This essay is an initial response as USU plans to publish a full critique of the article in the coming days.

I will attempt to illustrate my point using feminism as an example. Feminism and decolonial theory are in fact very similar, in that they are bodies of thought developed to address a specific axis of oppression for one section of society. As Marxists, we utilize feminism to understand the complex gender politics at play within society, between men and non-men of different classes and between men and non-men of the same class. Within the class of the proletariat there exist both men and non-men, and patriarchy not only complicates their relationship to one that is at times antagonistic, it shapes the form of the class. The struggle against patriarchy is a class struggle because the patriarchal relation is a relation of power and power is a function that is expressed through the class structure of society. The bourgeois class is overwhelmingly comprised of men. This is no coincidence, and feminism helps us understand this reality.

Decolonial theory, as utilized by Marxists, attempts to do the same thing, but for race, ethnicity, or nationality instead of gender. When the vast majority of the bourgeois class is made up of white people, it is, again, no coincidence, and it is critical to understand how this came to be and why it continues to be.

We can compare those who deny the importance of decolonial theory to those who deny the importance of feminism. For example, we can draw a direct parallel between the Communist Party of Great Britain calling “trans ideology” anti-materialist to J. Sykes calling decolonial theory a petit-bourgeois distortion. It is a lazy, dishonest, and anti-intellectual stance that refuses to engage earnestly with the study of the class struggle these misguided “Marxists” claim to be waging.

The failure of the Communist movement to contend with the realities of gender emancipation and national liberation are critical errors of the past century of struggle. The failure to contend with the particularities of these relations is one of the primary reasons why the U.S. working class has come nowhere near revolution in this country’s entire history. As such, it is absolutely critical for Communist organizations in this country to put forward a comprehensive and complete understanding of these concepts if they hope to be successful.

How does this failure manifest? It manifests in the simplification of the idea of class and of class struggle.

When learning the basics of any new field, the most effective way to create a base of knowledge is through simplification of complex ideas. We take, for example, the Bohr model of the atom and teach it to elementary school students. It is useful for conveying the concepts of a nucleus and the orbiting of electrons around that nucleus and the energy levels associated with different types of orbits. But this does not tell the whole truth, we don’t tell them that the Bohr model was disproved in 1920 and that the true form of the atom is far more complex than this. It would be counterproductive to teach an elementary school student quantum physics even though it presents a more accurate atomic model.

We can compare this to the simplified concept of class and of class struggle that we use to bring new people into the fold. It is quite straightforward to inform a learning Marxist that there simply exists a proletariat and the bourgeoisie and they have interests which are antagonistic to one another, and this results in the class struggle, and that the class struggle is resolved through socialist revolution. While this is all essentially true, phrased this way it is a simplification of the real world into an easily understandable model for new learners. The problem with Marxism in the U.S. is the lack of a vanguard capable of consolidating an education model that can churn out scientists of scientific socialism on a mass scale. Without such a vanguard, Marxists exist in a state of perpetual underdevelopment.

And so our big national parties, at whose feet we can lay this failure, assume simplified lines and present them as complete to each other and to the masses. While it can be useful in convincing the disaffected Bernie voter to join the Communist Party, it is a sorry excuse for intellectual and ideological struggle.

This is why J. Sykes has put forward poorly worded and poorly argued polemic decrying the body of decolonial thought as a petit-bourgeois distortion. It allows so-called “Marxists” to insist that nothing but class matters and that all struggles are created by class and thus subordinate to the struggle for socialism. It allows them to mischaracterize all decolonial theorists as white-hating ultras who deny the existence of the working class and its role in socialist construction.

To subsume the struggle against colonialism to the “working class vs the ruling class” automatically treats the working class as a single homogenous entity with no internal contradictions and struggles; no motion within itself. It denies the struggle that takes place within a class and the contradictions that are present between the advanced and backwards elements of that class. It denies that the struggle for national liberation, the struggle for gender and sexual equality, the struggle for the emancipation of disabled peoples, and the struggle for the liberation of undocumented workers all constitute class struggles. 

Much like proletarian feminism seeks to identify the class basis of the struggle against patriarchy, an analysis of settler colonialism in the U.S. is an attempt to elucidate the origins of the U.S. working class and to analyze the struggles within the class itself. When we utilize feminist theory to seek to understand the complex gender relations that operate within class society, we do not do so on the basis that all men are counter-revolutionary and therefore cannot make up elements of the advanced proletarian party. However, there are strains of feminist thought that see patriarchy as the source of all social ills, including class society, and there are strains that take a stance against all men as a class. However, these misguided beliefs do not mean that feminism as a framework and body of thought is completely wrong. We can obviously see the complex gender politics in class society today and we can even see that socialist revolutions do not automatically solve the problem of patriarchy, therefore it is something that must be incorporated into a complete Marxist analysis of class society and the struggle for emancipation of all peoples.

The same is true of decolonial theory. Yes, there are some distortions of the idea of settler colonialism that says all white people are enemies of the working class, but this is a flawed analysis. However, to abandon the framework altogether in favor of a reductive concept of a multinational working class to whom the colonial relation has no bearing is almost worse. To frame it as a purely petit-bourgeois ideological strain of thought is lazy and dishonest. When we analyze the colonial relations in this country, we do not do so to supplant an analysis of class, we do so to inform our analysis of class. The colonial relation is a class relation. The struggle for national liberation is a class struggle. Any analysis of class that denies the continued existence of the colonial relation and how it shapes class society is incomplete.

It can be tempting to discard the ideas of race or gender as immaterial, non-essential, or otherwise subordinate to the class struggle. At a first glance, we can see the social basis of these concepts. In other words, a gender or a race is not fundamental to what it means to be human; these concepts arose out of social relations and have no presence in nature and no material basis. Therefore, some would say, we must focus on the material fight, the class struggle. But class is also socially constructed, and it is class society which “invents” the concepts of class and applies material consequences to a person’s specific class status. In the same vein, patriarchy transforms the socially constructed concept of gender and gives it material consequences. Colonialism does the same for the concept of race. Because patriarchy and colonialism are products of a class system, this makes the concepts of race and gender class relations. This is not to say that all women or all Black people constitute single classes, but that a person’s gender or race are determinants of class. Under capitalism, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and the various minor classes in between still exist. We have not invented new classes, but we have illuminated elements of the origins of this specific class structure and identified what we call class determinants. 

Race and gender are social relations, elements of the superstructure, and therefore are subject to the conditions of the substructure, or base. But the relationship between the base and superstructure is not static, it is fluid. When studying two aspects of a contradiction, it is necessary to determine when and under what conditions the dominance flips and one becomes the other. The base shapes the superstructure and the superstructure maintains the base, but under certain conditions the superstructure also shapes the base. It is cases such as these where we can begin to understand how race, a superstructural relation, can shape class character. Under the colonial relation, a person’s race dictates a person’s class. In colonial Africa, the Europeans were not working the mines and plantations, they owned them. A person worked the mines because they were African and a person owned the mines because they were European. In the U.S., a person was a slave because they were Black and a person was a slave owner because they were white. Today, this reality has been buried beneath decades of assimilationism and obscured behind liberal radicalism. But there was no forceful overthrow of the colonial system, and because of this, it persists and shapes class relations to this very day.

