Preliminary critique of the work has focused primarily on the erasure of transmisogyny, a particularly glaring omission given the author’s supposed inclusion of “marginalized genders”. This omission, coupled with an essentialist theoretical framework pulled from a radical feminist tradition, lead to the necessity of the piece’s retraction. The Red Clarion seeks to lead the communist movement towards the best path of sexual liberation, which necessitates a dialectical and scientific approach to understanding and combating sexual oppression. The conclusions reached in the article rely on a haphazard array of correlated data that are then assumed to be set phenomena across the breadth of patriarchal societies. The following criticism looks through these major flaws, and opposes the conclusions reached thereafter; as USU struggles towards unified clarity on these vital theoretical positions, we will move towards the publishing of a definitive piece regarding where the movement must take the issues of sexual liberation.

We will first begin with the author’s failure to conduct adequate research on the subject at hand, exemplified by the following passage:

Regardless of if you watch porn, you experience the effects of porn. You are punished by the existence of porn. A study of over four thousand young people in Melbourne found that 59% of men had reported strangling their partner during sex, with 61% of women reporting being strangled, and 78% of trans or gender-diverse individuals experiencing strangulation. Importantly, 61% reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.

This passage mistakes shadow for substance. Sex work is not the base economic relationship from which patriarchal violence emerges, but rather the result of patriarchal economic and social relations that reinforce and reproduce patriarchal relations. In other words, sex work does not create the social exploitation of women, nor lie at its foundation. Sex work is the result of divided labor regime. The scientific study cited by the author directs us to this very same conclusion: “Pornography was the most common avenue by which people reported first hearing about choking during sex (34.8%), followed by discussions with friends (11.5%).”¹ In other words, pornography does not create sexual violence, but rather reinforces it; it is not the cause of sexual violence, but rather its result. Failure to recognize this dialectical relationship that makes sex-divided labor the primary aspect puts us off immediately on the wrong track.

Here we must also make plain a glaring error in our comrade’s citation. The author warns that “61% [of young people in Melbourne participating in the study] reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.” This statement is false. A vast majority (65.2%) of the study’s subjects learned about choking during sex via means other than pornography. This suggests that even if pornography was banned, this ostensibly violent sexual practice would still exist and propagate through other means of social reproduction. With 61% of subjects exposed to but not learning about sexual strangulation via pornography, the study does demonstrate pornography’s role in reinforcing risky sexual practices amongst the general population through repeated exposure. However, with subjects also being exposed to the practice via “…movies (40.3%), friends (31.9%), social media (31.3%), and discussions with potential partners (29.2%),” we cannot give serious credence to the notion that pornography itself is the (or even one of many) progenitor of sexual violence.² At the very least, the failure of the article’s author to catch such a misrepresentation of the study at hand is demonstrative of a methodological sloppiness that cannot be considered Marxist for its lack of an adequately scientific approach to analyzing these social phenomena. The study actually shows that those who “first learned/heard” about strangulation through pornography constitute a mere 34.8% of respondents. The 61.3% number is representative of those who were “ever exposed to strangulation in pornography.” Failing to distinguish these incident rates is a critical error. Despite this sloppiness, our comrade further digs her heels in:

Studies vary on how much of pornography is degrading, verbally and physically, to women and marginalized genders, but as we see rates of strangulation rising, we can rest assured that it is a significant portion. Moreover, a meta-analysis of studies has found that porn consumption is linked with an increased likelihood to commit an act of sexual aggression, even if the pornography was considered non-aggressive.

This passage demonstrates another significant error in the author’s manner of conducting research. When analyzing any phenomenon, particularly social phenomenon where variables cannot be controlled and holistically observed, the correlation of data does not mean there is a relationship of causality. While the research in question does demonstrate that those who consume pornography more frequently “are more likely to hold attitudes conducive to sexual aggression and engage in actual acts of sexual aggression” than those who consume it less frequently, or not at all,³ it does not prove that pornography is the source of these behaviors. Given that not everyone who consumes pornography is sexually aggressive, we can just as easily assume that pornography lends itself to reinforcing pre-developed behaviors.⁴ Only one of these positions lends itself to a Marxist framework of socio-behavioral analysis.

Pornography, just as any tool of bourgeois social reproduction, functions by providing moral licensing for individuals’ self-interested and exploitative behaviors. To argue otherwise would be to deny personal autonomy, and thus, moral responsibility for one’s actions as an individual. People do not enact sexual violence as a result of consuming pornography, nor even because they are raised in a patriarchal society. Every action one takes in committing sexual violence is of their own volition, even if these social phenomenon may prime them to view such behaviors as permissible. Despite her previous claims in the piece, the author demonstrates a clear lack of satisfaction with treating pornography as a systematic tool that “…emboldens preexisting attitudes towards women, towards sexuality.” For our comrade is not interested in dissecting the material base of sex work.⁵ Even one unfamiliar with feminist analysis can pick up on this from the author’s incessant focus on sexual anatomy; she uses the word “cunt” 14 times throughout the work. The author does not define this term beyond its vernacular usage until its sixth appearance in the piece, and then the definition she provides is the following: “Anyone, not just the prostitute, can be penetrated, anyone can be turned into a cunt, anyone can be dehumanized and alienated from their sexuality and their body.”

Given such an apt definition, we can indeed state that nearly everyone within bourgeois society has been turned into a cunt. Proletarian and lumpenprole alike are alienated from their bodies as they expend their brain and muscles to labor for those with capital to spend. Settler-colonial and imperialist societies alienate the masses from their sexuality by using the violence of the state to coerce them into cis-heterosexual social-reproduction, as seen through the violent criminalization of access to birth control, abortions, hormone replacement therapy, mastectomies, gender reassignment surgery, etc.

Rather than developing a theoretical framework that naturally includes all those who are subjected to the violence and exploitation of patriarchal society, the author vulgarizes patriarchal power into a class struggle of the penetrated vs the penetrators. Everyone, no matter their class or social position, is flattened to the supposed power imbued within their sexual behaviors. Even gay men are not free to be men, for “The receiver, the gay man, is therefore reduced to a cunt as well, an object made for penetration and degradation.” In this absurd calculus, one is either an all powerful cis-heterosexual man (the phallus) or the weak and wretched cis-heterosexual woman (the cunt), a theoretical framework so fragile that even a pebble could shatter it into a million pieces.

If “power” is indeed based on one’s relationship to Penetration, then what are we to make of the men penetrated by women?⁶ When presented without reference to social reproduction theory, this argument simply cannot be reconciled with Marxism. Does this simple act truly turn the system of patriarchy on its head, turning men from exploiters to the exploited? This is no idle question. With the study on strangulation reporting approximately 50% of straight male subjects having been strangled during sex,⁷ and if we accept the notion that this supposed sexual “degradation” is an extension of real material power, we can indeed state that, “The war on women has expanded and mutated once more; it’s recruited our fellow women…” For now men must be on the defensive from this supposed wave of woman-led sexual violence! With 60% of lesbians ever being strangled and 54% ever strangling a partner, and bisexual women respectively reporting 80% and 51%,⁸ Cde. Reed’s struggle against sexual domination would have to extend its front to combat this degeneracy amongst sapphic women. In our comrade’s struggle against supposedly anti-social sexual behaviors we must not forget the worst offenders, transgender people, among whom we witness the highest rates of sexual strangulation, 78% and 74% respectively.

Using the framework presented, one could argue that women who strangle men or women who strangle women are adopting the mechanisms of patriarchy for their own benefit; however, the question then would become “why are men overwhelmingly the oppressors, if acting out sexual violence is in-itself sufficient enough to make one an oppressor?” The article’s theory fails to provide any answer to this question.

Had the author given any thought to the conclusions readers would draw from her prescriptive moral stance on such sexual behaviors, she would have read the publicly accessible scientific paper she cited and come to a vastly different conclusion. From this clear negligence we can conclude that our comrade’s goal was not to provide a proper investigation of these systems, but to find data useful in propping up her positions. The framework provided by this article can only function under the bold assumption that every sexual relationship is either patriarchal heterosexuality, or an imitation of it. The author appears to use the high rate of sexual strangulation amongst transgender people as a means to spark readers’ rage against an imagined wave of cis-men strangling poor defenseless transgender women. This assertion completely disregards transgender people’s actual dynamics and conditions as a population. This essentialist framework gets transgender people killed.

Amidst the ongoing war against transgender people, in which transgender people’s presumed sexual behaviors are used to justify mass waves of social violence and murder, a prescriptive framework adds fuel to the fire by proclaiming non-violent and non-coercive sexual acts as inherently oppressive. When transgender people engage in these sexual behaviors, who is being oppressed?⁹ Transgender people are most likely to be in relationships with other transgender people. With studies on sexual orientation demonstrating that only 19% of transgender women, 2% of non-binary people, and 23% of transgender men are reported to be heterosexual in the United States.¹⁰ If we made use of the framework presented, the movement would have no choice but to condemn a majority of transgender people as irredeemable oppressors. Are we to take such an absurd system, that would make an enemy of a hyperexploited population for acts we have no business meddling in, and take it to practice within our movement? Our comrade may take moral opposition to sexual strangulation, but that in-itself is not a basis upon which a Marxist theoretical framework can be built. Such a framework must be based on an analysis of the material conditions at play, not idealist and puritanical notions on proper sexual relations. 

Sexual behaviors are reflections of social and cultural phenomena, but in isolation they tell us very little about contemporary material conditions. We must constantly go deeper. For example, the social root of something such as a leather fetish is likely a result of the materials’ historical use in military and police uniforms, providing the objects a socially constructed aesthetic of power and authority. So what are we to make of its prevalence in gay and lesbian communities? Due to extreme levels of state repression and violence, the social authority imbued within leather provides an outlet for participants to be humanized through symbolic access to authority and/or resistance to it. The fetish provides an emotional outlet for the constant pressure of social restraint. As a reflection of material conditions, sexual behaviors can act as a tool to reinforce exploitative social relationships. With heterosexual relationships requiring a particularly high level of internal analysis of relationship dynamics, given men being socially conditioned to engage in more aggressive and high-risk sexual behaviors. However, power is not determined in the bedroom. Power is determined by one’s relation to property. 

