Two peaks of Communist organization in the US are typically identified in the historical record: the CPUSA in the first half of the ’30s and the Black Panther Party (along with the New Left in general) in the ’60s and ’70s.² The first peak coincided with the Great Depression. The CPUSA’s success in the Deep South must be credited to the fusion of Communists with the Black national liberation movement, which itself was a line attributed to firstly Black revolutionaries themselves and secondly the Comintern and its intervention in CPUSA supporting the Black Belt Thesis.³ The second peak was in many ways a reaction to the class collaboration and liquidation of CPUSA by Browderism and McCarthyism, and the disorganization of the party by internal revisionist lines and Soviet revisionist “peaceful co-existence” policies, in particular the abandonment of the Black Belt Thesis and the liquidation of the Black national liberation struggle and Southern CPUSA branches. The second peak was characterized by theoretical eclecticism, adventurism, and the failure to consolidate all Communist forces into a unified revolutionary party to wage class war. The material basis for these errors, of course, lie in the original settler-system itself and the later development of a burgeoning labor aristocracy within the US Empire.

Owing to these factors, there hasn’t been a successful Communist revolution in the so-called United States to this day. The CPUSA was routed by its own internal enemies (arguably, stemming from its foundation as a forced merger of two settler-chauvinist groups and the Comintern’s complete failure to deal with the Indigenous land question) and became a reformist social-democratic organ; the New Left, which failed to build the united front against settlerism and therefore did not survive state repression, was shattered into various remnants and cults and erased or recuperated into the “nonviolent Civil Rights Movement” narrative in US history books. Therefore, it is of interest to me when there is history to be relearned that is not the stereotypical “crazy revolutionary age where students committed terrorism” depiction of the New Left.

Contemporaneous with the Black Panther Party for its brief three years, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (1969 to 1971) was consolidated out of spontaneous Black worker’s uprisings after the 1967 Detroit Rebellion and the flowering of Black-led auto unions, student unions, and neighborhood organizations thereafter.⁴ Disagreements on whether to nationalize the revolutionary unions throughout the country or to consolidate and train members in Marxism-Leninism, and longstanding class tensions between workers and intellectuals led to a split, of which one faction merged with the California Communist League, later reforming into the Communist League, the Communist Labor Party, and finally, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America of which both authors of Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers are members of.

The bulk of Motown‘s contents is based on interviews with people who actually lived through the formative events that gave rise to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). What the authors of this book hope for, clearly, is that this book will be more than a historical curio for niche specialists, and that the knowledge of generations past will contribute meaningfully to the present struggle. In this sense the book operates more as a collection of testimonies about the Black revolutionary worker’s movement in mid-1970s Detroit than a critical movement post-mortem. This is a weakness of the book, in so far as it is minimally editorialized (and where there is analysis, points of sharp disagreement arise for me).

It is also important to note that previous works about the LRBW were composed by outside academics whom rank-and-file workers refused to speak to, as is addressed in the first chapter. This book, published through the University of Georgia Press, is based on the testimony of those who actually lived through the events. That it exists at all is both something sad and hopeful; we are merely reading a radical history in place of living through the revolutionary changes that the members of the LRBW hoped for. But we can be glad that this knowledge has not been consigned to the dust bin of history, as much as the bourgeois state would like it to be, and is part of our inheritance as Communists that will arm us for future struggles.

Motown generally moves chronologically. Since all people start off as children, that is where the book starts. It accounts for the origins of LRBW leading members as immigrants or children of immigrants to the Midwest from the Southern US (or in another view, New Afrikan diaspora) and their paths to political activity, whether born into it as the children of the advanced masses or through personal experiences with capitalism and national oppression. These children grew up in a US that won the Second World War and reaped the profits of the imperialist (re-)redivision of the world, that was organizing a globalized White Terror to massacre Communists (and leftists of all stripes), and had already “cleaned up” at home with the domestic innovations of Browderism and McCarthyism.

With the disembowelment of the CPUSA (where it was not already insufficient in addressing the national question in the US Empire) and the disruption of institutional Communist memory, new organizers were left with the task of essentially developing mass organs from scratch in a hostile landscape dominated by state-controlled collaborator unions. Fortunately, the actions of the state itself gave workers the impetus to organize themselves in defense against repression. The Detroit Rebellion of 1967 was touched off by the police raiding a blind pig (unlicensed bar), one of the many that served as a node of social reproduction for factory workers. The heavy-handed state repression that came down, principally on Black workers, kicked off their self-organization in Revolutionary Union Movements (RUM) the following year, principally through the use of the wildcat strike, against both the auto corporations and the settler UAW. These RUMs were consolidated into the LRBW.

What I find useful about this section of the book is the descriptions of practical mass activities and tactics that organizers took on to mobilize not only the sections of Black workers within the factories themselves, but also to mobilize the households of striking workers. In the context of the struggle of Black workers against white-chauvinist and class-collaborationist unions, the wildcat strike was their primary weapon, as the disproportionate placement of Black workers in the most difficult, unsafe, and tedious jobs gave them control over specific choke points in the supply chains of major automobile manufacturers. Wildcat strikes were publicized and made into mass actions by the use of printed materials (especially the newspaper format, directly inspired by Lenin) circulated by high schoolers and use of existing cultural forms like music and poetry. The mass movement also had the services of radical lawyers on hand to defend workers from legal repression, though these intellectuals would later contribute to the split of the LRBW.

Specific material conditions (such as the proximity of bars to factories as an after-work socialization nexus) facilitated the mass movement, but in particular the effectiveness of the wildcat strikes and the RUMs themselves were based on the density of industry in the city. This tactic lost effectiveness as bourgeois counter-measures like offshoring and automation removed Black workers’ jobs and leverage. The wildcat strike cannot be repeated uncritically today (a point that is repeated again and again in this book), but must be related to organizational strategy under specific conditions at particular historical moments. Still, it is important to understand that previous generations of organizers did not fall into a stereotyped and mechanistic class-only or workplace-only style, but instead brought in all aspects of society possible to exert targeted pressure on specific contradictions.

Exemplary of creative organizing is how the RUMs brought in students and other non-workers into the movement, effectively supporting the workplace struggles by organizing entire neighborhoods for propaganda and logistics and to truly extend the RUMs into a mass movement. The book dedicates an entire chapter to the involvement of high school students (through the Black Student United Front) in the League and to the role of women in the day-to-day operations of the mass movement and especially in running Black Star Publishing. The LRBW conducted outreach to wives of striking workers to explain why their husbands were not working; the wives mobilized to support their husbands and organized themselves to take on many logistical tasks to support strikers (Scott and Katz-Fishman 2025, 82). The self-criticism on the treatment of women (especially the lack of women in the leadership) in the LRBW also is worth highlighting, though it appears that misogynistic men had not been quite as successfully weaponized by the state in the same manner that it was against groups like the Black Panther Party. In terms of obvious pitfalls that will destroy Communist organizations (or at least demonstrate their lack of internal democracy and inability to rectify themselves), the improper handling of patriarchal chauvinism and gender oppression shares the top spot with settler chauvinism.

On the topic of the split that led to the demise of the LRBW, the authors remain perhaps far more restrained than should be warranted (if I had to guess, to have those on the other side of the split consent to be included in the book at all). Though there are doubtless many sides to the narrative, it is commonly agreed on that there were two major factions of the split. The first faction, consisting principally of intellectuals, wanted to scale up the League and export its model to other cities in the USA, uniting revolutionary unions of Black workers nationwide in the Black Workers Congress (BWC). The second faction, consisting principally of workers themselves, wanted to develop and educate themselves in Marxism rather than nationalize the League. Importantly, the LRBW won workplace concessions around desegregation in the workplace and unions but did not fundamentally affect the exploitative class relations that workers experienced daily (Scott and Katz-Fishman 2025, 109).

