The Kebra Negast

In the 14th century, the ideological foundation for Ethiopia was written. This text, borne in the ancient clerical language of Ge’ez, was known as the Kebra Negast, or the Glory of Kings. This 900-page epic framed “Ethiopia” not simply as the highlands of Abyssinia but as the biblical and universal land of Cush. This was an ideological construct, an Ethiopian Zionism, that would be wielded to justify imperialist claims over the entire Horn of Africa. The Kebra Negast became the pillar of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and the Solomonic Dynasty that reigned from 1270 AD through 1974, facilitated the fusion of church and state, and most notably, served as the basis for Abyssinia’s European-backed crusades at the end of the 19th century that would lead to the formation of modern Ethiopia as a prison house of nations.

The Kebra Negast, in essence, named the leaders of “Ethiopia” as the direct descendants of the biblical Ancient Israel. It appropriated the name Ethiopia from the Bible’s Psalm 68:31, which proclaimed that “princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” 

As the epic is told, on a delegation to Israel, the Queen of Sheba (of “Ethiopia”) was wooed by King Solomon of Israel, and they had a night of passion. Back in Ethiopia, she had his child. She named that child Menelik, and when he grew up, Menelik traveled to Jerusalem to meet his father, Solomon. Solomon then recognized Menelik as his favorite child and tried to convince him to stay to be his heir. Menelik refused, opting instead to return to his mother. Resigned, Solomon sent Menelik away with a large company, including the first-born sons of his nobles and a congregation of Hebrew priests. Resentful that they were forced to leave Jerusalem, the priests smuggled with them the Ark of the Covenant, a gold chest that bore the very tablets that God himself inscribed the Ten Commandments in. When Solomon discovered the theft, he attempted to pursue them, but the ark’s divine power miraculously flew Menelik and his entire party to Ethiopia unscathed.

According to the legend, since then, the ark has been held in the Cathedral of St. Mary of Zion in Axum, located in modern Ethiopia’s northern Tigray province. Today, a constant stream of the devout huddle in the cathedral or congregate outside to bask in its glow. However, nobody besides the Guardian Monk (the highest ranking priest tasked with watching the ark for life) is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies where the ark is housed. All others, according to the Hebrew Bible, are strictly forbidden from looking at the ark lest they be struck dead by God.¹ Ethiopian Orthodox churches across Ethiopia and throughout the world are constructed as models of Solomon’s temple and contain within them symbolic replicas of the ark.  

Thus, Ethiopia’s mythical relationship to Ancient Israel is consecrated through Menelik I, the Ark of the Covenant, its Orthodox churches made in the image of Solomon’s temple with replicas of the ark, and the distinctive Hebrew traditions, practices, and language imbued within Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity itself.

The story of the Kebra Negast, placed alongside an excerpt from the Jewish text Midrash Tanchuma, shows clearly how Ethiopia as the holder of the ark meant it could best Ancient Israel and situate itself at the center of the universe:

As the navel is set in the center of the human body, so is the land of Israel the navel of the world; it is situated in the center of the world, and Jerusalem in the center of the land of Israel, and the Temple in the center of Jerusalem, and the Holy of Holies in the center of the Temple, and the Ark in the center of the Holy of Holies, and the foundation stone before the Holy of Holies, because from it the world was founded.²

Wielding the Kebra Negast

In the centuries following the Kebra Negast’s completion, the Abyssinian aristocracy, priests, and nuns acted as if they were descendants of the Ancient Israelites. Kings and emperors viewed themselves as Kings of Zion and they invoked Solomonic descent through their names and titles. Zara Yaqob of the 15th century wrote theological treatises that framed Ethiopia as the Ark’s resting place. Emperor Yitzhak (Isaac), took his name from the Hebrew Bible’s Isaac, a founding figure of Judaism. And centuries later, there was Menelik II, the emperor that carried out the European-backed crusades against the Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other nations at the end of the 19th century to establish the foundation of modern Ethiopia. 

The significance of Menelik II’s name was that, while wiping out the people in the south and east,³ sending Black Abyssinian settlers from the north into their lands to enslave them,⁴ carving out his gains alongside the European powers in the Berlin Conference,⁵ and mass–converting the survivors from their Indigenous religions and Islam to Orthodox Christianity,⁶ he was legitimizing his claim as the direct descendant of Menelik I, the prized child of King Solomon of Ancient Israel. Thus, contemporary with the genocide of Palestinians and occupation of Palestine by Jewish Political Zionism was the genocide and occupation of the Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other nations by Ethiopian Zionism.⁷

The Ethiopian Jews

All of this is to say nothing of the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews who reside near Gondar in Ethiopia’s northern Amhara province. The Beta Israel are both a source of legitimacy to Ethiopia’s claims to descent from Ancient Israel and a source of revulsion, given that Jews are viewed by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians as the betrayers of Christ.

To the Ethiopian Zionists, possession of the Ark, the Beta Israel’s habitation in Ethiopia, and the existence of Ethiopia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity is proof that the Jews of Ancient Israel were “restored” and perfected through their religion. In contrast to European Christian Zionists who played a crucial role in establishing ‘israel’ in Palestine (such as Arthur Balfour and Reverend William Hechler), who believed the world’s Jews must return to Palestine to eventually convert to Christianity and usher in the second coming of Christ, Ethiopian Zionism already proclaims itself the final, perfected version of Israel. Zion, not in waiting, but already fulfilled.

As the Kebra Negast reads:

The daughters of Jerusalem suffered disgrace, and the daughters of Ethiopia were held in honour; the daughter of Judah was sad, whilst the daughter of Ethiopia rejoiced; the mountains of Ethiopia rejoiced, and the mountains of Lebanon mourned. The people of Ethiopia were chosen [from] among idols and graven images, and the people of Israel were rejected. The daughters of Zion were rejected, and the daughters of Ethiopia were honoured; the old men of Israel became objects of contempt, and the old men of Ethiopia were honoured. For God accepted the peoples who had been cast away and rejected Israel, for Zion was taken away from them and she came into the country of Ethiopia.⁸

The Beta Israel endured brutal conditions in Ethiopia. Many of them looked to the Yishuv (early Jewish settlements in Palestine) and later, the newly emerging ‘israel.’ Over time, they saw it as their promised land and in small pockets began to “make Aliyah” — to flock there — undermining Ethiopian Zionism’s narrative of the perfected Zionist entity and bolstering israel’s claims to embodying Eretz Israel, the land of return for the world’s Jews. Given the Beta Israel were considered the world’s oldest practitioners of Judaism, their allegiance lent gravity to whoever could win it.

In fact, on his first visit to Jerusalem in 1924, Haile Selassie (at the time known as the Crown Prince Tafari Mekonnen under Empress Zewditu) rebuffed an inquiry by the Chief Rabbinate of the Yishuv into improving the lot of the Beta Israel. “The history of the Ethiopians and Israelites indicates that these two nations are similar in race… in regard to the Jews known as [Beta Israel] and located in Ethiopia, we will always try to give them our help and protect them from every evil,” he replied.⁹ Holding fast to its Zionist claims, for many more decades, Ethiopia would refuse to give its stately blessing for Beta Israel migration despite ongoing israeli pressure.

Simultaneous Crisis Draws Together the Twin Zions

In October 1935, the Italians unleashed a full-scale attack on Ethiopia as a prelude to World War II. Oromos, who since the era of Menelik bore a deep resentment for Abyssinian rule, seized the moment to reclaim their lost freedom. In 1935, the Raya and Azebo Oromos attacked the Abyssinian armies traveling to and from the Battle of Maichew. In 1936, the Oromo of Jimma attacked and expelled Amhara officials and thereby demonstrated their rejection of colonial rule. In western Abyssinia, the hereditary rulers of the Oromo declared their independence and formed the Western Oromo Confederation (WOC), offering themselves as a mandate territory of the League of Nations.¹⁰

The same year the WOC was formed, Emperor Haile Selassie, by then known as the “Lion of Judah,” fled Ethiopia, avoiding Raya and Azebo Oromo land as he left. In his crisis, the first place he went was to Jerusalem. He arrived just as the Palestinians had initiated their general strike and began their armed struggle in what would be known as the Arab Revolt.¹¹ Selassie, who only years prior had codified in the 1931 Ethiopian Constitution his descent from Solomon and Sheba,¹² arrived to a wave of sympathy from the Zionist press.¹³

The struggle of the Oromo and Palestinians had created their respective antagonists’ crises and made their need for unity apparent. Even then, Selassie still held fast to Ethiopia’s ancient claims to the Beta Israel and Judaism while casting the Yishuv as simply a nascent phenomenon. In a prepared speech to the Hebrew press, he asserted:

I visited the Land of Israel in 1924, and I find that there is great progress in this country. I know that the Jews are quiet people and dedicated to peace. Of course it is also known to you that in Ethiopia there are Jews of an ancient race who live in complete harmony with all others. They preserve their religious traditions and no one hinders them. Please know that we appreciate the support that the Jewish people have expressed for Ethiopia, and we hope that the Jewish press will continue to support us.¹⁴

Of course, such struggle between Zionisms coexisted with a necessary unity imposed by heightening struggle from without. David Ben-Gurion, later the first prime minister of israel, recognized that the crisis in Ethiopia was also a crisis for the Zionists in occupied Palestine:“We knew that what is going on in the world has an impact on what we do in the Land of Israel. That beginning of the crisis should be seen not as April 19th [the outbreak of the Arab Revolt], but in what happened a few months earlier in Ethiopia.”¹⁵ 

A resolution was worked out. Orde Wingate, the same Christian Zionist British captain who formed the Haganah (the precursor to the israel Defense Forces) that crushed the Arab Revolt, a hero to the architects of the Palestinian Nakba,¹⁶ would enter Ethiopia in 1940 to lead the force that defeated the Italians and restored Selassie to the throne.¹⁷  In Wingate’s own words, it was “for the sake of Zion.”¹⁸

The Beta Israel Exchange

Decades later, when the military government that deposed Selassie had its back to the wall, owing to the national liberation struggles of the Eritreans, the Oromo, the Somali, and the Tigray nations, Ethiopia would begrudgingly use the Beta Israel as a bargaining chip. So long as it was done in secret, to avoid tarnishing Ethiopia’s Zionist claims and undermining its credibility to the oppressed world that had taken up anti-Zionism, israel could receive loyal new Black Jewish settlers, who themselves gained in escaping their oppression in Ethiopia. In the act itself, Ethiopia laundered the racial cover it received on the world stage to israel — and conveniently at a time when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had made inroads into Black Amerika¹⁹ and israel faced the wrath of the world for its support of apartheid South Africa. The Beta Israel then settled Palestinian lands, filled the ranks of the occupation army, and took up highly visible political and cultural posts. In return, Ethiopia received weaponry, security expertise, and economic aid to crush the rebellion of the oppressed nations within itself.

Ironically, the brutal, racist israeli state would come to treat the Beta Israel just as poorly as the Ethiopians did. Given that many of the Beta Israel fled persecution to a promised land, they were unquestionably loyal to the israeli Zionist cause. It meant that, even if most of them would come to face abject conditions — from forced sterilizations, to staggering poverty, and rampant police killings — their propensity for revolt was quite low. Thus, while Ethiopia could acquire from israel the means to extinguish the oppressed — primarily the Oromo — the Beta Israel were a useful dumping ground for antagonisms borne from the struggle of the oppressed — particularly the Palestinians. In this regard, the two entities quite literally reinforced each other.

Tewodros’ ambition

The Deir-al-Sultan Monastery

Though Abyssinia (the northern entity that preceded modern Ethiopia) had all the makings of Zion, the one thing it lacked was direct control over the holy city of Jerusalem, which it claimed descent from. Since Christianity was embraced in Abyssinia as early as the 4th century, Jerusalem held a special place in Abyssinian culture, with monks and pilgrims flocking to the city and dwelling there. In the late 12th century, King Lalibela built his own version of Jerusalem in his capital of Roha. Exchange flourished for centuries until Abyssinia’s decline upon defeat by Ahmad Gragn of the east, who occupied its highlands beginning in 1527, as well as the rise of Ottoman rule in Palestine. In this period, Abyssinian presence in Jerusalem became reduced to one monastery known as the Deir-al-Sultan.

The Deir-al-Sultan sits on the roof of the Chapel of Saint Helena that was part of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City. For some time, Abyssinia’s claim to the Deir-al-Sultan served as a powerful symbol of its historic ties to the city. However, in 1838, a plague wiped out its monks, and with permission from the Armenian Patriarchate, the Egyptian Coptic monks in the neighboring monasteries moved in and laid claim to the Deir-al-Sultan.²⁰ Three years later, a new group of Abyssinian monks arrived and accused the Copts of unfairly seizing the site. This marked the beginning of a long-term conflict.

The Rise and Fall of Tewodros II

In this period, a man by the name of Kassa rose to power, inheriting a weak, divided Abyssinia. An ancient prophecy, known as Fekkare Iyasus (The Explanation of Jesus) foretold that a king named Tewodros would save Ethiopia from destruction and rule for around 40 years.²¹ Kassa harkened back to this prophecy and took the name of Emperor Tewodros II.

Upon taking power, Tewodros II wielded this divine mission to grease the wheels of his imperial ambitions. He revived vigor around the Kebra Negast and sought to reclaim the Deir-al-Sultan, on which the Ottoman Turks sided with the Egyptians.²² This was considered a great humiliation and drove Tewodros II’s burning desire to take Jerusalem by force.²³ While ensnared in war on all fronts, in October 1862, he sought sympathy from Queen Victoria as a fellow Christian monarch and a self-professed descendant of Ancient Israel and wrote to her:

Since my ancestors, the kings, have until now offended our creator. He had handed their kingdom over to the [Oromo] and the Turks. But now, ever since I was born my Creator has raised me from the dust and given me power and placed me over the kingdom of my ancestors. By the power of God, I have dislodged the [Oromo]. But when I told the Turks to relinquish the soil of my fathers they refused; and so, by the power of God, here I am about to struggle against them.²⁴

Before Tewodros II could even dream of Jerusalem, he faced many obstacles, including Oromo militias in Wollo, rebellious nobles in Tigray, Egyptian pressure from Sudan, and Ottoman expansion along the Red Sea coast. He could not defeat them all. In fact, the Foreign Office in London failed to even pass the letter to the Queen,²⁵ given it sought appeasement with the Ottomans who occupied Jerusalem. Evidently, Tewodros II was not an ally but a nuisance. As a last ditch effort, Tewodros imprisoned missionaries and representatives of the British government. In response, a British expedition led by General Richard Napier faced Tewodros II in the Battle of Magdala in 1868. The British defeated his forces and freed the hostages. Rather than surrender, Tewodros II committed suicide, ironically with a pistol gifted to him by Victoria.²⁶ His dream was to remain unrealized.  

In Lieu of Conquest

Licking their wounds, subsequent emperors and rulers would have to abandon direct conquest of Jerusalem and opted instead to shore up Abyssinian presence elsewhere in Jerusalem to lend credence to its claims of having direct, holy ties to the city. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Abyssinians acquired houses and lands in west Jerusalem. Meanwhile, a succession of emperors built Solomonic churches and monasteries, such as the Debre Genet monastery, and many other buildings. By 1905, the Ottoman authorities designated this part of Jerusalem as Haret al-Habash, what is known today as the Ethiopian compound centered on Ethiopia Street, a lasting imprint of Ethiopian Zionist claims to descent from Jerusalem.

The fate of Deir al-Sultan’s keys remained in flux for another century after Tewodros II’s death. Diplomatic struggle over the monastery occurred throughout, including on Selassie’s 1924 tour when in Cairo he submitted a request for the keys directly to the highest level of the Coptic Church and the Egyptian Prime Minister.²⁷ Of course, he was resoundingly rejected and would not see success until the later period of his reign. In the meantime, he sought conciliatory measures, such as an arrangement with the Greek Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem where he acquired a room in the monastery of Abraham which was connected by a door to the Deir-al-Sultan — among other backroom deals.²⁸ These were, of course, token arrangements.

The Forging of Twin Struggles, 1960s-1970s

The Naksa

Palestine and Oromia would see a new period of converging struggle. At the end of 1964, the Palestinian national liberation movement’s Fateh began launching guerrilla offensives against israel under the front organization Al-Asifa. Al-Asifa’s first communique proclaimed:

From our people, steadfast to the limit, and from the conscience of our battling homeland, our revolutionary vanguards burst out, believing in the armed revolution as the way to Return and to Liberty, in order to stress to the colonialists and their henchmen, and to world Zionism and its financiers, that the Palestinian people remains in the field; that it has not died and will not die.²⁹

In this mounting struggle, israel retaliated against the guerillas and neighboring Arab states. Syria and Jordan especially were caught in the middle and vacillated between supporting the Palestinians and fighting against them. This escalated into the Six Day War in 1967 and culminated in the Naksa — the day of setback. Here, israel, in conventional warfare, defeated Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq in six days. It captured the Golan Heights, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and Sinai. Up to 325,000 Palestinians were displaced. Though 1967 was a setback, it opened the way for the Palestinian guerillas to take leadership of their own struggle and break away from the humiliated Arab armies.

Macha-Tulama and Bale

Along with the Palestinians, Oromos had their own developments in the 1960s. In 1963, Oromo intellectuals, army officers, soldiers, students, and merchants used a loophole in Ethiopian law to form the Macha-Tulama Self-Help Association. In its constitution, the Association established two objectives: First, to establish schools, health clinics, and roads in Oromia where they were needed. Second, to build churches and mosques while provisioning financial and legal assistance for disabled and unemployed people.³⁰ In essence, “the first set of objectives aimed to improve the welfare of the Oromo nation; the second sought to mobilize the Oromo people toward a common goal by undermining the colonial policy of divide and rule based on religion, class, and region.”³¹ The Association achieved such widespread popularity that within three years, membership reached more than two million.³² It was effectively operating as “a government within a government.”³³ And among its membership were not just Oromos but were 26 leaders from other colonized nations brought to heel under Menelik II, including the Afars, Sidamas, and Walayitas.³⁴

During this time period, Oromo peasants in eastern Bale began a massive armed rebellion against land alienation, heavy taxation, maladministration, and Ethiopian occupation as embodied in the presence of Amhara landlords. In the rebellion, the movement’s leaders united the Oromo with Somalis under the banner of Islam to fight the Ethiopian state. Together, they mounted decimating attacks on landlords concentrated in the local towns.³⁵ The landlords were no match for the peasants, who used guerrilla tactics and at one point held 75% of the Bale region while encircling the provincial capital of Goba.³⁶

The two movements in Bale and Macha-Tulama weren’t only simultaneous, but actively linked up and coordinated with each other. Ahmed Buna, a schoolteacher and member of the Association who would go on to co-found the Marxist Oromo Liberation Front, smuggled the leaders of the Bale armed resistance to Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) in 1965. While there, the leaders discussed how best to coordinate their activities. Mamo Mazamir, one of the revolutionary members of Macha-Tulama involved in the discussions, lucidly analyzed the Oromo struggle and pledged solidarity with the rebels of Bale:

The history of mankind shows that a people who rise in the struggle for freedom and independence, in defiance of death, are always victorious. The life and death struggle of the oppressed masses in the Ethiopian Empire against the hegemony of the Amhara and their allies headed by American imperialism is a sacred liberation struggle of millions of oppressed and humiliated people. That struggle will surely intensify in the course of time, as the oppressed peoples organizational means and consciousness become deeply rooted. As learnt in discussions, the Macha and Tulama democratic movement, which was created to raise the consciousness of the Oromo people is in the present situation working day and night to put in hand coordination activities that are within our reach. In fact, the militant members are working now on the means of organizing a nationwide people’s movement which is based on realizing the aspirations of Oromo people. Please, keep up your heroic armed struggle, defending every inch of the Oromo nation to the last drop of your blood. The decisive war of resistance you are conducting in Bale will, despite the maneuvers of imperialism, Zionism and local reaction, be victorious. We shall continue doing everything we can to keep in touch with you.³⁷

The communique from Al-Asifa and these words from Mazamir demonstrate that the Oromos and Palestinians were two fronts of the same struggle. They were both conscious of themselves as nations with a right to self-determination and they knew that their enemy was imperialism and Zionism. And in the exact same moment, the two fronts were unleashing a struggle to the death to liberate themselves from Zionist imperialist oppression.