Historically women have been denied the right to property, actively excluded from economic production so as to be coerced into the labor of social reproduction. With the development of class society, the role of women was largely relegated first as an economic and diplomatic asset in their youth, to later be sold into domestic servitude as a wife and mother. It is only recently that western women have gained the “right” to be workers and not the property of men, a concession made in part to constrain the spread of achievements that resulted from the dauntless and bloody struggles of communist women across the globe and in part as a result of capital’s drive to proletarianize everyone — to dissolve all social relations. Despite patriarchal systems losing ground in this age of collapse for the capitalist system,¹¹ women have not yet been liberated from traditional socially reproductive roles, particularly those of marriage and prostitution. These roles have changed in kind with the economic basis of society. The marriage and legalized prostitution of Ancient Greece are far different in their structure than marriage and prostitution within the capitalist age.  

The piece posits that, within bourgeois society, prostitutes make up “… a class that is designed to be difficult to get out of, as a ruined proletariat, and is slated to be accessible to all men. The state may punish different classes of men more commonly than others, but she is still available to all men.” Further, the author denies these workers their position as laborers, arguing that instead of being members of the proletarian or subproletarian classes they are instead ‘public property,’ — hyper-exploited subjects forced into ‘a form of slavery that is distinctly female.’ If these laborers are truly turned into property or commodities to be bought and consumed, then why haven’t sex dolls and sex toys replaced their existence entirely? It is the same reason humans can never fully be replaced by tools or machines in the production process. What is being valued here is not the mere production of a commodity or the provision of a service, but human labor power. This is why prostitutes sell their labor in the form of timeslots, and clarify the kinds of specialized sexual labor they are willing to perform within specified time-frames. When one buys this form of labor they engage in a form of petit-bourgosie labor exploitation, and like any member of this class the buyer seeks to take as much from the laborer as possible for as low as the wages can go. 

Within the article this claim of prostitute as public property is justified by the argument that sex work cannot be comparable to other forms of labor, as “The prostitute is alienated not just from her profits or her work, but from her body and the most intimate parts of her mind” and that “She is often forced to remain in the prostituted class via coercive forces…” Is the woman working 16 hours sewing with docked wages for every mistake not also alienated from “the most intimate parts of her mind”? What of the railway conductors coerced by contract and federal law to be on call 24/7 while working at minimum 12 hours a day? Is not the denial of sleep and a home life alienating one from their own mental wellbeing? When it comes to coercion, what worker cannot claim the same? Many women in the workplace are sexually assaulted but are forced to either stay quiet or risk homelessness and starvation of both themselves and their families. Other workers are coerced into their labor through the seizure of passports or the pointed guns of the police and hired mercenaries. The bourgeoisie will always seek the maximal level of exploitation. When they buy your labor-power, they buy the contractual right to ruin your body, break your mind, and kill you if it’ll make them even a penny more in profit. The only limit to the bourgeois drive to create profit at the expense of the worker is the level of class struggle. The relative conditions of the working classes are a symptom of class struggle.¹² Whether you are a sex worker, manual laborer, service worker, etc. the capitalist system runs on the rule that you are disposable to the bourgeoisie.

But with its blind drive, its bottomless werewolf-hunger for surplus-labor, capital doesn’t merely push past the moral limits of the working day. It does the same with the physical limits, too. Capital usurps the time that the body needs to grow and develop, and also the time for maintaining the body in a healthy condition. It steals the time it takes to get fresh air and sun. It chips away at mealtimes, incorporating them into the production process wherever it can; as a result, food is added to workers as though they were merely so many means of production, or the same way a boiler is fed coal, machines are fed grease and oil, and so on. Sound sleep destroys and refreshes a person’s vital powers, enabling him to build up his strength, but capital reduces it to only as many hours as it takes to revive a totally exhausted organism […] Only one thing interests capital: the maximum amount of labor-power that can be activated in the workday. It achieves this goal by shortening the lives of labor-power’s bearers, just like a greedy farmer gets the most out of the land by rendering it barren.¹³

[…]

So from society’s standpoint, the members of the working class—including when they aren’t participating in the immediate labor process—belong to capital just as much as the dead instruments of labor do. Even their individual consumption is simply an aspect of capital. It is hard for the worker, that instrument of production endowed with consciousness, to simply run away, since it constantly sends his product from his pole to the opposite pole—i.e., capital’s. Individual consumption is the means through which workers maintain and reproduce themselves, but as it occurs, it constantly destroys their means of subsistence, ensuring that they will keep reappearing in the labor markets. The Roman slave was fettered with chains. Invisible ties bind the wage laborer to his owner: he merely seems to be independent. The constant turnover among the worker’s individual wage masters and the fictio juris of his contract keep this semblance in place. 

In the past, capital enacted compulsory laws whenever it felt that it had to assert its proprietary rights over free workers. Until 1815, for example, it was illegal for England’s machine workers to emigrate, and people committed this crime at their peril, since the penalties it carried were severe.¹⁴

If sex work does not constitute a special super-class, then how do we as communists position ourselves against this particular form of exploitation? To answer this we must first understand the socio-economic nature of prostitution. Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent feminist within the CPSU, provided a clear analysis on the subject: “Prostitution arose with the first states as the inevitable shadow of the official institution of marriage, which was designed to preserve the rights of private property and to guarantee property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs.” Further outlining its emergence within the capitalist age:

The sale of women’s labor, which is closely and inseparably connected with the sale of the female body, steadily increases, leading to a situation where the respected wife of a worker, and not just the abandoned and ‘dishonoured’ girl, joins the ranks of the prostitutes: a mother for the sake of her children, or a young girl like Sonya Marmeladova for the sake of her family. This is the horror and hopelessness that results from the exploitation of labor by capital. When a woman’s wages are insufficient to keep her alive, the sale of favors seems a possible subsidiary occupation. The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path.

Prostitution is a form of socially reproductive labor. Just as maids are hired to clean houses, nannies to raise children, and nurses to care for the old, prostitutes are hired to satisfy personal needs without the buyer being obligated to provide for the care of the worker until the grave. Prostitutes are domestic laborers. If they are in a waged relation which is exploited for profit, they are proletarian. If they are not, they are nevertheless subproletarian, as those excluded from social production.¹⁵ The nature of their work, that of socially reproductive labor, does not alter their basic relation of production.

It is here that class divisions make themselves the most evident. A white cis woman is far more likely to gain access to legal, or at least institutionally protected forms, of sexual labor than a Black and/or trans woman. With white supremacy and cis normativity further providing enough class mobility to allow her escape into the membership of the labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois classes. This was the purpose of western nations’ struggle against so-called “white slavery” in the early 20th century. White slavery was a nationalistic tool used to secure white womanhood from the exploitation of lumpen and proletarian sexual labor. It was never about protecting women from sexual labor, it was rather a “common fixation on protecting the purity of white womanhood, constituting an image of white women’s precarity that was only tangentially connected to the realities of women’s lives.”¹⁶ Reed’s reintroduction of the term is yet another example of her gender reductionist framework, which excludes all other forms of class, national, and disabled oppression. By systematically denying nationally oppressed, transgender, and disabled people from the benefits and wages of the upper classes, the necessity of survival coerces them to flood the market of sexual labor. The resulting reduction of wages and working conditions, alongside a crackdown on legal sexual labor, pushed members of privileged social classes from the streets and into domestic servitude as wives and mothers.

The consumption of sexual labor, particularly in the form of pornography, is so widespread in society that even moral condemnation will do nothing but harm the most marginal of sexual laborers. Laws seeking to limit public access to “sexually explicit materials” have been used to actively suppress access to resources for sexual education, birth control, and transition related medical care.¹⁷

While we could dive further in this historical and materialist analysis of sex work, the breadth of the theory’s deviation from Marxist analysis should now be abundantly clear. Despite her condemnation of liberal feminists for flattening the experiences of sex workers, the author actively chose to disregard the autonomy and humanity of sex workers so that their idealized forms could serve as a prop for her radical feminist analysis. By using the theoretical framework of Andrea Dworkin, a zionist and arguably transmisogynistic theorist,¹⁸ to position men as a cabal seeking the sexual slavery of all women (i.e., people of penetration), the author — in one masterful stroke — both eschews class analysis and creates a false solidarity with sex workers by flattening their varied conditions into one of a universal metaphysical precarity.  Instead of seriously studying the scientific nature of these classes and the material conditions that bring them about so we might properly dedicate ourselves to uprooting these systems of oppression, we are instead given a world that has been wholly abstracted into a totalizing struggle between “men” and women. 

In its conclusion, the piece proclaims that “Our war is not against sex workers but against johns, sex buyers, and consumers of pornography.” This statement serves no theoretical purpose. We can make whatever proclamations we like, but what matters is the rhetoric behind them. The rhetoric of the piece gives ample justifications to the reader for hunting down these progenitors of patriarchal violence while at the same time excusing class collaboration between women (penetrated, the subjects of violence) of all classes:

These commodified individuals are surviving under patriarchy, under capitalism, and under oppressive forces. Until they engage in traitorous behaviors such as, but not limited to; promoting an OnlyFans referral code to 18 year olds to make money off of their content, dressing in children’s clothing, dressing in ways that contribute to the sexual violence minority women and those in the global south face, and/or glamorizing the industry, they are our comrades in the struggle.

