The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

The Pied Piper is arguably more dangerous than the hunter, and neither should be discounted.

Background

Mamdani’s campaign started with a surge of popularity riding on radical anti-zionist talking points. A long-time “pro-Palestine” activist, supporter of BDS, and critic of zionist settler violence in Palestine, Mamdani has been a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America since 2017, and the New York State Assembly since 2020. Using his elected position to amplify his particular brand of “radical” politics, Mamdani’s public visibility quickly ramped up following his condemnations of the genocidal zionist reprisals following the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood uprising. By repeatedly stirring controversy within settler power structures and zionist media, Mamdani has spent the last two years building a popular image of a radical “socialist” Muslim within a key hotbed of settler political struggle, carefully ramping up the controversy to keep himself in the media spotlight by spouting radical rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada” and “abolish the police.” In October 2024, he announced his candidacy for the 2025 Mayoral race, winning the Democratic Party primary in June 2025. 

Surprising no-one paying attention, Mamdani began walking back his phony radicalism as soon as his candidacy was assured, currying alliances with key members of the NYC police force, choosing open zionists for his staff,¹ announcing his support for the zionist occupation’s “right to exist,” and declaring his intent to greatly expand the police budget for prosecuting anti-zionist activities. 

Principles of Settler Opportunism

The “socialists” who run for office are little more than political adventurists and opportunists. A political adventurist here means an individual who sees themselves as a heroic figure setting out to save the masses from their oppression. They believe they can “make a difference” by struggling within the system, so long as they retain their “principles.” They set aside the necessity of first constructing a class that is conscious of itself and able to coordinate political action according to a definite plan, and try to instead champion what they individually perceive to be the interests of this class (which does not yet exist!). This necessarily produces an eclectic undisciplined political line, because one individual, or group of individuals (like the many so-called “communist” parties) is not capable of producing a correct political line. Only a vanguard party with the backing of the masses, acting in their interests according to their will, can do this. Adventurists either do not know this, or do not care. They believe that by “showing the way,” the masses can be inspired to spontaneous action in support of their own liberation. They believe that by spurring the masses to all go to the polls, they are at the same time building working class unity, solidarity, consciousness, or whatever. Inevitably, they are ultimately defeated: either they fail to gain any purchase within the system and wash out, or they realize the futility of pushing a “revolutionary” line all by their lonesome and turn to opportunism. To this end, political adventurism is materially indistinguishable from opportunism.

Opportunists are in it for whatever they can get. They may agree in principle with a revolutionary line, but in practice they are more than willing to discard inconvenient segments of the masses in the interest of political expediency. Often they can be found eagerly doing this in anticipation of what they believe will win the most “support” at the polls. Inevitably, their most radical edges are rounded out and dulled by constant contact with the inertia of bourgeois/settler governance. In the game of musical chairs that is settler colonial privileges, the most vulnerable people are the first pushed out of the way, and the opportunists are the ones who take up the task of doing the pushing. Because it may be “politically inconvenient” to militantly struggle against the settler colonial occupation and genocide against Palestine, they tell us that these issues must be set aside “for now,” to be pursued “later” when the movement has built more momentum and mass power. Of course what they fail to mention here is that in doing this they are dividing the masses, weakening the movement by directing mounting class struggle into dead-end reformist avenues down which only a small section of the masses can advance. Their actions lead to the sacrifice of all principles on the altar of “pragmatism.”

Besides Mamdani’s tepid criticism of some of the most depraved zionist acts of violence, the key reforms he promised (and those which have won him such widespread support among the imperial left) are as follows: 

• To freeze rents and build “affordable” housing
• To crack down on “bad” landlords 
• To establish city-owned grocery stores
• To establish free public transit
• To raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030. (This in particular appears to be why the “progressive” settlers are so thrilled.) 

A full explanation of the flaws in the rent freeze is well beyond this article, but suffice to say that whatever attempt he may or may not make at expanding and stabilizing the private property regime, it won’t put a dent in the empire-wide land speculation that is the real cause of the housing crisis. Cracking down on “bad” landlords is laughable, considering the socialist position is not to hound out malfeasors, but to liquidate entire classes. And rather than feeding people directly, Mamdani would prefer to compete on the market by creating his own NYC brand grocery store!

This minimum wage increase will mostly benefit the service workers in the empire’s finance capital, the people who keep the gears turning in the nerve center of global imperialism. The claim being made by the settler “socialists,” is that this push for higher wages for some of the city’s workers is building the mass base necessary to push through some “real” reforms—just later on, at an unspecified date and time. There’s no word on how that’s to be accomplished or what the demands will be, but never mind that, they say, we’re getting paid. How exactly is socialism advanced by the appointment of a bourgeois politician as the mayor of the bourgeois finance capital of the empire in the middle of a holocaust being waged against Palestinians? That this disgusting mockery of human decency is being held up as a beacon of hope for the socialist cause hinges on the idea that wage increases are a victory in themselves, that advancing the conditions of some workers is always an advance for the socialist cause. We contend that this is simply not true. Let’s ask the real question: wage increases for who?

Simply being employed, however wretched that employment may be, is itself a position of privilege and power in the imperial system. Yes, the bourgeoisie remain the top dogs, but people who “work for a living” in the colonial economy are still a privileged group: their class position depends on the continued exploitation of people who can’t work for a living. 

There has never been a challenge to the employment problem, and a major reason why is that following along to the plans of the Imperialists keeps wages high and development uneven, securing employment while simultaneously securing unemployment. 

Example scenario: Capitalist introduces labor saving machines that double productivity. Rather than overproducing, they cut the workforce in half and raise the wages of the leftovers by 50%. Overall, the capitalist just reduced aggregate wages by 25%. The business operates at the same level. They don’t overproduce and break their market position, the workers who didn’t get cut have a huge wage increase that puts a contradiction between them and their laid off siblings.²

– @probablykaffe

Many people are excluded from the “productive” sphere on the basis of nationality, gender, ability, etc. We know that a Black person is much less likely to have access to employment than a white person—in fact, the Black unemployment rate in New York City is more than double that of whites (8% vs 3.5%). Disabled people are often completely excluded from a livable income, with less than 25% of people with any disability being employed, and fewer than 1 in 5 autistic people. According to the 2022 US transgender survey report, trans people in the US face a whopping 18% unemployment rate, more than four times the empire-wide average, which frankly should be considered a demographic crisis. These are entire populations of people who are excluded from the privilege of accessing employment, and those who do gain access are often limited to part time or sporadic/seasonal work. And all of this is before we even get into the issue of the role of US imperialism in inflating worker wages inside the empire at the expense of billions of global south workers. 

It can’t be dismissed how difficult it is to be a low wage worker in New York City. There’s a very good reason people are clamoring for this reform. But as the grip of capital tightens around your throat, disabled people who have been suffering under brutal austerity conditions for years are dying at atrocious rates under state eugenicist campaigns. The fact that these plans don’t address the needs of the most oppressed, and in fact perpetuate their oppression in a mystified and more acute form, should be a warning that Mamdani doesn’t deal in social revolution but rather in reinforcing the capitalist state with a “kinder” face. How does the “socialism” of Mamdami do anything to build solidarity between oppressed groups? What is the plan for carrying this movement to a higher stage of struggle? What is being accomplished here, except grabbing more for a select few while the most vulnerable people continue to languish and die in ever-increasing poverty and homelessness? Is the wealth supposed to trickle down from people with jobs to those without? Everyone needs to eat before you reach out your hand for seconds! If any group is forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of “progress” then inequality is reproduced and oppression persists. What does “universal emancipation” mean to you, seriously? If your “socialist” candidate isn’t running on the democratic mandate of the masses of the exploited, and held to account by that democratic mandate, following a definite plan to continually heighten the struggle and broaden the involvement of the masses, then they aren’t a socialist. Unfortunately, the democratic institutions necessary for this, a vanguard party or socialist state, do not yet exist in this land. Our efforts, therefore, should not be to run candidates accountable to no one, but to build the party capable of holding leaders accountable, so that we can finally seize the state. 

Whose Side Are You On?

We must be very clear on this point: Palestinian sovereignty is non-negotiable, just as much as all anti-colonialism is. There is no middle ground or compromise with the settler colonial system. Either we destroy it or it destroys us. Any position which leaves room for the continued existence of “israel” in any form is a denial of the sovereignty and humanity of Palestinians. In tossing out this issue, by “compromising” with genocide, they draw a line between themselves and the Palestinian people. They separate international humanity into two groups pitted against one-another: “us,” and “them.” In the arena of class warfare this division is fatal. When one section of our forces advances while leaving another behind, reactionary forces are afforded room to encircle and defeat both groups, usually by absorbing the opportunists and killing off the rest. Either all the oppressed advance in unison, or we get picked off one-by-one. Genuine revolutionaries demand that every oppressed group be respected, uplifted, and empowered; this will be done in opposition to the dominant groups, who recognize every gain for the oppressed as a loss for their profit. On the other hand, opportunists are content to allow reactionaries to pick off “inconvenient” groups, so long as they personally benefit in the end.

This strategy of divide and conquer, directed from the rear by the bourgeoisie and spearheaded by opportunism, goes back to the earliest days of the anti-capitalist movement. In particular it has come to dominate and define imperial politics over the last century. When the interests of those privileged enough to have jobs are prioritized ahead of those who aren’t, the material division between the two widens. The privileges of the advantaged group are reinforced at the expense of the disadvantaged group, which produces an incentive to keep it that way in the privileged group. This is how reaction breeds. The issue with homelessness is not “the lack of supply” but the capacity for landlords to evict tenants. Ensuring everybody is housed and safe needs to come ahead of reducing market prices on apartments.³ The speculative value produced by rent extraction is what drives the constant inflation of property prices, not “undersupply.” When the health and safety of disabled people is considered a secondary concern to the “comfort” of abled people, and (for example) masking is not enforced, disabled people are excluded from the movement, further weakening it. When trans rights are considered a “token” issue and worth ceding ground on in exchange for concessions for “the majority,” the movement further fragments as trans people are left behind to struggle to survive and to die alone. When Indigenous sovereignty is treated as a secondary concern, or a threat to the property “rights” of “the majority,” the settler-Indigenous divide deepens, and one of the most revolutionary elements of all human society is ejected from the movement. It is this way that, in the name of “the majority,” the opportunists carefully and meticulously carve up the movement into bite-sized chunks that the reactionaries are only too eager to devour. The bourgeoisie and settler masses will always demand that we sit down and shut up and in exchange they will grant some privileges to those of us who acquiesce while they slaughter those who won’t or can’t. Every “temporary” retreat from solidarity turns into a strategic defeat for the movement.

In the coming months, Mamdani supporters may pretend to be shocked at his complicity in settler violence and his leadership in maintaining the colonial occupation of Lenapehoking, just as they are now pretending to be critical of his zionism. The signs pointing towards his opportunism were always there for those willing to see. While he did condemn the zionist reprisals on October 8, 2023, he was quick to also condemn the Palestinian resistance within the weeks following, and since then has eagerly participated in spreading zionist propaganda lies about supposed “war crimes” committed by the resistance.⁴ Mamdani has carefully and consistently played both sides, spouting anti-zionist rhetoric out one side of his mouth while materially aligning himself with colonial hegemony with the other. This barefaced opportunism, and its inevitable tragic outcomes, should be wearily familiar by now to those of us with the slightest of principles. It’s plain as day now, just as it has been for years, that Mamdani is just another lying settler pig—perfectly content to take advantage of public outrage against the Palestinian Holocaust for his colonial ladder-climbing career. 

For as much ink that has been spilled and attention monopolized for this man, little mind has been paid to the social processes underlying his ascent to international fame and infamy. Mamdani’s popularity and controversy could well serve as a case-study in how the left wing of capital uses radical window-dressing to conceal maintenance of the status quo, but we’ve had enough such case studies to fill a library. What is happening to us on the ground? Whether you’re cheering and applauding or booing and hissing, you’re watching the show — so how has the so-called “revolutionary left” become so enraptured by what amounts to performance art on a stage inside a colonial garrison? The complete hegemony of the settler empire’s cultural influence continues to mislead and dull the senses of our aspiring revolutionaries, but not by lying to us to convince us that one settler politician or another is a radical. Even the most ineffectual liberal “socialist” will openly admit that they don’t believe Mamdani will deliver anything resembling a radical break. After all, they’ve “learned their lesson” from former DSA campaign outcomes, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vile opportunism. But if they’ve learned their lesson and “don’t expect much” from Zohran Mamdani, what exactly are they doing? The answer is a parallel to Mamdani’s career.

The Social Technology of Settler Socialism

The mass base of Democratic Socialism is the lower and middle strata of settler colonists.⁵ These people are genuinely discontented with the system, but pay attention to their grievances! “Housing is unaffordable, wages are too low, social safety nets are not robust enough, and  education is too expensive.” Wealth and capital have become too concentrated in the hands of a minority, “the 1%,” and they aren’t getting what they see as their due share. Are these the grievances of a revolutionary, or of petulant settler youth and failed settler aspirants? Are these demands aiming towards the complete destruction of the colonial system and the restitution of Indigenous land sovereignty, or are these demands aiming at a “fairer” redivision of the spoils of colonial conquest and imperialist exploitation? Are the grievances rooted in a desire to end class society or to simply make it more comfortable for those fortunate enough to live within the colonial jurisdiction at which their reforms are aimed?