Settler colonialism not only exists today, it shapes the internal struggles within the working class, and the shifting complexities of class loyalty, consciousness, and propensity for revolutionary struggle.

J. Sykes derogatorily remarks that proponents of decolonial theory are attempting to “‘copy and paste’ from the Palestinian experience” as if the struggle for national liberation in Palestine is wholly disconnected from the struggle for national liberation here. While it is true that the conditions in Palestine are not identical to the conditions in the U.S., the settler colonial relation in “israel” is a microcosm of the settler colonial relation here. Because the colonization of Palestine is not buried beneath centuries, it is easily observable. Coupled with this fact, it is highly intense due to the shrinking of the technological gap between the colonizers and the colonized, thus making it extremely visible to the entire world. The same cannot be said of the process of colonization of the continental U.S., which has become relatively dormant. However, there are clear parallels in the colonization of the U.S. and the colonization of Palestine. I have written about some of this history in my previous essay.

What Palestine is showing us is a clear picture of settler colonialism at work. We can see in this case the ways in which race (nation) is the axis of oppression. We can see the clear rift between the “israeli” proletariat and the Palestinian one, how the settler relation aligns the “israeli” proletariat with their own national bourgeoisie, and how our simplified model of the class struggle breaks down. No longer is there a single, homogenous working class that has a united interest. There are contradictions within the class itself, struggle and motion between different segments. This is not to say that an “israeli” is incapable of engaging in revolutionary struggle, but the “israeli” section of the working class constitutes its backwards element. An “israeli” who denounces the formation of the zionist entity, rejects their nationality, and joins the struggle for national liberation truly understands the meaning of class struggle. This would be the task of any true Communist Party in “israel”.

This analysis does not “copy and paste” the Palestinian experience into the American one. However, a magnifying glass held over the continental United States will reveal thousands of little Palestines waging their own national liberation struggles on every street corner of this rotten nation.

Our task as Communists seeking to unite the progressive elements of the working class and oppressed peoples cannot be to deny the relevance of the colonial question to the class struggle. It must be to expand our understanding as practitioners of the science of Marxism-Leninism, to understand the history of class and how class in this country is shaped, to embrace new theoretical contributions and to utilize them in our practice. Our task is to bring together the advanced elements of the white working class, oppressed nations, and oppressed genders and sexualities and direct them in their historical role as harbingers of a new and better world carried out through the utter annihilation of this settler nation down to its very foundations.

Normally, it wouldn’t be worthwhile engaging with discourse on Twitter, but because of the overwhelming positive response to the thread, including affirmations of its relevance to all organizations, not just DSA chapters, it is evident that this is a product of a widespread and troubling attitude among organizers in the U.S.

Now, there are some truths and some merits buried in this argument, if we can only excavate them from the worship of spontaneity that pervades it. What this person is attempting to describe is the concept of stagnation, which is very real. An organization is a machine; it is a vehicle. If it is not moving, if it is not progressing, it is failing to serve its purpose — not only that, it is beginning to degrade. That which is not growing and coming into being is already beginning to fade away. As Marxists, as Communists, as members and leaders of Communist organizations, we must always be engaged in the process of building revolution. We must take care to ensure our organizations are always moving toward this end and always furthering this goal.

Stagnation is a lack of qualitative movement or direction, and is characterized by wasted effort and wasted time. It is often the death knell of organizations, leading to burnout, despair, and nihilism. Stagnation is, in essence, the opposite of progress, a perpetual holding pattern whereby we are all just waiting for something to happen.

Stagnation does not necessarily mean failure. Failure, when it is part of the process of trial and error, is actually progressive. When we make mistakes, we learn. When we learn from our shortcomings and failures, we develop. Development is part of progress, and when we develop we are engaged in the process of building. As long as we are learning, we are growing. That is also not to say that we do not expect moments of calm when we are assiduously performing the plan we set out and agreed upon. Every moment is not necessarily a heightening of the struggle, and all organizations must make numerous strategic and tactical retreats, withdrawals, and breaks. None of these things are bad in and of themselves. (After all, we are Marxists — nothing has any positive or negative quality in itself, but derives those qualities from how it relates to the project).

Stagnation can also appear in the form of circular movement, where completed actions and programs leave you right where you started with no qualitative advancement. In cases like these, success does not always constitute progress. If an action is performed, regardless of how “successful” it was, if there is no real outcome, no lessons learned, no structures built, you have not really moved from where you were. In fact, a “successful” action can disorganize your organization and demobilize your cadre if the tactical or strategic direction is incorrect. Think, for instance, of making a push to elect a certain local politician in the hopes that they will open a breathing window for socialist discourse in your region. Once the election is over, many of the structures that were built to mobilize voters, because they were highly specialized (over-specialized), collapse. When this politician instantly turns coat and betrays the socialist values they claimed to espouse, you may lose morale and membership. This “success” was actually a failure.

When we make a mistake and learn from it, it was worth that time and effort. If we refuse to learn from it and continue to repeat the same mistakes, it is not and we have stagnated. We have failed to make progress towards our goal. This is the danger of stagnation, and it is a danger we must do our best to avoid.

This former staff member identifies one way to avoid stagnation, which is to find a direction and move in it. Programs and projects, with defined goals and practical milestones, are essential to construction and progress. An organization must have a direction around which to focus its efforts. If a vehicle has all of its wheels pulling in different directions, it does not move, but when all of its wheels are united and moving in the same direction, it makes forward progress, motion. So it is with organizations. Without a direction, there is no motion; there is no motivation, there is no unity.

Where our friend’s argument fails is that it lacks an understanding of progress, construction, and priority. Their “Danger Zone” doesn’t actually give an adequate definition of stagnation. We can restate this in a clear way as the answers to the following series of questions:

What exactly is the “Danger Zone” that this person describes?

DSA chapters fall into the “Danger Zone” when they focus on internal work instead of external work. It is in these moments, they say, that ideological differences among members become clear, issues between members erupt into conflict, and less active members are neglected and grow distant from the organization.

Is the “Danger Zone” actually stagnation?

No. In fact, if the “Danger Zone” makes existing contradictions between members clear and ideological struggle comes to the forefront, it is not actually dangerous at all! Debate, struggle, working through contradictions with your comrades; these are essential elements of development. This is how correct positions are adopted and direction and unity clarified.

This person effectively makes a distinction between internal and external work, arguing that external work is the only progress possible. However, internal development, building structure, clarifying ideology and political position is organizing. It is progress.

If this is the case, why is the “Danger Zone” so destructive to DSA chapters?

It is necessary to resolve or reconcile contradictions between members, because their resolution is motion. However, there are some contradictions that are irreconcilable. A dogmatic anti-Communist liberal who refuses to engage with Marxism in good faith cannot be reached through struggle because you cannot establish unity with them. The nature of DSA being a big-tent organization, which allows anyone to obtain membership and makes no central structural attempts to develop them, means that people like this can become members of the organization. They can, and do, amass significant influence and take up positions of leadership. Therefore, when the organization attempts to take up internal work, which involves ideological and political struggle, it is destructive instead of constructive.