Eventually, Ethiopia, whose intelligence by that point, according to an israeli historian, was “literally run” by israel,³⁸ were able to crush the Macha-Tulama movement by framing, torturing, and killing its leaders.³⁹ With the help of the israeli counter-insurgency and Anglo-American demolitions experts, it defeated the Bale Revolt,⁴⁰ and left over 700,000 dead.⁴¹ From this defeat, the Oromo peasantry suffered; 36.5% of the administrated land in the district where the rebellion emerged was confiscated by 1968. By 1970, the leaders of the Bale Revolt negotiated amnesty for themselves and ended the revolt.⁴²

A Resolution Between the Twin Zions

That same year, the israeli government, newly bolstered by its spoils from the 1967 war, marched in, changed the locks of Deir-al-Sultan, expelled the Coptic monks, and handed the keys to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, even defying a ruling by the israeli Supreme Court to return the key to the Egyptians.⁴³ That lock-changing marked a resolution in Ethiopia’s century-long pursuit of the Deir-al-Sultan key that spanned multiple emperors and rulers. And by doing so, the two powers did not just merely resolve a monastic dispute, but through defeat of Palestinian and Oromo resistance movements, and the conquest of their respective lands, consecrated formal unity between the Ethiopian myth of Solomonic descent and the israeli Zionist myth of Jewish return.

Of course, the driving force of their convergence was not conspiracy, but the struggle of the Oromo and Palestinians that drew them together. The two entities were forced to an agreement that could accommodate both Zionisms, a necessary qualitative leap in unity between the two oppressors.

Meanwhile, capturing Jerusalem brought sheer ecstasy for the israeli Zionist project and gave it a base to further expand its territorial ambitions. In Ethiopia, the access to the Deir-al-Sultan similarly brought celebration and helped cement its spiritual claims to Ancient Israeli descent. With this arrangement, when israel strengthened, it could only legitimize Ethiopia more. It was in Ethiopia and israel’s utmost interest to band together to crush the Oromo and Palestinians.

In the diplomatic realm, such mutual interests of Ethiopia and israel were referenced through incessant overtures to an “ancient” relationship stretching back to Biblical times.

The Birth of the Oromo Liberation Struggle and Contact with Palestine

The embryo of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) was within the Macha-Tulama movement. Its primary founder, Baro Tumsa, became an active member of the association as a student, where he served as a legal advisor while also coordinating the youth wing.⁴⁴ Goaded on by the government’s escalating violent suppression of the Macha-Tulama movement, Baro and his comrades formed clandestine study circles while secretly distributing propaganda.⁴⁵ They established relationships across Oromo society within and without Oromia, including with Oromo students at Haile Selassie University who played a central role in the student movement that toppled the emperor in 1974.⁴⁶ Similarly, they established relations with other colonized nations, such as the Sidama and Afar, and other liberation fronts, such as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF).⁴⁷

At the same time, Oromo revolutionary Elemo Qilxu, who was living in Aden, Yemen, established relationships with the Yemeni, Syrian, and Iraqi governments, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF).⁴⁸ Other Oromos received military training in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Iraq, and Syria. They opened offices in several Southwest Asian and North African countries already aiding Palestine, most notably in Damascus and Beirut.⁴⁹ In 1969, Abbaa Gadaa Jaarraa and others went to Iraq to receive guerrilla training for seven months.⁵⁰ Then, on their journey to Hararghe in East Oromia, Jaarraa and 38 other fighters were captured, disarmed, and imprisoned by the Somali government for five years.⁵¹

In 1972, Baro sent Getachew Baissa, Mitiku Terfassa, and Yusuf Bakar through Somalia to receive military training in Vietnam, the DPRK, China, and throughout SWANA where they learned from Palestinians. The Somali government, then led by Siad Barre, which at the time possessed its own Pan-Somali ambitions in reuniting Ethiopia’s Ogaden region and East Oromia with itself, refused to help the three. Only Bakar was able to make it to Yemen, while Getachew and Mitiku returned to Oromia.⁵² Years later in 1975, Baro sent a second delegation of six Oromo university students to Somalia to receive training and secure support for the Oromo national movement. These were Muhee Abdo, Aboma Mitiku, Demisse Techane, Zakariyas Hassan, Hashim Gobana, and Mohammed Ibrahim Khalil. The Somali government rebuffed them and advised them to go to Aden to work with Bakar. [53]

Unperturbed by the Somali government’s arrest of Jaaraa, Elemo persisted on, traveling to Finfinnee to link up with the emerging Oromo political group led by Baro Tumsa, which formed the central coordinating body of the OLF in 1974.⁵³ From there, Elemo moved east to begin the armed struggle against settler colonialists between 1973 and 1974. In these early battles, Elemo and five others were killed, causing the group to disband. But, not before they killed or wounded several enemies.⁵⁴ Out of this early armed struggle, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) was formed.⁵⁵

In 1974, the Ethiopian emperor Selassie fell to a tidal wave of discontent. In the power vacuum, the Derg military government seized control, while two Ethiopian political parties, the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON) and Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), contended with the burgeoning Oromo national movement. And though they called themselves socialists, what they both had in common was their rejection of the Oromo right to self-determination, decolonization, and the Oromo colonial thesis that stated that Ethiopia colonized the Oromo with the help of European imperialism, and imprisoned the Oromo and other nations during the Scramble for Africa.⁵⁶

While the OLF considered that the colonial question was principal, requiring either full separation of Oromia from Ethiopia or the establishment of a democratic multi-national federation or confederation, the Ethiopian socialist parties liquidated the Oromo question into a larger class question. They simply treated the Oromo land question as indistinguishable from the feudal question without the need for political self-determination for the historically oppressed Oromo nation. Given that many Oromo students and intellectuals were either thoroughly imbued with Ethiopianist ideology, or themselves possessed their own personal interests intertwined with Ethiopia, they joined these Ethiopian parties while deeming the OLF “narrowly nationalist.” MEISON would ally with the Derg and EPRP would lead the opposition to it. Both, unable to shore up the colonized majority due to their own chauvinism, would eventually be savagely liquidated by the Derg.

Thus, surrounded on all sides by a hostile military government, obstructionist neighbors, and settler “socialist” parties, in their May 1975 pamphlet, titled “The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation and Amhara Despotism,” the OLF clearly placed its liberation struggle right alongside the Palestinians. At the time, the Palestinians were similarly facing down Zionist occupation, betrayal from Arab regimes, and relying on allies ensnared in bourgeois state building.

In the pamphlet’s closing, the OLF resoundingly stated:

The enemies of our revolution are many, and they are organized under different banners of reaction, which could very easily be related to the root of settler colonialism. Hereby, we call upon all progressive Organizations and Democratic Forces to hear our battle cry for our political independence, progress, and Socialism. Thus, our struggle to deface the colonial aims and imperialist reaction will continue until victory. World progressive forces, unite and struggle for worldwide total victory. Long live the world struggle against imperialist forces and colonialism. Long live the Oromo people’s revolution. Long live the Palestinian revolution. Long live the Eritrean, Afar, Somali, and other oppressed peoples’ revolutionary struggles. And down with Abyssinian and Zionist settler colonialism. Down with imperialists and reactionaries. Ever forward with victory.⁵⁷

In sum, the OLF, the highest expression of the Oromo nation’s aspirations, saw itself as an inviolable pole in the anti-Zionist struggle, inseparable from the struggle of their comrades in Palestine.

All of the above, then, induces a series of questions. What could Zionism be but the mythological ideology of settler colonialism? What could support of Ethiopia be but support for Zionism and the occupation of Palestine from the rear? What could be the negation of Zionism but the struggle of the Oromo people, consciously and inviolably fused with that of the Palestinians?

References

1. 1 Sam 6:19 (English Standard Version). ︎
2. Midrash Tanchuma, Kedoshim, Buber ed., trans. John Townsend (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1989), Kedo. 10, https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma_Buber%2C_Kedoshim.10.2?lang=bi​​​​​​​ ︎
3. Harold Marcus, “Motives, Methods and Some Results of the Unification of Ethiopia during the Reign of Menelik II,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Haile Selassie University, 1966), 269–280. ︎
4. League of Nations, “Perpetual Servitude Resulting from Defeat,” Report of the Committee of Experts on Slavery, C.240.M.171.1935.VI (Geneva: League of Nations, 1935). ︎
5. Bonnie Holcomb and Sissai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1990), 103. ︎
6. Ibid, 289. ︎
7. Ibid, 71–125. ︎
8. The Kebra Nagast, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), chap. 87, 147–48. ︎
9. Haggai Erlich, Alliance and Alienation: Ethiopia and Israel in the Days of Haile Selassie (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2014), 28. ︎
10. Ezekiel Gebissa, “The Italian Invasion, the Ethiopian Empire, and Oromo Nationalism: The Significance of the Western Oromo Confederation of 1936,” Northeast African Studies 9, no. 3 (2002): 76. ︎
11. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 32. ︎
12. “The Constitution of Ethiopia,” 1931, https://ethcln.com/system/files/ethiopian-constitution-of-1931.pdf. ︎
13. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 35–40. ︎
14. Haaretz, May 19, 1936. ︎
15. David Ben-Gurion, lecture to the Council of the Histadrut, February 1, 1937, Ben-Gurion Archives, Item #88003. ︎
16. Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1972), 58–59. ︎
17. Simon Anglim, Orde Wingate and the British Army (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 57–144. ︎
18. Avraham Akavia, “Orde Wingate,” in The Friends of Israel (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1950), 94. ︎
19. “Jackson and Arafat Confer in Lebanon,” New York Times, September 30, 1979. ︎
20. Stéphane Ancel, “The Ethiopian Orthodox Community in Jerusalem: New Archives and Perspectives on Daily Life and Social Networks, 1840–1940,” in Ordinary Jerusalem 1840–1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City, ed. Angelos Dalachanis and Vincent Lemire (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 50–51. ︎
21. Ras Iadonis Tafari, THE EXPLICATION OF JESUS [Yeshua]: FIKARE IYESUS: A Raw Translation in English (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012). ︎
22. “The Amharic Letters of Emperor Theodros of Ethiopia to Queen Victoria and Her Special Envoy,” Journal of Ethiopian Law 14, no. 1 (March 1989): 115. ︎
23. “The Ethiopian Community in Jerusalem from 1850 to the Conference of Dar-el-Sultan 1902: The Political Struggle for Independence,” in Ethiopian Studies: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference, Tel-Aviv, 14–17 April 1980, ed. Gideon Goldenberg and Baruch Podolsky (Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema, 1986), 487–500. ︎
24. “Amharic Letters,” 115. ︎
25. British Museum, “Maqdala Collection,” Contested Objects Collection, accessed July 8, 2026, https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/maqdala-collection. ︎
26. British Museum, “Maqdala Collection.” ︎
27. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 28. ︎
28. Stéphane Ancel and Vincent Lemire, “Across the Archives: New Sources about the Ethiopian Christian Community in Jerusalem (1840–1940),” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 71 (Autumn 2017): 109. ︎
29. Mu’assasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyah, Al-Watha’iq al-Filastiniyah al-’Arabiyah li-’Am 1965 (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyah, 1965), 1. ︎
30. Asafa Jalata, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 75. ︎
31. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” American Journal of Islam and Society 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2009): 103, https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v26i3.385. ︎
32. Asafa Jalata, Baro Tumsa: The Principal Architect of the Oromo Liberation Front (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 131. ︎
33. Olana Zoga, Gizat na Gizot: The Macha-Tulama Association (Addis Ababa, 1985 Ethiopian Calendar), 37. ︎
34. Asafa Jalata, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 75. ︎
35. Mohammed Hassen, “The Oromo Nation under Amhara Colonial Administration,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44, no. 3 (1981): 36. ︎
36. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” American Journal of Islam and Society 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2009): 104, https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v26i3.385. ︎
37. Borana Tullu, “The Bale Oromos’ Armed Struggle, 1963–1970: A Basic Lesson for the Oromo National Liberation Movement,” Saba Oromo: The Journal of Oromo Students in Britain 1, no. 1 (1980): 25–26. ︎
38. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 137. ︎
39. Norma J. Singer, “Ethiopia: Human Rights, 1948–1978,” in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, ed. Robert L. Hess (n.p.: [s.n.], 1978), 663–678. ︎
40. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 26, no. 3 (2009): 104. ︎
41. Asafa Jalata, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868–2004 (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2005), 184. ︎
42. John Markakis and Nega Ayele, Class and Revolution in Ethiopia, 1st American ed. (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1986), 53. ︎
43. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 189. ︎
44. Asafa Jalata, Baro Tumsa: The Principal Architect of the Oromo Liberation Front (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 90. ︎
45. Ibid, 31. ︎
46. Ibid, 101–110. ︎
47. Ibid. ︎
48. Ibid, 181. ︎
49. Ibid, 155. ︎
50. Ibid. ︎
51. Ibid, 131. ︎
52. Ibid, 155. ︎
53. Ibid, 132. ︎
54. Ibid, 181. ︎
55. Ibid. ︎
56. Ibid. ︎
57. Oromo Liberation Front, “The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation and Amhara Despotism,” 9 May 1975. ︎

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contextualizing Left-Wing Communism

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

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

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

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

This is what Lenin referred to as infantile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Road to Hell is Paved with Liberal Intentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Symptoms of Opportunism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Elections Are a Failed Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Sum, Put Away the Fucking Ballots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is only one solution.

Iraq was bombed into desolation — its electricity grid, water systems, hospitals, roads, bridges, and even sewage systems were reduced to rubble. Their bloodlust still unquenched, the U.S. used depleted uranium rounds, poisoning the land and condemning generations to birth defects and cancer. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked whether she regretted the slaughter of over half a million Iraqi children, calmly declared on 60 Minutes that it was “worth it”  (Twaij, 2022). A personal memory, I recall once watching a lecture by Arundhati Roy who remarked on the U.S. justification of the bombing of Iraq, “We are expected to believe that the U.S. Marines were sent on a feminist mission.” One truly has to applaud the audacity of the lie. However, this kind of propaganda is hardly uncommon in the history of U.S. imperialism; it is very much par for the course that they hide behind the language of human rights and progressive Western feminism to justify their carte blanche bombing campaigns that eviscerate women, men, and children alike. The hypocrisy cannot be ignored — a woman in a position of senior leadership in the U.S. actively contributed to a campaign that resulted in the catastrophic rollback of women’s rights, safety, and security.

In Syria, America waged a relentless crusade to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, once again cloaking itself in the rhetoric of “democracy and human rights” — not unlike Iraq (and countless other cases throughout the 20th century). As a result, the nation that was once called the cradle of civilization is today a blood-soaked nightmare of unimaginable human tragedy, all because the U.S. demanded a regime change in favor of someone more amenable to their investor and business class interests (Naiman, 2015).

To add to the ensuing horror even further, America continues its crusade of calamity in Yemen, where its bombs continue to shred civilian infrastructure, while American money and weapons fuel Saudi aggression. Meanwhile, Israel, armed to the teeth with U.S. military aid, carries out daily atrocities with impunity, trampling human rights as the world watches in silence (Saleh, 2025). And I have only scratched the surface of American imperialism — and only over the last few decades, in just one part of the world — all while it claims to act under the moral mission of civilization and humanitarianism.

Is it reasonable, then, to expect nations broken and shattered by such wars and foreign intervention to function in any democratic manner? We do not — and cannot — know what these nations might look like today had they been allowed to develop on their own terms, guided by the specific and unique cultural, material, and economic practices democratically determined by their own citizens. The argument is often made that West Asian nations remain undeveloped because Islam is a backward religion that breeds terrorism and oppression — as if religious belief alone determines the course of a nation’s progress. But progress is not born of ideology; it comes from the democratic participation of the masses and the historical and material conditions in which they live and struggle. The idea that faith in a particular god sets the limits of development is not only wrong — it is ahistorical and frankly, absurd. The Western Liberal Democracies, dripping with a colonial arrogance so vast and insatiable it eclipses all of history, lecture such nations on “Progressive Politics.” Yet was it not these same nations that razed to the ground even the tiniest sliver of hope and institutional framework required to achieve such a thing?

Furthermore, if the Western model of development is so superior — if the ideals of the Enlightenment were truly as revolutionary as they are claimed to be – then why did it take centuries for women, Black people, people of color, Indigenous peoples, minorities, Queer communities, and immigrants to even begin to be treated with dignity and granted equal rights? And that struggle, I should add, is still far from over. As a glaring example, just four years of Donald Trump was enough to destabilize the American “Democratic” system so thoroughly that the federal right to abortion — Roe v. Wade — was overturned. Just four years of one reactionary leader. Now imagine decades of that, layered with war, foreign occupation, sabotage, and poverty, with not a single institution left standing to hold back the worst instincts of violence and repression. That is — and has been — the reality for much of West Asia, and far beyond.

Not only has Western liberalism failed to deliver on these rights and promises throughout its historical development, but it continues to fail — with equal, if not greater, force — even today. On this, I offer both historical and contemporary evidence. Consider first what the famed liberal hero Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about the workers’ revolt of the June Days Uprising in 1848: “After the outbreak of the workers’ revolt, de Tocqueville was not only in favor of conferring emergency powers on Cavaignac but recommended shooting on sight anyone caught ‘in a posture of defense’” (Losurdo, 2011, ch. 10).

Now consider Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed champion of the working class, who calls himself the “most pro-union president” and has been hailed by historians as the greatest advocate for workers since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Loomis, 2024). Yet this same president blocked a bill that would have granted sick leave to railroad workers, denying the demands of more than 115,000 workers who had gone on strike in 2022. And this was not some anomaly or failing of character — it is the function of liberalism itself, which gives with one hand and takes with the other, only retreating when popular movements threaten its order. Even on the rare occasions when liberals do offer concessions, they are steadily eroded into nothing by one reformist negation after another. As Losurdo (2011) writes, “At issue was canceling, or more or less drastically reducing, the democratic concessions won from liberal society by the popular movement.” And as de Tocqueville made clear, when that fails, the gun will do. As the old saying goes: scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.