These irreconcilable views led to the BWC faction resigning from the executive board and the education faction having to look afar for teachers themselves. They eventually found it in Nelson Peery of the California Communist League (CCL), and the remainder of LRBW was brought in to merge with the CCL, which (with many factions and organizations dropping in and out) eventually transformed into the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA).

The authors of this book remain cordial when discussing the other side of the split. Since I don’t need to, I will state that in my opinion, the intellectual elements who walked off the board were an opportunist faction who wished only to replicate and spread the LRBW model to other cities so that they could benefit from the larger movement personally as well as politically, with little attention to the burden this placed on workers in the organization, who themselves opposed it because they were already having difficulties maintaining the pace of organization in Detroit alone. Peery himself remarked on the fact that the LRBW had a lot of resources at its disposal thanks to its independent, self-funding Black Star Publishing press and the large amount of voluntary labor it was able to draw from Detroit’s Black working-class community. These were crucial resources to move the headquarters of the fused organization from California to Chicago.

Opportunism does not necessarily blatantly look like “selling out” because opportunist goals can align with revolutionary ones, even if the basic motive is unprincipled self-gain. Had the BWC plan been unanimously agreed upon by the Executive Board, the result of pursuing pure quantitative increases at the cost of educating organizers and workers to a higher level of theoretical understanding would have been the growth of a theoretically underdeveloped mass movement, unable to mount a challenge against its leadership clique and thereby reduced to following the clique’s whims instead of being able to sum up and readjust revolutionary strategy in a rational manner. The example of PSL and its literally idealist Socialist Consciousness Thesis, and the recent wave of resignations by principled Communists from that party is instructive for what consequences arise from pursuing quantity over quality, though the errors of the Mensheviks and their disdain for qualitative party-building predate the PSL. These were errors that should have been obvious to the intellectual faction and it is likely that intellectual petit-bourgeois prejudice against workers also played a role in fomenting the split.⁵

Related to this lack of editorializing, perhaps in reaction to the rampant sectarian nationalism (one might be reminded of the Jewish Labor Bund’s insistence on the exclusive right to organize Jewish workers, which was correctly repudiated by the RSDLP and other internationalist Social-Democratic parties at the time) in New Left, oppressed-national, and Communist organizations of the ’60s and ’70s, the analysis of the Multi-National Working Class is the one which shapes the entire book.⁶ In short, the thesis that the revolutionary class in the US Empire must be the “multi-national working class” ignores the stark fact that settler workers, as a class, subjugate colonized workers whenever they are united in class organs and that white supremacy is not a one-sided invention of the settler bourgeois class, but rather, a two-sided gentlemen’s agreement between the settler masses and the settler rulers. The formation of the new revolutionary vanguard party in the US Empire will not be guaranteed unless this reality is understood for what it is and all backdoors for white supremacy to sneak in through are hermetically sealed shut.

Nonetheless, the impact of practical experience in the LBRW integrated with Marxist education (as described in the last chapters of Motown) shows clearly in the lifelong dedication of individuals to the revolution (whether they are organized in the mass movement or in the LRNA and other organizations). At the same time, the failures of all revolutionaries up to the present day demonstrates how deeply embedded settler consciousness is even in those who truly do desire revolution. But, consciousness is a subjective factor that can be changed. Today, where the US Communist movement barely qualifies as a movement and continues to harbor red liberals and chauvinists of all stripes, and the advanced masses are drawn to ineffectual anarchism and adventurism because no current Communist organization has the ability to actually lead them to revolutionary action, reconstituting the party by principled, disciplined struggle and dialogue is the most urgent task to be taken by serious Communists.

I write this review as part of this disciplined struggle; there is no time to waste. As is emphasized in the final chapter of Motown, the working and oppressed masses are already on the move: the Communists must lead the way and not drag at the tail of the mass movement. With the climate apocalypse on the horizon, it is no longer a choice between socialism or barbarism; it is a choice between socialism or extinction.

Despite its editorial mutedness and disagreeable analysis of present day conditions, Motown is a book that should be read especially by those who are already familiar with the New Left and those seeking precedents for neighborhood and workplace organizing in oppressed-nationality communities. To pull a quote from Motown itself:

Survival of humanity and the earth requires all us to take up this revolutionary work. The revolutionary horizon is within our grasp. Make it happen!

1. The first chapter of Motown makes this exact same point about the academy and bourgeois media in general. ︎
2. The following summary of US Communist history relies on “A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words” by G. Gracchus and Settlers by J. Sakai. ︎
3. The book Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism by Frank Chapman covers the history of the intersection of Black nationalism with Communism; it specifically credits the Comintern’s outside intervention as a kind of “adult in the room” into intra-CPUSA debates to the correct line taken up by CPUSA during this time as regards the Black nation in the United States. Chapman was personally involved in politically lynching a member of Chicago FRSO who questioned the mythology of Black internationalism in 1935 around the Ethiopian-Italian war and advocated for the support of national liberation struggles within Ethiopia. J. Sakai also lauded 1935 as an example of Black internationalism in Settlers. ︎
4. There is a brief section that describes the LRBW forming their own Panther chapter to avoid conflict with them. This speaks to a lack of political stringency on the part of the Panthers and to the issues with a purely numerical view of organizing. Unfortunately the book does not opine so much about the different versions of Black nationalism promoted by the Panthers and other groups such as Nation of Islam. This was a missed opportunity in my view. ︎
5. If I had to speculate from the account of their behavior (specifically their disapproval about workers educating themselves while proclaiming Marxism to be the guiding ideology of LRBW), it appears that the intellectual faction drew upon an opportunistic reading of Kautsky’s political consciousness thesis as expounded on in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. In essence, Kautsky’s thesis states that no class struggle in of itself is revolutionary; workers on their own can only develop trade-union consciousness and organize towards reformism. Socialist, revolutionary, political consciousness must come from the outside. This political consciousness originates from petit-bourgeois revolutionary intellectuals who fuse with the worker’s movement, providing political consciousness to the advanced ranks of the workers, realizing the proletariat as a conscious class-for-itself, and orient it towards the goal of social revolution. Shifting the meaning of words, one could argue that it is not the place of workers to be educated but that workers need to be under the firm and enlightened hand of a small elite of revolutionary intellectuals. ︎
6. Informing the bulk of political-economic analysis and thus strategic orientation is the thesis that automation, robotics, and AI/LLMs are developing a “new mode of production,” which is overstated in my view. I would point to the chief driver of the weakness of the Communist movement in the US and extending existing weaknesses caused by settlerism from the ’80s to present day, being the increased exploitation of the Global South (through industrial offshoring) resulting in the extension of the labor aristocracy and its settler unions, and the atomization of remaining proletarian workplaces through techniques such as digital securitization, external contracting, gig work, and other technological and organizational innovations on part of the imperial settler-bourgeois. However, even with all of their tricks, the bourgeois cannot outrun the law of the falling rate of profit and the fact that the machinery of society still remains in the hands of the colonized working class worldwide. ︎

Peoria is an average, mid-sized city in central Illinois that boasts the largest park district in the state.¹ Any resident of the city will tell you that these parks are used extensively for public events, by local clubs, associations, and anybody who wants to hike and/or bike through nature; all carefully maintained by an army of 144 full-time staff and around 1,400 part-time employees during the summer.² Considering the benefit these lands bring to the public, it is no surprise that there would be public outcry when a case to facilitate the O’Brien Steel company’s purchase of part of Detweiller Playground was rushed through courts last November.³

O’Brien Jr., a trustee for the nonprofit in charge of (supposedly) maintaining the park property, is also the executive vice president of O’Brien Steel company.⁴ A man so principled in duty that he is selling the land to himself. It is no wonder, then, that such secrecy clouded the court case last year; the media exposure of these backdoor deals has put the company in a bind and raised citizen environmentalist opposition to the sale.

