“Even if only a fairly large minority of the industrial workers, and not “millions” and “legions”, follow the lead of the Catholic clergy—and a similar minority of rural workers follow the landowners and kulaks (Grossbauern)—it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.” (V.I. Lenin, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, emphasis added)

The question of whether Marxists should participate in bourgeois elections has been a topic of significant debate, particularly in the last ten or so years. There has been a surprisingly wide spectrum of ideas presented within this debate, such as advocacy for voting for a Democrat, abstaining from electoral participation entirely, or running third-party candidates through an independent workers’ party.

This piece will use another essay titled, “Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism” as a reference, expanding upon its arguments and offering additional insight. As that essay has already put in the theoretical work for why the first strategy should be discarded outright, we will not revisit that position here. We will, instead, approach this discussion from an adjacent angle, and it is recommended to read through that essay before engaging with this one.

In the United States, there are quite a few Marxist-Leninist parties, and throughout the years, these parties have used participation in bourgeois elections as one of several strategies to advance their party’s program, ideally toward revolution. They base this participation in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Lenin’s most unambiguous advocacy is laid out in the opening quote of this essay, but it is worthwhile to share aspects of Marx’s view as well, which is that, even when there is “no prospect of achieving their election,” the working class must put forward candidates in bourgeois elections “to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention.” Workers, further, must not “be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory” (Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League).

As such, these parties justify their participation on a few additional grounds. First, that elections draw out a significant number of working-class people, and our participation is theoretically justified in Lenin’s own words as a means of meeting the masses where they are. Second, that these elections present us with an opportunity to agitate and propagandize the masses around the limits of reform and to expose the bourgeois character of the two-party system.

Third, ballot lines build name recognition and recruitment infrastructure for the party itself. Fourth, running candidates is necessary to maintain political independence from the Democratic Party. Fifth, electoral cycles concentrate mass political attention in ways that other arenas do not, rendering them strategic moments for us to intervene, regardless of vote totals.

Lenin himself was one of the strongest advocates for participation in bourgeois elections, as the Bolsheviks themselves participated in them, and he also criticized parties on the European left for their conclusion that bourgeois elections were “obsolete,” arguing that if there were masses of workers still engaged in these elections, then it became obligatory upon communist parties to use them as a means for agitation. Simply because these arenas are reactionary or saturated with bourgeois ideology does not mean that we should refuse to participate in them, and even the significant hurdles that would need to be overcome in order to participate do not mean we should not at least try.

If we graze the surface of the theoretical implications of Lenin’s critique of the European left, we would conclude, as these parties in the US have, that our participation is equally obligatory. This, however, represents a vulgar reading of theory that does little more than recite Lenin’s words and uncritically apply them to one’s own current reality. This reflects the kind of dogmatic application of Marxism-Leninism critiqued by Lenin, Mao, and other theorists.

For this purpose, before we can take this conversation any further, we must contextualize the historical climate in which Left-Wing Communism was written in order to fully understand Lenin’s critiques and to determine whether they remain applicable today.

Contextualizing Left-Wing Communism

In the wake of the success of the Russian Revolution, many of the European communist parties had taken to adopting Lenin’s strategies and applying them, uncritically, to their own circumstances. Lenin found this uncritical application to be rather childish, as it reflected a failure on their part to analyze their own material conditions to determine which, if any, of these strategies would be of use to them.

One such critique was directed at the German and Dutch communists, namely the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (the KAPD, which had split from the KPD in April 1920), who argued that bourgeois parliaments were “historically obsolete” and that revolutionaries should refuse to participate in elections altogether. The important context here is that the KAPD and its allies were operating in a country where the SPD had been a mass workers’ party for decades, with millions of German workers still voting for social-democratic and Catholic Center parties.

There was already a massive proletarian movement within these political arenas, meaning that the German and Dutch left were operating among a working class with a considerable degree of existing political consciousness. This was particularly true in Germany, which already had one failed attempt at revolution resulting in the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. So, importantly, these were not your average undifferentiated voters, these were voters who were already operating within an organized system of labor from trade unions to worker cooperatives, maintaining an entire ecosystem that prioritized labor as a political entity.

The KAPD’s decision to boycott participation in bourgeois parliament was short-sighted because it was primarily aesthetic in purpose; that is, it had little to do with an analysis of the masses, and instead rested on the perspective that because the elections were bourgeois in character, any revolutionary party should boycott them on principle alone.

This is what Lenin referred to as infantile.

He agreed that, in principle, bourgeois elections were obsolete insofar as they could not serve as a means to obtain socialism, but he disagreed that they were historically obsolete, particularly when the masses still participated in them in large numbers. Lenin argued that their illusions about parliament were structured around a false consciousness in which these worker parties would somehow lead to socialism.

The task of Marxists was to participate within these elections because the German left held significant influence over the workers, and that influence could be utilized to redirect their consciousness away from bourgeois elections and toward revolution as the only viable path to socialism.

The same was also somewhat true for Lenin and his party. It is important, however, to focus on the structural function of their participation in these elections, as it speaks significantly to their strategy. The six Bolshevik deputies who were elected to the Fourth Duma in 1912 had legal parliamentary immunity for any speeches given inside the chamber.

They could make revolutionary declarations from the rostrum that would have been criminally prosecutable if delivered anywhere else in Russia, and this, in turn, legally permitted their press networks to publish these speeches and distribute them to the masses.

These declarations included speeches written by Lenin from his exile, in which they openly denounced the tsar, called for his overthrow, and urged the public toward revolutionary socialism. The deputies also received worker delegations in the Duma building, used their parliamentary salaries and travel allowances to fund underground party work, and used their immunity to facilitate communication between legal and illegal party activity.

Further, the structural elements of the Duma and the German Reichstag were wholly, functionally different from the electoral systems of today. The Russian Duma was a legislative body created by the tsar in 1905, after mass revolutionary pressure forced him to concede limited representative government, with seats divided among four separate voting classes that weighted landowners far above workers. The Weimar Reichstag was the central legislature of Germany after the 1918 revolution overthrew the monarchy, and it allocated seats through proportional representation, meaning that roughly 60,000 votes was enough to acquire a seat for the party.

The Bolsheviks were a faction inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which was already a recognized party in the Duma system, and recognized parties needed only to put forward candidates directly within each voting class without needing to overcome additional barriers to appear before the electorate. In the Reichstag, any recognized party could submit a ranked list of candidates, and if that list received the votes necessary for a single seat, the first candidate on the list took office, meaning that a party with even minimal working-class support could send representatives to parliament!

The political climate in which Lenin released Left-Wing Communism was one of immense revolutionary potential. It was a climate that had just emerged from the First World War, a moment in which socialism, communism, Marxism, and “democratic socialism” were dominating the political sphere among the working class. So while the workers themselves still harbored “parliamentary illusions,” the broader political climate was ripe for revolution and necessitated the participation of communists in order to quickly dispel these illusions and harness the revolutionary potential of the (already organized) working class.

The Road to Hell is Paved with Liberal Intentions

Now, we hope that it is becoming more apparent why this historical context is relevant and why it would seem that it doesn’t map clearly onto our present conditions in the United States. Before we elaborate on that point, we should also make clear that there are a number of contingencies that have been laid out for us to understand not only if our participation in bourgeois elections is justified, but what our primary objectives as Marxists should be in the first place.

Foundational to Lenin’s classic polemics is the insistence on a clear division between communists and the opportunistic, social-chauvinists who had co-opted the term “socialism,” and on the corresponding necessity that communists clearly identify themselves as such. Lenin had observed that socialism was already being captured by those who wished to steer revolutionary politics into that of reform, thereby betraying the working class. In a piece written on the 25^th anniversary of Marx’s death, Lenin wrote about how Marxism had emerged as such a revolutionary ideology that it completely transformed the political landscape and captured the hearts and minds of the working class.

He observed that the “dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compels its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism” (V.I. Lenin, Marxism and Revisionism). Lenin argues that this is due to capitalism reproducing itself in the form of the petite bourgeois, that is, those who have yet to challenge the capitalist hegemonic mentality into which they have been indoctrinated.

Mao Zedong similarly wrote about the difficulties of overcoming liberalism, stating that liberals “approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practise it or to practise it in full… they talk Marxism but practise liberalism” (Mao Zedong, Combat Liberalism), and that whether wittingly or unwittingly, they serve as enemies of Marxism and push the party toward reform.

This would be proven correct in August 1914, when the parties of the Second International (most notably the SPD in Germany) voted to approve war credits for their respective national bourgeoisies at the outbreak of the First World War, betraying the international working class in the crisis where their support was most needed.

Lenin identified this betrayal as the co-optation of the communist movement by opportunists, those who represent “a section of the petty bourgeoisie and of a certain strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corruptors of the labour movement,” what Lenin would call the “labor aristocracy.” These opportunists would infiltrate the communist parties, achieving ranks high enough that “the proletariat allows itself to be led by men bought by, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie” (V.I. Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism)

Lenin wrote in his foundational work What Is to Be Done? that we should judge these people by their actions and by what they actually advocate for through their words. In doing this, we will very quickly realize who is interested in introducing “bourgeois ideas and bourgeois elements into socialism.” And in another of Lenin’s foundational works, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he explains in the preface how, due to the success of Marxism, the bourgeoisie had moved to turn Marx and Engels into “harmless icons” while also “robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

The reason we call all of this to the reader’s attention is that there are within these passages an implicit yet obvious conclusion, which is that those of us who identify as Marxist-Leninists must ensure that our revolutionary platforms are not compromised by opportunists or social-chauvinists who seek to flatten the revolutionary character of our message. This requires us drawing a clear line of demarcation between our message and that of the social chauvinists and opportunists. We must clearly identify as communists, and our agitprop must be overtly revolutionary in character.