The DSA professes to be a “socialist” organization, so on the surface it appears to be approaching an alignment with national liberatory, decolonial, and communist struggles. But is this really the case? Remember to always analyze the class position of a given organization by the actions it takes, not by the ideology it professes. Ideology is always a more or less accurate reflection of class alignment, but recall the scientific tenet that the appearance of a thing does not perfectly match its content—therefore we have to look deeper. The reflection can be, and often is, inverted. Zionism purports itself to be a liberatory movement, which is an inverted reflection of reality. Amerikan liberalism purports to be interested in universal democracy, which again is an inverted reflection of reality. So, is DSA really socialist? What are the outcomes of DSA’s political activity? As of this writing, no militant organizations or movements have emerged from the DSA, and decades of organizing has yielded little but a few “more radical” Democratic politicians in colonial office positions. The standard explanation given by “communists” within the DSA for its lack of revolutionary action is that the masses have yet to be radicalized, and therefore struggle within the DSA is necessary to bring them the consciousness they need to begin to take revolutionary action. In 43 years, however, the DSA has largely remained ideologically stationary.

This “failure” to radicalize the masses is a constant point of debate and analysis. Many individuals and organizations within the communist milieu but outside the DSA contend that the source of this failure is because the organization is ideologically democratic socialist (i.e. not revolutionary in ideological outlook), and therefore a different, “more communist” organization is required to impart the necessary revolutionary outlook in its adherents. But this is putting the cart before the horse! Ideology does not dictate material alignment, material alignment dictates ideology. The DSA is not a stagnant ineffectual organization because of its backwards ideology—instead it has a backwards ideology because this is necessary to fulfill its actual goals. What are its goals? The purpose of a system is what it does, especially a system which has remained more or less stable and self-reproducing for over four decades. So what does the DSA do? It reels in members of oppressed groups (trans, queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, etc) and disciplines their activities into serving the interests of its colonial middle-class leadership by mixing them into a single “organization” under middle-class leadership. The profession of “socialist” aims is a smokescreen to obscure the actual aims of the organization, which is ultimately little more than colonial, careerist ladder-climbing.

What of the internal criticisms levied at the organization? Many of the members are often very dissatisfied with the outcomes of their political activity, and among the common refrains is the need for more centralized leadership, for the ability to enforce a political line on the politicians they get into office, and for the organization to divest itself from cooperation with zionism. Yet despite a resolution passing in August⁶ enabling the expulsion of zionist membership (which was barely successful, succeeding with 56% percent of the vote), the openly zionist Mamdani continues to be backed by the DSA, and the overall strategy of the DSA continues to be to maintain its involvement in the zionist Democratic Party. The reality of the matter is, despite professing anti-zionism for the first time in its long history, the DSA remains a zionist organization, and its new “anti-zionist” mask is the same “anti-zionism” of the broader imperial left—an anti-zionism that affirms the necessity of the occupation to continue. Little more than a barefaced lie.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The settler empire has long since perfected the social technology of penetrating organizational and community structures built by, or being built by, the oppressed, with the aim of taking them over from within and submitting them to colonial interests. Where the oppressed see a dire need for unity and solidarity in the face of colonial genocide against our siblings in Palestine, the lower and middle strata of settlers see an upsurge in laboring subjects available to fill the ranks of their latest campaign for redivision of the imperialist spoils. That, in essence, is what the Democratic Socialists of America is: far from a dysfunctional organization which routinely fails to meet its goals, the DSA is a well-oiled machine of settler-colonial annexation. In which revolutionary currents among the oppressed are carefully cultivated within a narrowly bounded arena of struggle, both in order to prevent a dangerous rupture of the colonial system, and in order to ultimately benefit the settlers served by the DSA. That this process occasionally settlerizes individuals from oppressed demographics is part of the point—in order for the DSA to function as intended it’s necessary that the occasional individual from an oppressed demographic attains an internal leadership position or a colonial office position, but this is always predicated on the condition that they closely adhere to the interests of colonial maintenance; they must not engage in illegal activities, such as organizing and arming militant struggle. “Class peace” remains the priority ahead of anything else, even when the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children hinge on the taking up of armed struggle. To the settler socialists, their deaths are water under the bridge so long as wages are increased enough to broaden the number of people who can access the colonial land exchange.

For revolutionaries, what the success of the DSA and Mamdani’s campaign represents is a complete capitulation of the “Free Palestine” movement to settler annexationism and zionism. We’ve failed to differentiate between friends and enemies, failed to take the actions necessary to expel enemies from our organizations and communities, failed to build up the militant organizational capacity necessary to wage armed struggle against zionism, and in doing so failed to defend the lives of our Palestinian siblings in their hour of greatest need for two years ongoing. And yet, Mamdani’s electoral success is lauded as a victory for the left! Indeed, this is a triumph for the left wing of zionism. With hardly a word to the contrary, we’ve rolled over and allowed this travesty to unfold for two years, all the while repeating the inane mantra that “any day now” the masses of settler oppressors will “radicalize” and join forces with the oppressed to aid in the overthrow of their colonial system. In doing so, we’ve demonstrated our own willingness to be complicit in a holocaust so long as this complicity keeps us out of the prison cell and out of the line of fire.

Our Place in History

When freshly stolen land became scarce and prices rose in the late 1700s, the lower and middle masses of settlers eagerly aligned with the planter bourgeoisie to oppose British rule and expand the colonial system. Indigenous peoples bore the cost of their genocidal brutality.⁷ Since then this pattern has repeated itself over and over. At each moment of crisis in the colonial system, the dispossessed and poorer settlers will seek out temporary alliances wherever they can find them to bulk up their ranks for coming confrontation with the ruling strata, but always with the sole aim of securing their own slice of colonial land and their own share of imperial wages.⁸ As times change and ideologies shift and develop, the colonial redistributionists will find alliances in different places. During the period of protracted economic crisis in the 1930s, the redistributionists found alliance with rising Black nationalism, only to cast off their allies the moment a fresh flood of booty came pouring in following the empire’s successful conquests at the close of the Second World War, and by the 1950s the Communist Party USA had successfully liquidated all revolutionaries from its ranks and disavowed national liberation. In the 1960s, a new wave of national liberatory struggles rose, and by the 1970s, settler “radicals” had successfully played out their role in crushing all resistance. The defeated liberation movement became a victorious “Civil Rights Movement” in the settler history books.

Today the same pattern plays out yet again in real time before our eyes: with the colonial system’s internal stratification at historic highs, and faced with the objective necessity of violent armed struggle in support of the Palestinian resistance and against the US empire, the settler “left” floods into our organizations and our discussion spaces, reads our literature and learns our language of resistance, claims to be our allies in struggle, and spends two years marching in circles to maintain the facade, while shoring up support for their preferred reformist. Time and energy and resources that could be spent serving the needs of the most oppressed, building dual power institutions, organizing guerilla strikes against weapons manufacturers and zionist finance institutions, etcetera, gets repeatedly diverted into the same century-old discussions about whether socialists should vote. Those of us aiming to build the revolutionary forces necessary for winning this war find ourselves surrounded by the most dishonest dregs of humanity, grabbing and pulling us back from struggle to keep our labor squarely aimed at shoring up the structures of oppression holding us down. Make no mistake, when $30/hr is firmly in hand, these so-called radicals will ride into the sunset towards their very own mortgages on stolen land and pensions funded by imperialism. 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for personal gain at the expense of the Palestinian resistance is not a betrayal of the “socialist” movement, but the blueprint to be followed by each of its adherents. We’ve already failed to lend Palestine the support it needs for two years ongoing. If the aspiring revolutionaries of our new rising wave of national liberation fail to recognize the myriad methods that settler opportunism uses to exploit our labors for individual gain, we too will take our place in the history books as the defeated “extreme fringe” of a successful movement to redistribute the spoils of genocide and oppression.

1.  Julian Gerson, political director for Mamdani’s electoral campaign, previously served as a campaign manager for US congressman Jerry Nadler. Nadler describes himself as a “committed Zionist” and “a strong supporter of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people.” Gerson is on record saying, “Jerry embodies the idea that one can absolutely be pro-Israel and progressive simultaneously.” ︎
2. From Kaffe in the same thread: “The ratio of the sub-employed population has been roughly the same for the last half century, even as the role of ‘housewife’ has eroded (good riddance), with the shift in joblessness going mostly to the Nationally Oppressed. The abolition of unemployment (a Soviet right), is so little entertained for two reasons:
   1. The Labor Aristocracy refuses to let go of wages and security, even if that value could be re-allocated for increased employment, and erase the security problem. 
   2. The work that desperately needs to be done (i.e. land healing), would reduce dependency on Imperial relations, making it more difficult to compel the working class to reproduce them.
   Instead: insecure-security, stratified wages, uneven development (the cause of high economic migration — the medium of insecurity and stratification), and the ‘public works’ cages a million people yearly, militarizes the population, and (re)builds Bourgeois terrorism.” ︎
3. Hence why housing was a right in the USSR, “Thus a worker cannot be put out of his room, even for non-payment of rent. His wages can be attached, but if he is unemployed his rent is free. He cannot be charged more than a certain low sum, fixed in proportion to his wages.” Anna Louise Strong, The First Time In History, (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1924),149. ︎
4.  “…of course I condemn Hamas. Of course I have called October 7th what it was, which was a horrific war crime,…” ︎
5. According to the 2021 DSA Member Survey Report, 85% of membership is white, compared with only 4% Black representation. 28% of members are full upper-PB with household incomes of $100k or more. 80% of respondents had bachelor’s degrees, and approximately 60% of respondents occupy petty bourgeois or labor aristocratic positions, split between scholars, academics, white-collar, tech workers, non-profit organizations, public sector employees, healthcare or social work, self employed, writer, performer, arts, and political org/union. ︎
6. See resolution R22. ︎
7. “This pretense toward ‘freedom’ continued in 1776 when settlers revolted when London seemed to be loath to continue funding their wars of dispossession against indigenes and the constant conflict with enslaved Africans that was an adjunct of that process” Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 154 in the PDF. ︎
8. See J. Sakai Settlers Ch. 4.4, describing the process of the settler economy importing Chinese labor to displace the Mexican population of the southwest, only to then violently expropriate Chinese industry and landholdings. Afterwards, the same participants in these genocidal purges urged “unity” with Afrikan labor, as the next phase of the developing industrial unionism movement: “Terrance Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor (who had personally called for wiping out all Chinese in North America within one year), suddenly became the apostle of brotherhood when it came to persuading Afrikans to support his organization: ‘The color of a candidate shall not debar him from admission; rather let the coloring of his mind and heart be the test.’” ︎

What is the psychological impact on the children for whom their agency over their own bodies is violently ripped away from them, whose bodies are disfigured against their will, and their identities and very humanity denied them by friends, family, and society? These mechanisms of social abuse lead many trans people to attempt suicide. Rather than treat us as victims of social violence, reactionaries proudly tout “41%”, referencing the trans suicide attempt rate. It is of course nonsense to assert that being trans makes us suicidal, rather than the issue of the above denial of our fundamental humanity, and denial of our access to life-saving medical care, and denial to community, love, support, and respect, that produces suicidal individuals. It’s social murder. But that is naturally the aim of these policies. The cruelty is the point. They want us dead. This is a deliberate policy of genocide, which we have written about before (Transition or Death, Total War and Trans Liberation, Death Before Detransition: In Solidarity with Jaia Cruz). This assertion is in no sense hyperbole or exaggeration. Trans people are under genocidal assault by the settler state.

The proponents of this policy are well aware of this, and consider this forcible imposition of their own values onto the bodies of children to be “protecting” them. Protecting them from what? From the freedom to choose, which naturally builds on the innate drive to resist infringements on that choice. If children are permitted agency over their own lives, then what guarantee is there that girls will grow up into submissive subservient women, obediently serving the interests of abusive patriarchal fathers, husbands, and the state? What guarantee is there that boys will grow up to take their place in the home, workplace, and state as the violent enforcers of the patriarchal order? If given a choice, children can choose anything, and as far as the settler-colonial system is concerned, that is unacceptably dangerous. These children will be ruthlessly punished for choosing “wrong”, and so in a twisted sense stripping away their freedom to choose certainly does “protect” them.

It should be stressed that this danger perceived by the transphobic reactionaries is in fact real. We are a threat. By simply existing out in the open, trans people, particularly trans women, threaten the continued enforcement of transmisogynistic violence which undergirds the very fabric of the cispatriarchal regime and consequently the material reproductive base of the settler colonial occupation of Turtle Island. We lay bare the crying contradictions of this societal death cult. We exemplify in action as well as in words that you really do have a choice, you don’t have to submit, you can live the life that you want for yourself, you can be the person that YOU want to be. By demanding respect for our humanity and our agency, we demand in the same breath respect for everyone’s humanity and everyone’s agency.