The citizen opposition to the deal, consisting of concerned local residents and activists, gets to the point: this was a shady deal done out of sight of the news media and the public. The citizen opposition makes the argument that this land is useful and good for the public, and this is true. Even on an overcast day with cool temperatures, anyone can sit at the picnic tables and observe ordinary families use the playground, take the trail, wander around the fields, or go down to the docks. Not only do humans derive enjoyment from the playground and marina, but other animals live there and enjoy the park too. The citizen opposition is correct in every sense of the word to oppose this deal.

The mysterious confluence of private for-profit and nonprofit interests we see is not exceptional to Peoria, or even to Illinois. This is how, on a fundamental level, capitalism works. And it functions excellently. It is well known that members of Congress trade in stocks in a lively manner, that hankering Wall Street investors and hedge fund managers watch Trump trade stocks to inform their own decisions, that elected politicians often end up on corporate boards after their term is up, that insiders and fraudsters of all types make bank on cryptocurrency and Polymarket gambling rings, and there are too many examples of backdoor deals that go on daily and hourly to list here.

Apologists for the free market insist that these are exceptions and surface blemishes on the ideal of capitalism. But to the contrary, we insist the only version of capitalism that exists is the one that is put into practice. People and things are not free-floating ideas in the consciousness of individuals; people and things are engaged in real situations and real relations. They must be judged from their practical results. It is only by starting from analyzing objective reality that we can discover how something works.

We must investigate: What are the practical results of capitalist society on this land? What are its peculiar characteristics?

The Settler Colony

In the so-called United States, capitalism is intertwined with settler colonialism. Capitalist development in Europe, kickstarted by the looting of overseas colonies and human trafficking, dispossessed massive amounts of peasants of their land and diminished prospects for the offspring of the artisan and merchant middle classes. Those who could not live off of the land or off their small crafts or off of trading had to go begging for jobs in workshops that expanded into factories. They made less than the money they needed to live, and when they did live, they lived in cramped, squalid conditions.

The conditions of proletarian poverty drove waves of land-hungry settlers to the “New World.” That meant rampant land speculation, the “clearing” and subjugation of the Indigenous peoples already inhabiting the land, and their reduction of numbers by genocide and the trafficking of enslaved (primarily, West African) labor to replace enslaved Indigenous labor. In North America, these processes resulted in the creation of the settler nation, glued together by the invention of “whiteness” and common experience in colonial conquest. The settler-colonial system ensures that the settler nation lives off of the exploitation of the Black nation (and other national minorities) and the remaining Indigenous nations which, starting from the New Deal onwards, have been given paper governments which primarily facilitate neocolonial resource extraction. Neocolonialism means that, despite paper promises for Indigenous sovereignty in the form of federally recognized tribal status and governments, the US government and the settler-corporations still dominate the lives of Indigenous people, politically, economically, and environmentally.

Running a settler colony is not easy: when people are oppressed so extensively, they will resist with whatever means are at hand. Within the US Empire’s borders, domestic discontent by propertyless settlers and, more crucially, by the colonized working class, had to be pacified; imperial loot was redistributed to the former and repression was enacted upon the latter. Internal conflicts of settler colonialism are, in essence, exported via imperialism, which means rape and genocide across the whole world. Imperialism lowers the cost of labor and raw materials in the Global South by force; this stolen wealth bolsters the working class wages of the US Empire. The imperialist distribution of these kickbacks itself is stratified on class and national lines predefined by settler colonialism.⁵ This is, fundamentally, how our society functions on a day-to-day basis. It is no question that settler colonialism and imperialism inform every granular detail of politics within the USA.⁶

The foundation of our entire government and our entire idea of what constitutes “private” or “public” property rests on the conquest of preexisting Indigenous nations, the enslavement of the Black nation, and the exploitation/liquidation of oppressed national minorities (like the Chinese workers who died building California’s railroads, or the Latine laborers who work in the fields and factories). The foundation of settler society is the betrayal of every single promise made to peoples deemed non-human or “uncivilized.” These are facts that will not change with a simple land acknowledgement, nor they are privileges that will go away with piecemeal reforms to make settler society “more inclusive.”⁷

That is to say, no matter how correct the citizen opposition is in its stance against the subversion of public interests, no matter how militant it is in the fight to preserve a public good that is used by the working and oppressed masses regardless of nationality, the citizen opposition is also limited by its own views and existence as a progressive faction of settler society itself. When it is said that this deal undermines democracy and this deal takes away a public good, we must ask, whose democracy is it? Who makes up the public?

The answer is simply the democracy of the masses of settlers and the settler public (plus, the national minorities graciously granted use of public facilities). Our democracy is a paper democracy where in theory everyone is equal before the law and in practice it is economic power which drives political power.⁸ Our paper democracy allows us “protest” and “freedom of speech” for the stolen “public.”⁹

What is the specific history of Detweiller Playground, the Detweiller lands themselves, and how does it relate to the history of the settler colony?

Thomas Detweiller’s Gracious Gift 

Here is the story of how the Detweiller lands got into the hands of the public:

Let’s start with Captain Henry Detweiller, […] He was born in Larraine, France in 1825 and as a teenager found himself living here in Peoria, Illinois in 1837. He had a few jobs as a teen, but his heart and soul belonged to the Illinois River. He finally landed a job on one of the steamboats he loved so much and spent his life working on them, from deckhand to pilot to owner, becoming a local hero during the Civil War. In 1874 he finally retired from the river and went into the ice business here in Peoria, Illinois. […] Henry amassed a sizeable fortune as well as a lot of valuable land. His son and two daughters inherited all of the Captain’s assets, and set out to donate most of it to charities and the City of Peoria.

Thomas Hunter Detweiller took over his father’s business, and in consultation with his two sisters donated Detweiller Park to the Peoria Park District on July 23, 1927. The total land grant was 745 acres, and today the park board lists Detweiller Park as 601 acres. The gift later included some valuable riverside property where the old ice business once stood and an area set aside for a playground for children. Today there is a Marina within that land, and historians tell us that that was not the intended use of the Detweiller property.

Another source tells us:

The notable Illinois Riverboat Captain Henry Detweiller (d1907) had a deep love for the river, navigating riverboats up and down the Illinois. Upon retiring from navigating the river, he opened an ice business at the foot of Caroline St. The Captain was a successful businessman and accumulated wealth he left for his children. After his death, his son Thomas noticed “industry” was quickly taking over the Peoria riverfront and there was no place for the community to recreate and play along the river. As a legacy from the Detweiller family, Thomas set aside a piece of property that would belong to “the people” and be used for “public recreation and playground purposes”, in perpetuity.

Upon Thomas’ death in 1947, he gifted the land, the location of the Detweiller’s former ice works business, to the ‘People of Peoria’ through a trust—the “Detweiller Playground” (& Marina). A board of trustees and a trust fund was established in 1948 for care and maintenance of the land.

A classic American story! Henry, a young man from France, immigrates to the New World for a better life and becomes part of the working class of America. By hard work and ingenuity in running his small business he acquires land and a fortune to pass down to his son, who chooses to donate it to the public so that everyone can enjoy it.

Who were the workers who ran his ice business? From where did he acquire his land? What of the original inhabitants of the land, the civilizations that existed prior to Thomas Detweiller’s “gift”?

