proletariat.

The Urban Masses Need Marxist Organization

The question, then, is what do we do with this information? The urban masses are crying out for organization. The wellspring of proletarian action has never been the countryside. In the imperialized third world, the countryside has been a locus of action and agitation throughout the last century not because it is where the proletariat is located, but because it is where the third world peasantry is to be found. The U.S. does not possess a coherent peasantry. We must not apply lessons learned by the successful revolutions in the underdeveloped periphery indiscriminately to the imperial center. 

There are 2,500 police in Suffolk County, Long Island, to a total population of 1.5 million residents, or one cop for every 600 residents. New York City has 36,000 police officers, or one cop for every 230 residents. This is because the population density in Suffolk County is 1,600 residents per square mile, but the population density of New York City is 29,300 per square mile. The closely-packed nature of city life, particularly in the country’s biggest city and financial capital, means organization can proceed at an exponentially faster and easier rate. More people amenable to being organized can be reached, more quickly, with less effort, in New York City than anywhere else in the United States.

What the urban masses lack is not the will to resist the NYPD or anger at the system that continues to exploit and deprive them, but the organizational forms and dedicated cadre to run those organizational forms that will allow them to win confrontations with the enemy state. The bourgeoisie have used many cunning new means to divert and distract revolutionary consciousness among the working classes for fear of this exact type of urban uprising. The most advanced version of this misdirection comes in the form of the non-governmental agency or NGO. Political action NGOs purport to be interested in reforming the government and absorb many bright-eyed would-be radicals, redirecting their energy into phone banking, door knocking, and trying to pass progressive legislation.

This is not what the working people need. The working people need Marxist organizations. They need developed Marxist cadre who can help train new radicals and bring new organizations into existence. New York City needs hundreds of local organizations of radicals numbering 10-20 members, all studying to prepare for a city-wide League of Workers and Students. New York City can be, and should be, the epicenter of resistance to the imperialist order.

What do we mean by organization? We mean a group that has definite membership, standing rules, standing meetings, democratic decision-making, keeps minutes and records, and so forth. We mean a group with defined relationships, officers, and responsibilities. We mean professional revolutionaries who professionalize the task of overthrowing the bourgeois order.

The working people do not need the revisionist organizations like CPUSA. They do not need social democratic organizations like the DSA. Marxists can work within these organizations to build something else, but the organizations themselves are fatally compromised and held by the sympathizers of bourgeois power. We must build something new, something that can resist the great-nation chauvinism that has plagued all parties and formations in the West. We must confront that chauvinism and dismantle it before we can make any forward progress. Only by completely debunking the bankrupt vestiges of past (failed) attempts to establish revolutionary organizations can we embark on our own project.

We will start by building local organizations, cells, to become the constituent parts of an organization of organizations — a regional League. When this league is secure, a party may develop from many leagues.

Assembling Many Local Organizations

Those Marxists who are either in New York City or who can regularly access it should consider founding local organizations. The study group is the archetype of local Marxist organization, and serves to develop cadre and create Marxists capable of taking consistent revolutionary action. What we see more commonly is what has been referred to as “mutual aid,” but which is essentially a kind of charity. We reject the form of the “red charity,” but wholly embrace a revolutionary form: the logistics organization.

The study group is the optimal form in a locality without a sufficient number of developed Marxists to run a Marxist-Leninist logistics organization on a continuous basis. That is the case on the ground almost everywhere in the United States. Thus, we urge our readers to begin Marxist study groups and embark on cadre-development plans. A sample cadre-development plan has been included in this analysis. 

The Study Group

USU has published on the study group and on organization in the past. We recommend anyone reading this who is interested in pursuing this plan also read The Study Group and Constructive Struggle, both of which go into much more detail than is possible in this short paper.

Formation of a study group is the first step toward a functional Marxist organization. This is how cadre are developed, how advanced workers transform themselves into Communists. Although your study group can meander and pick books based on interest, this kind of broad, all-over study can take a long time to develop into a functional organization. Why do we urge the creation of study groups? It is not to sequester ourselves inside and remove us from the movement. However, we must counter the cult of action, that anarchistic urge that has pervaded all modern organizing in the West.