If we are indeed asked to believe that liberalism is an ideology adorned with glitter and gold, then we must confront an unavoidable question: how can such ideas give rise to some of the most depraved acts of horror ever known to humanity? The contradiction between liberalism’s glittering promises and its reality is precisely the primordial force that necessitates its overwhelming need to oppress.

To further emphasize: as we have already demonstrated, these liberal ideas were never inherently superior; they were not even exclusively European. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment — pillars of so-called “Western thought” — emerged only through a deep engagement with earlier Greek and Roman texts, which in turn drew heavily on the scholarly achievements of Egyptians, Persians, Indians, and Mesopotamians (modern-day Iraq) (Davidson, 2006). Yet today, many of these regions are dismissed by the West as “uncivilized” or “underdeveloped.” The irony would almost be laughable, were it not so tragically real. As Michael Parenti observed, “The third world is not underdeveloped, they are overexploited.”

Moreover, even in their European form, these ideas were never truly progressive; they were always fundamentally Hobbesian and Machiavellian in their outlook on human nature. It was only the emergence of genuinely revolutionary ideas that forced liberals to concede to democratic ideals. The liberal framework, as we have discussed, can only muster reforms that preserve the existing state machinery, whereas revolutionary thought dares to transcend it. Consider the institution of slavery: a liberal might express shock at the slave’s plight and propose marginal improvements — better clothing or food — while the revolutionary would cry out, “Come, comrade, let us shatter the chains of slavery!” That is precisely the kind of transformative progress that followed the Bolshevik Revolution when peasants gained literacy and women secured equal pay, voting rights, and the opportunity to hold office (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 1983). Throughout history, liberals have consistently resisted the sweeping democratic changes championed by revolutionary movements.

Is it any wonder, then, that nations devastated by Western colonial and imperial ambitions remain broken beyond comprehension? Those of us in the West who are not members of racially or economically privileged groups did not receive our rights out of benevolence; rather, we were forced, for the first time in history, to compete with a rival political system that was materially superior and genuinely progressive. It was this competitive drive — fueled by the extraordinary social and human progress of the Soviet Union, combined with decades of development untainted by colonial or imperial interference — that enabled Western societies to evolve into what they are today.

If these same conditions were systematically denied to nations in the Global South through neocolonial exploitation, debt entrapment, illegal coups, and invasions, then it is not only unfair but intellectually dishonest to blame them solely for their own lack of progress.

If we were to allow these nations to develop according to their own histories — if we were to let their people prosper on their own terms, and if the forces of production, labor, and industry were free to drive genuine democratic participation — then, just as in every other society, the rights of minorities, women, and other oppressed groups would naturally flourish over time. Not out of moral charity, but because the conditions of their growth would make progress inevitable. We are told to measure progress by the standards of those who denied it to others. But given the chance — given peace, sovereignty, and the right to chart their own course — these nations would not need lectures from the West. They would show us what real progress looks like.

Citations:

1. Al-Shammari, M. (2023), “Women’s Education: Cultural and Religious Solutions from the Heart of Afghanistan”, Middle East Council on Global Affairs, https://mecouncil.org/publication/womens-education-cultural-and-religious-solutions-from-the-heart-of-afghanistan/
2. Twaij, A (2022), “Let’s remember Madeleine Albright for who she really was”, Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-madeleine-albright-as-who-she-really-was
3. Naiman, R (2015), “WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath”, Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/wikileaks-reveals-how-the-us-aggressively-pursued-regime-change-in-syria-igniting-a-bloodbath/
4. Davidson, N (2006), “Islam and the Enlightenment”, Socialist Worker, https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/islam-and-enlightenment/
5. Saleh, A. (2025), “Yemen dismantles UK-Saudi espionage network and continues to attack strategic US and Israeli targets”, Peoples Dispatch, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/08/yemen-dismantles-uk-saudi-espionage-network-and-continues-to-attack-strategic-us-and-israeli-targets/
6. Loomis, E. (2024), “Biden’s labor report card: Historian gives ‘Union Joe’ a higher grade than any president since FDR” Government Executive, https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/05/bidens-labor-report-card-historian-gives-union-joe-higher-grade-any-president-fdr/397002/
7. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1983), United Nations, https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/cedaw25years/content/english/CONCLUDING_COMMENTS/Russian_Federation/Union_of_Soviet_Socialist_Republic-CO-1.pdf

Forgive this short introduction for there is much to cover; Hawai’i’s nature is certainly one of the most beautiful on Earth. If we want to keep it that way, we must do everything in our power to decolonize the Hawaiian islands that have been under U.S. occupation since 1893. But let’s start with some history. Let’s talk about the illegal occupation and annexation of Hawai’i.

While we should rightly begin where history begins — that is, from the initial Polynesian settlement of the islands to the establishment of the unified Kingdom of Hawai’i in 1795, this is not a history I would be able to tell, because it is not mine to communicate. I could not do justice to the millennia of Hawaiian history and  its language, culture and people. For that, I would instead point to Indigenous Hawaiian sources, such as the Ka Mooolelo Hawai’i — the first history of Hawai’i written by Native students in 1838 — or the Papaliko database which hosts a collection of data on historically and culturally significant events, curated by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, If you know more Indigenous resources, feel free to post them in the comments for our readers.

We will begin shortly before the pivotal event that cemented Hawai’i’s status to the United States: the overthrow of queen Lili’uokalani.

In January of 1893, the queen of the independent and sovereign kingdom of Hawai’i (which had been united by King Kamehameha I in 1795, putting all the islands under one monarch) was overthrown at gunpoint by U.S. Marines. She had ascended to the throne only two years earlier after the untimely death of her brother Kalakaua, and quickly set out to restore power to the monarchy and native Hawaiians with a new constitution after one had been forcefully passed just four years earlier. This effort, however, was quickly opposed by a group of U.S. and European businessmen and lawyers, known as the “Committee of Safety”, who favored annexation with the United States.

We have to understand the context surrounding the United States in 1893 to understand why the U.S. were interested in Hawai’i. By that time, most of the territory that now forms the continental United States had been settled and attached to the Union. In 1846, just half a century earlier, settlers had stolen Texas from Mexico, which led to a war in which Mexico relinquished control of what now forms the southwestern quarter of the United States territory, including California. With this, coast-to-coast imperial ambitions were  achieved.

The following years would be marked by rapid settler expansion to the west, and with it came industrialization — including the building of the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869 and of which 90% of the workforce was Chinese (on the western portion). They would later be expelled by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 passed by Congress. In Hawai’i, Chinese immigrants were instead welcomed (alongside Japanese immigrants) by Native Hawaiians, though plantation owners instituted a blanket 10-hour work day on plantations under harsh conditions.

This rapid industrialization didn’t please slaveowners in the south who saw their privileges threatened, and led to a civil war that marked the 1860s. The industrialized Union won, and with it came what is called the Reconstruction era: the final rupture of the slaveowning mode of production that remained in the South and towards a proletarianization of the labor force, which allowed manufacturing to become even more productive.

This laid the final brick in the foundation of the American Empire’s hegemonic ambitions, and they could start to look outwards. In 1898, the U.S. declared war against Spain and, in the peace deal, took the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam — the final colonies of the declining Spanish monarchy.

But the Philippines are far away, especially in the age of the steamboat. To pave the way to Asia, a base of operations was thus required in the Pacific, and Hawai’i was perfectly suited for it. In 1898, President McKinley declared “We must have Hawai’i to get our share of China.”

On top of that, Hawai’i’s climate made it perfect for growing cash crops — prior to annexation, U.S. businessmen had already established large sugar plantations on the island chain. And of course, Hawai’i also formed a shield against attacks from the west, seen as recently as the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

All of this leads us to the reasons the U.S. wanted to annex Hawai’i.

When queen Lili’uokalani took the throne in 1891, she had her work cut out for her. A few years earlier, the so-called Bayonet Constitution had been passed in the kingdom, imposed on King Kalākaua on July 6, 1887 by the aforementioned plantation owners. They called themselves the Hawaiian League (despite none of them being Hawaiian) and, through arms, forced the new constitution that they had drafted for the king. This constitution allowed foreign residents to vote — which, to this day, no country offers — and denied over two-thirds of Native Hawaiians from voting.

In 1892, the Legislature of the Kingdom of Hawai’i passed the Highways Act to protect public lands from privatization. At the same time, the monarchy was also trying to push forward a new constitution that would undo the Bayonet Constitution.

As we’ve already seen, all of this came crashing down in 1893. Shortly after the new year, queen Lili’uokalani made her intentions to push the new constitution clear. Immediately, the Annexation Club — composed of six citizens of the Kingdom (specifically not recorded as being Native Hawaiian) and seven U.S. and European foreigners — carried out their counter-plan: with help from the U.S. government, a fully armed warship anchored in Honolulu harbor (a tactic that the U.S. would use several more times in the future, including in 1974 in Portugal). This move initially scared the legislature who withdrew their support for the new constitution.

Lili’uokalani tried to ease tensions by walking back some of the changes she wanted to make, but it was too late and annexation was within reach for plantation owners. On January 16, 162 U.S. sailors and marines landed in Hawai’i and illegally occupied the sovereign and independent nation.

On January 17, the Committee of Safety — the descendent to the Annexation Club — announced martial law and the deposing of the queen. Specifically, they also declared a provisional government until a union with the United States could be achieved.

Queen Lili’uokalani surrendered to the U.S. government and thus came the end of the long-standing Kingdom of Hawai’i.

Before we continue with this important piece of history, we should take some time to understand what life in Hawai’i was like prior to the coup.

The imperial core’s own institutions recognized Hawai’i as a sovereign nation. By 1843, Hawai’i became the first non-Western nation to receive full recognition as an independent state by Western powers. By 1893, the kingdom maintained over ninety consulates and legations (which served the functions of an embassy) worldwide, including in the United States. Only sovereign states maintain embassies abroad to serve as their representatives on foreign soil.

This fact cements that prior to the deposing of the monarchy (and arguably even prior to the Bayonet Constitution), Hawai’i was a fully sovereign nation in the eyes of the imperialists. Thus, logically, the occupation by U.S. Marines on January 16 was an illegal invasion by a foreign state, and annexation by the U.S. was a coup.

By the mid-19th century, Hawai’i had achieved a 95% literacy rate, the highest in the world. The Constitutional Monarchy established in 1840 guaranteed equal voting rights regardless of race, gender or wealth — the first of its kind in the modern world; at the time, most Western countries were still limiting voting rights to landowning males, if they had any at all. The constitution came about on the impulse of king Kamehameha III himself (also known as Kauikeaouli), as part of efforts to modernize the kingdom.

In 1859, the Queen’s Hospital was established and provided free healthcare to all native Hawaiians. Electric public lightning came to the streets of Honolulu in 1888 — before even the White House had electric lightning. Laws on land distribution made by the Declaration of Rights (1839) guaranteed virtually no homelessness. Affordable mass-transit made travel between islands possible for everyone.

All of these achievements were instantly reversed after the foreign coup in 1893, which turned Hawai’i into a plantation colony for the United States.

Hawai’i became the 50th state of the “Union” in 1959. What happened between 1893 and then?

Immediately after the queen was deposed, a provisional government was set up. This government immediately sent envoys to Washington to seek a treaty of annexation — manifesting their desire for the complete destruction of an independent Hawai’i into an occupied colony of the United States. The treaty was delayed by the inauguration of Grover Cleveland as U.S. president however, and stalled there. Because of this, the Republic of Hawai’i was proclaimed by the Committee of Safety in 1894. Sanford B. Dole, a white man born in Honolulu, became its president. He was approved for a six-year term and if the name Dole is familiar, that is because his cousin James D. Dole is the one who started the Dole fruit company (then called the Hawaiian Pineapple Company). James Dole came to Hawai’i in 1899 and developed the pineapple industry which he had started there in 1851 — pineapple, which is used on “Hawaiian Pizza”, is not native to Hawai’i.

The new constitution accompanying this puppet temporary state required voters to swear allegiance to the republic. Strict property requirements prevented most Hawaiians from voting. The U.S. quickly recognized the coup government, despite president Cleveland publicly criticizing the involvement of U.S. Marines, as is usual — to this day we see the same performative criticism of the particular forms brutal occupation takes, but not its end result.

A counter-rebellion was attempted in 1895 to restore the sovereign kingdom, but failed. In 1898, the situation had stabilized sufficiently that then-president McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution, which annexed Hawai’i to the United States. A petition signed by over half the Hawaiian population was presented to the U.S. government protesting the move, but was ignored.

In 1900, Hawai’i became a territory of the United States — the same status that Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and ‘American’ Samoa have today. Stanford Dole, previously the president of the coup republic, was named governor of Hawai’i.

At that point, everything that existed under the late constitutional monarchy was broken and rebuilt. There was no more President or king in Hawai’i, but a U.S. governor — and with it, the laws of the occupier came along too, which is illegal under U.N. Occupation Law.

During that time, sugar production expanded from 289,500 short tons in 1900 to 939,300 short tons in 1930 in plantations owned by white Americans and toiled by native Hawaiians. Pineapple grew from 2000 cases in 1903 to 12 million cases in 1931. Tourism, which plagues Hawai’i to this day, started in 1901 with the opening of the Moana hotel. By 1958, tourists amounted to 171 thousand in one year compared to 25 thousand in 1940. All the while political control remained largely in the hands of the Haole — non-Native Hawaiian, specifically white.

In 1896, the Hawaiian language was banned in public schools — that ban remained in place for 100 years, until 1986. Today, UNESCO still classifies the language as critically endangered.

U.S. businessmen were not the only ones scrambling to the newly-acquired territory, of course. The government immediately set out to fulfill its ambitions and established a dozen military bases in Hawai’i between 1898 and 1922. Since it now considers Hawai’i part of their territory, military presence has only increased, and with it came many scandals and destruction. The military occupies 6% of Hawai’i’s land (illegally), and these bases have displaced many Indigenous Hawaiians and destroyed sacred cultural sites. The U.S. military contributes heavily to environmental crises in Hawai’i, being responsible for example for the Red Hill water contamination crisis.

The effects of the colonization of Hawai’i are still felt today because the U.S. government still considers Hawai’i to be their playground for tourism, army and the mass distribution of pineapple.

Native Hawaiians face higher rates of poverty compared to whites — 15.4% versus 9.6%. Cost of living has soared in Hawai’i with the introduction of a tourism industry (owned by white businessmen); 40% of Indigenous Hawaiian households are cost-burdened by rent prices, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on rent. Indigenous Hawaiians form only 10% of the population of Hawai’i, yet make up 51% of the homeless population. 50% of Native Hawaiians live outside of Hawai’i. The tourism industry pays pittance wages with most of the profits going to the white owners.

More than a quarter of missing girls in Hawai’i are Indigenous, and the average profile of a missing person is a 15-year-old Indigenous girl. Hawai’i is the state with the eighth-highest rate of missing persons in the United States, and 84% of Indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime. In Operation Keiki Shield, 38% of those arrested for soliciting sex from a 13-year-old online were active-duty U.S. Military personnel. 

The tourism industry in Hawai’i has put over 60% of plants and animal species in the ‘endangered’ status, largely due to deforestation to build resorts that make a parody of traditional Hawaiian culture. 44.7% of water on the Big Island (the island of Hawai’i) is consumed by hotels and resorts.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military causes crisis after crisis, and never cleans up after. They pollute potable water through mismanagement. Over several months in 2021, fuel tanks failed one by one at U.S. navy bases at Red Hill (Oahu island) and released tens of thousands gallons of fuel into the island’s drinkable water supply. The U.S. military controls 30% of the land on this island and used it — and the sacred cultural site at Kaho’olawe — as a bombing range for decades. The issue was compounded by the fact that the leaks happened over several months, raising the question as to why the fuel tanks were not inspected and fixed after the first leak. Petroleum contaminated the public water supply for 1 million residents, and the U.S. Navy both refused to help fix the problem and did not notify the authorities when the leaks happened — the problem was reported far too late, when local residents noticed the leak in their tap water. Instead, the Navy ‘promised’ to close the facility by 2027. Today in January 2025, 4,000 gallons of fuel and 28,000 gallons of sludge still remain in the pipes and tanks. In the first weeks after the leak, colonial authorities in Hawai’i even said that the water was safe to drink, leading to the poisoning of thousands.

Pearl Harbor, which we mentioned at the beginning of this piece, was known as Wai Momi (Pearl Waters) by the Hawaiians, and got its name from the pearl oyster diving trade that took place there. The pristine and shallow waters were perfectly suited for that activity, as well as fishing to feed the population — and they did so faithfully for over 600 years. 27 fishponds lined the shores of the Pearl Waters. In 1887, after the Bayonet Constitution, the U.S. gained exclusive rights to the lagoon as a coaling and repair station and from there built their naval base. Today, the water at Pearl Waters is polluted with arsenic, lead and mercury.

In the mid-20th century, the U.S. military detonated nuclear weapons as part of tests in the Pacific, not far from Hawai’i. At the Pacific Proving Grounds — Johnston Atoll, Bikini Atoll, and Enewetak Atolls — nuclear bombs were detonated. As part of Operation Fishbowl, a nuclear test was conducted in high-altitude, which caused an artificial aurora visible from Hawai’i and an electromagnetic pulse that damaged electrical infrastructure on the island chain. Over 100 nuclear detonations were made in the Pacific between 1946 and 1962, and the fallout caused — and is still causing — cancers in Hawai’i and other Pacific Islander populations. Residents of Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands chain, still cannot grow food locally.

In 2023, deadly wildfires burned on the island of Maui, becoming one of the deadliest natural disasters in Hawai’i’s history. The fires were caused by sparks from broken power lines that ignited dry vegetation. 102 people were killed by the fires, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in history. As of 2025, only three homes have been rebuilt, out of 2,200 structures destroyed. Landlords immediately sensed a good business opportunity, and rent rose by 44% on the island, further displacing Indigenous Hawaiians from their ancestral home. The only help from the federal government was a FEMA loan that will stop in 2028.

In terms of land ownership, some 200,000 acres have been set aside by the Department of Hawaiian Homelands to be distributed to Indigenous Hawaiians, but long waitlists persist. The U.S. Federal government, in comparison, owns 531,000 acres which are used for military bases and national parks. National Parks in the U.S. (under Roosevelt), as in “Israel”, were mainly established to drive Indigenous tribes away from their homelands — Yellowstone Park, for example, is located on the ancestral homeland to the Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfeet, Crow, and Nez Perce.

Mark Zuckerberg has also been acquiring land on Kauai since 2014. He now holds over 1,400 acres including beachfront and agricultural properties. In 2016, he initiated lawsuits to force owners of kuleana (small parcels with ancestral rights enclosed in ‘his’ property) to sell their property, dragging them in expensive lawsuits that the families could not finance. He is not the only one: other U.S. tech figures such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) own mansion compounds of their own in Hawai’i. Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, owns 98% of Lanai island, one of Hawai’i’s eight islands. Meanwhile, Indigenous Hawaiians pay $3,000 per month in rent for an average of $18 per hour, which is twice as low as the occupation state’s average wage of $32 per hour.

Again, all of this is technically illegal, not only under U.S. law, but also under international law. The U.S. is illegally occupying Hawai’i, an occupation made possible only by their military might and the putting down of independence movements. In effect, the Kingdom of Hawai’i is under occupation and U.N. Occupation law applies to it — similarly as it does to Palestine. More and more organizations are recognizing this occupation status, including U.N. bodies, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild. Under Occupation Law, the occupied population has the right to resist occupation, including by force.