After the Taíno people encountered the bloodthirsty rapist Christopher Columbus in 1492, the European empires began to send colonists, soldiers, and traders who wished to make a fortune in the Americas. The nations that lived in what would become Illinois were related by the common Algonquian language family, including the Peoria People, whom the city is named for. The French gave these nations the name of the Illinois Confederation. Through germ warfare, trade, trickery, intermarriage, and divide-and-conquer tactics, the French colonizers staked out a vast claim on what would become the American Midwest and the interior of the American South. The purpose of this conquest was to secure a market for manufactured French goods in exchange for colonial raw materials, to boost nascent capitalist accumulation in Europe. This was no benign “natural market” but the seedling of imperialist domination.

This seedling would blossom fully into rampant settler colonialism with the inter-imperialist “French and Indian War,” after which the British Empire was “given” the French-claimed land in 1763 to expand their settler colonies. Decades before the land claims were transferred on paper, the nations of the Illinois Confederation already faced war and pressure from eastern nations, including the Iroquois Confederacy, who were themselves displaced by settlers. Disease and warfare from European settlers further slaughtered whole sections of the nations of the Illinois Confederacy. Although British defeats during the Seven Years’ War and the costs of garrisoning the colonies in general led to the empire restraining colonization and reserving the lands west of the Appalachian mountains for the Indigenous peoples, settlers continued to flaunt imperial law through murders and land-grabs no matter what their distant monarch said.

Two decades later, the inter-imperialist war of 1776, motivated in part by the class pressures of unlanded (and working class!) settlers seeking to breach the treaties set up by the British, would result in the independence of the US Empire. Unrestrained liberty to colonize what settlers viewed as “their” land, having already preemptively settled it in many cases with the accompanying violent means. The combination of unfettered colonization and knock-on effects from other nations facing settler aggression led to genocide waged on the Kickapoo People and other nations in Illinois, land concessions and displacement in 1819, culminating in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The act enforced the eviction of Indigenous peoples remaining in the area, resulting in mass deportations and forced marches to reservations in Oklahoma, essentially clearing out “living space” for white settlers.

Not every single Indigenous person left. Those who were able to stay on their land often were digested into settler society as marginalized national and cultural minorities (whether recognized by the federal government or not in the form of tribal status or NGOs), benefiting later from reformist measures and carve-outs won by radical Indigenous movements. However, the bulk of their nations were removed due to the genocide, leaving the remainder a tiny minority in the territory west of the Mississippi River.

Indigenous resistance to colonialism existed at every juncture of this history in the form of guerilla warfare, espionage, and diplomacy. The pan-Indigenous alliance formed by Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa across so-called Indiana and Illinois drew in nations from north and south to militarily resist the US Empire from 1812 to 1813. The sum effect of Indigenous resistance delayed the bulk of dispossession until 1830. Continued guerilla warfare prevented settler control over swaths of territory for several more decades. The Seminole Nation, formed from the remnants of several Indigenous nations and escaped African slaves, was eventually fractured and dispossessed, but a small group in the Everglades was able to fight the US Empire until 1858.

Taking this history into account, we find that Henry Detweiller entered the scene just in time to benefit from decades of targeted ethnic cleansing and freshly opened-up lands ripe for settling and capitalist exploitation. He would have been part of the economy that serviced the masses of settler-soldiers and their garrison-towns up and down the Illinois river. His workers would have been fresh immigrants escaping European conditions, likely from Ireland or Germany, or “native-born” settlers seeking upwards mobility through land and capital ownership.

Was the land truly gifted for everyone? No, it was not, we can say. No matter how much the story is repeated over and over again, with the enshrining of yet another white man’s name on Indigenous land, the truth still lies at the bottom of the pile of settler mythology.

Why does this historical blindspot exist?

Environmentalist and conservationist organizations have historically gone hand-in-hand with unfettered colonialism and imperialism.¹⁰ How else would you secure the lands you must “preserve” other than by military conquest and garrisons? How can you imagine preserving land “unused” by humans in any other way than denying Indigenous inhabitation and subsistence on that land? Moreover, despite the promises of old conservationism to preserve natural resources for “future generations,” the liquidation of the natural world, piece by piece, is inevitable, as long as capitalism exists. As long as our entire society is ordered around the pursuit of profit, public parks and public lands will not exist in perpetuity but as banked resources to cash in when the going gets tough. The future generations are nothing compared to the present needs of unlimited expansion, which is the organizing logic of cancerous masses.

There is the root of the injustice and inequity we see before our eyes. It was not gifted to “everyone.” It was in fact taken away from its previous inhabitants, then declared to be special and set apart for the settler public to enjoy, neglected by rapacious capitalists through the instrument of the nonprofit board, and now, it is in danger of liquidation and conversion into capital, merely storage space, for the profit of a private company. From being a living thing, home to many other living things, it will be transformed into a dead space to pile on dead metal to furnish the conversion of more living things into dead things.

The Revolution Against Ecocide

Since the establishment of the first colony of the thirteen colonies that would eventually form the US Empire, the basic industries of the United States have been, in aggregate, an engine of Indigenous dispossession, Black slavery, and ecocide, the murder of the environment and the eradication of the ecosystems that make up this continent. What may happen to Detweiller Playground is yet another murder in a long spree of murders taking place all over the country, spanning more than two and a half centuries.

The citizen opposition to ecocide may succeed against capital. They may earn a stay of execution with their arguments even as the agreement hangs in limbo.¹¹ Much like the struggle against the imposition of data center construction onto towns, which are the most egregious example of how even settler democracy does not give capital any pause, they might win.¹² However, without opening the question of land and our human relationship to it as part of nature itself, without considering the aspects of class and nation, the only path of opposition to ecocide is incremental legalism, ineffectual protest, or occasionally, individual adventurism. The opposition, with their tools arising from settler-democratic norms and practices, may never need to reach for anything else for this battle. Peaceful protest and petition to the local settler government may be enough.

But capital and the profit incentive insists on growth for its own sake, like a cancerous mass, and the immune system cannot hold it back forever. The fundamental metabolic rift of capitalism is that the alienation from the land we live on, at the behest of increasing accumulation, has irreversibly disrupted ecological cycles and processes. The metabolic rift in the form of climate change manifests most severely: the earth is on track to surpass the 1.5°C average global warming benchmark as this year’s El Niño may herald even more warming in 2027 and bring more natural disasters. The imperialist genocide of the Palestinian people, fully supported, aided, and abetted by the US Empire, is an ecocide that is directly responsible for the acceleration towards climate disaster.

More than crude surgery, we need the most sophisticated forms of radiotherapy and chemotherapy to save the patient, our planet.

Our prescription is revolution. Revolution means the dismantling of the settler-bourgeois government and its privileges, the return of “public” lands and “private” property not to settler “public” ownership but to Indigenous stewardship and care. Revolution means that those who bleed and sweat every day in service to maintaining the vital functions of human society will have control over it. In short, revolution is the end of all forms of exploitation, of not only human but non-human living things, and the restoration of a relationship to the land which protects and nurtures the land, and each other as human beings. Revolution means dissembling the US Empire and the imperialist army, to give Palestine back to the Palestinians, to relinquish control over Indigenous land and make reparations to the oppressed nations of the world. Then, and only then, may the healing start at last.

“But the Indigenous people who live in Peoria are a tiny minority of the population and highly integrated into settler society,” one might say. “There is no war here to fight against settler colonialism, when the frontline is in Black Hills and Pe’ Sla is seven hundred miles away.¹³ How can we fight against settler colonialism in a place where it has already won?”

