During the 19th and early 20th century, the majority of Marxists assumed that, alone among all social relations, the division of human beings into sex-categories was natural. It was not until Simone de Beauviour’s 1949 Le Deuxieme Sexe (“The Second Sex”) that a well fleshed-out challenge was issued to the essentially physiological definition of sex. Monique Wittig carried this further with “The Category of Sex”.¹ The question has finally, thoroughly, been answered in the firm ground of social reproduction theory, which, when properly applied, entirely eliminates the naturalism of earlier Marxists as well as the racialism and bio-essentialism of Beauviour and Wittig.

To put it simply: there is no “woman” question, there is only the question of social reproduction.

One is Not Born a Woman — Or a Man

First, we must address the science. Biological sex is not an ontological category, but rather a label assigned by a medical professional at birth based on the physical characteristics of a child’s genitals.² There is no simple sex binary. There are groups of characteristics defined as primary (genitalia and reproductive organs) and secondary (body hair and breast development, among others), but these groups are shaped not only by genetics, but also by the hormonal environment in the body. These traits all vary widely among individuals, even with the same “chromosomal” sex. It is common for individuals to have atypical combinations of chromosomes, hormones, or anatomy that do not map to the binary model of sex assignment.³ There is, it turns out, no sex binary in nature.⁴ Even which traits or variations are considered typifying for “male” or “female” bodies differ between different cultures and different cultural contexts.

The categories of man and woman are not found in non-human nature, but rather created by human beings and imposed on nature as a result of the sexual division of labor. Pre-sedentary humanity knew and admitted no sexual division of labor. There was, therefore, no division into sexes among people. Expression of sexual traits, identity, and desire was an affair with no social meaning, something shared entirely between individuals.

What began the regime of divided labor is still unknown. It may be that the mastery of animal domestication gave rise to the sexual division of labor, or that it arose simultaneously with slavery. Whatever the cause, the sexual division of labor was a social technology that caused (and required) early human beings to begin to gender bodies and assign those newly-gendered bodies roles in social reproduction: inferior roles, subject to the expropriation of their labor. At around this time, either the sexual division of labor or the “invention” of slavery (itself predicated on advancements in productive tools, horticultural technology, or a more complete understanding of animal husbandry, which allowed for a single person to produce sufficient food to feed themselves and another, to produce the first surpluses) gave rise to private property (my woman, my slave) and thus, to class society.

Sex as we understand it is a creation of the sexual division of labor. It preceded the advent of class society and became one of its social foundations. Sexual mores, the social oppression of non-heterosexual relationships, and the subordination of all gender and sex expression to the heterosexual, patriarchal family, are all the result of this original and archaic sexual division of labor. It is not possible to complete the social revolution without attacking and uprooting this relation. Any revolutionary movement that fails to contemplate the total emancipation of all sexes and sexual orientations is doomed; doomed to failure in carrying out the liberation of all peoples, and doomed to reproduce class society from its very root.

Sex Orders Class

The economic relation of sex is characterized by the expropriation of the labor of social reproduction. This includes not only the bearing and rearing of children, but all domestic labor necessary for the reproduction of society: the preparation of meals, purchasing of clothing, cleaning and ordering of the household, caretaking of children, disabled, or elderly family members, even the psychological relief of soothing and processing the events of life.

This economic expropriation led to juridical oppression throughout most of European history and is the source of the social oppression faced by marginalized and oppressed sexes. Sex has cut across classes throughout history. It is itself a quasi-class, in that members of any social class may be subject to its relations (economic, social, or even juridical where they still exist). However, because members of the ruling class have historically been able to dictate the ways in which economic relations are imposed, the entry of a person of oppressed sex into the political and economic strata of the ruling class often permits that person to avoid the economic relations of sex (labor expropriation). The bourgeois woman purchases the labor of the proletarian woman — a nanny for child care, a maid for house maintenance, etc. To the extent that an individual is fully bourgeois, they cease to be, in the economic sense, a member of that quasi-class. Social oppression, however, may and does remain.

In essence, under capitalism, only the proletarians are fully members of any oppressed sex or sexuality. The pressure of the patriarchal system often demands individuals reach a separate and individual accommodation with power to avoid  the economic effects of their sex-position; however, in exchange, because these individual accommodations acknowledge the overall schema and actually reinforce, reproduce, and permit the wider oppression of marginalized sexes and sexualities, and because social oppression is a direct consequence of this broader economic relation, these individuals essentially become complicit in their own sexual oppression.

Sex is Found in the Base and the Superstructure

Sex is not simply economic (labor appropriation) or social, but rather is a complex of relations that are dialectically intertwined. Labor appropriation is the basis for sex definition and the social oppression of sex, but once the superstructural elements were created to identify and sort human beings into different sexes (the act of gendering), the superstructural element took on a role of their own in this process.

Identification of individuals as “belonging to” one of the social/economic categories of sex created a cluster of traits that can be sorted, graded, and experienced by other actors. This includes those primary and secondary sexual characteristics listed above, but also includes less concrete traits such as conversational strategies, social behaviors, etc. Sex is not a class but a regime, and the sex-regime that has grown up alongside class society violently genders everyone, at all times.

Not only is there no such thing as a natural, ontological woman (or man), the process of being gendered into one (or more) genders is one that is continuous and ongoing. Gendering, like racialization, is a process that requires effort and violence from the individuals engaged in the social structure.⁵

Adaptation and Synthesis of the Gender Ternary

The most advanced articulation of this theory is the Gender Ternary (coined by the Sizhen System on their substack). This divides the gendered social categories along two lines: the socially legitimized sexes and the subaltern sexes as the first division, and the division between oppressed/oppressor sexes as the second division. Although Sizhen collapses the final two categories, they retain analytical power.

It’s important to stress that these categories are constantly being created and recreated through social (superstructural) interactions and rules. It is possible to move between these quasi-classes — indeed, the functioning of the gender/sex system requires individuals to be moved through these quasi-classes over time in order to function. These are not medical/biological categories, but rather social categories onto which medical/biological ideology is mapped.

This creates the following arrangement, in which the overarching categories remain man and woman, but are divided along a second, normally “hidden,” axis along which the question is whether they are legitimized or subalternized:

• The legitimized oppressor sex: the heteronormative man.
• The legitimized oppressed sex: the heteronormative woman.
• The subaltern⁶ oppressor sex: Any male-sexed individual who exhibits traits outside of the heteronormative becomes subalternized.⁷
• The subaltern oppressed sexes: Any non-male-sexed individual displaying a  non-heteronormative sexual identity or trans person is subalternized.⁸

Quoting Sizhen at length:

“The Subaltern Gender exists as the Punitive Gender: in service of the need to keep the [legitimized oppressed sexes] in check, should they start to “get ideas” in the sense of political consciousness, in their eternal dialectical contradiction with the [oppressor sex]; and in service of the need, broadly, to curtail class traitorism by reifying the superstructural elements of the Gender-Class Ruling Ideology, by maintaining the integrity of the boundaries between these gender-classes [ED: here, we use the term sex quasi-class], and to act as one of the mechanisms by which gender-class mobility is controlled and mitigated.

Gender is a class system. Gendered violence exists to control the movement within and between those classes. The Subaltern Gender Class is one peculiar form [ED: this should be “particular form”] of gender[ed] violence, which exists to be a punitive class in which one is thrust upon sufficient transgression of gender-class ideology or correct protocol.

….

To derive gender-class from “identity,” which is to say “how one Identifies,” is itself an idealist error, which locates the origin of gender class as a manifestation of a spiritual ritual of identification, and which retroactively creates a past experience of gender class after identity is achieved. This is necessarily incoherent. Gender is never a choice. To say “Trans men are men” is as much of a tautology as to say “I am a transgender woman because I Identify as such.” It is a liberal analytical concession to the prevailing discursive technologies of the Transgender Tipping Point-era, which were strategic decisions which prioritized the legitimization of “validity” rather than a correct, materialist analysis of gender….”⁹

Total Liberation Requires Liberation of the Forces of Social Reproduction

This is the ultimate conclusion of the “Woman Question” addressed by Marxists over the past two hundred years. Freedom for any individual requires freedom from the oppressive class-system of sex and gendering. In order to achieve this liberation, we must ground our analysis on firm materialist bedrock. The material basis of sex is the expropriation of labor — the sexual division of labor. The entire superstructure of sex and the gendering of human bodies rests on the bedrock of the sexual division of labor; although it operates, at times, without direct reference to this bedrock, with the end of the regime of divided labor, it will be possible to abolish the superstructure of sex-oppression.

The social revolution must uproot the property relations of sex and gender as a special task. This will see the complete depatriarchalization of world society, the abolition of all regressive and outmoded views on sex, sexuality, and human interaction. It will establish real equality between sexes, alleviate the inordinate weight of domestic and reproductive labor on oppressed sexes, and guarantee the right of existence of those sexes and sexualities that are under threat by the patriarchal capitalist order.

Gender, sex, sexual preference, and sexual expression will become entirely an affair for individual expression, and cease to have any political or economic meaning.

1. (1982). ︎
2. American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “Just the Facts: Biological Sex”. ︎
3. Id. ︎
4. That is, sex is not an ontologically-existing category found natively. Mechanical Marxism sees ontologically-existing categories everywhere, which is a relic of primitive Enlightenment-era scientism. This is the same process of reification that we can see in, for instance, scientific racism. It is marked by the social creation of an analytical category, then the privileging of the analytical category over material reality. ︎
5. It is important to note that the radical feminist proposition that being a man is characterized by being a rapist or an abuser and that being a woman is characterized as being subject to sexual violence is incorrect, in that it sites the division of labor only at the level of sexual violence and obliterates the superstructural elements. ︎
6. Here, Sizhen (and I) use the term, as Gramsci did, to indicate someone who is denied control over the hegemonic social forces. ︎
7. By sexed, we mean anyone subject to the social process of gendering who is sorted into the category of “man,” and who is therefore able to appropriate the labor of those sorted into the social category of “women.” This includes passing trans men, but does not include trans women. ︎
8. On the social nature of sexing, see note 4 above. ︎
9. (emphasis mine, editor’s notes in brackets). ︎

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On “Safe Haven” States

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trans Guerrilla

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

Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla War, Chapter 5, 1937

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

Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla War, Chapter 1, 1937

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

These lands are actively occupied. They were not acquired through fair and conventional warfare, but through the distinctly unfair practice of genocide, targeting mostly women and children. This genocide was and is waged by coerced treaties, active war, deprivation of resources, chemical and biological agents, ethnic cleansing, and more treaties. These practices have certified these regimes as apartheid states.

If you do not agree, you do not need to visit Palestine to see the dispossession of the people being pushed out of their generations old family homes, out of their land and being deprived of their resources and the many U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognitions of genocide. You have the option of seeing that in the country/occupation we already reside in; but even easier, we can read up on the Indian Act and see the starkly different conditions that we live in.

I don’t use the term settler, it’s too soft and it’s inaccurate because most people did not settle, they were born here. I use the terms colonist and occupier because these are active descriptions, their being here is active and our efforts must be active. 

Indigenous people and occupiers are not naturally antagonistic towards each other. But if we examine the differences under the colonial enfranchisement of cisheteropatriarchy, we see inequalities being instituted. We see the inequalities of class society being replicated. This makes it harder to deal with. We see it with the ruling class and working class, then masc folks and femme folks, then colonists and Natives, older generation canadians against refugees and new immigrants, with parents and children, abled and disabled, workers and sex workers. The instituted inequality makes it so we all have differences in the level of violence we face. This fabric of our colonial and capitalist society with its wide range of violence ensures that people experience our reality differently, and as such, assimilate at different rates. Our reality is a lot messier than a Marvel movie where there is our protagonist to root for and our antagonist to defeat. Our goal is not as simple as 1. Defeat the ruling class. 2. Live happily ever after. We cannot beat the bad guy, check our phones as the credits roll, and walk out of the theatre stimulated and satisfied. Our goal is to heal all the existing antagonisms so that we can have harmony. It’s a lot harder and bigger than defeating the antagonist/reactionary force. All reactionary elements at every level must be healed.

One example is the “patriotic socialists” (patsocs) calculating that the white guys at the top of the labour aristocracy have their labour expropriated the most because they make the most. Through this math, they concluded that they are the most oppressed. This is one small example of brushing off the importance of the analysis that we live in a settler colonial regime. Our existence of exploitation in our respective societies is more complex than a set of numbers, it’s about our relationships to society, to the state, to the class opposing us, etc.

Another example is the many East European fishermen on the west coast. Many with military experience and a truly rugged upbringing should make them incredibly powerful allies in revolution. Yet they spend decades repeating racist tropes about Indigenous people on the radio transmissions up and down the coast because canadian fishermen have long done that. Those Eastern European fishermen and the canadian fishermen should have unity with Indigenous People and Indigenous fishermen but that isn’t the case at all. 

The ruling class is able to manipulate them because they don’t face the same violence that we do. Their class interest is in contradiction to the ruling class yet they do not speak or fight against it. They assimilate because they operate in an extractive industry of our resources and they are brainwashed. This is a much bigger and more important problem with the oil industry because it affects more people. 

I was a fisherman for a long time and first hand I’ve seen it worse with oil workers. In both industries, the brutal alienation, physical duress and propaganda eviscerates people and strips them of who they used to be, converting people from humans to husks. When Samidoun brought me in to lead an educational on colonialism and Indigenous history, I tackled this science and assimilation. 6 minutes of it is linked here. 

In 25 minutes you will have better analysis than most of the people in this country on the topic, better than some scholars. If you have time later and gain from this writing, I’ve included 7 or 8 hours of other studies.

Speaking of some scholars, some members of United in Struggle had written a paper that laid out some critiques but it was not really their place to be making them. I had discussed the topic a few times but I never read a paper about it. It was good to read up on it and then discuss the paper with many others. However I went into the meeting angry. The paper had 4 authors: one is a Native friend and the other three are non-natives. I was told that only 1 line of my friend’s writing had made it into the paper. I viewed this as tokenizing him so that they had the freedom to critique Indigenous organizing. During this meeting, he was not there to uphold this work and they could not use him as a shield.

They have done good work before and they helped occupy the port of vancouver during the last escalation in Wet’suwet’en. Not the one where the police fired 70,000+ rounds, that was before this last one. I honour the efforts and contributions of ILPS in that port blockade. Personally, I had gone home a few hours before the 37 arrests because I am weak to the cold. The blockade lasted 3 and a half days.

I usually write a bit longer than this, so this doesn’t contain much prose. This is writing about as dry as 3 unbuttered buns with no drink. 

During the discussion, a lady said that she doesn’t see any meaning in analyzing differences between settler colonists and natives. Now this deeply bothered me because Strasserites push that; Trotskyists push that; wooks, hippies and anarchists say things like “We are all part of the human race, I don’t see colour” etc., etc. Now that line is probably not the line of their entire organization, more likely it is just her feelings being previously hurt causing her to say nonsense. I thought about joking “I want to smoke what you’re smoking because it must be fantastic stuff.” I wanted to say “I have over 40 near-death moments in the workplace, 50-60 sprains, I’ve lent over 120 grand to my family over 15 years beginning at age 13, and I’ve been to more than 40 funerals. Surely if there is no use in examining the different experiences between natives and occupiers, all 3 of you must have worse numbers than I do, because you are older than me.”

I could have mentioned residential schools and gone into detail about what my grandpa and many family members of mine went through. Here is a free educational I had on it, covering Residential Schools on both sides of the border: Indigenous history, Residential schools, Indigenous issues and canadian imperialism (The Four Cornered Room podcast, 137 minutes)

My headache as a colonized person in a revolutionary organizing space and state-driven intergenerational trauma aside, we can take a look at the science. A quote from The Native National Question and the Marxist-Leninist Movement to show the theory of our reality of existing in a settler colony:

“It is a Marxist-Leninist principle, put forward by Lenin and defended by Stalin and Mao, that colonized peoples have the absolute right to self-determination, up to and including secession from their oppressor nation. As Communists we recognize that struggles which weaken the hegemony of the world imperialist system are progressive. This means that the bourgeois democratic revolutions in territories which have not yet achieved bourgeois democracy, that political independence in countries which do not yet have political independence, is a progressive step from the standpoint of the world proletarian revolution; they are a part of the world proletarian revolution and they help to realize it. This is part of the Marxist-Leninist understanding that the Third World is the motive force propelling history forward today. Trotskyites malign these national liberation struggles in the Third World, saying that their nationalism is reactionary and that only a “pure” proletarian revolution is appropriate; revisionists insist that Third World struggles can only be revolutionary when under the hegemony of the “proletarian” struggles of the developed sections of the world. Marxist-Leninists distinguish themselves from these agents of the bourgeoisie by understanding the role which Third World struggles have in the course of world events, by defending their progressive nature and above all by upholding the right of Third World nations to self determination.”

With this, we can see why Trotskyists, Strasserites, “Patriotic Socialists” in the U.S., and other people who make light of and deprioritize Colonized people’s struggles are either ignorant or malicious, often both. In the U.S., the American Indian Movement was Marxist-Leninist and it made amazing progress. The Black Panthers were mostly M-L and the American state massacred and imprisoned them. I hope you are not familiar with the 3 bastard groups I mentioned (as a bastard, I mean no offense to my fellow bastards). The last group is the newest. Strasserites are a bit older — they were basically national socialists who wanted to control the means of production, but not work towards international liberation and the end of imperialism. This is a very easy position for white folks to develop into. Let’s take an uneasy look at SAG-AFTRA. 160,000 union members united. An amazing feat. And also a horrible colonial reminder of what happens when you do not have theory, history and love for marginalized peoples; SAG-AFTRA voted against supporting Palestine. 

Related, there is no wave of celebrities supporting Palestine. But there was a wave of celebrities supporting the U.S.-backed Ukrainian state with many western voice actors jumping for gigs to get paid to support Ukraine in the propaganda blitz, in hiding the U.S.’s 120 years of interference in that country and blaming everything on Russia. Why are there no gigs for getting paid to produce propaganda for Palestine? Why are there immense gigs and paid support for israel? The answer is Imperialism. In depth piece I did on the topic here: Historical and Contemporary context on Ukraine and NATO interference. 

I set to work. I pulled out a microscope for the room of people to examine the colonial chauvinism. 

I told them of nearly every job on reserve paying a dollar or two more than minimum wage. I swallowed my anger and did not tell them directly that everyone is poor except the business owners and those paid to administrate the colonial chief and council capitalist wing of the canadian regime’s “democracy”. I told them they can read Unsettling Canada if they want to get a grounded stance on colonization of this province, where we cannot judge harshly those who sellout because each treaty has been made under coercion and they have all been deemed illegitimate. 

An example from that book that Arthur Manuel uses is that the Wet’suwet’en nation has land so they are able to maintain their culture and reject offers from corporations and the canadian regime. The Nisga’a do not have land and the fishing industry in the west coast has been fully privatized and commodified, so that the Nisga’a and other coastal nations are not in the same position to uphold our culture and we are not in the same position to be able to raise a fist and a war cry to offers from corporations and the canadian regime. 

Can you imagine being elected to govern your people, or just being someone who your people look to for guidance, and watching your people suffer and starve for decades, and then be given a choice to continue to watch your people starve or to sign away your land and resources to get some food to the people dying in front of you? The canadian state figuratively has set my people on fire in order to sell water to their leadership. If they literally did this, it would be faster. On the plains, John A. Macdonald, our first prime minister, starved Natives so thoroughly that the population starved from 32,000 people to 20,000 people from 1880-1885. 