Indigenous Hawaiian groups have been very clear about the effects tourism has on their homeland, and have thus requested that tourists refrain from visiting Hawai’i — not just U.S. tourists, but all tourists. I can only echo their voice and make you reconsider visiting Hawai’i as long as it remains a U.S. colony. 

Like many other countries and territories, Hawai’i is not spared by the effects of ongoing colonization; and all of this is still happening in the 21st century. The only just solution for Hawai’i is the complete expulsion of the U.S. army, the recognition of a sovereign Hawaiian state and nation by the U.S. government, and the relinquishing of its status as a U.S. state or dependency of any kind.

Donald Trump is promising deportation on a mass scale not seen since the Eisenhower administration. Right on cue, liberals have opened their tired old playbook and started to bleat on about “the xenophobia of Trump,” failing to understand that the current hostility being shown to undocumented immigrants is neither unique to this president nor to this particular time in U.S. history. The ruling class provoking animosity toward a group defined as “other” dates back even further than the founding of the republic itself, and serves a vital purpose in maintaining unity among the oppressor classes. 

The Settler and the Indigenous

Since the arrival of the first Europeans to what is now the United States, settler colonists have used any and every excuse to expand their territory and to pillage and plunder, either by direct military conquest, lying, cheating, or a terrible combination of all three. In search of land and riches, colonists invaded the North American continent and found seemingly endless land that, if put to European methods of cultivation, could yield enormous profits. The settlers expanded out from original landing sites like a virus, squatting on “claims” (sometimes) made in the name of the king and paying no heed to those who lived there. The violent pushback visited upon the settlers by Indigenous groups was given by the settlers as justificatory evidence not only for increased settler war against native populations (and subsequent settler expansion), but for the categorization of the native by settlers as a racially subaltern group. A Declaration of the state of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia categorizes Indigenous people of the region as “beasts,” “treacherous,” and, crucially, “wicked Infidels,” among other epithets. Englishmen of the Virginia Company saw the Indigenous as people in need of a Protestant salvation, people who lacked the moral character necessary to obtain the individual prosperity so coveted by the settler, and thus in need of “civilizing” — which in practice meant subservience and a tranquil acceptance of expulsion and extermination. The never-ending thirst for land led to even more ousting of the Indigenous — the “other” — clearing the way for more expansion, exploitation and murder by the settlers.

Bacon’s Rebellion is an early example of European unity against the Indigenous “threat” — a threat wholly instigated by settlers appropriating Indigenous territory. Nathaniel Bacon — a white landowner — instigated the rebellion as a response to his exclusion from the inner circle of the Virginia plantocracy. He leaned on both the settlers’ desire to expand their holdings and their fear of the Indigenous people fighting against the occupation of their land to whip the disenfranchised among them into a frenzy. The rebel mob was a multiracial coalition, and Bacon promised instant freedom to any enslaved or indentured laborer that joined his cause. While Bacon and his ragtag regiments managed to take Jamestown and burn it to the ground, the arrival of 1,000 English soldiers under the command of Herbert Jeffreys pushed the rebels to a hasty acquiescence. In an attempt to smooth things over, Jeffreys pardoned the insurrectionists and agreed to a treaty with the local Indigenous peoples. 

But the plantocracy was not so quick to forget their close call with revolution. Watching enslaved Black laborers march side-by-side with poor whites shook the planters to their very core, and as a result Virginia society underwent a significant restructuring. In 1705 the Virginia government passed an act reinstating the headright system first enacted in the Great Charter. Each free white settler was now guaranteed 50 acres of land to be exploited for their own use, and as the planter class refused to subdivide their own enormous holdings, the land was thus expropriated from Indigenous people. Tribes were relocated again and again to make room for the crushing hordes of white hopefuls desperate to get their grubby hands in the tobacco business. The burgeoning mob of settlers slashed, burned, scarred and destroyed land that for millennia had been carefully managed to provide everything necessary for survival and happiness. Blind greed for hogsheads full of stinking green narcotic profit pushed the Indigenous farther and farther away from the places they had called home as far back as they could remember, as the land itself was bent to suit the will of colonial capitalism.  

The Settler and the Enslaved

To kidnap someone — to take them to a ship in chains, manacle them naked below decks for almost the entirety of a three-month voyage and, upon arrival to port, to sell them at auction to the highest bidder — requires a most severe differentiation between oneself and those forced into enslavement. To purchase said human beings at auction — to transport them to one’s home or place of work, incorporate them into a building crew, set them to toil as a domestic servant or install them in any other position as may exist in the settler’s business concerns, and work them until they die — likewise requires an extraordinary rationalization. Thus Africans, captured, sold and sent — many to remote concentration camps isolated from most of society — and given a life sentence of work without having committed a crime, had to be considered not only as property, as cargo, as a price, as a means to wealth, but to be somehow deserving of said treatment. 

But the settlers’ collective Christian conscience  —  so worked upon by Calvin, Locke, and eventually by the brothers Wesley — pricked them yet, and the consequences of their sins could not help but be made clear to them. The Stono Revolt, the Maroon Wars in Jamaica, the panics in New York City in the 1740’s all fired a (well-founded) fear both in slave-owning and non-slave-owning settler whites of a mass slave revolt. Dread hung in the air of every colonial port, town and plantation, and while settlers were able to make the connection (obvious as it was) between slave revolts and the whippings, rapes, and genocide that scarred the life and conditions of enslaved Africans in the British Atlantic colonies, others were unwilling or unable to do so. Just as settlers blamed the consequences of their violent expansion into native territory on the Indigenous themselves, so also they put the consequences brought about by their countless abuses, their innumerable crimes against both their fellow man and the God they claimed to follow, upon the Africans themselves.

The wages of their sins having been made manifest, the Christian slaveholders launched a desperate attempt to postpone their payment. The settlers convinced themselves that the victims of their violent enterprise were in fact the instigators of their own misfortune, thus blaming the enslaved for the deeds of the enslavers. In the settler’s mind, the African was born to follow orders from the white man, and failure to do so constituted a break with the natural order, characterized as “insolence” from an “inferior” race. So slave codes were tightened, punishments became more severe, and even free Africans fell under suspicion from terrified settlers. As the crackdowns continued, so too did slave revolts, which augmented panic among whites to a hysterical pitch. The latter reached a crescendo in 1775 with Lord Dunmore’s famous proclamation that all slaves in the colony of Virginia that aided the Crown during the colonial rebellion would be liberated. The settlers howled, wailed, and eventually won their war with the help of France and Spain. But the colonists — now “free men,” citizens of a country of their own making, did not see fit to resolve the issue that provoked so much fear throughout the former colonies. 

The vaunted founding fathers wrote screeds about freedom and man’s right to seek his own happiness, but when it came to the men and women they enslaved, the great men dithered, hemmed and hawed, and excreted the most pitiful, paltry excuses imaginable. They stammered about inconceivably abstract futures, far, far removed from their own time, when the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery would be banned or would have disappeared of its own right. Jefferson and Madison and all the rest of the hypocritical lot spoke of liberty while raping and whipping the enslaved on their own plantations; they pontificated on supposedly universal human rights but couldn’t see their way to sacrificing even a fraction of their own material comfort that others might have the “freedom” about which they blathered on so incessantly. So Stono gave way to Gabriel’s Rebellion, and Nat Turner’s Revolt, and eventually a bloody civil war, all while settlers still considered the enslaved Africans “insolent” and lazy. In the settlers’ minds the Africans still embodied all the faults and vices of the settlers themselves. 

The Settler and the Undocumented Immigrant

The turn of the 20th century marked the so-called “closing” of the frontier, as settlers proclaimed a supposed “end” to the centuries-long extermination campaign visited upon the Indigenous peoples. As the domestic frontier closed, the international frontier opened, and U.S. soldiers were shipped to foreign lands, to oppress and exploit, to force other peoples, societies, and economies to bend the knee to the interests of U.S. capital. Sons of white Southern sharecroppers mingled with the sons of white Northern shopkeepers, and they were led by officers hailing from families of industrial capitalists, factory supervisors, and monied planter families. American troops, united in their racial identity, plundered the vaults of Port-au-Prince, toppled the government in Santo Domingo, and partook in atrocities that were hauntingly familiar to those their forebears committed upon enslaved Africans and the Indigenous. Massacres, wanton executions, violations and an extravagance of bloodshed followed in the wake of the U.S. military wherever it went. Wholesale looting ensured that factories back home, kept churning by a never-ending flow of cheap immigrant labor from Asia and Europe, never ran out of raw material. International plunder ensured astronomically high profit rates for an all-American oligarchic capitalist class. 

This brutal, rabid expansion continued throughout the 20th century, picking up steam in the 1950s with the advent of the Cold War. A restructured world in the process of jettisoning the old boots-on-the-ground European colonialist template provided a wealth of new opportunities for the capitalist kingpin country. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Angola, Burkina Faso, Yemen, Indonesia, and both sides of the Korean peninsula are only some of the most notable manifestations of the United States’ unquenchable thirst for accumulation.

But reckless growth across the globe has come with a price. The constant upheaval and instability that follows in the wake of imperial capitalist expansion has resulted in a tsunami of people shut out of any hope of achieving prosperity in their home countries by whatever flavor of capitalist brutality is local to them. The tentacles of American hegemony are long and deeply rooted, so migrants have flooded northward — a frenzy of dreamers hungering for the life that was plundered from them to feed the American labor aristocracy and their oligarchic overlords. At first, the lords of American capital were all too willing to manipulate the new immigrants to their own advantage — using the immigrants’ unstable legal situation to drive salaries to pitiable lows. However, a justification was required to explain the blatantly unfair treatment received by the undocumented worker. Thus, in the same way that enslaved Africans were said to have deserved their subservience to the ruling slaveholding class, as Indigenous peoples were said to have deserved their genocide and expulsion at the hands of the ravaging settlers, the ruling class and its flunkeys assert that the immigrant that finds work due to settler unwillingness is in fact stealing jobs, that asylum seekers fleeing political instability in their home countries are in fact the cause of said instability, that those who have seen their homelands corrupted and defiled, those who have seen their hopes, dreams, loves and lives ground into the mud by the jackboot of capitalism are in fact the true corruptors and defilers of the pure American settler state. In short, the immigrant is abused and exploited simply because, to their abusers and exploiters, they are inherently inferior, and thus deserve inferior wages. When the immigrants have fulfilled their duty to the capitalist overlords, they can then be discarded, as the whole world can see now.  

However, it is here that a break with the past becomes evident. The tactic used by the ruling class when faced with a crisis of their own making — blame the oppressed for the faults of capital — has always been accompanied by a tangible benefit for a certain subset of the petit- bourgeois population (usually an exclusively white coalition). Designated members of this “in-group” could then be counted on as loyal foot soldiers in the expansion of oppression. The settler invasion of Indigenous land was not only fought to bestow more land upon the plantocracy; lower-class white settlers were also able to stake their “claim” to the newly-emptied lands, thus ensuring lebensraum for the planters themselves. African slavery resulted in a phasing-out of white indentured servitude and a host of economic and social benefits opening up to members of a newly-named “white” class. U.S. economic and hegemonic expansion has likewise resulted in a glut of well-paying job opportunities for the American settler petit bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy both at home and throughout the world. 

However, this most recent push to deport immigrants is missing any sort of increase in the economic position of the settler labor aristocracy or petit-bourgeoisie. While chauvinist social consciences will be eased, the capitalist or small business owner who formerly employed undocumented workers will find themselves with the same amount of work to be done, but a much smaller (and less-pliable) workforce. The reserve army of labor will shrink substantially. Another point: the current increase in profits for capitalists is being driven in large part by a mass pirating of middle class wealth within the imperial core by capitalists. Prices are skyrocketing, salaries are not keeping pace with inflation, and the smooth promises of the big bourgeoisie are evaporating like morning dew on a hot day. Even the exalted “American Dream” no longer fulfills its propagandic function, but has been reduced to a talking point for those who use it as a yardstick by which to compare all supposed economic, social, and moral failings of American settler society. In the face of capital’s imperative to grow at all costs, the strategy to manage, package, and sell that growth to the lower imperial social classes has fallen apart. 

The deportations are a feeble attempt by the settler bourgeoisie to bargain with the lower settler classes, to postpone the day of reckoning for the consequences of capital’s rapacious thirst for blood and land, its insatiable need to squeeze human beings like rags and wring out every drop of work and wealth. Eventually the bill comes due, and the more intelligent members of the capitalist class understand this. They hope to buy a little more time to increase military strength, in the hope that brute force can replace mass subornation of the white settler class as the primary impulsor for order. Heaping blame for current social ills upon undocumented immigrants and deporting them in a twisted attempt to sell the idea that the sins of capitalism are being deported along with the migrants might buy U.S. capital hegemony a little more time, but the days of glory for the majority of white American settlers are long gone, the last great capitalist plundering is on, and rifles and tanks are coming to replace the hideous amalgamation of sin-eater ritual and race-class bribery fundamental to the American settler project.

Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, and National Liberation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CPUSA Convention Controversy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Class and Class Struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is to be Done?

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

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

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

If you read the newest article by CPUSA officer C.J. Atkins (managing editor of the party organ People’s World, and Executive Director of the pro-Canadian government NGO, ProudPolitics), How does the Communist Party elect its leadership, it’s clear that they still aren’t ready to admit new voices. We will address the hypocrisy that is the CPUSA constitution and the anti-democratic structure it enshrines to protect its opportunistic and careerist leadership below, but first we must deal with something that is purposefully hidden from new recruits in the CPUSA: the party’s own history.

For this reason, we urge the widest possible circulation of this pamphlet among the new recruits of the CPUSA, so they can make their choices clearly, and have their voices heard despite the pressure from the “national” organization. Only through real struggle — not the tame, leashed thing present at CPUSA conventions of the past century — can the party be vigorously purged of its opportunists and careerists and fit to participate in the revolutionary milieu of North American Communism.

A History of Opportunism

It’s not easy to learn the history of the CPUSA; comprehensive studies haven’t been compiled, and the publicly available information online is all tinged with bias one way or the other. Fatally for the CPUSA, the party’s own accounts of its history that are publicly available (for instance, Five misconceptions about the CP’s stance on Black liberation, written by a CPUSA employee who is paid through one of its shell corporations) are outright lies. We know this because other party members and even earlier party historians disagree. The Five misconceptions can be easily debunked by looking at the party records!

We can divide the history of the CPUSA into several major periods based on the predominant forces at work. The party’s roots can be traced back to the Pre-Party Period (roughly 1876-1919). The founding of the party (1919-1923) was followed almost immediately by fierce factional fighting between different types of political opportunists. We can call this entire period the Lovestone War (1919-1928). The party’s Third Period (1928-1935) coincides with the so-called Third Period of the Comintern. These three periods can collectively be termed the “early party” in which the membership was grappling with imperialist opportunism. The Early Party was followed by the disastrous Browder Period (1935-1958), during which open class-collaborationism ruled the day. The intervening Hall Period (1958-2000) was followed by the most recent period of open liquidation (2000-2019) and the Sims/Cambron Co-Chair Period (2019-present).

The Early Party

The party was initially created out of several social democratic organizations that had long subordinated internationalist concerns to mere economism — the narrow concerns of direct economic gains. A coalition of “leftists” brought together non-reformist elements of the Socialist Party of America. This group was known as the Left Wing Section, a formal faction within the party. This faction was not only praised by Lenin, but was even used by the Communist International (Comintern) to help form the Communist Party of the USA. So much for the ban on factions!

The early party was actually unable to cohere; immediately following the election of the Left Wing Section to most of the executive positions in the SPA in 1919, the moderates in the SPA expelled them. The non-English speaking “language sections” of the SPA broke off and founded the Communist Party of America. The SPA called an emergency convention in August of 1919 and the remaining left delegates formed the Communist Labor Party. These were both ordered by the Comintern to join into the single Communist Party of the United States of America and the CPUSA as we know it was born.

But it was not born without strife. The following ten years would be typified by a power struggle between two cliques represented more or less by two forces of opportunism within the party: the Ruthenberg-led former CPA and the Lovestonites. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of Lovestone: he was responsible for the thesis of “American exceptionalism.” This is the line that the CPUSA, openly or not, still materially follows. They can’t afford to educate you about Lovestone because you might see through their program.

His clique put forth the so-called analysis that capitalism was stronger in the U.S. than anywhere else on earth or in history, and that it could not be overcome by revolutionary might until it began to decay. He presented this thesis to the Comintern and helped lead the early CPUSA toward a position of capitulationism. He proposed that the party should just attempt to “hang on” until the revolution was possible, retrenching and defending itself from the capitalists but taking no moves to advance toward overthrowing the capitalist class. This basic thesis has informed top leadership in the CPUSA since.

The Comintern blasted Lovestone, as did Comrade Stalin himself. They ordered the CPUSA to cease factional fighting between Ruthenberg and Lovestone and chastised Lovestone as being a defeatist. This was not the end of Lovestone. By the 1960s, Lovestone would be an active CIA contact inside the AFL-CIO, funneling money from the counter-revolutionary forces of the Central Intelligence Agency into the labor movement.

At the same time, the African Blood Brotherhood was being integrated into the CPUSA and revolutionary action was proceeding in Alabama and the Black Belt. Harry Haywood is the most famous of the revolutionary theorists to come out of the U.S. during this period, and for good reason. Haywood was a proponent and defender of the Black Belt Thesis, the analysis that the Black population of the U.S. Empire was a nation-in-chains in the South, and this serves as a nexus of oppression everywhere until land reform is undertaken. He was a staunch opponent of revisionism and opportunism in the upper ranks of the CPUSA.

Those who opposed Haywood and the Comintern’s position on the Black nation classified racial prejudice as a “moral concern” that needed no special attention. Haywood, the Comintern, and many Black comrades in the U.S. defined Black liberation with regard to specific economic structures. The struggle within the CPUSA against Black liberation came to a head not during the early party period, but in the 1940s, under the villain Earl Browder, as the party tacked toward peaceful coexistence with the U.S. capitalist class, and then finally during the liquidationist period at the end of the 1950s as the party was permanently conquered by petit-bourgeois interests.

Earl Browder: Arch Class-Collaborationist

The never-unified CPUSA’s internal struggles continued to grow more dangerous throughout the middle and late 1930s. It had not been on any firm class footing, despite its membership achieving certain powerful successes in the U.S. class struggle. Earl Browder was appointed by the Comintern to suppress this factionalism and was selected to serve as the party’s head alongside William Z. Foster, the CPUSA’s candidate for president who ran on a Black Belt liberation ticket. Foster suffered from health problems, and Browder took command of the party apparatus.

In the early 1930s, the CPUSA considered president Roosevelt to be a fascist, and opposed joint work with the Democrats. Browder took the lead in convincing the Comintern that a new detente with capitalists in the U.S. was not only possible, but necessary to fight European fascism. He was the champion of the “People’s Front” — a corruption of Georgi Dimitrov’s United Front strategy — and by 1936, Communists were in key positions of the Roosevelt administration. Foster, now sidelined, fought against Browder’s collaborationism with Roosevelt, but Browder controlled the key party positions.