It is not possible to learn to tie your shoes while you are running a marathon. We should make no mistake, revolution is a grueling path that we have chosen. We cannot train ourselves, train others, and act all at once. We should begin with training and developing ourselves together, until we have a sufficient number of trained and dedicated Communists prepared to act in concert. This may, perhaps, strike readers as unnecessary caution. After all, anarchists and liberals run charities every day without training! We speak now from the bitter teacher of experience. When embarking upon a new revolutionary organizing project, a high number of the people who will join in that project will not be highly motivated to begin with. The basic requirement for every revolutionary movement is the capacity to create new revolutionaries. A revolutionary — a professional revolutionary — is not merely someone who knows Marxist theory. A professional revolutionary attends every action they pledge themselves to. They are consistent in their action, and they arrive early to ensure that actions are successful. They are able to engage in class analysis. They know how to write concise after-action reports and they are hardened against arrest and interrogation. This is what it means to be a revolutionary. Revolutionaries, in other words, do not fall out of the coconut tree.
It is through the basics of a study group that the historically successful parties (most notably the CPSU and the CPC) built up their membership prior to becoming parties. This is the course that we must take: one that simultaneously breaks up the ossified hulk of the old revisionist parties and builds the basis of the new party-to-be. In forming revolutionary circles that become organizations, organizations that become regional leagues, we build the basis for our work. Nowhere is that more important than in the financial heart of the U.S. empire.

The enemy, after all, is professional. The enemy is organized. We are facing the might of the capitalist state, embodied in the NYPD, FBI, and National Guard. The city government itself, despite being filled with workers, is our enemy. This corporate agency is highly organized and highly professional; revolutionaries must also be organized and professional. Only the reliable revolutionary will be embraced by the masses. No one wants to be agitated to by someone who doesn’t show up in the hour of need or can’t be trusted to offer consistent revolutionary aid.

If you are able to gather enough advanced workers who are interested in cadre development, we suggest the following plan:

Week one: How to Be a Good Communist, Liu Shaoqi

Week two: Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Week three: Class Struggle, Chapter 1, Domenico Losurdo

Week four: Critique of the Gotha Program, Karl Marx, Program of the Parti Ouvrier, Marx and Guesde, Critique of the Erfurt Program, Friedrich Engels, Programme of the Emancipation of Labour, Plekhanov, A Draft of Our Party Program, Lenin

Weeks five-ten: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, J.V. Stalin

After this, we have a number of “blocks” which accumulate texts on a specific subject, but which can be read in any order or combination.

Political Economy Block

• Blood in My Eye, George Jackson
• Capital, Karl Marx
• Class Struggle, Domenico Losurdo
• Dialectical and Historical Materialism, J.V. Stalin
• Foundations of Leninism, J.V. Stalin
• The Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, Otto Kuusinen
• Grundrisse, Karl Marx
• On the Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels
• Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels
• Wage Labour & Capital/Value, Price, and Profit, Karl Marx

Organization-Building Block

• The 18th Brumaire, Karl Marx
• On Authority, Friedrich Engels
• Combat Liberalism, Mao Zedong
• Constructive Criticism, Gracie Lyons
• Constructive Struggle, J. Katsfoter
• The Dreyfus Affair, Rosa Luxemburg
• Fanshen, William H. Hinton
• One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, V.I. Lenin
• Reform or Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg
• What is to be Done? V.I. Lenin

National Liberation Block

• The Apocalypse of Settler-Colonialism, Gerald Horne
• Assata, Assata Shakur
• Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois
• Blood of the Land, Rex Weyler
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Chicano Liberation and Proletarian Revolution, the August 29th Movement
• Decolonial Marxism, Walter Rodney
• For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question, Harry Haywood
• Hammer & Hoe, Robin D.G. Kelley
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
• Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, V.I. Lenin
• The Negro Nation, Harry Haywood
• The Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galleani
• The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

Sex Liberation Block

• Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici
• Lenin on the Women’s Question, Clara Zetkin
• Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, Anuradha Ghandy
• Revolution at Point Zero, Silvia Federici
• The Straight Mind and other Essays, Monique Wittig

The Logistics Organization

Logistics organizations can address a wide variety of survival issues: copwatch, food supply, community gardens, educational spaces, hot food for children, etc. These are what the Black Panthers called survival programs. However, many of those groups and circles seeking to emulate the Panthers’ survival programs do so without having anywhere near the infrastructure the BPP built up. In order to run a logistics program, you must have a dedicated cadre of Marxists. In order for a program to be logistics instead of simply charity, the program itself must also run political development classes — in essence, it must become a study group with a logistics element.

Despite our earlier warning against running and learning to tie shoes, it is possible to begin with a logistics organization if you have some requirements already met. If your organization or circle satisfies these requirements, you can feel confident in founding a logistics operation. If it does not, you should strongly consider putting together a study group first and attempting to meet the criteria.

1. Defined membership on a non-voluntary basis — formal membership requirements, including dues which will support the logistics operation.
2. At least 5 developed Marxist members who are at cadre-level in both political development and militancy.
3. At least 5 other members; development needn’t be as high as the core cadre group.
4. A method for arriving at binding collective decisions. This can be as simple as some rules of thumb on ending discussions and voting, or as complex as Robert’s Rules of Order. At any rate, it cannot be a procedure that allows endless talking.
5. Sufficient free time and effort to run the logistics program at a set time and place on a regular period. As close to a one-week repeating period as possible is best practices, since the people you serve will come to rely on you.
6. Sufficient free time and energy to run a political development program as part of your work, to develop those who begin attending the logistics operation.