This is also stated rather explicitly in the conditions for entrance into the Third Communist International, and although these are rather lengthy, we should like to provide several of them below, as they are of the utmost importance for the formulation of our argument:

“1. Day-by-day propaganda and agitation must be genuinely communist in character. All press organs belonging to the parties must be edited by reliable Communists who have given proof of their devotion to the cause of the proletarian revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat should not be discussed merely as a stock phrase to be learned by rote; it should be popularised in such a way that the practical facts systematically dealt with in our press day by day will drive home to every rank-and-file working man and working woman, every soldier and peasant, that it is indispensable to them.

2. Any organisation that wishes to join the Communist International must consistently and systematically dismiss reformists and “Centrists” from positions of any responsibility in the working-class movement (party organisations, editorial boards, trade unions, parliamentary groups, co-operative societies, municipal councils, etc.), replacing them by reliable Communists. The fact that in some cases rank-and-file workers may at first have to replace “experienced” leaders should be no deterrent.

3. In countries where a state of siege or emergency legislation makes it impossible for Communists to conduct their activities legally, it is absolutely essential that legal and illegal work should be combined. In almost all the countries of Europe and America, the class struggle is entering the phase of civil war. In these conditions, Communists can place no trust in bourgeois legality. They must everywhere build up a parallel illegal organisation, which, at the decisive moment, will be in a position to help the Party fulfil its duty to the revolution.

5. Regular and systematic agitation is indispensable in the countryside. The working class cannot consolidate its victory without support from at least a section of the farm labourers and poor peasants, and without neutralising, through its policy, part of the rest of the rural population… To forgo this work or entrust it to unreliable semi-reformist elements is tantamount to renouncing the proletarian revolution.

6. It is the duty of any party wishing to belong to the Third International to expose, not only avowed social-patriotism, but also the falsehood and hypocrisy of social-pacifism. It must systematically demonstrate to the workers that, without the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, no international arbitration courts, no talk about a reduction of armaments, no “democratic” reorganisation of the League of Nations will save mankind from new imperialist wars.

11. It is the duty of parties wishing to join the Third International to re-examine the composition of their parliamentary groups, eliminate unreliable elements and effectively subordinate these groups to the Party Central Committees. They must demand that every Communist proletarian should subordinate all his activities to the interests of truly revolutionary propaganda and agitation.

18. In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker.”

We must understand that this document represents one of the most authoritative texts in Lenin’s entire body of work, including What Is to Be Done?, with even Left-Wing Communism, written the same year, being subordinate to the terms laid out within this piece. The Twenty-One Conditions are the formal institutional codification of how Lenin’s tactical arguments in Left-Wing Communism were supposed to be applied.

Both of these works were written after the success of the October Revolution, after the collapse of the Second International in which the opportunists betrayed the communists, and after Lenin’s ample experience dealing with the social-chauvinists and opportunists who had repeatedly attempted to infiltrate and co-opt his revolutionary program in favor of revisionist bourgeois reformism.

These points represent a formula that was put forward in opposition to a period that sought to completely strip Marxism of its revolutionary character. When we place Left-Wing Communism within the context of these points, it becomes quite clear that any party seeking to participate in bourgeois elections must, at the very least, be overtly communist in name and in message. This includes drawing a clear line of demarcation between the social democrats and the communists, agitating openly toward the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and even seeking to expose and purge social democrats from other organizations and replace them with communists.

It also highlights the importance of using elections as one of many tactics rather than a primary one, and emphasizes the importance of pairing legal work with illegal work. Arguably most importantly for our purposes, there is a direct callout from Lenin that acknowledges that America is heading toward civil war (which remains true today), and that in periods of emergency or where the bourgeoisie has made it nearly impossible to conduct our work, we should place no faith in legal mechanisms and should direct most of our efforts toward illegal forms of organization.

It could be argued that our present conditions allow us to conduct considerably more work legally than in Lenin’s time, but regardless, we must understand that electoral participation is incomplete if it is not paired with alternative primary strategies.

Without any of this, and without waging a continual battle against opportunists, without recognizing them as the threat they truly are, we end up in the situation Lenin describes when he writes that “such a mistaken, inconsistent, or spineless attitude towards the opportunist parliamentarians gives rise to ‘Left-wing’ communism, on the one hand, and to a certain extent justifies its existence, on the other.”

In other words, a communist party that participates in elections while tolerating opportunist parliamentarians and softening its communist character almost justifies the left-communist rejection of parliamentarism altogether. Effectively, there is no point in our participation in bourgeois elections unless these contingencies are being met.

The Symptoms of Opportunism

We might have noticed some other contingencies within the points listed above that seem somewhat irrelevant to the discussion of bourgeois elections, which we will revisit momentarily. First, we must understand what opportunism is and why it poses such a significant threat to Marxist-Leninist parties.

It might seem, upon first glance, that an opportunist is someone who knowingly co-opts socialist movements to steer them toward reform. But this is not the case, no, opportunists are often those who are sincerely dedicated to the party. As Lenin put it, the opportunist “does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless. Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.”

The opportunist is most dangerous because they appear as dedicated, loyal comrades, and it isn’t their loyalty that we call into question! It is their inconsistent, short-sighted, and unprincipled strategies that sacrifice the long-term project of proletarian revolution by getting lost in reacting to the current moment. While no serious communist would argue against responding to the changing political tide, by Lenin’s own standards this responsiveness is opportunistic if it isn’t grounded in a consistent long-term strategy and vision.

The damage this produces is often irreversible, once the opportunists have unconsciously guided the party toward short-sighted small wins and reforms, Lenin tells us, it is likely impossible to correct course. Those who would be most likely to aid in the change of course have either left, been worn down, or been gradually shaped by the new revisionist norms.

Social-chauvinism is a form of opportunism, but it largely involves prioritizing one’s own bourgeoisie over the interests of the international working class, including support for war, or support for policies put forth by the Democratic Party that do not serve the long-term interests of the working class, or even a refusal to build solidarity internationally with other communist parties. This is the ultimate result of opportunism, that the proletarian movement gets actively mobilized in support of the bourgeoisie’s project, lending its organizational weight and ideological authority to the achievement of their goals.

The symptoms of opportunism appear in the form of tailism, which is characterized by continually tailing after the spontaneous consciousness of the working class without guiding them a step further. The working class will naturally and inevitably diagnose many problems within their society and react to them through spontaneous uprisings such as protests, strikes, and the like.

However, without guidance, these spontaneous uprisings often dwindle into nothing, with everyone returning to their lives as normal. This is because the working class has not yet achieved the political consciousness necessary to turn spontaneity into revolutionary change, and the bourgeoisie’s ideology remains intrinsic to their ability to approach and solve problems.

If we only seek to echo their ideas rather than systematize them into a strategy that elevates their consciousness, we are “meeting them where they’re at,” but only to keep them there. Mao explains the process of this systematization where he says that we should “take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own” (Mao Zedong, Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership).

The masses are not without understanding, and we should have faith in their ability to diagnose problems even if their solutions are disorganized or not yet of an elevated consciousness. Therefore, we should absolutely listen to them. But we should not tail after them and presume that whatever has their attention is where they are at consciously.

Lenin is highly critical of this tailist strategy as well, explaining that remaining subservient to spontaneity “seems to inspire a fear of taking even one step away from what is ‘accessible’ to the masses, a fear of rising too high above mere subservience to the immediate and direct requirements of the masses” (V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?). We should note that Lenin is not making a moralistic claim that tailism is bad because it isn’t “radical enough.”

He is making a structural claim that any deference to spontaneous mass consciousness, due to the character of bourgeois ideological dominance, automatically strengthens bourgeois influence within the proletarian movement. For example, continually using slogans that replace “capitalism” with “billionaires” will reaffirm what the masses already understand, that billionaires are a detriment to working people, rather than pointing to why billionaires exist in the first place and how to wage struggle against them.

Additionally, if a Marxist party allows the masses ebbing consciousness to guide their strategy, they will have to continually pivot and wind up sacrificing longer term strategies for shorter term ones (and in doing so, you also sacrifice the trust of the community by failing to prove your commitment to them long term).

On the other end of the spectrum of symptoms of opportunism, we have commandism, where we ourselves are far ahead of the masses and begin issuing orders, demanding actions, expecting compliance, without doing the patient work of earning the trust of the masses through dialogue, commitment, and meeting their material needs. This characteristic is typical of parties who are ideologically clear but have totally lost their connection to the actual consciousness of the masses they are supposed to be leading.

The danger comes when a party becomes isolated from the class it claims to represent, issuing communiqués nobody is listening to, planning actions nobody will join, becoming a self-enclosed sect rather than the leading detachment of a proletarian class-war. For this, Mao’s solution is to put down the theory and go to the masses as students to learn from them.

All of these things, commandism, tailism, opportunism, and social-chauvinism, ultimately steer the party (and the masses) toward liberalism. We can understand how the short-sighted perspective of voting for the “lesser of two evils” has progressively shifted the entire American political consciousness further to the right. When we continually make short-sighted compromises that do not serve a longer-term strategy, we will ultimately make the same mistake of shifting our own political consciousness further right toward liberalism.

Within this, we have “progressive” liberals and “Social-Democrats” who co-opt revolutionary language entirely to distort what socialism actually is. That is why Communist parties tailing after the working class rather than taking them a step further wind up making our platforms indistinguishable from those of a counter-revolutionary social democrat.

Commandism similarly operates by making top-down commands that are detached from the political consciousness and material needs of the masses, often instructing cadre to adopt strategies that are out of sync with the needs of a community, and this in turn creates confusion and distrust.

We might be inclined to give individual opportunists the benefit of the doubt, and while we certainly should not call someone’s intentions into question without basis, their actions can irreparably harm the proletariat even if unintentionally. Marxism-Leninism is a science, a means of diagnosing the problems in our society and identifying exactly what would need to happen to address them.

We understand that capitalism (and a system built around capitalism) cannot be reformed, must be captured by the proletariat, and that revolutionary consciousness must be actively constructed by a cadre of dedicated revolutionaries to dismantle it. This is what distinguishes Marxism-Leninism from every other kind of leftism.