This supposed “marxist feminism” tails the utopian organizational strategy of anarchists and radical feminists, wherein the supposed abolition of the state, or relationships with men, will instantly bring about heaven on earth where power and patriarchy are no more. We have only to unite all sex-workers (except those that promote OnlyFans referral codes to 18 year olds, dress in children’s clothing, dress in ways that contribute to sexual violence, and/or glamorize the industry of course) with all women! This super-class of sex-workers-and-women will then… well, what? Rather than building a serious strategy to bring about socialism, these adventurous radicals seek moral salvation by cleansing the world in a purifying flood. As Anuradha Ghandy writes: 

To assert that gender based division of labor is the basis of women’s oppression rather than class still begs the question. If we do not find some social, material reasons for the inequality we are forced into accepting the argument that men have an innate drive for power and domination. Such an argument is self-defeating because it means there is no point in struggling for equality. It can never be realized.

The liberation of prostitutes – and of all those from whom domestic labor is forcibly extracted – comes from the organization of their numbers into a body capable of battling their oppression and all work toward that organization, not from the repeated imprecations to divide the world into sexual abusers and the sexually abused. As Marxists it is our duty to organize, to bring together those who have an interest in fighting for total liberation. The patriarchal state is surely our enemy, as is the concept of masculinity itself insofar as it stands for the theft of labor, but we must be ever wary of the liberalizing drive to universalize victimhood and create a universal victimizer. No matter how strenuously the piece demands the reader to understand that “cunt” is shorthand for being raped, that does not make it so, nor does it make the central division along which society is divided into the raped and the rapists.

1. Sharman, Leah S., Robin Fitzgerald, and Heather Douglas. 2025. “Prevalence of Sexual Strangulation/Choking Among Australian 18–35 Year-Olds.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 54 (2): 465–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y.  Pg. 470. ︎
2. Ibidem. ︎
3. Wright, Paul J., Robert S. Tokunaga, and Ashley Kraus. 2016. “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies: Pornography and Sexual Aggression.” Journal of Communication 66 (1): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12201.
   Pg. 201. ︎
4. The correlation between the consumption of pornography and sexual violence lies in the dehumanizing of the sexual laborers. Even if the viewer were to construct subjectivity for the participants, one that they must construct themselves, as pornography commodifies the alienated images of these workers as they perform sexual labor. The consumer of pornography is a beneficiary of the patriarchal violence that produces this commodity as it only exists for consumption as a byproduct of systematic patriarchal violence. ︎
5. “For the cultural feminists, heterosexuality is about male domination and female subordination and so it sets the stage for pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, and woman-battering…. In their understanding of material conditions, they have taken the physical fact of reproduction and women’s biological role as the central point for their analysis and concluded that this is the main reason for women’s oppression…. Reproduction means both the reproduction of the person on a day to day basis and the reproduction of the human species. But in fact, reproduction of the species is something humans share with the animal kingdom. That could not be the basis for women’s oppression. For in all the thousands of years that people lived in the first stages of human existence, women were not subordinated to men.” Ghandy, Anarhuda, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, 54-5. ︎
6. Obviously, the Marxist analysis is that all real power is founded somewhere in property relations, and that other forms of power are all ultimately mediated property relations. ︎
7. Sharman, et al. Pg. 472 ︎
8. Ibid., Pgs. 472-473. ︎
9. On a case by case basis, it is, of course, possible for transgender people to reproduce patriarchal oppression. Domestic abuse is one form this takes. However, this is far from as simple a proposition as the mechanical oppressor/oppressed relation presented by the article at hand. Indeed, is it not possible that the penetrator in a relationship can be abused? Is it not possible that the penetrating partner can change from one to the other? ︎
10. James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. 2016. “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.” National Center for Transgender Equality. https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf. Pg. 59 ︎
11. Marx makes note of this phenomenon in Capital, that the family loses its material foundation in the capitalist age as children become the collective property of bourgeois society and women are a constant reserve army of labor ever ready to replace men in the workplace. It is through latter socialist social revolutions that women’s liberation has since unfolded. ︎
12. This struggle can itself be enervating to class consciousness, as is the case in the imperialist centers where class struggle has produced not revolution, but an entrenched labor aristocracy. ︎
13. Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press, pgs. 235-236. ︎
14. Id. at 528. ︎
15. In a waged relation, a prostitute is paid a wage by an employer, who keeps the amount that is paid for the sex work. In a slave or semi-slave relation, the prostitute is essentially kept in bondage to a pimp or madam, and receives instead whatever goods they need directly from their keeper, rather than a wage. Those thrust into illegal positions are excluded from legal production. We here incorporate slave and semi-slave relations as subproletarian, for in the age of “free” labor, these are all classes that must sell their labor-power. ︎
16. Harris, Leslie J. “Conclusion.” In The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity, 149–60. Michigan State University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.14321/jj.2990357.11. ︎
17. These and related “internet safety” politics have a long history of particularly targeting transgender and queer people, making both digital and physical spaces more dangerous for these communities. This is a result of queerness and transness being ideologically labeled as sexually explicit, or otherwise as a harmful social disease (Brooke and Turner, 2025; Kayyali & Mithani, 2025). Lawmakers in the UK have sought to expand such existing laws to further require websites to keep track of users sex assigned at birth, a tool that will be used to heavily monitor and further suppress the transgender population in the country if it comes to pass (Santi, 2025). 
    Kayyali, Dia, and Jasmine Mithani. 2025. “Age Verification Is Locking Trans People out of the Internet.” Tech Policy Press. December 8, 2025. https://www.techpolicy.press/age-verification-is-locking-trans-people-out-of-the-internet/.
    Santi, Mariano. 2025. “Data Bill: First They Came for Trans People.” Open Rights Group. 2025. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/.
    Tanner, Brooke, and Nicol Turner Lee. 2025. “Children’s Online Safety Laws Are Failing LGBTQ+ Youth.” Brookings. July 9, 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/childrens-online-safety-laws-are-failing-lgbtq-youth/.
    https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/  ︎
18. Dworkin actively proclaimed women’s struggle for liberation as resembling the struggle of the Zionists for a state in which they could finally find safety from the hoards seeking their death and sexual violation. (Lewis, 2025). Her early theoretical positions on the subjects of transsexuality and criticism of bioessentialism — despite holding a contradictory stance that “One might argue for a liberalization of sex-based roles, but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.” (Dworkin, 1974, pg. 175) — has left a wide range of room for an ongoing ideological struggle on whether Dworkin would be supportive of trans liberation today. In Woman Hating Dworkin stated “it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by faulty socialization. More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society.” and “…transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency (see p. 185) as a transsexual.” (Ibid., 186). With her short term solution to this so-called emergency being that “…every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.” (Ibid., 187), with the end goal being the construction of an androgynous human community that would bring transsexuality to an end by subsuming it into “…new modes of sexual identity and behavior.” (Ibid., 188). Dworkin later gave considerable praise to and actively promoted Transsexual Empire, a violently transphobic work which targeted transition related medical care, and specific transgender women who were subsequently harassed by Janice Raymond’s followers out of public life. While later expressing her distaste of the work’s treatment of transgender people in a personal letter to Raymond (Duberman, 2020, Pg. 161), her lack of public retraction has allowed figures such as Raymond to continually lay claim to Dworkin as an essential figure in the theoretical framework of modern Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (Janice, 2021, pp. 41-47). 
    Duberman, Martin B. 2020. Andrea Dworkin : The Feminist as Revolutionary. New York: The New Press.
    Lewis, Sophia. “Are Women Weak Jews? On Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism.” Spectre Journal.  May 27th 2025. https://spectrejournal.com/are-women-weak-jews/
    Raymond, Janice. 2021. Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. ︎

This eradication takes the form of misgendering and deadnaming transgender people after their death, as the police, bourgeois media, morticians, and families work in tandem to eradicate our ancestors and erase our collective history. It was in defiance of this epistemicide that the first recorded Transgender Day of Remembrance was held in memory of Rita Hester, a black transgender woman whose murderer is still being protected by police who refuse to investigate the case (as they do with most trans murder cases). Since that ceremony in 1999, this ritual of resistance has spread across the globe, with international groups long linking anti-trans violence to colonial and imperialist  systems of genocide, femicide, and misogynoir.

These systems can be clearly observed in the data we do have. This year, the Trans Europe and Central Asia network recorded 281 reports of transgender and gender diverse people being murdered worldwide: 90% of these murders are femicides, 88% are Black or brown people, 68% of murders are recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 34% of victims are sex workers. In this same report, it is observed that there has been a sharp increase in the targeting of trans activists, making 14% of victims in 2025 where they only made up 6% in 2023.

There are, however, differing numbers that will be listed on this day, as the organizations which track this information differ in philosophy on what they count as violence against our people. Due to these differences, the Remembering Our Dead project has recorded 365 deaths worldwide, a number that includes suicides, deaths in detention by police or in prisons, and more. No matter the number there are likely hundreds, if not thousands, of our sisters, siblings, and brothers whose lives were cut short and may never be accounted for in this naming of our dead. 

In the last essay Sylvia Rivera wrote before her death in 2002, she expressed her recommitment to the struggle, stating in conclusion:

Before I die, I will see our community given the respect we deserve. I’ll be damned if I’m going to my grave without having the respect this community deserves. I want to go wherever I go with that in my soul and peacefully say I’ve finally overcome.

As we come together to honor our dead and our ancestors on this day of memory, do not forget that it is you and your community that have the means to struggle and achieve a liberated life in a liberated world. Let the flickering candle flames on this day be a kindling for a revolutionary passion. For together, you, your community, and your comrades have the power to bring about the world that is to be. 

“Times are changing. Our armies are rising and we are getting stronger. And when we come a knocking (that includes from here to Albany to Washington) they’re going to know that you don’t fuck with the transgender community.”