Essentially, this is a way to satisfy the urge of action while also building political development; a study group plus a logistics operation, in other words. However, this is a draining, complex, and difficult task to undertake. If there is insufficient labor (that is, if there aren’t enough developed and militant members to continuously run the logistics program), it will be impossible to pursue continued political development. At this point, the political development of membership must be primary. We simply do not have enough trained and militant Communists. If your organization cannot perform both functions with time left to spare, it should focus on the study and development above the logistics aspect.

Worse, running a logistics operation and then stopping it damages the trust of the masses in Communist organizing. The result of running a short-lived logistics program is far worse than not running one at all. An assessment of capacity must be taken before the program is launched.

Finding Membership

This seems to be the part of organizing study groups and logistics programs that present the most difficult hurdle to overcome. In rural or lightly urbanized areas, membership can be very difficult to obtain. There are fewer central locations for flyers, posters, and handbills to be posted; distances between towns are greater, with less public transportation, requiring longer drive times, and so on. Large apartment buildings are fewer, and workers often live in more sequestered locations. There is a higher percentage of petit-bourgeois or labor-aristocratic workers living in the white suburbs.

In New York City, these problems vanish. To obtain membership and run a study or logistics organization, there are only a few simple requirements in a city as densely populated as New York.

1. Meeting place and time. You should have a meeting place and a regular time lined up before you begin seeking members for your study group or logistics organization. This can be a local radical bookstore, a church basement, a meeting hall or community center, a library branch, even your own apartment or a public park. If your group doesn’t require privacy, you should strive to hold the meetings in as public a place as possible to encourage walk-up attendance.
2. Contact information. You should have some contact information that people can reach. What type is a security question for your membership. Should you create a gmail account or a protonmail account? Can you afford to list a phone number? These questions should be answered prior to your first major recruitment efforts.
3. Flyers. Flyers containing the meeting place and time, your contact information, and a meeting call that will explain to workers the purpose of attendance without alienating them. A few sample flyers have been added to this piece. They’re designed to be easily customized.
4. Consistency. You should continue to meet, over and over again, even if only a few people show up consistently. You should strive not to postpone or cancel meetings. If you do this for a substantial period of time, eventually your attendance numbers will increase. Consistency proves that you aren’t a fed, proves that you won’t disappear tomorrow, and proves that you are serious about revolution. Advanced workers who are not yet Communists need convincing that revolution is possible. The best way to convince advanced workers that revolution is possible is to believe it yourself and act as though it were. That means acting in a consistently principled manner.

As to where and how to best gather recruits: we have identified in the analysis above several key areas in terms of the IBZs. Additionally, the largest and most well-trafficked subway and PATH stations should provide ample locale for flyering and postering with wheat paste or tape. The 1 train, for example, is the busiest train in the city and the Times Square-42 Street station is the busiest station. The Port Authority also provides a hub for bus travel and trains coming into the city from the surrounding regions and would be another suitable location.

We urge you to go forth and build!

A League Conference

It is possible that there are already a number of local organizations that meet the above criteria and that the authors simply do not know of them. Once five or more spring up or are located, the first steps toward the creation of a New York City League of Struggle can be taken. These organizations can participate in the foundation of a larger, umbrella regional organization. Rather than admitting individuals, a league would admit member organizations and serve as a central coordinating point for those organizations.

A conference to found a league would follow a simple progression:

1. Form a working committee of organizational delegates to determine the logistical questions of the first conference, namely: i) minimum organizational requirements for entry into the league, ii) method of determining votes and delegate ratios, iii) location of the conference, iv) time of the conference, v) rules of the conference, and vi) formation of a credentials committee to oversee vetting and attendance.
2. Advertising the conference to other potentially interested organizations.
3. Once the conference is held, the first order of business would be to verify credentials.
4. Then, the conference should elect a unity committee to propose basic points of unity which all members of the league would adhere to as their basic positions.
5. As the unity committee prepares the first draft of the points of unity, the general body of the conference should set up other committees to take care of other business, namely:
   1. An executive committee for carrying out decisions and for sitting in between future conferences;
   2. An agitprop or art committee for coordinating and pooling resources for the production of agitation;
   3. The establishment of sections for gender oppressed and nationally oppressed members;
   4. A rules committee for the creation or recommendation of the adoption of various rules and procedures, including grievances and harassment policies;
   5. And any other committee the general membership feels it is necessary to establish.

This is the road forward that we recommend. Form your organizations. Study. Develop. Unite.

Onward, to revolution!