The existence of trans people then is an irreconcilable contradiction, a revolution in process against the hegemony of patriarchy. This as-yet-incomplete revolution forces compromises by the regime. It begins to accept our existence, but only in part, in incomplete form, and it demands at the same time compromise from us. The forms of these compromises are varied, ranging from “stealth” where our existence as trans people is accepted only so long as we remain invisible and indistinguishable from cis people, to “respect” for our “identities” wherein our humanity is treated as a relatively harmless aberration, a “delusion” to be tolerated and humored, or a “mental illness” to be pitied rather than a revolution to be feared. But the fear is there nonetheless. We’re depicted in the news media and mythologized in horror movies as grotesque brutish caricatures of women, bent on the predation and murder of “real” (cisgender) women. A cold gripping terror of trans women is woven into the very fabric of this society. We are the worst thing you can possibly be, repulsive to all decent upstanding people. At least, that’s how the bourgeois media likes to present us, as a cultural boogeyman to be reviled. And as the empire’s grip on power declines, as its legitimacy in the hearts of the people falters, the fear turns to panic, and it begins clawing back what little it gave us. The empire itself is terrified of us and killing our trans children because of it.

Trans people, particularly trans women, have always been at the forefront of the Queer liberation struggle. From the Stonewall riots to STAR’s collaboration with the Black Panthers, trans women have consistently been on the bleeding edge of militant struggle, cutting into the heart of the empire. Today the Communist movement finds itself disproportionately represented by trans women. Nearly every org has us, and some of our orgs are majority trans. And the reason is simple: we’re marked for death by a society which has never had a place for us and never truly will. When our very lives are forfeit, we have absolutely nothing left to lose but our chains. We’re drawn to Communism because the settler colony leaves us no choice: revolt or die. Make no mistake, this assault will continue and it will escalate. The support by Communists for the Palestinian liberation struggle will be pointed to as evidence of “transgender terrorism”, necessitating additional crackdowns, surveillance, imprisonment, and disappearing. Cutting off trans children from lifesaving healthcare is accompanied by banning the discussion of trans issues among all children. We face punishment, arrest, and even death for simply talking to kids about this. They will begin to consider us unfit parents and those of us who have kids will face the reality of the state’s willingness to kidnap them in order to break the generational continuity of our revolutionary resistance. Don’t believe us? Disabled people already routinely face this, and are being pushed ever further into the margins of society where they can be left to die with nobody watching. 

This is nothing new. The AIDS epidemic was left to run rampant, deliberately exacerbated, research was blocked, and trans and queer people began to waste away and disappear, because they were afraid of us, because they wanted us dead, and those deaths set the revolutionary movement back by a whole generation. The genocide against us destroyed and continues to destroy countless lives and their accumulated experiences, knowledge, culture, and traditions of resistance. But this tendency towards genocide, and the tendency to target children, goes back even further—it is baked into the structure of settler colonial society. The empire’s genocidal hunger for control over this land faced militant resistance by the Indigenous nations for centuries, until finally the policy to “kill the Indian to save the man” was implemented. The state kidnapped children from their Native parents, forcing them into brutal reeducation camps disguised as “residential schools.”

Native children were abused and tortured into adopting the colonizer’s language, religion, and culture. Their spiritual and philosophical understanding of the world was beaten out of them. Their hair was cut short, their clothes were destroyed and replaced with what the colonizer deemed acceptable. Any “confusion” about gender roles (which the Indigenous nations had very different views on), was violently stamped out. Their very names were stolen from them, replaced with names suitable for “Christian” society, and unspeakable sexual violence was inflicted on them as a disciplinary measure. In breaking the Indigenous cultural continuity, the traditions and experiences of resistance were shattered. Traditional communal practices and modes of organization were erased, and the very language of resistance was lost (a process referred today as epistemicide).

This is why they are targeting trans kids first. Not because there’s any “reasonable scientifically-grounded” argument for blocking lifesaving healthcare for children, not because children are “threatened” by trans education, or by sex education, but because the empire itself is threatened by our tradition of resistance. It is terrified that we are forming part of the leadership of the revolutionary struggle that will overthrow it, and it is seeking to erase our history, culture, and knowledge through both exterminatory and “cultural” genocide. Similarly, the targeting and extermination of Palestinian children by the zionist occupation is far from an accident, but a deliberate measure to break the continuity of resistance, to stave off the revolution for generations to come. 

The Black, Indigenous, trans, and queer revolutionaries of yesterday were crushed by coordinated campaigns of genocidal propaganda, state terrorism, assassination, and biological warfare. Palestine faces the brunt of the current wave of the genocidal onslaught, (as of this writing the occupation is killing 150 Palestinians a day) but the violence won’t stop with them. The fate of colonized peoples everywhere, from Palestine to Turtle Island, is bound together by the violence of settler colonialism; and as a group fundamentally incompatible with the settler regime, the fate of trans people too is bound up with theirs, as is the fate of disabled people. We aren’t in this struggle alone! It is the solemn duty of the Communist movement to center and uplift the struggles of the most oppressed, to center the Black liberation struggle, the Indigenous/Palestinian liberation struggle, the Queer liberation struggle, the trans liberation struggle, the disability liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle. These forces can and will be united, they must be for all of us to survive. These are the forces of the revolutionary proletariat, whom Communists must weld together into a united class capable of leading the Revolution. Together, we will take the future into our own hands, by force, and carry forward the banner of humanity, marching hand-in-hand over the flaming wreckage of this most ruthless and destructive of empires, towards a shining future of peace and equality for all.

It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Let’s get to work.

“The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty for a few pence. They cravenly preached ‘social peace’ (i.e., peace with the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the ‘sympathising’ intelligentsia.”

Perceptions of material and social precarity in the middle classes (principally settlers, petit bourgeoisie, and the imperialist working class) tend to produce two outcomes, both a product of the heightening of the international class struggle. In the first case, middle class precarity can produce real class consciousness, that is, proletarian consciousness. In seeking answers to the problems faced by the middle classes, a small contingent of radicals emerges who seek education on matters of class conflict, imperialism, colonialism, settler occupation, racism, patriarchy, and the international Marxist-Leninist, Decolonial, Indigenous, and National Liberatory traditions. In the second case, a broader movement of false class consciousness, that is petit bourgeois consciousness, emerges. The latter is what we’re going to look at here. What is false consciousness? This broadly refers to all forms of middle class consciousness which purport to be liberatory. Because of the diversity of interests represented within the middle classes, these forms of consciousness are equally diverse in content, though in practice they all point in the same direction:  continued bourgeois supremacy over the whole world. 

Contemporary liberalism for instance can be analyzed as a form of middle class consciousness: extolling the supposed intrinsic virtues of order and procedure, universal equality before the law, freedom of expression, and “non-violence” as a central tenet of political activity. In false consciousness, the individual begins with the assumption of an ideal reality towards which to strive, and through political action attempts to shape material reality according to these ideals. In actual practice, this produces a dogmatic approach to political activity where these central tenets of Liberalism are more important than the material outcomes. Why is this? Attempts to label liberals as unintelligent, misguided, or otherwise unaware of the contradictions within their approach to political activity are unsatisfactory, as can be quickly seen when these contradictions are pointed out in discourse, and liberalism demonstrates its boundless capacity to deny, distort, and excuse. What then is the material outcome of liberal political activity? Social and institutional inertia, the preservation of the status quo, and ultimately support for and defense of oppressive white supremacist regimes of settler-colonial occupation, and imperialist exploitation of the global south. It’s important to note here that these patterns are not necessarily inherent to any particular ideology, but to the class itself.

The professed ideals are a smokescreen for the material outcome, which is the real intended function of the ideology. This smokescreen serves mainly for the benefit of the ideology’s adherents, who easily learn to live with its contradictions by rationalizing their ideas as being broadly “correct” on the basis of their own material concerns. If they are comfortable, they feel their worldview is approximately correct. It is only when they experience or expect discomfort that they begin to change their worldview, and usually only by demanding the restoration (or increase) of privileges. This additionally serves the interests of bourgeois rule by keeping the politically active sections of the masses debating and disputing one another’s ideological conceptions — conceptions rooted in the material interests of different strata of the middle classes. These debates, while sometimes incredibly lively, all operate within the bounds of the overarching middle class interest of the continued maintenance of the settler empire, and at their most intense represent conflicts for control over the levers of imperial power, but never stray into the realm of revolution. While the right wing of the settler empire is happy to experiment with new methods of control and dominance in the face of crisis, the imperial left wing can only debate and denounce, or at most occasionally roll back or delay particular reforms taken by the right. This leads to a circular process, a sort of political holding pattern that can only react to events and retroactively justify inaction and passivity in the face of crises, rather than actively struggling to change reality. 

Whether their words say so or not, the liberal does not want to solve homelessness, because to do so would require the overthrow of the regime of private property which is fundamental to imperial land speculation, the surest path to “financial security” (that is, upwards class mobility) available to the middle class individual (which most commonly takes the form of “homeownership”). The liberal does not want to free Palestine, because to do so would be to shatter the legitimacy of the institutions which actively maintain the occupation of Palestine, and which at the same time actively maintain the occupation of stolen Indigenous lands inside the borders of the U.S. empire, and which actively maintain the continuing flow of inexpensive commodities and superprofit-inflated worker wages into the empire. 

The liberal may go as far as to couch their demands in radical language, but the demands remain reactionary nonetheless. In the case of homelessness, liberals will advocate for jobs programs, or zoning reform, or expanded homeless shelters, and so on, measures which may or may not produce improvements in the conditions of the homeless population, but which are ultimately aimed at maintaining homelessness as an institution by providing a harmless outlet through which to redirect any resistance against the private property regime. At the same time, the victims of housing exploitation are corralled along lines amenable to the bourgeois/settler state, and violence is employed against them should they resist or fail to comply with the measures imposed. The language may say “end homelessness”, but the demands say “the homelessness regime is in need of maintenance”. In the case of Palestine, the most popular of such liberal measures is the two-state “solution”, which seeks to divert the struggle for national liberation into a formalized acceptance of the occupation by Palestinians, and a concretized formalization of apartheid by the occupation. The language may say “Free Palestine” but the demands say “the occupation has a right to exist”.

With this analysis in mind, let’s now turn to the issue of middle class “communism”. On the 22nd of May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two staff members of the Palestine occupation regime, shouting “Free Palestine!” during the act. In doing so he tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the U.S.-israeli empire. This was, first and foremost, an act of radical love for and solidarity with the Palestinian people, the victims of the occupation’s genocidal onslaught. At the same time, this was an act of political desperation, a refusal to accept the normalization of genocide, whatever the personal costs may be. In doing so, Rodriguez called direct attention to the failure of the “Free Palestine” movement within the imperial core to heighten the struggle and bring tangible consequences to the perpetrators of the Gaza Holocaust. In one stroke, Rodriguez demonstrated that resistance is absolutely possible, and that those of us who have so far failed to organize militant violent resistance to imperial genocide are failing in our duty to uphold and defend the oppressed.

Seemingly frightened to the core at the dreadful thought of militant struggle against the state, the so-called Party “for” Socialism and Liberation, and the so-called “Communist” Party USA both immediately leapt to denounce this heightening of the struggle. Professing a commitment to “peace” and “non-violent struggle” these organizations have eagerly demonstrated in action the real aim of their respective programs: maintenance of imperial rule and the bourgeois monopoly on violence. We already knew this was the case, but the discussions erupting around these revisionist statements point in the direction of the future of this movement, and where the red line of class allegiance is to be drawn. Remember to ask: what is the material outcome of their political practice? This will inform us as to their actual goal, and in turn the outcomes of their practice will inform us as to their class allegiance.

The goal of the settler Communist, as a member of the international middle classes, is to leverage their material and social privileges in the interests of the international proletariat, with the aim of the liquidation and abolition of the settler class. The goal of the settler “communist” is to claim to fight for liberation in word while obstructing liberation in practice. They will therefore wield whatever institutional power they possess to effect this desired outcome. The CPUSA claims to fight for liberation in word, but in practice they canvass for bourgeois parties, instruct their members to “call their senator” in response to genocide, platform and defend zionists, and denounce violent struggle. These proponents of watered-down and sanitized “communism” are not doing this because they are unintelligent or ignorant or otherwise unaware of the aims of Communism, but because these actions serve their real material interests. During the First Inter-Imperialist War (1914 to 1918) the leadership of the Second International famously betrayed the aims of the Communist movement in favor of backing their own respective national bourgeois formations, not because they misunderstood the aims of Communism but because their aims were the interests of their own class, which at the time was benefitting tremendously from the expansion of imperialism and the intense exploitation of the colonized world. Today this opportunistic betrayal of the proletarian struggle repeats itself, as it has for most of the past century, in the settler-run “communist” and “socialist” parties. 

Marxism-Leninism has been proven, time and again through the history of the last century of class struggle, to be the most potent ideological tool wielded by the revolutionary proletariat. In this sense it is a dire existential threat to the continued privileges of the imperial middle classes, whose comforts are predicated on the very system which Marxism sets out to defeat. Despite this, it does not require any greater degree of cognitive dissonance (compared to adherents of liberalism) on behalf of the middle class radical to claim adherence to Marxism while rejecting it in practice. It is equally as trivial to wield the phraseology and aesthetics of Communism in the interests of the settler middle class as it is to wield liberalism for the same. The difference is that while liberalism is at present a decaying order, increasingly seen as obsolete by the masses, Communism is, after decades of decay and decline, currently on the ascent in international power and influence. It is therefore more urgent than ever that committed revolutionaries study Marxism. It is the development of mass consciousness which is the antidote to the opportunistic poison of middle class radicalism. Don’t just accept what we tell you to be the truth! You have to study, learn for yourself, and develop yourself and your understanding. Settler radical “communists” prey on youth and ignorance, turning potential budding revolutionaries into the footsoldiers of the perpetual counter-revolutionary holding pattern. Marching in cop-approved circles waving signs and decrying “violence” in word while supporting it in action as colonized people are actively being exterminated with your tax dollars feels wrong because it is.