One famous incident was the Indian Agent Thomas Quinn gathering the Natives in the reserve he controlled and starved. He gathered them in front of the ration house and then announced, April Fools, no one was actually going to be fed.

These examples are good to examine. We have that history, and then we have colonists being given land to farm. 

If you are reading this, I know you have had struggles. We all do. It does not matter if your ancestors were barbarian racist murderers or unwashed mealy-mouthed wrist-wringers. Even if they were revolutionaries, they are then and we are now. You are your own person. You are the link between them and your future generations. What matters now is your analysis and your efforts. For better or worse, you may mirror them — you might uphold their legacy. We live in the age of information, there is no point in history where we can be as well informed and organized as we can be today.

Near the end of the meeting, I told them that a mutual friend of ours is stuck for 7 weeks on a seine boat because the ruling class bought most of the family licenses and our ruling class was permitted to convert 3 of them together into an industrial seine license. It was the Jimmy Pattison corporation but now it is the Weston family upholding this privatization. I am a 4th generation fisherman and after 15 seasons, I have left the industry. Our mutual friend is not native but he is still suffering from this privatization nonetheless. 

I told them across the 5,000 kilometre breadth of this colonial project there is unity against extractive industry and oil projects, that the only supporters are the people who work for them and they are outcasts among the rest of us and even their own people. I told them every Native house you pass by you will see unity of anti-oil placards in the windows, that we may not have Native socialist groups writing about imperialism but that our anti-oil line is in line with anti-imperialism because extractive colonialism is driving our conditions today. We can look internationally and that holds true; as of 2020, there are 194 canadian mining corporations in South America and around 75% of mining corporations in the world are based in the canadian regime. 

The U.S. puts more money into oil subsidies than it does running its entire government. I forget the exact number, somewhere around $740 billion per year. This lets us see the focus of these settler states…which is resource robbery, expropriation of Indigenous land and resources domestically and internationally while maintaining NATO as the consolidated imperial bloc.

Back to the meeting, when they said imperialism is the primary contradiction here, I told them inside this settler colony, settler-colonialism is our primary contradiction because it is the foundation that everything is built on, and that they would not tell a Palestinian that settler-colonialism is secondary. The only difference is more time has passed between that land and this land. But the same remains true, colonists and occupiers are eager to hide the truth of our conditions here because it requires that they fight this injustice. Any colonist on this land has the same relationship to it as an israeli: direct colonialism with a relationship of comfort granted as long as they look the other way. If you are reading this, it is vital that you look at the canadian flag with the same visceral fury that you look at a nazi flag and an israeli flag.

I told them I fucking hate to see colonized people’s becoming anarchists and about my 14,600 word piece on it: Why Anarchism can rub a sack (Dialectics of the Western Left). I told them that many natives become anarchists because the people we are around are deeply right wing, we are frequently bombarded with nazi bullshit. We are almost never in a place where we hear revolutionary discussion, history, theory and accomplishments; we just hear liberal noise and the most progressive thing we hear is fantasies of libertarian escapism of wanting to start a commune. We are functionally wading through a swamp of colonial opinions and reactionary violence.

Personally I had one coworker and one facebook friend tell me about their uncles fighting in the White army. These did not surprise me because I have met more than a dozen white nationalists. Settler states are international havens for white nationalists, enslavers, kulaks, and general traitors to humanity.

Another thing I vented was that the NGOs popping up to take native revolutionary potential and convert it to liberalism is distinct. It is a really effective way to defang our power. The exact same tactic is used to absorb Black power in the U.S. while Native power is power defanged this way there too. In episode 6 of season 2 of Reservation Dogs, they cover a similar method. The method of fake radicals who sell smoke and mirrors, who sell the vacuous essence of Decolonization and the words preaching it while not systematically changing anything or even identifying capitalism as the source of our oppression. I told them a question they need to be asking themselves is, can we work faster at building Indigenous Socialism than the canadian state can provide grants and fund NGOs to target this potential?

One thing they brought up was the worry of Natives adopting capitalism, they mentioned a worry of a Native ruling class. In canada there is no need to worry about this. In the U.S., casinos have been brought to many First Nations. But in the canadian regime, First Nations are too far from most cities for casinos to be effective. The injection of casinos is a strong tool of implanting destruction and capitalist influence into Native lands.

After the meeting, a white guy told me he didn’t feel what I was saying until I spoke of the government killing 1 million buffalo to wage genocide and privatizing fishing, these examples of capitalist and state level efforts to wage genocide and destroy our cultures and force us to assimilate. A parallel to this is in Palestine where israelis destroy olive trees and have made it illegal for Palestinians to harvest and sell Akoub. A related local example is the canadian government killing 20,000 sled dogs of the Inuit to force them to settle and lose their nomadic way of life. The focus of genocide is not merely to kill, it is to destroy culture, destroy their way of life, bury their legacy and erase every trace of a people. Hence the canadian government openly saying “We want to kill the Indian in the child” as their policy during residential schools. The focus is not just to kill, but to prevent the culture developing and to violently enforce assimilation. 

One of the last things I said was that a question they need to be asking is: What are we doing to build Indigenous Socialism?

I would like to stress, they did not argue with me. I have dealt with this argument in the Young Communist League as well. I have argued this online with many people over the years, which is why this gave me a headache thicker than a bun with only peanut butter. Things continue as they are until they are interrupted, these conversations are worth having. It is good to have them. The folks did not disrespect me at all. They said we may not see eye to eye on every issue, which is natural, we aren’t legally required to be in perfect harmony. They did not dismiss me. They were deflated and not smug, which is what leadership needs. The reason it was so frustrating for me was because I dealt with it so many times, not because they were in denial or reacting harshly. 

Colonial chauvinism shows up in different ways. A few ways:

• Pretending to be Indigenous and taking jobs and grants reserved for native folks to try alleviate economic depravity after centuries of intentional efforts to deprive us of economic prosperity 
• Going to a country and complaining about slaves becoming free and saying that that revolution “took everything from you” or “took your family’s business”
• Believing racist propaganda locally but also being willing to believe anything about other countries and centring the West as Just, civilized and a moral place to judge countries interfered with by NATO as if we aren’t in an occupying genocidal kingpin of a “country”
• Coming from a country resisting the U.S. at the state level and singing stories of how evil they are and directly using political energy to propagate that instead of learning about and fighting local injustice
• Selling out your homeland by selling anti-communist propaganda to pearl clutching liberals who call homeless people “junkies”
• Talking about how hard you work and saying Natives should stop asking for handouts
• Suggesting “we are all one”/denying our material conditions and history
• Caring only about your own personal struggle
• (Very closely related: western chauvinist anti-theism and Islamophobia)
• Burying our duties to wage revolution here by pointing to other countries to critique them when we do not know their material conditions, their history, their language or the external contradictions and hegemony that limits them
• Repeating “National Endowment for Democracy” CIA propaganda about Uyghurs from Adrian Zenz instead of talking about actual death camps like ICE camps and residential schools
• Patriotic Socialists who create a false dichotomy painting feminists and people who care about queer struggles as liberals and painting themselves as the “real” revolutionaries and anti-imperialists
• Sharing Lithuanian double genocide theory and Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s Holocaust denial that the Bolsheviks were worse than the Nazis
• Listening to Gusanos and white nationalists’ descendants excusing their crimes and speaking ill of revolution
• Suggesting all of humanity is evil/human nature is innately bad due to the actions of the colonial powers
• Hiding history by blaming all states as equally bad when this directly buries revolutionary history and defeats of nazis, enslavers, nationalists, U.S.-backed nationalists etc
• Blaming the Chief and Council government for being corrupt while not addressing that it is the canadian regime’s Apartheid bureaucracy, while also ignoring that the canadian government is vastly larger with worse corruption. C and C makes decisions that deal with millions of dollars while canadian bureaucrats make decisions with tens of billions of dollars. C and C is the tail being wagged by the dog, no Chief and Council determines the fate of colonists.

I don’t want you to have to read a part 4 so I will keep this short. The important focus for us as revolutionaries is that the material analysis here is that we cannot simply build Socialist canada. There cannot be Communist canada, just as there cannot be Communist israel. Revolution here means demarcating from colonialism and the point that has led us to where we are, which is a continental mass grave. If you are an anarchist the last few sentences may bring you joy, if you’ve read Lenin this may bring you joy. If you are strongly tied to canadian identity, this may bring you distress. 

Comrade, this settler state must be destroyed and sovereignty must be granted to the Indigenous nations. The privatization of our land, deprivation of our resources and political autonomy must end. We must be able to determine our path forwards from the last few centuries of genocide. We have more than enough resources for all. Kinship with the land is not complex and it has served us well for thousands of years.

We must build a Socialist Confederacy of Indigenous Nations. We can have societies that prioritize the People and every Pro-social pursuit. Bolivia is doing this already with its 14 point plan. Will you join the efforts to usurp Colonialism?

P.S. Please share this writing with anyone you think might benefit from it, I am very tired of having this argument.

Additional Resources

These are some really accessible and important resources for anyone to study to focus on Indigenous peoples.

• 1+1 Ep 105 Youri speaks to Alexander Reid & Damien Gagnon on Indigenous Affairs in Canada (114 minutes)
  • Wet’suwet’en struggles
  • Indigenous struggles across canada
  • the complexity of the Indian Act and why a right wing figure supports abolishing it
  • MMIW
  • how and why canadians are pitted against Indigenous peoples and colonial law
  • prison reform versus prison abolition
• Indigenous material analysis of settler colonialism (72 minutes)
• Legal history of the West coast, commodification of the fishing industries and contemporary fishing struggles on both coasts (97 minutes)
• Glen Coultehard on his book Red Skins White Masks (40 minutes + 20 minutes Q&A)
• Canadian mining corporations and extractive industry robbery of Latin America and Africa (15 minutes)
• Bolivia’s 14 point revolutionary constitution (10 minutes)

May 19th, 1918 in Brooks County Georgia.

The death of plantation owner Hampton Smith unleashed a wave of violence on the Black residents in the small Georgia town.  Smith, known for being excessively violent towards his workers, also severely battered Mrs. Turner. 

Upon hearing the news of the plantation owner being killed, death-hungry and vampiric mobs of white terrorists removed Black residents from their homes, schools, places of employment and worship; then proceeded to torture and lynch them to death. Thirteen Black people were slaughtered in the name of white terrorism.

Hayes Turner would not return to the home he shared with his wife Mary and their future child on that sullen Georgia day. A few days after the May 16th murder of the plantation owner, Hayes Turner was arbitrarily charged with his murder and jailed. While awaiting “trial,” Hayes Turner was taken from his cell by scores of white terrorists, strung up by a tree, and lynched, the deep Georgia air falling to its knees, writhing and sick from the smell of Black death.

Mary was eight months pregnant when she was taken by white vigilantes for daring to raise her voice in defense of her husband. The death-mob proceeded to tie her ankles, string her body upside-down, douse her with gasoline, mutilate, torture, and shoot the young Black woman, and crush the head of her unborn child. In defending her husband against the frame-up by the white supremacist mob, Mrs. Turner also defended herself against the state that would do nothing to protect. It was the state that reaped, and still reaps, a benefit from lynched Black bodies. It is the state and its owners that creates and enforces laws to protect those who mutilate and destroy Black life. Of course it didn’t protect her; it was designed to kill her.

It was more than murder that Mary and her unborn child endured. This was a frenzied bloodletting of an already gutted people. And, yet, the mad cutting and slicing wasn’t enough; white terrorists proceeded to shoot her drained and lynched body multiple times, beating her into a sunken puddle of blood, dislodging her unborn child from her womb.

Already subjected to the savagery of white violence, the unborn child wasn’t even a second old when they stomped, beat, kicked, and smashed it to death. The fetus lay there, butchered and lifeless on the dirt road; never given the chance to breathe one last tiny cleaved and severed breath.

Mary, her husband, and her unborn child are the exemplars, the stand-ins, the proxies, and archetypes of all the victims of a brutal hegemonic violence that casts its net of murder and profit over every corner of the earth. 

A few months into Israel’s genocidal campaign last year, The New York Times ran an article, the now thoroughly debunked “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7th” by Jeffery Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella, in which it claimed to expose the vile rape of Isreali women by Hamas supposedly ignored by the U.N. It should be noted that both Gettleman and Schwartz have expressed deep anti-Palestinian views. The article goes on to describe in detail the alleged violent assault and mutilation of these women. Reports of sliced breasts, cut genitals, stabbings during rape, a slaughtered family at a dining table, and mounds of other horrors are “documented” in the New York Times article. In another report by ZAKA, a self-proclaimed nonreligious organization specializing in collecting dead bodies and body parts from scenes purported to be “unnatural” deaths, a testimony from Yossi Llandau,who is head of ZAKA in the southern region of Israel, aired. In the video, Landau recounts seeing the dead body of a pregnant woman who was raped, her stomach sliced open by Hamas militants, an unborn fetus with the umbilical cord still attached falling out of her stomach, and then repeatedly shot.

It’s important to note, the testimonials of the “witnesses” were all either from IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) personnel or subject to rigid approval by IOF soliders (themselves involved in endless sexual harassment cases that went unsolved, including allegations of rape, torture, indiscriminate killings, and cover ups). Despite all this, no evidence of these “crimes” was collected, allegedly because Israeli investigators were just too “overwhelmed” and “concerned with religious customs regarding the dead” to worry about the very minor detail of making sure any of the claims were true. The entire report was wrought with evasions and excuses as to why evidence of even the smallest kind could not be provided. Many of the eye witness accounts, primarily from ZAKA “first responders,” concerning the state of the dead bodies — for which they have no forensic expertise  (they’re only trained in preparing the bodies for funerals “in a dignified way” according to strict orthodox Jewish rituals) — underwent numerous changes with each version becoming more and more macabre.

The parallels between the depraved racist terror Mary Turner was subjected to and the story constructed by Yossi Landau about the pregnant woman whose stomach was sliced open with an unborn fetus, for whom there’s no evidence, is striking. Too striking, in fact.

In order to justify the arch genocidal bloodthirst of the zionist entity, in order to make frail excuses for their ruthless slaughter and forced removal of Palestinians, the zionist government is outright hijacking the painful history Black people have endured at the hands of white terroristic violence. What’s more, its not enough that the zionist entity has turned Gaza into a maze of perpetual death, where the Isreali state marches about violently colonizing and displacing the people of historic Palestine; they are now using our history of being subject to savage Jim Crow violence and instrumentalizing it against us in order to justify the continued genocide of Palestinian people, and, to that end, the broader colonized world. 

Further, those invested in the zionist project want to sustain the narrative of the “crazed and violent brown men” with an unhinged animalistic need to rape the “virtuous white woman”. Palestinian men are held in the confines of an animality conjured by the hallucinations of the racist white psyche. Thus, upholding the racist narrative of the savage brown man with a ravenous appetite for rape is a double genocide serving to delegitimize the resistance movement, and further cannibalize a people.

Even more disturbing, is the liberal Western feminist narrative that hurls itself into unhinged hysterics at the mere sight of the mythological threat against the “unsoiled virtue of white womanhood,” yet remains historically silent when colonized women are brutally raped and murdered. All Black people have been forced to endure a necrophilic, blood-lust at the hands of the racist white woman and man. This strain of Western feminism does not contest, and in fact aids in, the reckless hunting and extermination of what theorists defined as outgroup males: racialized men not considered a part of the dominant, normative group. Western feminism revels in the mutilation and slaughter of Black women like Mary Tuner and her unborn child while savagely vilifying Black and racialized men.

It is this strain of feminism that looked on wide-eyed and compliant as Hayes Turner was noosed and ripped from the earth. It is this strain of feminism that stifles the screams of Israeli women abused by cowards like ZAKA founder Meshi Zahav,  turning them into cold susurrations of complicity and protection of a known rapist. It is this strain of feminism that propagates proven fabrications of “rape by Hamas fighters” as a strategy to validate their massacre-driven imperialist aims. It is this strain of feminism that hinges its framework on the butchering of Mary Turner and the desecration of Dalal Mughrabi. 

It is imperial feminism, with its many arid, post-Intersectional vicissitudes, which grounds itself in recognition by the state and the oppression and murder of Black and brown women, yet never dares speak of revolution and freedom from state repression. It is a feminism tilled on inherently racist axioms that breeds and justifies Black death. Thus, as history has shown, imperial feminists stand undivided with the patriarchal brutality of its white male counterparts. 

Where were the Western feminists when Mary Turner was being butchered and lynched? Where were Western feminists when Mary’s unborn child was being kicked and stomped to death? Where is Black feminism for Mary Turner and her unborn child now? Western feminism is where it’s always been, right alongside white men aiding and glorifying the gruesome murder, rape, and plunder of Black life. And Black feminism — bled of its radicality, confusing revolutionary movement for one’s identity, a priori presumptions, a multiplicity of gender categories, and a gutted and deradicalized queerness — now stands alongside Western feminism seeking refuge, celebritydom and financial kickbacks from the state instead of freedom from it. 

Black feminists, who laud Kamala Harris as the paragon of success and woman leadership, will uplift her intersecting identities and hardships of navigating the campaign trail as top cop, but not only completely discard women like Erica Garner — a fighter, and, as Dr. Joy James theorizes, a Captive Maternal — but offer them up for the slaughter. James, who theorizes the Captive Maternal as one (beyond gender binaries) who moves inside the tense contours of conflicted care-taker, protester, movement-maker, maroonage, and war resister, affirms, “most black feminist, conventional abolitionists, seek to reject, obscure, or attack the militant Captive Maternal.” It does not present a moral entanglement for Black feminists to praise Kamala, the top cop, who peddles representation as liberation while poor Black women, who are actually at the forefront of the struggle for freedom from state repression, are left to die destitute and broken.

Further, because Black feminism has aligned, has always been aligned, with state forces, it is not only unproblematic for them not to discard the vicious rape and summary execution of Palestinian women and children, but to embrace their perpetual murder as normative; to see their continuous deletion as a necessary corrective on revolutionary Black thought that dares to move beyond the confines of the mercenary logics of imperial feminisms. Because Kamala has presented herself as the “aunty” and “homegirl” of the racist capitalist state, it’s okay for Black feminists to raise millions of dollars for her to continue funding the rape, torture, and mass murder of Palestinian women while feigning support for a ceasefire. 

Black feminism exists inside homicidal ruptures that destroy true sisterhood, that cleave through any kind of genuine care and love amongst communities of Black women. Instead of lifting our sisters in an honest communion that seeks to heave against the destructive imperial feminisms that tear away at Black people as a whole, Black feminism embraces and centers racist constructs of Black people and aims to cut down poor Black women who may disagree with their theoretic — the very women they claim to love and protect. In essence, the Black feminist can write about poor Black women — viewing us as some sort of exhibitionist project — but when it comes to poor Black women defining our own genres of being and narrating our own lives, we’re met with cold, paternalizing disregard from the Black feminist. The Black bourgeois feminist academic class seek to legitimize themselves and feed off of the labor and knowledge-production of poor Black people on the ground, while remaining consciously disconnected and disinterested in the lives of the poor Black women they sternly avow to advocate for. They, like all members of the bourgeois class, are cultural vampires. Even as it seeks to offer a critique of Black feminist thought, Black feminism’s analysis remains banal and deflated. There is an entrenched refusal to engage in an honest root-to-stem interrogation of the way Black feminism has been used to delegitimize militant Black power movements, and dislocate a sense of sisterhood and firm togetherness within the Black community. Black feminism, therefore, proffers a synthetic and vain “sisterhood” that only offers uplift and blurred adulation if you commit to propagating racist tropes of both Black men and Black women. 

