Estimated reading time: 17 minutes
We say that we must come to know the difference between mobilization and organization because the enemy will use mobilization to demobilize us. Mobilization is very easy. Very, very easy. Since we are a people who are instinctively ready to respond against acts of injustice, any time there’s one little act of injustice, we can blow it up and we will find people who will come and make some mass demonstration around it. […] And this is what mobilization does, it mobilizes people around issues. Those of us who are revolutionary are not concerned with issues, we are concerned with the system. The difference must be properly understood. […] Mobilization usually leads to reform action, not to revolutionary action. […] We must transform mobilization to organization. We say the enemy will try to use mobilization to demobilize us. Many brothers and sisters who’ve been to the million and more march will say to you, ‘I was there.’ Well, what are you doing today my sister?
— Kwame Ture
Organizing, Not Merely Mobilizing
We have all heard and seen the mass demonstrations, marches, and walkouts that erupted in the Twin Cities, signaling the start of this year of struggle. We’ve heard the tramp of ten thousand people marching against the occupation, the sounds of mobilization; but beneath it, and lasting beyond, for those who know to listen, is a steadier sound — like whispers, like chants. That of the organizers standing sentry on street corners in the aching cold, coordinating grocery runs, rapid response to raids, and transporting students and workers safely. These bands are built by grassroots organization, and it’s precisely the last lesson our enemies want us to learn.
Five years ago, Minneapolis erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd. For that summer, it seemed every city in the world became an uprising, as Democrats scrambled to take a knee and corporations writhed to retire racist brand mascots and grant better media representation. USU spoke with a Communist on the ground in Minneapolis who has witnessed the sweep of 2020 to the present moment. “During this period, it felt like people were taking power in a way that’d be much bigger,” they told us. “Living in south Minneapolis, a police precinct being lit and set on fire, grocery stores looted and turned into mutual aid sites, 200 buildings going up in flames – that was a lot happening. In that short period of time, it felt more than a moment, but it quickly went away.”
All the energy to abolish the police, or even defund them, was funneled by liberal counterinsurgents into tactics that either wasted the time of great masses of the oppressed, or narrowly appealed to the upper classes of the nationally oppressed through job prospects and investment opportunity.1 The “moment” that was 2020 evaporated into an utter defeat for the oppressed, and a complete victory for the settler-colonial ruling class that ensures daily the death of a countless unnamed Floyds. The only price paid: a handful of temporary concessions this current regime has already pried back with vengeance, and a single sacrificial pig.
As our comrade in Minneapolis said, “As Communists, we were not organized enough to win the masses over when they were ripe to be captured.”
It is the general consensus of principled Communists that this was a watershed moment wasted. Every failure is a lesson, data in the experiment of social revolution; but if no one is keeping track, if no one is recording the results and learning from past efforts, the movement might as well be hurling human lives at the wall to see what sticks and looking away at each impact. But, as it turns out, something has stuck. Something has lodged itself firmly in the communities of Minneapolis, that all resulting efforts to resist occupation have been able to grow from: organizations, persisting from the embers of 2020 to now. It’s our responsibility to learn from them.
In Minneapolis, there was a massive wave of homelessness at the beginning of COVID. Networks of mutual aid popped up because of that. Then the uprising happened, and people started figuring out how to take care of each other. Figuring out food, how to handle work, those networks were built by organizers, and after the mobilized masses disappeared in 2020, these networks remained.
The remarkable pace at which these networks expanded, from the handful of organizations to the intersecting community webs connecting every single city section, neighborhood, and block proves the lessons that Kwame Ture described so perfectly more than half a century ago. It also shows all of us, empire-wide, a roadmap for how to prepare as these “occupations” escalate. Every city on this land is a garrison fort, palisades replaced by cameras, automatic alarms, and barbed wire, so to call any concentration by the federal government an “occupation” is essentially a misnomer. It is merely a reinforcement. It is a concentration of already-existing state repressive powers. But we must not ignore the difference in form. The organizers in Minneapolis have adjusted to the reality of their new opponents.
All law enforcement in this country can and will kill you, we know that. They’re parts of the same arm in this imperialist state. However, what has become clear with these federal agents is that they do not function on the same playing field as a local PD. They do not operate on the same playing field as the National Guard. […] I don’t know if it’s a martyr complex or just talking shit, but I see this tendency from people who don’t live here when they say, “Stop filming and go de-arrest.” Or, “I wouldn’t let this happen.”
I’ll tell you: you would let it happen, or you’ll get killed.
De-arrest is more common in anarchist circles; anarchists here are not calling for de-arrest anymore that I’ve seen, because it’s understood in the city that we don’t stand any chance. You can de-arrest with the local PD. Not with ICE, because there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll kill you and the person they’re trying to kidnap. In the end, you still won’t stop who they’re trying to kidnap.