Equally as urgent is the need to recognize the direction that settler “communism” is developing. No ideology is static while it has living adherents, and the ideologies of the middle classes are no different. As mass consciousness has developed and grown, the settler “communist” parties have been forced to take up the increasingly radical and revolutionary language of the proletarian struggle and distort it in order to adapt it to their aims. In recent years these parties have started talking of issues like settler colonialism, decolonization, national liberation, gender liberation, and so on. When they think they can get away with it, they denounce these issues as “un-Marxist”, “revisionist”, “ultra left”, etc. If they feel they can no longer hold back the tide of consciousness this way, they may adapt by accepting these ideas in theory while continuing to struggle against them in practice. Beware of “communists” who claim settler colonialism is no longer an ongoing structure, but an event of the past, or “communists” who promote a workerist agenda to the exclusion of Indigenous, Black, Queer, and women’s issues.

The old adage that if you “scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds” holds truer than ever today. Faced with culpability in the extermination of the Palestinians, liberals have roundly demonstrated their commitment to upholding the imperial order no matter the human cost. This development does not create fascists out of liberals, but exposes the classes invested in liberal ideology as being committed to the same interests as fascism. This commitment is inherent to the class, not to the ideology. Though liberalism is fundamentally incoherent, this is owing to its idealistic character which it draws from its reactionary class representatives. Marxism is not fundamentally incoherent, but middle class “communism” only superficially resembles Marxism, and in practical character functions identically to liberalism.

Does this mean that the so-called “communist” parties of the middle classes have more in common with fascism than proletarian Marxism? In most cases this still remains to be seen: will the settler “communists” change their allegiance when a really revolutionary international proletarian party emerges? For many, particularly among the disillusioned youth of the movement, the answer is certainly yes! For many others however, their commitment to the imperial order will win out. With the undeniable necessity of Marxism-Leninism becoming clearer by the day, many middle class radicals are even now preparing to either stem this tide for as long as humanly possible, or to subvert it to their own ends. “Marxism” which openly upholds such reactionary and counter-revolutionary values as US nationalism, the patriarchal family, “anti-woke ideology”, queer/transphobia, zionism, etc, has been emerging. And while the left wing of the middle classes can only hand-wring over the (potential) loss of their privileges and otherwise maintain the counterrevolutionary holding pattern, the right wing is openly preparing to mount a renewed offensive against the proletariat by consolidating the middle classes under the banner of “Marxism”.

We’ve seen reactionary middle class revolutions before. It bears reiterating that the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) called itself a “socialist workers’ party” because it was drawing on popular radical ideas of the time, portraying itself as a “sensible” third way alternative to radical Bolshevik terror and failing capitalism. In our time the ideas have changed somewhat, but the processes of class conflict are very similar in many ways. When our own NSDAP emerges it will drape itself in both the red flag and the U.S. flag.

What are the hallmarks of an organization which upholds false consciousness?

• Attempts to control members, rather than empower them. Members are isolated from their community rather than supported as Communists within their community.
• Stifles development through repetitive tasks and overbearing bureaucracy, rather than making development and the carrying forward of the struggle the key priority.
• Education takes a lower priority to “action”, rather than practice and study being treated as equally important aspects of the dialectic of development. Members are taught what to think rather than how to think.
• Opaque and/or impenetrable internal organizational functioning, instead of clearly defined rules which everyone follows and which everyone has a voice in the drafting and implementing of.
• Communications with central leadership are limited to commands that are carried down the line, rather than a dialogue.
• Leadership is upheld on the “strength” of their ideas, rather than on their contributions of labor to the struggle.
• Decisions are justified by appeals to the authority of leadership, “The Party”, etc. rather than democratic accountability. 
• Leaders are treated as rulers to be obeyed, rather than servants of the membership and the people.
• Ossified leadership structures, leaders are not subject to recall, elections do not happen or are designed to reproduce leadership power rather than empowering the general membership.
• Historical revolutionaries (particularly Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao) are treated as infallible prophets whose word cannot be challenged, rather than regular human beings whose ideas should be studied and understood holistically and within their particular historical contexts.
• Contradictions in the ideology, outlook, organizational functioning, decision making, theoretical disagreements, etc, are resolved with appeals to “faith” in the organization’s mission or leadership, or the words of the aforementioned “prophets”, rather than constructive struggle.
• Attempts to engage in constructive struggle are shut down, treated as “wrecker” behavior, or ignored, rather than embraced as necessary to the development of the proletarian party.
• Finances are kept hidden from the membership, and/or spending decisions are made without the consent of the membership, rather than being open and democratically accountable.
• The voices and contributions of members from oppressed populations (women, Indigenous, Black, Queer, disabled, etc) are dismissed, excluded, minimized, or otherwise disempowered or decentered, rather than being held as central to the proletarian struggle, and empowered and uplifted by the organization.
• Discussions with or about other organizations are discouraged or silenced, rather than being considered essential to the task of building unity among the Marxist movement.

If you feel like you or someone you know may be involved in an organization which upholds false consciousness, we have several articles which can provide further guidance:

• From USU: Cadre Development Literature, Organizing Theory
• On the Cult Form: The Cult Building Tendency
• On CPUSA: A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words, Against CPUSA’s Colonizer “Communism”
• On PSL: Revolution in Our Lifetime
• On FRSO: Colonizer “Communism” in the FRSO, The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO
• On DSA: Organize Within the DSA!, Uncommitted: A Lesson in Counterinsurgency

The struggle for the Party is at times a bitter one, and promises to only grow in contention as the proletarian movement builds momentum and begins to truly challenge the established “communist” institutions. Already many middle class “communists” resort to increasingly coordinated campaigns of harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence in order to assert the “legitimacy” of their particular organization. Committed revolutionaries must understand the backwardness of this approach: To assert authority without the backing of the proletariat, or to attempt to cudgel the proletariat into submission to “the party” can only ever at most postpone the emergence of the Party of the revolutionary proletariat. 

The Party will form the vanguard of the revolution only when the masses of the most oppressed internationally recognize it as their representative and their weapon in the class struggle, wielded by and in the interests of the international proletariat.

The haute bourgeoisie, i.e., the billionaire class, the big finance capitalists, have lately taken a heel turn towards transphobia, racism, and general reaction. Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos are the face of this movement. The corporate powers which make up the flesh and blood of the U.S. empire, threatened by anti-trust breakups of their monopolies, have now (in a transparent effort to kiss Trump’s ass) begun to cast off the friendly DEI mask they used to wear. Transphobia is now specifically and explicitly allowed on Facebook and its subsidiary platforms.

State after state is striking down trans protections, banning our healthcare, banning our public existence, banning speech advocating on our behalf. It is a fervent frenzy of fascistic reaction against our existence. The reactionaries, largely from the privileged middle class, call us child predators for the crime of standing up to protect trans children. They cheer when trans kids are murdered. They intend to push us back into the margins of society, out of employment, out of our apartments, to rot on the streets. They intend to murder us through homelessness, prostitution, suicide, gay bashing, imprisonment, rape. We will call this what it is: a systematic targeted campaign of extermination. This is genocide. Trans liberation activists have been warning us of this for years. 

When I chose to transition in November of 2023, I made that choice with the full conscious knowledge that this was on its way. In fact, I made that choice in part because I knew this was on the way. I have studied Marxist theory for my entire adult life, I’ve internalized its methods of dialectical and historical materialism, the methods of scientific socialism (the study of the development of human society). When I finally worked up the courage to admit to myself that I am a woman, I knew in that moment what this meant for me — transition meant discarding the privileges of the oppressor class and openly siding with the oppressed. I would no longer belong to the class of men and of cisgender people. I would be so much more vulnerable to the violence of society. I would experience hardship, suffering, perhaps death. I accept this eagerly. Trans children suffering under this regime need people like me to look up to and to advocate for them, and our history has shown us over and over that liberation only comes through struggle.

Many of us did not see this wave of transphobic reaction coming. It was unexpected and inexplicable, and so many of us are terrified. We’ve seen what they do to those who resist. We watched 15 months of live-streamed systematic industrial genocide against the Palestinians because they dared to stand up to oppression. 

But Palestinians know the truth of resistance: it is the only path for the oppressed to reclaim their humanity. They chose the path of resistance because the only alternative is deliberate submission to slow extermination. I will not submit!

What did the liberal trans rights movement bring us? Was all that effort wasted? No, it brought us consciousness. More of us are now more conscious of the conditions of our oppression than ever. Trans people are no longer a tiny minority, we are now a distinctive class. We have consciousness. We have community. We can take action.

The age of liberalism is over. The era of “trans rights” is over. The days of “tolerance,” “inclusivity,” corporate “diversity” are gone. And of course this was going to happen! We’ve been hearing all our lives “the middle class is shrinking,” and what did we expect? That cispatriarchy, our oppressors, would allow themselves to be squeezed out of their privilege alongside us? Did we expect we could remain among their ranks so long as we swore obedience to the empire, followed all the rules, obeyed and submitted? That’s exactly what we did when we lived and died in the closet, and that was so much more comfortable for them. Of course they want us to go back. And more will follow. We are only among the first to be subject to their rollback of imperial privileges. 

I refuse to go back! Moreover, I refuse to play by their rules any longer. I refuse to beg and scrape for “rights” ever again, I refuse to “debate” the merits of my existence, I refuse to allow their sense of entitlement to dictate the way I live my life and express my soul. I refuse to justify my body to their regime of death! 

It is clearer than ever that we can never attain liberation by appealing to the morality of our oppressors. The moment their comfort is threatened they’re happy to feed us to the machine of destruction that guards their lifestyle. Our struggle lies only with those who resist this global order of death. Our enemy is not merely one or another particular individual, and our enemy is not overseas! Our enemy is the system that empowers bigotry, reaction, and oppression. The system that devours the environment and humanity to feed its mindless accumulative drive. Our enemy is the international system of imperialist finance capital, with its heart in New York City and what passes for its brain in Washington D.C. Our liberation can only be attained by its overthrow! Our friends are all those who stand against the imperialist system, our enemies are all those who stand with it. 

If our friends don’t yet see us as their friends, it is because we have yet to build that relationship of mutual trust and support. 

The people of Palestine have been fighting and dying for their liberation for a century, and today they stand closer than ever to attaining it. The whole might of the empire and its international vassal states rained down on them for 15 months and they stood and fought and won. And the imperialists tell us “they hate queers” as if they’ve ever had a chance to even think on the question. They hate those who murder them, and they love those who stand with them. They have no time to give a damn about your gender. If any of them believe we’re worthless it’s because we are, because we’ve stood and watched for a hundred years while their land has been stolen and their children murdered. 

If you care about Queer people, you care about people all over the world who are oppressed by U.S. imperialism. Our failure to stand up for their interests has long allowed the left wing of capital to use mistreatment of our siblings overseas to justify regime change operations, sanctions pressure, and other hostile actions to violate national sovereignty. The right wing of capital has used this to claim that “gender ideology” is a tool of imperialism. This is how they divide and conquer us.

Put an end to it! Supporters of U.S. imperialism, american/canadian nationalism, NATO, zionism, and “israel” have no place in the Queer community! Participants in these institutions have no place with us, we stand for all human rights or we stand for none!

Today the heartland of the colonial system that began in Europe and which birthed the monstrosity of “israel” is the United States of America. The U.S. empire’s continuous ongoing genocide of the Indigenous peoples of this continent served as the blueprint not only for the establishment and expansion of “israel,” but for Hitler’s war of annihilation against Jews and the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. Hitler’s rabid opposition to Communism in turn paved the way for the U.S. empire’s so-called “Cold War” against Communism, in which it butchered millions upon millions of Natives of Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, West Asia, the African continent, and everywhere else the human struggle for community, cooperation, and liberation — in a word, Communism — stood up against the inhumanity of Capital. 

Did you know many of the Indigenous peoples of this land did not have gendered pronouns at all in their languages before colonization? They never had a reason to care. Colonists care because they want to enslave half of us to the other half to exploit us for our reproductive labor. It was colonists who imposed “gender ideology” on us, and it is those same colonists who today are tearing down our reproductive healthcare and our gender-affirming care. The end of capitalism requires the end of colonization. 

Trans liberation requires Landback.

You know the 2028 election doesn’t hold anything positive in store for us. The Democrats don’t give a damn if we live or die, and if it gets them more money from their rich donors they’ll happily kill us themselves. The system is against us, so we must be against it! 

The movement is growing: 2024 saw the establishment of the international All-Empire Worker’s League, which aims to build the conditions for international unity among all the oppressed, towards the forging of a revolutionary Party capable of going on the offensive to at last smash this system. The movement for liberation needs you just as urgently as you need it. Our biosphere is collapsing under the weight of the imperialist system. The people in this empire are beginning to rise up to meet this challenge, and standing at the vanguard of the movement are trans and other Queer people following the leadership of the nationally oppressed.

Every empire in history thought it would last forever, until it didn’t. We all feel the collapse of this empire in our bones.

It is with that that we must remember, they set the terms of this conflict: Transition or death!

We say in response: Communism will win!

Though we object to numerous aspects of the article, we would like to focus on three key failures: (1) Sykes collapses class struggle down to a binary, (2) Sykes uses an inadequate definition of settler colonialism, (3) Sykes argues against strawmen, showing little evidence of having read theoretical works by those they are attempting to refute.