When we flatten the message into one that is more “palatable” to the masses, we are ultimately betraying the solution to our diagnosis and transforming it into something else entirely. Lenin wrote that there is “no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory” (V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?), and that theory itself comes from the praxis of previous revolutionaries who took the time to write down the problems they encountered along the way with the solutions to address them.

By studying revolutionary theory and revolutionary history from the perspectives of revolutionaries, we can learn from how they identified and addressed problems. Today Western Marxists experience a proliferation of opportunism that is the result of a nearly century-long project to obfuscate socialism, dilute it, and literally kill revolutionaries and the potential they carried.

The trend toward anti-intellectualism is significant in driving the idea that we, as revolutionaries, do not need theory. We absolutely need theory if we claim to be revolutionaries, and it is our job to turn theory into praxis and bring it to the masses in a way that treats the masses as capable of understanding it. And we have to have confidence in the masses, rather than paternalize them or treat ourselves as heroes who are there to save them.

Why Elections Are a Failed Strategy

Bringing all of this back to our overarching discussion of American Marxist parties’ participation in bourgeois elections, we can pretty clearly see that the historical context in which Lenin advocated for participation in bourgeois elections is entirely different from the political climate today.

The actual structures of the Duma and the German Reichstag were wholly and entirely different from our pseudo-representative “democracy,” and the amount of time, money, and resources that are required just to get past all of the red tape for a chance at participating in elections is drastically different from the relative lack of barriers that the Germans and Russians had to overcome in their time.

American Marxist-Leninist parties must acquire hundreds of thousands of signatures, tens of millions of dollars in funding, and dedicate tens of thousands of hours campaigning within the four-year election cycle just to be able to throw their hat in the ring. The American political system is designed entirely to keep legitimate socialist candidates off of the ballot, and the internal red tape is structured to prevent us from using the system against itself (if we were miraculously able to win an election).

Decades of red-scare propaganda and additional measures to restrict ballot access and voter access (redlining, gerrymandering, etc) add further barriers that need to be overcome that our revolutionary predecessors never encountered. Further, when we look across the actual platforms of the candidates running in these elections, what we notice is that their campaign platforms are indistinguishable from those of any other “progressive” candidate.

Let us take a look at the campaigns of two candidates from the 2026 Gubernatorial Election in California. The two explicitly socialist candidates are Ramsey Robinson, running through the Peace and Freedom Party, and Butch Ware, running through the Green Party. Ramsey Robinson is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which is a Marxist-Leninist party that believes the “only solution to the deepening crisis of capitalism is the socialist transformation of society.” (PSL website)

Butch Ware is an independent running through the Green Party but describes himself as a “movement builder, an activist, educator, and organizer.” Ware is obviously further left than many demsocs but he is certainly not a Marxist-Leninist. Robinson, being a PSL member, upholds the values of his party as laid out in their party program.

When we look at each candidate’s platform on their campaign websites, we notice an astounding similarity between the two. Robinson’s campaign slogan is “A California for the people, not the billionaires,” while Ware’s slogan is “We’re fighting for a California that serves you, not the corporations.”

Already, we notice their slogans are effectively the exact same. When we dive into the actual platform each candidate is running on, they are nearly identical. Both Robinson and Ware are advocating to end California’s housing crisis, single-payer CalCare, free education, protection of immigrant rights, and divestment from “israel,” among other similar points.

Each platform is structured around reforming capitalism and disciplining it through taxation, minimum wage increases, outlawing corporate bribes, and similar measures. Every single thing within these campaign points operates within the capitalist system, rather than putting forward any real solution to challenge or dismantle it.

Ware, at least, acknowledges this by explaining that his campaign’s reforms are a form of “direct action” aimed at meeting the needs of working-class people, though we disagree with this perspective entirely. Robinson’s platform, however, doesn’t even explain the pandering toward systems of reform, with the closest thing to agitation being an option to “get involved,” which states that it’s “going to take more than one election to fight the billionaire agenda. Join us in building a socialist movement: together we can make a California for all of us.”

What is concerning here is that one of these candidates is a Marxist-Leninist who should be advocating for the complete abolition of the bourgeois state instead of lightly disciplining the capitalists within it. Yet, in order to even ascertain that this candidate is a communist would require significat digging, and his platform certainly is not revolutionary or even explicitly socialist in anything other than name.

After sitting through dozens of interviews and social media reels, it can be concluded that while Ware’s politics are somewhat inconsistent depending on who he’s talking to, it cannot be denied that his language is more overtly socialist (even when his platform is not) than that of the Marxist-Leninist candidate.

Now, when we compare both of these candidates’ platforms to that of Bernie Sanders (a liberal zionist from the DSA) in 2020, his campaign similarly advocated for universal single-payer healthcare, free education, immigrant reform, and other similar issues, with the most notably absent being divestment from “israel.” Ware and Robinson’s platforms are very subtly but noticeably further left than Sanders, but the undeniable overlap in similarity is extremely alarming, and not recognizable by the general public. The platform of the Marxist-Leninist is indistinguishable from those of two other non-ML candidates.

We should recall that Lenin, rightfully, stated that we should analyze someone based on what they advocate for and what they actually do, not on what they say in interviews and on social media. Sanders exposed himself as a zionist shill of the bourgeoisie repeatedly by voting in favor of arming the apartheid state, voting for pro-war measures, and similar betrayals. While Robinson and Ware have not yet achieved an electoral position that we can measure against, we should understand that their platforms neither challenge the capitalist system nor advocate for dismantling it entirely.

It can certainly be argued that calling for the overthrow of the government as a slogan for governor would indeed likely alienate many working-class people who are not quite ready for such “extreme” revolutionary language, and could also pose legal consequences. However, there are a great many ways to elevate the consciousness of the masses within these confines without pandering to outright reformism!

There is a congressional candidate in Texas who called for converting ICE detention centers into prisons for zionists, which is hilarious and outlandish in a way that quickly revealed the reactionary nature of AOC and other politicians, and is suprisingly a more effective way of exposing the cracks in the capitalist duopoly.

Now, the defense from most Marxist-Leninist parties is that they don’t run in elections to win, but to forward their platform, recruit candidates, etc. Our criticisms would not change regardless of if they sought to win or lose these elections, and arguably their participation makes significantly less sense if the objective isn’t to win.

To campaign on a platform without intending to act on it is to lie to the general public, who (according to the duopoly) is already “wasting” their vote by putting confidence in a communist candidate, and it is a betrayal to that confidence by running on platforms that give no indication of this strategy. The masses need to trust us, and this doesn’t build trust.

These parties are also wasting significant amounts of resources on these campaigns just to lose them. And the individuals they do manage to recruit into their party will likely not understand the difference between scientific socialism and Bernie Sanders’ distortion of “socialism,” which isn’t to say that they cannot learn, but recruiting them on false pretenses is not the way to attract the dedicated, professional revolutionaries of Lenin’s vanguard party.

And just as a side note, Lenin did not lose elections. In fact, the Bolsheviks won six seats in the Fourth Duma in 1912, and as we’ve discussed, despite living under the tsar, openly called for his violent overthrow.

Communist parties in the United States have been participating in elections at the local and federal level for over a century. When we analyze the statistics on what portion of the working-class vote we are able to win and how often we win, the results are genuinely depressing. Eugene Debs’ 1912 Socialist Party run remains the most successful at roughly 900,000 votes (about 6% of all votes), and CPUSA candidate William Z. Foster managed only 102,991 votes (0.26%) in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, when conditions for socialist win should have been perfect.

While the PSL’s 2024 presidential campaign did secure the most votes for a socialist candidate in nearly a century (roughly 167,000 votes, or 0.11% of the total), as we have explained, assuming that this correlates to a genuine interest in revolutionary socialism is short-sighted and opportunistic. The material conditions of the 2024 election had significantly more to do with that number of voters than any actual interest in socialism or communism itself.

The most damning aspect of our participation, however, is what “Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism” pointed out. Those who participate in elections at the local and federal level are typically those who belong to the labor aristocracy.

According to this article, while the average voter turnout from the 2020 presidential elections was about 63%, “turnout among households with a family income of 75 thousand to 99 thousand dollars per year, 100 thousand to 149 thousand dollars per year, and 150+ thousand dollars per year turned out at rates that were well above the average (72%, 77%, and 80% respectively) and in much greater numbers than lower income brackets.” The article continues, explaining that these “upper income brackets should correlate roughly with the Labor Aristocracy, the Petty-Bourgeoisie, and Bourgeoisie proper.” Their conclusion, which we wholeheartedly agree with, is outlined below:

“Firstly, the kinds of people who are likely to turn out for elections in the US are unlikely to support Communism barring a massive decrease in the living standards of most of these people. As stated earlier in this essay, most likely voters in the US come from the American Labor Aristocracy, Petty-Bourgeoisie, and Bourgeoisie. These groups do not have any natural inclinations to support Communism. They have either carved out a precarious yet comfortable place for themselves within the Capitalist system, as in the case of the Labor Aristocracy, benefit directly from the Capitalist system, as in the case of the Bourgeoisie or Capitalist Class, or fall somewhere between these two poles, as in the case of the Petty-Bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the most exploited, and therefore more inclined to support Communism, segments of American society turn out not only in lower percentages than the more Bourgeois classes, but also in lower overall numbers. This is especially telling since the more exploited classes represent a far larger segment of American society… When taken with the fact that the social classes of Capitalist society tend to be segregated into separate communities, making concrete efforts at targeted community outreach, going to the Proletariat and trying to meet its needs while also educating and organizing it, is a far more concrete strategy than running a political campaign and hoping that you catch the attention of some portion of the Proletariat. In this regard, the “survival programs” of the Black Panthers should be taken as a model for any political group organizing towards Proletarian Revolution in the US.” (emphasis added)

Again, we might encounter pushback from someone who would insist that the Black Panther Party also participated in electoral politics. And indeed, they participated in bourgeois elections, specifically Bobby Seale’s 1973 mayoral campaign and Elaine Brown’s 1975 city council campaign.