The organizers in Minneapolis understand fundamentally the dialectic between theory and practice. They have gathered experimental data from their lives, developed practices, tried and applied this theory, analyzed the results, and developed new theory and new practices. They are at the forefront of the fight against the bourgeois government.
The Four Opportunists and the Spontaneous Movement
As the press organ of the All-Empire Worker’s League, we have already taken a stand against the Four Opportunists, those “organizations” that capture revolutionary and radical energy, sweep up developing Communists and the newly class-conscious, and then negate them by combining them with liberals, by denying them access to the levers of power in their own organizations, by teaching them bad theory, and by burning up their energy through endless mobilization with no strategic goals. The Four Opportunists are the CPUSA, the PSL, the FRSO, and the DSA. (See “The 2026 Outlook of the Central Press” and “Liberalism and Fascism With Communist Characteristics” in the Red Clarion).
In Minneapolis, the growth of the spontaneous movement has continued in the face of the Four Opportunists, specifically the FRSO and DSA. USU has had contact with other Communists in Minnesota who tell us that…
De-legitimizing action and organizing is being done by individuals acting on the behalf of FRSO (DSA was also involved on this front). The hegemony held by FRSO makes this possible, as their cadre members are involved in other orgs. There’s another Somali group in Cedar Riverside who call themselves the Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance, but are democrat adjacent and pro assimilation. They were attempting to de-escalate by gathering all the African folks into their homes for that day, telling them to stand down and not confront [Jack] Lang.2 Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance was doing flyering, circulating statements via signal group chats or boosting messages that were calling [an] org 3 outside antagonists with no right to organize in Cedar. They cut off supply lines and disrupted organizing work doing this.
When the fascists came to town, Jack Lang and co., the Coalition Against the Trump Agenda (A group made up of a lot of FRSO front orgs) enacted the strategy of “shadowing” the fascists.
Basically, this amounted to them just following them around and yelling stuff at them. However, things did not play out as FRSO planned. Roughly 1000 folks showed up (the divide between the masses and org affiliated was obvious) to counter around 10 fascists with a banner. The FRSO marshals protected the nazis’ banner from the masses, until they eventually lost control and the banner was destroyed in spite of their efforts. Extreme peace policing.
An additional note to further illustrate the resource strangulation and white chauvinism of FRSO: [a] Somali organization that led the defense action against Jake Lang in Cedar Riverside reached out to the SRA [Socialist Rifle Association] of Minneapolis for a firearms training. They later learned that there is a strong FRSO contingency in SRA. Once SRA realized this Somali organization was the one that held the defense action, SRA informed the organization that they would not move forward since they “created confusion and gave other (FRSO) organizations a hard time.”
From the comrade in Minneapolis:
One thing I can speak to is, right now, not just in Minneapolis, but nation-wide — we’re seeing opportunism. There’s this tailist need to use this term “general strike“ to try and illicit buy-in from people. For these days of action. We saw this last Friday. The labor unions involved, the orgs involved, it was never called a general strike. It was clear we weren’t calling for one. There were outside groups that decided to call it a general strike. […]
When we mislead people into thinking a day of vacation is the same as a general strike, we do an insurmountable amount of damage to education and getting working people to understand the actual risk-reward of going on strike. And dealing blows to capital which is the point of a strike. That is the big criticism I Have right now. The organizations that should and do know better, continue to use words like general strike.
PSL has pursued a similar strategy in Minneapolis: more than any other group, they have misrepresented the effort to organize petty-bourgeois businesses to voluntarily close as a “general strike.” They encouraged people to use paid time off to participate in marches. This is the PSL’s strategy of class struggle — not as the struggle of the lowest elements of the proletariat against the imperialist system, but as the struggle of the petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic layers to achieve limited political aims. This is not revolution. This is counterinsurgency.
The spontaneous development of the people is breaking free of the chains long cast over the struggle for liberation by the Four Opportunists. In every corner of the US Empire, the grip of the opportunists and the tailists is weakening. We must unite the most advanced theory with the most class-conscious elements of the people and we must fight against the settler-socialism of the opportunist groups. What is this settler-socialism? It is the Marxism of capitulation, a form of revisionism that sees reform as the only path forward and puts the question of revolution forever over the horizon. (See “Revolution in Our Lifetime” in the Red Clarion). In FRSO and PSL, this is partially accomplished through the deceptive organizational structure in which access to internal documents and planning is entirely isolated and inaccessible; day to day members of these organizations are encouraged to pay into them and attend marches, but the strategic and tactical level operates at one remove from the general membership. All decisions are made by a secret group of select few — Blanquism, in other words. (See, for instance, “The Cult Building Tendency” in the Red Clarion). Have you seen calls for marches spring up with less than 24 or 48 hours notice? That’s the work of the Four Opportunists. Whether it is their intention or not, the material result is the bleeding off of revolutionary energy into channels that are acceptable to the ruling class. In truth, it is an attempt to find accommodation with the ruling class and demand a different distribution of power within the imperialist system. It is the plea of the imperialist labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie (who overwhelmingly command the Four Opportunists) for more spoils to be allocated to them and for a greater degree of input into the empire’s political system.