It is a feminism, as in the case of Audre Lorde and June Jordan, that leads  Black women to abandon the unflinching truth of her sister in favor of settler feminist lies and distortions. It is a feminism of deep incisions sometimes too scared and riven to repair, where the sutures of love and community become frayed and forgotten. We must begin to build and anchor ourselves in frames that do not opportunistically center one group of Black people while justifying and excusing the slow genocide of another by the state under the veils of “protecting women” from the historic Black male brute. We need a guiding theoretic that understands: yes, these are our mothers, these are our sisters, but our mothers and sisters also have failed in protecting us; and oftentimes barter the depredation of their daughters for their own self-interests.

Imperial feminism — as history has documented — stood idly by as white men ripped Black babies from their mothers and fed them to alligators. It is a feminism where you will never be able to move from Margin to Center as bell hooks asserts because coloring the racist Suffragette movement Black and taking the white supremacist patriarchal dictums of Elizabeth Cady Staton and bearing it as our own, has not helped us as colonized women. It cannot. We must come to grips with the fact that the white supremacist genealogy of Western feminism uses Black men to produce racist tropes about Black people as a whole: i.e, the hypersexual Black male rapist and the hypersexual jezebel Black woman. By employing myths of both the Black male rapist and Arab male rapist, imperial feminism, an arm of the state, is able to justify the lynching and mass genocide of Palestinian men and Black men, and keep colonized people held in the fetters of a cannibalizing demonization. Western feminism, moreover, descends from a racist genealogy. The violently racist logics of white criminologists lie at the taproot of Western feminism, which views colonized people as reified objects they can mutilate and exoticize. Hence, the colonial epistemologies of Western feminism lays the ground and provides the legal framework for the imperial axis of murder that justifies the slaughter of colonized people a world over. 

Anat Schwartz, who helped write the  evidence-deficient New York Times article, “Screams Without Words”, has committed a double genocide against the Palestinian people with groundless claims of rampant sexual torture by “Arab militants.” What’s more, not only has Schwartz blotted out the vicious torture and actual evidence of sexual assault of Palestinian women and girls by the IOF which spans decades, she has made it such that the pain and endless suffering of Palestinian women and girls is actually a threat to precious white zionist life; and that the very truth of their live-streamed murder and dispossession must, in turn, be absorbed back as that of the suffering and death of only Isreali women. Moreover, this violence through consumption not only discards Palestinian women, it makes it so that they are completely disappeared with the only vestiges of their existence being the bombed homes, hospitals and schools that Israel has consumed and is claiming as its own. Israel is, therefore, a cannibal-state sustaining itself through their own necrophilic fantasies; through the twisted rapturous joy of maiming and exterminating the men, women, and children of Palestine.

Further, as Anat Schwartz employs the feminist label and narrative to propagate the idea that the U.N. and international community ignored the mass rape of Israeli women– claims that have been found to be outright fabrications in many instances, so much so that the New York Times itself pulled their podcast episode on the article — we see how these very white supremacist dictums serve to monsterfy an entire group of people, turning them into phantoms who exist between intervals of deletion and Delectability by the “Child-Killing state.”

Even when the IOF commits the most sadistic and heinous crimes against Palestinian women, to the white supremacist zionist, it is impossible to view their vile acts of sexual terror against Palestinian women as sexual assault because, to the death-state (to use a term from Dr. Tommy Curry), they are the masculinized extension of Hamas. Thus, Palestinian women are held in the interstices of a gendered and de-degendered coffin-state forced to claw at the dregs of a butchered life where horrific abuse against them is not only normalized, but is the very essence of Israel society itself.

As it stands, over 186,000 Palestinians and counting have been killed in Gaza, including over 14,500 children, with 19,000 now orphans, over 150 intellectuals and artists bombed or hacked to death, and over 150 known journalists slaughtered. Israel has bombed Rafah, a densely overpopulated city of 1.4 million people in Gaza’s Southern region, even after the IOF ordered Palestinians to go there. There are no schools or universities — teachers have been slaughtered by the occupation forces with the aid of the West, and hospitals have become a distant and erstwhile memory. Over 10,000 children are missing, while masses of people are forced into living amputated lives. Already scarce water has been poisoned with sewage, soil destroyed, women raped, men raped; medics, academics, and UNRWA, the only battered lifeline, now mercilessly cut while Palestinians are massacred within minutes for daring to ask for flour. All while we listen to the tiny grave and sullen pleas for help from 6 year old Hind and thousands like her whose cries have been suffocated by IOF and the Biden administration’s unending lies and liberal pyrotechnics to justify the total evisceration of the Palestinian people.

Like Mary and her unborn child, the people of Gaza have been stricken down and rendered silent. They are condemned by Western liberal democracy and some on the Western left for taking up arms in an unmatched show of strength, resilience, and revolutionary power. From Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, Vladimir Lenin, to Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani, Chris Hani, George Habash, PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine)  and Hamas – all grasped the elementary fact that national liberation could not be won without an equal showing of brute force on the part of the colonized. Colonial regimes have always marched upon oppressed people with genocidal violence. In peddling utopias of peaceful roads to decolonization, Western leftists end up sending colonized people to their death under the pretense of nonviolence and liberal humanism. What’s more, as a result of the paternalism that plagues the West, many, in truth, do not want revolution as it would expose their own complicity in cutting down and half-pretending to care about the mass slaughter of — children in Gaza. 

For the West in general and America in particular, killing children has always been a favorite pastime. This is a country, on the frayed basis of white supremacist reasoning, that gave the electric chair to 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr (Curry, 2017); a country that tortured and lynched 14-year-old Emmet Till; a country where, in the horrific case of Kendrick Johnson, Black children are slaughtered with their organs missing; a country, unmatched in its brutality, that bought, sold, traffics, and kills Black children. A country where Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and innumerable Black children undergo an un-childing; and are transformed, at fatal gun and knife-point and post-mortem, into adults, because their Black maleness indicates an imminent sexual danger. 

Recently, video footage has surfaced of settlers storming the Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base in the Negev Desert now serving as a prison camp to torture Palestinians, in support of the soldiers. The settlers, seething with rage, began demanding the release of nine soldiers held in custody by Israeli military police on the morning of July 29th. The soldiers were being held for the sexual torture of a Palestinian man being held prisoner. IOF forces gang raped the Palestinian man, forcing a cell phone into his rectum. The rape was so brutally horrific that the man was sent to a nearby hospital with “severe anal bleeding”  where the doctor confirmed the man also suffered damage to other internal organs. This is not only a sustained moral cleavage of the sadist IOF, this is an eternal homicidal rupture of which liberal democracies, from the Israeli death-state to America, is tilled on.

Capitalism/imperialism suffers an historic, homoerotic consumptive appetite for the flesh and blood of colonized peoples. Critical race theorist Vincent Woodard in his seminal work, The Delectable Negro: Human consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture, embarked on a deep interrogation of the psycho-sexual fetishistic terror of capital-white supremacy. Racialized people are simultaneously vilified and sexually desired to sate the rapacious hunger of the state for colonized flesh. Dr. Tommy Curry also builds on this analysis with his theory of phallicism. In Curry’s analysis, Black men are branded rapists, hunted, and fetishized by state forces. Furthermore, Black male ontology is butchered and in its place a feminized nonentity that is also a brute rapist. 

This rapist/rapee dialectic bleeds through Curry’s work in the conceptualization of phallicism. In the same way that Palestinian men are designated by the zionist-ethnostate as violent rapists yet are psycho-sexually devoured, so too areBlack men in America  consumed; their flesh feasted on by the American gendarme and targeted for murder. Thus, the necrophilic thirst for colonized men drives the homoerotic slaughter carried out by Israeli death-state and the terroristic public lynchings done by American-garrison state.

Black boys remain solidified in the liberal Western imaginary as violent hyper-masculine Black male terrorists when, in fact, they are Black children who have been brutally severed from their families; who have been disintegrated by the state and their white vigilantes, pushed into the enclaves of oblivion and intentionally forgotten — except, of course, when it’s time to excavate the bodies of dead Black men for hashtags and algorithmic hypervisibility; playing intersectional recognition politics and discursive games with Black genocide. 

This is a country that endlessly prates about the violence of the PLO, PFLP, Hamas, and The Muslim Brotherhood, but aids in the reckless murdering of Palestinian people and colonized people around the world. Further, this country also continues to assist the occupation regime in killing their own people, as is proven in the Kibbutz massacre, and continually counts all men whom they’ve butchered and hacked to death in Palestine as “hamas terrorists”. It is evident Western humanist moralisms are the logics of murder and hollowed justifications for transferring colonized people from one death world to another, locking them in Sepulchrally: a death that does not end but is sustained under a colonial force (Mbembe, 2019); an endless butchering of one’s sense of self and putting in its place an apparition that moves inside the contours of coloniality; cleaved yet drifting between the narrow ledges of bloody death worlds. The state of Sepulcherality is consumptive and the colonizer (false construction) has a necrophilic thirst for the flesh of the colonized (dual false-true construction).

Inside capital/white supremacy, there is a long tradition to disassociate humanity from the darker peoples of the earth and put in their place imagined creatures driven only by primordial and animalistic cravings for violence and death. Missing from this mythological construction, however, is the liberal West’s own bloody depravity, without which this country and its corollary Israel, would not exist. Moreover, without the relegation of Palestinian men as terroristic sexual brutes — the same taxonomies reserved for Black men as in the case of Willie McGee — they, the Hitlerite ethnostate of Netanyahu, would not be able to carry out its fanatic bloodletting of Palestinian men. Hence, when it comes to poor Black and brown people, particularly poor Black and brown men, from the viewpoint of the death-state, there are no humans involved.

The same misandric assumptions that operate to consume and slaughter Black men, also are at work to categorize all Palestinians, particularly Palestinian men, as Hamas, marking them as targets for final deletion. It is therefore necessary for Imperial feminist thought to brand all Palestinian men as terroristic rapists who, by merely existing, threaten the historically unsoiled virtue of Israeli womanhood. Imperial feminism — which takes as its undercarriage the violent white supremacist ethos of racist ethnologist Samuel A. Carthwright, who theorized the sadistic anti-Black male framework of Drapetomania, attempting to rationalize in the white psyche the power of Black men who rose up in unbroken militancy against slavery — and much of its intersectional adjuncts are tilled on the violently racist ideology of late 19th century ethnology. 

Inside the psychic holds of liberal feminism is the belief that Palestinian men are violent patriarchs that must be slaughtered. This destructive misunderstanding of patriarchy as a biological and cultural phenomenon, holding that all men are privileged, regardless of their historically racialized and hunted position by imperialism, because they’re men, and therefore reflexively oppress women; despite being divested from the very notion, let alone category, of manhood (Homo-economicus) however, must be uprooted. We must cut through this imperial feminist reasoning of patriarchy peddled to us by despotic feminisms which takes white supremacy as its base, in order to form a material, cogent analysis that takes into the folds the racialization, degendering, rape, plunder, slavery, dispossession, and genocidal terror against Black and Palestinian men.

In examining the savage raid on Al-Shifa hospital, we see witness accounts of Palestinian men being rounded up and summarily executed. Palestinian men, accused of being Hamas militants, were hunted down by IOF soldiers who disguised themselves as civilians and proceeded to murder three defenseless Palestinian men in their hospital beds awaiting treatment. Instead of going head to head with Hamas (because they’re losing the war and can not) the IOF has — much like Hitler himself, whom they have undeniably modeled their genocidal project after — resorted to the wholesale slaughter of all Palestinian men considered of fighting age. Genocide scholars have also noted the systemic targeting of raciacilzed/ outgroup fighting age males in the hopes of lifting Palestine from the earth altogether.

There are further accounts of Palestinian men and boys being stripped naked and tortured, with hundreds of children held in Israeli prisons. There is proven evidence of Palestinian men and boys being raped and used as human shields by the IOF. In one of the many disturbing accounts, a child who, while simply trying to light fireworks in celebration of Ramadan, was subsequently executed by an IOF sniper. Later, an Israeli official praised the murderer of the child saying that he was a terrorist. The universal dictum of the liberal West and its necro-state Israel, moreover, is there are no children amongst the colonized, therefore all must be executed. 

Sepulcherality means traversing one death world to another: jagged and dead inside seams that lead to homicidal ruptures — managed, calculated, and indexed by the state for perpetual execution; a hollowed-out state where racialized groups are spiritually severed, existing only in absence. The psycho-spatial nature of their dislocation not only from their communities, but from themselves, places them into the construct of the oppressor class; thus, existing inside the projection of the imperial force. The imperialist gendarme, through its economic policies, education system, healthcare industry, carceral structure, cultural structures, colonial geographies, and ecological system, bludgeons colonized people into sepulchral non-existence: a ghostly coffin-state where the slaughtered awaits their turn to die another death. In this state, a people exist only as the construct of the Western imaginary and not as themselves.

The apartheid-state continues to carry out Kaliyugan raids on the Rafah tent compound near the UNRWA warehouses. Video evidence and reports of the siege show a beheaded child whose tiny headless body looked to be between the ages of 4 and 6. Despite Netanyahu and the corruption-riddled organization ZAKA’s folktales of 40 beheaded babies, there is ACTUAL evidence of a beheaded Palestinian child. Palestinian children are forced into a cleaved phantom existence, 

The media-gendarme of the West has an orchestrated blackout against the material reality of unimaginable violence unfolding on the ground of Palestine because it wants to continue to inculcate the American public with racist propaganda against Palestinians so it can continue its fascist onslaught. Further, while Biden instrumentalizes the Holocaust with bled claims of Antisemitism and gives lobotomized speeches about Israel never being compared to Hamas (a claim that is true — the murder-state could never be as valiant and unbreakable as Hamas fighters, who, even when injured, continue fighting for their people with unmatched revolutionary strength), a Palestinian child’s sodden decomposed body lies on the dirt road with their head blown off by 2,000Ib bombs. 

The liberal fits about democracy, wailing from each sunken corner of the earth about the loss of innocent (white) life, are throwing tirades not because they actually care about democracy, but because they do not want their everyday capitalist phantasmagorias interrupted by slaughtered Palestinian people. There is something to be said when Americans view the macabre scenes of headless children as a mere drag on their day. They are appalled not by the suffering and endless murder of Palestinian men, women and children, but by the fact that they can no longer drape themselves in the dead morality of liberal humanist reasoning; screeching about Hamas violence when the entire world is seeing the asymmetries of the genocidal zionist warfare. Liberals and those of the compatible Western left alike — the same left that praises the intellectual breadth of  Western analytical Marxism, but looks on disapprovingly, and, I’d argue, with contempt, at Eastern Marxism and the practical application of Marxism as “Totalitarian”–sinks into barren humanist convulsions and does not necessarily want an end to the genocide in Palestine — they want an end to being confronted with the sharp realities of their own proto-fascist ideations.

Western Marxism bears the stain of the chauvinist 2nd international and suffers from an over/under intellectualism: high-minded theoretical analysis that, when you begin to deeply inquire and go from stem to root, there’s actually nothing there (Losurdo, 2024). Steeped in paternalism and chauvinism, the practical application of Marxism continues to elude Western Marxists as they scold global south liberation movements such as Hamas, Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, etc. The basic understanding of revolutionary national liberation movements as being the necessary soil for socialist potentiality to take root is decidedly lost. The Leninist praxis of Marxism has been altogether gutted. 

American Marxism in particular suffers a xenophobic psychosis, centering itself and playing up the particularities of the American context while willfully negating the universal tenets of Marxism-Leninism. The absence of rigorous self-critique is reflected in decayed phrase-mongering and entertainment based so-called practical work that views the masses of working class people more as an exhibition rather than leaders in class struggle. Both Lenin and Stalin stressed the deep significance of self-criticism within a party and movement, underlying the powerful role it plays in strengthening the strategic goal of the party in tearing away the capitalist state. Hence, as a result of Western Marxism not being anchored in and mastering the art of self-critique — or, as I’ve termed it, revolutionary self-inquiry — we’ve sunken into a dismal paternalism; a lacuna of sterile and desperate chauvinism, that aids in the derailment of revolutionary class struggle.

Introspection and reflection of oneself are inseparable from the methodology of criticism/self-criticism in a party and movement. Self-introspection, or, revolutionary self-inquiry, strengthens and serves the criticism/self-criticism method. It requires deep self-interrogation into the capitalist-constructed-self, made to reflexively function in this society, and the true self. It is a dialectical movement to thread through the contours of tension, of struggle of one’s self; uprooting the old and working to understand the universal flux that shapes and guides what is to be born anew, and, thus, building political awareness. Therefore, without working to develop the skill of revolutionary self-inquiry, one can not effectively self-critique, and liberal tendencies and prevarications will always prevail, devouring the marrow of what Marxist-Leninist core there is. A movement or party that does not build the necessary muscle of revolutionary self-inquiry is destined to sink into dred economism; peddling reformist policies that serve to strengthen the state under the banner of Marxism-Leninism.

Turning Lenin into a liberal and pulling the innards out of class struggle, Western Marxism — and in particular American Marxism — has altogether distanced itself from militant resistance movements. It exchanges revolutionary struggle for mythologies of peaceful roads often pointing to Chile’s Allende as an example, conveniently discarding the fact that Salvador Allende’s social democratic government — which was left unarmed and vulnerable as a result of the ideology of peaceful-road-socialism — was couped, with Allende himself driven to suicide by the murderous appetite of the CIA-backed Pinochet regime. Moreover, bartering with capitalist henchmen, Western Marxism advances reform over revolution. It navel-gazes in barren disarray about the horrors of Stalinism (which is not an actual thing, but a linguistic bias and an anti-revolutionary mythological construction) emptily quoting Lenin while butchering his core principles and eviscerating the need to engage in militant class struggle (Losurdo, 2023).

Historically, “Stalinism” has been used as an anti-communist trope to deter people from forging resistance against the capitalist offensive. The mythology of Stalinism, however, is not only propagated to upend liberation movements deemed inherently dictatorial by the bloody, enslaving, and genocidal West, it is also used as an indictment against Black men who form revolutionary parties to counter the ruthlessness of the state — as in the case of Huey P Newton, Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, Robert Williams, etc. — and who theorize frames of resistance. In other words, just as there is a wholesale dismissal of the Black power movement as overly “authoritarian” and laved in “toxic masculine ideals” that forgrounds their onto-epistemological position, there is a wholesale (liberal-anarchistic) generalizing disregard for, and false comparison of, any move to form a militant organization to directly challenge the state as “Stalinist” and “authoritarian.” Further, Black male militancy, and, by extension the professed revolutionary nationalism of the Black community, is written off as an historic authoritarian failure that must be cut down by imperial feminism before it can have the chance to develop new roots. Endless derogatory statements of Huey Newton as a drug-induced terrorist with a bloodlust for authoritarianism abound as the counterinsurgent efforts of the U.S. sally forth these narratives in order to reorient the collective consciousness of the Black community away from mass revolt.