It is clear that this is the result of a massive structural failure endemic to the DSA as a whole. It is a product of petit bourgeois liberalism which can put forward no scientific analysis and instead defaults to liberal conceptions of democracy and individualism. They have no internal structure upon which to develop their various chapters. Some chapters develop their own education programs, but without standardization they are variable in scope and effect. As a result, members do not engage in adequate political development. Additionally, a lack of a central protocol for “grievances,” or criticism, causes struggle between members to quickly devolve into destructive pettiness and personal conflict.

Why is focusing solely on external work not actually a solution?

Imagine a merry-go-round. If you pick a point on the outside edge, it appears to be moving very fast. If you pick a point closer to the center, it is moving much slower. If you pick a point in the center, it is not moving at all.

External work only gives us the appearance of movement if it is not also paired with internal work. When we engage in canvassing, tabling, holding protests, even engaging in aid work, it makes us feel as if we are progressing. We are, after all, “getting out there.” We are putting boots on the ground, we are talking to our neighbors and community members. We say we are “organizing” them.

But mobilization is not the same as organizing. If you get a thousand people to come to a march, but then they go home afterwards and never come out again, what progress have you made? What have you built? If you pile a hundred people on a merry-go-round, where are they traveling to? Nowhere. In fact, they are not really moving at all.

As such, it is entirely possible to be thoroughly engaged in external work AND ALSO be stagnated in your development. In fact, focusing solely on external work obfuscates stagnation and lack of development, making one feel as if they are organizing when they are not.

The U.S. left, and DSA in particular, is obsessed with action, with what we call spontaneity. All of DSA’s major efforts have been organized around spontaneous events in American politics; falling in behind Bernie Sanders and M4A and the “Fight For 15,” all of these things are products of spontaneous populist demands. 

In many ways, organizing is the antithesis of spontaneity. Organizing is deliberate, it is planned, it is paced, it is controlled and directed. It is the work that happens behind the scenes when the streets clear of protestors and everyone else goes home. Organizing prepares us to take advantage of spontaneity, because moments of spontaneous passion and rebellion from the people are times of consciousness raising and opportunities for qualitative leaps in growth. It is the structures built between spontaneous moments that allows that momentum to be taken hold of.

For someone who lacks a holistic, scientific view, external work appears to be the preferable, or indeed, the only, form of motion. They see a person running on a treadmill and shout, “My, how fast they’re going!” But if the building is on fire, who is making more progress, the person sprinting on the treadmill or the person walking towards the door? 

Is this not the real “Danger Zone”?

We must reframe our understanding of what actually constitutes organizing. We must refocus our efforts from circular, wasted time and effort towards actual development and construction. We cannot use external work as an excuse to avoid the hard work of ideological struggle and commitment. We cannot use it to ignore contradictions and shortcomings in our structures and among our membership, pushed down like repressed emotions. Those contradictions must be dealt with or they will erupt.
At this time, our movement has no political formation capable of realizing class power and fighting for the interests of the working classes. Therefore, while external work is important, internal work, organization building, is primary. We cannot shy away from it as something dangerous or scary or incorrect, we must embrace it and engage with it wholeheartedly. Comrades, the “Danger Zone” is not actually dangerous at all. It is necessary work that must be done if we are to make forward progress towards our goals. If we avoid it, we fall into stagnation, regression, and irrelevancy. If we refuse to engage with it, if we refuse to engage in learning and development, then our failures truly are failures and our efforts are in vain.

The argument for why one must support the Democratic Party takes various similar forms, one of the most popular being the argument for the “lesser evil.” You may commonly hear proponents of the “lesser evil” argument give the sympathetic appeal of “yes, this guy sucks, but the other guy is much worse.” This argument fails to contend with the question of how meaningfully different are the two major political parties from one another. It fails to understand in what ways the two parties are identical and in what ways every “Democratic” president has furthered if not championed the reactionary political objectives that “lesser evil”-ists claim are the main goals of the GOP.

An extremely popular variant of the “lesser evil” justification among left-liberals is the “vote against fascism” trend. They say we must vote for the Democrats because the Republicans are “literally” fascists who will curtail democratic rights, exact “totalitarian” control over the U.S. political sphere, and bring about a fascist state. In order to avoid this eventuality, we must vote for Gore/Clinton/Obama/Biden to save democracy from the scheming fascists.

This position is championed by left-liberals and so-called “socialist” organizations alike. While it accurately identifies the fascist nature of the Republican Party, it is purely coincidental due to the fact that it betrays a complete misunderstanding of fascism in the most basic sense.

It is merely a consequence of political circumstance and colonial/imperial rivalry that the U.S., the U.K., and the other allies fell on the opposite side of the battle lines from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930’s and 40’s. Look no further than the utter enchantment of the American bourgeoisie by Hitler in the run-up to WWII or the direct collaboration by U.S. firms such as IBM, JPMorgan Chase, the Associated Press, General Motors, or Ford, summed up so eloquently by General George S. Patton when he remarked that “we’ve been fighting the wrong enemy (the Germans)” and that the US should have been fighting the communists all along. As a result of this ideological and political alignment with Nazi Germany, in the wake of WWII and the near global acknowledgement of the inherent evil of fascism, it became necessary for the U.S. to wash its hands of Nazism, make clear its opposition to fascism, and obfuscate its alignment with the fascists by putting forward a rigid, superficial, and non-materialist definition of fascism. What we’ve been taught by our education system and our popular media is that the outward form of Nazism is the definition of fascism, and anything that does not look or sound exactly like Nazism cannot possibly be fascism.

This superficial definition is very convenient for the U.S. ruling class in a few key ways. First, it allows the propagation of the narrative that the U.S. and the Allies “defeated” fascism in 1945, that the good guys won, and that all is well and good in the world. Secondly, it allows the ruling class to conflate fascism and socialism by pointing to political purges or the persecution of counter-revolutionaries in socialist countries as equivalent to the repressive acts of the Nazis. And thirdly, it allows the U.S. to obfuscate its historical connection to fascism and to hide the machinations of global fascism since 1945 from the public eye. This simplistic analysis of fascism states that this one specific form of fascism is the extent of fascism, and it ignores the economic function of fascism and its use as a historical tool of class power to fight against revolutionary change.

When socialists legitimize this definition, they effectively whitewash the history of fascism and its current day expressions.

What is fascism?

Fascists first achieved political power in Italy in 1922 with the appointment of Benito Mussolini to the position of Prime Minister, but it achieved primary historical relevance in the form of the National Socialist German Workers Party, a.k.a. the Nazi Party, which took power in 1933 with the appointment of Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

In both Germany and Italy, the fascist political movement found its roots in the persecution of Communists, as it was utilized as an indispensable tool of the bourgeois state to combat rising class consciousness during post-WWI economic instability. The Nazi Party in particular found its roots in the Freikorps, a collection of paramilitary militias which consisted in a large part of German WWI veterans, that were utilized by the Weimar Republic government to put down the Communist revolutionary movement in 1919, led by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht and their KPD.