It is the duty of the Communist movement to study the actual reality around them, to adapt their theory to fit those conditions, and to use this theory to lead the working classes to victory over the old society. It is a serious perversion to study theory and demand conditions alter themselves to match what is written on the page. Sykes insists that the working classes of the U.S. empire’s oppressor nation have the same immediate material interests as the working classes of its oppressed nations and as the oppressed nations of the world. Only someone with fundamental misunderstanding of material reality or a mind completely rotted away by chauvinism could entertain this notion for more than a moment before discarding it.

It is, rather, our duty to identify the internal contradictions which prevent the working classes in the U.S. empire from uniting to destroy the capitalist-imperialist state and resolve them non-antagonistically. It is our duty to overcome those internal contradictions. It is impossible to overcome something that, like Sykes, you pretend isn’t there. A man with his eyes closed cannot bridge a gap: he must fall into it.

As a preliminary question, we must then ask: why has revolution failed to manifest in the U.S. and other imperialist centers for over one hundred years? Should we make the same mistakes? If not, what can we do to avoid them? Certainly not repeat the same tired chauvinist platitudes that destroyed our hopes at revolution in the 20th century.

Point 1: Sykes sees class struggle as a simplistic binary

Sykes describes the position of their ideological opponents in this way:

“[T]he basic argument from the proponents of this theory goes something like this: The United States remains today a settler-colonial state. People of European descent, regardless of their actual class position, are settlers, and are seen as continuing to benefit from and perpetuate a colonial system. In other words, the people of the United States are divided into two camps, with the colonized in one camp, and the settlers in the other. Some even go so far as to say that this makes up the principal contradiction in the U.S. This is furthermore viewed as a fundamentally antagonistic contradiction.”

In brief, Sykes accuses their opponents of collapsing class struggle into a binary, with settlers on one side and the colonized on the other. This accusation comes with some irony, as Sykes declares their own position to be one of collapsing the class struggle into a different binary:

“[W]e see a division of U.S. society into two camps. On the one hand there is the camp of the capitalists, and on the other the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and oppressed nationalities. The principal contradiction is therefore between the capitalist class on the one hand, and the multinational working class and its allies on the other, particularly the oppressed nations.”

Sykes goes on to propose that the “multinational working class and the oppressed nations” must form a “united front” against capitalism. We agree that the working classes must come together in solidarity to struggle against capitalism. However, we understand the working classes of the imperial core as a multitude of classes, often in contradiction with each other — gender, settler-colonial, and imperialist contradictions. The class struggles of U.S. society cannot be collapsed into two camps, except at the broadest level. These are the ultimately antagonistic camps of worker and owner — but that is not the only class antagonism that exists, that is not the only contradiction that exists.

Communists do not traditionally champion the proletariat merely because it is among the most oppressed classes or because it is a uniquely communistic class. Communists champion the classes most receptive to their message and who are best prepared to build a revolutionary movement.² In our conditions it is the colonized working classes who play this role. A Communist movement in North America must be led by centering decolonization and opposing settler interests. This is because the interests of the colonized are directly opposed to the immediate interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and so they are most in line with the interests of the international working masses. These decolonial priorities must inform organization structure, programming priorities and political education strategies at every level, and must certainly not be relegated to the realm of mere “special consideration.”

For example, resource extraction projects often find popular support among the white working classes that see them as opportunities for jobs that will keep bread on the table or keep gas prices low, which puts their immediate material interests at odds with the indigenous communities whose land sovereignty these projects violate, and instead aligns their interests with those of the bourgeoisie. As Communists, we know that it is also in the long-term interests of the white working class to respect land sovereignty, to seek sustainable energy sources, and for workers to own these productive means and not private companies.³ To resolve these contradicting interests and to unite these forces, it is essential that political education center decolonization and that institutional structures insist upon decolonial priorities over these immediate interests of the white working classes. 

Sykes does not recognize that the white working classes have real material interests in settler-colonial relations, insisting that it is only “the monopoly capitalist class who reap the super-profits from national oppression,” and denying that an entire ideological superstructure has formed to support these material interests of settlers (“those ideas [racist and white chauvinist ideas] are the ideology of the class enemy.”) Because these material interests are not acknowledged but are instead papered over, FRSO’s political program is unprepared to deal with contradictions between the colonized and the settler working classes. 

Point 2: Sykes presents a woefully inadequate definition of settler colonialism

Sykes defines settler colonialism as follows:

“U.S. settler-colonialism is a particular social formation with a particular set of contradictions at the heart of it. Historically it is a transitionary period in the early development of the capitalist mode of production. It is characterized by the dominant role played by the contradiction between settlers on the one hand and colonized people on the other. This contradiction is the main thing shaping the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production in the period of ‘primitive accumulation’⁴ during its nascent development. In this way, settler-colonialism fueled the rapid growth of the capitalist mode of production in the early United States.”

This definition requires settler colonialism to be transitionary, conveniently making it by-definition incompatible with capitalism. It is also a tautology: settler colonialism is a contradiction with settlers on one side and colonized people on the other. Furthermore, this definition fails to distinguish between colonialism and settler colonialism. These are modes of extraction and oppression with different characteristics, and this difference is crucial for understanding our present context. 

Let us contrast Sykes’s near-meaningless definition with definitions used by those who do argue that the U.S. is a settler-colonial nation. Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks, is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, an Indigenous studies scholar, and associate professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. He defines settler colonialism in this way:

“A settler-colonial relationship is one characterized by a particular form of domination; that is, it is a relationship where power…has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority.”⁵

For example, the Dakota Access Pipeline was proposed to run within 10 miles of Bismarck, ND, but because it would require additional new infrastructure construction, because it would threaten the water supply of the settler city, and because it would violate settler laws about residential zoning, it was decided that it would cross the Standing Rock Reservation instead. Indigenous land defenders waged years of struggle in the form of protests, legal challenges, sabotage, and eventually open violence. Though many settlers joined the movement, the majority of local settlers did not and were content to allow the project to continue. The state’s subsequent violent clamp-down on protests enabled the project to continue to completion. Ultimately, the settler state almost always sides with settler interests, which occupy a position of entrenched institutional privilege backed by the monopoly of violence wielded by the bourgeoisie. 

Patrick Wolfe, historian and scholar of Aboriginal history, described as a “cherished friend of the Wurundjeri” at his memorial service, said the following about settler colonialism:

“The primary motive for [settler colonialism] is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler-colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”⁶

That Sykes’s definition does not even mention territoriality is a critical error in analysis. In skating past the material basis of the settler-colonized contraction, Sykes appears to see the contradiction not as a material class relationship facilitating the violent acquisition of land and accumulation of power through control over land, but as a mere contradiction of identity. The colonized and the settlers may as well be two opposing football teams for all it matters to Sykes.

Wolfe also notes:

“Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory … The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In common with genocide as Raphaël Lemkin characterized it, settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.

…

In its positive aspect, the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler-colonial society. It is both as complex social formation and as continuity through time that I term settler colonization a structure rather than an event.”

Sykes merely views settler colonialism as an event. To them it is an ephemeral phase of the development of the contemporary state, a phase which has long since passed and only bears consideration as an academic matter. Sykes fundamentally does not understand what settler colonialism is or what it does, and was evidently not challenged by others in his organization. As a self-professed “revolutionary” organization operating within a settler-colonial system, FRSO can and must do better than this!

Point 3: Sykes argues against strawmen

Sykes sets out to refute “the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory” but does not name these opponents, nor quote them in their own words. Indeed, Sykes shows little evidence of having read many theorists of this persuasion at all. The crux of Sykes’s assertion that the U.S. does not remain a settler-colonial state is that this phenomenon happened a long time ago and the U.S. is no longer an English colony:

“[S]ome people believe it’s as simple as ‘once a settler-colony, always a settler-colony.’ This is metaphysical thinking. While it is true that the legacy of settler-colonialism in the United States certainly persists, the systems of oppression have not remained static. … As the capitalist mode of production developed, this transitional settler-colonial period had to give way to mature competitive capitalism, bringing forth new contradictions.

…

As the book An Economic History of the Major Capitalist Countries by Kang Fan puts it, ‘American victory in the war [of Independence] and the subsequent establishment of the United States overthrew England’s colonial rule in North America. Domestically, it swept aside many feudal remnants, and it opened the road for the development of capitalism.’ Lenin called the War of Independence ‘one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few,’⁷ and after that war the U.S. was no longer a colony.”

It is true that settler colonialism is not a static arrangement, this of course would be metaphysical thinking, if anyone were actually asserting this to be the case. Theorists that refer to the United States and Canada as settler-colonial states have also noted that socioeconomic relationships have changed over the last centuries. The argument, however, is that settler-colonial relationships that dispossess Indigenous people of their lands and self-determining authority continue to play a role in our society.⁸

For example, Glen Coulthard notes “the escalating onslaught of violent, state-orchestrated enclosures following neoliberalism’s ascent to hegemony has unmistakably demonstrated the persistent role that unconcealed, violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts.”⁹ Nick Estes, describing specific examples of violent dispossession of indigenous communities in the 21st century, states “settler states like Canada and the United States continue to settle the land, raping and killing Native women and Two-Spirit people in order to do so.”¹⁰ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues settler-colonial ideology continues to shape the behaviors and beliefs of both settlers and new immigrants:

“A ‘race to innocence’ is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression. This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country’s past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.”¹¹

Racing towards innocence themself, Sykes does not engage with these Indigenous scholars, nor, as previously pointed out, with any theorist that believes that “the United States remains today a settler-colonial state.” The result is that this “scientific” analysis falls apart when consulting the works written by theorists that term the U.S. a settler colonial state.

Instead of putting forth any effort to understand and critique the arguments made by those who call the U.S. settler-colonial, Sykes dismisses this position because his unnamed opponents are alleged to be petty bourgeois: 

“The petty bourgeoisie, the class of small business owners or petty capitalists, is under immense pressure  … from the working class on the one hand, whom they exploit generally, and the monopoly capitalists on the other hand, with whom they cannot compete. Because they are driven to ruin by the monopoly capitalists, and ultimately have no future as a class, they sometimes take up radical, even revolutionary, ideas, however inconsistently. … They are not members of the working class and do not grasp the centrality of the working class in the socialist revolution. They take up all sorts of petty bourgeois ideas about the backwardness or ignorance of the working class and take a pessimistic and defeatist attitude regarding the revolutionary potential of the working class. So, they seek revolutionary potential elsewhere.”

Those committing the “error” of asserting that the U.S. remains a settler-colonial state that are not merely petty bourgeois ideologues are instead naively trying to copy-paste their analysis of Palestine onto American soil:

“Second, many see the heroic struggle of Palestinian resistance against Zionism and wish to copy and paste an analysis of the Palestinian struggle onto U.S. conditions. Largely this comes from a desire to use what is happening in Palestine to draw attention to the need for revolution in the U.S. As admirable as this is, the United States is not Palestine, and so this obscures as much as it illuminates.”

True, the U.S. is not Palestine. But in what ways are they different?

“The U.S. isn’t an apartheid system, like ‘Israel’ or ‘Rhodesia’ for example. The horrific system of Jim Crow segregation that followed the betrayal of Reconstruction was itself uprooted by the Black liberation movement. While national oppression remains, de jure segregation no longer exists. The working class, as a result of its historical development, is therefore multinational in character.”

In what ways does national oppression remain? What are the forms it takes? Sykes doesn’t tell us. Certainly “du jure” segregation has long since been abolished, but that naturally leads us to ask, what about de facto segregation? What are redlining, gerrymandering, ghettoization, if not the contemporary form that racial segregation takes? Does the “reservation” system not qualify as an apartheid system? A “reservation” is a particular zone, whose borders are generally designated by the settler state, in which the Indigenous may exercise limited sovereignty and may enjoy the few special rights still afforded them by the settler state. Outside this zone these remaining privileges largely do not exist, and what few there are can only be accessed by registration of “native status” with the state. How is this functionally different from other apartheid systems? How does a native community – isolated and deprived of amenities like consistent access to electricity, sanitation, and clean drinking water – have identical class interests with a settler community? The suburban sprawl of settler communities, with their huge homes, lawns, commercial plazas, and roads and parking lots their cars, have paved over the land and natural resources which the indigenous used to rely on for life. To claim these two groups are, in the present moment, a single class is simply ridiculous.

If one wishes to truly refute settler colonialism as a discrete theory of class relations and historical development in the contemporary U.S. empire, one would have to actually engage with prominent theorists, in their own words, and present a real counterargument. Instead Sykes sets up a pair of easily dismantled strawman positions, tears them down, and calls it a day. 

Why Was This Article Written?

Sykes emphasizes the need to “understand the contradictions at work in society,” recognizing the stakes for this debate are high: 

“[I]f the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country. Indeed, such a view sees the ‘settler working class’ as instruments of colonialism, hostile to the interests of the colonized people, rather than viewing all working and oppressed people as natural allies in the struggle against imperialism, our mutual oppressor.”

In other words, the author asserts that if the theory of settler colonialism is correct, their own revolutionary program is incorrect and will not work. Therefore the settler-colonial theory must be incorrect. Rather than engage with the actual arguments put forth by theorists, Sykes sets out to collapse class struggle down to only that of workers versus capitalists, and builds their argument backwards to support this conclusion.