In the aim of Killing Boogeymen, of  exterminating the perennial militant negro communist threat, imperial feminism is thus employed as disciplinary warfare against the Black community under the aegis of saving poor, backward, non-feminist Black women from the historic insurgent Black male brute. Thus, the anti-communist construction of the “Stalinist” Boogeymen; of the arrested and undone people of the East who dared to challenge the axis of finance-capital of the West with the Leninist practical application of Marxism. The people of the east, under the leadership of Joseph V. Stalin, who dared to defeat the bloody death-march of Hiterite Nazism that Western powers colluded with and defended (Soviet Information Bureau, 1948); the same Nazism that the West has no problem protecting and colluding with today in the form of zionism (as opposed to the vain theorizing spearheaded by the West that views Marxism, with a complete negation of Leninist praxis, as an abstract, idealist liberal-conservative free-for-all with an eternal grimace of revolutionary party organizing and the capture of state power as primordially dictatorial) live as an apparitional psychic threat that parallels the visceral despotism of the Black male militant and the revolutionary Black nationalism/Black power politics of the Black community. 

Equating the militancy and revolutionary nationalism of the Black community with despotism also serves a second counterinsurgent function: if you can propagandize the Black community away from mass revolt against the murderous repression it has been subject to, you pacify otherwise potentially insurgent elements. Africana philosopher Miron Gilmore aptly interrogates counterinsurgency in his framework of Killology, which analyzes the U.S. global “war on terror” as a modern form of earlier colonialist counterinsurgent formations. Their transformation builds on Silvia Wynter’s frame of the omnipresent reason of homo-economous Man1 to the capitalist, techno-militarized imperialism of Man2, to now, Miron’s theoretic of Man3 “MAN3/homo homini lupus (man as wolf to another man AKA MAN as Praetorian).”

In analyzing the thick latticework between colonialism, “modernization”, racialization, and the counterinsurgent scholar-soldier trained to kill under the veils of humanitarianism and lifting poor Black/colonized people out of the desperate “backwardness” of the masculinized Black power era Gilmore affirms, “[……]modernization theory must be explicated to properly understand the role of Black feminism’s theoretical agenda as a stratagem of U.S. counterinsurgency, its embracing of the iconography of the counterinsurgent girl, its basic tendencies towards pathological (criminological) cultural representations of Black Power masculinity (and Black males writ large) and the U.S.’s doctrinal mastery of counterinsurgency theory to subvert anti-colonial threats to its hegemony around the globe.”

In the era of the techno-slaughter, the pillaging colonialist ethos of the “civilizing mission” is replaced by alleged humanitarian concerns (which never calls into question the West or its corollary, Israel) that focus on ideology and culture as “humane” methods of counterinsurgency aimed at subduing/eliminating the target population: Killology. Further, Gilmore avers, “a new population-centric approach to Black militancy and thought (along with a strident resistance to the criminalization of self-defense, and a new Black consciousness or set of ‘inner eyes’ based on revolutionary suicide) with the masses as its center of gravity will be the basis for a cultural-logical contribution toward accomplishment of a new truly human theory of victory — the accomplishment of a new Human.”

This cultural-logic, or what is referred to as the 20th century counterinsurgent doctrinal strategy of “winning the hearts and minds” is the seedbed anchoring this epoch’s liberal democratic genocidal advance that creates and utilizes their theory industry, here namely imperial feminism, to sedate potentially revolutionary elements within the Black community, truncating their developing consciousness, and drugging them with the pervasive and septic logic that pathologizes Black revolutionary nationalism as hyper-masculine, deviant, heavy with the burden of an unmatched patriarchy worse than that of the historically racist colonialist white man, and radically insurgent in their antediluvian desire for violence.

It follows then that presumptive presidential nominee Kamala Harris would be the archetypal image of the liberated, educated, Western feminist (who holds no qualms about materially supporting the vicious rape and murder of Palestinian women and children), who built a career on the mass imprisonment of Black men and is now aiding to spearhead a genocide that leaves children charred and headless and blows up civilians in Lebanon through pagers via the cutting edge cybernetic killing machines of the imperial West. Climbing in and out of Blackness, Harris serves the dual function of arch counterinsurgent and “Homegirl.”

What’s more, Harris is able to appeal to Black women and the broader Black community on the basis of posturing her identity as the Chuck-wearing sister/aunty from Oakland, all the while maintaining her positionality at the highest level of empire as the top cop who champions the cowardly assassination of Yahya Sinwar, and creates the policies that drive the mass asphyxiation of poor Black people. Harris’s peculiar ontic as homegirl/mercenary occupies a specific dialectical spatio-temporal zone: the pacification and subsequent bloody deletion of potentially insurgent Black men and other radical elements within the Black community. 

Further, even Harris’s strained relationship with her father Donald Harris, Black Jamaican Marxian economist, serves to reinforce the U.S. doctrinal counterinsurgent strategy of marking Black men who theorize alternatives to the capitalist order of blood and profit as communist threats to the racist social hierarchy that must be delegitimized and blotted out. While there is endless footage of Harris exclaiming the strength and grace of her mother — the biomedical scientist who raised the would-be vice president and her sister, the former senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton, all on her own — her father is seen as the phantasmal derelict with crazed left politics. Furthermore, in the U.S., Donald Harris is viewed as the unfit parent unworthy to be in the presence of his daughter’s success within the great emporium of murder and depredation. He is the seen/unseen vaurien negro communist buck incapable of caring for his exceptional daughters. Harris’s function as arch counterinsurgent genocidal homegirl, moreover, strengthens and bolsters the strategic aim of the U.S., and its corollary imperial feminism, in branding Black and racialized men in the revolutionary tradition as visceral threats to the capitalist social order and maiming advanced revolutionary segments of the Black community.

If we’re to meet this current revolutionary moment we must recognize that facism has changed its shape. It is, therefore, not enough to get lost in worn cultural characterizations of fascism as a distant and isolated jackboot phenomenon. Fascism is structural and woven into every facet of the spectacle that is capitalist society. A serious analysis does away with vain debates about the unhinged fascism of only Trump and The Right Danger; barren debates that often seek to downplay the outright genocidal policies that have killed over 186,000 Palestians and beheads children. An examination of the facts exposes that Kamala Harris and the Democrat cabal move in lock step with Trump and fascism. Historically, from Germany, Italy, to Hungary, fascism could not have thrived without deep liberal collusion.

Without sinking into the frenzied petit-bourgeois sophistry of ultra-leftism, declaring the wholesale uselessness of elections, or uncritically declaring there’s nothing we can do except engage in some ill-conceived suicide mission that dislocates the left (this is in fact not an adequate criterion; it is not enough to be “left” in some general, amorphous sense: one is either in favor of capitalism or wholesale against it) from the broader body politic, we must understand a sober analysis is needed. The needed analysis is one that clearly understands, to paraphrase Gabriel Rockhill, that facism is a mode of governance within the greater structure of capitalism. 

Yet, one must, if one considers themselves a serious Marxist, ask how can fascism be completely defeated with a fascist-enabling party? Though conditions are different, and one can also point to certain ultra-left mistakes, we must not forget that it was the social democrats that had a bloody hand in knifing away at the revolutionary movement in Germany of which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were at the helm . Conversely, whether it is the Biden administration or Harris/Waltz administration, both have vowed to continue, uninterrupted, the death-march in Palestine. The Democrats, moreover, use market liberalism as a narcotic for public consumption in order to conceal mode-one of their fascist onslaught.

Therefore, it is not a matter of whether supporting Harris is a “strategy against Trump” when both capitalist parties, which in actuality is only one capitalist party, breathe sustenance into one another. Liberalism, moreover, has a symbiotic relationship to fascism. This idea that we can choose one fascistic party to fight the supposedly more virile form of fascism of another is, therefore, flawed from the very outset. It is a choice not of a reduced form of fascism even. Rather, it is a choice between a slow lethal injection or a summary execution. However, the paradox is: what is perceived as a slow death is actually a more accelerated mass butchering.

Liberal democracy needs zionism. To have an ethnostate that can instrumentalize the oppression of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews — the so called “undesirables” the early zionists wanted absolutely nothing do with that Israel treats like detritus while pretending to honor victims of the Holocaust — is a convenient justification for the imperial machine to unleash its techno-slaughter on Palestinians and elide criticism. 

Zionism has always maintained shared points of interest with Hitlerism. Imperialism, furthermore, needs zionism to strengthen and fulfill its fascist aims as it is easier to weaponize the history of the Nazi occupation in order to stifle anyone who questions the occupation force’s heinous crimes. If, in fact, facism is the genocidal march of the total evisceration of a people, and we are, as it stands, in the deep of a genocidal march funded, upheld, and defended by the U.S. government, then I argue we are at the very least in a full thrust forward of fascism. 

It is liberal democracy that funded, aided, and drafted policies protecting those who hacked and lynched Black people. The settler feminist narratives of Anat Schwartz, therefore — narratives that justify the pained dismembering of a people — are the same narratives that not only ignored the brutal killing of Mary Turner, her husband and unborn child, but deleted her story from the collective psyche, and continue an institutional butchering of Black and brown people. Settler feminist narratives acted as a barricade against indictment of the violent white vigilantes that lynched and mutilated Mary Turner and her unborn child; and continue to act as a barricade for the IOF against any form of possible indictment for their murderous rape of Palestinian women. 

From that day in Brooks County Georgia May 1918 to present day Palestine, we see the imperial machinations at work. Ethnic cleansing, as Domenico Losurdo has aptly reminded us, is a “twin birth” of liberalism (Losurdo, 2011) — a twin birth that gives life to mass graves, amputated, and headless children. Those paralyzed and defenseless, lying in a barely functioning hospital awaiting aid that will never come (because the U.S. blocked it), are gunned down in their hospital beds. Almost 400 Palestinians and counting have been buried, with accounts of some being buried alive in mass graves in Nasser Hospital (and Al-Shifa Hospital) in the city of Khan Yunis covered in feces; their hospital clothing still somewhat attached to their charred and desecrated bodies. Palestinian women are raped and tortured, their babies minutes old are left to die of starvation or slaughtered by the IOF just like Mary’s unborn child who was torn from her stomach and stomped to death by “virtuous” white American Christians. 

While settler feminism spirals into outrage about the the savage brown Hamas rapists, even a recent U.N. investigation, though desperate to give credence to Israel’s claims of mass rapes, admitted there is no evidence. Settler feminists make bold assertions vowing to defend Israeli women against sexual assault, but are completely mute when it comes to the 260 cases of rape reported everday in Israel. What’s more, while Israel advances its Hasbara about imaginary beheaded babies, actual evidence of Palestinian people found beheaded in mass graves are surfacing as Palestinians desperately try to identify loved ones lost amid the bombs.  

These same voices that affirm the protection of women against the Hamas terrorists, interestingly enough, are rigidly silent about the violent rape of their own IDF women soliders by the IDF themselves. It is an imperial feminism that violently imprisons actual feminist intellectuals, as in the case of professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who was thrown into jail by Israelis for “incitement.” It is the same imperial feminism that finds itself in a sudden catatonic state when asked about the Haredi Jeffrey Epstein.

 A Hitlerite feminism, or, as Joy James affirms in her analysis, state feminism, that protects the white supremacist terrorists — as in a particularly tragic case — that kidnapped, gang raped, tortured, murdered, and buried a Bedouin teenage girl because, to quote, they wanted to “fu%ck.” It is a Hitlerite feminism that continues to aid and abet rapists in Israel, ensuring that serial rapists continue to victimize Palestinian and Israeli women with impunity; and that Israel remains a comfortable abode for murderous serial rapists. These settler feminist axioms that claim to protect and honor Israeli women actually offer them up for a lifetime of the imprisoning patriarchal abuse they claim to be defiantly against. Settler feminism serves as an accomplice in shielding predators and covering up their sadistic violence, ensuring the abuse of women is Israel remains structurally intact.

Anat Schwartz, in her imperial feminist logic, can not see the suffering of Palestinian women because, inside the settler feminist inverse, Palestinian women exist only as an orchestrated march of terror against the zionist body. Put another way, to borrow from Louis Althusser, the Palestinian people in general, and Palestinian women in particular, have already been interpolated in the zionist imaginary. They’re, thus, an apparition only appearing as transient projections between clefts of murderous zionist aggression and feigned Western sympathies contingent upon their consent to be killed and never defend themselves.

The Palestinian people have been positioned outside of themselves, dislocated, and reassembled to fit the zionist frame. This seemingly unending horror takes on the quality of being an accelerated yet slowed dismembering of a people. What is needed now is not more discursive notions of revolution. As the genocidal onslaught of the state kills mothers in front of their children; as it rips unborn children from their mother’s stomach and crushes the fetus to death as in the horrifying case of Mary Turner that Israel tried to hijack as their own, a revolutionary movement not built on frayed and compromised solidarities is needed. What is needed in this juncture is not more Rancièrean ideations of liberation that aim to deny and sublate a sharp hedging forth of working class power that seeks to uproot the imperialist state. What is needed is a revolutionary inquiry and understanding in order to advance our “guide to action.” To heave against state capture, therefore, we must cut through the choking haze of fascist verisimilitudes.

Furthermore, we can not take Western disrealities and its imperial constructions of a self and its world to be truth. We must fight this war; this war that thrust forward and maintains its structural grasp on the spiritual, ideological, economic, and cultural fronts seeking to tighten its psychic grips of oppression. We must develop revolutionary understanding that will in turn serve as a powerful anchorage for our practical work. What Mary Turner suffered and what Palestinian women and all the people of Palestine are suffering are the cleaved and deadened veins of imperialism that spreads its rot all over the world. 

Capitalist/White supremacy cannibalizes those it pushes into a peripheried existence, causing a mass rupture of spiritual atrophy. The colonized are consumed; violated even in death; devoured by the necrophilic fantasies of the imperialist entente. Colonized people, viewed as reflexively and primordially antisemitic, are marked for the slaughter; walking from one death world to another. 

In effect, it is no surprise that Palestinian men are being marked for outright deletion. As history has evidenced with the brutal torture and rape of Black men in the liberal democracy of America, the despotic white, patriarchal machine targets the men of a racialized group first, either wholesale murdering them, or, as Jasbir K. Puar asserts, maims them (Puar, 2017). Thus, in permanently debilitating any fighting-age Palestinian man who may be looked upon as a militant symbol of resistance and hope, the Necro-state of Israel seeks to ensure that  Palestinians are too psychically gutted to even imagine a world free of zionist aggression . However, as the world bears witness, their aims are being powerfully destroyed by the resistance.

In the same way, to paraphrase Dr. Curry, as the capitalist white supremacist state thrust forward tropes of Black men, which by extension means the Black community writ large — cataloging them as violent and hypersexual — it is in the same way it catalogs Palestinian men qua Palestinian community as primordially violent, antisemitic, and hypersexual. Thus, just as the genocidal American logic pathologized Black men who resisted slavery as suffering from Drapetomania, and thus, killable, the zionist ethnostate pathologizes Palestinian men as viscerally terroristic for resisting zionist brutality and brands them as rapists targeted for mass extermination.

“Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7th” by Jeffery Getlemen and Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella exemplifies the fascistic nature of Western liberal feminism. The fundaments of racism that bleed through Western feminist narratives are the very same responsible for the rape, dispossession, torture, and murder of Black women and Palestinian women. Western feminism has always had a vested interest in the rape and slaughter of Black and brown women. Throughout its fascist genealogy, imperial feminism has excluded racialized women and has reproduced the same genocidal logics responsible for slaughtering Mary Turner, her husband, and unborn baby. It exploited, and continues to exploit, Sojourner Truth for its own white supremacist campaign to demonize Black men, and as a result, Black people. While Black women’s babies were fed to alligators, imperial feminism stood by, willing and compliant in the atrocity.

While Black women like Joanne Little are raped and imprisoned, imperial feminism offers anemic solidarities and continues to aid in the structural hardwares at work that enabled the hypersexualizing, de-gendering, cyclical rape, mass lynchings, and mutilation of Black and brown women. It is, furthermore, the same imperial feminism that unceasingly slaughters Palestinian women and girls, leaves babies in incubators to die, and adultifies Palestinian children marking them as terrorists to be killed. It is a feminism that can steal our history of lynching, and mutilation against Black women like Mary Turner and present it to the world as their own and have no one question them about this outright hijacking of Black life, Black truth, and Black resistance. These are the imperial taxonomies of extermination.

The physical and socioeconomic strangulation of the Palestinian people must end. As we reflect upon the insights of Georgi Dimitrov who defined fascism as the open “terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” we must inquire what this means as the Biden administration — a genocide that Kamala vows to uphold under the neoliberal, settler feminist axiom of represention — engages in, if not outright fascism, then a type of proto-fascism (which, I’d argue is even worse as it courses through, desperate and heavy, in insidious movements butchering people under the veils of progression and reform).

As the Palestinian people face a genocidal onslaught by the zionist ethnostate funded, protected, and celebrated by the American genocidaire, it is worth it for us to take into account the salient point George Jackson makes and modern day philosopher Gabriel Rockhill builds upon when analyzing the current political tenor within the neoliberal frame and the two imperialist parties, it is “a difference in mode not in kind” within the greater capitalist schema. These are the very same fascist modalities that lynched Mary Turner, her husband Hayes Turner, and stomped to death her unborn child; the very same modalities that massacred and ripped 6-year-old Hind Rajab from the earth; the same modalities that drove Erica Garner to an early death, and sinisterly tried to hijack our history as their own in order to proselytize the public towards zionism and justify the savage rape, torture, and bloody elimination of a people;  the very same fascist modalities — with their global reach of terror — that continue, undeterred, the genocidal killing of Palestinian people.

Endnotes

• Curry, Tommy J.. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017.
• Woodard, Vincent. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within U.S. Slave Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 
• Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics (Theory in Forms). Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 
• Losurdo, Domenico. Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024.
• Losurdo, Domenico. Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Iskra Books, 2023.
• Soviet Information Bureau. Falsificators of History (An Historical Note). Washington D.C.: Information Bulletin of the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1948.
• Clay-Gilmore, Miron J. (2023). Thinking for the Bound and Dead: Beyond Man(3) Towards a New (Truly) Universal Theory of Human Victory. [Doctoral Thesis, University of Edinburgh]. Era. https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/40895/Clay-GilmoreMJ_2023.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y 
• Losurdo, Domenico. Liberalism: A Counter-History. London: Verso, 2011.
• Puar, Jasbir K.. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 

“The struggle… is in essence a struggle for political domination… The primary issue is control over people… our adversaries have generally employed armed force… primarily as a political abrasive intended to cow the population into submission, collapse all political structures… and erode the appetite for struggle… but the ultimate measure of success or failure will not be relative casualties… but — instead — whose political writ runs… over the population of South Vietnam.”

In July of 1967, the CIA began what it would later call the Phoenix Program. A 2005 U.S. Army proposal paper drafted by Lieutenant Colonel Ken Tovo said Phoenix “directed the participation of key representatives from civil government, police, security services, and military organizations” in Việt Nam with the explicit purpose of destroying support for the Communists in the South. In 1971, after rumors exploded into the public consciousness, the U.S. Congress held a series of hearings on Phoenix where it was described as a “murder program.” In 2015, CIA analyst Samuel Adams described Phoenix as a combined assassination and torture program. The Phoenix Program was shut down on paper in December of 1972, but in reality, as our own Lt. Colonel Tovo noted in his very forthcoming paper, the program continued under CIA direction until the “fall of Saigon” in 1975.

Douglas Valentine, an independent journalist, has spent the last forty years warning the American public about the Phoenix Program and how it has been operationalized within U.S. borders. Today, we are going to talk about what the Phoenix Program still means for the broad group of Communists and anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist activists working to topple the U.S. foreign policy regime of terror, death, and profit. In reality, the Phoenix Program never went away: it was merely transplanted, first to Chile, then to El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, and folded into the “Global War on Terror.” Now it is mushrooming up again as the Department of Homeland Security, militarized police, targeted murder of Black Lives Matter activists, and the not one but many Cop Cities springing up all over the United States.