This is a small perspective. Peoria, like every other capitalist society, is sustained by exploited labor. The stratification of labor on national lines (Black and Latine workers, especially immigrants, face the sharpest class-national oppression) creates the conditions for the “middle class” indeed, settler society itself, to carry on as normal, while the labor of the petit-bourgeois and labor aristocratic middle classes furnishes imperialism at home and afar.¹⁴ The “middle classes” find their interests pulled both above in line with the capitalists and below in line with the lower working class; many of them become radicals from a combination of practical experience and Communist education.

Even settler workers, as a class actively bribed by both imperialism and settler colonialism, can find reasons to be dissatisfied with their current way of life. Pay attention to the numerous complaints of unsafe working conditions, abusive management practices, and racial abuse at O’Brien Steel itself! Do these workers support the expansion of their dangerous and exploitative workplace and more profits for their bosses, or are these workers the key element in stopping the deal, who can be drawn by the issues of workplace safety and disrespect from management and united with the citizen opposition to the land sale? It is Black and Latine workers here, who are forced to take the worst, most dangerous, yet the most important and critical jobs, who have the most leverage.

The settler nation, already full of fractures, must be further divided on class and gender lines.¹⁵ The settlers honest enough to see through the facade of settler society and to determine that their true interests lie in defection must be brought into the fold (by the truth and not by deceit!) of revolutionaries, and further developed into comrades and accomplices to the colonized peoples of the world. What we require to remake discontented settlers into freedom fighters is the political discipline that can only come from the Communist party with its roots in the class-national liberation struggles of the colonized working class, not a “Communist party” that represents the interests of colonizers.

If the US Empire’s early political economy was an engine fueled by Indigenous liquidation and Black exploitation, it quickly overflowed its borders to parasitize the rest of the world the moment its external fetters were loosened by the inter-imperialist war of 1776. Today the engine is one that profits handsomely from not only its internal colonies, but from international death and waste, and sustains its bourgeois class and its labor aristocratic working class on the dual pillars of the oppressed nations within the US Empire itself and the Third World peoples that global imperialism enchains. The very same machinery that drops bombs in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, and other “far” places is the one that is paving over the land within US borders.

To stop the engine, by any means necessary, is the highest political imperative of anyone who has continued interest in living on a habitable earth.

To the settler in opposition: motivated by your love of nature, your genuine commitment to democracy and the common good, however misled by settler society, we say that it is not too late. Commit yourself to landback, to Indigenous liberation, to decolonization and communism. Link your arms with the decolonialists and Communists and fight for their liberation. Betray your class and your nation and in doing so you will merely liberate yourself and the entire world.

1. Peoria is so average that there was even a phrase coined: “Will it play in Peoria?” This refers to performing arts shows previewed in Peoria. As of 2024, the park district has 29 parks and 66 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents. ︎
2. As of March 2026. ︎
3. The Detweiller Playground Board was actually working on selling off part of the land as far back as April 2025, but the plan was approved by the Illinois Attorney General in November 2025. O’Brien is listed on the board as of 2024 tax filings. Of note is the amount of assets that the board owns and the yearly expenditures. If the park is dilapidated and unsuitable for use, why is it not being maintained with these funds? The playbook is clear: take a “public” good, neglect and degrade it, then use its poor condition to justify its liquidation! This is the same tactic that conservatives call “Starving the beast” whereby reducing expenditures on social services by cutting taxes, those services perform more poorly, thus justifying more cuts. ︎
4. As of January 2025. ︎
5. As according to statistics collected by the US government itself, Indigenous people consistently report nearly twice as much unemployment as do non-Indigenous people. This statistic worsens with Indigenous people who live on reservations, which are neglected by the US government when not seized in pursuit of resource extraction or to develop industries for the benefit of settlers and the Indigenous collaborationist bourgeois. Indigenous reservations and Black neighborhoods are also disproportionately food deserts. The key distinction between oppressed nationalities within the imperialist countries and oppressed nationalities outside of them is that the former can enlist in the imperial military and thereby benefit from imperialist rape. That ex-military members from oppressed nations in the USA are easily discarded once their usefulness runs out demonstrates that no amount of individual collaboration with the imperial armed forces is enough to save anyone. ︎
6. See J. Sakai’s Settlers for a more or less comprehensive history of settler society. ︎
7. The following section of Indigenous history draws upon this article as well as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. ︎
8. The Civil Rights movement, itself torn with internal factions but united on the question of Black integration into settler society, existed on the right of national liberation movements (exemplified by the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party) in the heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. The organizing of this era won concessions from settler society against legal segregation and public lynch terror. Nonetheless, economic and spacial segregation still exists deeply in Peoria, lynching remains a mainstay of police terror all over the country, and persists in the private sphere. ︎
9. Working people have little free time to engage in electoral politics and oppressed nationalities are actively prevented from exercising even paper rights. The recent gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which used to (somewhat) prevent racial gerrymandering, will accelerate the latter trend even more. We are permitted to have “protests” in the form of liberal parades and rallies as managed by 50501 and the liberal-resistance complex. Protests that cause disruption or are escalated by the police are called riots instigated by “domestic terrorists.” Freedom of speech, especially of the kind proscribed by NSPM-7, is also on a contracting trend. ︎
10. Theodore Roosevelt, arch-imperialist and general showboater, was also a great outdoorsman and committed conservationist. ︎
11. As of April 25th, 2026, the issue would be revisited in mid-May, but this did not happen. ︎
12. The rush to build data centers to resource more and more energy-intensive large-language models goes hand in hand with the monopolization of computing power and the apocalyptic Silicon Valley “General AI” ideological project. Of course, the boom in construction jobs satisfies the collaborator unions who represent the labor aristocracy and their hanger-ons. Incidentally, this represents the true face of trade-unionist consciousness held by these workers as they are unable to see past the short-term gains for their workplaces for the long-term negative effects of the increased energy and water usage of data centers and the monopolization of computing capacity under the control of a few corporations. Labor aristocracy is obviously associated with settlerism but is not a complete correlation— many degree holders imported from outside the USA become part of the labor aristocracy regardless if they are white or not. ︎
13. As of May 4th, 2026, Indigenous youth successfully defended the Lakota sacred site Pe’ Sla from a mining company in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. ︎
14. “Middle class” refers to the petit-bourgeois and the labor aristocracy, which in the context of the USA have porous boundaries. The petit-bourgeois are people who derive their income from owning the means of production and employing workers and usually also work themselves because of the smallness of their business. The labor aristocracy refers to the upper layer of well-paid workers who have good benefits and lead reformist trade unions and other groups which prevent the development of revolutionary working-class organizations as well as a “peripheral” labor aristocracy, a kind of unorganized reactionary flotsam whose inflated real wages and access to credit exceed the costs of living (healthcare, housing, transit, retirement, etc.) thus making their immediate interests the preservation of imperialism. ︎
15. Simple exposure of settler workers to colonized workers in their workplace results in the subjugation of the interests of nationally oppressed workers to settler workers. Rather, there must be revolutionary, decolonial, conscious unions that aim to construct the Communist party as well as other organs which unite students, disabled people, and the unemployed population together. Gender oppression refers to both the oppression of women and to the oppression of LGBTQ+ people in general. The current exterminationist stances taken by the federal government against trans people means that, if organized properly, trans settlers will become an important asset in the fight for decolonization and for communism. ︎

I love Iosif Stalin. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to write about Iosif Stalin. Not even Stalin himself knew how to write about Stalin, though he knew that Stalin the Figure was not Stalin the Person and behaved accordingly. In terms of the person, he left no diary or journal for his innermost thoughts, his personal letters were carefully guarded, and he was generally not one to doubt himself or write about doubting himself. Into this hole has flooded a deluge of words about Stalin’s personality and psychological makeup, like the nonsense spouted first prominently by Trotsky and Khruschev, and then remixed in a thousand variations by the liberal academic publishing complex. Needless to say, there are abundant biographies about Stalin, and few of them are serious and even fewer are good.