History demonstrates the role of fascism as a tool to preserve capital in the face of political and economic unrest. Post-WWI Germany and Italy faced extreme economic hardship which naturally saw the formation of a strong socialist movement spurred on by the then-recent victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. The fascists were first utilized by the bourgeois state to put down the progressive anti-capitalist forces to protect the existing capitalist order from the calls for revolution. Upon taking power, the fascists in both Germany and Italy continued this trend, not only furthering the persecution of Communists, but utilizing their newfound political power to shore up the broken economies.

As Michael Parenti points out in his book Black Shirts and Reds:

To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut…

But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable (sic) occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.

To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task, Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

What this reveals is the economic essence of fascism. Fascism is an order of austerity, a plundering of the public sectors by the private, taking away the menial social concessions from the working classes and enforcing the dictatorship of capital.

In early 20th century Europe, this took the form of the Italian National Fascist Party, the German Nazi Party, and the Francoist Nationalist Faction in Spain.

The final paragraph in the above-quoted section describes how the fascists at this time imposed their economic order. Jack-booted thugs, extrajudicial assassinations, secret police, and Heil Hitler’s were the measures necessary to achieve the economic goals of fascism in Western Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s. But they do not define fascism in their own right.

The Rise of Neoliberalism

In the 1960’s and 70’s the falling rate of profit and global economic downturn again threatened the rule of international capital. As a result, researchers at the University of Chicago devised a new economic order known today as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism saw its entrance into the global political and economic spheres with the administrations of Reagan in the U.S. and Thatcher in the U.K. in 1980.

What neoliberalism aimed to do was devise new methods for the generation of profit. To this end, the new neoliberal regimes gutted public funds and social services, smashed organized labor — epitomized by the brutal crushing of the Miners Strike by Thatcher in 1985 — and imposed a ruthless austerity regime.

There is a reason that the outwardly fascist Pinochet government in Chile served as the Chicago Boys’ laboratory for neoliberal economic policy. The economic aims of fascism and neoliberalism are identical. Neoliberalism is merely the perfected form of fascism, capable of disguising its austerity regime behind a veneer of liberal democratic reform.

As Parenti again puts it, neoliberalism was able to “achieve fascism’s class goals within the confines of quasi-democratic forms: use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; replace the jack-booted militarists with media-hyped crowd pleasers; convince the people that the government is the enemy — especially the public service sector — while strengthening the repressive capacities of the state; instigate racist hostility and antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants; preach the mythical virtues of the free market; and pursue tax and spending measures that redistribute income upward.”

Here we can see how the ruling class ingeniously achieved the implementation of fascism without the overt political structure that was necessary for fascist organization in early 20th century Europe. Here we can see how the essence of fascism, the economic arrangement of fascism, has been effectively operating in the U.S. for the last 44 years.

Fascism and Colonialism

If, perhaps, you are not convinced, and you believe that a definition of fascism must include the same overt repressive elements of its superstructure, let us turn to the definition from Aimé Césaire, who, in his essay “Discourse on Colonialism” argues that fascism is merely an extension of colonial policy. In essence, the barbaric and violent rule of European fascism in the form of Nazism is a reflection of the rule of the colonialists over their territories.

It is easy to see the merits of this argument. After all, the dictatorial “totalitarian” rule of the colonizers complete with extrajudicial killings, crushing of organized labor in the form of national rebellion, and the denial of democratic rights to the Indigenous is almost indistinguishable from the violent state practices of European fascism. Indeed, when we analyze the systematic genocide of those deemed “undesirable” during the Holocaust, we can directly trace the origins of those practices to the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in the German colonial territories in South West Africa (present day Namibia) between 1904 and 1908.

In the book Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman shows in great detail how Hitler pulled much of his inspiration for racist, genocidal practices in Germany from colonial practice in America. He argues that Lebensraum was directly inspired by the American settler ideology of Manifest Destiny, and notes that Hitler literally calls out practices of racial segregation in the U.S. in Mein Kampf as admirable practices that he wanted to, and did, impose in Germany.

When we acknowledge the colonial legacy of Nazism and fascist political policy, we can begin to analyze the curious case of settler colonialism. In a settler colonial society, the colonial practices are already turned inward from the outset. Genocide, extrajudicial murder, racial stratification of society, state violence used to curtail the democratic rights of “undesirables”, all of these are things that one may argue are characteristic of fascist political formation, and indeed, all of these things have been true about the United States since it declared independence in 1776. In this way, it can be argued that not only is the U.S. still fascist today, it has been quintessentially fascist since the day it was established, albeit in various stages of development.

Over the past several months, The Red Clarion has published a number of articles detailing the continuation of the colonial legacy and the overt fascist practices of the U.S. government: SCOTUS Vision: Debtors’ Prison, Abbott’s Stormtroopers Beat a Man to Death in Texas, Police Murder Reminds Us of Their True Purpose, Fascist Court Strips Right to Protest, No Free Speech About Palestine, Kansas Police Kill Newspaper Owner, SCOTUS Denies Navajo Nation Water, Haaland V. Brackeen, and many others.

Here we can see that those jack-booted thugs that liberals say must accompany any implementation of actually-existing fascism are already here. The CIA and the FBI have been committing extrajudicial assassinations and murder since their inception. Armed state military forces in the form of DHS round up non-white immigrants at the border and imprison them in concentration camps. Unmarked vans drive around in the middle of the night and disappear protestors off the street. Communist and anarchist actors are labeled domestic terrorists and political dissidents such as Kevin Rashid Johnson and Jalil Muntaqim and Assata Shakur are already prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

And all of this done under the careful direction of the political establishment, regardless of party affiliation. 

A key element of the social expression of fascism is scapegoat-ism and the instigation of racial hostilities. Fascism is able to inspire collaboration of the various classes of capitalist society and orient them away from the state and the economic base by pinning the ills of society upon a “subhuman” class of undesirables, typically described as having some inherent criminal element. In Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people, the Roma people, and those deemed socially or politically deviant, such as LGBT people and Communists. In the U.S., it is easy to see this very same pattern, fomented by the political and media class, and not just elements of those we would typically consider “right wingers”. Never forget that Hillary Clinton justified the expansion of the prison system with her description of Black teens as “superpredators” in the 90’s or that the immigrant detention centers were largely established under the Obama administration.

Any way you want to spin it, there is no denying that fascism already exists in America, making the drive to fall in behind Joe Biden and vote out fascism in November completely nonsensical. Biden and Trump are both fascists of the same variety, one just has a greater degree of deniability. 

Can You Vote Out Fascism?

Let us, for the sake of argument, ignore everything written in this essay up to this point. Let us say that the Democratic Party are not fascists, that fascism is not already here, and that the GOP does constitute the threat to democracy that “lesser evil”-ists are so concerned with. Can you beat fascism at the ballot?