Before we begin, it is important that we extend our thanks to Twitter user @sxlongshadow for his continued commitment to exposing the Phoenix Program’s involvement in modern domestic affairs and the CIA’s meddling in all aspects of U.S. policy. This article will not be able to replace the primary research conducted by people like Douglas Valentine, but it will lay out the basic operational outline of how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) follows the Phoenix outline and, we hope, provide cautionary information for those who are on the front lines of the struggle today.

Part One: What is the CIA?

To understand the methodology and function of the modern incarnation of Operation Phoenix, we have to understand the formation of the CIA and the national security state.  When we say that fascism is already here, it is the creation of the national security state and the inauguration of a century of surveillance and murder primarily directed against the nationally oppressed and left groups — Communists, Black liberation fighters, and anyone else designated by the decision-makers of white “square” America as outside the social fold. In Marxist terms, the class-conscious advanced workers in all spheres, the nationally oppressed members of internal colonies like the Indigenous peoples and Puerto Rico, and the nationally oppressed members of the internal semi-colonies like the Black Belt, were all targeted as non-people, individuals outside the protection of the legal arrangements of the liberal U.S. state.

The 19th and early 20th century U.S. state was anemic when compared with the vast machinery we now associate with Washington. There were few federal agencies and departments: the State, War, and Treasury Departments (1789), Department of the Interior (1849), of Agriculture (1862), Justice (1870), Commerce (1903), and Labor (1913) were the entire executive apparatus. In 1901, President William McKinley was shot to death by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exhibition. This set off an imagined scare of anarchists and revolution, which was used by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte (yes, of those Bonapartes), to justify the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908. More state machinery was needed to “enforce” Prohibition, which led to the creation of new jobs and departments. By the end of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, pursuing his “program of preparation for fascism and war” (according to the CPUSA before its revisionist turn), created an American version of the German Reich’s controlled labor union, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, by shepherding into existence the Works Progress Administration and the National Labor Relations Board. For those thinking this is a stretch, we refer you to the comments of President Biden this past week that the unions in the U.S. represent a “domestic NATO.”

World War II marks the major transition into a qualitatively different kind of state. In 1942, by Roosevelt’s executive order, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was created to serve as the intelligence agency of the U.S. during the war. One of the key tasks given to the OSS as the war progressed was to ensure the defeat of Communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. To achieve this, the OSS partnered with the Kuomintang in China, and became involved in protecting the drug-running operations that financed the Kuomintang warlord Chiang Kai Shek. To Washington and the bourgeois businesses of the U.S., the OSS was a way to strike against rivals for imperial power — Germany and Japan — as well as to prepare the ground against the Soviet Union for whatever would come after the war.

In 1947 Harry Truman, who was a pure class puppet of the high bourgeoisie and was a compromise vice president to replace the left-leaning Henry Wallace in case Roosevelt should die, signed the National Security Act, creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This new agency was formed out of members of the armed forces intelligence services as well as the OSS, and was immediately directed to continue the former activities of the OSS in combating Communism. The National Security Act forbade the CIA from taking action within the U.S. The newly created agency almost immediately violated its authorizing act and began the process of fighting Communism everywhere: at home and abroad. Among its most well-known domestic spying operations were CHAOS, which served as a counterpoint to the FBI COINTELPRO during the 1960s and 1970s, and the infamous MKULTRA, which began in ignominy as a series of mind-control experiments on U.S. citizens and ended with CIA agents filming U.S. politicians having sex with trafficked minors.

“The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology. It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals,” wrote Marcus Raskin, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in 1976. At home, the national security state gave the office of the president nearly untrammeled power, placing him at the helm of the various national security gangs: the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc. It was Truman himself, in Executive Order 9835, who instituted loyalty oaths for government officials. By 1949, dissenting voices — Communists, socialists, progressives — were being driven out of the unions, which became the vehicle for capitalist control of the labor movement.

Let us consider the words of D. Guerin in his 1939 book, Fascism and Big Business:

[a]n important fact [in the case of Mussolini’s Italy] is that the fascist squadron had at their disposal… not only the subsidies of their financial backers but the material and moral support of the repressive forces of the state: police, carabinieri, and army. The police recruited for the squadrons, urging outlaws to enroll in them and promising them all sorts of benefits and immunity. The police loaned their cars to squadron members and rejected applications for arms permits by workers and peasants while extending the permits granted to fascists. The guardians of “law and order” had their orders to remain idle when the fascists attacked the “reds” and to intervene only if the latter resisted. Often the police collaborated with the fascists in preparing attacks on labor organizations.

The line between criminal gang and police is crossed without compunction in the national security state. Compare this to Noam Chomsky’s introduction to COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom:

One FBI provocateur resigned when he was asked to arrange the bombing of a bridge in such a way that the person who placed the booby-trapped bomb would be killed. This was in Seattle where it was revealed that FBI infiltrators had been engaged in a campaign of arson, terrorism, and bombing of university and civil buildings, and where the FBI arranged a robbery, entrapping a young Black man who was paid $75 for the job and killed in a police ambush.

The CIA was once part of this network of national security gangs, but now stands above it as the premier agency of the national security state. They achieved this position through their control of criminal networks in Eastern Europe and Asia. This led them to infiltrate and essentially take over the Drug Enforcement Agency in order to protect their sources in drug running operations across the world. At the same time, they pioneered the Phoenix Program, which has become the counterinsurgency technique par excellence.

The CIA’s initial role, the destabilization of Communist governments, was undermined by their victory over the Soviet Union in 1991. In order to continue driving its militarism and the national security obsession, the U.S. needed a new enemy, and it turned out that the CIA had already financed them to be an enemy of the Soviets: political Islam. It’s here that we catch up with the 2005 proposal paper by Lieutenant Colonel Tovo and his desire to bring the Phoenix Program in its entirety to the “War on Terror.”

The contradiction for a secret police agency like the CIA is simple. The acts which the CIA targets are essentially non-criminal. Yes, it is against the law to commit treason or to teach of the necessity for the overthrow of the U.S. But there are ten thousand other acts that lead up to this treason that the CIA wants to stop. Subversion, progressivism, unrest, dissent. These are the hidden, non-criminal activities the CIA targets. These acts are usually carried out between willing participants. Talking about revolution isn’t something you do with every person you meet on the street. In order, therefore, to draw out their targets, the CIA needs to manufacture crimes by enticing potential Communists into criminal conspiracies with CIA plants.

To review: on the eve of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, the CIA was one of several terror gangs of secret police operating on U.S. soil. It pioneered a unique cocktail of drug running and hunter-killer squads abroad and domestic spying at home. It was poised at the tip of the U.S. foreign policy spear, to enter into a target country and subvert its government, undermine its authority, assassinate its leadership, and so on. It had already done so in Chile, in Nicaragua, etc. One of the CIA’s previous benefactors, political Islam, came into conflict with the U.S. empire at around the same time. The CIA recommended that they themselves be put in charge of all counterinsurgency operations, and for the U.S. to adopt the same plan the agency had deployed in Việt Nam. Lt. Col. Tovo’s proposal in 2005 is part of that scheme; the paper embodies that recommendation.

The CIA encouraged the federal government to create a Project Phoenix for the U.S. homeland. It engineered the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Part Two: What Is Phoenix?

Philip Agee and the other former spies that ran the magazine CounterSpy between 1973 and 1984 called the Phoenix Program “the most indiscriminate and massive programme of political murder since the Nazi death camps of World War 2.” In 1963, the CIA began operation Chiêu Hôi, “open arms,” which sought to subvert National Liberation Front (a.k.a. Viet Cong) members to defect through amnesty and resettlement. When this failed to produce results, the CIA reoriented and began to train, direct, and equip what were called Counter-Terror Teams (CTTs), later given the rebranded name of Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). This was the beginning of Operation Phoenix.

Phoenix had the following attributes:

1. Action at a distance;
2. Data-driven;
3. Civilian targets;
4. Recruitment of motivated anti-Communists;
5. Combined arms of counterinsurgency;
6. Torture;
7. Recruit, defect, capture, kill;

Action at a distance. Phoenix operated through “local” agencies to increase deniability. CIA advisors sat with Vietnamese National Police and gave them instructions about what they wanted not by doing it themselves, but primarily instructing their GVN subordinates. They created their own branch of the National Police to act on their behalf. If agents instructed information to be extracted by means of breaking ribs, withholding medicine, or attaching electrodes to a detainee, if they ordered their hunter-killer teams to kidnap or execute someone, they could tell Congress that the CIA never actually did anything illegal. A child’s distinction of morality, but such are the men (and now, women) that make up the premier intelligence agency of the U.S. empire.

Data driven. It began with a general census taken through the GVN to help identify the names of the secret Communist Party cell leaders in each village, as well as identifying their family members for later extortion, kidnap, and torture.

Civilian targets. The CIA developed its program not to demoralize the army, the National Liberation Front, but to kidnap, subvert, or kill the civilian members of the Communist Party that ran the administrative roles within Communist organizations. The CIA pursues what Douglas Valentine calls a “political order of battle” as opposed to the armed forces’ military order of battle.

Motivated anti-Communists. The CTTs or PRUs recruited the most highly motivated anti-Communsits and paramilitary forces available; this included deserters, desperados, and criminals facing lengthy prison terms or execution; even American soldiers who were otherwise going to be disciplined would volunteer for the CIA’s special operations roles.

Combined arms of counterinsurgency. The crown jewel of Phoenix from the CIA’s point of view was the Province Interrogation Center, or PIC. PICs were combined-arms centers that coordinated strategic civilian, police, and military intelligence in one place. The PICs were built all over the country, in each province, and that is where the Special Police interrogated “suspects.” Results of these interrogations, usually the identities of civilian Communists, were shared with a CIA paramilitary officer in the province, and the paramilitary officer could then dispatch a CTT to kidnap or kill the target.

Torture. There was widespread use of torture. As Douglas Valentine recounted in the words of a Phoenix officer, torture that was conducted out of sight of the CIA but with their instructions included “rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder, the ‘Bell Telephone Hour’ rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body; waterboarding; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling suspending the prisoner in mid-air while he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.

Recruit, defect, capture, kill. Phoenix established a hierarchy of outcomes. The creator of Phoenix, Nelson Brickham in 1967 explained it: “My motto was to recruit them; if you can’t recruit them, defect them (that’s Chieu Hoi); if you can’t defect them, capture them; if you can’t capture them, kill them.” The COINTELPRO and CHAOS programs were designed to sow distrust among Communist and left organizations by planting false evidence of federal agents in their midst; their crowning achievements were the actual subversion of Communists. The same with the Phoenix program. 

Operation Phoenix went so far as to dress the Special Operations Division police in the clothes and gear of National Liberation units and have them commit atrocious crimes against the people to spread fear of the Communists among the rural population. Subversion can come from the inside, or the outside. These seven elements made up the basis of the Phoenix Program and still serve today as the underlying logic of the Department of Homeland Security.

The War on Terror and the drive for homeland security are merely two sides of the coin of class warfare. The effects of imperialist policies have long been known to us. In 1950, Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, wrote “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken in him buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism…. no one colonizes innocently, [] no one colonizes with impunity either; [] a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization — and therefore force — is already a sick civilization.”

Veterans of the U.S. armed forces make up 20% of police officers. These men and women are sent overseas to engage in targeted murder and terror in Phoenix-like operations in Afghanistan or Iraq, to operate little Phoenix Programs across the world, and then brought back to work in the domestic police force. They are desensitized to killing, torture, and corruption because those tools are taught to them as the legitimate methods of control of foreign territories. They train in Abu Ghraibs abroad only to come home and build little Abu Ghraibs in the U.S. Officers who served in the military are more likely to have fired their weapons while doing police work (32% vs. 26%). The use of SWAT teams and military tactics has ballooned. 

The Chicago Police Department operated a secret black site where suspects were held without booking, shackled, and beaten. Beginning in 2005, the Maryland State Police began keeping a list of death penalty opponents and anti-war protestors as part of their effort to track terror. After Hurricane Katrina, the private security firm Blackwater patrolled the city of New Orleans and operated under DHS authority. Starting with the Reagan-era War on Drugs, police began to receive surplus military equipment from the Pentagon. After 9/11, DHS created anti-terror grants to provide new military equipment — armored trucks, ballistics gear, armored personnel carriers — to police departments. As Valentine says, “[F]our months after 9/11, D[irector of Central Intelligence] George Tenet personally arranged with New York City’s Muslim-hating Mayor Michael Bloomberg to slip senior CIA officer David Cohen inside the NYPD as its deputy commissioner for intelligence.”

The Homeland Security Act of November 25, 2002, created the same centralized structure out of the domestic U.S. law enforcement agencies, including local police departments, as the Phoenix Program did in Việt Nam. This is point 5 of the Phoenix Program as described above. DHS established “fusion centers,” which they call “focal points in states and major urban areas for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between State, Local, Tribal and Territorial, federal and private sector partners.” DHS says the role of these fusion centers is to receive classified information from federal partners, analyze and assess the implication of those reports, gather information to feed back to federal partners, and then disseminate the threats assessed with local law enforcement.

That is point number 1 of the Phoenix Program: act through local agencies. There is at least one fusion center in every state, which permits the CIA to coordinate its so-called counterterrorism efforts through local law enforcement. As of 2018, there are 79 operating fusion centers. These are no different from the Province Interrogation Centers: coordinating hubs between the federal security gangs and local police and paramilitary operations.

It was recently confirmed by the Intercept that the FBI paid a felon to infiltrate Denver’s 2020 racial justice protests. He spent his time trying to convince George Floyd protestors to pick up a rifle so the right-wing paramilitary agents could shoot back. Even though the protestors were too smart to be fooled by this agent provocateur, that didn’t stop the media from creating the circumstances for Kyle Rittenhouse to murder Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. He was recently set free by a Kenosha jury. So much for law and order!

At the top of DHS is the executive management team. Below them are the deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, who manages the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, containing about 1,000 analysts, many from the contributing agencies. There is also an Office of Operations Coordination and Planning, which oversees the DHS National Operations Center (NOC). The NOC acts as a central clearing-house for the fusion centers. DHS employs over 250,000 people. It communicates with tens of thousands of private Terrorism Liaison Officers, or privately-paid secret police. TLOs monitored Occupy and BLM from inside the protests and encampments.

Citing Valentine again, “[a]t the strategic political level it consists of bankers and corporate lobbyists paying elected officials to create tax loopholes for the rich, blanket domestic surveillance that compels working people to live in terror of being fired if they make suspicious utterances, and corrupt officials rewarding their arms industry contributors by laundering taxpayer dollars into the war machine.”

Non-governmental agencies (NGOs) play a huge role in this machine by trammeling revolutionary energy and redirecting it. Grants are doled out by CIA cut-outs and in response, groups report their entire membership and submit expenditure reports directly to Washington.

Part Three: Why Don’t We Recognize the Enemy?

We are trained not to understand the class forces at play in society. There are several tactics used by the law enforcement gangs to shape public perception through the media we consume. For federal agencies, the most prominent is the scheme of “it happened long ago,” a kind of limited hangout. For police and the military, there is what we’ve come to call copaganda. A generation or two ago, these would have all been overshadowed by the sentimentalist portrayal of all these agencies as uncomplicated heroes, but the modern period is one of increasing cynicism as the machinery of capital becomes more and more exposed.

“It happened long ago,” is a rhetorical trick that the CIA and FBI use to downplay their history of misdeeds. They allow certain records of very bad behavior from 30+ years ago to become public, owning up to the things their agencies did in the past. COINTELPRO, CHAOS, MKULTRA, Phoenix? Yes, these agencies did those things. But they happened long ago. We’re a new agency now. Meanwhile, they continue to pursue the exact same strategies that they honed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Copaganda is a topic too broad to cover here, and there are numerous other good sources on it as a media tactic. The news media doesn’t cover the most egregious and flagrant abuses of federal law enforcement agencies because the reporters would lose their access to exclusive stories and contacts within those very same federal gangs. The letter agencies carefully control what information is published.

Together, these strategies feed what CIA agent Cord Meyer dubbed the “compatible left,” liberals and pseudo-intellectuals who claim to challenge power but in fact are easily duped by its narratives and influenced by the ruling class and its nodes of control. Compatible leftists will regurgitate pre-cooked CIA talking points about how everything happened a long time ago, or worse, will actively engage in disinformation, claiming there was never any proof for Iran-Contra or the flooding of Black communities with drugs by the intelligence agencies. During the Trump years, the compatible left was responsible for the Mueller Report amplification, and now works tirelessly to exonerate Biden and Washington from the provable charge of having engaged in genocide in Palestine.

Conclusion

We must hold ourselves apart from NGOs, which are tools of governmental control. We must make a firm break with the compatible left, and reject all attempts to escalate to “direct action” that we do not have a firm strategic plan for. Above all, when analyzing the behavior of police and local authorities, we must never forget that behind every tin badge in the U.S. empire there stands the full might of the letter agencies, coiled and ready to strike.

It is necessary for us to maintain independence of action from the compatible left and to strictly delineate our organizations to be independent of all NGOs and government grants. We cannot take money from the enemy state, for every grant comes with intelligence agents of one stripe or another quick behind it. The maintenance of strict organizational control over our local groups (and, eventually, our all-empire party) is necessary to prevent the kind of backbiting that was fostered by the letter agencies in the last century.

The effect that the federal law enforcement gangs hope to achieve is one of terror and paralysis. We cannot afford to become terrorized or paralyzed. It is not the death of one, or even one hundred, that destroys the movement, but the fear that ripples through it thereafter. For the same reason, we must engineer the production of new Communists as the first and most critical task of any organization we build.

Further, we must insist not only on organizational integrity but on political development as a necessary component of organizing. We cannot fall prey to the trend of hyper-security that plagued the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and 1980s and still haunts us today. This is an outcome actively desired by the CIA and the other federal law enforcement gangs because it cuts Communists off from the wellspring of the movement: the people. We must study the techniques used to build both above- and under-ground movements in China during the struggle against the Kuomintang and the Japanese; we must insist on politically developing our membership; we must above all be principled and reproduce principled members.

As Fred Hampton said — you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can murder a freedom fighter, but you can’t murder liberation. While we cannot underestimate the U.S. Empire’s capacity for violence against us, we must also remember that, by the very nature of this program, the anti-imperialists who came before us have already proven victory is possible. The Communists have beaten the Phoenix Program before, because it undermines the support of the capitalist invaders. We will beat the Phoenix Program again, in the same way.

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!

NIGHT-VISION – Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, by Butch Lee and Red Rover first circulated in the activist underground thirty years ago. Despite presenting a scathing premonition of how capitalism and neo-colonialism would function in the 21st century — a vision that has only become more accurate since its publication — it remains obscure. The text has been relegated to a peculiar limbo. Its content is much harsher and more discomforting than the cultural criticism that resonates in liberal-academic circles, yet NIGHT-VISION also seems fairly unknown among its intended audience of queer-feminist Marxists, Maoists, and anarchists. In the only other review this author could easily locate, one written 13 years ago, J. Moufawad Paul argues that Marxists may disparage the text’s deviations from orthodox Marxism — for instance, its authors ascribe rationality to the anarchy of production and have an anarchistic enthusiasm for “autonomous struggles in the midst of chaos.” But while the text contains some un-Marxist conclusions and unwieldy notions, these are reasons to read NIGHT-VISION, rather than dismiss it. After all, for the immortal science to deserve its status, it should endure this kind of cage rattling.