However, before running campaigns, the Black Panthers spent almost a decade engaging in mass organizing initiatives through their survival programs and self-defense programs, and had garnered the attention of mainstream media, which granted them national name recognition in addition to the respect and trust they had cultivated within their own communities.

Their participation also came after the FBI spent years systematically crushing their movement and momentum, reducing their ability to engage in self-defense programs and their survival programs, and had already assassinated much of their leadership. Electoralism for the Black Panthers was one of their last legal forms of party work that they could engage in. In addition, these elections were used as organizing platforms for their survival programs (sickle cell testing happened during Seale’s campaign), and were subordinated to the rest of the mass work that constituted the actual base of the party’s politics.

While the Black Panthers contain many lessons for us to draw from, their evolution as a party took time to form and was not always explicitly Marxist-Leninist. One thing they correctly identified, which we should take time to discuss, is the group of people in the United States with the most revolutionary potential, the lumpenproletariat. First, let us break down some statistics expanding upon the figures above.

The author correctly pointed out the correlation between those who actually turn up to vote and having a higher income, but let us put this figure into more context. Out of the roughly 183 million U.S. workers, about 42.3 million (23.1%) made at least $100,000 in 2024, which means roughly 140 million individual workers, about 77%, earned less than $100,000 per year (both figures from the 2024 U.S. Census). Over 90% of employed workers earn their living through wage labor (BLS, 2025).

There are almost 800,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night according to the HUD 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. There are roughly 23 million non-citizen adults living in the United States, with 14 million of those being undocumented immigrants (Pew Research Center, July 2023), and 4 million formerly incarcerated people with felonies (The Sentencing Project, “Locked Out 2024”), representing 27 million people who are legally barred from voting in the United States.

When we look at the voting statistics from 2024, we can see that voters earning under $100,000 make up only 42% of voter turnout, with that number decreasing to 16% for voters earning under $50,000 (PRRI, “Breaking Down the Differences Between Voters and Non-Voters in the 2024 Election,” May 2025). Roughly half of all adults earning under $50,000 did not vote in 2024, and half of all adults earning under $100,000 did not vote in 2024. That is over 100 million eligible voters who did not vote. For comparison, only about 22% of adults earning $100,000 or more did not vote.

These numbers are quite staggering, and their complexity gets even worse when we factor in other demographics such as age, ethnicity, and location. It should be incredibly obvious that the Marxist-Leninist parties, who claim to represent the interests of the Proletariat (those who have nothing to sell but their labor power), are spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours to platform watered-down socialism to predominantly white voters aged 45 and over who earn $100,000 or more annually, the labor aristocracy, historically the least likely to give a communist the time of day let alone join in their “movement.” The Proletariat and lumpenproletariat, roughly 65% and 8% of the U.S. population respectively, are indeed the least likely to turn up to the polls whether it comes to local or federal elections.

Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, explained that “it is among these masses, in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpenproletariat that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead. The lumpenproletariat, this cohort of starving men, divorced from tribe and clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneously and radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.”

He also explained that these factions of people, who have already been pushed to the outskirts of society, systematically excluded from participating in the system and often abused by it, already understand how broken the system is and are willing to challenge it. “So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals, urged on from behind, throw themselves into the struggle for liberation like stout working men.” Further, it is of the utmost importance that revolutionaries get to the lumpenproletariat first, because the bourgeoisie “will also find in the lumpenproletariat a considerable space for manoeuvring.”

In Sum, Put Away the Fucking Ballots

In conclusion, it is evident that after over a century of participation in bourgeois elections, they have not produced any meaningful results, by any possible metric, at urging the working class toward political consciousness. In fact, by taking more than a superficial glance into the justifications these parties make for their participation in bourgeois elections, we find that they have neither a theoretical nor a material leg to stand on to justify their continual use.

By every possible metric, our participation is a failure, an astounding misappropriation of passionate revolutionaries’ time, money, and energy that is drilled into a completely feckless endeavor. When we look into the amount of money that these campaigns require, it becomes more than just a silly oversight of party leadership to continue this failed strategy, and becomes a deliberate, opportunistic strategy to thwart any revolutionary change.

More concerning, revolutionary language, to this day, is flattened into that of reformism and revisionism, despite Lenin’s diagnosis over 100 years ago. While many (though not all) Marxist-Leninist parties take the “correct” geopolitical stances, and have astute material analysis in their publications, when we look at their actual organizational efforts and what they advocate for, it becomes evident that these are not serious revolutionary parties.

This should not discourage any revolutionaries within these parties, or those who have considered joining them, but these revolutionary Marxists should take up reading theory as a preventative measure against allowing their hearts and minds to be corrupted by opportunism, and understand that it is their duty to fight opportunism!

What we can also take from this long-winded critique that there is a clear path forward. But we simply do not have the time to continue to recycle failed strategies and to tiptoe around the sensitivities of the comrades or leaders who have engaged in these strategies. It is time to stop organizing the labor aristocracy, the liberals who show up to No Kings protests, the engineers who work from home, and the suburban neo-liberals who love to “two things can be true at once” us into war.

While these groups are always welcome to prove themselves as comrades to the struggle and to join in our efforts toward revolution, it is evident that our primary focus should be foremost on the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat, those who are disengaged from elections and left behind by society.

Given the bloody century of feckless endeavors by American Marxists, a good place to start is by going to these communities and learning from them, and gradually working to earn their trust by meeting their needs (using the Panther’s as a template, forging it’l solidarity along the way) and being consistently devout to the proletarian struggle. It is our job to have faith in these comrades’ ability to intrinsically understand their own exploitation, and to present them with a means to become the tools of their own liberation.

Further, we MUST distance ourselves from the progressive liberals, the social democrats, the pseudo “socialists,” and all other social-chauvinists and opportunists who have co-opted the term socialism to obfuscate and confuse the true nature of it. This clear line of demarcation is necessary to ensure that our solution to the diagnosis of capitalism (and the proletariat’s clear understanding of such) stands in stark contrast to the feckless measures that will reproduce systems of suffering.

There is only one solution.

Editor’s Note: Aside from a few minor copy-edits for consistency across the piece, the letter has been republished in its original state.

The following is a letter I wrote to my comrades on June 4th, 2026, in which I formally withdrew my membership from the PSL. I debated whether or not to post it here publicly, and initially decided to post it with the PSL’s name redacted. However, in light of the recent wave in resignations, particularly that of Walter Smolarek, a member of the Central Committee and a 17 year veteran of the PSL, I have decided to post my own letter in full in solidarity with the numerous other comrades who have arrived at the same conclusions and quietly or vocally resigned.

Before I continue, I want to clearly state that the problem is not the individual comrades in individual units, these units are often filled with the most genuine, kindhearted, and passionate people whose energy and time are currently being exploited by a corrupt party. These comrades believe the work they are doing is toward the stated goal of a proletarian revolution, which is why they are defensive of the party and their work. It should be noted that the PSL’s central leadership does not represent these comrades as a whole, and as Walter’s letter points out, there is absolutely no transparency regarding the PSL’s decisions, and this has intentionally cultivated a membership that cannot see the corruption and has no real system in place to challenge it.

The PSL’s internal response to Walter’s letter contains the same deflection I encountered anytime I lent constructive criticism or voiced concerns to leadership. There is only a superficial acknowledgement of “organizational issues,” while the purpose and intent of the criticisms are shifted to personal grievances and a “misunderstanding” of the party line. This shift away from the central thesis of Walter’s arguments, which are overwhelmingly and demonstrably not about a petty personal grievance or a misunderstanding of PSL’s “political line,” is manipulative and dishonest.

Rather, his thesis is a confirmation of a current of dissatisfaction running across Party chapters nationwide, the same conclusions that I, and evidently many others, arrived at independently. It is now apparent that the inferences I drew are, in fact, an accurate description of the PSL’s actual internal workings. And while I affirm the patterns he documents, I do not endorse or validate Walter’s past or present conduct and have found many inaccuracies in his letter that I will detail at a later date. He offers no real criticism of the PSL’s participation in bourgeois elections, and he does not reckon honestly with his own role, as a long-tenured member of the leadership, in many of the errors he describes.

The PSL is already mobilizing its members on social media to discredit the validity of these criticisms, dismissing them as the work of wreckers, that to circulate these criticisms while the organization is “under state scrutiny” is doing the work of COINTELPRO. This is deflection, a pattern of PSL’s central leadership to avoid accountability. A party genuinely worried about infiltration and wreckage would tighten its analysis and its accountability, not move to crush valid criticism. And importantly, naming a pattern of structural rot is not sabotage, the rot is the sabotage, and will ultimately be the party’s own downfall if it does not address it.

I actively pursued membership with the PSL around April of 2025 and became a candidate in June of the same year. To be clear, I did not finish the candidacy classes necessary to become a “full” member, and this was deliberate because the classes, as I note in my letter, were filled with numerous historical/theoretical errors that sought to guide the conclusions of comrades away from their historical intent. In my repeated attempts to address my concerns about the PSL’s political education, strategies, and structure with various levels of local leadership, those concerns were often repeated back at me as though I had simply “misunderstood” the PSL’s political orientation, as though, because I did not understand it, I had not engaged with it, had not finished the classes, and was therefore incapable of grasping its purpose.

Effectively, regardless of how analytical, precise, and specific my concerns were, I was told by local leadership, in so many words, that it was my own deficiency for not “getting” the purpose of our feckless strategies, rather than that I fundamentally disagreed with them. The PSL is deliberately obscuring the fact that these are not trivial differences or simple “disagreements,” their behavior is a named ideological-political tendency within the history of revolutionary movements and parties, and that this tendency is inherently antagonistic to the working class.