In 1922, the Italian Blackshirts marched on Rome and occupied various government buildings to demand the resignation of the liberal Prime Minister Luigi Facta. When the king refused to enact martial law to quash the rebellion, Facta resigned and Mussolini was appointed prime minister, bringing the National Fascist Party into power. In 1932, a presidential election was held in Germany with the three front-running candidates consisting of independent Paul von Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party, and Ernst Thälman of the Communist Party. The election went overwhelmingly in the favor of Hindenburg, who was elected president with 53% of the vote. In 1933, after the failure of parliament to establish a majority government, Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the office of the chancellor, bringing the Nazi Party into power for the first time.

What do these historical examples show us? They show us that traditional fascist dictators do not need to rely on democratic processes to take power. When conditions are right for them to take power, they do so, with no regard to whatever elections established the current political order. In the case of Germany, the German populace literally did vote against fascism, choosing instead to elect Hindenburg as president, however, not only did it fail to stop fascism’s rise, the outcome of the election directly led to the appointment of Hitler as chancellor of the German state.

So often accompanying the “lesser evil” discourse is the attempt to guilt trip skeptics into voting for the Democrats through the assertion that not voting or, god forbid, voting third-party is tantamount to siding with the fascists. But this is as nonsensical as claiming that Thälman is in part responsible for the rise of the Nazis because he took votes away from Hindenburg.

What is most lacking from the drive to “vote out fascism” is a historical, class-based perspective. Ultimately, Hitler does not fascism make. Fascism is not a single individual, and preventing an individual from achieving a certain political status will do little to stem the rise of fascist power if such a political movement is truly in motion. Fascism is a historical force, and traditional Nazi-esque fascists are utterly unconcerned with democratic processes. They will take power whether you vote for them, against them, or not at all.

This question is explored further in the Red Clarion article, You Can’t Vote Against Fascism.

Presenting an Alternative

In the months leading up to this election, the Democratic Party has been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy due to the failures of the Biden administration to fight against reactionary policy and champion the progressive measures demanded by the people. Between the failure of the Biden administration to address the continued COVID-19 Pandemic, to enact critical environmental policy, to stop the overturning of Roe v. Wade, to stem the revocation of Trans rights nationwide, and most critically, to stop supporting the genocide in Palestine, people all over the country are beginning to see the bankruptcy of bourgeois electoralism. Following the presidential debate on June 27th, even the liberal media class has begun to publicly question the legitimacy of another Joe Biden presidency.

Crises such as this one are the opportunities for revolutionary alternatives to step into the void and make themselves known. Millions and millions of people are right now searching for an alternative to the naked bankruptcy of the U.S. political establishment. Now is the time for the socialist left to come together and present a political formation that clarifies its distinction from corrupt bourgeois electoralism and champions revolutionary change.

Instead, our “comrades” are asking us to support a Democratic presidential candidate that not even the talking heads on CNN are falling in behind, and justifying it with the nonsensical argument that our democracy is under threat and needs saving from fascism. This position betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of class politics. It serves only to hide the realities of existing American fascism and obfuscate to what extent our democratic rights have already been eroded (or were never granted in the first place). It refuses to ask the question of whose interests our “democracy” actually serves and fails to present a coherent strategy for change.

The insidiousness of the neoliberal form of fascism is its ability to disguise itself as bourgeois liberal democracy. When we fail to put forward a comprehensive analysis of fascism and acknowledge to what extent we are already embroiled in it, we aid the ruling class’ attempts to camouflage the machinations of the fascist regime. It is a thin veil and it is slipping. Let us not stand there and offer to fix it for them. We must tear it away and reveal the monstrous face of American fascism once and for all.

We must make clear to other Communists and disenfranchised and disaffected persons that fascism is already here and that participation in bourgeois elections is a distraction from revolutionary organizing. This is not to say that we must roll over for reactionaries or cape for the monsters in the GOP, but it is the starting point for the development and presentation of an alternative. It is the base upon which we can take up true, revolutionary, anti-fascist organizing and practical work. By understanding the connections between settler colonialism and fascism, fascism and neoliberalism, and nazism and Manifest Destiny, we can begin to develop a political position and a political formation capable of challenging each of these axes of oppression and changing the world for the better.

Let us internalize now the immortal words of Communist, Black Panther, and political prisoner George Jackson:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor, butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.

Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, and National Liberation

Colonialism in the modern era first developed in the latter years of the 15th century, but reached maturity in the late 19th and early 20th century with the comprehensive colonization of the African continent. In their infancy, colonialism and capitalism developed hand-in-hand, with the resources and profits extracted from the colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade spurring rapid growth in the European economies. In turn, products manufactured in the European metropoles were utilized to further develop the grip of the European economy over the world at large. In essence, capitalism was born with the profits of colonial extraction, and the insatiable capitalist mode of production drove the expansion of the colonialist system.

In its “traditional” form, the colonial economy is primarily an extractive economy, maintained through economic, political, and military domination. The colonial power takes raw materials and other resources from the colonized territory to be shipped back to the “home” country to fuel their burgeoning economies. During the dawn of the era of imperialism (from the 1880s onwards), colonial holdings also served as a sink for the exportation of capital from the European countries, financing international corporations in their advancement of the extraction of resources from the colonial territories. For “traditional” colonialism, the Indigenous population constitutes the labor force for the international corporations. The rapid development of the urban centers in the colonial territories drove the “proletarianization” of the colonized workforce; that is, driving populations from the countryside to the urban centers to engage in the newly imposed capitalist-colonialist economy. The Indigenous people themselves in this context serve as a resource; labor to be exploited for profit, most acute under the slave system in which colonized peoples were literally exchanged as commodities themselves.

Settler colonialism is a distinct form of colonialism. Whereas in the “traditional” colonial economy, extraction of resources is the primary focus of the occupying power and indigenous labor utilized in that extraction is a central component, settler colonialism is concerned with complete control and assimilation of the land as the foundation of a new settler nation. Under settler colonialism, the Indigenous populations are eradicated, in whole or in part, by a series of deliberate policies enacted by the settlers to drive them off the land and claim it for themselves.

In its initial stages, the development of settler colonies on the American continents was driven by rivalries between the last remnants of the European monarchies, which involved religious and military expansionism. The so-called “New World” presented a crisis for the European kingdoms, essentially constituting a new battleground for existing tensions on the continent. At the time, the nascent capitalist system in the form of mercantilism was subordinate to the interests of the monarchs, driven by the need to expand control in the religious sphere, through which the kings justified their “divine right to rule”, and the need to grow the coffers through which they funded their respective armies. An as yet “undiscovered” continent made up of billions of acres of “unclaimed” land presented both an opportunity and a threat to the kingdoms. They could not afford to be left behind while their rivals expanded their power overseas.

What resulted was a mad dash for the direct control of the land, leading to a period of primitive accumulation which increased the wealth and power of the European kingdoms, but also increased the wealth and power of the nascent bourgeoisie which would go on to supplant them in the following centuries. Some of the European powers attempted to engage in “traditional” colonization schemes, but the most successful and the earliest — that of Spain — was settler colonial from its inception and would provide the model for England.