Most of the English-language biographies are on the level of Sebag-Montefiore’s orientalist Young Adult historical adventure fiction.¹ In terms of serious study, Stalin’s tenure in the USSR has gotten a better shake than the man himself, with the rise of the revisionist school of Sovietology in radical liberal academia (surprisingly, one man did not have absolute power over an entire society!).² And even from the Communist side, historical biographies of Stalin published during his rule took care to buff out his sharp points and polish his face smooth — as much as Stalin himself did not enjoy it, he resigned himself to becoming an idol for his people.³ Post-de-Stalinization defenders like Domenico Losurdo and Ludo Martens are much more concerned with Stalin and the USSR more broadly, than they are with the man himself, as a person.

Who the hell was Stalin? No one knows, I’m afraid. But there might be a good guess.

In 1987, Ronald Grigor Suny set out to write another Stalin biography to add to the pile of Stalin biographies in the world. It took him until 2020 to finish the project, as the Soviet Union collapsed in the interim. But besides the unpleasant fact of the capitalist holocaust, this cracked the former government’s archives open to Western scrutiny. Dr. Suny had a field day, digging through pretty much all documentary materials available on Stalin’s pre-revolution life, and produced a 896-page tome of Stalin’s life before the October Revolution. Good for him! He was lauded and attacked for his book, by the peanut gallery of respectable socialists and rabid anti-Communist dogs.⁴

Move over, Stephen Kotkin. Suny’s on the scene!

Suny’s book, based on his excessive archival trawling, makes the argument that the young Stalin can be divided into three phases of his life: Soso, the faithful seminarian, is not Koba, the unseasoned rebel, is not Stalin, the Marxist professional revolutionary. Suny, unlike pretty much every other Stalin biographer, actually has a wide breadth and depth of knowledge of the revolutionary Caucasus, which he exercises to great effect, filling pages on the nuances of Georgian Social Democracy and the various environments that Soso, then Koba, then finally Stalin moved through. He lays out in fine-grained detail how those environments shaped Stalin’s development, his personality, his preferences, and ultimately the man who would be the Stalin we all know and love (or hate) and how Stalin in turn impacted Georgian and Russian Social Democracy as an activist-organizer-revolutionary. How dialectical!

I imagine the book will be tedious for the reader who just wants to know what hijinks our buddy Koba is getting up to next. As an avid hoarder of facts, I really enjoyed those tangents on politics and culture. As distant as the Tsarist-Russian revolutionary milieu seems to us today, filtered through time and historical mythology, it is helpful to remember that these were ultimately just people trying to figure out how to win against their oppressors and then build the first long-lasting socialist experiment in human history. In other words, they had their own version of inane discourse and difficult personalities. The young Koba, too overconfident, kind of an asshole and schemer, is either relatable because you’ve been a Koba or you’ve had to deal with a Koba.

Though Suny is hostile to the later Stalin in power, he treats the young Stalin with a rare amount of care and empathy. Stalin’s personal life (or, whatever existed of a personal life for a professional revolutionary) is elaborated based on actual documentary evidence instead of the sensationalist rumor-mongering that Stalin biographers often indulge in and the real friendships that Stalin had at the time are named for what they were, even if they later ended very badly.

Where the book is weakest is towards its end, where Suny forecloses Stalin’s trajectory into the revolution eating its children, typical of academic petit-bourgeois pessimism. Trillions starved, etc. But arguably what is most valuable about this book is less than what it details about specifically Stalin’s early activities and personal development, but much more about what it details, through those long tangential passages, about the revolutionary Tsarist-Russian underground, about the cruel reality and life-or-death stakes of fighting an autocratic regime in a peripheral region of a reactionary empire, the nagging national question and the various ways that Communists reconciled (or didn’t) with national liberation, and yes, what it details about the nuances of party-building in Tsarist Russia and its borderlands. Suny commentates from outside these internal splits and dynamics within Russian Social Democracy with more than a century of ironic hindsight, but these are debates that the revolutionaries took seriously at the time and so does he. And so should we.

It would be preposterous to suggest that Tsarist Russia is a mirror of the modern day US Empire– and yet, the challenge remains the same for all Communists: how do we build the party to seize power from the bourgeois state? After all, if the particular characteristic of Tsarist Russia was the autocracy, then the particular characteristic of the US Empire is settler-colonialism, a kind of decentralized autocracy. Perhaps Stalin’s experiences in the underground organizing reading circles with students and workers, his brief stint with legal union organizing, his leadership of armed militias during the height of reaction, his activities as a Bolshevik traveling agent always one step ahead of the Okhrana, and finally his role as a tribune of the people in the interim between February and October provide a clue as to what Communists should expect from their work as the US Empire crumbles. Perhaps we should have a closer look at what it actually took to sustain an underground network and an aboveground movement and draw appropriate lessons from it for today, while keeping in mind that our adversaries are just as well-studied as we are.

In lieu of a numerical rating, I’ll tell you who I think should read this book: Baby Communists who only know the myths of anti-Stalin, obsessive enthusiasts of Soviet revolutionary history, active Communists engaged in the hardest questions of national liberation, and anyone who’s read any other biography about Stalin at all.

1. The clearest example of this is his Young Stalin (2007). This critique of Montefiore can be found almost verbatim in the pages of another of the Big Stalin Biographies, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power by Stephen Kotkin. ︎
2. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously is a group biography that argues that the functional dynamic of the top Stalinist leadership was as a team. Stalin was the team leader who delegated responsibilities and had final word on team inclusion or exclusion, but relied on the loyalty and agency of his teammates to carry out day-to-day governance. Stalin’s team did not mindlessly bend to his will; he had to argue his case convincingly and rely on a combination of argument and intrigue to get his team members on board with certain strategies or tactics. ︎
3. Briefly, for more on this, there are these two letters: (1925) and (1938). ︎
4. Funnily enough, Suny wrote about the reception that his book got in third person about himself. ︎

The blurb for this workshop was:

Join us for a teach-in on how to build out winning campaigns to change policy and laws through grassroots power. At this educational event, we will discuss how to go from activism and advocacy to organizing and running campaigns to win lasting change.

In clear terms, this blurb outlined CPUSA’s tactic. It was a baby’s first workshop for those who wanted to exercise their bourgeois-democratic rights of voting, make petitions, and have meetings with elected officials. It promised to teach the most basic skills of doing so, all within a liberal framework of the free competition of ideas. In that sense the ideological content matched the label on the box.

But why would the ostensible Communist Party be engaging in this type of activity of liberal miseducation? And why host it at a white church (a tellingly white church) instead of at one of the numerous Black churches in segregated Peoria?

Because essentially the CPUSA has no interest in uniting the revolutionary masses of the US Empire. CPUSA has all the interest in the world, however, in reproducing its membership of radical-liberals, and securing the greater white networks of support that make that reproduction of the activist-organizer caste possible. In no stage of this process does the leadership have an interest in actually making revolution. Whether this idea of hosting a liberal workshop was stochastically generated by Peoria CPUSA’s own reformist-minded members, or if a directive came down from a higher body, it makes no difference in so far as the results are the same: a counter-revolutionary tactic for a counter-revolutionary strategy wielded by a revisionist and settler-chauvinist organization whose sole purpose is to reproduce the conditions of its own existence.