The focus of my letter is on the tendency of opportunism (namely, right-opportunism) and revisionism within the party which I ground in the theoretical works of Lenin, Mao, and other revolutionaries. Importantly, my critique of this tendency is not purely theoretical, but is also based on the astounding amount of negative feedback from members of my community that have made me realize how dangerous this tendency is to the proletarian movement. The party’s leadership is deeply disconnected from the needs of individual units and the units themselves are disconnected from the masses.

The overarching thesis of my arguments is that the PSL has wrongfully titled itself the vanguard of the working class while distorting the meaning and function of the vanguard in revolutionary history. “Vanguard” is a relational term, there is no such thing as a vanguard party without the overwhelming support of the working class behind it. That support is not won by presenting the masses with “correct” ideas, it is built by fighting alongside them, by embedding ourselves in the real conditions and struggles of their lives.

The PSL’s work is not organized at the center of the our class’s struggle, it happens at the margins of it, orbiting leaderships own political line, brands, calls to protest or “boycott”, rather than the lived struggles of those exploited by the capitalist system. Because the PSL’s leadership is itself severed from the masses, it can only relate to its own units through top-down command, issuing directives that do not arise from any real struggle of the working class. Nor is there any channel running the other way to surface the needs and conditions of different regions back up to leadership. This is why so many of these commands make no sense on the ground, why, for instance, the PSL can insist on agitating for a nation-wide “general strike” without any of the infrastructure necessary to support one.

As I diagnose in my letter, this is a form of opportunism, called commandism. However, this opportunism cuts in the opposite direction as well, in which the PSL constantly tails after the spontaneous consciousness of the masses, echoing their own sentiments, rather than raising them up. Both of these signal a party that, regardless of how many people show up to our actions or vote for our candidates, is deeply disconnected from the actual daily lives of the people.

That is, turnout measures how many people we can mobilize for an afternoon or election, not whether our work has sufficiently elevated their consciousness by being connected to their struggles. A party with no meaningful connection to the masses is an irreconcilable contradiction. Stalin makes this most explicit in Foundations of Leninism, where he states that the party is “the vanguard of the working class,” but only insofar as it merges with the class, absorbs its best elements, and is connected to it by “a thousand threads.”

Walter offers numerous examples of commandism in his letter that we can draw from, and I touch briefly on my own, but it’s important to understand (as I’ve already stated) that this is a historical ideological-political pattern. In the 1970s, thousands of leftists turned toward Marxism-Leninism and began building new revolutionary parties in a period that came to be known as the New Communist Movement. By the 1980s it had largely collapsed due to relentless sectarian splits, dogmatism, and international communist crises. As it fell apart, organizations tried to account for what had gone wrong, and one of them, the Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee, wrote a study that named these organizational failures. Their description of commandism reads quite similar to what we experience now:

The discouragement of independent thinking and discussion in the party leads to an overdependence on leadership. We have noted the crucial role of organizational leadership. Yet if only officially sanctioned ideas have a place in the party, it can quickly develop a bureaucratic spirit: leaders command, members become ‘employees’… Commandist parties quickly tend toward dogmatism because the cadres will not or cannot take responsibility to apply the organization’s line in an intelligent way to the specific circumstances they face. Even though the members of the organization may discuss how to apply the line, their discussions cannot get very far–because applying a political line in a concrete situation requires dynamic understanding rather than dogmatic memorization. In this atmosphere members avoid reporting problems or failures for fear of being thought disloyal or defeatist.

In our movement, commandism has often reflected the leadership’s mistrust of the members (not to mention their mistrust of the masses) because of the members’ low level of political development. Yet commandism is not a cure for uneven political development; it is a prescription for continuing it. Commandism can never result in members gaining that critical grasp of Marxism-Leninism necessary to develop communist leaders and cadre.

The PSL, as Walter points out, is about as far from being the “vanguard” of the masses as a supposed “revolutionary” party could possibly be. There is a culture of deflection and a refusal to engage in meaningful criticism, in which anyone, or any group, who criticizes, distances from, or rejects the PSL is treated as little more than a “hater” or even a fed. The PSL encourages comrades to dismiss those who distance themselves from us as simply not understanding democratic centralism or Leninist organization, when in reality this is a gross negation of the mass line which only harms our work and our connection to the proletariat.

The PSL manages and contains working-class energy rather than organizing it in the direction of independent proletarian power, becoming what Lenin called a “bourgeois labor party.” Lenin explained that the opportunists are “better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie itself,” because they perform a service for capital that capital cannot perform for itself, which is keeping the proletariat tied to safe, non-threatening, system-preserving activity.

Those who earnestly seek to see the dictatorship of the proletariat in our lifetime must abandon the opportunists, and must realize that their energy has been driven into non-threatening measures that drill their passion into the ground. In the past, when the PSL has had membership ruptures, many of those comrades never rejoined any organization or returned to political work at all, which is far more a victory for the ruling class than for the PSL or the proletariat.

So, comrades, I ask you not to lose sight of why we joined the PSL in the first place, and to understand that there is a great deal of work to be done, and that every day we spend with a party that has abandoned its revolutionary premise is another day without challenging the ruling class, another day it gets to inflict violence on the masses. The remedy for this diagnosis is to complete the task set before us by Engels and sweep away the “colossal pile of garbage inherited by tradition,” namely opportunism, by going to the workers and the oppressed to engage in revolutionary mass organizing at the heart of class struggle.

We cannot allow ourselves to be lost to the wind, nor can we abandon the tasks before us. If comrades read this and are inspired to persist in our historic task of revolution, please reach out so that we may coordinate and determine the path forward!!! Had Lenin remained within the undivided RSDLP, the Bolsheviks would never have formed, and the October Revolution would never have happened. Lenin explained in an issue of Iskra that “Before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation.” You do not stay in the ranks of an ineffective, corrupt party, even when the alternative is a significantly smaller group.

As Comrade Mao said, “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”

Assalamu alaikum Comrades,

I want to begin by explaining how incredible I think each of you are and how much you’ve all inspired me. After having to start over in a state where I knew so few people, watching ICE terrorize my new home and feeling completely powerless without a community to fight back with, I joined the PSL, and it gave me both a community and a sense of purpose. Because of you all, I have so much hope for the future, and I genuinely believe that a revolution in our lifetime is possible and inevitable.

However, I have decided to discontinue my membership with the PSL.

This is a decision I have been dwelling on for months, one that has tugged at my heart and led to immense guilt. My decision to leave has absolutely nothing to do with any of you, and I am so grateful to have struggled alongside each of you. Lenin was famous for announcing his departure from an organization and distributing it to the membership, so, in the tradition of Lenin, I will offer a clear explanation of why I’m leaving. Criticism is a longstanding tradition of revolutionary parties, and I genuinely hope my criticisms are understood in good faith, rather than as an attempt to sow disunity.

My decision rests on fundamental disagreements with national’s political orientation and strategies that, from my perspective, have led to a significant gap between the national leadership and the needs of local units. I have voiced many of these concerns in internal meetings and in private to leadership, and though I genuinely appreciate our incredible unit leads, leadership, and other comrades for patiently discussing them with me, I have not been able to reconcile them.

There is a tendency that continually emerges within revolutionary parties, one that every single revolutionary has had to reconcile with in the past, this tendency is what Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and others have identified as the biggest threat to revolutionary parties. This tendency is opportunism, and importantly, it isn’t a moral failing of individuals within the party, nor is it intentional! Its a structural drift that, according to Lenin and Mao, must continually be combated to prevent this tendency to cause the party to abandon the revolutionary cause altogether. A party that has drifted towards opportunism will still present as a Marxist-Leninist party.

And, indeed, the PSL identifies as Marxist-Leninist, its public political analysis is generally correct, and its propaganda and longer-form content retain the language and conclusions of Marxism, these are what drew me to the party in the first place! Diagnosing opportunism requires an analysis of the political character, content, and action of the party and continually holding it next to the ultimate objective, which is a proletarian revolution. This letter will break down my primary concerns with the party’s political character, content, and action by continually grounding it in the objective goal and pairing it with the wisdom of our revolutionary predecessors. My concerns break down into a few primary categories: political education, party propaganda, failure to convert spontaneity into action, lack of underground work, and electoralism.

(Addendum: I would like to note that the PSL carefully distances itself from identifying as a Marxist-Leninist party. In both their “About” and their “Party Program” sections on pslweb.org, the party never mentions Lenin at all. Instead, they frame themselves as simply ‘Marxists.’ They never specifically utilize Leninist or Marxist phrasing such as “vanguard,” or “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and instead soften these terms with less descriptive language. These specific terms are not “communist jargon” you can abandon for accessibility, they are literally the dividing lines that separate Marxism from reformism.

In The State and Revolution, Lenin writes that someone who extends the recognition of class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a Marxist, everyone who accepts class struggle but stops short of the DotP is a reformist or opportunist. This is an extension of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he is clear that the transition between capitalism and communism is the revolutionary DotP. Comrades, we must recall that the Gotha is a furious polemic against a socialist party watering down its program with vague, conciliatory language to make themselves palatable.)

Political Education

Beginning with political education. As Lenin states, “there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory.” Marxists have gotten a reputation for obnoxiously harping about the need to read theory, this has been exacerbated by those who treat Marxism as a dogma that must be strictly adhered to and applied. But Marxism isn’t a dogma, is it comrades? It is a science! And like any other science, it must be approached using skepticism, observation, hypothesis, and application, but we can build on the existing scientific research instead of starting from scratch. If enough evidence has disproven our hypothesis, we can begin to reanalyze and rehypothesize, rather than continue on without question (that would be dogma).

Theory represents the practice and research of revolutionaries who came before us, who diagnosed the problems in our society and how to address them, with each building off the work of the last, and all grounding their theories in the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. For a revolutionary party, theory is indispensable. Many challenges that Marxists face today are the same challenges that revolutionaries of the past confronted. Reading, understanding, and applying theory not only helps us become better agitators and propagandists, it equips us to make the right analysis and decision in a time of crisis.