The problem for the Europeans was that this land was not “unclaimed” as they pretended, but was inhabited by millions of Indigenous people organized in thousands of complex societies across both continents. Instead of halting the ambitions of the European economies, a solution was developed, and the Europeans, especially the English, having honed their skills at warfare through centuries of struggle both inside and outside the continent, utilized those skills towards the complete supplanting of the indigenous populations for their own.

Today, the first phase of the settler colonial project in North America is complete. What once was a land of dizzying cultural wealth and complex civilization has been completely supplanted by the US settler colonial empire and its Canadian counterpart. The millions of Indigenous people that once inhabited the continent have been subjected to outright slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and otherwise removed from the land to be corralled into reservations, making way for the fascist global hegemon to thrive. 

Some believe that because the “settlement” of the U.S. is complete, the colonial relation in the country has ceased. On the contrary, through the reservation system and the indigenous reserve labor force kept in perpetual poverty, through the continued subjugation of the Black interior semi-colony by the survival of slavery in the prison industrial complex and the continued denial of land rights in the Black Belt, and through the exploitation of immigrant labor largely consisting of indigenous South and Central Americans, the colonial relation is thriving. This relation is most clear through the antagonization of these colonized populations by the armed wing of the state — the DHS, the BIA, and the federal, state, and municipal police — which takes up its legacy as an occupying colonial military.

The imperial outpost of “israel” is the most readily apparent example of settler colonialism due to the intensity, and thus visibility, of the conflict. Through widespread media coverage of the issue, this genocidal relation is undeniable. Despite billions of dollars being funneled every year into maybe the most advanced propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, the age of social media has allowed the Palestinians to demonstrate their plight for all to see.

The colonization of Palestine is well-documented by scholars and by the zionists themselves. Following the British acquisition of Mandatory Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, the “holy land” provided a golden opportunity for the zionist conference in Britain to begin their colonial project. Between 1917 and 1948, zionists began in earnest to claim land in Palestine through both purchase and conquest. This process culminated in the infamous Nakba of 1948, in which zionist paramilitaries excised large swaths of the land through genocidal slaughter and ethnic cleansing, killing thousands and driving many hundreds of thousands more from their homes. What resulted was almost 80% of the land of Palestine falling under control of the zionists, driving the displaced Palestinians into refugee centers that became the Gaza Strip and the West Bank territories, an act that was legitimized by the international community’s recognition of the “State of israel”.

Zionist ideology closely resembles the religious settler ideology of Manifest Destiny that drove the lion’s share of the colonization of what would become the western United States. Believing the land to be promised to them by God, settlers push the boundaries of the existing colonial borders, encroaching into land that is still controlled by the indigenous inhabitants, often in violation of the various treaties and agreements previously negotiated between the colonialists and the colonized. When the colonized naturally resist this unlawful expansion, the military forces of the colonial entity intervene on the basis that the settlers constitute civilians and they must be defended from the “violent, uncivilized natives”. Thus, the colonial borders expand and the indigenous are further removed from the land. This practice is utilized to this day in the zionist settlements in the West Bank.

We should not be surprised at the similarity; we should not be surprised that the zionists appear to be brothers in arms to the U.S. ruling class. After all, the same economic exploitation of Indigenous people is the basis for both.

So what is the resolution to the colonial contradiction? Despite settler colonialism constituting a distinct form of colonialism, the solution remains the same: national liberation. The anatomy of the colonial system consists of the economic, social, and political domination of the colonized by the colonizers. To abolish this relation, the political, economic, and social spheres must be taken hold of by the subject nation. In a “traditional” colony, this is easy to envision due to the fact that the majority of the population is Indigenous. The anti-colonial liberation movement in this context must seize control of the state from the colonizers and the bought-off compradors, nationalize the colonial enterprises, and begin the process of developing national self-determination. In the settler colonial context, control of the land is the axis upon which the Indigenous peoples are oppressed and self-determination takes the form of the reclamation of the land from the settlers.

South Africa is a particularly interesting case study on this point. Prior to the takeover of the South African apartheid government by the ANC in the 1990s, South Africa could similarly be described as a settler colonial project. After the apartheid system was overthrown and Mandela elected in 1994 as the first president of the country, a process of land reform was undertaken, but was not taken to completion as it had been in Algeria in the 1960s and in Zimbabwe and other territories that made up the former Rhodesian state in the 1980s. As a result, racial disparity and racial tensions continue to wreak havoc on the South African social and political sphere, with white settlers still owning a disproportionate amount of land relative to their population, leaving millions of indigenous South Africans in poverty. What this tells us is that the land and who controls it is the most important aspect of the settler colonial context.

CPUSA Convention Controversy

This past weekend, June 7–9, the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) held its 2024 national convention in Chicago. Two particularly important results of this conference made a significant stir among communist circles on social media regarding the Party’s position on settler colonialism.

As part of the party’s membership in the International Meeting of Communist Workers’ Parties (IMCWP), the CPUSA invited delegates from several other participant parties to speak at the convention. Included in this group was the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), whose speech, delivered by israeli Knesset Member, Ofer Kassif, was streamed on YouTube and subsequently posted by the Party’s official account on Twitter. In this speech, Kassif began by “providing context” to the situation in the zionist entity, in which he vocally condemned the Palestinian Resistance for its acts on October 7, repeating the rigorously debunked lie that thousands of Israeli citizens were massacred by the Palestinians. Later in his speech, he rightly describes the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a genocide, but ultimately delivers a message that is indistinguishable from the messaging of, say, US Senator Bernie Sanders. In essence, it espouses a political position which can be described as “labor zionism”; the genocide of Palestinians is to be condemned but so are those struggling against it. It is bad to kill Palestinians, but those who are waging a national liberation struggle to overthrow the settler colonial relation are terrorists. Essentially, their position is that the state of “israel” has a right to exist and that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1917 and 1948 is legitimate, but with a left-wing facade. The position of the CPI is further revealed in an article posted on their website in November of 2023, calling for an investigation of war crimes against the Palestinians for sexual crimes committed on October 7, which has since been thoroughly debunked as a conspiracy, a lie spread by the IOF to justify the genocide in Gaza.

The Twitter post of Kassif’s speech received vitriolic backlash from people criticizing the party for inviting the CPI to speak at the convention, especially during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many CPUSA members took to social media in an effort to do damage control, justifying the invitation of the party with such excuses as CPI being a “fraternal party of the IMCWP”, as if that isn’t an indictment of the IMCWP in its own right!

During the CPUSA’s discussion of the resolutions being adopted at the convention, the question of settler colonialism in the United States was presented. Following this discussion, a CPUSA delegate who was present at the convention tweeted “After an investigation the Communist Party USA has rejected settler colonialism as the primary contradiction in the United States”. Again, backlash from communist circles on social media was responded to by hand-waving and justification by party members, calling any who criticized this decision “ultras” and “wreckers.”

The formulation of this CPUSA resolution is malformed and belies the lack of understanding on the part of the CPUSA delegates and those who rejected it. It is clear that the resolution was raised as a sop, and always designed to be defeated. There is no primary contradiction; this is a mish-mash of Marxist terms. There is, of course, in any situation, a principal contradiction, but this is a question of strategy. The principal contradiction conditions the other, secondary, contradictions, which cannot be resolved without first addressing it.