Political Miseducation

The workshop revealed a lot about the class character of the attendees and of the presenter. With the exception of the author, all attendees were white, with a few visibly queer people, split between the younger cohort (young adults) and the older (around or past retirement age). During introductions, the main concern of the attendees was the fear of the general crisis of American imperialism and the resulting blowback on the domestic front. The desire for some people was a return to “normality” and for others an ascent to a better society. Primarily, the attendees were motivated by subjective factors (moral outrage, political opposition) rather than objective necessity.¹

H. began by highlighting Black Lives Matter and the reform to eliminate money bond as a success of the kind that he intended to convince attendees was primary for political change.² This is of course in line with CPUSA’s social-democratic political outlook — revolution is impossible (or ill-advised), so socialism must be won piecemeal by political struggle encapsulated within the liberal law-and-order rules. Mass mobilization is a tool for these ends.

Our presenter further defined organization as a disciplined craft, as an exercise of collective power. Whose collective power? The power of the “99%” against the “1%”? The Poor vs. The Rich? The power of the white liberal against the white conservative? Why this emphasis on discipline, which is obviously needed for any type of sustained human activity, but no emphasis on scientific class analysis? One of the handouts (a reproduction of a copyrighted worksheet sold by a liberal career-NGO professional) helpfully defined a variety of “roles” one might play within a liberal campaign, proposing that each liberal organizer assort themselves based on one’s own personal talents and passions. Of course, there is no room to discuss the actual efficacy of a “diversity of tactics,” but instead different responsibilities are presented like roleplaying classes that each individual selects like players at a game table. This embodies the voluntaristic, amateur nature of CPUSA and of liberal organizations in general: organizing is something that people do as a hobby because they feel morally compelled to, not because otherwise they will not survive their conditions. When there is no imperative for survival, when the margins for mistakes are large enough, there is no selective pressure to correct mistakes at all.

Our presenter stated that the goal of organizing is to win real material benefits for “the people” (defined in abstract, totally absent of class and other internal contradictions). But what is a victory? A bill reluctantly passed in the Illinois State House of Representatives? Tiny reliefs in funding packages? Again, one only has to look at CPUSA’s line to understand why they push this dead-end incrementalism, which in reality means temporary concessions against a systemic onslaught of deprivation and predation by the bourgeois class, doled out primarily to the white-settler population. Of course, for the settler labor aristocracy and settler petit-bourgeois, it makes sense to struggle within the settler-colonialist system. But for the precariat and the colonized, much less so.

Our presenter claimed that the large, systemic problems of society must be sliced into smaller, winnable issues; that by dealing with smaller issues, one can defeat large problems because society-wide problems are “too big” to conquer outright. He took the example that an attendee volunteered of systemic ableism, cut it down into a problem of inaccessibility for a historic building, then proposed that the organizing solution would be a campaign for funding to renovate the building or zoning law changes to require accessibility. This is the misshapen dialectic of the general and the particular, the abstract and concrete in action utilized for liberal metaphysical practice.

Two strategic interpretations arise from this tactic, neither which are revolutionary models: either the system is “too big,” invincible, and therefore one must carve out spaces of exception via reforms, or by fighting for reforms one can finally defeat enough enemies to get to the Final Boss and then win against the “too big” problem of society. The first reaches the radical zenith of running off into the woods to start a settler-commune in disastrous retreat; the second proposes that Big Ableism (and all of its fellow distinct -isms) lives in a specific office in the White House and must be defeated there. In any case, this model of slicing oppression like a sausage fails to understand that Big Ableism does not exist as a concrete phenomenon, but rather ableism saturates social dynamics in general, as part of the class struggle as a whole. This too repeats for other “axes of oppression” which are always already part of the class struggle.

H.’s primary metaphor utilized for this workshop, to get from an undesirable present state to a desirable future state, is the bridge. To build a bridge requires knowing a source, destination, the conditions of traversal, the resources at hand, and whatever else. In this metaphor, progress is cumulative and linear (though not necessarily sequential; one can build parallel bridges). Each bridge must be constructed via a campaign to unite the “base” through interpersonal relationships, common agreement on sausage-slice issues, and strategic agreement. Of course, the idea of coalition-building and drawing in a number of organizations (of what class character? Again, unanswered) becomes primary here, with the potential base sorted into fixed tiers of “unconnected,” “supportive,” “activist,” and “core” categories (vanguardism with the serial numbers filed off). The same old canard of “diversity of tactics” is repeated. Experimentation is important, yes, but if political struggle is to have a scientific component to it, useless tactics must be discarded and successful ones must be replicated. One cannot permit themselves or others to repeat harmful tactics if they want to win.

Next, our presenter instructed us that communication for a campaign must be done like any other electoral campaign, with pitches and volunteers and donations, etc. What is interesting is that throughout the presentation, the enemy is unspoken, and only given concrete form as targets of isolated issues, never to the level of implicating the whole system of liberal democracy and its underlying imperialism and settler-colonialism unto itself. This can be partially chalked up to the requirement of a “non-partisan” workshop, but the silence on the general class struggle in society is deafening. Again, for a so-called Communist Party workshop!

The final apparatus that our presenter wished to impart on the class was the concept of a campaign lifecycle (a variant of this model) and self-critique. Not “self-critique” in those words obviously, and certainly not to critique individuals for the purposes of ideological development or to escape the entire paradigm of liberal organizing itself, but rather as a checklist to improve upon liberal organizing and to propagate electoralism into the infinite future. The phases of the campaign lifecycle may well be effective in guiding our liberal reformists in spinning their wheels into the mud as each successful campaign is rolled back by their fascist brethren. As for Communists, we desire real advancement.

Before the Q&A section, our presenter advised us on further reading: March by John Lewis (who is the archetypical representative of nonviolence); No Shortcuts by Jane Mallery (who proposes the united front of social progressives and settler-unions); Let This Radicalize You (towards left-populism and left-eclecticism) by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba; and Roots to Power by Lee Staples (who spouts even more left-populism and left-eclecticism)… Nevermind any scientific socialist texts!

During the Q&A itself, our presenter fielded a question about environmentalism and possible stakeholders adequately. Then one of the attendees asked how unions, if they were forbidden to strike by law, could have any actual leverage on politics. This was dismissed as an “out of scope” issue. Yours truly asked about examples of past successful campaigns and current ongoing ones by CPUSA, but was told that this was a “non-partisan” workshop and to speak with the presenter after class.

All in all, what a strangely liberal class for the Communist Party to put on! That is, if you take the Communist Party at their word, which we shall not, and examine only the workshop and not the situation in which it was placed, which we shall do now.

Class and Nationality in Peoria

Originating from the onset of European colonization, the settler-colonial political economy of the US Empire generates and maintains a specific settler consciousness for the white population: a sense of liberal humanitarianism and universalism, of free speech and debate of ideas, and of the civilizational battle for democracy against undemocratic (“barbaric”) forces, be they Native American, the descendants of enslaved Africans, Palestinian, or Russian. In the practical sense, this means that white people and their thoughts are quite literally valued more than the colonized peoples and their thoughts, in both the economic sense and political-economic sense. Settlerism, whose social basis (those who are racialized as “white”) has increased over time and which also admits individual nonwhites on a case-by-case basis, creates the bourgeoisfied proletariat (labor aristocracy) and petit-bourgeois,³ whose mobilization is much more politically impactful and legitimated by the extant bourgeois-democratic order than the mobilization of the colonized proletariat and the precarious white proletariat.