This is how the embarrassment of “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” came to pass. “Patriotic” Communism, as seen today, is a revival of Browder’s efforts at class-collaboration.

It doesn’t stop there.

Browder produced a piece of “theory” known as Teheran, Our Path in War and Peace which was published in 1944. Among other garbage, including a contention that imperialist exploitation of the world by the U.S. was weakening, Browder wrote that “There can be no effective national unity in America… that does not include big capitalists.”

“The Communists,” he wrote, “foresee that the practical political aims they hold will for a long time be in agreement on all essential points with the aims of a much larger body of non-Communists, and that therefore our political actions will be merged in such larger movements. The existence of a separate political party of Communists, therefore, no longer serves a practical purpose but can be, on the contrary, an obstacle to the larger unity.”

The party encouraged no-strike pledges during the war, ostensibly to protect Soviet Communism, but in actuality destroying the revolution at the time when the organization of the working class in the U.S. Empire was at its height, and a time when U.S. imperialism was weakened by fighting foreign enemies.

In 1944, Browder dissolved the party.

This move was nearly successful; throughout 1943 and ‘44, he suppressed all dissent to the buildup of the plan to dissolve the CPUSA as being in violation of party discipline. This toxic and ludicrous understanding of democratic centralism, preclusion of all dissent, persists within the CPUSA and many other “sister” parties to this day. It was only through the intervention of the French C.P. and the circulation of newspapers and letters from France blasting Browder and demanding his removal that the party was reconstituted in 1945.

Although the party was actually dissolved and Browder managed to issue party-wide orders to that effect, it was shortly thereafter put back together under the leadership of William Foster.

It was during this time of Browder’s leadership that the attacks on Haywood and the Black members of the party holding to the line of national self-determination grew stronger and stronger. Browder fought to suppress national self-determination as antagonistic to the new vision of the world he predicted in which the U.S. capitalist class would eventually peacefully hand over power to the working class.

The Traitor’s Convention: 1957

In response to FBI investigations and the prosecution of eleven highly-placed members of the CPUSA, the party took the position that it was not advocating for the overthrow of the capitalist state — a crime under bourgeois law — but for Browder’s “peaceful transition.” The eleven defendants were found guilty and each sentenced to five years in prison. This led to the prosecution of some 100 more party members throughout the early 1950s.

The party, having been led down the rabbit-hole of opportunism by Browder, who took advantage of the already-existing petit-bourgeois tendency for collaboration and conciliation with Roosevelt and the so-called “progressive” capitalists, was caught unprepared for this onslaught.

Khrushchev’s “secret speech” also rocked the party. John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker, called for dissolving the CP as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and became the center for a new liquidationist faction, intent on removing the revolutionary content of Marxism and making it palatable to the progressive capitalists. Liquidationists sprang out of the CPUSA woodwork. They demanded a “re-examination” of Marxism-Leninism and condemned the theory of the bourgeois state as an instrument of class rule.

The most fateful convention of the CPUSA, that of 1957, was fast approaching. A draft resolution was circulated in September of 1956 to be debated at the convention. The draft argued for what Haywood recorded as a “peaceful, parliamentary, constitutional transition to socialism.” It would be

…the development of an anti-monopoly coalition through “labor and popular” forces gaining “decisive influence in key Democratic Party state organizations and even liberal Republican movements.” Thus would develop the “American Road to Socialism.” The Communist Party would remain on the sidelines to “support and endorse” such progressive campaigns. On the Afro-American question, the right of self-determination was completely omitted and the Party urged wholehearted acceptance of the NAACP slogan of “Free by ‘63.” Working class leadership and proletarian revolution were entirely excluded from this document. The National Board voted in favor of the resolution, Foster and Davis voting a qualified “yes.”

Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik

Left opposition to this turn grew throughout the end of 1956 and the beginning of 1957. However, they were lacking central guidance; the left opposition was excluded from the National Board. They had no regular access to any of the party machinery to air their views, and leadership deliberately suppressed Marxist-Leninist education to maintain the status quo. All dissent was systematically suppressed, and inner-party democracy was quashed.

Three factions of rightists came to the Sixteenth Convention on February 9, 1957. The Gates faction was openly anti-Soviet and supported the liquidation of the party in its entirety. The center-right  faction was led by Eugene Dennis and called for the ideological liquidation of the party’s vanguard position. The left-center was represented by Foster, and were staunchly opposed to any further leftward movement — embracing open calls for revolution, for instance, in the face of FBI repression.

The Sixteenth Convention, in an attempt to quell the disunity that had plagued the party from the beginning, moved to suppress the split. The three right trends, which had captured the National Board, called for a “unity of all trends” during the convention. The left opposition attacked this false unity, and upset many of the “unity slates” — you see the beginning of the hideous slate system here — that were planned to oust left candidates.

As part of this “unity of all trends,” the three right cliques forced through the passage of the treacherous September Resolution, which spelled the death knell of the party as any kind of revolutionary force. Immediately following the convention, the three “unified” trends began to harass the left opposition within the party, driving membership out through bureaucratic gamesmanship. When Haywood attempted to challenge the slogan calling for the party to follow the petit-bourgeois lead of the NAACP, he was attacked by the leadership. The question of self-determination for the Black Belt and the oppressed Black nation was abandoned. The CPUSA had openly determined to follow the petit-bourgeois-dominated NAACP and the petit-bourgeois/bourgeois alliance that formed the central core of the Democratic Party of the 1930s-60s.

The Party Leaves the Struggle — So the Struggle Leaves the Party

The content of the CPUSA program has been, since the Sixteenth Congress, roughly the same for the last 70 years. In some periods it is more openly liquidationist (as we will see below, with the coming of Sam Webb), and in some less (as this current period), but the actual on-the-ground effect of every party program since 1957 has been, on one end of the spectrum, to tail the petit-bourgeois “progressives” or, on the other, to call for the complete abolishment of the party.

The Black Power movement and the New Communist Movement began in the mid-60s  as the CPUSA failed in its historical role to lead the working classes. In 1966, the Black Panther Party was formed. Organizations like the essentially anarchist Students for a New Democratic Society and its militant offshoot, the Weather Underground, sprang up. These were organic expressions of working class militant socialism that arose independently because the main outlet for the working class had been stopped up by the revisionist, opportunist, and government-infiltrated CPUSA. Two FBI operations, SOLO and TOPLEV, garnered many CPUSA informants; as early as 1948, the CIA had identified a goal to implement agents at the top levels of the CPUSA, and unredacted reports from the FBI as late as 1984 indicate a large number of government spies within the CPUSA ranks. Operation CHAOS, a CIA domestic spying program begun by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, undoubtedly planted even more spies within the CPUSA ranks.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle thus, having been driven out of the party by its accommodation of U.S. capitalism, manifested in other organizations. Projects were undertaken to re-found the CPUSA or to purge it of its opportunistic elements. None of these produced lasting results. Because the CPUSA had consumed the oxygen for working class organizing on an all-Empire level, because it stood back and did nothing while the Black Power movement was slaughtered in the streets by police both in uniform and in suits, there was no way to challenge it, and all meaningful revolutionary activity drained away. By the late 1980s, party membership had dwindled from a once-proud 300,000 to 25,000.

The Ghost of Sam Webb

The next stage in the CPUSA’s development was the appearance of the treacherous Sam Webb in 2000. Webb became chairman, and kept the party on the same tack as its 1980-incarnation: playing a supporting role to the Democratic Party against the “ultra-right” threat of the GOP.

Webb repeated the Sixteenth Congress throughout his entire tenure. He directly contradicted the tasks set out by the socialists of the 20th century and embraced Bernsteinian revisionism as the order of the day. “While political supremacy of the working class and its allies is imperative, once acquired its task isn’t to smash the state into so many pieces, but rather to transform the class content of state structures,” he wrote in 2009. “[C]ommunists of our generation,” he sang, in the siren song we have seen above, designed to convince the petit-bourgeois, vacillating elements, “would do well to follow the example of our Depression-era comrades.”

He denounced Marxism-Leninism itself, calling it “rigid and formulaic” and said it was time to move “beyond Communist Parties.” At the 2014 convention, the party narrowly avoided removing Marxism-Leninism itself from the constitution and party documents.

Webb was ousted at this convention by John Bachtell — current editor-in-chief of the party organ, People’s World. Bachtell, who worked for the Obama campaigns, had worked extensively as chair on the so-called inside/outside project coordinating “Communists” within the Democratic Party. He was slightly to the left of Webb in that he didn’t call for open liquidation of the CPUSA as an organizational structure, but did hew, in his time as chair, to a tailist strategy to “defeat Trumpism” (as he put it). Class consciousness had begun to rise with the threat of the far-right fascist advancement of the Tea Party and then-metastasizing MAGA elements in the GOP. Webb, who advocated dissolving the party just as Browder had done, had to go. The party couldn’t countenance open liquidation — perhaps because it once again began to serve its purpose as a magnet for young Communists who don’t know any better. This allows the party to draw in potential revolutionaries and neutralize them by subjecting them to Byzantine, opaque, and undemocratic party structures. The rules require them not to get too feisty, and soon they find themselves forced to keep their revolutionary activity at a very low grade. At every opportunity, that energy is redirected into campaigning for the political class of the Democratic Party — to campaigning for our enemy. Sam Webb had to be sacrificed to save Webbism. Growing class consciousness threatened to push the working class into a revolutionary position. John Bachtell helped to negate it. The party had been winnowed down to some 2,500 members in the wake of Webb’s disastrous time as chair. After Webb was ousted, it grew again to roughly 5,000.

In 2019, Bachtell lost the chairship to long-time CPUSA members and Webbites Rossana Cambron and Joe Sims. This followed the even higher pitch of class consciousness during the Trump years; membership in the CPUSA appears to be as high as 8,000 people. The co-chairs immediately began to call for more revolutionary organizing to channel the surge of class consciousness — while maintaining the exact same 1957 line in action.

CPUSA’s Democracy — but For Which Class?

There exists at the top of the CPUSA a group of well-paid labor bureaucrats that make their living off of corporations owned by party members. Party properties and organs — in fact, all CPUSA assets — are owned by shell corporations like the International Publishing Corporation and Long View Publishing. This includes a network of charities and other corporations that pay out salaries, such as Military Voices Speak Out (the charity headed by Arturo Cambron, Rossana’s husband and a District Organizer for the party in California). Individuals are vetted to serve in these positions, then moved up through the CPUSA and the “mass” organizations that are controlled by high-ranking CPUSA members (like Long View, etc.)

To understand how this leadership retains control of the money and resources of the party as a whole, we can step through the sly doublespeak of C.J. Atkins’ article about elections within the CPUSA.

To begin with, Atkins starts with a canard. “In the Communist Party,” he cautions, “our unity and our collectivity are our most powerful weapons. Our democratic process is all about finding ways to include the voices, thoughts, and experiences of everyone in the party as we decide our policies — and doing so in a fashion that is collective, which safeguards our unity.” This sounds like a touching bit of organizational dogma, but what does Atkins mean when he says this? He admits right away that elections “might even strike [new members] as downright undemocratic when they first see it, totally top-down.”

What is he talking about? The slate system and the National Committee.

Let’s forget that the U.S. Empire isn’t a “nation” but rather a prisonhouse of nations. Set that to one side. What is the National Committee? It is the executive body of the CPUSA, and makes all decisions on all levels. It is the final arbiter of all disputes, and the body to which one would appeal if you disagree with another body. The National Committee is the Politburo and the Executive Committee and the Supreme Soviet rolled into one.

So how are members of this ultra-powerful party-brain elected? Once every four years (or longer, if the National Committee decides to postpone) a convention is held. Once the convention date is set, the existing National Committee creates a subcommittee called the Committee on Leadership. This subcommittee develops what Atkins calls “proposals” for who should staff the National Board and the National Committee, and who should serve as officers of the various subcommittees. How does it do this? Through no formal process. It “casts a broad net across the entire country.” How democratic! Can you submit your name for consideration? Not formally.

“Consultation is the name of the game,” Atkins says. “It’s all about ensuring that the leadership of our party is equipped with the diversity and experience that’s needed.” Ah, but the Committee on Leadership is also “tasked with guaranteeing the party’s continuity, and that means getting the right mix of seasoned party veterans and newly-emerging or young comrades who are growing into leaders.”

Break that down.

The leadership of the party, who have the absolute authority to expel or dismiss members, to select officers, to pick who get the lucrative sinecures of appointment to the party corporations and the payroll of party charities, breaks off a piece of itself (we don’t know, from Atkins’ article, how big the Committee on Leadership is — it might be composed of all the same members as the National Committee) to pick a few people “growing into leaders” (based on the criteria that they share the same political outlook as the current leadership) and “seasoned veterans” (by which they mean, charitably, the same small pool of people on rotation, or uncharitably, just themselves).

Is the floor open for nominations at the convention? Sure, but the vote is presented as a slate. Members are not allowed to campaign — Atkins presents campaigning as some filthy bourgeois tactic, rather than the knowing coalition of groups sharing struggles — so any attempt to campaign prior to the convention is just labeled factionalism and the campaigners are expelled.

But the process doesn’t end there. The National Committee then appoints a Presiding Committee — a credentialing committee and executive committee for the conference. The Presiding Committee makes final rulings on procedural questions, and then presents the slate of candidates selected by the Leadership Committee to the convention. No one that is not approved by the Presiding Committee can appear on the slate. Voting is not yes or no. It is not up or down. Voting proceeds by “choosing a minimum percentage of names from the final list of nominees” — the slate.

Truly, we can take Atkins’ words about process at their face value: the National Committee elects itself.

Debate about political lines and issues is prohibited until the convention begins. Such debate is (wrongfully) called a breach of democratic centralism in the long four-year plus stretches between conventions. Don’t like a party policy? Don’t like a party line? Even bringing up that fact inside a party meeting is grounds for discipline. How can you determine if you agree with people on the slate? How can you tell what you think about any individual candidate? You are left to the whims of the Leadership Committee and the Presiding Committee, both of which are wholly creatures of the National Committee.

Whom does this “democracy” serve?

It serves the clique of interested functionaries who live off of the wages of the rank-and-file party members. It serves John Bachtell, who is paid by Long View and International Publishers. Every few months, the party brass sends out a party-wide warning that People’s World needs more, more, more donations, or else they won’t meet their goal! What is their goal?

Subsidizing the very opportunist serpents that are paralyzing the party with coil after coil and loop after loop of bald-faced lies.

Proletarian Democracy Requires Struggle

It is not possible to achieve a meaningful contribution to the revolution without struggle. Bitter struggle! That means the combat of opposed viewpoints, the dialectic of conflict. Why is the CPUSA averse to conflict? Because its leadership cannot afford to be on the losing end. All struggle must be controlled and subsumed, lest the party be re-captured by the revolutionary element and its resources directed to the destruction of the capitalist state and the very lifestyles of the petit-bourgeois functionaries that now command it.

Do not let them defang the struggle.

Confront the beast in its lair.

Ever onwards, toward revolution!

History and Background
Blood libel is an antisemitic canard that accuses Jewish people of ritual murder and blood sacrifice, specifically that we kill Christians to use their blood for various rituals. Many of the historic accusations of blood libel suggest that Jews use the blood of Christians to bake Passover matzah. Primarily, though, the accusations of blood libel sprang up when a Christian child (often a young boy) went missing or was killed in a town. The local Jewish community would be blamed, often by the actual perpetrators (if a crime had taken place at all), and Jews would be brutally tortured until a confession was given. Sometimes, the specifics of these accusations tied into deicide, another antisemitic trope blaming all Jews throughout all of time for the crucifixion of Jesus. Jews are frequently used as scapegoats for countless disasters throughout history, and the death of young children is no exception.

Though the first documented occurrence of blood libel dates back to 40 BCE, the examples we usually see originate from Europe in the Middle Ages, where it was an incredibly dangerous time and place to be Jewish. Blood libel was used alongside various other antisemitic canards to justify the mass-murder and expulsion of Jewish people, especially from Central and Western Europe, like modern-day England, France, and Germany (who is always at the scene of the crime).

In 1144, Jews in Norwich, England were accused of blood libel after a young boy named William was found to have been stabbed to death on Good Friday. A monk named Thomas of Monmouth wrote The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich about the murder of the boy and the alleged miracles occurring near his burial site. It’s his fabrication that solidified the rumors of blood libel stirring in Norwich. William was treated as a Christian martyr (someone killed for being Christian/professing love for Jesus) and even canonized as a saint. A cult began to form around him not long after that.

After several more instances of blood libel popped up in England in the following decades, the pogroms started. Jewish communities across the country were raided and their people massacred. A few decades after the death of Hugh of Lincoln, another young boy who was killed in 1255, England expelled its entire Jewish population in 1290 and they were not allowed to return until 1657, four hundred years later.

Another notable case of blood libel – perhaps the most famous – occurred after the death of a two-year-old boy in modern-day Italy, Simon of Trent. Simon was killed in 1475 and like a majority of other children used in blood libel accusations, was venerated as a saint. His cult spread throughout Europe and to this day, I’ve still seen him referenced by antisemitic Christians.

Blood libels have persisted throughout time since then, including being published in Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. Though their more modern iterations haven’t really resulted in the mass-murder or expulsion of Jews, like all antisemitic tropes, they’re still extremely dangerous and we absolutely should take great lengths to avoid them.

Modern Applications
Now with the background on blood libel accusations of the past, we can see what they look like today. The most common example I can think of is the adrenochrome conspiracy theory, a popular one amongst the QAnon crowd. The adrenochrome conspiracy posits that “Hollywood elites” participate in child-trafficking rings to harvest their blood for adrenochrome, which would allegedly make them immortal somehow. Of course, the usage of “elites” makes it easier for the promoters of these antisemitic conspiracy theories to deny that they’re talking about Jews, but dogwhistles are very common with contemporary antisemitism (which we’ll discuss more in depth another time).

The trope has also “accidentally” been regurgitated by modern media plenty of times. I think this may sometimes be unintended, because of how antisemitic tropes have worked their way into acceptable public consciousness, but it’s still negligence on the part of the creators. A good example would be Inside Job on Netflix (see this article about why). Or perhaps Roald Dahl’s The Witches (but this one’s not really hard to put together considering Dahl was a raging antisemite). Disney’s Tangled suffers enormously from the Jewish-coding of Mother Gothel, in appearance and behavior and using her blonde-haired, stolen child’s powers to keep herself young. 

It can also sometimes be applied to vampire media in particular, and it’s definitely not uncommon for there to be a connection between vampire imagery and antisemitism, but that’s something I’ll cover another time. 

What Blood Libel is Not
Blood libel absolutely is a trope that still exists today in the media we consume, but that doesn’t mean the label of “blood libel” can be ascribed to something that doesn’t fit in with the libel itself. Today, Israel has leveled the accusation of blood libel against South Africa for describing the attacks on Gaza as “genocide” as South Africa attempts to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice. The same accusations are regularly directed towards anyone else being vocally pro-Palestine.

Accusing supporters of Palestine of blood libel for pointing out that Israel is committing genocide is a blatant attempt to take legitimacy away from these statements. None of these discussions bring up ritual murder or consumption of blood, which are very key parts of categorizing a claim as blood libel. Zionists also pretend any “blood libel accusation” against Israel is the same as one being made against Jews in general; it’s not. Israel is a militaristic, apartheid state that commits atrocities in the name of the Jewish people, but it is not “us”.