NIGHT-VISION contains compelling analyses of gender, nationality, and race, and how these have created different classes and new class struggles beyond those typically described in Marxist texts. Even if some of what Lee and Rover have concocted is dubious, it remains worthy of interrogation. Their perspective, and fiery rhetoric, are a welcome change from the mire of discourse on these subjects found both online and in physical organizing spaces. 

Lee and Rover bake race, gender, nationality, etc. into a modern class structure, developing the idea that oppression forges only discrete classes, and that other identities are “class in drag.” For example, instead of using the standard historical phrasing, in which colonization created Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity as races, the authors argue they were created as classes. They argue for a deeper reading of how race, gender, and nationality alter relationships to production. For instance, they expand upon the Sakaist notion that the white proletariat constitutes a separate class from the Black, Indigenous, and Third World proletariat. They depict how the common exploitation of previously distinct African and Indigenous peoples, who had been of separate races and nations, homogenized them into the monolithic oppressed classes of the Black Slave and the Native. Black peoples’ shared experiences as slaves and the imposition of common languages like English or French created the nation-class identity of “New Afrikan.” Similarly, the experience of being marked for extermination through genocide, the cultural genocide against their languages and customs, and the enclosure on “the res” created the Indigenous nation-class, whose role in production, according to the settlers, is to go extinct.

This is a riff, or a logical extension to what Marx and Engels describe when they articulate how economic crises in capitalism are crises of overproduction — it is no longer just commodities, productive forces, or capital itself that are overproduced, and need to be disposed of, but entire societies and classes. This is worth pondering, even if it’s counterintuitive to scientifically break down how dying out is distinct from not owning the means of production.

NIGHT-VISION draws from an extensive theoretical basis. It cites heavily from the expected canon like Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney, but also draws on criminally under-read revolutionaries and theoreticians such as Amilcar Cabral and Samir Amin. The influence of J. Sakai’s Settlers upon the text is abundantly clear. But what Lee and Rover do with these texts is extend their analysis to the furthest peripheries of society — arenas of oppression that frequently go unacknowledged, even by the strata of would-be revolutionaries, communists, etc. The authors apply the traditional Marxist lens of historical materialism to neo-colonial circumstances such as the narcotics economy, the textile sweatshops of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the semi-slave operated semiconductor factories of Hong Kong. They emphasize, through visceral descriptions and first person accounts, the abhorrent conditions that make the Western standard of living possible. Again, their critique invokes Marx himself, in that it is, “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” 

Lee and Rover’s portrayal culminates with the assertion that neocolonialism consists of the squalorous 19th century conditions Marx described in the mines and factories of his time, magnified and permeating to the furthest corners of society, on a world scale. This sounds obvious, but they argue that some Marxists have benefited from their class position to the extent they now misunderstand key Marxist concepts, such as primitive accumulation and the basic definition of certain classes. In Capital Vol.1, Marx defined primitive accumulation as “the expropriation of immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner” that creates the first capital, and makes capitalist relations possible.  In NIGHT-VISION, Lee and Rover contend that most readers of Marx only understand the surface equation of what Marx meant — different Europeans conquering and enslaving first each other, and then broadening their conquest “outward in ever-widening circles of colonialism, in particular to Indian and Afrikan slavery” (185) — but NIGHT-VISION’s most compelling thesis is that primitive accumulation actually began as witch hunts in the 13th century. 

This claim is a bit of a historical oddity, as the historical consensus is that witch hunts didn’t begin until early modernity, i.e. the 16th century. The discrepancy is due to the authors’ conferral of witchlike qualities to the semi-monastic Beguine and Beghard communities that existed in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Though similar to convents, Beguine communes were not formally part of the Church. The authors denote efforts by the Church to expropriate Beguine property and persecution of Beguine women, such as Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1310, as the first witch hunts. 

Lee and Rover further describe how the witch hunts took on institutional form from the 15th century onward, and were social camouflage for the genocide, economic dispossession, and proletarianization of women. Due to the decimation of available labor from centuries of war and the Black Death, European countries and churches had an economic imperative to expropriate widows and any women who resisted their own commodification and their enclosure as the primary inner labor colony.

If you think this sounds exactly like Silvia Federici’s seminal 2004 text, Caliban and The Witch, you’d be right. But while Federici’s text received academic plaudits, was widely translated, and is taught in universities, scarcely anyone’s read 1993’s NIGHT-VISION, regardless of the texts’ sameness. Now, I’m not an intellectual property respecter, or someone who thinks plagiarism is necessarily wrong — in fact, different analysts using the same scientific tools should replicate the same conclusions about history. Still, the variegated treatment of Federici and her works, compared to Lee and Rover and their works, does speak to another of NIGHT-VISION’s conclusions — that the bourgeois classes are intellectually and materially parasitic upon the proletarian classes.

This seems like an obvious and redundant observation, but Lee and Rover use the framework they establish throughout the text to distinguish different class boundaries than those identified by orthodox Marxists. They take Marx’s observation that the first proletarians in England were women, children, and alien labor from England’s first colonies in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and carry it forward to the present. English men from every social strata resisted becoming proletarian for as long as they could, and constituted the first parasitic class. Today’s proletariat are the women, children, and alien labor of the Third World. It also includes the labor of the colonized and dispossessed who live in First World countries, who are collectively called the “Fourth World.” As capitalism expanded, first through colonialism and then neo-colonialism, access to membership in the parasitic classes also expanded, first to other “white” men, then to “white” women, and so on. With time, even formerly proletarian classes, such as the white working class, acquired the capacity for parasitism. After all, although the euro-American auto worker and the South African child semi-slave who mines Vanadium for pennies a day have the same relation to production, they clearly experience different degrees of exploitation. NIGHT-VISION claims that the gulf between these workers places them in different classes. It questions what meaningful solidarity western workers can possibly extend to the practically invisible and oppressed classes of the marginalized world, when their way of life is wholly dependent upon continued exploitation.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” For these reasons, capitalism always contains the conditions for class struggle and its own inevitable demise at the hands of the oppressed. What NIGHT-VISION does best is describe the “disturbances of social conditions,” that it defines as new classes and class struggles. Its study of historic and modern conditions is riveting. It creates a compelling parallel between capitalist crises of overproduction and the capitalist overproduction of class parasites, both of which act in concert to foment capitalism’s destruction. Ironically, the fate of capitalist parasites is the same fate that colonialism and then neo-colonialism attempt to impose upon their subjects — namely, extinction.

Where the text is weakest, unfortunately, is “what is to be done” with the information it presents. Its advocacy for disunity with parasites is only decorative, evocative language for what in practice is a call for unity between oppressed peoples. A communist movement will obviously isolate and repress class parasites. Its construal of uncounted numbers of national, racial, and gendered classes, some oppressed, some parasitic, in a web of struggle, is ultimately facile. After all, “socialism means the abolition of class” — for that to be possible, oppressed classes must align along their common oppressions, and not exacerbate struggles between themselves.

Overall, NIGHT-VISION is a double-edged sword. Its depiction and indictment of neo-colonial realities, “the terrain upon which we’re fighting” is stark, necessary and unforgiving, but it doesn’t offer compelling tactics for fighting on that terrain. Its construction of class creates new questions and as many semantic obstacles as it seeks to overcome. The authors’ tendency to excerpt at length from other works — there’s a thirteen page excerpt from another Butch Lee work, The Military Strategy of Women and Children, for example — may be helpful to a reader who’s new to theory or is unfamiliar with the source material. Lee and Rover may have intended NIGHT-VISION as an accessible compendium of thought for their movement. However, I found the quotations excessive in both length and quantity. Still, NIGHT-VISION’s fiery rhetoric and observations will appeal to readers interested in decolonization and land back, queer liberation, and feminism. At the end I couldn’t help but feel reaffirmed and encouraged to re-read Marx and Fanon, whose indelible presence permeates the work, even if the authors achieved this in an unorthodox manner. Ironically, the white working class — and chauvinists like those at Midwestern Marx, who have recently been attacking the NIGHT-VISION’s theoretical tradition — would benefit immensely from reading it, but they are also the most likely to dismiss it outright.   

—David Beck, President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, 1952-1957, until his indictment on charges of embezzlement

More and more today, our struggle as the working class in the U.S. Empire is embodied in unionism. This is a return to something that had been long abandoned. The Bessemer and Long Island Amazon drives, Starbucks United, service unions, Railroad Workers United, the UPS-Teamsters dispute, the ILWU strike, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes — these are merely the most visible of the recent upsurge in labor struggles. There’s a new generation of labor standing up to Capital. We’re becoming more and more conscious of our existence as the working classes: that we share common economic, political, and social demands. As this resurgence of class consciousness spreads and grows, we have to take stock, pause for a moment, and learn our history. The lessons of the last century are crying out to us: take heed! Unless we look back, we won’t be able to chart a course forward. We have to learn from our defeats, because the capitalists won’t forget them. In fact, they already learned from the past century and have been applying all their efforts to  crush us.

Why did the working class movement abandon unionism as a strategy for organization?

Why do the unions, as they exist today, seem to be on the side of Capital?

Why can’t we seem to expel the cop unions from our international organizations? Why do our international organizations force contracts on us that we don’t want? Why, for instance, did the Teamsters Brotherhood International force the UPS workers to ratify a despised contract in 2018, in the face of the popular vote of the membership?

How can we organize in a way that isn’t undermined, diverted, and destroyed by the capitalists and their pet politicians?

Which Side Are You On?

You know it in your flesh and bones: when you go to work, you’re at the mercy of your boss. Your boss — probably a manager, someone employed by the owner of the company to monitor you and make sure they can get the most out of your work — can change your hours, change your job description, give you more work, ask you to work on weekends, even fire you for any reason or for no reason. If you say “no” enough times, they can fire you.

It’s so self-evident why this is the case that it seems almost trite to spell it out: the employer owns everything that you use to do your job. If they don’t want you there, they can call the police to get rid of you. The employer has a huge amount of money. If they don’t want to pay you, that’s it — you’re done. In contrast, individual employees have no leverage over the employer. If you get angry and quit, that doesn’t hurt the employer. They’ll find someone else to fill your place. You have no leverage. They have all the power.

Now, if you’re in a union, if you’re organized, that boss lacks this power. By combining, by agreeing to act together, you can take back some of the leverage the boss has. It makes no difference if one person quits or withholds their labor, but if many people do it simultaneously, it costs the boss money and worse, from the employer’s point of view, it proves that the workers can extract concessions by organizing and refusing to work.

This fundamental imbalance in power is part of capitalism. As long as capitalism persists, workers will have an incentive to organize collectively against the employer. At the end of the day, this threat of work-stoppage, of a strike, is the greatest weapon we have and is the final resort in a labor-management relationship when the employer tries to exercise their power over the workers.

That’s the theory behind unions, and how they’re supposed to work. So why, in the modern world, does that not seem to be the case? Why do we still see strikes being broken, unions being busted, and unionized workers accepting decreases in pay, concessions, and bad contracts?

There are some terms that would be helpful in answering this question. There are two overall shapes that unions can take: craft unionism, on the one hand, and industrial unionism on the other. Then, there are two philosophies that unions can adhere to: social unionism and its polar opposite, business unionism.

Craft unionism is the organization of a union on a narrow basis — everyone in a certain trade belongs to the same union. This divides workers at the same site into different unions and, as a result, capitalist employers can play the different groups of workers off one another and try to keep them divided.

Industrial unionism is the organization of everyone in a given industry into a single union, preserving solidarity and permitting the maximum amount of force to be concentrated against the employer.

Social unionism sees union organization as part of a broader social program to empower workers; this was the form unionism in the U.S. almost invariably took until the late 1930s.

Business unionism sees unions as a business and their membership as clients. The philosophy of the business union is to restrict union struggles to one narrow field of action: wages and benefits. Business unions openly admit that they believe that management has the “right” to make many decisions: hiring and firing, closing plants, etc. Business unionism has all but conquered every major union in the U.S. Empire. It is the professed and avowed philosophy of every one of the big “International” unions — the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, etc.

This still doesn’t provide an answer to our questions, although you can begin to see the outlines of one. To get the full picture, first we have to look at how U.S. law has treated and shaped unions, and then we have to examine how business unionism has manifested within the movement.

The Enemy Without

The U.S. law has never been friendly to unionism. In the 19th century, unions were prosecuted as illegal conspiracies. Working people struggled against the government for formal recognition under the law and, after several major uprisings in the late 19th century — the 1877 mass uprising, which led to the short-lived St. Louis Commune, the 1886 Haymarket Massacre, the 1894 Pullman Strike, and others — labor organization  finally won some legal protections — the bare minimum.

The law keeps working class organizations divided, makes it difficult (if not impossible) for new unions to be certified, and has been transformed to be a tool of the employers rather than a tool for unions.

The law that governs labor disputes and union certification is the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the “NLRA”). The NLRA establishes an all-empire board of arbitrators, the National Labor Relations Board or NLRB, that oversees unions and labor complaints. The NLRA determines the form that unions have to follow to become certified, or recognized, at workplaces and gives labor protections against suppression by employers. Under the NLRA, employers can be enjoined from interfering with the exercise of their employees in seeking self-organization, forming unions, and engaging in collective bargaining. It also grants the Board jurisdiction over employers who try to dominate or interfere with unions, engage in discriminatory  hiring to encourage or discourage union membership, fire employees because they filed charges or gave testimony under the NLRA or “refuse to bargain collectively.”

None of these rights are self-enforcing. That is, if an employer (or their managers) does one of these things, you have to file a labor complaint with the NLRB. The NLRB then investigates the complaint and determines whether it will take action on your behalf. In the meantime, if the company fired you, you stay fired. The remedies available to workers when their bosses commit these “unfair labor practices” are limited to back pay, being re-hired, and monetary damages. NLRA cases take years to prosecute. The average time for the NLRB to investigate and decide if it will take a case is 2 months. The average time it takes an NLRB case to resolve is around 650 days. That’s 650 days after they complete their investigation that you might get your job back.

The NLRA was amended by what’s called the Taft-Hartley Amendment in 1947. Taft-Hartley edited the law to make labor unions liable for unfair labor practices, just like employers. In addition, along with the Employment Act of 1990, it makes it an unfair labor practice for a union to engage in what’s called a “sympathy strike” — that is, to strike in support of another union. It also makes “secondary boycotts” illegal — that is, to boycott or strike a company that does business with a struck company. 

For instance, let’s say you work at the countrywide grocery chain, Pause and Procure. The shipping company, Containers Inc., delivers supplies to the grocery stores. If the Containers Inc. union strikes against Containers Inc. for firing someone, and Containers Inc. management hires scabs to defeat the union strike, your union at Pause and Procure is legally prohibited from striking, boycotting, or picketing Pause and Procure for continuing to work with Containers, Inc. and their scab drivers.

How Did It Get That Way?

The process that culminated in these laws was ongoing through the 20th century. It accelerated when finance capital in the U.S. firmly and forever merged with industrial capital and the largest shareholders of major corporations became the banks and mutual funds. For instance, Vanguard, a mutual fund, owns the majority of shares in 330 of the top 500 companies in the U.S. That’s two-thirds of the world’s most important stocks according to Investor’s Business Daily. Their competitor, BlackRock, is the largest investor in another 38 of those top 500 companies. “Management” is no longer a person or even a particular corporation’s CEO — it’s a faceless multi-corporation conglomerate that demands unions be broken both on the shopfloor and in the government. Since 1970, these financial corporations have driven U.S. companies to attack unions in the courtroom and in the halls of Congress, and they have succeeded.

Why do they want to break unions? Well, let’s look at the source of profits for U.S. companies over time: in 1950, 3.4% of total profits made by U.S. companies came from operations abroad. In 1965, that number was 5.9%. In 1970, it was 9.4%. By 1980, it had gone up to 15.6%. In 2017, it was 44% of all profits made by U.S. companies. As the percentage of profit acquired overseas increased, the profitability of domestic investment decreased.

The rate of profit, the profitability of investment, in the U.S. was decreasing for two reasons: the increase in machinery costs, and the increase in labor costs. Both of these had increased, at least partially, due to concessions won by unions. Corporations don’t want to pay U.S. labor costs. When they are obligated to pay such costs, they fight tooth and nail to keep them as low as possible. This necessitates crushing workplace organizations, and any inkling of solidarity among the working classes. 

In a 1970 congressional report, it was noted that “close to three-quarters of total U.S. exports and upwards of one-half of all imports [were] transactions between the domestic and foreign subsidiaries of the same multinational conglomerate corporations.” The post-war boom secured record profits at home, and was primarily built by the U.S. state securing its position as global hegemon, dominating global markets, and sending forth billions of dollars in the Marshall Plan to “rebuild” Europe,. That profitability declined in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to the domestic industrial slump and the consolidation of finance capital in every industry. In the face of declining profits, corporations began to squeeze the maximum surplus from workers, and claw back the previous decades’ labor victories.

Corporate Scheming

This is the world we live with today: a corporate America that is openly and brutally hostile to union organizing — as vicious as any boss of the early unionizing period, and as cruel as any of the men at Blair Mountain or the Coal Wars. They’ve learned new tricks, and now they have the NLRB to help them. We aren’t organizing and fighting for our unions under the same conditions as those late-19th and early-20th century pioneers. The bosses have cut their teeth, and now they have a whole new assortment of tricks and legal powers at their beck and call. If they don’t call armed Pinkertons to shoot up workers’ barracks anymore, it’s only because they no longer need to.

U.S. corporations have adopted tactics to indefinitely delay elections for union certification. Because these representation elections can’t be held while there are any unfair labor practice charges pending, management simply ensures there are always grievances from the employees. J.P. Stevens put off a union vote at its Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, plants for over 10 years using this method.

The number of unfair labor practice charges against employers has continued to grow over time. From 3,655 in 1957 to 20,311 in 1975, they exploded as employers fought against workers. By 2020, that number had stabilized around 20,000 a year. Employers consistently provoke unfair labor complaints by their actions; part of this is clearly intended to bog down the NLRB and prevent it from timely resolutions.

Corporations created lobbying bodies in the late 1960s and early 1970s that have carried on the fight against unionization behind closed doors, in the offices of  Senators, Congresspeople, and Presidents. In 1972 trade associations contributed $8 million to elections. In 1984, business PACs contributed $23.6 million to Republican congressional candidates and $20.7 to Democratic candidates. In 1978, the Wall Street Journal noted that “Business PACs aren’t experiencing any difficulty in finding outstretched hands, and they seem to be getting their money’s worth from a growing contingent of Democrats.” Under Carter, the White House had an open door policy for businessmen to come and air their grievances. Not so for labor. While the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, labor has suffered some of its most stunning defeats. Since 1971, the only significant piece of labor-friendly legislation to pass while Democrats controlled congress was the Family Medical Leave Act in 1993.

The capitalists have reorganized themselves; they are marching together under one banner, and they’ve identified their enemy: us.