Peoria, due to historic redlining and ongoing national oppression, still remains one of the most segregated cities in the Midwest. The Joint Commission on Racial Justice and Equity of Peoria County maintains its own set of arcGIS map data and comprehensive tables for the purposes of assessing national oppression, as well as comprehensive statistics assessing the prospects of different racial groups in Peoria County. Informal apartheid is reflected in the income gap between white and Black households (and other statistics related to pollution, employment, etc.), and in the political organizations that populate the area. Further complicating this picture is the high population of bourgeoisified proletariat and petit-bourgeois in the city of Peoria, such that in 2024 a combined 33.7%of the workforce earned more than $100,000 per year and 66.0% earned more than $90,000 per year⁴ with an average home ownership rate of 57.5%; these are all statistics inflected by national oppression, at the county-level the average white household earns $63,100 annually compared to $30,400 for Black households.⁵

Owing to this demographic composition, Peoria is politically quiet with a handful of left-liberal organizations compared to a college town such as Bloomington-Normal or Urbana-Champaign. CPUSA, the Democrat Party’s 50501, the Green Party, as well as local single-issue formations and the recent addition of the crypto-Trotskyite Workers Strike Back organization occupy organizing spaces. All these exist with heavy overlap, sorted more into personality-based cliques and aesthetically sectarian friend groups than representing any substantial political disagreement. So are the activist NGOs in Peoria present: including but not limited to Peoria Proud, ACLU, League of Women Voters, and, of course, the Unitarian Universalists (UUes).

These organizations are mostly white organizations, in so far as they are dominated by white people, hold settler consciousness, and a faith in Law and Order. Black organizations such as NAACP, Southside Community United for Change, and the Black churches are also imbued with settler consciousness in so far as the political economy of the NGO as an organizational form plus the concessions of the settler state towards token political representation naturally produces such consciousness, and in so far as religion acts counter to revolutionary consciousness. Yet at the same time, this exists in tension with the national oppression experienced by Black Peoria and is reflected in their practice. SCUC in particular, a conglomeration of neighborhood associations (a liberal version of neighborhood councils) in the deprived Southside area, acts like an informal networking space between those particular organized nationally-oppressed reformists and Black (and other nonwhite) politicians. What distinguishes white from Black organizations is which community they recruit from and mobilize; Black organizations generally have less margin for error and less surplus labor to use up and as such are primarily focused on poverty (and the effects of poverty such as over-policing and incarceration) and intra-community issues, while white organizations have much more room for mistakes to be made and play in the field of “high” politics. Hence the segregation in Peoria remains despite everyone’s liberal best wishes that this ought not be the case.

To examine one white organization of interest: the UUes are a sociopolitical node for a specific kind of white progressive that has left even ostensibly progressive wings of Christianity but has not yet broken with religion entirely. Instead of Christian charity (paternalism), the UUes market themselves as a sort of Social Justice Church, which in practice means charity (paternalism) and reform campaigns. This mostly manifests in the form of encouraging their members to organize in settler-dominated reformist organizations, which perfectly lines up with the content of the workshop. In any case, like with other white churches, when attending their services one does not expect to see a lot of melanin. This makeup was reflected in the actual attendance of the workshop as mentioned before.

Compared to other small churches, which tend to be caught in a kind of money-sink death spiral due to a lack of attendees and therefore tithes, the UUes appear to be doing well. They run regular events for fundraising, they keep up charitable programs, they have a decent proportion of children to adults in the congregation. They are ideological left-liberals dedicated to land acknowledgements and statements of inclusivity and pulling isolated quotes from a variety of faiths in the pursuit of a homogenized liberal-universal spirituality. Committed to participating in protest theatre and nonviolent resistance, in agreement with the hegemonic imperialist logic of civilized democracies and uncivilized autocracies, in the end, they serve as release valves for white guilt and to redirect anti-hegemonic questioning into a reinforcement of the very same liberal political economy that has brought the world to this general crisis of imperialism. None of this is out of the ordinary for settler consciousness.

Revisionist Reproduction

So why would an ostensibly Communist organization host a reformist (liberal at worse, social democratic at best) workshop on organizing at the UUes, implicitly targeting that congregation for attendees? What value does Peoria CPUSA get out of trying to recruit these particular people into the habit of creating and leading reformist campaigns, and of eventually recruiting morally-outraged left-liberal bourgeoisfied proletariat and petit-bourgeois into their ranks?

Very simply put, Peoria CPUSA, whose founding members were originally the Peoria DSA chapter (DSA being another left-settler electoralist organization), is made of the same stuff as the UUes are, has an understanding with them and with the other liberal progressive organizations, and represents the CPUSA as a whole. Worse than any honest liberal formation which at least does not lie to your face about what it is, CPUSA proclaims itself to be Communist while eviscerating Communism of its revolutionary content. They strip all which distinguished Communism from the ideology of the social-imperialists of the Second Internationale — the class-collaborationists who welcomed the advance of fascism in their own countries against Communists, who sought to maintain the grip of their imperialist countries on their colonies within and without, whose mass base was the parasitic labor aristocracy they defended zealously. Worse than any honest social-democratic party which would at least proclaim itself proudly to follow this hoary tradition, the CPUSA offers the illusion of changing course through hypothetical line struggle, which would be productive in any well-formed Communist organization.

But the hypothetical remains unfulfilled. In reality, CPUSA is an anti-democratic organization which ruthlessly purges any genuinely revolutionary tendencies, such as in the case of the 2024 National Convention and the liquidation of the Austin chapter thereafter in order to maintain a reformist theory and practice. In their theory, the revolution must be carried out within the framework of bourgeois democracy, and the current crisis of imperialism must be soothed by the united front of labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois settlers to win more pieces of the imperial super-profit loot, and to win accommodations and assimilation for the nationally-oppressed and gender-oppressed into imperialism.⁶ In their practice, it means forever delaying and sabotaging revolution in favor of reforms, suppressing genuinely revolutionary impulses from their own membership, and in general shamelessly fulfilling a counter-revolutionary purpose on behalf of the bourgeois.

Through this investigation, we understand what Peoria CPUSA is doing as a reflection of their national organization and as a reflection of their environment. Their goal is to reproduce their own membership drawn from the “middle class,” to gain enough influence to successfully claim piecemeal reforms locally, and to morally justify to themselves that they are building revolution in the meantime. Once we know these facts, we understand that the central conception of building “collective power” is not meant to be taken in the abstract. It means, concretely, building the collective power of the labor-aristocratic and petit-bourgeois settler left, of re-legitimizing bourgeois democracy by winning small concessions as to stave off the desire for the whole pot of revolution in all of its total destruction of old social relations and forms and therefore the total destruction of US imperialism and settler-colonialism. We understand why CPUSA as a whole supports the Democrats: because they are ideological allies and dedicated partners who benefit from the arrangement — not because the left-bourgeois can be understood in any way to be the “lesser evil.”

1. For the queer white people, this factor is more wiggly in so far as the current bourgeois regime embarks on an exterminationist campaign against them; but, of course, whiteness gives one more room in the first place. ︎
2. Every year since the passing of the SAFE-T Act, held up as the golden standard of reform-oriented organizing by this club of CPUSA, there has been a concerted effort to gut and reverse the reform. ︎
3. Admittedly, the categories are blurry as labor aristocrats are often specialized laborers with the capital to become petit-bourgeois; by the same token petit-bourgeois often obtain labor aristocratic jobs when the going gets tough; this is a fact captured in the liberal “middle class” term. ︎
4. These figures was reached by grouping together all workers in an industry earning over $90k and $100k respectively, based off of their median yearly wages, dividing that by the total number of people in the workforce, then multiplied by 100 to get the percentages. ︎
5. Hispanic Peorians experience their own dire statistics; the lumping of national groups together however makes this data less useful overall in discussions of national oppression. Hispanic Peoria does have its own set of grassroots organizations, churches, and charities which serve the community. A discussion of the prospects of Hispanic, especially immigrant-based, organizations is out of scope of this article. But generally the same contradiction between the legal reformist framework and the realities of class and national oppression are present as in Black organizations. ︎
6. Gender oppression referring to both women’s oppression and the oppression of queer and trans people. ︎