Introduction

Over the last five years, an open war has been waged by reactionary forces against the transgender population within the United States. There are two fronts on which this war has been waged. The first front is a de jure assault by the state through the direction of its mechanisms of settler-colonial violence to enact systematic social murder and constrainment. This multi-pronged attack includes restricting or banning access to transition related medical care, legalizing discrimination (making the population more viable for hyper-exploitation), deputizing cisgender people into enforcers of the patriarchal social division of labor by criminalizing transgender people’s existence in public spaces, and using the police to round up transgender people so they can be disposed of in the colonial garrisons otherwise known as jails and prisons. The second front is a de facto assault coordinated by fascist paramilitary groups shored up by the far right media apparatus, which actively recruits members of the petit-bourgeois and labor aristocratic classes into sporadic anti-trans vigilante violence.

This war on two fronts has been pursued as a means to destabilize the transgender population and demobilize their allies. By inducing a panic among transgender people, reactionaries hope to force broad swaths of the population to further jeopardize their already precarious conditions of survival. Transgender people fleeing the fronts of this war attempt to immigrate to expensive “safe haven” states they can’t afford, spend all their savings on obtaining a hormone surplus, or find any means possible to find refuge in another country. Through the Blitzkrieg of anti-trans laws (910 introduced this year across 49 states) and murder with 43 violent deaths (67 when you include social murder in the form of suicides) recorded in 2024, reactionaries aim to stretch the transgender population’s limited resources and political support to its absolute limits. Like the endless waves of a bombing campaign, their goal is to induce such an intense pressure that our supply lines finally snap, leaving us helpless for the inevitable slaughter. While there has already been substantial work done to build supply networks and organizations to help transgender people flee the most dangerous states (such as Florida and Tennessee), they often rely on the support of donations and the dedicated work of a few trans women. Without the substantial backing of an organization with the resources and capacity to aid in this key logistical struggle, these limited efforts will likely be snuffed out by the overwhelming task laid before them. 

As Communists, it is of utmost necessity that we open up our own front in this war waged on the transgender population. It is our responsibility to use everything within our means to build the organizational capacity necessary for providing material support in this struggle; the work can start with simple volunteer labor and financial aid. While there still exist pockets in this country where transgender people can find a semblance of safety, the Federal Government’s attacks on trans existence coupled with an increasing regularity of everyday harassment and violence suggest that these levees may soon collapse. Without a centralized authority to guide our people through this tumultuous era, we’ve begun to see the most privileged amongst our ranks choose to scatter rather than engage in collective struggle. This is not a new phenomenon: in Marxism and the National Question, Joseph Stalin describes how nations and their internal classes tend to scramble for personal gain in times of crisis when lacking an internationalist socialist project.¹ Central to the Communist struggle is building a political line that centers the revolutionary nationally oppressed and transgender populations. Regarding the latter, we luckily do not have to start from scratch. Leslie Feinburg dedicated zir life to documenting the history and tactics of trans liberation both in the United States and in Actually Existing Socialist (AES) states.² It is from this materialist analysis that we can construct the theoretical and organizational means to achieve trans liberation. A Communist party can put this theory into action by building supply lines to secure transgender people’s access to HRT,³ constructing an underground railroad to transport transgender people to safer states, and work with the parties of Actually Existing Socialist countries to obtain aid supplies or achieve the asylum of the most vulnerable internal trans refugees.

As transgender people, there is a tendency to cast shame on those who flee the struggle; but, how can we expect our siblings to act otherwise when we still lack the means to respond in kind to this war waged upon our people? For a soldier to advance forward, they must know their struggle is not in vain, they must clearly see the bright future for which they forge ahead. Yet cast in shadow, the vast majority of trans people today instead see themselves as wretched objects of history. Faced with the overwhelming pressure of oppression, revolutionary political consciousness is replaced by a gnawing drive towards survival. Needs of the future are replaced by the needs of the present, analysis of the systematic replaced by analysis of the direct, and all politics is reduced to whatever keeps you housed, fed, and maintaining access to HRT this day and the next. In this state of desperation, even an offering of crumbs can be received as salvation, a promise of seeing tomorrow. It is under these dire conditions that the parasitic worm of Liberalism takes its root.

Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism manifested, a worship of private property and so-called individual freedom. The more you own, the more you are; the more you exploit, the more you tower over society embodying an enlightened and superhuman soul no longer bound by the moral chains of social responsibility. Capitalist society inoculates even the oppressed into this self-obsessive ideology. You are taught that in times of desperation the only solution is to work harder, to pinch and save, and inevitably you’ll find yourself among the class of exploiters rather than living in the abominable drudgery of the exploited. This parasitic infection of Liberalism has a wide range of affect and severity. It primarily makes itself known through a severe dulling of revolutionary consciousness, inducing a zombie-like effect where the material conditions of the world pass by unnoticed. Amongst the sliver of our population who find themselves temporarily within the upper classes, we witness the most devout faith in the Democratic Party, with some going so far as to hold fast to the outlandish claim that the current calamity would have been prevented had Kamala won. Yet, when she was directly confronted with the question of whether our people should have access to gender affirming care, Harris quickly replied that she would “follow the law.” When 27 states have anti-trans laws on the books, “following the law” is not a neutral stance; it is active complicity in this mobilization towards our people’s genocide. When the law makes our people’s murder legal by painting us as deceivers,⁴ when even our acts of self-defense are routinely charged as premeditated murder,⁵ when the prisons systematically enforce sexual assault against their transgender populations,⁶ the law is revealed to be nothing more than a crude layer of legitimacy used to obscure a system pursuing our systematic social murder.

Even if members of the Democratic party genuinely care for transgender people, as members of an imperialist bourgeois party, they are incentivized to refrain from taking actions that would prevent or bring any form of exploitation to an end. These so-called representatives of the people are in actuality a managerial class whose goal is to maintain the system by smoothing over the contradictions produced within bourgeois society. When an oppressed group gains rights within the imperial core, it is not a reflection of liberals’ proactive political struggle for human liberation. Rather, liberals can only offer concessions. Concessions which they use as a release valve, easing exploitation just enough that the oppressed maintain a bare minimum investment in the status quo and become disinterested in taking on the risks of revolutionary action. Any demand for more is crushed with extreme prejudice and without mercy. We have seen this direct and unyielding response in the silencing of Rashida Tlaib for speaking out on the struggle of Palestinian people and the expulsion of Montana’s first openly transgender state Representative Zooey Zephyr for encouraging public struggle against anti-trans legislation. This internal party pressure is why even the Democratic Party’s token representative of our people, Sarah McBride, has chosen time and again to actively aid in our people’s genocide rather than do anything that could be perceived as harming the party’s standing amongst the ruling class.⁷

In the imperial core, liberals tout, “Here we allow our third-sexed sexual objects to sing and dance within the bounds of this golden cage, are we not the most progressive societies in the world?” A narrative constructed to obscure that our ancestors fought tooth and nail for even this pittance of survival. To liberals, our existence is a luxury of empire, a vice to be enjoyed and disposed of the moment it hinders the maintenance and expansion of the empire. Even so-called “Safe Haven” states are already beginning to crack under the pressure of the empire’s expansion of hyper-exploitation at home to offset imperialist losses abroad. This is demonstrated by Gavin Newsom’s openly spreading anti-trans propaganda, despite being the governor of California, the country’s largest and most economically independent “Safe Haven” state. The Democrats cannot save us, they won’t even try. Belief in this bourgeois party is not merely naive: the perpetuation of this false consciousness is actively suffocating the struggle for trans liberation. 

In the face of the Trump administration’s open displays of brutality against transgender people, a majority within this undeveloped portion of the trans community cried, “This is the end!” While this despair and frustration is a genuine reaction to the trauma of systematic violence being inflicted on our population, waving the white flag at the mere declaration of an exterminationist war will get us nowhere, and neither will naive worship of the Democrats or the pursuit of spontaneous action. Liberalism’s fetishization of “civil disobedience” has even led some courageous trans women to engage in individual protests of anti-trans laws, such as bathroom bans, only to be locked up in men’s jails with limited political effect. Although conditions are dire, what we need now is not action, but organization. 

On “Safe Haven” States

“We raised a lot of hell back when STAR first started, even if it was just a few of us. We ate and slept demonstrations, planning demonstrations. We’d go from one demo to another, the same day. We were doing what we believed in. And what we’re doing now, the few of us who are willing to unsettle people and ruffe up feathers, is what we believe in doing. We have to do it because we can no longer stay invisible. We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are. We have to show the world that we are numerous. There are many of us out there.”

Sylvia Rivera, Queens in Exile, the Forgotten Ones, 2002

Amidst this total war, the crumb of safety that Democrats have offered transgender people is the so-called “Safe Haven” state. States have earned this title by passing legislation that prevents the extradition of transgender people, their parents, or medical providers of transition related care, to states that criminalize trans existence and social reproduction. These states vary in what additional protections they may have for transgender people. Some have a full suite of laws covering insurance to discrimination, while others provide no additional protections. Of the 16 “Safe Haven” states currently in existence, a majority overlap with the 11 most expensive states to live in within the United States. Despite the fact that the transgender population is made up primarily of the precariat and lumpen classes, liberals proudly tout these silver palaces as oases for our people.

This is by no means a new narrative. We have heard this mythology before about the liberation that queer people would find in San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles in the 60’s and 70’s. While queer inhabitants of these areas could find a sense of freedom in finally being with their own people, they knew the truth: they were not free, but merely tolerated as long as they remained within the stark confines of their ghetto. As Carl Wittman describes in Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto:

San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals. We have fled here from every part of the nation, and like refugees elsewhere, we came not because it is so great here, but because it was so bad there. By the tens of thousands, we fled small towns where to be ourselves would endanger our jobs and any hope of a decent life; we have fled from blackmailing cops, from families who disowned or ‘tolerated’ us; we have been drummed out of the armed services, thrown out of schools, fired from jobs, beaten by punks and policemen.