Most importantly, the genocide of Palestinians is actually happening. There is an overwhelming amount of photo and video evidence documenting the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, along with testimonies from the people involved, including admissions from the perpetrators themselves.

Another consequence of unjustly accusing people of antisemitism is that antisemitism is taken less seriously, or legitimate accusations of antisemitism are met with denial or indifference. I would argue that this is intentional, because Israel relies heavily on the lack of safety of Jews in diaspora to legitimize itself.

By combatting antisemitism in all its forms worldwide, we make sure that Israel can no longer claim to be the only safe place in the world for us. We will thrive where we are, and education about antisemitism is imperative to that goal.

Sources
Passover and Blood Libels | My Jewish Learning
The Adrenochrome Conspiracy Theory—Pushed By ‘Sound Of Freedom’ Star—Explained (forbes.com)
Does Netflix’s ‘Inside Job’ encourage antisemitic conspiracy theorists? – The Forward
Israel-Hamas war: List of key events, day 85 | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

Republished from the author’s blog, Doikayt Delivered.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoléon

Our story begins with the fall of the July Monarchy, itself the result of a brief explosion of street fighting in the early 19th century which rid France of the last restored Bourbon king, Charles X. King Louis-Phillipe d’Orléans took the place of Charles and instituted a vaguely liberal constitutional monarchy.

In February of 1848 — the year that saw Europe explode in upheaval against the so-called Metternich system, with revolutions breaking out in Italy, Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin — the people of Paris demanded Louis-Phillipe liberalize his government. When he failed to meet their demands, revolution swept the streets of the city. The radical socialists of Paris and the bourgeois liberals joined together to erect barricades in the heart of the city. Louis-Phillipe, unwilling to give the order for the army to fire upon the people of France and fearing the republican revolution would send him to the same fate as his father and uncle — regicide — fled first Paris and then France. The bourgeois ministers who reaped the rewards of this revolution would have no such compunction about ordering the army to turn their guns on their former allies, the radical socialists. The July Monarchy came crashing down.

The 1840s were also the years of the great potato blight that swept through Europe. Financial turmoil and an enormous market crash played a decisive role in spurring the 1848 revolutions and, in France, left millions starving and without work.

The bourgeois liberals at once moved to cut out the radical socialists and utopians from the new government. They founded what the French call the Second Republic (following the First Republic, that of the Revolutionary Government in 1792). Although the bourgeois government that took over from Louis-Phillipe promised to enact the “right to work” laws sought by the socialists, instead, they purposefully constructed mismanaged National Workshops in Paris to provide make-work for those thrown into unemployment by the blight, the financial crash, and the tumult of the February Revolution.

When the bourgeois republic of 1848 closed the National Workshops, as poorly managed as they were, the workers in Paris exploded in outrage. Thousands had come from the surrounding countryside to seek work, and now they were told they had scant days to clear out of the city. On 23 June 1848, the city rose. Barricades were built across the heart of Paris and the armed citizenry demanded the establishment not only of a democratic republic, but a social republic: one that solved the crisis of poverty and property. The Second Republic responded by calling out the National Guard, that body of petit-bourgeois shop owners formed into a 40,000-man-strong Parisian militia. Under General Cavaignac, the National Guard crushed the revolt of the June Days, shuttered the workshops, and deported nearly 4,000 insurgents to newly conquered French Algeria.

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew to the former emperor of France and self-styled Prince, was permitted by the Second Republic to return to his native soil and to run in the parliamentary elections of 1848. In September of that year, he won a seat in the new National Assembly. Catholics and peasants, who missed life under the Empire which had at least seen to their needs, overwhelmingly supported Prince Louis-Napoléon; he was seated in the Assembly to cries of “Vive Napoléon!” and, more troublingly, “Vive l’Empereur!”

In December of 1848, Louis-Napoléon won the newly-created presidency in a landslide 74% vote in the first French election with universal male suffrage. The memory of the glories won by the emperor Napoléon had not faded. The France of the restored and then the July Monarchy was a beaten France, hemmed all around by former enemies that still cowered at the thought of the revolutionary wars that Paris and her armies had brought (along with fire, requisition, and the sword) to all of Europe for a generation. Embittered former soldiers of the emperor and those who longed for the days when tribute flowed into France — instead of out of it — swept the victorious miniature second Napoloéon to power. This movement was backed not only by the old officer corps and the class of career military men created by Napoléon I, but also by the big bourgeoisie, the mighty capitalists of France.

In December of 1851, facing the end of his term limits and unable to convince the Party of Order and the French Parliament to lift them, Louis-Napoléon followed his more famous predecessor. He staged a coup.

A fanatically loyal army was all he needed. On the morning of 2 December, Louis-Napoléon deployed troops all over Paris. His opponents were arrested. On the walls of the city were plastered flyers proclaiming the Six Decrees:

In the name of the French People.

The PRESIDENT of the Republic

DECREES:

The national assembly is dissolved.

Universal suffrage is re-established.

The French people are convened in their committees.

A state of siege is declared.

The council of state is dissolved.

The ministry of the interior is charged with the execution of the present decrees.

On January 14, 1852, the Prince-President declared himself Emperor. The Second Republic was abolished and the Second Empire begun. From 1852 until 1870, the social revolution, which had broken out in 1848 and been suppressed by petit-bourgeois republicans who had, in turn, been crushed by bourgeois monarchists, was crushed under the weight of the Second Empire. Napoléon III went so far as to restructure the face of Paris. Under his direction, the Baron Haussmann tore down entire districts, plowed broad avenues through the old warren of streets, and made certain no one could barricade the center of Paris — just as they had during the fall of the July Monarchy or the June Days, again.

The Franco-Prussian War

In 1870, Germany was being unified by iron and blood under the ungentle guidance of the arch-conservative Prussian minister, Otto von Bismarck. Von Bismarck had, in his own way, helped to shackle the social revolution in Prussia by granting constitutional reforms to disarm Prussian political radicals, just as Louis-Napoléon had argued for universal suffrage merely so he could have himself voted emperor.

When Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a prince of Prussia, seemed poised to take the throne of Spain, France took action to prevent an encirclement on both borders. Although the prince’s candidacy was withdrawn, Otto von Bismarck published a doctored telegram, called the Ems Dispatch, that appeared to show a diplomatic slight between the King of Prussia and a French ambassador. Napoléon III declared war. Many in his court approved, as did the big landowners and bourgeoisie in France, hoping to restore the French Empire to its former glory. Military advisors and Napoléon III  himself believed that the southern German states would ally against Prussia to help serve as a check on their aggressive northern neighbor.

The French army left Paris on July 28, 1870, driving for the German city of Metz. Far from joining the French, the southern German states revealed secret treaties of aid to Prussia, freeing up the entire Prussian army, renowned for its bloodthirstiness and precision, to concentrate against France. After a brief campaign, Napoléon III, surrounded at the small French border-town of Sedan, surrendered to the Prussian army on  September 1, 1870.

Prussia did not accept the surrender as the end of the war. It was Bismarck’s plan to reduce France as a European power; to do so, they would accept only an unconditional surrender. At home, the Second Empire was overthrown when news reached Paris. A group of moderate Republicans, Jules Favre, Léon Gambetta, and General Louis-Jules Trochu, led a coup against Napoléon’s remaining ministries and declared themselves to constitute the Government of National Defense.

The Socialists of Paris

Commune member and National Guard general Antoine Brunel said that the revolution that began on March 18, 1871 was “provoked by patriotic sentiment,” and he was right. For Benoît Malon, member of the Commune and the International Workingman’s Association, the Commune was essentially a socialist undertaking, and he too was right. Gaston Da Costa, a follower of the great revolutionary conspirator Louis-Auguste Blanqui and deputy procurator of the Commune, saw the Commune as a continuation of the Jacobin tradition of the first great French Revolution, and he too was right. The journalist and poet Maxime Vermersch saw in the flames set by the dying Commune a foretaste of the purifying revolution that was still to come, and he also was right. Massenet de Marancour, leader of a National Guard battalion and participant in the Commune’s battles, saw the entire event as the working class falling into a trap set by the bourgeoisie so the latter could have done with any threat to their rule, and he was right as well.

Communards, The story of the Paris Commune of 1871, As told by those who fought for it, Mitchell Abidor Ed., Marxists Internet Archive (2010)

At the time of Napoléon III’s defeat, Paris had many currents of radicalism and socialism within her walls. At the extreme right were the bourgeois republicans who wanted to see the end of the Empire but who demanded protection for private property, safety from the “mob,” and suppression of everyone to their left.

The socialists, of every stripe, advocated for what had come to be known as the “social revolution.” Everywhere in Europe, the questions of the future had been divided, cut in two. There was the “political question” — republic or monarchy — but there was also the “social question” — property or equality. Since the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789, every power in Europe had colluded to prevent the working people from answering the social question. Republicans, monarchists, parliamentarians; all were horrified by the specter then haunting Europe, the specter of Gracchus Babeuf and the sans-culottes of Paris, the specter of Communism.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon, although dead by 1865, lived and worked in Paris and left his legacy there. There were many Proudhonists among the Commune. There were also Jacobins and Babeufists, the heirs of Robespierre and Gracchus Babeuf, two towering figures of the French Revolution. Also among these socialists were the followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui. Although Marx called them “pure revolutionists,” for they followed Blanqui’s theories of the conspiratorial overthrow of the capitalist state, most had no social or economic solutions which would follow such an overthrow. Ideologically, most of the socialists within the Commune were unformed — they had no distinct comprehension of how they were to set about achieving socialism — what economic measures they should take. Their ultimate creation, the Commune, serves as the Marxist model for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The two strongest streams of  socialism, then, were the anarchism of Proudhon (which had been criticized thoroughly by Marx) and the vulgar putschism of the Blanquists. Yet, many of the members of the Commune’s governing bodies were also members of the International Workingmen’s Association — the party to which Marx and Engels belonged, and that would be involved in the Haymarket Massacre in 1886.

The average Communard was the average Parisian: young, between twenty-one and forty years of age. They included artisans and craftsmen. They were skilled and semi-skilled workers. Shoemakers, printers, small-scale artisans, construction workers, day laborers, domestic servants, shopkeepers, clerks, and men in the so-called liberal professions. The women of the Commune came from the world of women’s work, the textile and clothing trades, and prostitutes.

Of the 733 people participating in political clubs, 115 were women (15 percent), and 198 held a position within the Commune (27 percent). These were socialists without a precise program, or rather with many programs that had yet to be tested. Adolphe Thiers’ armies would start the fires used to test them; the Commune would finish them.

The Government of National Defense

On the morning of September 4,  1870, all of Paris poured into the Palais Bourbon. Debate was raging within. Jules Favre had proclaimed the end of the empire, and Adolphe Thiers, the most perfect servant of the murderous capitalists, called for the nomination of a provisional government of national defense. The crowd and the partisans, which included both the bourgeois republicans and some radical elements, moved to the Hôtel de Ville. There, they found a gathering of the most prominent socialists and quarante-huitards (Forty-Eighters), veterans of the failed 1848 revolution.

The Prussians wanted not only the official surrender of a government they could trust, but also the transfer of now-occupied Alsace-Lorraine. Louis-Napoléon was sent packing to Great Britain. The partisan Government of National Defense sued for “peace with honor,” but refused to accept a loss of territory. The Prussian army advanced into France and, unopposed, marched all the way to Paris.

This new government was aggressively conservative. They made it clear that they were committed to “God, Family, and Property.” Paris took on a festive air, all its residents confident they would be able to resist the Prussians, just as their ancestors had resisted the Austrians during the first Revolution of 1789. At the same time, the wealthiest residents of Paris fled the city. 

The socialists mobilized at the same time. The Arrondissements, the districts of the city of Paris, each created a local “vigilance committee,” composed of coalitions of radicals, which set out to organize the defense of the city. On 15 September, the committees published a red poster demanding elections for the municipal government. They formed a single Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements and signed the red poster. They demanded popular control over defense, the food supply, housing, and the universal armament of the Parisians. The word “Commune” was heard on the streets, referring back to the old Insurrectionary Commune of the Revolution. The Prussian armies surrounded Paris and took its forts, even as the Government of National Defense and France’s wealthy capitalists took flight. 

The first siege of Paris began on 19 September. The Prussian army ringed the city around, occupied its outlying forts, and encamped in the palace at Versailles. The Parisians treated it lightly until they heard, at the end of October, that the last hope of relief was gone: the French army under siege at Metz inexplicably surrendered to the Prussians. On October 31, this boiled into rage against the Government of National Defense. Angry workers attacked the Hôtel de Ville and, led by Blanquists, stormed it. Militants announced a new government but, once the crowd dispersed, the Government of National Defense swept in and arrested most of the leading socialist partisans.

By December, people were “talking only of what they eat, when they can eat, and what there is to eat…. Hunger begins and famine is on the horizon,” according to the journal of Edmond de Goncourt. Signs were hung advertising “canine and feline butchers.” Calls for the Commune grew louder, and twice more, the Vigilance Committees put up red flyers announcing that the hour had come for Paris to govern herself.

During the siege, the Vigilance Committees did what there was to be done to help distribute the little resources they had. The Government of National Defense suspended rent payments and debt repayments. The National Guard swelled to 400,000 strong and its petit-bourgeois, shopkeeper character was completely overwhelmed by radicals, socialists, and workers who joined either for ideological reasons or because the Guard continued to pay a stipend, even while the city was starving.

On January 28, 1871, the Government of National Defense agreed to the first preliminary armistice with the Prussians, ending the siege of Paris and permitting food to re-enter the capital. Two days later, the government signed the surrender at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. France would have to pay an enormous war indemnity and cede the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the Prussians. The government scheduled new elections almost immediately, despite the outcry that this would favor monarchists and conservatives. True to the fear, the monarchists dominated the National Assembly, which removed to Bordeaux rather than its ancient seat of Paris. Adolphe Thiers, an avowed restorationist, was elected head of the executive authority of the republic. Thiers and the other reactionary capitalists had been long suspected during the war of favoring a slow strategy of attrition so the Prussians would bleed out the radicals in Paris. Many had heard the wealthy muttering “Better Bismarck than Blanqui.”

Although the armistice had disarmed the remnants of the French armies, the National Guard were permitted to keep their weapons and, above all, their cannons. Some of the guard units had paid for those guns themselves. Thiers and the new government were wary of the National Guard, and feared that they would side with the radicals — which they would, because they had been thoroughly infiltrated.

On March 7, the National Assembly ended the moratorium on debts and rent, declaring repayment due immediately on penalty of eviction from rented rooms. They also ended the daily stipend of 1.50 francs for national guardsmen, leaving tens of thousands of families without enough money to buy food or fuel. Adolphe Thiers and the National Assembly moved the seat of government from Paris to Versailles and issued their orders from the safety of the old royal palace.

On March 17, Thiers decided to be done with his enemies in Paris, the militant socialists and republicans. On 18 March, the Versailles government sent army troops to take the cannons from the National Guard of Paris. The guns had been moved to Montmartre and Belleville, where they could command a range of fire over the city. He said, “Businessmen were going around constantly repeating that the financial operations would never be started until all those wretches were finished off and their cannons taken away. An end had to be put to all this, and then one could get back to business.”

At Montmartre, the 171 cannons were ranked up into two rows on the heights and also on a plateau further down. At 4:30 a.m., March 18, troops began to enter Montmartre. A column of 4,000 men under the command of General Bernard de Susbielle began marching to place Pigalle at the foot of the great hill. As women in these neighborhoods woke to buy bread first thing in the morning, they found themselves facing the French army.

The residents of Montmartre mounted the steeples of their churches and sounded the tocsin bells, which had been the call of the insurrectionary Commune going back to the first Revolution of 1789. The National Guard answered. The civil war had begun.

The Civil War in France

Although the troops from Versailles had arrived to secure the cannon in Montmartre, they had failed to bring horses with them, and so the guns remained immobile. When horses finally came, they started to limber the cannon and move them down from the hilltop. But the women who had been out that morning had wakened their families, and Louise Michel, the so-called “Red Virgin,” the fighter for socialism, had donned her National Guard uniform and run out to assist. The crowd threw bottles and rocks at the regular soldiers. One observer saw “women and children swarming up the hillside in a compact mass; the artillerymen tried in vain to fight their way through the crowd, but the waves of people engulfed everything, surging over the cannon-mounts, over the ammunition wagons, under the wheels, under the horses’ feet, paralyzing the advance of the riders who spurred on their mounts in vain. The horses reared and lunged forward, their sudden movement clearing the crowd, but the space was filled at once by a backwash created by the surging multitude.” A national guardsman shouted, “Cut the traces!” Men and women drew their knives and cut the harnesses that tied the cannon to the horses. To cries of encouragement, the artillerymen left the guns and joined the crowd in eating meat, rolls, and wine. On the other side of the hill, troops refused to fire on a national guard platoon. The national guard began building a barricade. The troops withdrew. 

On Montmartre itself, General Lecomte stepped forward to get the guns moving again. He ordered his men to fire into the crowds. They did not move. He ordered again, and still the men did not fire. He ordered a third time. A woman shouted back, “Will you fire on us? On your brothers? On our husbands?  On our children?” Lecomte threatened to shoot any man who refused to fire and asked if his men “were going to surrender to that scum?” Louise Michel later wrote that a noncommissioned officer left ranks, “placed himself before his company and yelled, louder than Lecomte, ‘Turn up your rifle butts!’ The soldiers obeyed… [T]he Revolution was made.”

All of the columns were engaged in similar scenes, though the troops on rue Lepic had been beaten off by gunfire. National guardsmen took Lecomte and a few other officers prisoner.

Mayor Clemenceau, a petit-bourgeois politician and mayor of the 18th Arrondissement, which contained Montmartre, went down to broker the general’s release. At the same time, national guardsmen arrived with another prisoner: General Clément Thomas, the butcher of ‘48, who had slaughtered so many working people during the June Days. The crowd pulled Thomas and Lecomte into a garden and shot them both.

Adolphe Thiers ordered the troops out of the city to regroup at Versailles and ordered the evacuation from the forts of Mont-Valérien, Issy, Vanves, and Montrouge. He quickly realized that abandoning Mont-Valérien was a mistake, and his troops beat off a halfhearted assault by the National Guard to retake it.

The communist Rigault took command of the police. He ordered the release of political prisoners. The Blanquists demanded the National Guard follow Thiers’ retreating army to Versailles and destroy the Versailles government, but the Central Committee of the National Guard (which had been reorganized along democratic lines) demurred. The Jacobins and members of the International agreed; they would try to resolve the crisis by peace.

On 19 March, Émile Duval warned the Central Committee that conservative elements in the wealthy First and Second Arrondissements were on the move. They had summoned their conservative, bourgeois National Guard units to Versailles. Members of the committee protested that they did not have the popular mandate to defend Paris and refused to take authority over the revolution. They only went so far as to order detachments of guardsmen to key points in the city such as the Bank of Paris and the Tuileries. The committee then determined to hold elections.