The Enemy Within

Yet we aren’t immediately able to confront the bourgeois state or the corporation as our enemy. There’s something that we have to deal with first, before we can get to them — the business union. We can trace the origin of business unionism to the American Federation of Labor — the AFL, now one half of the merged AFL-CIO — and its founders, men like Adolph Strasser, who said, “We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We are fighting for immediate objects – objects that can be realized in a few years.” As George Meany, the AFL leader responsible for merging with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) put it in 1955, “We are dedicated to freedom… through a system of private enterprise. We believe in the American profit system.” John L. Lewis, a business unionist who was integral to founding the CIO said, “Trade unionism is a phenomenon of capitalism quite similar to the corporation. One is essentially a pooling of labor for the purpose of common action in production and sales. The other is a pooling of capital for exactly the same purpose. The economic aims of both are identical – gain.” Regardless of any concessions that these men won for the working class, their intent was never to actually triumph over the capitalist system.  They were only ever reformers, who were content with the continuation of exploitative systems so long as their people got a slightly larger piece of the pie.

Union organizers like these men eventually recognized the profitability in what they were doing and  decided that business unions were just that, businesses, and they should be run like businesses — from the top down. Business unions attempt to routinize and bureaucratize bargaining. The big umbrella unions — the “International Unions” — centralized all of their processes in the 1940s. Contracts were extended from one year to three, giving more power to the International Unions in bargaining. The Internationals developed bargaining patterns, centralized methods and norms of bargaining. They hired an explosion of administrative staff. Labor unions employ some 105,000 people in the U.S. Empire. This glut of administrators serves to bureaucratize and endlessly convolute labor bargaining. 

As an example, United Auto Workers didn’t get any new union members from 1949 to 1970, but its administrative staff grew from 407 to 1,335. Sidney Lens, a labor leader, wrote that the representative from the central offices

develops a whole set of special attitudes. Since he is appointed by the regional directors or top officers rather than elected by the membership, he tends to lose a feeling of responsibility. His post is now a ‘job,’and he is no longer vitally concerned about pleasing his own sense of mission as in pleasing his regional director, or at least keeping clear of his lash. His own salary and benefits become progressively larger by comparison with the members who still work at the lathe, and his economic stake tends to make him moderate just as the secure doctor or lawyer tends in the same direction. He is now an ‘organization man.’

While the welfare state grew in Europe, in the U.S. Empire it was replaced by benefits-bargaining from the business unions. The immense wealth flowing into the U.S. from its conquest of the global markets gave domestic workers healthcare, paid time off, bonuses, child care assistance, life insurance, and pension plans. Rather than receive the traditional blessings of the welfare state from the government, which represents the collective arrangements and desires of the capitalists themselves, workers in the U.S. Empire must cajole these benefits from their individual employers. In 1951 fringe benefits accounted for 17% of the value of compensation of manual laborers. By 1981, that had risen to 30% on average, and firms covered by the former CIO unions were spending 50% of all their labor costs on these fringe benefits.

In the 1920s, only a handful of companies like Ford provided a limited number of benefits like company clinics or doctors. By the early 1980s, 75% of contracts had health care programs and 60% had major medical benefits. By 1980, over 130 million Americans were covered by employer or union health care plans.

Because strikes forced employers to provide benefits, strikes were tamed and controlled. The “contract strike,” the only kind that’s now legal thanks to the business unions’ development of the “no strike clause.” This has deprived unions of their most powerful weapon so long as a contract is in place. The NLRA doesn’t recognize spontaneous strikes, so-called wildcat strikes,  and employers are permitted to fire strikers when they violate these clauses — that is, when they strike while their contracts are still in force. They remember their defeat by wildcat strikes such as the Flint Sit-Down Strike, which resulted in the unionization of the American automobile industry. Locals can no longer call strikes of their own; strikes must be authorized by leadership, and they are now run as a more or less passive affair with a few token pickets at the gate or on the street while the majority of members are told to stay home. Thus, strikes today are a sad mockery of those in the past. Even the aforementioned reformers staged dozens of spontaneous strikes that terrified the capitalist class. 

Bargaining secrecy — that is the use of non-disclosure agreements and secret bargaining teams — has become the norm. That means the members don’t even know what the offers and counter-offers are being made between the union and the company. Just like the latest Teamster-UPS contract, members are left with nothing to do but wait for reports. As we’ve reported in the past, union leadership often claims that this kind of closed bargaining makes it easier to reach an agreement with management. In fact, it’s only “easier” because the labor bureaucrats can claim that they were outmaneuvered and that the contract they came out of the bargaining room with was as “good as they could get.”

This type of secret bargaining goes hand-in-hand with the business unions’ explicitly stated philosophy that they are in partnership with the managers — that, in fact, the goal of union organizing is to ensure the owners get enough money so they don’t close the factories or warehouses. The bankruptcy of this approach was revealed in its full, vile, form during the Chrysler bailout of 1979. To protect the rest of the domestic economy, the U.S. Congress approved a bailout plan to prevent Chrysler from collapse but the banks and the financial capitalists that run the show wanted concessions from the union as part of the plan. Chrysler was eventually given $1.5 billion in loans and credits but the United Auto Workers had to agree to wage freezes, the loss of $125 million in expected wage increases from nonunion staff, and, eventually, a $1.15-an-hour wage cut in UAW wages. Doug Fraser, then-president of UAW, was rewarded for his loyalty in pushing these horrific concessions with a seat on the Chrysler Board of Directors.

The UAW used this kind of back room bargaining to agree to a total of $203 million in wage and benefit concessions and $100 million in deferred pension funds payments. What was Fraser’s public position, so he could sell this to the thousands of Chrysler autoworkers? That “these actions make it clear that UAW has met its responsibilities in the broad effort to save Chrysler workers’ jobs and restore the company to stability.” Even before the vote was taken, Fraser and the UAW Vice President had gotten on a plane to meet with Chrysler exec Mark Stepp in Washington with Vice President Walter Mondale. The UAW’s monthly magazine Solidarity reported “We know how to strike, how to fight, and how to bargain. We don’t have to prove those things as much any more. What we do have to prove is that we can solve problems.”

During World War II, Communists, other tendencies of socialists, and various other militant groups formed organizations within their unions to debate policy and to vie for power. These debates were a source of union democracy. No matter how bureaucratic the authority the union leadership secured over the bargaining process, the top leaders still had to contend with opponents in their rank-and-file membership. Sadly, in each of the major unions, this opposition was systematically defeated. The internal democratic life of the union was crushed, and political pluralism was reduced to a mere anti-Communist crusade by the mid-1940s. Red-baiting, which had little traction during the ‘30s and the war, exploded into McCarthyism. The leaders who adhered to business unionism purged their ranks of Communists and other socialists. The 1946 CIO convention banned members of the Communist Party USA from membership. The question asked by leadership was, “Are you going to be loyal to the CIO or the Communist Party?”

The now well-known tactic of cutting local organizations off from one another became the standard in the unions. Rank-and-file workers lacked (and often still lack!) any means to communicate with their counterparts in other areas. The business unions became an entrenched, self-perpetuating clique of leaders at the top dictating all terms and making all important decisions.

It is only relatively recently that groups within the big unions have once again built up enough power to challenge this trend. Organizations like the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and UPS Teamsters United (to name a few within the Teamsters themselves) have begun the titanic effort to address business unionism by attacking the very structures that have historically been used to silence the voices of the workers.

So What Do We Do?

Lenin called the tendency of unions to pursue narrow economic gains trade-union consciousness. U.S. unions have a different term for the same thing: business unionism. One of the leading theorists of the tame labor struggles in the U.S. Empire, Gregory Mantsios, wrote in 1998 that unions

exist in order to address the immediate and practical concerns of unionized workers. The objective of unions is to protect their members economically, primarily by negotiating and enforcing the union contract. Unions are seen essentially as service organizations, whose task is to ensure fair wages, increase job security, protect against victimization, improve the conditions of work, and provide additional economic benefits… In the arena of  politics, unions are concerned only with those issues that have a direct or indirect impact on unions, their members, and the industries in which they function.

When capitalists are not capable of actually making unionization illegal, this is what they dream that unions should be. When the ruling class isn’t actively union-busting, it has focused its efforts on restricting the activity of unions to narrow, trade-union consciousness — to business unionism. A business union will never challenge the capitalist status quo. It will never stand in solidarity with migrant laborers, or with Black workers who are excluded from the workplace. It will protect its members first and foremost, and do that by restricting access. Even unions that once acted broadly for the benefit of all workers have been corrupted by this tendency toward business unionism.

Nothing is easier than allowing this blinkered, narrow vision to predominate among union members; it is the natural, organic consciousness that develops out of the struggle of the workers in combination against the owning class. First becoming aware of their narrow, shared economic interests, unionized workers will tend to become closed-off, focused on protecting the jobs that exist now, for the workers who are members today. It is by funding, rewarding, and exaggerating this natural tendency that the capitalists have made their deepest inroads to disarm the threat posed by unionized labor in the U.S. Empire — but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Solidarity is the ethos of revolution.

The struggle against capitalism is not a narrowly economic struggle.

It’s not enough to merely join a union. Joining a union is joining an organization that long ago betrayed the working classes in an effort to come to an agreement with the bosses. Similarly, it’s not enough for new unions to be created if they will fall into this same tendency. Labor bureaucrats claim that business unionism gets the goods, but in fact it’s nothing more than begging for crumbs. When the bosses’ table is overflowing, the crumbs will come, but when it comes time to tighten their belts, the business unions will be first to go starving.

The business unions can’t act in solidarity. They’re scrupulously observant of labor laws (even when their leaders don’t seem to care at all about breaking criminal laws) and the labor laws were designed to break up solidarity. Solidarity is acting in support and defense of another person without knowing them; it’s supporting a stranger on their own terms. It is the fundamental ethic of the workers’ movement! It’s only in solidarity that we can overcome the competition that capitalists sow between workers.

Therefore, before unions can be the vessel of a mature workers’ movement, those unions must be won away from the business unionist model. We have to defeat the narrow parochialism of craft unionism and the entrenched leadership of business unionism. We must form organizations and fight within our unions, for solidarity between all oppressed peoples, sexes, and classes. The first stage of that fight is the fight against union leadership, to democratize the unions. Until this occurs, modern unions will continue to shamble along as undead husks of what they once were.

Almost nowhere in the United States is the class struggle sharper, or more one-sided, than in Atlanta, Georgia. And almost nowhere can the dynamics of race in that class struggle be more clearly seen. This has been true for years. In 2018, the Guardian devoted a week of coverage to the city, laying out in great detail a situation which was, even then, remarkably bad. The passage of five years, with the pandemic and the political unrest those years brought, have only made things worse.

Atlanta’s population in 2019 was 51% Black. By the following year, that number had fallen to 47%.  This was the first time in its modern history the city did not have a Black majority. In January of 2019, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the city was $1,868. By January of 2023, that had gone up to $2,212. The national average rent over the same period increased from $1,465 in 2019 to $1,900 in early 2023, placing Atlanta well ahead of the national curve for the period. These numbers clearly show a city that is rapidly becoming both whiter and more expensive.

This process is known as gentrification, of course, and it has arguably been the primary contradiction faced by the U.S. working class over the last several decades. In Atlanta, several factors have come together to create a situation that surpasses the scale and scope of the problem elsewhere. The most obvious of these, as a driver of the increasing whiteness and costliness of the city, has been the relocation of much of the U.S. film and television industry to Atlanta. Hollywood has come to town, and both the city and the state have rolled out a red carpet worthy of the gaudiest, most decadent film premier.

In the period 2019-2020, Georgia was home to an estimated total of 641 film and television productions, which brought over $5 billion into the state.  The vast majority of these productions were and are based in Atlanta. And what led them all here was simple: money. Georgia, from 2008 onward, has offered the industry heavy incentives in the form of tax rebates and other enticements. And the local government has allowed the influx of film industry people to essentially colonize the city. No effort has been made to protect longtime residents from the economic impact of a tidal wave of rich Californians and New Yorkers crashing into the place. Quite the opposite, in fact. The city has declared class war on its poorest people and their neighborhoods. And the army that fights that war is the Atlanta Police Department.

An excellent case in point comes from a neighborhood known as the Old Fourth Ward, which sits east of downtown. This was Dr. King’s neighborhood, and he and his wife are buried there. It is also rapidly being transformed into precisely the kind of petty bourgeois Potemkin village that has sprung up all over the city, to house and amuse the white gentry. Gated communities of condos or townhouses that come with game rooms and gyms, dog parks and pools, surrounded by upscale restaurants and shops to soak up the residents’ spending money. Many of these also feature a “market,” essentially a high-end mall food court minus the mall, of which there are many throughout the city. The one in the Old Fourth Ward is called the Krog Street Market. To go there on a weekend evening is to stumble into a stereotypical yuppie’s wildest dreams. Throngs of white people peppered with a few darker faces, all of them frolicking in their artificial paradise, dropping fistfuls of cash. What one does not see is any poor people, and very few Black people, who are not at work. This is one of Atlanta’s most historic working class Black neighborhoods.

The question is how the Old Fourth Ward got this way. We are fortunate to have a firsthand account from a former Atlanta police officer who, disgusted by what he was ordered to do and why, not only quit over it but went to the media. This was Tom Gissler, which may not be his real name. According to Gissler, in 2020, after three years on the force, he was given very specific instructions by his superiors: target the people living in an Old Fourth Ward complex called Bedford Pines Apartments, which is privately owned public housing. Gissler’s orders were explicit: get the people living there on anything you can, parking violations, old warrants, petty drug charges, whatever. Let nothing slide. According to Gissler these orders were unusual:

It made me very curious. So on my own time…I drove over there and…was like: “Hey, this is what I’m being asked to do. Why do you think that is? What’s going on?”

A homeowner in the area was very frank with me. He said the guys who own Bedford Pines got their tax bill last year, and their taxes were assessed based on all the gentrification that’s happening in the area. And so they wanted to move everybody out of these apartments and knock ’em down and rebuild these nice expensive apartments and the government said no. And so then they said, “Well, that’s ok, we’ll just increase the rent.” They tried to increase the rent and the Section 8 guys came back out and said, “No, you can’t do that either.”

The only way you can evict or do anything like that is if the person who [lives in] the apartment is convicted of a felony. So the Bedford Pines guys just went to the police department and said: “We want you to police in here, and we’re going to give you a section of Bedford Pines to actually have office space. And I want you to lock up as many people as possible so we can make these apartments vacant and we can knock ’em down.”

I go to my supervisors: Is this what the case is? And they looked at me like, what are you, stupid? Of course, why else would we be doing this?

The pattern of aggressive policing to drive out working class Black residents that Gissler witnessed in the Old Fourth Ward has been carried out in neighborhoods around the city. Summerhill, Peoplestown, Pittsburgh, the Bluff; the list is long and growing. Once the original residents are mostly gone, the city and their preferred developers move in and buy up whole blocks. These are then leased out to white hipster capitalists, who renovate the buildings and open their foodie restaurants, their breweries and cafés, their boutiques and yoga studios. Fast forward two years and the high-end yuppies start to move in. They displace the hipsters, and the whole grim circus rolls on to the next neighborhood. And if, somewhere along the way local residents become frustrated enough to protest or otherwise object, the police come back, make more arrests and bust whatever heads catch their eye. Many of the city’s numerous gang prosecutions are rooted in this process.

This has gone on in Atlanta for years, at least as far back as the preparations for the 1996 Olympics. It might appear, from the outside, to be strange. Atlanta is a Black-controlled city, after all. The offices of mayor, police chief and city council have been mostly occupied by Black people since the 1970s. The city has long been held up as the most successful, practical, capitalist answer to the demands of ’60s radicals for Black power. And yet the policies that slowly eroded that Black majority have been relentlessly pursued. One might be tempted to conclude, on this basis, that the primary contradiction in Atlanta is class rather than race. As we shall see later on, this is not really the case, though class does play such an outsized role in the political economy of race in the city that the two are difficult to separate.

The best guides through this terrain are E. Franklin Frazier’s 1955 book The Black Bourgeoisie, Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture’s 1967 work Black Power, and the work of the late Glen Ford on the concept of the “Black misleadership class.” The short version is that the Black political leadership in Atlanta employs a rhetoric crafted to appeal to their working class constituents, while their policies advance other interests. Viewed through this lens, the situation becomes more clear.

Things in Atlanta would likely have continued this way until the remaking of the city was complete, if not for 2020. That year, the covid pandemic collided with outrage at the police murder of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and many others. There was a serious uprising in Atlanta. It was in the aftermath of that uprising that a proposal was put forward which had, as its stated goal and purpose, rewarding the police after a long hot summer. The centerpiece of that proposal was a massive, new, state-of-the-art police training facility.

This announcement was years in the making. Research on “what a training center would look like and what it would cost” began as early as 2015. By January 2021, after months of reactionary media coverage about crime waves and low police morale, conditions were ripe. The mayor at that time, Keisha Lance Bottoms, rolled out “One Atlanta: One APD,” a multi-pronged plan to “bolster police presence, training, and morale.” The plan called for the expansion of the city’s already vast surveillance network, the targeting of “nuisance properties” such as bars and nightclubs with increased force, and the forming of partnerships with the FBI and local sheriffs to “put more officers on the street.” 

Lance Bottoms’ plan further promised to “explore a public safety training academy that expands recruitment classes and ensures that police officers and firefighters have high-quality facilities and training.” On April 1, 2021 plans for the training academy were finally revealed. The $90 million project, to be constructed on a parcel of forested land in neighboring Dekalb County, was to include housing for police academy trainees, many shooting ranges, an explosives testing and training site, and large a mock city for urban warfare and counterinsurgency training. It was this last feature that led opponents of the project to give it the name which stuck: Cop City.

Opportunism from the White “Left”

Right Opportunism 

The proposal to construct Cop City was met with harsh criticism and resistance from around Atlanta. An eclectic coalition of neighborhood associations, police/prison abolition groups, environmentalists, liberals, democratic-socialists, and anarchists began to come together. Soon they had a slogan: Stop Cop City.

Activists focused their efforts on mobilizing community pressure on the City Council to vote the proposal down. They canvassed neighborhoods, circulated petitions, held rallies, marches, and town hall meetings. As opposition to the plan grew, the city made a few calculated concessions. The 150-acre project was scaled back to 85 acres, and provisions were added to plant 100 hardwoods for every tree removed during construction. Meanwhile, the official city council vote on the project was twice delayed by allegations that the “listening sessions” being held to gather community feedback were a sham. Eventually, the Council set up a phone line that people could call to make a short recording of whatever they had to say. This resulted in 17 hours worth of audio, about 70% of which was firmly against the project. Nevertheless, on the evening of September 8, 2021, the City Council voted to greenlight Cop City by a margin of 10-4, swatting away four months of mobilization like a gnat.

This was of course predictable, and indeed it was predicted. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s local Steering Committee, told a reporter at an August protest outside City Hall, that DSA thought the measure would pass. “We just believe that Councilwoman Shephard isn’t actually listening to her own constituents, and she is doing what she wants to do to support the Atlanta Police Foundation’s funders.” For some organizers, the obstinance of local officials was more than just likely, it was necessary. A former member of a local organization called Defund Atlanta Police Department, Refund Communities (DARC), Jesse Pratt López, stated in a recent interview that the defeat came as no surprise. It was, in fact, the very reaction the coalition had built their strategy around. According to Pratt López, the goal was to radicalize the masses by leading them through a futile civic exercise, thereby catalyzing a more militant movement against the project. Following the vote, however, rather than picking up steam the first iteration of the movement to Stop Cop City began to fissure.