And we have formed a ghetto, out of self-protection. It is a ghetto rather than a free territory because it is still theirs. Straight cops patrol us, straight legislators govern us, straight employers keep us in line, straight money exploits us. We have pretended everything is OK, because we haven’t been able to see how to change it – we’ve been afraid.

Although “Safe Haven” states position themselves as sanctuaries, the legal safety they provide lacks any real stability due to its reliance on the sustained political interest of the settler, labor aristocratic, and petit-bourgeois classes in our struggle. Central to these classes’ material interest is property value, which serves as an abstracted system used for the dual purpose of determining the existing value of the amount of labor and capital that has been invested in the land and predicting future investment. This existing value emerges out of the colonial exploitation of the land and subjugation of hyper-exploited populations, which is the constant capital of settler-colonial social relations. The predicted future value of investment assumes ever increasing levels of exploitation of both natural resources and human labor. This is why discussions of homelessness coincide with discussions of property value. The presence of homelessness subverts colonial ideals of the country’s purity (causing potential class treason amongst their ranks of the elite), actively drains the resources of local settlements, and the potential of their organization is posed a legitimate threat to the landed classes that keep them in this constant position of desperation. The migration of transgender people to these states is a very real material threat to property value. Our precarity as a population forces us into proletarian labor, prostitution,⁸ and homelessness due to our broad lack of social safety networks. The constant stress of survival leads in turn to higher rates of addiction as alcohol, weed, etc. are used as a means to alleviate the mental and physical pain we endure. While our concentration provides an opportunity for landlords, the bourgeoisie, and petit-bourgeoisie to profit from our hyper-exploitation, it also provides us the means to organize and harness our population’s revolutionary potential.

To counteract this, states will use coercive means, such as the police and social services, to gradually confine their transgender populations into easily observable and manageable areas. Just as with our ancestors and the colonized peoples of so-called Amerika, the class contradictions of our society at play will produce the political conditions for our peoples’ ghettoization. With history guiding us, we must proactively subvert this trend. We must use the concentrations of our people to harness our collective wealth (what little we may have) and labor power to develop logistical networks through trans-led Communist organizations that will form the backbone of our struggle for liberation. Like Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries (STAR), we can develop the means to provide our people housing, healthcare, food, and security locally, with the goal of inevitably connecting regionally and nationally to shore up these supply lines in the long term. It is essential that we not fall into the snare trap that is mutual aid when engaging in this work. The key to preventing this organizational blunder is understanding that the oppressive systems at play will continually produce ever more transgender people in need of support. Rather than hope that our supply lines will hold against this ever increasing pressure, we must develop a fighting force capable of striking fast and true against the roots of this oppression. Each successful strike will ease the pressure and provide us with more maneuverability in our resources and organizational capacity. Our people did not ask for this war, but we will be the ones to end it. To do so, we must prepare ourselves for an all out guerrilla war.

The Trans Guerrilla

“There are those who say: ‘I am a farmer’, or, ‘I am a student’; ‘I can discuss literature but not military arts.’ This is incorrect. There is no profound difference between the farmer and the soldier. You must have courage. You simply leave your farms and become soldiers. That you are farmers is of no difference, and if you have education, that is so much the better. When you take your arms in hand, you become soldiers; when you are organized, you become military units.”

Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla War, Chapter 5, 1937

“What is the relationship of guerrilla warfare to the people? Without a political goal, guerrilla warfare must fail, as it must, if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and their sympathy, co-operation, and assistance cannot be gained. The essence of guerrilla warfare is thus revolutionary in character.”

Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla War, Chapter 1, 1937

What primarily plagues our struggle today is not the methods of war waged against our people, but the festering disease of self-doubt. Any leftist or socialist organization that has achieved even a grain of political progress in the last 20 years is undoubtedly indebted to the labor of trans women. As a hyper-exploited population, transgender people are already primed for spontaneous revolutionary consciousness. The luxury of liberal idealism cannot last long when met with the clear headed material analysis necessary for survival. Although this lived experience makes clear the necessity of political struggle, trans youth doubt their own capacity to lead. When they join the Communist struggle, they most often offer their labor to one of the dozen different democratic-socialist organizations (DSA, CPUSA, PSL, FRSO, etc.) in the hopes that they will be educated in the ways and means of revolution. Instead of turning this revolutionary youth into cadres, these organizations work to actively suppress the revolutionary potential of our people by burning them out and exploiting their labor as secretaries, facilitators, propaganda officers, or recruiters. What our young comrades do not realize is that this labor makes them the true leadership of the revolutionary masses, not their feckless comrades whose 10-20 years of mass action tailing liberals has only served to prevent socialist revolution.

This is by no means a new phenomenon, as Sylvia Riveria notes:

“But in these struggles, in the Civil Rights movement, in the war movement, in the women’s movement, we were still outcasts. The only reason they tolerated the transgender community in some of these movements was because we were gung-ho, we were front liners. We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose. You all had rights. We had nothing to lose. I’ll be the first one to step on any organization, any politician’s toes if I have to, to get the rights for my community.”

Throughout her whole life as a revolutionary, Sylvia saw organizations time and again exploit the revolutionary energy of transgender people and then spit them out like used gum. Even the Gay and Lesbian liberation movements—who owe everything to their transgender forbearers—time and again chose personal gain over joint revolutionary struggle. This bourgeois nationalism still rears its ugly head in the form of queer anti-trans organizations. Its source being the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie, and labor aristocratic queers who believe they can use this war to curry favor with or replace members of the imperialist cisgender and heterosexual bourgeoisie. It is an active class struggle against socialist internationalism—and thus the cause of human liberation.

Our grandmothers Sylvia Riveria and Marsha P. Johnson may not have fought with weapons honed by Marxist theory, but they entered the struggle with a clear understanding that steadfast political leadership was needed within the trans, gay, and lesbian populations. The goal of STAR was not to achieve the crumbs of rights and respect, but to achieve revolution. While STAR did not start off as a Marxist-Leninist formation, it quickly became one, as Sylvia engaged in political dialogue with the leadership of the Young Lords and Black Panther Party. The Young Lords took STAR under their wings as a project their organization could put their resources into, putting to practice their theory that only through the joint struggle of all oppressed peoples can we bring about our collective liberation. Sadly, STAR did not last, but Leslie Feinburg and Sylvia Rivera carried on its banner and lessons of struggle until their untimely deaths. 

With reactionary forces bearing down upon us, we, the children of these struggles, must take on this banner and win the war once and for all. To do so, we must develop the means to secure our survival outside of the support from the state or any liberal institution. We must develop cadres that can bring the masses into our joint struggle for liberation, underground communication networks through digital encryption and physical dropbox networks, resource depots (which will form the backbone of a logistical network) to secure the supply of necessities to the people and our revolutionary fighters, basic physical and medical educational programs so cadre are fit to engage struggle they are met with, and we must develop cells within every pore of this country from which we can mount our organized counter-attack. When discussing revolution, people often get lost in the aesthetics of struggle; they imagine revolutionary fighters engaging in battle after battle with no break or set-up. They imagine that all one needs is a band of revolutionaries and rifles to force the new world out of the shell of the old. These fantasies are the birth of well intentioned, but naive hearts. Most of the work of a revolutionary army is logistics, followed by aiding in the work of the people by acting as a pool of concentrated labor, then engaging in direct confrontation with the enemies of the people. The People’s Liberation Army undoubtedly harvested more pounds of rice and millet than can be counted in spent bullet casings. A Communist party is nothing more than the rationalized organization of the people’s collective will, for every gain of the people is a gain for the party, for every loss of the people is a loss for the party. Only through unwavering dedication and service to the people can we have any hope for success in our revolutionary struggle.

For most so-called Communist formations in the imperial core, the goal is not to become servants of the people, but rather to achieve moral salvation by engaging in liberal bourgeois politics with a red coat of paint. They claim they are serving the revolution by tailing the mass actions of settler, labor aristocratic, and petit-bourgeois classes. When confronted with the needs and strategies for genuine socialist struggle they balk; while they play pretend at being revolutionaries, our people are actively being murdered by individuals and a system that seeks our total eradication. The time for patience is long over, now is the time to call their bluff. If you as a transgender person find yourself in a position of leadership in a self declared revolutionary organization, press them to take on this war against our people with the utmost seriousness; when they refuse, destroy them by taking every disciplined cadre they have to form a local Communist organization. If you as a transgender person are not yet in the struggle, then form a Marxist reading group of your friends and follow this guide; with time and dedication, this too will become a Communist organization. The more of these organizations we form, the stronger the eventual party that emerges from them will be. Like a spider’s web, each node will be able to support the other, and soon enough we’ll have the foundations for genuinely revolutionary mass action. 

The time this will take may not sit easy. With the war raging on, the desire for action in our people is like an overwhelming and nausea inducing pain, but as a soldier you must endure. Although we were caught off-guard by this war, that does not mean we have lost. As long as there are transgender people still breathing, as long as revolutionary cells are still fighting, we shall remain on the path towards victory. Guerrilla war is not total war, it is a war of annihilation. Our numbers are far too small to attempt to destroy our enemy in one decisive blow, rather we must destroy their forces piece by piece. As Mao says, “Injuring all of a man’s ten fingers is not as effective as chopping off one, and routing ten enemy divisions is not as effective as annihilating one of them.”⁹ Quantitative changes eventually form qualitative differences. Just as a few droplets of water will eat through a stone, so too will our every success eat through the forces of our enemies, diminishing their capacity and will to fight until they inevitably collapse under their own weight. Through dedicated struggle we will win; it is simply a matter of having the courage to seize the time!