Party members on Twitter immediately began denying the need for any national liberation struggle in the US. It is clear that, where CPUSA once suffered from extreme white (imperialist) chauvinism, that chauvinism is alive and well.

Social Class and Class Struggle

Defenders of the party’s resolution on Twitter made a point of railing against Anything But Class (ABC) Marxists. While ABC as an ideological trend does constitute a liberal distortion of Marxism, the Nothing But Class (NBC) position lacks any basis in reality. Proponents of NBC argue that all oppression and oppressive institutions arise from capitalism, and thus through waging class struggle, all oppressive contradictions will be resolved. What this deviation ignores is the reality of social classes, and the particularity of the nature of class in the colonial context.

The Wretched of the Earth, written by Martiniquais revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who developed his analysis from his participation in the national liberation struggle against the French settler colonial project in Algeria, argues that in the colonial context a person’s race in part dictates a person’s class. An analysis of the colonial relation reveals this fact to be true. In colonial Africa, all of the enterprises were owned by Europeans, whereas all of the industrial and agricultural workers were African. They were workers and not owners because they were members of an oppressed nation; because of their indigeneity. As a result, class was stratified along national lines, meaning that a national liberation struggle also constitutes a class struggle.

“Identity politics” is a contentious topic among Marxists, with many taking the view that the concept of identity is a liberal distortion that only serves to obfuscate the class struggle. What this leaves out is a robust understanding of what exactly goes into determining someone’s social class. In our white-supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchal settler colony, a person’s identity plays a part in determining a person’s class. If you are a trans person, a Black person, a gay person, or any intersection of the various avenues of oppression, odds are that you are not a member of the bourgeois class. As a result, gender relations, race relations, disability relations; these things all constitute social relations with an objectively identifiable economic base. They are class relations and thus are essential to address when engaging in class struggle.

These are fundamentally not questions of identity. Identity is a social question; the relations that produce these social identities are economic questions.

In the US settler colonial system, Black and Indigenous people are corralled into reservations and ghettos, flushed into the prison system to work as money-printing slaves, and are oppressed along national lines. As a result, a national liberation struggle must be waged as PART of the class struggle. National liberation IS class struggle, and must be taken up and supported by Communists.

When CPUSA and its membership reject an in-depth analysis and discussion of settler colonialism, reject the principles of national liberation, and embrace only a simplified analysis of class, they are, in effect, abandoning the class struggle. 

Do not mistake their behavior. The CPUSA has abandoned the class struggle. At best, they represent a dam holding back a reservoir of committed Communists, straining to fight in the class war. At worst, they represent an active barrier to the advancement of the very movement they claim to lead, and thus serve as an objective pillar of U.S. capitalist-imperialism.

A source within the party shared a section of one of the resolutions to be adopted at the convention with regards to the national sovereignty for Indigenous peoples of the Americas which read:

Therefore be it resolved that the CPUSA fully supports the struggles of the Native American people for full social, economic, and political equality and national sovereignty over Native lands. We demand expansion of federal and state funds and services for all the reservations. We oppose schemes to nullify tribal treaty rights.

While paying lip service to national sovereignty for indigenous nations, this resolution reveals deep issues within the party’s understanding of settler colonialism. In their message of support for the struggles of the Indigenous people of the Americas, CPUSA takes care to specify that this only extends to the borders of so-called “Native land”, a distinction that legitimizes the settler control of land not specified as “Native”. The resolution also calls for the expansion of federal and state funds with regards to the existing reservation system. Instead of calling to abolish this violent colonial institution, the CPUSA takes the position that the system should be expanded! Funneling funds into the existing genocidal reservation system can do nothing but strengthen it in its purpose: exercising control over the indigenous populations held captive inside of them. Additionally, this resolution calls for the upholding of existing treaties between indigenous nations and the US government, with no mention at all as to the nature of those treaties as documents forged through coercion that legitimize the settler control over already-stolen Native lands.

This position is indistinguishable from the “labor zionist” position of the Communist Party of “Israel,” which pays lip service to the plight of the Indigenous Palestinians while at the same time upholding the existing colonial borders taken through wholesale slaughter and ethnic cleansing in 1948 and today. By refusing to acknowledge the nature through which this land was claimed and the illegitimacy of the settler control over it, the CPI and its brethren in the CPUSA effectively condone the genocidal actions taken by the settler system.

Settler colonialism and national liberation are not buzzwords. They are not empty platitudes to be tossed out and then ignored, nor are they secondary issues to be subordinated to an ill-defined “class struggle”. They are class struggle, and any party which seeks to overthrow the settler colonial relation must engage with this from the outset. Settler colonialism is a material relation concerned with control of the land. A communist party in a settler-colony must contend with the question of the land and who controls it. They must take the stance that the reclamation of the land through a national liberation struggle is the issue at hand. Otherwise, they are giving in to settler chauvinism as willful idiots of empire.

What is to be Done?

A problem of this magnitude requires extensive education of general party membership, but the capacity to carry out that education would require a party leadership which has this understanding and is capable of imparting it to others. Many members of the CPUSA, especially the younger ones, have a better understanding of these issues than the old party bureaucrats, but the undemocratic nature of the party —  through measures such as the slate system — prevents that leadership from being replaced. Instead, membership at large is forced to table any attempts at eliciting structural change until the party convention, which is only held every four years, and even then resolutions are laundered through the National Committee before being put to a vote.

With the CPUSA’s rejection of settler colonialism as the principal contradiction, they willingly reveal the settler chauvinism that is eating away at the party’s structure, nullifies its revolutionary capability, and condemns it to serve the forces of reaction. 

We have no Communist party in the United States. Once we accept this, we can then begin the process of building one. National liberation and gender liberation are essential aspects of the class struggle, and we must begin to organize a resolute political structure that understands this fact. In order to engage in class struggle, in order to destroy all existing oppressive relations, we must come together to build a political formation capable of taking on this challenge and building a better world for all people.

A person who shows up to protests is called an organizer. A person who is a member of a leftist group is called an organizer. A person who administers aid to the people is called an organizer. Even someone who works for a non-profit may take up the title of organizer without much challenge from others.

The confusion arises because the definition of organizing is obfuscated; diluted by liberal commandeering. After all, an organizer is someone who organizes, so, in order to properly apply the title of organizer, we need to figure out what actually constitutes organizing.

Is organizing building and supporting unions? Is organizing providing aid to the masses? Is organizing holding protests and marches, trying to get as many people as possible to join your group, holding book clubs, or debating theoretical differences with others? Yes, in some ways, it encompasses all of these things. But these definitions lack an essential aspect which ties all of these parts together.

Organizing is the process by which an organization is developed. It allows for the repetition and replication of an organization’s processes. It is the sorting of chaos along a defined structure. A socialist organization involves the development of unity between groups of people, a process which aims to transform our chaotic, uncoordinated efforts at change into a coherent force; a unified voice.