Perceptual knowledge comes from our direct experiences with the world, and these perceptions are what help us to realize things like the unfairness in the justice system, wealth inequality, or that everything feels bad all the time. These data points reflect certain realities of the objective world, but they are one-sided and superficial, an impression that reflects things incompletely without revealing their essence. Rational knowledge is what you get when those scattered impressions are synthesized into an understanding of the why and the how. This synthesis helps to explain the laws and relations that produce these impressions. This is, as some of you may know, an overly condensed explanation of Mao’s theory of knowledge which isn’t limited to book clubs and study groups, it requires reflection and is incomplete without actual practice. Practice is what makes theory dialectical and material, rather than purely ideological.

The reason why many of us became leftists is because of this perceptual knowledge that helped us identify the impressions of capitalist exploitation in the world, rational knowledge is what leads us to become Marxists, and application is what transforms us into revolutionaries; this application is what produces new theory. Anyone can recognize and diagnose problems within society. But without taking these observations past their impressions, they will be captured by the ruling class, converted into an understanding that is compatible with ruling class ideology. Due to the nature of ruling class cultural hegemony, their conclusions are what seem most natural or inevitable to us. The theory is what produces the difference between a Marxist and a leftist.

This is why we need revolutionary theory. However, it is entirely unnecessary to start at step zero and to insist on rediscovering, by our own trial and error, things that were settled ages ago. The same way we wouldn’t need to come up with our own theory of gravity in order to understand that what comes up, must come down, as this has already been extensively tested and iterated upon. In the same way, revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin put Marx’s existing theories to the test and developed them further, which other revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro have done with Lenin’s ideas. The body of theory is the rational knowledge of the entire international proletarian movement!

However, theory without application is useless and produces dogmatists who are incapable of acting. As Marx said, the point of studying theory and discussing it is to change the world! Rational knowledge is only verified and developed when it is put to the test in our own material conditions, which is why every revolutionary party should pair practical application with a continual study and revisiting of theory. This doesn’t mean that “right” ideas come only from those who’ve read every volume of Das Kapital. The masses often have many right ideas, but those ideas are usually isolated to individual issues, and our role as revolutionaries is to systematize them into something coherent, a strategy. We cannot do this without theory.

In the PSL, theory is de-emphasized in practice. Our political education often vulgarizes theory and simplifies it to the degree of obscuring it altogether. The format is accessible, which is lovely, but this format cannot and does not supplement engagement with the revolutionary theory and pedagogical discourse that produces rational knowledge. The most important part of theory is NOT the conclusions drawn from it. The value of reaching the rational stage is understanding the analytical movement from impression to essence, so that we can perform that analysis ourselves on new conditions.

The PSL’s political education condenses almost two centuries of Marxist theory, supplemented with other PSL publications, all of which are secondary sources that place a barrier between us and the words of the theorists themselves. In the instances where actual theory is studied, it is often paired with study materials provided by the PSL. I’ve been informed that this is only to provide historical context, which is frequently what makes theory so difficult to absorb (so true). However, as I will demonstrate later in my letter, historical context is not neutral, and providing it pre-interpreted is where the PSL’s conclusions get inserted into the theory itself. (Note: It has been revealed that this is intentional, not incidental. In this letter I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I would revoke today.)

Leadership has framed the PSL’s resources as a pragmatic means of continuing education, one that alleviates the burden of study, which is time-consuming and often inaccessible. But theory isn’t just reading or learning, it is a cycle of analysis and application, and it is the PSL’s responsibility to treat political education as a continual project of sharpening our analysis and strategy. This isn’t to say we should hand comrades a stack of texts and wish them luck!

A presentation of historical context, in a classroom setting guided by analysis and dialogue, lets us develop our analytical skills against the texts themselves. A summary of that history paired with pre-determined discussion points intended to steer comrades toward a fixed conclusion does not. Education is the investment a party makes in its members to produce capable, confident revolutionaries, and the decision to de-emphasize it in favor of PSL-produced summaries is one I fundamentally disagree with.

Lenin himself already assessed the pragmatism in de-emphasizing theory in favor of practice, his conclusion is that there is no middle ground between ruling class ideology and Marxist ideology, without a full understanding of Marxism we will default into ruling class ideology. This default to conclusions that are acceptable to the ruling class, which is subconscious and unintentional, is what produces opportunism. This is what happened in Lenin’s time, in his polemics against the “Economists.”

These were Marxists who believed they should focus on the workers’ immediate economic struggles, wages, hours, conditions, because that is what workers “actually respond to,” and that they should meet workers where they are rather than ply them with abstract theoretical demands. They thought this was the practical, non-elitist, mass-connected approach, and they accused Lenin’s emphasis on theory and professional revolutionaries of being aloof and disconnected from the “real movement.”

Lenin argued that they fundamentally misunderstood the task, which was to elevate the consciousness of the masses, and that because they refused to study theory, they could not see that all they were doing was tailing after the masses. This brings my opening quote from Lenin fully into context:

“Those who have the slightest acquaintance with the actual state of our movement cannot but see that the wide spread of Marxism was accompanied by a certain lowering of the theoretical level. Quite a number of people with very little, and even a total lack of theoretical training joined the movement because of its practical significance and its practical successes… Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.“

Public Propaganda

This leads me into political propaganda. Now, when it comes to the masses, they do not need to be experts in political theory, but it is our job as revolutionaries to bring theory to them. This doesn’t mean we should show up to No Kings chanting that the “bourgeoisie’s appropriation of surplus value from the proletariat is the primary contradiction that will lead to capitalism’s downfall!” However, we are supposed to use our understanding of theory to take the working class’s ideas and connect them to revolutionary theory in a way that they can grasp, and to continually raise their consciousness rather than just reaffirm what they already understand.

What I’ve noticed about the PSL’s agitation and propaganda geared toward the masses (think social media, campaign platforms, statements and speeches) is that it doesn’t seek to elevate the consciousness of the masses (though some of our longer-form content is better in this regard). When Lenin explained that the masses will always achieve a degree of political consciousness (”trade union consciousness”), he was trying to convey that the masses are fully capable of diagnosing the problems in their society based on their own experiences, as we’ve discussed. But this consciousness would not develop into revolutionary consciousness due to the hegemonic function of ruling-class ideology, which was always lurking in the shadows to redirect their political consciousness back into the system rather than away from it.

This is why populist phrases like “eat the rich!” and “people not billionaires” emerge organically from the working class! They’ve identified the economic element that leads to exploitation, but it is our responsibility to provide a class analysis that connects those phrases to the problem, capitalism. The masses are intelligent and will understand this. As Lenin put it, “the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.” When our propaganda only mirrors back what they already understand, we fail in our job to raise their political consciousness.

The Democrats and Democratic Socialists and other reformists center the entirety of their political agitation on socioeconomic “improvements” for the working class but they do not provide a class analysis. This is why Lenin explained that they “limit the tasks of the workers to a struggle for immediate, palpable results; they refuse to recognize that we Social-Democrats cannot reduce our tasks to those that are ‘attainable’ at the given moment… It is precisely the role of Social-Democracy as the vanguard in the actual struggle against autocracy to lift the spontaneous workers’ movement onto a higher plane, to raise it to its proper level of class struggle.” (Note: the Social-Democrats here are the Russian Marxists; Lenin would later break with this term.) Diluting our propaganda into left-populism that isn’t entirely dissimilar to that of the Democratic Socialists (like Bernie Sanders) is a grave error, as Lenin observes: “to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.”

What our propaganda should do is take that degree of spontaneous consciousness a step further by explaining that even if every billionaire disappeared, everyone’s material conditions would remain the same, because “billionaire” and “the rich” only describe a wealth category, and it isn’t the wealth in itself that produces systems of exploitation like wage labor and imperialism. In fact, not all billionaires are capitalists, plenty of capitalists are millionaires or small business owners. Whenever we simply reaffirm that billionaires are the problem, we allow the working class to conflate wealth with class, and we never help them understand that capitalism is the problem, and that IT needs to be abolished. We should have confidence in the working class’s ability to reason and to understand theory (insofar as it applies to their own conditions), and recognize that we may even have much to learn from them.

It is a common pitfall of leftists, not just Marxists, to underestimate the capability and smarts of the working class. Sometimes the argument is made that we still need to “dumb down” our agitprop because the average American reads at a sixth-grade level. This, too, is an excuse. Almost every historical revolutionary had to raise the political consciousness of an almost fully illiterate population. Lenin, Mao, Che, the Panthers, etc., all elevated the consciousness of a peasantry or working class that, in many cases, could not read at all! Lenin called out this tendency to belittle the masses’ capability as follows:

“Attention, therefore, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’ as the Economists wish to do, or to the level of the ‘average worker’… You, gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker’, as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation. Talk about serious things in a serious manner; leave pedagogics to the pedagogues, and not to politicians and organisers!”

Failure to Convert Spontaneity into Action

In the PSL, we have this idea that our primary tasks are to “popularize socialism” and “meet the moment.” Neither of these is inherently wrong. We should popularize socialism in the Marxian sense, and we should meet the moment. Wherever the masses are, as most Marxists argue, we should be there too, to listen to their needs, meet their needs, struggle with them, and elevate their consciousness. In the United States, the ruling class has successfully distorted the history and intention of protests, turning them into a pacifist performance, an outlet for working class rage. But even these entirely harmless, pacifist demonstrations are being pushed into less and less effective means (from protesting in streets to protesting on sidewalks, not being able to block traffic, police escorts, etc.).

As a result, protests are now viewed as a single solitary action lasting an hour or two at most, with everyone returning to business as usual afterward. Some on the left even refuse to attend due to the inefficacy of them. But protests contain immense potential, particularly for revolutionary parties, who should view them not only as a means to agitate and recruit, but as a way to turn the directionless rage of the masses into immediate, organized direct action. This shows the working class exactly what we are capable of while elevating their consciousness. If we show up to No Kings protests only to chant along with the masses, we once more fail to guide their consciousness a step further. As revolutionaries, we are the leaders of the proletarian movement, and it is our job to take the disorganized ideas of the masses and turn them into political action.