Footnotes

1. Stalin, J. V., 1913. Marxism and the National Question, Chapter 2. ︎
2. Zir works such as Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left, are essential readings regarding the history of Trans and queer liberation and the struggles relation to the Communist movement. ︎
3. Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) is one of the most common forms of transition related medical care for trangender people. The treatment produces a wide range of changes to one’s secondary sexual characteristics, bringing them broadly in alignment with their cisgender counterparts. ︎
4. This phenomenon is most well known in the trans panic defense, where men blame transgender women for their own assault and murder on the basis that discovering their transness is a justifiable basis for violent reaction. Oftentimes this defense works due to rampant trans-misogyny upheld in the judicial system, reinforced by police who treat our victimhood as an impossibility. To the courts transgender people are self-made victims whose very existence is an act of deceit, and this violence is justified in its use against us, but violence is not justified in our defense.
   Fields, Shawn E. 2021. “The Elusiveness of Self-Defense for the Black Transgender Community,” Nevada Law Journal 21 (3): 982;992-993. https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/nlj/vol21/iss3/4 ︎
5. Transgender people are frequent victims of violence, with higher rates among transgender women, and the highest among black transgender women. Faced with the dual violence of patriarchal and national oppression, which is enforced by both these systems’ benefactors and the state, black transgender women are given no choice but to act in their own self-defense. This defense, although rational and necessary, is treated as an intentional act of violence by the judicial system that then often charges them with assault and premeditated murder. ibid., 975-978. ︎
6. This systematic sexual violence is known as V-Coding where “transgender women [are placed] in cells with aggressive cisgender male inmates as a form of social control.” The sexual violence is further perpetuated by male staff within these prisons, who regularly use their position of power to dehumanize and violate transgender women. It is by far the most common experience of the prison system for transgender women (Kulak, 2018, pgs. 314-316). When not being made the subject of sexual violence, transgender people are forced into solitary confinement as punishment or for so-called “protection” (ibid., pgs. 316-318). These daily tortures are made even more extreme by the routine physical and psychological violence of the regular denial (or sporadic provision) of transition related medical care (ibid., pgs. 318-320). Kulak, Ash Olli. 2018. “Locked Away in SEG “For Their Own Protection”: How Congress Gave Federal Corrections the Discretion to House Transgender (Trans) Inmates in Gender-Inappropriate Facilities and Solitary Confinement,” Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality, Vol. 6, Iss. 2, Article 6: 314-320. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ijlse/vol6/iss2/6 ︎
7. When faced with horrific dehumanization and attacks by Republicans after being elected to office, including a bathroom ban and congressional policies to enforce the misgendering of both herself and the various transgender staff who work for Congress, Sarah McBride argued that anti-trans attacks are a distraction by Republicans and that the Democratic party would have to be more open to an anti-trans political project as fighting on behalf of transgender people “impedes the very needed path toward winning electorally…” (González, 2025). A true statement that inadvertently reveals the Democrats true political base: self-conscious exploiters and reactionaries. González, Oriana. 2025. “Inside Democrats’ Reshuffling on Trans Issues.” Them. https://www.them.us/story/notus-inside-democrats-reshuffling-on-trans-issues ︎
8. Why prostitution and not “sex work”? Sex work and prostitution come from two different class positions; the former being a proletarian position of socially reproductive labor that one can leave due to having access to some form of class mobility, and the latter being a form of systematic sexual assault forced upon a hyper-exploited population (primarily women facing dual oppressions). Sylvia Rivera considered it key to understand that “We don’t want to be out there sucking dick and getting fucked up the ass. But that’s the only alternative that we have to survive because the laws do not give us the right to go and get a job the way we feel comfortable. I do not want to go to work looking like a man when I know I am not a man.”(Rivera, 2001) and “Unfortunately, many of us have to live by night, because of the lack of laws or protections. A lot of transwomen are standing out on street corners or working clubs. And many of them are highly educated, with college degrees. Many of us have to survive by selling our bodies. If you can’t get a job, you have to do whatever it takes to live.” (Rivera, 2002). The trauma of being forced to sell your body to survive, coupled with the constant threat of assault and murder, drove many trans women in the 70s and 80s to addiction and premature deaths. Something only partially elevated with material gains in the 90s and 2000s. Rivera, Sylvia, 2001.” Bitch on Wheels.” Color Collective Press; Rivera, Sylvia, 2002. “Queens in Exile: The Forgotten Ones.” GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary. ︎
9. Mao, Zedong, 1936. “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War,” Chapter 5, Section 9, ¶1. ︎

“Commodities begin to be exchanged because of an act of will: their owners agree to dispose of them reciprocally. In the meantime, people gradually come to rely on use-objects produced by others. Constant repetition makes exchange into a normal social process.”

“Our commodity owners learn, then, that the same division of labor that makes them into independent private producers also makes the social production process — and their relations within it — independent of them, the producers themselves: they learn that their independence from one another emerges in and is complemented by a system of all-around dependence on things produced by other people.”

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

Recently, Cde. Potato published a work in Red Clarion entitled “No One is Coming to Feed Us.” While the piece brings to the forefront important issues regarding food supply chains in the United States, its surface level analysis coupled with individualistic calls to action reflect a deeply disruptive tendency within the contemporary communist movement. This paper serves as a substantive critique to the faulty theoretical lines of thought contained within Cde. Potato’s piece, while also providing a new framework for systematically addressing political issues that will aid us in our struggle to obtain political power and bring about a socialist state.

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

As communists, using scientific analysis of contemporary and historical social relations to determine the correct path of revolutionary struggle is the key aspect of our work. What differentiates Marxism from other pseudo-intellectual attempts at social analysis is that humans are not prescribed natures as independent actors or socially dependent subjects, but are understood in their contradictory truth as both. As an individual you can act in ways that benefit both yourself and those around you. You can go vegan, reduce food waste and compost the rest, and even plant native flowers to help local pollinators. The issue with individual action lies not in its moral nature as a good thing that you should do, but in its quantitative relation to broader society. One person going vegan in a country of over three hundred million is going to have a negligible effect on average consumption habits and their subsequent environmental impacts. However, local concentrations of thousands of vegans and a national population of over a million can begin to introduce qualitative changes in broader society. This is the dialectical nature of social development.

Historical progressions in social-economic relations keenly reflect this process. The bourgeoisie did not always exist, nor did they simply emerge from the mist to bring about a new age of gunpowder and roaring steel. Instead they emerged slowly out of the contradictions of feudal society. These small groups of proto-bourgeois eventually found one another and began to organize towards the interests of their class. Bit by bit the bourgeoisie concentrated and began to disrupt the feudalist biospheres. By the time feudalist society caught onto this process it was already too late to prevent the capitalist age. Feudalist classes had two options: they could either consign themselves to a slow death or face the guillotine. The bourgeois eventually won their class war through bitter struggle and brought about the contemporary age, in which capitalism has subsumed and guaranteed the death of all former social divisions of labor.

Anyone who calls themselves a communist must understand this process, as it is by the same means which we will bring about communism. There are no shortcuts or tricks that allow us to avoid direct confrontation and simply declare the world anew. We are as much subjects to history as we are its progenitors. Winning our war with the bourgeoisie will necessitate a strict dedication to proven revolutionary strategies and the scientific development of new tactics informed by historic failures and contemporary material conditions. The population of cadres politically developed enough to engage in such a struggle may still be small in number, but just as the bourgeoisie and feudal lords before them, we will achieve our social revolution through quantitative action.

Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for our movement. In the face of the end of unimpeded imperialist expansion, the liberal mask of the American empire has fallen. The bourgeoisie have turned their gaze to the core in the hopes that by ripping out the copper wire and using the floorboards as fuel they can hold out against a global turn towards anti-imperialism. We have seen this self-destructive tendency emerge in several ways. On the international scale, the American bourgeoisie have begun to forcibly open up the empire’s vassal states for rapid and brutal economic exploitation. This has primarily emerged through the use of economic crises induced via tariffs, the threat of annexing territories, and the move to end NATO to demonstrate the European bourgeoisie’s reliance on the United States as an occupational force. While these moves have shocked liberals within the imperial core, they are simply a continuation of the empire’s shift towards open imperialist brutality. The longstanding strategy of obscuring the violence necessary to maintain the settler and aristocratic laboring classes has been replaced with an ideological drive toward fervent celebration of complicity in the brutal murder of the globally hyper-exploited. With socialist and anti-imperialist resistance drastically reducing the ratio of surplus-value that can be extracted from the third world, the first world has been turned to as a fresh store of labor and resources prime for rapid primitive accumulation. 

On the national scale, we have seen the violent enforcement of the patriarchal social division of labor through the targeting of transgender people as a third sexed class. Making state backed and extralegal violence against transgender people an acceptable social reality makes all deviations from gendered norms, particularly those done by women (trans or otherwise), a viable marker for increased levels of exploitation. Regarding the nationally oppressed, the state has abandoned the policy of courting select segments of these populations to increase their tokenistic representation in the exploitative classes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and aristocratic labor to justify the continued brutal immiseration of the vast majority of their populations; replacing it with the open and fetishized brutality of their hyper-exploitation. This too is not unprecedented. Over the last two decades the state has forced migrant laborers into increasingly precarious conditions of survival through the slow erosion of legal protections, the expansion of surveillance, encouragement of settlers enacting extralegal violence, and the expansion of administrative violence through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Conditions of precarity that have forced this population into becoming a slave-like class of hyper-exploited laborers.

With capitalism’s barbarism now laid bare, millions have been galvanized to take action against these systems of exploitation. While the revolutionary energy of this moment is undoubtable, the ability of any of these movements to effectively harness them to bring about lasting social change is doubtable at best. Once again liberals squander this energy through haphazard and disorganized fits of reaction, such as the recent “economic blackout” that excluded small businesses from their supposed boycott of the American economy, or the national “hands off” protest which included an ideologically muddled list of complaints and no real demands. Those who have yet developed socialist consciousness mistake these protest movements as the means to develop and consolidate power. However, their lack of organization and long term planning leads to apathetic nihilism among the masses when the movements inevitably fail to achieve any of their idealistic goals. As long as there is no a communist party to lead the masses and uplift them from base trade union consciousness, these spontaneous actions will continue to act as a roadblock in the path of socialist struggle. To seriously address these crises requires us to direct our efforts away from spontaneous action, and towards the extensive construction of the communist movement’s organizational capacity. 