For more on the Four Opportunists and our criticisms, see generally “Stagnant Parties Don’t Deserve Your Time” in the Clarion, and…
CPUSA – “A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words,” “Why I Left the CPUSA”
PSL – “Revolution in Our Lifetime”
FRSO – “The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO,” “Forward Out of FRSO”
DSA – “Triumph For the Zionist Left”
We, and the organizers in Minnesota, reject this settler bargain.
The League Principle
We require a country-wide organization to fight both the Four Opportunists and their labor-aristocratic/petty-bourgeois base and the bourgeois state itself. The lessons of Minneapolis are clear: it is possible to bring elements of the imperialist working class into direct and antagonistic contradiction with the state when we move our strategic goals out of the narrow realm of wage increases and into the realm of the national liberation struggle. White anarchists and Communists, petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic elements, have joined the national liberation struggle against ICE. Breaking the law for the first time, acting directly against the state for the first time, opens a new world of revolutionary potential among the labor aristocracy. Show them that it is possible to oppose the state, rather than seek accommodation with it, and we develop the subjective awareness of revolution. Revolutionary potential is created within otherwise reactionary elements of the population.
However, this is only possible with uncompromising proletarian leadership. Without the anchor of a revolutionary, proletarian organization, opportunism is the unavoidable result. Those members of the imperial labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie who will not voluntarily surrender their class-outlook and who will not voluntarily subject themselves to proletarian class-leadership are our objective enemy.
The principle of the League is the intermediary principle between our present stage of development (scattered, ideologically incoherent, with the presence of small pockets of developed Communist organization at the local level) and the militant party-form. Yes, we need a party of the new (new) type, as the All-Empire Worker’s League has put it,
It’s not enough, though, to just state the obvious: that the US in 2025 is not Russia in 1917, it is not China, it is not Viet Nam, it is not a semi-feudal country or a country in the global periphery. The US is the center of world-capitalist reaction, an imperial hegemon that acts as the backstop and system of last defense for capitalism across the entire world. No metropolitan country has ever seen a successful proletarian revolution….
We must create a vanguard organization of the working class that can purge all opportunism and revisionism from its ranks, educate and elevate the working masses, defeat internal and external chauvinism, unite the liberation struggles of the colonies and semi-colonies, and prepare the reserves of the revolutionary proletariat for direct confrontation — for direct class war — with the enemy state, with bourgeois civil society, and with the world-bourgeoisie themselves, who largely reside within the US-Canadian bloc. In order to satisfy these requirements, we must creatively apply the lessons of 1905, of October, of the course of struggle in China, Viet Nam, Ghana, and the whole periphery.
While we work to create this party, we must organize our various local organizations together and take advantage of the benefits this centralization can provide. While a League is not yet a party, it is an organization of organizations. We have discussed the formation of regional leagues in the Clarion in the past (see “Towards a New York City League of Workers and Students” and “Towards a Boston League of Workers and Students”). It is through this process of regional organization that we can build our capacity to resist the state as well as the class forces that tend to drag Communist-oriented projects in the US empire toward opportunism.
Since 2025, the All-Empire Worker’s League has worked to integrate local organizations and propagate, develop, and advance the theory necessary to combat the opportunists and the bourgeois imperialists. In areas with a high concentration of developed local organizations that are actually engaged in class struggle against the state, we urge them to band together to resist opportunism and form centralized organs of class power.
In regions where the struggle has not yet been heightened to the same degree as in Minneapolis, we urge local organizations to prepare for the same degree of struggle. Our sources on the ground warn that unless we prepare in advance, we will be caught off guard. Washington is willing to kill to suppress class-consciousness and solidarity between the imperialist labor aristocracy and the US proletariat. We have to be ready to counter that violence with the main weapon we have: organization!
Footnotes:
- Black, Too and Rasul A. Mowatt. Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. Routledge, New York, NY, 2024. Introduction, xi-xxiii and 138-145. ↩︎
- Jack Lang is a pardoned January 6th rioter and fascist agitator. ↩︎
- “[…] a group of communists who have been organizing in Minneapolis and Saint Paul who are critical of the established Left in the region and are actively attempting to build a viable decolonial Marxist alternative[…]” — From the Communists in Minneapolis. ↩︎
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