We should never push them to do something they aren’t ready for, but we should be able to gauge an individual situation and gently push them toward a more and more impactful flexing of collective power. This means turning pacifist parades into direct action by creating a list of demands, either in advance (with the entire objective of a protest oriented toward these demands) or being ready to create one and encourage a longer, sustained protest from the spontaneous one. This also applies to our current agitation for general strikes, which is one of significant error. When I’ve raised concerns about it, namely that it doesn’t make sense to agitate for one without the infrastructure to support one, I’ve been told that the PSL doesn’t intend to dedicate party resources toward building said infrastructure.

A revolutionary party that is only interested in vaguely gesturing toward the need for a general strike, rather than dedicating party resources and capacity to building the infrastructure, is unintentionally betraying its role as a leader within the proletarian movement. Strike funds, legal defense networks, food distribution, childcare, communication systems, and all the alternative systems are what sustain a successful strike. The historical strikes in the United States all had this infrastructure, built by communist or socialist organizers who prioritized these forms of organization. Such actions are prone to being co-opted by reformists, social democrats, and the ruling class, so it is paramount that communists build these networks rather than allow them to be diverted & squashed by counter-revolutionary forces.

The PSL’s stance on the current moment is what seemingly prevents national from directing resources and capacity toward this. However, Lenin firmly believed that the party should stay ready so it never had to get ready. In their own period of “counter-revolution,” the Bolsheviks did indeed prioritize propaganda and agitation. But importantly, they also used this time to build the skeleton that could support higher-stakes actions, like a general strike, but that often included uprisings many leftists would wrongfully categorize as adventurism. Take the 1905 general strike, which actually shifted the political climate to one of revolutionary potential. Lenin wrote in a letter that the endless deliberation over whether the working class was ready for xyz, or whether to escalate, irritated him. Let me provide the passage in full:

“I need hardly say that I do not undertake to judge of the practical side of the matter… However, judging by the documents, the whole thing threatens to degenerate into office routine. All these schemes, all these plans of organisation of the Combat Committee create the impression of red tape… disputes and discussions about the functions of the Combat Committee and its rights, are of the least value in a matter like this. What is needed is furious energy, and again energy. It horrifies me— I give you my word—it horrifies me to find that there has been talk about bombs for over six months, yet not one has been made! And it is the most learned of people who are doing the talking…. Go to the youth, gentlemen! That is the only remedy! Otherwise—I give you my word for it—you will be too late (everything tells me that), and will be left with “learned” memoranda, plans, charts, schemes, and magnificent recipes, but without an organisation, without a living cause. Go to the youth. Form fighting squads at once everywhere, among the students, and especially among the workers, etc., etc. Let groups be at once organised of three, ten, thirty, etc., persons. Let them arm themselves at once as best they can, be it with a revolver, a knife, a rag soaked in kerosene for starting fires, etc. Let these detachments at once select leaders, and as far as possible contact the Combat Committee of the St. Petersburg Committee. Do not demand any formalities, and, for heaven’s sake, forget all these schemes, and send all “functions, rights, and privileges” to the devil. Do not make membership in the R.S.D.L.P. an absolute condition—that would be an absurd demand for an armed uprising.”

This is why a firm grasp on the history of revolutions, revolutionaries, their mistakes, and their successes, all of which is contained within theory, is crucial to creating a revolutionary party capable of making the correct assessment and decision at a moments notice. Many Marxists would be shocked to find Lenin advocating for what many would classify as “adventurism.” But please understand that I’m not at all stating that every protest should turn into violent “Combat Committees” lol. As I’ve mentioned, a simple list of demands would suffice, and whenever the working class sees victories from these types of actions, it moves their understanding of working class power from the ideological realm into the material realm, making it tangible and achievable.

The PSL has an admirable degree of discipline and responsiveness. As I mentioned, I am continually inspired by you comrades and your ability to set aside your individual needs to respond to the cries of the people! However, our inability to convert spontaneous uprisings into direct action we can support is of concern. We often hold the attention of the masses in a time of crisis, but once the momentum dissipates, so does the attention we hold. Ebbs and flows are natural, but if we are not building infrastructure in the interim to actually prepare the working class for the next crisis, we will continue to lose them when momentum dies down.

Importantly, this cannot be the decision of one individual unit. Dedication to building infrastructure must be agreed upon by the entire party and prioritized by ensuring we dedicate appropriate organizational capacity and resources to it. This is a slow-burning, long term project that requires continual renewal of our dedication. There are days when the free breakfast programs of the Black Panthers didn’t have a single child in attendance, for example, but refusing to give up and maintaining these long term projects will ensure that we stay ready so we don’t have to get ready.

But unfortunately, we often must drop even short term projects to accommodate national’s orientation to prioritize, for example, door knocking. This frequently includes canceling existing actions, like book clubs or community defense meetings, in favor of these more “urgent” priorities. To be clear, I am not discussing when we need to urgently respond to a working class crisis such as ICE raids or emergency rallies! I also understand that we are limited in organizational capacity, and oftentimes we need all hands on deck to be effective in our other strategies.

However, the continual habit of dropping longer and shorter term projects for shorter term ones signals to the working class that we have no interest in seeing these projects through. This continual pivoting is a form of commandism, which is a structural problem when a party grows in size, but it is worrisome that we do not have (many) long term projects we’ve sustained for more than a year. Comrades, I ask you to look into the history of revolutionary movement building and find one movement that has not sustained long term projects! Worse, these pivots are rarely discussed among the units first. They’re decided on by central leadership, either at the national or district level, and comrades are expected to comply.

This is not democratic centralism; abandoning a project, whether at the local or national level, is something that requires discussion when it is not emergent. This is national’s orientation for how the party should be run, and many of you may be okay with this as a strategy, but my analysis is that we regularly sacrifice long term strategies for shorter-term ones that produce small “achievements” but never larger, meaningful “wins” for the working class as a proletarian movement toward the objective of revolution.

(Addendum: Upon reflecting on the PSL’s assessment of the “current moment,” I would like to further push back on this claim. If we look at the political analysis of the world, it is one of revolutionary potential, as evidenced by the political uprisings across the globe. This is not a time of low political action or consciousness; even in the United States, we have had more protests in the last five years than at any other point in history, and more people are turning up to explicitly political action by the millions. Yet we continually fail to raise this spontaneous consciousness further.

So, what is it, exactly, that the PSL means by “meeting the moment,” and what if the “moment” in question is rooted in the same poor political analysis of a leadership that is more concerned with optics and “building the party” than building the capacity to support THE moment for the working class? Because the leadership does not understand what a genuine revolutionary moment looks like, and because they are not cultivating comrades who are capable of utilizing such a moment, we risk squandering the opportunity to elevate the consciousness of the masses to usher them toward that moment.)

Participation in Bourgeois Elections

Seeing as this essay is already approaching 12 pages in its current form, I will keep this critique short but for anyone who is interested, I have written a longer form theoretical polemic and analysis critiquing participation in bourgeois elections for all Marxist parties. Effectively, we spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars within the four year election cycle on these campaigns. We are told that this is a Leninist strategy, but it isn’t really. Those who make this argument rely on Lenin’s polemic in Left-Wing Communism, where he criticized the German and Dutch left for declaring bourgeois parliaments “historically obsolete” on principle alone, he insisted that communists were obligated to participate so long as the masses were still engaged in them.

Once we contextualize Left-Wing Communism, we find that its argument does not map onto our current conditions. Lenin wrote within a climate of immense revolutionary potential, among a working class that was already heavliy organized and politically conscious, and within electoral systems (the tsarist Duma and the Weimar Reichstag) that have absolutely no resemblance to our red-tapped, anti-communist, anti-third party “democracy.”

The Third International, the authoritative codification of how Lenin’s tactics were meant to be applied, also clearly states that any participating party must identify openly as communist, draw a clear line of demarcation from the social democrats, treat elections as a tactic subordinate to other work, and that if conditions are ripe for (as an example) a strike, electoral participation should halt. Our candidates platforms in our recent Vote Socialist campaigns are indistinguishable from those of progressive liberals and social democrats. This is a form of opportunism where we flatten our message to “meet the masses where they are,” but only to keep them there, echoing their spontaneous consciousness rather than systematizing it and raising it a step further.

More importantly, people who turn out to vote are overwhelmingly the labor aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie proper. Roughly half of all adults earning under $50,000 and $100,000 did not vote in 2024. That is over 100 million eligible voters who did not vote. For comparison, only about 22% of adults earning $100,000 or more did not vote. Those who are the most impacted by the system (systemically the poorest, undereducated, marginalized) are those who have already given up on it.

And while statistics do not reveal the complete nuance or the entire picture of one’s class, and those who earn a higher income (such as myself) are capable of joining the proletarian movement, they’ve been repeatedly identified as those with the least revolutionary potential. Further, there are at least 27 millions more (the unhoused, the undocumented, the formerly incarcerated, those in US colonized “territories”) who are legally barred from voting, who our campaigns are also not reaching.

I am not saying we should refrain from participation altogether, but it should heed the contingencies laid out nearly a century ago that distinguish us from the bourgeois Democratic Socialists, and it should be deprioritized. Dedicating party resources to building the infrastructure for a general strike, which the working class has expressed interest in, would be far more valuable. This means establishing distribution networks with storage and pickup sites, neighborhood committees and coalitions, alternative systems to sustain the working class like community gardens (some PSL units in other states are doing this short term), training in first aid, self defense, and childcare.

(Addendum: I am saying that running in presidential and governor races is a woeful misallocation of resources, whereas running in smaller elections across more cities would be significantly easier to win and would have a higher probability of materially improving policy to aid our class, providing the support necessary to engage in class warfare.)

This is exactly what the Black Panther Party did! Their programs were dismissed by other leftists as pointless mutual aid, but they were tactical, a skeleton built to support the proletariat in a time of crisis rather than an end in themselves. As Huey P. Newton put it, they were “survival programs, survival pending revolution, not something to replace revolution or challenge the power relations demanding radical action, but an activity that strengthens us for the coming fight, a lifeboat leading us safely to shore.”