You can engage in this work by joining or organizing a local Marxist Leninist book club. After building up a solid base of educated and militantly consistent cadres can you then direct your organizations capacity around a central project, whether that be communal gardening, mutual aid, becoming an anti-ice rapid response network, etc. This tiered process of development will provide you the means to effectively harness local revolutionary energy to not only enact social change, but to slowly institutionalize your organization as a node of political power. This essential work on the micro level will aid in the eventual consolidation of these nodes into a communist party that can harness our collective power towards dismantling the empire once and for all. While the struggle may seem daunting, revolutions have never been won in a single decisive blow. Rather they have succeeded against all odds by dismantling the enemy piece by piece.

The Conquest of Crumbs

As communists in the heart of the imperialist core, there is a vast array of issues we must address to build the foundations for socialism. A key issue that is rapidly exacerbating social contradictions is capitalism’s tendency towards ecological destruction through the metabolic rift. Current production processes and consumptive demands outstrip our environment’s ability to reproduce the raw resources these commodities rely upon. A process from which we have witnessed the total destruction of biomes through pollution, over extraction, and the mass eradication of hundreds of species. Faced with the existential threat that climate change poses, the global bourgeoisie was faced with a choice: either perpetuate the capitalist system by having the state intervene in the process of accumulation so as to restabilize the environment’s process of self-reproduction, or remove all fetters and pursue accumulation at any cost in the hopes some miracle cure for climate change will come along. Being nothing more than soulless husks that physically embody the spirit of capital, the bourgeoisie enthusiastically chose the latter. The ramifications of which have only just begun to hit the insulated imperial core. As Cde. Potato notes in their work No One is Coming to Feed Us, the rapid spread of pollution, disease, coupled with climate change are overlapping factors that will cause serious disruptions in food supply chains. Conditions that require us to face a serious question, who will feed the people?

Cde. Potato’s answer to this question is rather slapdash. Instead of outlining tactics and strategies by which local orgs could begin building the logistical means to feed the masses, we are given six individualist actions one can take to help bring about ecosocialism.

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

1. Grow your own food as much as possible to get a functional understanding of what your local ecosystem can produce
2. Support the food sovereignty of Indigenous communities by learning about what they are already doing
3. Support migrant farm workers by learning about what they are already doing
4. Organize to end child labor and prison labor through boycotts, advocacy, and direct action
5. Support local farms with an emphasis on perennials and orchards. Trees take YEARS to replace, these are the farms we can’t afford to lose
6. Recognize that “farmer” is not a specific term that automatically means petit bourgeois. Focus on the ownership class of agribusiness or Big Ag.

The author’s call for everyone to learn how to not just grow their own food, but to can and preserve this food on their own demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how systematic this issue truly is. This call for individual and small group preparation for a food crisis calls to mind the settler-colonial prepper mindset more than an effective socialist strategy. There will never be the spontaneous emergence of enough gardeners and small scale farmers to feed the people. These pressing conditions require a deeper centralization of agricultural production, not its decentralization.

Let’s say that you, as an individual, want to become more independent from national and international bourgeois agricultural production. So you decide to grow some potatoes in your backyard. Let’s assume you’ve got a natural green thumb and through hard work you’re able to produce 80 potatoes each containing about 100 calories. Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day, that would result in only a 1.09% decrease in your caloric dependency. If you were to compare the value of each potato given the labor time it took to till the soil, add fertilizer, consistently water them, cover them with leaves so they don’t freeze, harvest them, etc., the amount of labor stored within each potato would far outweigh the price of any you could buy at the store. Attempting to produce your own food at home, while a lovely hobby, is a complete waste of socially productive labor, as the socially necessary labor time to produce these products at scale will always be far outside your capacity as an individual laborer.

If you wanted to reduce your dependency by 10% you’d have to produce at least 73,000 calories, and spread that caloric intake across several nutritional sources such as onions, potatoes, rice, and beans. Of course this work would be made easier in a collective, but doing so comes with exponentially increasing costs. If each person is working towards the same goal you have to produce 73,000 calories for every member within the collective, divided across X number of crops, times an array of values for each crop’s individual requirements for land, water, and labor time necessary to produce a decent yield. Not to mention the financial costs of tools, seeds, etc. Taking on such a monumental task requires one to effectively answer several questions. For example, how are you acquiring enough land to grow that many crops? The majority of people do not own several acres to just start a farm. Even in suburban areas you’d require several front-and-back yards worth of land to feed more than a handful of people. Furthermore, which members of the working class have enough free time to dedicate themselves to farming on top of their jobs and domestic labor? Existing subsistence farmers still rely on the daily work of the whole family to produce enough food to eat or trade to maintain themselves. Finally, where will you obtain the money to maintain this project? Your comrades may be able to chip in through dues, and perhaps well-off members of your community may donate to such a noble cause. Yet, as soon as a financial crisis hits your pool of funds will dry up. There is simply no way to succeed on this path without the substantial support of an emergent socialist state.

When it comes to Indigenous food sovereignty Cde. Potato tells readers to research what their local Indigenous groups are, offer up support for their food sovereignty projects, and to “…shift your mindset to default the authority on agriculture and land management away from profit-driven science and towards Indigenous knowledge.” While it is good for comrades to know the conditions of their local tribes, the lack of direction given shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of these tribes. Indigenous organizations already have to deal with the incessant ignorance of well meaning liberal “allies” that come to the table with no means or tools to aid tribes in their liberatory struggle, yet demand to be educated and cultivated as activists so they can achieve moral salvation. As communists we must avoid adding to this feckless pool of good samaritans, and instead work to achieve the organizational capacity to work with these tribes in coalition. To have cadres who can be put to work using spades to put spuds in the ground or be an active presence to help in the protection of Indigenous farmers from settler violence. 

Beyond this lack of political activation, Cde. Potato refuses to explain what the struggle for food sovereignty looks like in the United States. In the place of such an explanation readers are given a collage of random news articles about Indigenous organizations, federal programs, and small businesses, with no context given for what each meaningfully does in the long term struggle for tribes sovereign management of their own food production, consumption, and distribution. No thought is given to the ways in which ecological colonization, the capitalist enclosure of land, and the genocidal destruction of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and traditions has made many tribes’ traditional food systems nearly impossible to reproduce. Nor is there consideration given to the fact that not all tribes have a strong traditional relationship to agricultural production. Take the Northern Arapaho tribe. Situated in the plains, the tribe’s primary form of caloric intake came from hunting local wildlife and gathering wild grown food. This in turn led to periods of extreme precarity before the introduction of the horse and gunpowder rifle guaranteed a more consistent means to sustain the tribe on wild game (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 74-75). The same level of nutritional variety and food security did not rematerialize until the 1940’s with the emergence of family gardens and increased levels of small game hunting. Gains that were again swept away within a few decades due to capitalist and colonial encroachment (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 78-80). While contemporary efforts such as the Growing Resilience project on the Wind River Reservation was able to achieve some gains in food sovereignty through the development of home food gardens, further efforts are still drastically constrained by extremely limited access to resources and capital.

To understand what role we as communists can play in the work to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty it’s important to first contextualize the project within contemporary material conditions. Food sovereignty represents several political goals in one project: tribes securing access to plentiful and healthy food, the ecologically sustainable production of this food, and the means to develop agricultural production in relation to their own needs and ambitions. While each is key to achieving the political project as a whole, most Indigenous people in the United States struggle with either hunger or being able to regularly obtain nutritious and healthy food, so of central importance to the current struggle is securing access to food. When food sovereignty is brought up by non-Indigenous people the focus is rarely on ending the systematic colonial violence that is the infliction of hunger on Indigenous populations, rather the ecological benefits of Indigenous food systems are made to be the main focus. This is because liberal interests lie not in aiding Indigenous people in their struggle, but using their knowledge to save the Bourgeois and the settler-colonial classes that served as their foot soldiers from the environmental catastrophe they themselves brought about. 

Despite these ideals placed on the back of Indigenous tribes they currently do not have the means to fix over two centuries of genocidal environmental destruction. The level of development required for tribes to achieve food sovereignty may at first look nothing like the ideals of ecological stability or growing crops native to a geographic area. It may very well require industrial levels of agricultural development owned, operated, and managed by the tribes themselves. Instead of family and community gardens that feed a handful of people, it may look like the efficient use of socially productive labor through the implementation of heavy machinery, greenhouses, and a variety of other large scale forms of agricultural production. The burden of fixing climate change alongside feeding not just their people, but everyone who will remain on Turtle Island, is a burden that should not be placed solely on the back of these nationally oppressed peoples who are pushed to the absolute extremes of precarity. To expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fix the ongoing environmental catastrophe forced upon them with nothing but a small amount of individual financial, moral, or volunteer support, is not merely an absurdity, but outright cruelty.

If communists are genuinely interested in helping to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty, then we have to develop the means to materially support them. The collective efforts of a communist club can do far more to aid these tribes than any individual deciding on a whim to look into what’s going on. A club could work with food sovereignty projects by helping to organize a donation drive, volunteering club members labor to help build and maintain gardens or farms, or find other ways to provide material and logistical support like offering car rides or free mechanical maintenance. Instead of this ceaseless chatter about what Indigenous sovereignty could do for us, we should be figuring out what we can do at scale to aid in their struggles and fight to restore their land.