Of particular note is the author’s implied assertion that socialist revolution is impossible within the context of settler colonialism. This is not the conclusion reached by proponents of settler-colonial theory, but appears to be what the author believes is the necessary conclusion reached by settler colonial theory. 

Nick Estes documented the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline that brought together Black Lives Matter activists, revolutionary socialists, and poor whites:

“Political elites and corporate media have frequently depicted poor whites and poor Natives as irreconcilable enemies, without common ground competing for scarce resources in economically depressed rural areas. Yet, the defense of Native land, water, and treaties brought us together.”¹²

Aligning with the interests of the colonized is the clear path to unity and intensification of the struggle. We have to ask, then, if the proponents of settler-colonial theory are not incorrect, why does the author believe this obviates the possibility of building a multinational communist party? We certainly do not believe this. 

We can glean greater insight into FRSO’s position by breaking down its key points:

1. Settler-colonial theory asserts that the interests of the settler working class are hostile to the interests of the colonized masses.
2. Revolution can only be carried out by broad unity of the working masses across national lines.
3. If (1) is correct, then (2) is impossible to achieve. 

By process of elimination, we are led to conclude that:

4. The position of the FRSO is that revolution is only possible through the participation of settlers as a class. The settler-colonized contradiction must not be abolished as a primary revolutionary task, but relegated as a secondary consideration. 

Why not come out and say that then? Why cloak it in this obfuscating argumentation about how settler-colonial theory is petty bourgeois? Some insight may be gleaned from this earlier passage: 

“They [the ‘petty bourgeois’ proponents of settler colonial theory] are not members of the working class and do not grasp the centrality of the working class in the socialist revolution. They take up all sorts of petty bourgeois ideas about the backwardness or ignorance of the working class and take a pessimistic and defeatist attitude regarding the revolutionary potential of the working class. So, they seek revolutionary potential elsewhere.”

We can derive the following further conclusions from this: 

5. FRSO believes proponents of settler-colonial theory are searching for a revolutionary subject outside the “working class”.
6. Following the above conclusion (4), FRSO sees the “working class” as being chiefly comprised of the settler masses, and the colonized masses as being peripheral contingents of workers incapable of independent revolutionary action, or as groups outside the working class entirely.

This conclusion (6) is further supported by the final passage in the article: “Only the multinational working class, allied with the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities, can overthrow the rule of the capitalists, smash the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, build socialism, and end exploitation and oppression once and for all.” (Emphasis ours.) The liberation movements are here considered separate from the proletarian struggle, one which the “multinational working class” must ally with. 

Sykes attempts to establish that the “multinational working class” is a single revolutionary body above lesser considerations like nationality: 

“While national oppression remains, de jure segregation no longer exists. The working class, as a result of its historical development, is therefore multinational in character. This is because workers of all nationalities, both oppressed nationality workers and white workers, toil shoulder to shoulder on assembly lines and shop floors, in kitchens, warehouses and offices, from coast to coast. Even as national oppression puts greater pressure on oppressed nationality workers, they are still forged into one multinational working class together with their white siblings as they suffer exploitation together under the same bosses.”

However it is difficult to square this with the above conclusions. If Sykes’s position is incorrect and the interests of the colonized must be centered in order to defeat the settler state, then it follows that revolutionary organization must be built within the colonized masses first, and in the process their leadership will provide the basis for international unity within the U.S. empire. If proponents of settler-colonial theory are wrong, then certainly the above quoted passage is more-or-less correct, but how then are we to understand the general tendency of settlers to align themselves with the capitalist class? Importantly, neither position rules out revolution, only defining the overall strategy by which it is to be achieved.

This then explains Sykes’s assertion that proponents of settler-colonial theory are “pessimistic and defeatist.” Only if we accept the premise that the settler masses are the only class capable of leading the revolutionary struggle would insisting that they are incapable of revolutionary action on the basis of their settler identity lead us to the conclusion that revolution in settler-colonial states is simply impossible. This conclusion then leads us down the path of reformism or nihilism, a truly counterrevolutionary and reactionary mode of thought. 

But this is not scientific socialism. Many assumptions are being made without supporting evidence: 

1. The settler masses are the chief revolutionary subject.
2. Unity between settler and colonized is necessary for revolution.
3. The capitalist-worker contradiction supersedes national contradictions.
4. Unity between settler and colonized is possible on the basis of (3).

Far from clarifying the strategy for revolution, FRSO’s position muddies the waters of national oppression and settler-colonial theory. Far from presenting a unifying message, it attempts to build the case that issues of national oppression are secondary to the class struggle. By attempting to place national oppression in the backseat and “multinational unity” in the driver’s seat, FRSO once more sets down the worn and tired dead-end path laid by the CPUSA in the 1940s and 50s.

A Scientific Case for Revolution

Our position is this: the settler masses of the U.S. empire are materially invested in the perpetuation of settler-colonial property relations. Petty bourgeois ideological currents are predominant among the material beneficiaries of settler-colonial land theft and imperialist resource and labor exploitation.¹³ No class unity can develop among the settlers except through outright rejection of settler privileges. However, their privileged class position is fading as imperialism continues its historical decline. The “middle classes” are historically doomed, just as Marx observed in the Communist Manifesto. Furthermore, the question of national liberation in the U.S. empire is not separate or peripheral to the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, but is the most advanced form that this struggle takes.¹⁴

Our movement’s abysmal historical record is reflected in this – by failing to recognize the petty bourgeois tendency of the settler masses and the proletarian character of the movements for national liberation, and by nature of the settler masses being the majority of the population of the U.S. empire, our movement has historically centered petty bourgeois leadership and strategy, firmly positioning the interests of the proletariat in a perpetually secondary and subservient role. In order to carry out revolution this relationship must be reversed. We must center the struggle for national liberation and decolonization as the particular forms taken by the proletarian struggle in the U.S. empire. In doing so we can establish a clear revolutionary path forward, one which invites the beneficiaries of fading U.S. imperialism to reject their doomed privileges and join the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. It is not the colonized masses which must ally with the leadership of the “multinational working class,” but the settler masses who must discard their petty privileges in order to ally with the proletarian leadership of the colonized masses, and only by doing so can we at long last forge the basis for a truly multinational working class movement.

1. J. Sykes, “Marxism-Leninism and the theory of settler-colonialism in the United States”, Fightback! News, December 4th, 2024. <link> All quotes derive from this article unless otherwise indicated. ︎
2. See, for example: Mao on the semi-proletariat versus the land-owning classes (<link>) and on all the classes of a nation united versus imperialism (<link>); Lars Lih on the Bolsheviks and the proletariat versus Tsarism (in Lenin Rediscovered (2008), particularly pages 6-7); Marx on the revolutionary potential of the Russian agricultural commune, contrasted to the Western European proletariat (<link>). ︎
3. In fact, Marx and Engels highlight the dehumanizing effect capitalism has on capitalists too, a dehumanization that would be abolished through the dissolution of capitalism. “The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence.” (<link>) ︎
4. Sykes also misunderstands what is meant by “primitive accumulation.” This is a basic or initial step in the process of capital accumulation, where resources, labor, land, etc. are violently appropriated and transformed into capital. This process necessarily occurs prior to the ability of wealth to function as capital, but it is nevertheless ongoing. See W.C. Roberts, What Was Primitive Accumulation? Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept (2017) <link> ︎
5. G.S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, “Introduction: Subjects of Empire” (2014). Emphasis in original. ︎
6. P. Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Journal of Genocide Research (2006). <link> ︎
7. The revolutionary nature of the American War of Independence has been challenged since Lenin’s time, see G. Horne, The Counterrevolution of 1776 (2014). ︎
8. For example, in 2017, the Canadian state upheld that corporations may continue to profit through the use of Indigenous territory against the wishes of the Indigenous communities affected. <link> ︎
9. G.S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, “Introduction: Subjects of Empire” (2014). Emphasis in original. ︎
10. N. Estes, Our History Is the Future, “1. Siege” (2019). ︎
11. R. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, “Conclusion: The Future of the United States.” (2014). ︎
12. N. Estes, Our History Is the Future, “Prologue: Prophets” (2019). ︎
13. D. Phos “Then as Farce” (2024) <link>, “The Middle Class Is Not a Myth” (2022) <link> ︎
14. In Accumulation on a World Scale (1970) Samir Amin identifies the emergence of the bourgeois-proletarian contradiction on an international scale, where the “center” nations of the capitalist world system occupy a bourgeois oppressor formation, and the “periphery” occupies an oppressed proletarian formation. This differentiation also occurs within the borders of center nations: “The mechanisms of centralization for the benefit of the dominant capital also apply as between the different regions of the center: the development of capitalism is everywhere a development of regional inequalities. Thus, each developed country has created its own underdeveloped country within its own borders.” ︎

Likely not. Objectively speaking, the Trump regime promises to be at least as tyrannical and destructive as it was before. The electoral contest of the past year was undeniably a contest between which faction of the ruling elite was willing to promise the most violence, the most bloodshed, and the most destruction. The fear felt by the vulnerable and marginalized members of our communities is real. The threat to immigrants, ethnic minorities, queer people, the disabled, and so on is more imminent and urgent than ever. Not to mention of course the ongoing U.S.-sponsored genocides in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Congo, Yemen, Myanmar, and Ukraine. Every life lost is a tragedy in its own right. Whether or not the Harris regime would have been any better, any kinder, any less vicious, is irrelevant at this point. The question now on everyone’s minds is “what do I do now?”

The answer we’re seeing many settle on is placing blame. Everyone has a different answer (or answers) as to who is at fault for the election results. Non-voters are to blame for staying home. Stein voters are to blame for taking away votes from Harris. The anti-genocide left is to blame for campaigning against the Biden regime’s genocidal actions. Arab and Muslim voters are to blame for refusing to back Harris. Mexican and Latino voters are to blame for backing Trump. Trump voters are to blame for their selfishness and bigotry. Women are to blame for failing to sufficiently back Harris. Men are to blame for disproportionately backing Trump. And of course the Democrats are to blame for running a terrible campaign, for refusing to waver even slightly on their commitment to genocide, and so on, and so on.

Who then is truly to blame? Seasoned socialists will see clearly what’s really going on here. These “elections,” rollercoasters of drama and intrigue that they are, are full of stories of plots and treason, endless debates, felony charges, assassination attempts, hateful violent rhetoric, and never-ending fearmongering of the “end of democracy” by the corporate news media. The ruling capitalist class has their “electoral” system refined down to a science to sow division, fear, paranoia, and hatred. 24-hour news cycles diligently maintain the frenetic atmosphere with constant updates. Every slight lull in the cycle is immediately disrupted by new coverage of “Project 2025” or breaking news about something Trump said or did, etcetera ad nauseum. 

This is not a democracy of course, and at this point it barely resembles one. It is a vast system of social engineering designed to sort the masses into mutually hostile camps, to keep us at one-another’s throats, to make us fear and hate each other, to blame one-another for the brutalities and crimes committed by the ruling elite. This is the keystone of the empire’s global regime of terror. Terrorism has always been the beating heart of the settler empire. Genocidal terrorism in Palestine tells the oppressed masses of the world what happens to those who dare defy the U.S. empire’s control. Settler-garrison police terrorize the empire’s own citizens, beating down, arresting, and disappearing dissidents, and lynching minorities from “problem” communities in so-called “officer-involved shootings.” Innocent people are executed by the so-called “justice system,” or imprisoned for years, decades, lifetimes, comprising the world’s largest prison population, a system of legal terror where your “right” to a fair trial, or any trial at all, is done away with by 90%+ conviction rates. 

And of course the corporate news media and political system engage in stochastic terrorism directed at the masses at large. They tell us to fall in line and vote for the perpetuation of this grotesque system, vote for empire, vote for destruction, terrorism, bloodshed, death. Sign your name to affirm your loyalty to the regime and your continued support for genocide, or your rights will be stripped from you. Every woman dying of sepsis because she can no longer access abortion is an act of terror by the ruling class, every dead trans child, every homeless person frozen to death on the sidewalk, every Black person lynched by cops, every mother worked to death just to feed her children, every individual who succumbs to the raging COVID pandemic. They want you to live every waking moment in fear that you’ll be next to suffer and die, and to blame and hate your neighbor for it. After all, they voted for the candidate you hate and fear, they voted for your rights to be taken away, they voted for genocide, they voted for more suffering.

Every progressive-minded person in your life is feeling this fear acutely. Do not allow the capitalist ghouls the satisfaction of taking out your fears on your fellow workers and community members. Now more than ever is the time for strategic action and unity. The people in your life are desperate for a way out. Forget the election! Forget who voted for whom! The only people truly at fault for the hellish mire we’re immersed in are the ruling class! The fault lies with the capitalist elites, every vile genocidaire and billionaire oligarch and investment tycoon. We are all in this together, we are all the victims of their petty arrogance and callous disregard for the sanctity of life and disdain for the dignity of their fellow humanity. 

The empire relies most heavily on terror in times of crisis. The crisis is here. The decline and fall of this system is inevitable. A revolutionary moment is fast-approaching us, as the world reaches the brink of global war and financial meltdown looms. It is your task to educate yourself and build consciousness and organization among the members of your community. There is no time to spare, and there is nothing the ruling class would prefer you be doing right now than petty squabbling over the results of their electoral circus. Now more than ever it should be clear how critically important it is to divest all action and energy from the U.S.’s federal political system and direct our efforts to the construction of local organizations and the linking-up of these organizations into a coalescing revolutionary movement.