They sent out a list of demands to the National Assembly in Versailles insisting that Paris be granted the right to elect its own mayors, that the prefecture of police be abolished, that the regular army be kept outside of Paris, that the National Guard be allowed to elect its officers, that the moratorium on rents be resumed, and that the National Assembly proclaim the republic. They declared that since 18 March, Paris “has no other government than that of the people and this is the best one. Paris is free. Centralized authority no longer exists.” But the mayors of the arrondissements refused to meet with the central committee, as did the deputies of Paris in the National Assembly.

The conservative and monarchist National Assembly met in a secret session on 22 March. They determined that no concessions would be made. “The criminals who now dominate Paris have attacked Paris: now they attack society itself.” Thiers explained that they should give the Commune time to establish itself while they built up an army so they could make the bloody execution of the Commune’s members appear legitimate. Thiers relished the thought of civil war. It was understood by Thiers and others in the Assembly that this was a class war.

On March 23, the Paris branch of the International proclaimed, “The independence of the Commune will mean a freely discussed contract which will put an end to class conflict and bring about social equality.” The supporters of the Commune were now being called Communards, and the specter of Communism clearly animated the Versailles government, which was terrified that the Commune would redivide property. Protestant minister Élie Reclus said, “Lazare, always starving, is no longer content with the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich, and now he has dared ask for his part of the feast.”

The city held municipal elections on 26 March to elect a central council of the Commune. Most of the delegates were Jacobins, Blanquists, and members of the International — the wealthiest residents had already fled the city.

The Commune needed money. It needed to pay the national guardsmen their 1.50 francs a day and to pay its municipal employees their workman’s wage. Arguments broke out in the provisional authority over where the money was to be gotten. Some demanded the remaining gold reserves left during the siege be taken from the Bank of France. However, the delegate for finance, François Jourde, instead arranged a loan of 700,000 francs and credit for 16 million francs more — nothing compared to the 258-million-franc credit received by Versailles.

The Commune Council met 57 times during the life of the Commune. It established executive commissions, each run by a delegate. These commissions convened twice daily at the Hôtel de Ville, but the meetings ran long, were increasingly contentious, and wasted much time discussing issues of no importance. Some members were swept away in the ceremony of their new authority. Most of the servants of the Commune had no experience in government.

On 10 May, the newly constituted German Empire and Thiers’ treasonous Versailles government signed the Treaty of Frankfurt, formalizing the capitulation of France. Immediately, Bismarck released captured French soldiers to Versailles, swelling the size of the counterrevolutionary army.

The forces of the Commune were led by their delegate for war, Gustave Cluseret, a Paris-born graduate of the elite military school of St. Cyr. He had been wounded in Algeria in the colonial venture of the very last Bourbon king and had fought as a commander of the Guarde Mobile to put down the June Days in 1848. He had gone to the United States to fight for the Union Army in the American Civil War and become an American citizen. He returned to France in 1867 committed firmly to social revolution and was jailed in 1868 for writing revolutionary articles.

He believed that if he could hold off Thiers and his minions, the Commune would be able to reach a negotiated settlement with Versailles. But the National Guard resisted Cluseret’s attempts to make it into a regular army. The democratic councils within the Guard sent out their own commands and ignored Cluseret.

The first fighting began on March 30, 1871, two days after the Commune was officially proclaimed. A patrol of the Versailles army came upon a Communard perimeter post. The troops hesitated to fire. General Gaston Gallifet ordered the artillery to fire and threatened them with a pistol. He then charged forward and took prisoners as the Communards fled. This was the first time the army had obeyed orders to attack their fellow Parisians and Frenchmen. It would not be the last.

On April 2, a skirmish broke out at Courbevoie. A military surgeon general called Pasquier approached the Communard lines to negotiate, but his uniform resembled that of a gendarme colonel. The Communards shot him, and a firefight saw the Communards beaten. Thirty or so Communards were taken prisoner, but General Vinoy ordered that all soldiers, men from the Guarde Mobile, and sailors who were taken prisoner were to be shot. There would be no quarter and no prisoners. Any citizens of Paris taken under arms would be summarily executed as traitors.

In response to the losses at Courbevoie and the massacre of the Communards there, the Commune assembled some 20,000 men and, in the early morning of 3 April, they marched out of Paris towards Versailles. The cannons of the national government began to shell them immediately from Mont-Valérien. The columns straggled. They failed to coordinate. Some of the National Guard seemed to be barely paying attention as the troops from Versailles closed on their positions.

In fact, many of the guardsmen assumed that the line troops would not fire on them and would turn their rifles around, butt up, like they had done on Montmartre. They did not. Two Communard generals, Émile Duval and Gustave Flourens, important and energetic men within the Commune, were taken captive. Flourens was hacked to death on the banks of the Seine by a gendarme. Duval and his chief of staff were shot.

This disorganization and hesitance would typify every military action taken by the Commune. By the time it was determined to act, it was already too late.

The Red Flag

The Commune banned the death penalty, though Thiers had no such scruples. On April 7 at the place Voltaire, below the prison of La Roquette, the national guardsmen burned a symbolic guillotine.

On April 16 the Commune ordered a survey of abandoned workshops. They expropriated these and turned them into workers’ cooperatives. A cooperative iron foundry was started in Grenelle employing 250 workers and producing shells for the city’s defense. Night baking was abolished on 20 April. Maximum salaries for municipal employees were set at 6,000 francs a year. Employers were barred from assessing fines from workers’ wages. Labor exchanges were established.

“The social revolution will not be operative until women are equal to men. Until then, you have only the appearance of revolution,” proclaimed Citoyenne Destrée. Louise Michel said, “[A woman] bends under mortification; in her home her burdens crush her. Man wants to keep her that way, to be sure that she will never encroach upon his function or his titles. Gentlemen, we do not want either your functions or your titles.” Proletarian women were (and are) doubly exploited — by gendered labor and by their employers. Bosses are the “social wound that must be taken care of.” 

Élisabeth Dmitrieff, née Elisavieta Koucheleva, was actually dispatched to the Commune by Marx himself to act as an observer there. She became intimately involved in calling for the creation of workshops for unemployed women, for equal salaries for male and female workers, and for a reduction in overall work hours within the Commune. She founded the Union des Femmes alongside four other women and took a position as its general secretary.

The Commune held up a revolutionary morality — a high standard of honesty and accountability. The Commune rejected high salaries for officials. Public servants in appearance and rhetoric were to be public servants in fact. Marx covered the public aspects of the Commune and its political organization in detail.

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class…. The police, which until then had been the instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves…. Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the instruments of physical force of the old government, the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of spiritual suppression, the power of the priests…. The judicial functionaries lost that sham independence… they were thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and revocable.

Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, pp. 217-21 (1973)

To illuminate what this meant, Lenin compared the governance of the Commune to the modern parliamentary “democracies.” The bankrupt nature of “representative” government in, for instance, the U.S. Empire is made clear by the comparison to the truly representative government of the Commune.

The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into “working” bodies…. [T]his is a blow straight from the shoulder at the present-day parliamentarian country, from America to Switzerland, from France to Britain, Norway and so forth — in these countries the real business of “state” is performed behind the scenes and is carried on by the departments, chancelleries, and General Staffs. Parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the “common people.”

V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1918)

Counterrevolution: The Bloody Week

On April 2, the second siege of Paris began; Versaille ordered the armies of counterrevolution to begin shelling Paris. By 21 May, Versailles had indiscriminately killed hundreds and possibly thousands of Parisians and destroyed hundreds of buildings in the western and central districts. The British resident John Leighton said that Versailles was “not content with” battering forts and ramparts killing Communard soldiers but also targeted “women and children, ordinary passers-by [including] unfortunates who were necessarily obliged to venture into the neighbouring streets, for the purpose of buying bread.” U.S. diplomat Wickham Hoffman agreed: “It must always be a mystery why the French bombarded so persistently the quarter of the Arch de Triomphe — the West End of Paris — the quarter where nine out of ten of the inhabitants were known friends of the Government.”

This was worse by far than the Prussian siege. Versailles bombed medical facilities. Thiers proclaimed defense of property while the cannons of Versailles obliterated rows of houses on the Champs-Élysées.

The Commune tried to achieve a negotiated settlement with Versailles, but every attempt was rebuffed. Even as late as 21 April, the Freemasons in the city sent a delegation, but Thiers sent them away with the dismissive (and telling) remark that “A few buildings will be damaged, a few people killed, but the law will prevail.”

On April 28, with the Versailles cannon pounding the city continuously and threatening to reduce its fortifications, the Commune floated a plan for a five-member Committee of Public Safety. On May 1, the Commune approved the creation of the committee by a vote of 34-28. The Committee was a self-conscious echo of the 1793 Committee of Public Safety. It immediately called up General Gustave Cluseret, and, blaming him for transforming the National Guard into an effective army, he was accused of treason and incarcerated in the Conciergerie.

One by one, the forts of Paris fell to the army of Versailles. The National Guard showed up in fewer and fewer numbers to their musters. On May 9, only 7,000 guardsmen arrived to a call that was meant to call up 12,000. On May 12, Jenny Marx, who was in Paris, told her father that the Paris Commune would be destroyed. “We are on the verge of a second June massacre.”

Spies and counterrevolutionaries in the employ of Thiers brought him information about the state of affairs in the city. He spoke menacingly of his obligation to order “dreadful measures” to destroy the Communards. He bribed guardsmen away and operated a secretive military organization within the walls.

On May 15, the leaders of the Commune saw that the end was coming. They knew they could not defend the city. Instead, the Commune determined to deny the old order of the city, to destroy the symbols of despotism and class-rule throughout the city. They fired Adolphe Thiers’ house first. They destroyed the Vendôme Column, the symbol of Napoléon’s empire, on May 16. 

On May 21, a counterrevolutionary in the city realized the Point-du-Jour was undefended and Porte Saint-Cloud was unmanned. He waved a white flag from the ramparts and Thiers’ killers entered the city. Within the hour, line troops under General Félix Douay had entered the capital. Porte Saint-Cloud and Porte d’Auteuil fell without resistance. The defenders began to build their last barricades within the city, each National Guard unit taking responsibility for its own defense and refusing to follow central orders.

Versailles moved slowly, executing everyone under arms they found. They swept the streets for traps, mines, and ambuscades. They poured fire into any house they believed held Communards. Fifty thousand line troops were soon in Paris and, within seventeen hours, 130,000 of Versailles soldiers, along with heavy artillery, had entered the city. They moved easily along the great boulevards. No Communard cannons concentrated on them — they were too uncoordinated. In twenty-four hours, Versailles had taken one-third of Paris from the Commune. Everyone they captured, they gunned down.

A woman ran into a building carrying a red flag. She was found in her attic with crates of weapons. The troops of Versailles hauled her down the stairs, but shot her before they reached the bottom.

The barricades were not enough. That Monday, on the rue Montmartre, a retreating Communard soldier screamed in tears, “Betrayed! Betrayed! They came in where we did not expect them!” At the place d’Italie, national guardsmen secretly tossed away their rifles, muttering, “It is the end!”

Vainly, at this late hour, the Commune proclaimed the levée en masse, the universal armament of the inhabitants of Paris. The American, W. Pembroke Fetridge, watched about thirty women demand a mitrailleuse machine gun to protect their barricade defending the Place du Palais-Royal. “They all wore a band of crepe round the left arm; each one had lost a husband, a lover, a son, or a brother whom she had sworn to avenge. Horses being at this time scarce in the service of the Commune, they harnessed themselves and dragged [the mitrailleuse] off, fastening their skirts round their waists lest they should prove an impediment to their march. Others followed, bearing the caissons filled with munitions. The last carried the flag.”

On Tuesday, the Commune issued an order stating, “Blow up or set fire to the houses which may interfere with your system of defense. The barricades should not be liable to attack from the houses.” The Commune ordered the burning of any house from which Versailles fired shots.

The Palace of the Conseil d’État was burned to deny it to the enemy. The Committee of Public Safety ordered the destruction of the Palais-Royal. The Ministry of Finance was torched. The Naval Ministry went up; the Hôtel de Ville was ordered destroyed. The Commune had become the scene of intense despair. Better to burn down the city than to give it to the enemy. Louise Michel warned, “Paris will be ours or cease to exist.” On Tuesday, May 22, the Communard general Jean Bergeret ordered the Tuileries Palace to be consigned to the fire. Two days later, a Montmartre woman asked what was burning; the Communard replied, “It’s nothing at all,” only the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, “because we do not want a king any more.”

Communards were executed regardless of their resistance now. On the rue Saint-Honoré, line troops found thirty national guardsmen in a printing shop with no weapons. They took them to the rue Saint-Florentin and shot them in the enormous ditch in front of the remains of the barricade. Nearby, on the rue Royal, troops found six men and a young woman hiding in barrels. They were thrown in a ditch and killed. When line troops reached the place, Vendôme, Versailles shot thirty Communards.

At the Church of the Madeleine, Versailles used a mitrailleuse to execute 300 Communards. On May 23, an officer ordered a soldier who refused to shoot women and children shot. Not far away from there, troops killed a man who had done nothing, then shot his wife and child when they hugged him too long and then shot a passing doctor who tried to help the child.

By Friday, the line soldiers were lying to national guards on the barricades, telling them to come down and all would be well. They were taken aside and shot. Victims were taken to basements or attics to be executed. Police detachments hunted for suspected Communards. On Saturday evening, the Versailles troops blew up the gates at Père Lachaise and stormed in. Hundreds of Communards fell in the rows in hand-to-hand bayonet combat amid the tombs. Hundreds of guardsmen were lined up in rows along a wall and machine-gunned. Clemenceau would later recall that the machine guns were firing for thirty minutes without pause. On Sunday, groups of 150, 200, and even 300 were brought continuously to the cemetery where they were machine-gunned by the troops of Adolphe Thiers.

Pierre Vésinier, a journalist and member of the Commune, wrote that thousands of bodies “strewed the avenues and tombs. Many were murdered in the graves where they had sought shelter, and dyed the coffins with their blood…. [T]errible fusillades, frightful platoon fires, intermingled with the crackling noise of mitrailleuses, plainly told of the wholesale massacre…. Property, religion, and society were once more saved.”

Sunday, May 28, 1871, marked the end of the Commune. Executions continued until the end of July.

Lessons from the Paris Commune

“Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”

(emphasis added.) Friedrich Engels, On Authority (1874)

“[T]wo mistakes destroyed the fruits of the splendid victory. The proletariat stopped half-way: instead of setting about “expropriating the expropriators,” it allowed itself to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task; such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over, and Proudhonist theories about a “just exchange,” etc., still prevailed among the socialists. The second mistake was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.

But despite all its mistakes the Commune was a superb example of the great proletarian movement of the nineteenth century…. The Commune taught the European proletariat to pose concretely the tasks of the socialist revolution.

The lesson learnt by the proletariat will not be forgotten.”

V.I. Lenin, Lessons of the Commune (1908)

The Commune has taught us the form and has played a historical role as the forerunner to the new society yet to come. It has taught us, too, that we cannot be lax in the prosecution of the social revolution. We cannot forget what our enemies will do to us if they should get the chance. Behind every smiling politician lurks the face of Adolphe Thiers, and behind every executive order is the Party of Order, waiting to strangle the revolution in its infancy.

Men and women died to teach us these lessons; they have died so that the revolution, the same revolution, their revolution and ours, may live.

The place was Chicago, the year 1886, and the ground fertile with revolution. With the Union’s victory in the U.S. Civil War — and the triumph of waged over enslaved labor, of capitalist industrial over slavery-based production — the development of capitalism in the U.S. Empire, long impeded by the backwardness of the Southern plantation economy, at last accelerated toward maturity. The country’s industrial output exploded, and its industrial proletarian workforce, swelled by Black freed persons and waves of migration and settlement from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, dramatically expanded. As U.S. capitalism matured, so did the proletariat mature as a class.

Chicago was then the central hub of the country’s transcontinental railway network. It connected the old U.S. colonial metropoles of the northeast Atlantic coast — New York, Boston, etc. — to the developing settler colonies along the Pacific.

The city had also earned a reputation as America’s larder, thanks to its massive slaughtering yards and meat industry. The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co. was founded by a number of railway firms in 1865. By the 1880s, the Union Yard spread over 375 acres and housed 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle, and 22,000 sheep at any given time. Each year, the Yards slaughtered somewhere on the order of 2 million animals. The horrible noise and the even worse stench were internationally infamous. This abattoir of animal (and, through overwork, exhaustion, and accident, human) flesh was famously cataloged by the socialist journalist and author Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel The Jungle. By the end of the 1860s, the huge meatpacking firms in Chicago had perfected an ice-cooled refrigerator car, designed to transport meat by railway across the country without ruining it.

As the railyards and the stockyards consolidated, Chicago’s burgeoning industrialists were stricken with an unquenchable thirst for cheap labor. In 1880, the U.S. population was 50 million. Between 1880 and 1920, over 20 million Southern, Eastern, and Central European migrants entered the U.S., with smaller numbers arriving from Mexico, China and other east Asian countries, and the Ottoman Empire. In the 1870s alone, 60,000 Europeans flooded into Chicago, reaching a total of 204,859 by 1880. At that point, they were 56% of the workforce. By far, the largest number, 163,482 workers, came from the German Empire. The overwhelming majority of these immigrants lacked any property aside from their personal effects, and came to the U.S. as laborers. In the 1880’s, 40.5% of all residents in Cook County were migrants, and the majority were either first- or second-generation citizens. Well supplied by waves of poor freed persons and migrants, propertyless and desperate for work, and ripe for conversion into an industrial army of proletarians, the capitalists drank, and drank deep.

During the 1880–90 decade, Chicago doubled in size. Large factory complexes cleared land near the stockyards. The coal operators had established their own “company towns” or “planned communities.” Advertised as philanthropic ventures, a sort of “caring capitalism” in which the workers would be well-looked after by their bosses, these were instead planned towns centered on a company-owned mines, to which workers were lured, debt-trapped by a combination of low wages and artificially high costs of living, and effectively imprisoned in an endless cycle of indentured servitude. The Pullman Company, which owned the captive town of Pullman (just outside of Chicago, the rail hub of the Empire) to house the workers who made the Pullman railway cars, would, less than a decade later, cut the low wages of its workers to near-starvation levels. This triggered the infamous Pullman Rail Strike, during which striking workers brought the U.S. Empire’s railways to a halt from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Coal Wars were on the horizon.

Socialists and the Working-Class Movement

We find ourselves at the end of the “long 19th Century,” nine years after the revolutionary upsurge and Great Rail Strike that led to the formation and brutal repression of the proletarian St. Louis Commune. The Long Depression of 1873–1896 was in full swing. The period began with the “Panic of 1873,” which saw the collapse and ruin of one of the U.S. Empire’s largest banks, Jay Cooke and Co., a giant that had financed the Union during the Civil War and the Northern Pacific Railway thereafter, and the shut-down of the New York Stock Exchange for ten days. In the midst of the depression, socialist and anarchist labor agitators had found wide, sympathetic audiences among the increasingly impoverished, still-young U.S. proletariat, and labor mobilization across the country had reached a fever-pitch. Hymns for the martyrs of the defeated Paris and St. Louis Communes, the thousands of socialist workers mass-murdered by reactionary forces, were sung by demonstrators throughout the country. The clarions of socialism and political liberty had issued their call, and the people — the working-poor and oppressed — were answering in the millions.