When addressing the conditions of migrant farm workers, Cde. Potato again refrains from fully addressing what these conditions are and how readers can engage in migrant workers struggles. The only direction readers are given is to follow United Farm Workers (UFW) “for updates and attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training if you can.” Information that is only useful if you live in California, as the UFW has little to no organizational presence outside of the state. Further, this call to action yet again shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of self-organized migrant workers. Workers who are expected to trust absolute strangers with not just their personal safety, but the safety of their family. An astounding amount of trust has to be given for these workers to tell a stranger they’re a migrant, particularly when ICE agents are rounding folks up while in plain clothes and many white people are more than happy to report migrants so they can take part in the spectacle of state enacted colonial violence.

Migrant workers can be found in every state of the country, doing not only local agricultural work, but much of the hard physical labor of proletarian jobs that the broad swath of Americans are totally uninterested in doing. Just as these workers can be found in every state so too can you find organizations fighting to improve their material conditions. Some states may have orgs dedicated to this specific struggle or chapters of national organizations such as the ACLU may have rapid response networks of trained legal observers who can show up to ICE raids to inform people of their rights and do everything within their legal ability to prevent an abduction. As an individual it is far more useful for you to get in contact with one of these orgs so they can train you and put you to use in the local struggle rather than simply keeping up on the news. What migrant workers need is not self-educated sympathy, what they need is organized groups of people who will fight to protect them from the violence of their employers and the settler-colonial police force that is ICE. Politically centralized orgs, even in some of the most rural and conservative states, have been able to use long term strategic planning to prevent both deportations and the construction of ICE detention centers. The only way migrants can regain any sense of stability is through the support of highly organized groups that provide safety through rapid-response networks, legal support, volunteer translators, or even the provision of daily necessities such as food and water.

Child and prison labor are similarly under-discussed by Cde. Potato. Child labor is nothing new to capitalist development. Whether it be in the cotton mills, coal mines, or modern day meat processing plants, the blood of child laborers has long served as a fountain of youth for the dead labor known as capital. Liberalism’s main function in the United States has been to obscure the violent exploitation contained within nearly every commodity so that aristocratic laborers can consume them without guilt, so they can eat their $10 cheeseburger without once thinking about the child who lost their hand carving up the flesh they now so greedily consume. The reappearance of such overt exploitation in the imperial core is merely a sign that the imperialist super-profits that once protected America’s aristocratic laboring class from such conditions have drastically eroded. All this change means is that to maintain current rates of surplus-labor extraction within the imperial core now requires adult laborers’ direct competition with child labor. This will continually get worse until we bring about socialism. Cde. Potato also engages in the longstanding myth that prison labor is a profitable enterprise, and thus believes a boycott could do anything to affect it. Prisons in America do not exist to produce a profit, but primarily serve to suppress and concentrate the nationally oppressed and precariat so as to sequester their classes revolutionary potential. The carceral state is a central foundation for maintaining the imperial settler-colonial state. These conditions cannot be ended without engaging in long term socialist struggle.

If feeding people is a genuine concern and if, as Cde. Potato argues, supporting local farmers is imperative to achieving this goal, then we must undertake a serious analysis of their needs and character as a class.  Despite Cde. Potato’s claims to the contrary, farmers are a petit-bourgeois class. Renting land, tools, and having to buy fertilizer do not disqualify farmers from membership in this class. If renting one’s constant capital is all it takes to not be a member of the petit-bourgeois class, then the local cafe or bakery owner is also a member of the working class because they have to rent the building in which their business operates. Whether they own or lease the land, becoming a farmer still requires having access to the capital and labor necessary to not just start their farm, but maintain ownership of it through the exploitation of surplus labor. This labor may come from their unpaid family members, migrant workers, or seasonal agricultural workers. Whatever the case may be, they actively engage in exploitation and thus cannot be labeled as peasants, proletarians, or even aristocratic laborers. Further, Their reliance on government subsidies and the willingness of locals to buy their produce at higher prices places them in a reactionary position against both the bourgeoisie and those that seek to overturn the state. Without state intervention their class would be fully subsumed by what Cde. Potato describes as “Big Ag.” Not only are they petit-bourgeois, but they serve as an active force of colonization.

It is a simple fact that anyone who owns land in the United States is an active participant in settler colonialism. On the east coast this participation is rarely seen and felt as there the tribes’ physical, social, and historical relationship to the land have been the most thoroughly eradicated. It is in the West, wherein lies the largest concentration of reservations, that we witness continuous acts of heinous violence inflicted on Indigenous populations. Police, white workers, ranchers, and farmers regularly engage in the trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of Indigenous peoples. White settlements built on reservation land expand themselves to further exploit native people and resources, while the means of social reproduction is restrained to conditions of utter desperation within the tribes. These conditions of precarity provide an opportunity for settlers to engage in further exploitation by getting Indigenous people addicted to drugs and alcohol. The war against Indigenous people never ended in the United States, the same tactics and tendencies have been in continuous use by colonizers for well over 500 years. Liberal society simply chooses to wash away the blood on its hands by silencing Indigenous voices and sequestering their violent subjugation to the least populated areas of the country. 

Local farmers are just, if not more, guilty of perpetuating this systematic violence. They have no legitimate claim to the land they till and grow food on beyond that which is enforced by the settler-colonial state. The right of eminent domain makes this relationship clear, as any land can be claimed by the state for the expansion of infrastructure to benefit the military and the national means of production. This makes their class one of highly concentrated, yet split reaction against all those who may attempt to expropriate their land and capital, i.e., the industrial bourgeois, the state, and Indigenous tribes.  This is why as communists we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the anarchist tendency to reduce every class and struggle to that of David and Goliath. Just because a class of people views the bourgeoisie as a threat does not mean that they are our ally in the socialist struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie’s reliance on the capitalist system of exchange to maintain their means of production and access to a wide pool of exploitable labor puts them in a natural opposition to the socialist cause. Even if that were not the case, Lenin’s critique of the cooperative movement remains a salient reminder of why we must struggle against these anarchist tendencies contained within Cde. Potato’s work:

“Do you really think that the capitalist world will pave the way for the cooperative movement? Capitalism will try to take power over the cooperatives by any means necessary. This ‘anti-authoritarian’ cooperative group of English workers will be crushed in the most ruthless way possible and will be made into servants of capital. They will depend on capital via a thousand threads so that the newly created trend, which you sympathize so much with, will be caught as in a spider’s web. Pardon me, but all of that is unimportant! Those are all details! What is needed is direct action of the masses, and as long as that is not happening, nothing can be said about federalism, communism or social revolutions. Those are all children’s toys, prattling without any firm ground under our feet, without power, without means, and it does not bring us any step closer to our social aims.”

Vladimir Lenin, A meeting between V.I. Lenin and P.A. Kropotkin

Capitalism will not allow you to leave its social relations! You can free yourself as much from their overwhelming pressure using collective farming, housing, cooking, etc. as a submarine can free itself from the pressure in the Mariana Trench by opening up its hatch. The capitalist class will smash you into mush just as it has done with every attempt at individualist revolution for well over two centuries. The choice is simple. Engage in vanguardist organization, or die being remembered for nothing but hindering the revolutionary movement. In order to win, these petit-bourgeois anarchist fantasies must be smothered in their bed, before we lose another decade to their cult worship of spontaneous and individual action.

If you want power you have to think as if you already have it. You have to think about how resources will be transported, you have to think about how people will be supported, think about where funds will come from, think about how to maintain people’s morale, and you have to take your enemies seriously. If we take for granted the fact that local farmers’ agricultural production will be of key logistical importance in the revolutionary struggle, then to prevent local farmers’ total capture by reactionary forces our short term strategy must be to direct the energy of their class struggle against our mutual enemies. Such work has already been done in getting farmers to join the ecological struggle against the construction of pipelines by arguing against the use of eminent domain and demonstrating to them how their farm could be destroyed if a leakage were to occur. Further work can be done to organize the struggle against factory farms due to their mass production of and spread of livestock diseases. Gaining the full trust of these farmers in the socialist cause will necessitate the construction of a sophisticated party that has the logistical means to ensure their goods are transported and traded at a fair price, can secure the maintenance of their means of production, and possibly reduce the economic pressures they face by providing free technical, mechanical, or physical labor through party cadres. To manage this contradiction of aiding this settler class and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, the emergent socialist state’s mass agricultural production must be placed under the management of Indigenous experts. Through this process the land and capital of industrial agriculture can be expropriated into the hands of Indigenous tribes, providing the foundation for the eventual expropriation of all settler-controlled land for the benefit of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples.

This paper is not a condemnation or a call to shy away from the necessary work to provide food security for the masses. It is however a call for comrades to recognize the path to do so is not an easy one with simple solutions. Taking on the task to feed the people is a vital struggle for our movement to take on, and doing so will significantly aid the development of our logistical capacity and political power. If your club or organization is interested in taking on this work then you should follow these steps: first, ensure you have developed the institutional means to take on and cultivate new cadres. If local needs outstrip your organization’s capacity and it collapses, that will harm the movement far more than developing the essential skill of patience within your cadres. Second, secure a regular supply of food through donations, organizational funds, or whatever means are at your disposal. Third, find and build connections with those in your area who lack the means to secure food on a regular basis. Learn their stories, struggles, and work to find out what they want and need. Fourth, connect with other organizations doing this work. Ask how they’ve come to their current strategy, what has worked and what’s failed, see if there’s any way you can support one another.

The struggle for a socialist world is not a game and there is no salve by which we can fix all the harm capitalism has brought upon humanity. The only path for liberation is to engage in massive struggle propelled through the people. As communists our responsibility is to become a collective leadership the masses can trust, to not just courageously overturn the present, but to safely guide them through this tempest with vision unclouded by idealism. When the people ask the question of who will come to feed them, our goal must be that it comes with the quick reply, “The party is here to feed you.”

Citations

Arthur, Melvin, and Christine Porter. 2019. “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 9 (2): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.012.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1902) 1961. What Is to Be Done? Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press.