You are now expected to sit down and shut up about real issues and wait patiently for another five months so Harris can get into office and “start making changes.” Never mind that she’s already in office as the Vice President, never mind that this means at minimum another five months of unrelenting horrors. If you dare to demand an end to the new Holocaust you’re “helping Trump” who will surely be even worse, somehow. Speaking out against the genocide is now, incredibly, considered counterproductive for the cause of ending it. Harris might end the genocide, you see, and Trump surely will not, so getting her into office is our top priority now! You simply must stop protesting the ongoing genocide, or you’re helping Trump commit theoretical genocide! It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so deeply sick. 

With Tim Walz as her pick for Vice President, Harris has catapulted herself from a miserable failure of a former presidential candidate to the darling of the so-called “progressive left” movement. The genius of the imperial propaganda machine can’t be denied. Feeling the pressure of mounting discontent towards the savagery of the Palestinian genocide, the empire has reinvigorated mass support for its campaign of inhuman butchery by dangling the carrot of “progressive” legislation in front of our noses yet again, with the ever present stick of Trump threatening us if we fail to obey. 

Walz’s speeches to voters play off his history of supporting the rights of the empire’s workers. Before a cheering crowd of UAW workers, Walz declares that Harris will stand up for collectivized labor and stick it to the “transnational gangs” and the “billionaires and corporate greed.” Harris smiles behind him. The irony of this declaration being made on behalf of a multimillionaire who is presently committing the most heinous crimes against humanity at the behest of those very same billionaires appears entirely lost on the crowd.

Who is Tim Walz? It should hardly matter at this point which lackey of empire is placed at the helm of the extermination machine, but this man in particular deserves a closer investigation, which may reveal some insights into what the hell is actually going on here. As governor of Minnesota, Walz has made a name for himself as one of the last holdouts of the bygone age of American “social democracy.” A proponent of raising the minimum wage, police accountability, workplace safety, welfare expansion, gun control, and cannabis legalization; and an opponent to corporate bailouts, the war on Iraq, and conversion therapy, Walz truly is the squeaky clean “progressive” that the Democratic voter base have been begging for since time immemorial. He’s stood on picket lines, started a Gay Straight Alliance when he was a school sports coach, and even wrote his master’s thesis on Holocaust education. What else is there to even say? He’s a “progressive” dream come true!

Except…

Walz is of course an ardent zionist. This should hardly come as a surprise at this point, with the Biden regime’s uncompromising commitment to assisting the zionist entity’s campaign of slaughter in every way it possibly can, including purging the Democratic Party of all anti-zionist speech. Somehow however the promise of a potential taste of “progressive” legislation at long last has led much of the so-called “progressive left” movement to simply ignore this uncomfortable and inconvenient fact. And make no mistake, Walz is as deeply and enthusiastically committed to his zionism as the next murderous imperialist ghoul. He has personally met with Netanyahu in the past, repeatedly voted in favor of the zionist entity during his stint in the House, and went as far as to vote against a U.N. resolution affirming that zionist settlements in the West Bank are illegal. But what’s a little “international law” and “settler-colonial ethnic cleansing” anyway? Look at everything he’s done for Minnesota! 

He has of course made excuses for his zionism: “You can hold competing things: That Israel has the right to defend itself, and the atrocities of October 7 are unacceptable, but Palestinian civilians being caught in this… has got to end.” This empty genocide denial and apologism is apparently sufficient to brush the issue under the rug for most so-called “progressives.” For anyone taking the matter seriously however, the problems should be quite clear already. 

Remember that master’s thesis on Holocaust education? Titled “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom,” it argues that the Holocaust inflicted on the Jewish people by Nazi Germany was not unique in the grand scheme of history, and should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses,” “To exclude other acts of genocide severely limited students’ ability to synthesize the lessons of the Holocaust and the ability to apply them elsewhere,” he wrote. This all sounds very good. It is in fact, an essential perspective for properly understanding how and why genocides happen. It appears difficult to square this with his history of Zionism. Or is it?

On June 2, just shy of eight months into the ongoing genocide against Palestine, Walz spoke at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC). In addition to his typical laundering of the genocide, the unambiguous condemnation of the “terrorism” of the Resistance, and the crocodile tears about how “unsafe” Jewish students supposedly felt at the campus protests against the genocide, he had the following to say:

“We need to do better on Holocaust education. We need to do better on ethnic studies. And I tell you this as a teacher and as governor, too. We don’t need test scores or anything to tell that we’re failing. People’s misunderstanding of what’s happening or what has happened in the Middle East is just stunning in many cases. And I think that lack of information, that lack of knowledge and the way people throw around certain terms or seem to try and rewrite history, it’s apparent to me that… we have got to educate, especially our young people, about the true story. We have to make sure they know.  

And as so many of you know, this is a really interesting study in this, especially at this time, we passed the law — but who writes the curriculum is gonna be really, really important. So to make sure — and JCRC being there — making sure we’re held accountable, that this curriculum is correct and how it’s being delivered is done right.”

Here is a man who studied genocide and wrote a master’s thesis on how it happens and how to teach this to people. He knows what “israel” is doing, and he knows what he is doing. By this point on June 2 he had watched eight months of babies starving to death, eight months of innocent children shredded by bombs, and then went on stage to spout this horrific rhetoric. He is weaponizing his education and his position as an educator and legislator to whitewash the genocidal crimes of the zionist entity and make pro-zionist genocide propaganda a feature of Minnesota’s educational system. This is grotesque and inhuman on what should be an almost inconceivable level, if only we hadn’t witnessed nearly a year straight of this kind of bald-faced arrogant hypocrisy from every imperial media outlet.

One thing is clear from this. Walz is not a friend to the working class. And he is not even trying to hide this fact. It’s no coincidence that after ten months of daily atrocities the empire is, for the first time in decades, putting a “social democratic progressive” on the campaign trail. Walz is offering everything the “progressive” movement has ever dreamed of (or at least a vague gesture towards such, which appears to be more than sufficient), if only they will agree to one little compromise. Open complicity.

Harris and Walz are not going to put an end to this genocide. Nobody in the imperial administration is. Anyone who believes this after ten straight months of lies about Resistance “terrorism,” lies about October 7th “mass rapes,” lies about ceasefires, lies about the “aid pier” (which was used once to commit a massacre and then quickly dismantled and forgotten about), lies about stopping weapons shipments, and lies about the upstanding morality of the IOF, is quite plainly living in a fantasy. 

They’re hardly pretending to care anymore. Biden just signed off on another $20 billion weapons shipment, and Harris has openly rejected issuing an arms embargo against “israel.” Both Harris and Walz have been clear on their commitment to the zionist entity’s “right to defend itself” and they will continue to support that “right” to torture, rape, and butcher Palestinian men, women, children, and babies, on an indefinite basis. They know that you know what’s really going on, and that’s the point. The cruelty is the point. 

The empire is building more than 90 “cop city” counterinsurgency training camps domestically while its people grow ever more discontent, its global power slips, and its finance system and the world climate both teeter on the brink of catastrophic collapse. The empire wants the whole world watching in stunned horror as it commits unspeakable atrocity after unspeakable atrocity, because then the whole world knows exactly what fate awaits them if they dare step out of line. Every dismembered child and starved skeletal infant is a brutal message to you and me and everyone else on this Earth what the empire is willing to do to those who assert their humanity and attempt to break free of its near universal enslavement of our world. 

Walz offers you a way out: Just accept that this is normal and everything will be okay for you. Like everything else, it’s a lie, one which will likely be fatal for those who buy it. But the empire doesn’t have the final say in the matter, and its depraved cruelty belies a deeper reality. 

The true underlying message of all of this is that the empire is afraid of us.

It is necessary to clarify here that by “queer” we are referring to all people who do not fit within the dominant normative notions of gender, sex, and sexual and romantic orientation. GSM, LGBT+, queer etc. are culture-specific labels for these people. Though there is of course always some controversy or other regarding the specifics of terminology, we will use “queer” for the sake of requiring a single one, and because we like it.

The queer question is as old as class society itself, although it hasn’t always been phrased as such. While the modern forms that queer consciousness takes are younger than Marxism and the Communist movement, we know from decades of scientific, historical, and anthropological scholarship that queer people have always and everywhere, in some cultural form or other, formed part of class society, and their recognition and rights within those societies have constituted class struggles.

Recently the answer to the queer question, as posed above, has increasingly been “Yes”. However, there has also been a continuation and diversification of political tendencies that galavant as Marxists but which actually serve to obscure and mystify the very heart of Marxist analysis, dialectical materialism.  Such groups put forth vulgar positions which seek to justify chauvinism and oppression against queer people, and they do this by disguising themselves as Marxist. Although the specific details may vary from group to group, the goal is the same: to use pseudo-Marxist or Marxist sounding nonsense to exclude some particular groups of queer people, or all queer people, from the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat.

Queer people, if even just by sheer happenstance of being part of the working class population, have always been among the ranks of the Communists. We can safely discard any arguments asserting that queer expression is a purely modern, western liberal phenomenon. The old trends within 20th century Marxism which rejected or did not have a firm answer to the queer question lacked the access we now have to modern scholarship on gender and sexuality, and have been scientifically outmoded by it. Those few organizations which still cling to notions of “bourgeois decadence” or other such wholesale rejections of queer liberation are therefore objectively unscientific and do not warrant further discussion here.

More common than wholesale rejection of the queer question these days is an error of idealism which asserts that the struggle for queer liberation is either secondary to or irrelevant to the cause of proletarian revolution. 

Some argue that “Queer liberation is unpopular with the masses broadly, so it should be rejected or set aside so as to make Communism more appealing to those masses.” A principled Marxist knows immediately that vulgar populism is not revolutionary — the Communists lead the masses on the path to liberation, we don’t tail their backwards ideas and errors in science while begging them to join us. Those who hold this position need to go all the way back to their unopened copy of The Communist Manifesto and actually read it this time. Marx and Engels clearly explained there that the task of the Communists is to guide the most advanced class conscious section of the working class: 

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. (Manifesto chapter two, emphasis mine.)

It is clear that the task of the Communists is to unite all sections of all the oppressed classes, not exclude one or the other on the grounds of populist appeal. 

Others argue that “Some queer identities, such as the homosexuals, are recognized by Marxism as having a material basis. However others such as the transgender and transsexual identities ignore or contradict the material basis of sexual biology, are therefore idealistic in nature, and must be discarded in order to arrive at a materialist position.”

This second idealistic deviation is one of the most subtle and insidious of the social-chauvinist arguments, and is a slow poison to materialist analysis. In the course of properly refuting it, we will arrive at a more correct, more scientific analysis of the queer question. The fundamental flaw in the above argument is in how it assumes the “material basis of sexual biology” has any bearing on the queer question. It does not. The deviationists either forget or are unwilling to admit that sex itself is a social construct.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State Engels explains: 

Thus, monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes entirely unknown hitherto in prehistoric times. In an old unpublished manuscript, the work of Marx and myself in 1846, I find the following: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for child breeding.” And today I can add: The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative regression, in which the wellbeing and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other.

Here it is explained quite clearly that sex is a social category based on the division of labor. Men and women became defined in dialectical contradiction with one another. They are not eternal immutable categories, but categories which arose from the conditions which existed at a particular historic time. One common theory about this division of labor is that it was made necessary by child rearing;  women were biologically equipped to nurse newborns and men were not, and this took shape in the social consciousness as the first dichotomy. The material necessity of this division of labor has long since been abolished by developments in society. Today infants can easily be fed from bottles and reared by anyone. The original basis for the sex dichotomy has passed into history. What remains is the institutions to which it gave rise.

As societies developed and grew in complexity, they began to rely more and more on maintaining a pool of labor to continue to serve the increasingly complex social functions necessary for survival. The development of animal husbandry gave rise to a production surplus which enabled the development of manufacture; weaving, pottery, etc. Men, not being bound to care for the children as the women were, were driven to take up the task of maintaining the pool of labor through acquisition and exchange of women’s reproductive labor — and therefore the acquisition and exchange of women. 

For a more detailed discussion of this process see The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner.

Further developments in production led to settled agriculture, by which point the nature of women as the exchangeable property of their tribe became fully entrenched. The great increase in surplus brought by settled agriculture enabled the overall population to rapidly increase beyond that of older modes of production, a process known by historians as the Neolithic Revolution. Methods of manufacture became more complex, metallurgy was developed and further revolutionized agriculture with the plow. Class society began to take shape as the acquisition of wealth became possible, and control over women’s reproductive labor became a primary form of wealth. The concentration of wealth into fewer hands led to the development of private property to institutionalize this control, which first took the form of ownership of women-slaves and livestock. Ruling patriarchs were then compelled to compete with one-another in order to maintain their control over society, and therefore competed on the basis of violent acquisition of property. Women were seen as a resource which could be obtained through force, and those societies who still treated women as equals were largely subsumed by the violent expansion of the enslaver state.

We can therefore see how differences between individuals in their biological characteristics (configuration of sexual organs, ability to nurse infants) at one point made necessary the first division of labor, which later gave rise to the institutionalization of the patriarchal state. Ruling ideology adapted to serve the continuation of this state of affairs on behalf of the ruling elite — the sex dichotomy became “naturalized,” seen as immutable and eternal, and encoded as such in countless religious scriptures and legal codes ever since. But we can easily see how this sex dichotomy is the product of a particular stage of social development, and we can therefore easily see how it will pass into history. 