What do we mean by an organization? An organization is not simply a group of people who adopt a name and a logo and go to protests together. An organization is a structure with a clearly defined purpose, function, and rules. It is a vehicle through which the efforts of many can be unified and channeled towards a specific end. When we organize, we attempt to take hold of the chaos of the various levels of consciousness at work among the masses. We attempt to harness the progressive trends that naturally arise within oppressed classes, mold it, sharpen it, and thrust it like a spear into the heart of oppression. What do you need to forge a weapon from raw material? Machinery, tools, and clarity of purpose.

When we organize, we strive to craft the machinery that will forge the weapon. We strive to create the structures, the practices, the strategies and the tactics that will be utilized to free us all when the time comes. Some of this work has been done for us already, for there is a wealth of knowledge left behind from our predecessors during their own attempts at change. But there is much work to be done.

A Tempered Weapon is Strong

There are those who desire to use the weapon before it is ready. Some try to strike with a dull blade, some with the ingots, and others hurl the unrefined ore at the great walls of capital, to burst upon impact and become nothing more than dust. They may be impatient, anxious, and unwilling to put in the work to build the proper machinery.

There are also those who fail to strike at the iron while it’s hot. Wait too long and the metal cools, becomes brittle, and shatters upon impact. They are too obsessed with the machinery for the sake of the machinery itself. They lose sight of the purpose of the machinery and the purpose of the weapon. 

The socialist left is rife with these trends, each of which must be exposed, criticized, and corrected if our weapon is to be built and used effectively. Struggle is the method through which we temper our blade, sharpen its edges, and ensure that it strikes true. Disagreement is an essential part of development, and struggle is the method of utilizing disagreement in order to discern truth. No single individual has all the answers. No one person or group is correct about everything at all times. However, somewhere within the minds of all people are the seeds of truth. It is only through struggle within and between groups that as many viewpoints as possible can be accounted for and the truth be revealed.

Building the Machinery

We are all part of the machinery, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not. We all have our roles to play. The machinery represents collective effort, it represents the victory or the defeat of us all. The battle looms and our weapon must be ready. Will you choose to be a well oiled part of the machinery, or will you choose to leave yourself rusted and chipped, dulling the same edge that you aim to sharpen?

We must work together. That doesn’t simply mean showing up to each other’s events; it doesn’t mean exchanging contact info, being cordial, and liking each other’s posts on Instagram. It means collaborating and coordinating, consciously, to build the machinery that will forge our weapon; to build the organization that represents our collective efforts and collective interests. It means creating a political formation capable of withstanding repression, capable of defending itself, and capable of lifting us all up.

This is the main function of our organization, Cincinnati Community Aid and Praxis. While we are an aid organization, we are not a charity. We do not do aid for the sake of aid itself. We seek to eliminate the conditions that create aid necessary in the first place, which can only be done with the spear. Our aid programs serve a few purposes. Firstly, we aim to serve the most downtrodden of our communities and help them to survive until tomorrow. Secondly, it allows us to grow closer to the communities we serve, ensuring that our ties to the masses are never severed. And finally, our aid programs give us the opportunity to hone our theory through our practice, our practice through our theory, and to exercise the structure of our organization to expose its shortcomings and to build its strength.

This last reason is the most important. When we engage in on-the-ground work, we put stress on our organizational structure. Coordinating an aid program requires relying on management of resources, logistics, and coordination. Every time we run one of our regular programs, we take time to examine our performance, analyze our effectiveness, and assess the current conditions and the need for other efforts. Through this process, we develop. We constantly adjust our practices, our structure, and our understanding in response to our mistakes, our shortcomings, and any other information we gather from our work.

Though our aid programs are our most public-facing aspect, it is only one fifth of our actual operations. There are four other committees within our organization, each with varying purposes, but all oriented towards one goal: building the machinery. We are what we consider a primary organization; a pre-party formation. The most valuable thing we can do as a primary organization is contribute to the struggle. That means developing a robust understanding of the material conditions of our locale, formulating theories regarding the character and structure of our formation, putting them to the test with practical work, and, most importantly, sharing what we have learned with others.

Envision yourself within your organization, and your organization within your community, not as an individual body, but as individual cells within a single body, a body that is learning how to walk.

Engage with us in good faith. Unite with us over our commonalities. Struggle with us over our differences. Allow yourself to be driven forward by others as they are driven forward by you. This is a call for action, but it is also a cry for help. We cannot do this alone, nor can you. We need each other, and victory can only arise through our coordinated and collective effort.

A Proposal

CCAP is a pre-party formation and an organization. When we organize, we are in the process of developing the members of CCAP and the locale in which we operate, as well as the organization itself. It is something all leftist organizations should have in common.

But there are higher levels of organization that we aim to achieve. Every advance in the complexity and capability of our collective organization is a step that will allow us to take on bigger and better challenges and provide us the foundations to advance the next steps. It is a process of development. There is no way to be at the top except to start at the bottom. 

An individual who grasps class consciousness is at a higher stage of development than one who does not. An individual who gives themselves to the study of revolutionary theory and the study of the machinations of the world is more advanced than the conscious individual. An organization is more advanced than the educated individual. An organization of organizations is more advanced than a single organization itself…and so on and so on until the collective level of the organization of the oppressed classes is at the stage that it can wage effective struggle against the forces that be.

In Cincinnati and across the country, there are many individual, isolated organizations all doing similar or adjacent work. We have our differences, yes, but on the whole we are more alike than not. It is upon the things that we hold in common—our convictions, our goals, our beliefs—that we can unite. Once we have united, we will utilize our differences to engage in discussion and debate and advance ourselves as a collective.

Just as it is erroneous for an individual to believe that they know everything, it is equally as erroneous for us to believe that we have nothing to offer each other as organizations.

What is needed is an organization of organizations, something qualitatively different from the various coalitions, networks, and alliances that currently dot the landscape. This umbrella organization is not just a show of symbolic unity, it is a material unification of groups into a cohesive whole. Should we unify with another group in our city, our two groups would become one organization, of which CCAP is just a single part. This unifying of organizations advances the collective organizational complexity of the movement as a whole and allows us to take on bigger challenges than we can as isolated groups.

This is the meaning of organizing: engaging in the efforts to build not just a movement, but a complex structure with a defined purpose and the capability to engage in operations that advance towards our common goal. As organizers, this is the activity in which we consciously take part.

Does this involve building unions, running book clubs, and going to protests? Yes, it does, at different times and to different degrees. But it is essential for you, if you believe yourself to be an organizer, to expand your understanding of what an organizer actually does. An organizer is not just an activist, they are an architect, a builder, and a blacksmith forging the weapon.

At the current moment, we are struggling without sight in the dark, pulling this way and that with no form or direction. We have a history to learn from, yes, but the conditions of our struggle are novel. We are individual cells of a single body, and we are only just learning to walk.

If you consider yourself an organizer, understand what it means to organize. Understand that while conducting aid programs and holding town halls and staging protests is important, these are surface level actions and don’t constitute a movement. It is not enough to simply espouse radical politics and hope that will change the world. The new world must be built and you as an organizer are a builder.