We know their method works here, that it has shaken the ruling class, and we have the Panthers’ own mistakes to learn from, which is again why theory matters. The PSL already knows how to do much of this work, but we don’t currently sustain it long term. We take these types of projects up for short periods and let them crumble in our absence, when sustaining them through the ebbs and flows is where the difficult work is. And much of it must be sustained independently of electoral or bourgeois arenas, so that when the state inevitably moves to crush it, we remain afloat.

In Conclusion

I sincerely appreciate those of you who’ve been able to read through this entire letter. Now, the reasons I’ve provided, for those of you still tuned in, may still seem trivial or unimportant, certainly not a reason to leave the party. But these reasons constitute Lenin’s definition of a party that has unintentionally abandoned the revolutionary premise of Marxism. Without theory, we cannot distinguish revolutionary work from work that only resembles it, and without propaganda that elevates consciousness, the masses will continue to be redirected toward ruling class ideology. This is a critique of the party structure, not of any individual comrades! As I mentioned, each of you is a dedicated, loyal comrade, and I do not question your intentions at all. But opportunism is defined by the use of revolutionary language to legitimize strategies that do not threaten the capitalist system, and that is effectively what our propaganda and political education have resorted to.

Lenin’s point in What Is To Be Done? was that there is no middle ground between revolutionary socialism and liberalism! Any de-emphasis of Marxist theory strengthens bourgeois ideology by default. What makes this dangerous is that the party, functionally, absorbs the energy of dedicated, loyal people who want to be revolutionaries and channels it into work that never actually threatens power, abandoning the necessary and patient work of developing leadership prepared to support the working class in times of crisis.

Every revolutionary leader you’ve ever heard of (Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro, Sankara, Minh, Luxemburg) identified opportunism as the greatest threat to revolutionary parties, more so than violent state repression, because repression leads to revolutionary clarity while opportunism eliminates or distorts it. The worst manifestation of opportunism is what Lenin identified as social chauvinism, when the party actually allies with the bourgeoisie and uses its organizational capacity to achieve their objectives. Lenin explains: “Opportunism is our principal enemy. Opportunism in the upper ranks of the working-class movement is bourgeois socialism, not proletarian socialism. It has been shown in practice that the working-class activists who follow the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeois themselves.”

(Addendum: the PSL has resorted to social chauvinism by mobilizing our organizational capacity to support legislation put forward by the Democratic party such as the recent redistricting in California.)

It may seem as though I’m purity testing the PSL and failing it simply because it doesn’t live up to my ideals of what a revolutionary party “should” look like, that all these theorists I’ve been quoting represent the standard I’m measuring the PSL against, and that we simply aren’t “radical” enough. HOWEVER, opportunism is a structural diagnosis with a long history within Marxist movements, and not a single revolutionary movement has avoided it. It is not representative of the individual moral failures of comrades and their work.

It is identified when a party sacrifices the long term interests of the proletarian movement for short-sighted gains. It is also identified when the question of revolution is continually put off into the distant future and intentionally delayed, treating the masses and the climate as not yet “ready”! Personally, I find this assessment by Parvus (written in 1901, though for transparency, Parvus was a promising revolutionary before the material success of the war persuaded him to abandon the cause, nevertheless, his revolutionary theory remains decent) to be the most astute:

As is well known, it is the dictatorship of the proletariat that opportunism criticises most. It does not directly deny the possibility of realising it, but it doubts it, it pushes it as far as possible into the distance, and above all wishes to eliminate it from present-day political considerations. The conditions, it claims, are still so unripe that they are not yet ready for it. The conditions, claims opportunism, are still so unripe that if the proletariat were to get hold of the machinery of the state, it… would end in a colossal defeat for the proletariat. So, for the time being, we leave the running of the state to those who already do so… And we must regard with trepidation every electoral victory as a step that brings us closer… to our defeat. But due to the inconsistency on which opportunism depends, it of course avoids drawing this conclusion from its premise. But what does it offer us instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it no can no longer countenance as a political guideline? How is the proletariat to abolish capitalist exploitation if not by conquering political power? What should be done, how should the working class act in order to achieve this goal…

It is only logical that opportunism, having abandoned the hope of the political rule of the proletariat, should seek to mediate between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Where socialism has hitherto uncovered the fiercest class antagonisms, opportunism seeks points of agreement. It pursues a policy of compromise. It wants to break off the peaks, to bridge over the antagonisms. This is how the theories of adaptation, of growing over into socialism, arose, with which opportunism seeks to conceal the hopelessness of its standpoint from itself and from the world.

Allowing opportunism to remain unchallenged is tantamount to allowing the party to forfeit the revolution. We will continue to invest our time and energy into strategies that never pose a threat to the ruling class, we will tail after the masses to “meet the moment,” we will substitute left-populist sloganeering for class analysis, we will never earn the trust of the working class, we will make short-sighted pivots that sacrifice the long term project of cultivating the masses, and we will distort the revolutionary character of our messaging.

Worst of all, we will be unprepared to assist the masses in times of crisis. One of the most dangerous aspects of opportunism is that it is rarely intentional (though it certainly can be)! As Lenin states, the opportunist “does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless. Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.”

In conclusion, I hope my criticisms do not read as an attack on the decent, genuinely good work we have done for the working class. I am aware of how strong my critiques are, and how, like myself, many of you have found a political home and community in the PSL, and it is not my intent to diminish that. The point of this letter is NOT that the PSL’s work is totally pointless or unimportant, nor that everyone should abandon it. The PSL does meaningful and important work, and for many, that work is valuable enough to continue.

But I do not believe this work, in its current form, is building the infrastructure or capacity to support a proletarian revolution.

Though it may not be apparent to everyone reading this, I have tried to address these concerns with varying levels of leadership and to emphasize the need for improved tactics, strategy, and political education. Over the last year I have suggested internal book studies, strategic mutual aid, infrastructure building, self defense training, targeted strikes, and more. Many of these suggestions were supported by our (amazing) local leads, but they require the material support of the PSL’s central leadership, and cannot be carried out by one unit of 6 to 10 people. (Addendum: They have absolutely no interest in doing this type of work.)

I have insisted on different formats for our public-facing “meetings” and “forums,” which often become a lecture with preset discussion points. I’ve heard from at least a dozen people that this format alienates them from attending, people who came expecting their own observations to be heard and taken seriously as a contribution to the struggle, are instead lectured at and forced to engage in timed, predetermined discussions. This overly corporate formula for community organizing is what happens when leadership tries to formalize the cultivation of political consciousness in a way that is totally removed from the actual proletarian movement.

There is nothing wrong with having an agenda or discussion points to keep a conversation productive. The problem is that they reverse the pedagogy of the oppressed, resorting to a style of dialogue that treats the community as empty vessels to be filled with the “correct” knowledge and guided to the “correct” conclusion, rather than letting us be led by them and learn as much from them as they might from us. To assume that only we possess all the knowledge, and must therefore guide their conclusions accordingly, underestimates and, as Paulo Freire argued, dehumanizes the working class and their capabilities.

What has troubled me most in my time with the PSL is that every time I have offered productive criticism, a change of tactics, an improvement to our political education, I have not been truly heard. The responses from upper leadership are often so defensive that you would forget I am a member of this party who deserves to contribute to it meaningfully! My criticisms have, rather, been taken as an attack on you comrades and your hard work.

In my final conversation with [Redacted], I was told that the only way for me to “understand” the work is to “do it.” As if I have not attended dozens of protests and rallies, given speeches at them, driven 20-plus miles in the middle of a workday to defend my comrades from police, ICE, or counter-protesters, as if I haven’t been teargassed and shot at trying to aid my community and my comrades, as if I haven’t harassed my friends and family to vote for our candidates, as if I haven’t tried to bring the PSL to my Muslim community, as if I haven’t spent my own money, time, and energy struggling along the party line with everyone else.

As if it were not from these experiences that I made my observations and earnestly sought to contribute by analyzing where we could improve! For God’s sake, I have been in the PSL almost as long as I have lived in this state lol! It has been the center of my life here. How utterly demoralizing to have my critiques received as though they come from an overly dogmatic, unrealistic armchair revolutionary.

I ground this letter in theory to show that these concerns have a history, a solution, and a name. The PSL claims to be Marxist-Leninist and uses theory to justify many of its stances, and it is for that reason that I have brought theory into this discussion, to substantiate my perspectives with historical precedent, in the hope that they will be taken more seriously after my departure. (Addendum: I implore comrades to genuinely reflect on their work in the party and determine if that work is valuable enough to continue at all.) But I know leadership has meant no ill will and did not intend to push me away or diminish my perspectives. I know they are defending work they believe in, and I still believe in them as individual comrades.

Despite these efforts, despite my attempts to raise these concerns with higher levels of leadership, I have not been able to reconcile these differences. And because I cannot reconcile the party’s strategies, I cannot defend them. It is for these reasons that I have decided to leave the PSL.

I want to end with a special thank you to [redacted comrades] who have taught me so much through their own actions, who have offered me friendship and comradeship, who have had more faith in me than I have at times had in myself, and who I know will continue to do meaningful, hard work both in and out of the PSL, work that all future comrades can depend on to lead them toward the good fight. That love extends to each of you, and I look forward to seeing everything that you all will accomplish and cheer you on from the periphery. <3

Love you all! Salaam!

Recommended Reading:

• The Labor Aristocracy: The Material Basis for Opportunism in The Labor Movement
• Lenin’s polemics against the Economists
• On the Tactics of Opportunism
• The Foundations of Leninism – Theory
• The Foundations of Leninism – The Party
• BE CONCERNED WITH THE WELL-BEING OF THE MASSES, PAY ATTENTION TO METHODS OF WORK
• Mao’s Little Red Book
• How To Be A Good Communist