This labor agitation came, however, with a patina of white-settler chauvinism. For instance, the 1877 “Great Uprising” in San Francisco, led by the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which nearly overturned the government in that city, was at the same time virulently Sinophobic — violently hostile to recent Chinese migrants. The young, immature socialist movement in the U.S. would eventually fail to overcome the racist tendencies that predominated within it, and would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The St. Louis Commune itself had collapsed largely because the white socialists actively chose racist discrimination against their Black fellow workers over solidarity and a fighting alliance against the capitalists.

The Militants of Chicago

Socialist and anarchist veterans of the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the St. Louis Commune moved to Chicago and, along with the existing socialists of the city, opened the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language radical newspaper. Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons’ husband, founded The Alarm in Chicago at around the same time. The Knights of Labor, a non-socialist and fundamentally capitalist-reactionary organization, began agitating in the city in the 1880s as well. Chicago was the industrial heart of the U.S. state, and socialists of all stripes were seeded among its workers and rising from their ranks.

A battle raged inside the U.S. socialist movement, and raged with particular intensity in Chicago, over whether or not the proletariat should organize itself into militias, over whether or not it should be armed. They had all watched in 1871 as the Paris Commune was destroyed. Albert Parsons threatened that “if people try to break up our meetings… they will meet foes worthy of their steel.”

One of those militants was August Vincent Theodore Spies. August left his home of Landeck, Germany in 1872. By the time he landed in New York he was well-read in German history — particularly what he saw as the social heroes of the Protestant Reformation, like Thomas Muntzer. Like many other German immigrants, Spies gravitated toward the capital of Teutonic life in the U.S.: Chicago. He settled in the North Side and began work as an upholsterer. By the end of 1875, when the city’s small band of predominantly German socialists began organizing massive parades demanding bread and work, August had been introduced to the writings of Karl Marx.

He watched as the city’s businessmen formed a militia to defend their stores from the socialist marchers of ‘75. By 1877, the year of the Great Rail Strike, Spies was an avowed Marxist. He met Albert Parsons and the two worked together as union organizers and socialist agitators. When the Rail Strike broke out, it spread to Chicago. On July 25, 1877, strikers gathered to hold meetings; they were attacked by patrolmen. That night, a Burlington switchman was shot dead by the police for the crime of being a striking worker. On July 26, the following day, blue-coated police shot into a crowd of protestors at the viaduct where Halstead Street crossed 16th Street.

The police marched up Halsted Street to the Vorwärts Turner Hall at 12th Street. Inside, the members of a cabinetmaker’s association were discussing the eight-hour-day question with their employers in German. Officers burst through the doors, clambered into the meeting hall, and clubbed cabinetmakers without mercy. Charles Tessman, a twenty-eight-year-old union cabinetmaker, was shot through the brain. Outside, a Chicago police sergeant fired his pistol at bystanders while his men beat cabinetmakers fleeing the hall in terror.

Having witnessed the “Battle of the Viaduct,” many German workers joined the Lehr und Wehr Verein (“Education and Defense Society”), an armed organization of workingmen dedicated to community defense. August Spies was among them. From then on, he adhered absolutely to Marx’s dictum that the proletariat must at all times be prepared for armed conflict with the enemy state and its apparatus of oppression.

In 1881, the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld a state law banning the Lehr und Wehr Verein and all other proletarian militias. Parsons and Spies watched as the businessmen’s First Regiment continued to arm itself in public and conduct drills, but the workers’ self-defense groups were banned. The Bill of Rights, Parsons argued, did not protect the socialist; it protected only their sworn enemies. (It is this case, by the by, Presser v. Illinois, in which Herman Presser was fined $10 for belonging to the Lehr und Wehr Verein, which formed the legal basis for all U.S. gun control until it was finally overruled in 2010. A century later, during the 1960’s and 70’s, the Illinois court’s ruling would serve as the legal grounds for the State of California, headed by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, to disarm another Communist organization: the Black Panther Party.)

The militants within the Socialist Labor Party took control of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language socialist newspaper with a wide circulation among the organized workers, and hired August Spies as its editor. The militants held a conference in Chicago in 1881 and, tired of tepid trade-unionist reformism and its transitory, merely “paper”  victories, staged a split within the SLP. The splitting faction called their new organization the Revolutionary Socialist Labor Party. Its founding principles urged the formation of communistic trade unions that would forsake the ballot and take up arms. It proclaimed it would lead “armed organizations of workingmen who stand ready with the gun to resist encroachment upon their rights.”

Fight for the Eight-Hour Day

In 1886, most U.S. laborers worked 60–70 hours per week. Ten hours a day was the industry standard — and the capitalists wouldn’t accept a minute less from their workers. Indeed, some firms forced their workers to maintain the grueling pace of 12- or 14-hour days for six days a week. The rallying cry of the U.S. socialist movement was the reduction of the working day to 8 hours, the working week to 40 hours, but with the same, 10-hour pay. The Eight Hour League had begun the long and bloody campaign to realize this demand in the 1860s, but had failed to secure real reforms. Although the State of Illinois passed an eight-hour law under pressure from organized labor and socialist organizations in 1866, which went into effect on May 1, 1867, the employers categorically refused to honor it, and the State refused to enforce it. The capitalists claimed this infringed on their “freedom of contract,” and demanded the right to “freely contract” for longer hours. Through this “freedom of contract” “loophole,” the capitalist courts saw to it that the law was reduced to a mere cipher. No firm would hire those who refused the longer hours, and the workers were forced to accept employment on the capitalists’ terms. The reforms therefore represented only a paper victory for organized labor, and an inconvenience for the capitalists that was overcome with the stroke of a pen.

Chicago, the heart of the labor movement at that time, erupted into spontaneous marches and protests. The capitalists deployed the police to club them into submission. The eight-hour movement was devastated.

In October of 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, led by Marxists and other revolutionary socialists, set May 1, 1886, as the day by which the eight-hour work day would become the standard — whether the bosses agreed or not. This time, things would be done correctly; the victory would come not from a capitalist-owned state government, but from the organized workers themselves. All across the U.S., marches would be coordinated; there would be no spontaneous protests exposed to the batons of the urban cohorts of the capitalist police and National Guard. The U.S. labor unions began to prepare. The Arbeiter-Zeitung demanded the eight-hour day. “Eight hours work, eight hours rest, eight hours for what we will,” was the call.

Strike!

On Saturday, May 1, 1886, nearly half a million workers across the U.S. went on strike. They called it “Emancipation Day.” In Chicago herself, it was estimated that 40,000 workers left their workplaces to march, and twice as many people took to the streets to join them. The city was quiescent. Her vast skyline of smokestacks was nearly still. Factory power plants were silent, the coal slumbering peacefully in its stalls or barrels. Steamships rode at anchor, unable to take on supplies.

The workers were on strike — and not only in Chicago. All over the country, workers marched in solidarity. In New York City, they were on strike. In Detroit and in Milwaukee, they were on strike. The machines stopped whirring. The looms waited. In factories and plants all over the republic, the productive forces of Capital were frozen. The spindles and lathes, scythes and scissors, hammers and presses, that day-in and day-out had produced a continuous rattle, and continuous clink of coin for their capitalist owners, and a continuous exhaustion for their worker-operators, were now gathering dust where they stood. They were wasting away, and so was the potential for profits they contained, useless without the workers to set them into motion. If you listened closely, you could just about hear the soft sizzle of money burning.

But not at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Plant in Chicago. The Reaper Works was not idle. Its 360 foot, four-story brick face was alive with motion. The nine-room woodworking department was filled with sound. The nine-thousand square-foot blacksmith shop thundered with the labor of hammers. The foundries and the engine house: thumping away at their tasks.

Cyrus McCormick, Jr., president of the McCormick Harvester Company, was not about to be cheated out of his day’s profit by any socialist balderdash. No, he would keep his factory open while all the rest were luxuriating in the cool May air. And how? Cyrus McCormick had hired scabs. This came as no surprise, since McCormick had hired Pinkerton agency mercenaries in 1885 to beat trade unionists demonstrating in Chicago’s downtown streets.

In fact, at the Reaper Works there was a labor dispute still bubbling over from earlier in the year. After locking out striking molders, plant managers had sought replacements all over the midwest and issued revolvers to 82 loyal employees. They built kitchens to serve the 400 Chicago police sent to protect strikebreakers. Cyrus McCormick was ready on May 1, because he had been fighting this battle since April. As the rest of Chicago held its breath, the armed battalions at the McCormick Harvester Company simply went about another day, prepared to see the crowds gathered by the Arbeiter-Zeitung and the discharged unionized workforce howling on the street just outside the compound.

Nevertheless, fully half of McCormick’s scabs defected to the strike, leaving their posts in the works. The strike at McCormick, begun as an isolated dispute over pay, ran right up into the general strike of Emancipation Day. As the whole city, the whole country, joined the strike, even the McCormick strikebreakers left their posts. Management, now desperate, promised an eight-hour day to the strikebreakers if they returned. They made no concessions to the locked-out strikers.

By Monday, May 3, many of Chicago’s employers, reeling from a few days’ lost profits, started to cave. The breweries agreed to employ only union members, limit Sunday work to three hours, and set five break periods each day. The pork and beef packers agreed to the demand to cut the working-day from ten to eight hours, but with the same day’s pay. 

In the morning, August Spies rushed to his printing office to put together a special strike edition of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He rushed all over the city to speak to strikers. In the early afternoon, a Czech-migrant lumber leader asked him to come down to the Southwest Side to give a speech, and the obliging Spies rushed there, too. When he got there, the crowd was large but uninterested. Just behind him and down the street stood “Fort McCormick,” the heavily armored and fortified Reaper Works. He was not there to rally the workers at McCormick’s. While he was still speaking, the bells at the works clanged, signaling the end of the strikebreakers’ workday. The McCormick strikers in the crowd wheeled away and surged toward the factory gates. Gunfire cracked and boomed from the heavily defended plant: the police had opened fire on the strikers. 200 armed officers boiled out of the Reaper Works, clubbing strikers with truncheons and shooting them at point blank range with pistols.

Spies escaped and sprinted back to the newspaper offices, where he grabbed handfuls of agitational leaflets before sprinting back into the fray. 

REVENGE! Workingmen, to Arms!!! Your masters sent out their bloodhounds — the police — they killed six of your brothers at McCormick’s this afternoon…. You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; you have endured the pangs of hunger and want; you have worked yourself to death; your children you have sacrificed to the factory lords…. [the master sends] his bloodhounds out to shoot and kill you! … If you are men, if you are the sons of grand sires who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms, we call you. To arms!

Meetings of union workers and socialists were held that night to decide a response. Rather than gather the next day on Market Street, in their usual meeting place (because, as one socialist argued, this would serve as a “mouse trap” if the police attacked), the socialists decided to gather in a larger space — Haymarket Square.

4 May: Haymarket

On May 4, the strikes redoubled. Acts of rebellion erupted across Chicago. A dozen laundry girls employed at the Clifton House Hotel informed their foreman that they’d be running things. When he refused, they quit on the spot. Young women left clothing shops for the eight hour strike; at one shop, strikers removed the belt from an engine, rendering it useless. Ships were prevented from offloading at the queues by lumber shovers who refused to work unless they got their ten-hours’ pay for eight hours of work.

In the Pullman company town, union workers elected a committee to present their demands to Mr. Pullman himself. The delegation was made up of cabinetmakers, tinners, finishers, carpenters, wood turners, car builders, wheelwrights, upholsterers, and common laborers. Pullman, of course, refused to receive the delegation. In response, at 7 p.m. that day, the strike committee met with all 3,000 Pullman employees in the company baseball park, and they voted to strike.

Employers across the city demanded their still-legal shopowners’ militias be deployed against the workers. At noon on the 4th, Colonel E. B. Knox, commander of the First Infantry, was warned of 6,000 strikers in the lumber district. Knox called up the National Guard and armed them. The mob never arrived — the scare was a capitalist fabrication.

The Arbeiter-Zeitung compositor, Adolph Fischer, added the words “Working men, arm yourselves and appear in full force,” to a leaflet calling for the Haymarket meeting, even though the socialist planning committee had not suggested that workers bring guns to the rally at Haymarket. Spies demanded Fischer redraft the leaflet for fear that the words would provoke a police attack.

The rally began in the dark. The street stank of manure and rotting vegetables. A single gaslight on a lamppost guttered over the Haymarket. August Spies began the meeting saying it should be peaceable. For twenty years, he declared, workingmen had asked in vain for two hours less work each day; they’d trusted the “democratic” process, only to be betrayed by legislator “representatives” and treated with contempt by their employers. “I see Mr. Parsons is here,” he said, as Albert made his way through the crowd. “He is a much abler speaker in your tongue than I am, therefore I will conclude by introducing him.” Parsons climbed up on the wagons near Crane’s Alley and looked out on a street that was packed with 3,000 workers.

Parsons reminded the listeners of 1877 and the words of the railroad baron Tom Scott, who said of the striking trainmen in that year: “Give them a rifle diet and see how they like that bread.” He condemned the police for the outrage at the McCormick plant.

After Parsons, Samuel Fielden addressed the crowd. He warned of danger everywhere. He brought his speech to a fiery close, invoking the workers martyred in McCormick’s massacre the day before. “Keep your eye on the law,” he cried. “Throttle it. Kill it. Stop it. Do everything you can to wound it — to impede its progress.”

A storm was blowing up. Albert Parsons suggested adjourning. Fielden said this wasn’t necessary because he was about to conclude. Parsons left anyway, and so did some in the crowd. Even Fischer departed. By 10:20 p.m. only about 500 people remained at the Haymarket. Fielden finished his speech: “The Socialists are not going to declare war; but I tell you, war has been declared upon us; and I ask you to get hold of anything that will help you resist the onslaught of the enemy.”

Murmurs rippled through the gathered workers. Through the gaslight, it was clear that there was a column of blue tunics and brass buttons making its way across the entire width of Desplaines Street toward the Haymarket. George Brown, a Yorkshire-born shoemaker, said that he saw “a great company of police with their revolvers drawn, rushing into the crowd which parted to make way for them.” The police had decided to strike.

Their captain, William Ward, stopped his men. He shouted up to Fielden, “I command you in the name of the people of the State of Illinois to immediately and peaceably disperse.”

From Fielden: “But we are peaceable.” Then, after silence, “All right, we will go.” He started to climb down from the wagon.

There was hissing in the air. A Union navy veteran recognized the thing now passing overhead. He shouted, “Look out. Boys, for God’s sake, there is a shell!” A few men looked up. An orange flash ignited overhead, and the device detonated in the street.

The police reacted, without a second thought, by unloading a hailstorm of bullets. Although officers would later testify that the crowd had thrown the bomb and opened fire on the police, Captain Ward thought the bomb came from behind police lines. Two businessmen who later testified in the criminal trials likewise swore that no one in the crowd fired.

“Goaded by madness,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, “the police were in the condition of mind that permitted no resistance, and in a measure they were as dangerous as any mob of Communists, for they were blinded by passion and unable to distinguish between peaceful citizen and Nihilist assassin.” According to witnesses, patrolmen “emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other.”

The numbers of workers and of socialist and anarchist leaders killed went uncounted. The capitalist papers didn’t care. We know that the deployed police  killed seven of their fellow officers by friendly fire. We can only guess at what these rabid dogs of the capitalists inflicted on the demonstrating workers and their socialist leaders.

The state reacted to the Haymarket massacre, committed by their own shock troops — with at least seven, according to police reports, and probably far more, workingmen slain by police bullets — by arresting the editorial staff of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and several associated socialists and anarchists. Chicago city officials were determined from the outset to hang them; they had only to convince a stacked jury. The city coroner’s inquest listed the causes of death of the officers as bomb shrapnel “aided, abetted, and encouraged” by Spies, Parsons, and Fielden. For days, detectives flushed anarchists and Marxists from cellars, conveniently “discovering” caches of weapons and dynamite as they went.

Eight men — socialist and anarchist leaders — stood accused. The trial, Illinois v. Spies et al., started on June 21, 1886, and went on until August 11. The judge was openly hostile to the defendants. No union members or anyone with socialist sympathies was permitted to be seated on the jury. The jury returned eight guilty verdicts. The judge sentenced all but one man to be hanged.

Fielden received a governor’s commutation to a life sentence. One man blew his own face off with a blasting cap in his cell, lingering on for six hours in brutal agony, rather than face the shame of a public hanging. On November 11, 1887, four defendants — Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies — were taken to the gallows. They sang the Marseillaise — a French Republican hymn. As he stood with the noose around his neck, Spies shouted, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

May Day: The International Remembrance

Solidarity with the Haymarket Massacre martyrs poured into Chicago from around the globe. In 1890, the Marxist Second International decreed May 1 “International Workers Day” in honor of the Haymarket martyrs. The 1904 sixth conference of the Second International asked all Social-Democratic parties and all labor unions in all countries to agitate for the eight-hour day on May 1. Today, International Workers Day is celebrated in some form in almost every country on earth.

Since it was established, May Day demonstrations have played a pivotal role in revolutionary history.

Bloody May 1929 marked the high point of Communist labor agitation against the corrupt bourgeois Weimar German republic. The German Communist Party, at the height of its popularity numbering over 350,000 members and millions of supporters, marched in defiance of the Social-Democratic Party government on May 1 in 1929 — and, as at Haymarket nearly fifty years before, the government unleashed its shock-troop police, and ordered them to open fire on unarmed marchers. The reformist, capitalist-captured Social-Democratic Party’s repeated betrayals of the workers caused its base of support to shrink and the socialist movement to become disorganized. The Nazi Party would soon use this instability to its own advantage. After the Nazis swept the German elections in 1933, the Social-Democrats capitulated and accepted fascist rule, leaving the Communists the country’s lone anti-fascist party.

For the international socialist movement, May Day has been a holiday held sacred since that fateful night in 1886. Recognized by all socialist states, it has been the subject of a thousand paeans and celebrations. In the Soviet Union, May Day was a celebration of the triumphs and accomplishments of workers the world over, but particularly those working toward socialist construction.

Our monopoly-capitalist rulers in the U.S. Empire and their loyal servant politicians in its appurtenant state machinery, of course, have done their best to suppress public celebrations and public awareness of the history of May Day in this country. In the U.S. Empire, labor is “celebrated” in September, not in May — an international idiosyncracy meant to keep us from getting any funny ideas about belonging to a global working-class movement! Officials in this country discourage marches, and there are no laws giving laborers the day off, either on May Day or on the U.S.-specific Labor Day in September. Why would there be? Our rulers won’t abide May Day celebrations taking off in the same country where the tradition first took hold; their aim is, and always has been, to force us back to work, from the first May Day until this one.

But the workers of the world know that May 1 is the day of labor’s emancipation. As our movement for Communism within and against the U.S. Constitutional Empire recovers from its nadir, we must all remember the socialist martyrs lost on May 1, 1886. More importantly, we must look ahead. We know, along with all the conscious workers of the world, that the victories of Capital are fleeting, while ours is the grand historical march of emancipation, the inevitable tide of total social revolution. That is what we celebrate. The sacrifices made by the brave socialist martyrs of the past, their deaths at the hands of our oppressors, are the links in the great revolutionary chain, by which we wend our way to the ultimate victory.