A useful comparison is the categorization of human beings into racial groups: though there is a “material biological basis” for this division (skin color and minor differences in constitution and disease resistances), we know that “race” is not an eternal natural category but a socially constructed category which was developed to legitimize the institutions of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Racial ideology emerged from a particular moment in historical development and will in turn fall as the conditions which gave rise to it recede into history. So too will the sex dichotomy.

As capitalism develops, it breaks down the old class barriers as it proletarianizes the masses. It is not a coincidence that the feminist movement first arose in the 19th century, when proletarianization began to hit its stride and the “natural” nature of women’s disadvantaged status began to be more consciously questioned. Increasingly, women began to perform the exact same labor as men, working at first in parallel factory operations and later directly alongside men. It is evident that “woman” represents an oppressed class just as much as “proletarian” or “Indigenous,” and as the social division of labor which enforces this class division becomes increasingly obsolete the necessity of its overthrow begins to crystalize. 

How does the queer question figure into this analysis of sex? We must look at the emergence of queer identity and consciousness as a historical process. It is nowadays a well-known fact that societies in which class had not yet developed had different notions of gender and sexuality than the patriarchal rule of class society. “Two-Spirit” First Nations people are a common example of this. There are as many notions of gender and sexual diversity as there are different cultures, which makes it clear that this diversity is common to all human groups. 

The emergence of class society and the rise of the rigid sex dichotomy condensed the wide spectrum of human expression into two classes, an oppressed class of “women” and an oppressor class of “men.” Queer expression fundamentally challenges the naturalization of the sex dichotomy. If women can choose to have romantic and sexual relations with women, then the naturalization of female sexual subordination to men is directly challenged. If “woman” is not an immutable natural state — if it can be altered, transcended, or cast off — if a woman can simply become a man, or something else outside the binary dichotomy, then the sex dichotomy is revealed to be materially meaningless. This is a threat to existing class relations, so queer expression is violently suppressed by patriarchal ideology.

Capitalism continues to require the sex dichotomy in order to function. Capitalism requires that the population continue to grow with each successive generation. As production improves, the amount of labor crystallized within commodities falls, and so too does the rate of profit. In order to maintain a steady rate of profit capital requires that production always increase, which requires increasingly more workers to produce and consume commodities. Therefore it is necessary for the continued existence of capitalist class relations that the working class grow without limit, and in order to facilitate this women must continue to be exploited for their reproductive labor.

As the process of proletarianization continues, the perception of the sex dichotomy as “natural” begins to wither away. It is not a coincidence that queer consciousness has primarily risen first within the most advanced capitalist economies. It is here that proletarianization has reached its most advanced state. It is also here that the forces of reaction respond most harshly to the rise of queer expression. This is why fascism (which we know is how capitalism reacts to a state of crisis) is so concerned with “traditional family values” and rigid gender roles. It is a violent reaction to the emergence of real human expression, an intensified reimposition of ideological structures of bourgeois oppression. Language accusing queer people of “defying the natural order” and other such anti-materialistic nonsense is slung about. “Communists” who parrot this rhetoric are communistic in name only: they objectively serve bourgeois reaction.

In communist society the requirement for endless growth is finally done away with. Absent the necessity to generate profit, production is purely on a needs-driven basis. The absolute volume of production can be consciously set to ensure everyone is provided for, and further improvements in production reap a reduction in the working day for all. Reproduction becomes a personal choice rather than a social imperative, and so the material basis which gives rise to the sex dichotomy is abolished. Men and women become true equals, and thereby the distinction between them ceases to be of any consequence and individuals become free to express themselves however they like. Queer liberation is not merely adjunct to communist revolution, but is in fact an intrinsic aspect of it.

This then should make clear the scientific socialist position on the queer question: as an oppressed class within capitalism, the very existence and free expression of queer people holds boundless revolutionary potential. The task of the Communists is not to set aside queer issues in favor of “the working class,” but to recognize that the vast majority of queer people are of the working class and make up a highly class conscious revolutionary element.

The oppression experienced by queer people, even today under liberal “tolerance,” is highly intense and acute. Queer people are subject to rampant discrimination in all areas of life, with the most visibly queer people relegated to the extreme margins of society. They are subject to severe violence, and in many places it is still fully legal to murder queer people. They experience the worst of the brutalities of capitalism, with homelessness (particularly among youth) higher than any other demographic. This severe oppression leads queer people to band together and support one-another as a matter of survival. They regularly form their own organizations, community support groups, activist groups, community defense, and so on. They are of course naturally drawn to radical politics in search of answers to their oppression — the “transgender communist” stereotype exists for a reason. They often go on to form a vanguard of sorts for other liberation struggles, making up a disproportionately large section of and often being the leaders of labor activists, Communists, anarchists, antifascist militants, national liberation activists, and so on. It should be difficult to miss how this spontaneous organizing and spontaneous arisal of class consciousness by queer people represents a heightened form of class struggle in embryo, yet somehow certain “Communists” appear to be wearing blindfolds. 

It’s long past time we change that and start making serious efforts towards uniting with queer organizations. This starts with forming a coherent political line on queer issues. The resurgence of fascism endangers us all, and queer people most acutely and most urgently. We need to be able to provide community defense, political activism, medical support networks, and education to queer adults and youth. The Communists have until now largely left queer people to their own devices on these fronts, and this is a fatal error in analysis. We cannot afford to continue to allow this revolutionary potential to go to waste. The victory of communism must be the victory of all oppressed people.

Doesn’t matter. We are lucky to be in this moment right now. For most of history the oppressed have had no way out of their miserable conditions. How many millions of lives were wasted toiling as slaves? How many millions died after a short brutal life at the hands of oppressors? We stand today at an unprecedented turning point in history — we have an arsenal at our disposal that none of the oppressed have ever possessed. We have the clarity of scientific socialism, which allows us to truly comprehend our conditions and our tasks. We have over a century of socialist struggle and revolutions to study and learn from. We have the thoughts, teachings, and experiences of past revolutionaries who dedicated their lives to arming us with the knowledge necessary to defeat capital. We have the internet giving us instantaneous access to all of this information, something undreamed of before our generation. Finally, and most importantly:

We have a dying empire to topple — Imperialism is on its way out. This constant onslaught of increasingly severe crises are the empire’s death throes. We know that fascism arises in response to a crisis of capitalism, as it did in the 20th century in response to the rise of the communist movement. What does the current resurgence of fascism tell you about the state of capitalism? The rate of profit continues to fall as the world economy shifts away from the empire and towards the new socialist superpower. The successes of Chinese socialism cannot be understated, their explosive rise to the economic juggernaut they are today is doing two things to make our task possible: 1) proving to the world the superiority of the socialist mode of production, 2) undermining the economic foundations of imperialism through win-win trade partnerships, preventing the empire from exerting its coercive neocolonial trade practices on underdeveloped nations. 

As socialism in China continues to develop and mature it will increasingly outcompete and lay bare the utter obsolescence of the capitalist mode of production. Already production in some key industries has reached levels of centralization and automation which capitalism struggles to match. Competition from advanced Chinese firms is cratering the rate of profit in these industries — capitalism already can’t compete in green energy and electric vehicles and is turning to extreme protectionism in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable. Socialist state-directed research and education have secured China’s lead in many emerging technologies, a trend which is likely to continue as capitalist education falls further behind with increasing state austerity measures. Where will we be after another ten years of capitalist decay and socialist development? It must be stressed that this situation is wholly new. Imperialism has never been weaker, and this gives us a world-historic opportunity to finally slay capital for good. 

We know from Lenin the three key aspects of a revolutionary situation are: 1) a crisis in the ruling class, where they are unable to continue to rule in the old way, 2) the suffering and want of the oppressed classes grows more acute than usual, and 3) as a result of the above the activity of the oppressed classes increases and they begin to take independent action. Does any of this sound familiar to you? If you live in America you know as well as I that nobody in Washington has any plan whatsoever for how to solve any of the increasingly dire issues tearing American society apart, and as crises continue to pile up they will inevitably be faced with issues which necessitate and force change which they are similarly incapable of responding to, which is when we need to be prepared to take action. It is clear that this is the direction we are heading. 

Everyone is desperate for change, and anti-capitalist sentiments have gone from the political fringe to a pressing issue on everyone’s mind in the space of less than a decade. The 2020 uprisings proved conclusively that the American people have revolutionary spirit and are willing to stand up and fight for a better future. The resurgence of the trade union movement proves the masses are beginning to remember the necessity of organization against capital. All we are missing is a revolutionary vanguard party capable of taking charge of the situation and leading the masses to a higher stage of struggle, to revolution. With only slight variations, we can see these trends across the entirety of the imperial core. 

The left in the imperialist countries is small and disorganized, but it is within our power to organize it. No movement has emerged because the left is plagued by infighting and scandals — why is this? We as a movement are lacking a humble commitment to political education.

Political education is the single most essential component of a revolutionary struggle. It binds the other components together. Following the counter-revolutions at the end of the 80s, Marxism experienced a tremendous decline across the world as the masses lost faith in its liberating power. In its place has grown opportunism, revisionism, anarchism, and all other sorts of deviationist tendencies that history has proven are dead ends. We desperately need educated Marxists to combat these tendencies and to educate other socialists. This is not a sectarian sentiment; much of Lenin’s enormous body of works is dedicated specifically to tearing apart incorrect tendencies. Mao greatly encouraged “line struggle” within the party for this reason. This is fundamental to revolutionary struggle. This does not mean splitting into tiny irrelevant sects whenever you disagree with anyone. Lenin struggled tirelessly for many years within the RSDLP to push it towards a correct revolutionary Marxist line. We need to follow his example.

Revolutionaries of the past prioritized political education for good reason. Ho Chi Minh personally translated Marxist texts into Vietnamese and read them aloud to illiterate peasant farmers because he and they understood they could only be truly revolutionary if they were educated. The Bolsheviks took great pains to set up entire illegal press operations in secret so as to publish Marxist literature. They understood, and we must understand, that Marxism is a science and it must be treated and studied as such. You could not take up chemical engineering without first a rigorous scientific study of chemistry, and you can not become truly revolutionary without first a rigorous scientific study of Marxism.

We must each dedicate ourselves to study with the aim of being able to:

1. summarize and teach fellow proletarians the content of the theory
2. creatively apply the dialectical method to the issues facing us today
3. decisively combat incorrect ideas and tendencies

With political education comes the ability to form a correct and coherent political line. With correct political lines comes unity of purpose and action. It is only through this unity that we can begin to win the masses over to the revolutionary struggle. At the same time, it is important to avoid book worship, to do better than to dogmatically copy the words and actions of dead men. We learn from their methods and build on them and apply them to our context. We learn to become scientists of revolution, we learn from what the great minds in our field have already figured out and we go on to work out our own problems.

We cannot afford to wait any longer. We do not have the luxury of the easy comfortable life so many in our parents’ and grandparents’ generations led. The very biosphere that sustains us is in mortal peril. Our very lives depend on revolution. Our children’s lives depend on it. Our grandchildren’s lives depend on it. Every human being who will ever be born depends on us taking action right now. I urge you to take a moment to reflect on this. Unknowable billions are watching us in this very moment through their history books. What will they see? We each have only a single precious irreplaceable life to live on this single precious irreplaceable Earth. Will our descendants see us willfully wasting our lives numbing ourselves with entertainment and escapism as our oppressors willfully lay waste to our world? Or will they see us heroically dedicating our lives to at long last put a decisive end to capitalism? Will we choose the easy path of slow suicide, or the difficult path of asserting our humanity and reclaiming our dignity by casting off our shackles?

The empire is ripe to fall, but it will not fall of its own accord — we must make it fall. We must learn to form a truly revolutionary, dedicated, disciplined vanguard. We must learn to become leaders. We must learn to wage the class war in organizational, theoretical, and military terms. We can’t wait around for someone else to take the lead. It has to be us. It has to be YOU.

The theory is more accessible than ever. M.L. Reading Hub has a wonderful curriculum with free annotated PDFs and study materials. Marxists.org has thousands of Marxist texts available for free. ProleWiki has thousands of articles to help deepen your understanding of Marxist theory and history, and an extensive resource library. Red Menace podcast has brilliant explanations and breakdowns of key Marxist texts. Socialism For All on YouTube has hundreds of excellently narrated audiobook recordings of nearly every major Marxist text. Gather the politically curious and fed up people in your life and study with them. There is no excuse. YouTube videos and memes are great for propaganda but nothing substitutes actually engaging with the material, studying it, internalizing its lessons, and carrying it into the real world to put it into action and build a mass movement. 

We need revolution, and it is within our grasp. Not in a hundred years. Not in fifty years. We can and must build it and carry it out within the next decade. If that sounds unrealistic, consider that it is far more unrealistic to sit around waiting for revolution to arrive on our doorstep “some day, eventually” while the imperialists strangle our Earth to death. We must have a clear goal in mind in order to seriously carry out our task. Revolution is a deadly serious business. Revolution demands serious, disciplined, professional commitment. The future of humanity and life on Earth demands this. We must thoroughly internalize this truth and make revolutionary struggle the chief priority in our lives.

Communism will prevail! Let’s make it happen!