Within days of the city council vote, DARC itself would dissolve. Its last act was the publication of an open letter, endorsed by a majority of active members, explaining the reasons for this dissolution. The letter describes a pattern of chauvinism and anti-Blackness in a movement riddled with internal contradictions. It begins: “In early September, our abolitionist group…informally dissolved after multiple white and non-Black organizers in DARC and Atlanta DSA completely eroded the trust and confidence of Black comrades in DARC. These same organizers harmed DARC’s relationship with other coalition groups that collaborated on the #StopCopCity campaign.” The letter goes on to allege that DSA’s leadership used the movement and the moment to advance their own goals: “While the campaign began as a horizontal movement-building project, it became clear that Atlanta DSA sought oversight and control (financially and structurally).” The DSA, according to DARC, saw the campaign against Cop City primarily as a way to recruit people into their own formation, and attempted to take over the coalition’s messaging and strategy. A text message from a member of the local DSA Steering Committee, sent the week of the council vote and published with the open letter, reveals them advising others to use this period of “peak attention” to “try to absorb as many people into DSA as possible, win or lose.”  

DARC’s letter helps explain the tactic of lobbying the City Council to vote the project down while knowing damn well they would not. The notion that working class Atlantans, people who live their entire lives in the trenches of the city’s class war, require a civics lesson to be radicalized is self-evidently chauvinistic. Such a plan coming from a broad, predominantly Black, coalition of locals makes no sense; but coming from a clique of mostly white, petty bourgeois electoralists, it does. DSA appears to have been more interested in growing their organization than winning a fight they always expected to lose. In pursuit of that goal, it strong-armed its way to the front of a movement of working class Black people, maligning and alienating fellow organizers as it went.

It is no surprise to see DSA, in this particular case and as a broader organization, move this way. It is an instrument, not of the working class, but rather of, by, and for petty bourgeois opportunists. Born out of the work of Michael Harrington, himself a petty bourgeois opportunist, amid the pervasive anticommunism of the Cold War, the DSA was formed in the early 1980s by a merger of two smaller social-democrat formations. Then as now, DSA’s entire reason for existence is to be a place for liberals who want to go further than the Democratic Party, but not “too far,” i.e.: not toward outright, mature communism. Its theoretical framework is derived largely from the work of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, two bourgeois collaborators who were soundly refuted by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg over a century ago.

Even the group’s name gives this away, speaking as it does, as Kautsky did, of “democracy” without going the necessary further step to ask: democracy for which class? The group has never, at any point, revealed an accurate understanding that everything in class society has a definite class character, and that which is not explicitly proletarian is bourgeois, because it derives from the culture and ideology of the bourgeoisie. As such, the DSA’s attempt to collage together a form of socialism that the bourgeois state will tolerate is doomed from the start, because this can only be accomplished by leaving the essence of Marxism, its scientific revolutionary character, behind. The end result can only be a reformist, radical liberalism at best, though more frequently such formations function, objectively, as agents of the bourgeoisie. The only real question being whether they are themselves aware of this or not.

Opportunism of this type arises in tandem with imperialism, as a fraction of imperialist superprofits are tossed to a section of the working class like so many crumbs. It emerged in the context of the First World War, which the opportunists supported in collaboration with their national bourgeois, in defiance of a revolutionary understanding of that war as an essentially imperialist project. In the heat of this controversy, Lenin defined opportunism simply as “an alliance between sections of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat.” DSA’s actions in Atlanta clearly demonstrate the accuracy of this definition. They attempted nothing but the advance of their own short-term interests over those of the majority Black proletariat of Atlanta. And they accomplished nothing but furthering the bourgeoisie’s goal of building Cop City, in that they seriously damaged the working class resistance to the project in the city.

Left Opportunism 

It is within this context of a working class movement undermined by opportunism that anarchists entered the scene in a significant way. Early in 2022, a nebulous group of individuals calling themselves “forest defenders” moved into the South River Forest, site of the proposed facility. They began setting up camps and erecting “tree-sits.” Their intention was to physically occupy the forest, thereby preventing work on Cop City from beginning. It is unclear how the decision to pursue this particular tactic, which has been employed many times with very little success, was made. In many reports, the forest defenders describe themselves as a “decentralized, autonomous movement [where] nobody is in charge, and nobody is responsible for anybody else’s actions,” so it’s unlikely we will ever get an answer to that question.  

The camp was in a state of perpetual flux, with people constantly coming and going, but reports indicate that somewhere between 40-100 activists were ensconced in the trees throughout 2022. They practiced yoga, planted gardens, held religious ceremonies, and of course engaged in minor vandalism of construction equipment. Their strategy was to make themselves “an immovable obstacle to any construction” while allies outside of the forest went to court and pressured construction companies in an effort to end the project before it began. And when, as they sometimes did, work crews tried to start clearing the forest despite all this, those in the camp “put their bodies on the line, climbing into trees to prevent them from being felled.”

The risks involved with such tactics hardly need to be explained. The police were called in very quickly and there were frequent altercations, which became increasingly violent as the year went on. During a May confrontation, police claimed a forest defender threw a Molotov cocktail at an officer. In a December raid on the encampment, police used tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets on activists in the trees. Yet for all of this, the approach to operational security in the camp was incoherent at best. When speaking to the media, as they often did, forest defenders concealed their identities, distorted their voices and used aliases like Twig and Rutabaga. This gives the impression that, on some level, they understood how vulnerable they were. But rather than regimenting security given the clear threat of police violence, they left fundamental things such as scouting and keeping watch to be taken up by anyone on a spontaneous, voluntary basis, for reasons which were purely ideological.

Arguably more important security concerns, such as the fact that police would surely attempt to infiltrate the camp, do not appear to have been considered at all. On their numerous social media accounts and websites, forest defenders repeatedly sent out open calls to the public: all were welcome, no questions asked. A June 2, 2022 communique posted to the website Scenes from the Atlanta Forest reads:

We are welcoming ALL the tactics. Kate Bush flash mob when kkkops arrive? Fuck yeah. Frontline Action to stop machines of destruction? Fuck yeah. Please just get your sweet fucking feral ass down here.

Your house sitting gig & coffee shop job can wait– come occupy the forest, & if you got privilege, use it to throw down, as trees, community members & non-human animals are better than a clear cut lot with a militarized police training center.

The stakes are high & the forest is calling!

Come for the blackberries & community, & stay for the chaos!

Setting aside the condescension toward workers who, with bills and babies, must have jobs that absolutely cannot and will not wait, there are serious problems here. The “act first, ask questions later” ideology permeates the forest defenders’ entire internet footprint. One of their Instagram pages features a buffet of organizing tactics: phone zaps, rallies, marches, mutual aid, and teach-ins. These are peppered with more urgent calls to direct action. One such post, from January 25, 2022, reads in bold red and black font: “We need folks on the ground to stop bulldozing happening by the ponds by the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. Most of the entrances have cops. Risk of police encounter is medium-high, be smart. Be alert.” Another post, from May 4, 2022 reads “Police are entering the Weelaunee Forest in large numbers to remove forest defenders. Please come help now!”

One needn’t be a seasoned organizer to understand how reckless this is. To put out a mass call to action, on the internet, insisting that anyone who reads it charge immediately into the woods, flinging their bodies in front of a brigade of heavily armed cops and bulldozers is astonishing. The best it can do is halt construction at that particular moment, a victory so temporary as to be essentially Pyrrhic. At worst, it leaves everyone who turns up totally vulnerable to police violence, with no means of self defense and without the requisite knowledge of the terrain to even flee. It boggles the mind that activists, so diligent in concealing their identities from the readers of Rolling Stone or Vice, could have such a cavalier attitude about the various dangers posed by police. Eventually, this would have literally fatal consequences.

On the morning of Wednesday, January 18, 2023, gunfire rang out in the forest. Police encircled the camp and ambushed, opening fire on Manuel Terán, known in the camp as Tortuguita a.k.a. Tort. They were shot at least 13 times, killing them as they emerged from a tent. A sheriff’s deputy was shot as well, and while police claim that Terán shot first, everyone on the scene except the cops have disputed this from the start. For weeks, police denied that there was any body camera footage from the incident; but such cameras were clearly visible on APD officers in news reports and the recordings were eventually released. They reveal a cluster of suppressed, high caliber military weapons opening up almost in unison, with no preceding, small caliber fire such as might have come from the legal, registered pistol which Terán owned. Later in the video an APD officer is seen asking someone off-camera, “You fucked up your own officer?” and receiving a grunted, affirmative reply.

What happened that day is as clear as it will likely ever be, though important questions remain. Did the police know beforehand that Terán had a gun and target them on that basis? If so, how did the cops come by that information? How were police able to encircle the camp that morning without being detected? Why were there no lookouts when everyone knew this was coming eventually and even one minute’s warning would likely have kept everyone in the camp alive? Because the only real feature of the “autonomous, nonhierarchical” form of mobilization that prevailed in the forest is that “no one is in charge and no one is responsible for anyone else,” there is no one to even ask such questions, leaving only silence regarding the entirely needless death of a brave, committed person.

Rather than pausing to reevaluate their strategy after this catastrophic turn of events, anarchists immediately resorted to reckless mobilization once again. The Saturday after Terán’s murder, a vigil in their honor was used as cover for a small-scale riot. A police car was burned, a Wells Fargo vandalized, and 6 more protestors were arrested. #AvengeTort became a trending topic on social media and across the country there were other random acts, ranging from graffiti to attacking office buildings with “stench agents.” What the people involved clearly fail to understand is that mobilization alone, no matter how immediately satisfying to the emotions, will never be enough to halt Cop City or anything else. As Kwame Ture was constantly at pains to point out, mobilization is easy because people instinctively respond to injustice, but “if we’re not careful, we allow mobilization to become an event. The struggle is never an event, it’s a process: a continual, eternal process.” Mobilizations that aren’t tied to a disciplined, organized, working-class base will always fall apart once the heat of feeling fades.

Liberal reformists, petty bourgeois opportunists and custeristic anarchists have spent two years at the center of this struggle. For all of their efforts, they have not made any measurable progress at all, having failed at every turn to convert mobilization into organization. In fact, many of their tactics have proven downright alienating to Atlanta’s working class. This is certainly true of all the tilting at City Council windmills. And it is equally true of the forest camp, where one local resident noticed that “those treehouses are nicer than my fucking apartment.” The erstwhile movement against Cop City seems to be about everything except winning, and therefore it is losing. One activist is dead. Eighteen are facing Domestic Terrorism charges that carry thirty-five year sentences. At time of writing, construction crews are clearing the forest while heavily armed police stand guard at every entrance. And the best the project’s opponents can come up with is a plan to re-occupy the forest the first week of March, to which end they have called, once again, for anyone and everyone to come to Atlanta and go camping with them.

These events are as troubling as they are familiar. Recent history is littered with the wreckage of such mobilizations. From Occupy Wall Street to Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter, all were undone by their insistence on mobilization at the expense of disciplined, militant organization. And for all this, still such methods are widely praised and held up as the future of leftwing politics, which is flatly absurd. The reality is that a truly horizontal organization does not and cannot exist. Friedrich Engels explored this in his 1872 essay, On Authority, concluding that, under bourgeois rule, it is impossible to create an organization in which one’s will is never subordinated to another’s. Even in the most utopian, anti-authoritarian formations, someone’s ideas end up prevailing. And when the idea that prevails is nothing but a refusal to have coherent ideas, it virtually always ends in defeat, with people dead or in prison.

The Atlanta Police Foundation and Ignored Answers 

The movement against Cop City, such as it is, has focused its outrage on various actors at various times. The mayor, the city council, the police, the contractors, and the corporations who have provided funding for the project have all been targeted for everything from protest to graffiti to sabotage. Often overlooked entirely, and rarely correctly analyzed, has been the private, 501(c)3 nonprofit called the Atlanta Police Foundation.

This is a serious error, because the APF is in fact the primary force behind Cop City. It was their idea, they brought it to the mayor, they pushed it through the city council, they have controlled the conversation around the issue, they control the land in question, they are slated to provide the overwhelming majority of the funding for the project and they will apparently operate it if it is eventually built. The question, then, becomes who and what is the APF? Answering that question is of paramount importance, because it reveals not only the interests that want Cop City built, but also maps the real terrain of power in the city of Atlanta.

In seeking an answer to this question, what we do not find is as eloquent as what we do. The APF, as a 501(c)3 organization, is required to file fairly transparent tax documents which subsequently become publicly available. But such records are only available up to and including fiscal 2020, the year before the activity around Cop City begins. So few details pertaining to the project are on the formal record. There are receipts for some of the money, though the source is APF itself and the information must, therefore, be viewed somewhat skeptically. This is relevant, because the records for 2020 show $24.1 million in assets against $16.7 million in liabilities, leaving a balance around $8 million. This is well short of the $60 million the APF has committed to the project. None of the tax records currently available, which go back to the organization’s founding in 2003, show them having anything close to a spare $60 million dollars lying around. So it is clear that a massive amount of money was raised very quickly for the Cop City project.

The information APF has chosen to make available, in a “campaign update” from the third quarter of 2022, lists 24 large donors. Nine of these are foundations, including the project’s two largest single donors. The Woodruff Foundation, endowed from the estate of an early president of Coca-Cola, has contributed $13 million. The James M. Cox Foundation, endowed by the owner of Atlanta’s only major newspaper, gave $10 million. Also on the list are the companies that control gas and electric service in Georgia, two large railroad companies, and then a laundry list of large corporations based or doing substantial business in Atlanta and Georgia more broadly.

For some reason, efforts to problematize the project’s funding have ignored the foundations almost entirely. Some attempts have been made to pressure one or another corporation into withdrawing their support, though at this point only Coca-Cola has been responsive to this pressure. And even then, the victory consisted only in extracting a promise that they would provide no further funding, rather than somehow clawing their prior $1 million “donation” back. Every other corporation involved has simply ignored the pressure.

But the corporations as such are beside the point. They are not the major donors to Cop City. And they are not people, despite the legal sophistry that classifies them as such in the U.S. They are not subject to shame or embarrassment. The investors to whom they ultimately answer might be, at least in theory, but probably not. The corporations and the foundations, along with all the other donors, are advancing the self-identified interests of human beings. If they judge that one way to do that is to give millions of tax-deductible dollars to the APF, then they will. The only language they understand is money, so arguably only a strategy that would escalate the cost of their involvement beyond what they were prepared to spend would have a chance of success. And it seems no such strategy was ever even considered.

The fact of the matter is that money to fund Cop City is simply not a problem the APF has. If one corporation were to drop out, as Coca-Cola appears to have done, it changes nothing. If they all pull out, the APF already has their money, and could simply switch to soliciting money from more foundations and private individuals. More to the point is who the APF is and what it does with the money that comes in. And here the available tax documents are actually useful.

First, the who. APF’s fiscal 2020 documents list some 50 members of the board of directors, 41 of whom hold the mere title of “director.” The other 9 are the foundation’s officers at the time, and even a brief glance at them is very revealing. The president and CEO is one W. David Wilkinson, who has served in that post through the administrations of three successive Atlanta mayors. Wilkinson’s prior work experience consists primarily of 22 years in the U.S. Secret Service. Marshall B. Freeman, the APF’s chief operating officer, is ex-APD, where he was the deputy chief administrative officer. The chief financial officer in 2020 was one Courtney Collins, who came to the APF from the local nonprofit sector, specializing in homelessness, toward which the city is infamously brutal. She has since left the APF, and gone on to work for something called the Atlanta Building Wealth Initiative, which is exactly what it sounds like. APF chairman Robin Loudermilk is a member of one of the oldest, wealthiest families in the entire South, and has a background in high octane real estate speculation. Vice chairman John F. O’neill was formally president of “US Multifamily Capital Markets” at Cushman & Wakefield, a Chicago-based commercial real estate firm with over $9 billion dollars in annual revenue. Calvin Darden, also a vice chairman, was an executive at UPS, and was heavily involved in the building of the city’s yuppie hiking park known as the Beltline. Treasurer Tye Darden has been general counsel for both Georgia-Pacific Railroad and Koch Industries. And finally, secretary Bob Peterson also has a background as a commercial real estate executive. Of these nine officers at the APF, only two are Black.

As for the what, the tax records don’t cover the Cop City project, but the APF’s other programs are nightmarish enough. Taken together, these activities are clearly seen as intended to bring about a kind of new golden age for U.S. police on behalf of those the police serve and protect. For the rest of us, the future the APF is working to bring about can only be described as a chilling, dystopian police state.

Perhaps the most obviously problematic program is what the APF calls OPERATION SHIELD. This is a surveillance network. It consists, not only of the 11,000 cameras that APF has provided to the city, but of virtually every other public and private camera in the entire city. Closed circuit security cameras, Amazon’s Ring cameras, traffic enforcement cameras and others are all linked into a single network that the APD can monitor in real time from their APF-provided Video Integration Center. As an adjunct to SHIELD, the APF has built what they call ComNet, a communications hub linking the APD to private security outfits. These networks are available to any group that cares to pay the subscription fee for access. This means communications between APD and any manner of private security, from the unarmed watchmen of a company like Securitas to the more overtly militarized personnel of a mercenary firm like Blackwater, are perfectly seamless because they are all on the same network.

More subtly troubling is an initiative called SECURE NEIGHBORHOODS. Under this umbrella, the APF purchases real estate in neighborhoods targeted for gentrification. They then bring in contractors to build new housing or renovate existing structures on those lots, and these homes are then sold to APD officers at sub-market prices. The end result, obviously, is that various working class neighborhoods come under full-time surveillance and threat of police intervention, courtesy of their new neighbors. This program has also provided discounted housing for APD recruits at a development called Unity Place, which has room for up to 30 such recruits at a time.

Another, more overtly carceral APF initiative is something they call the Atlanta Repeat Offender Commission. According to the APF’s tax records, in 2014 “the AROC was given authority” to track and issue reports on repeat offenders who, if their cases originated in different jurisdictions, might have received something less than the harshest legal punishment.

And finally we come to the Atlanta Crime Research Center, which APF describes as its “research and analysis arm.” Launched in 2019, the ACRC’s first task was a study of APF’s own Repeat Offender program, which included compiling reports on local judges’ sentencing patterns, no doubt intended to help pressure or remove those who decline to throw the entire book at every such defendant. The language in the tax documents is intentionally vague, stating that the ACRC “is managed by APF but works in concert with local universities and law enforcement partners to develop and analyze content” and conduct various “short- and long-range studies” with the goal of reducing “crime.” It seems reasonable to assume that this entity will be and is being used to identify law enforcement targets, probably using the pseudo-science known as “predictive policing.”

While this is not quite a complete list of the APF’s programs and activities, it is sufficient to outline the nature of the organization’s efforts. These, clearly, are all about expanding the power of the police. The Cop City project is about consolidating that expanded power, giving the police a physical, military-style base from which to operate while moving towards more sophisticated techniques of crowd control and counterinsurgency. Furthermore, it is quite clear that there is very little chance of effective political oversight being exercised by the city government. The city council has fallen over itself in its zeal for the project. And two mayors have now been caught in the project’s undertow. One has seen her political ambition go up in flames, in part, because of the controversy around Cop City, and the other has compromised himself so publicly that it is highly unlikely that he will even seek, let alone win, re-election.

In point of fact, one has to question who actually runs the city of Atlanta, where the real power resides. Mayors come and go and are tossed aside once they can no longer advance the APF’s agenda. City Council members, too. All of these elected officials, most of them Black, put in office by the city’s still large population of mostly Black Democratic Party voters, have a clear record of laboring, not on behalf of their constituents, but rather on behalf of the APF. And as we have seen, the APF’s officers and funding come from a sewer of private and corporate interests that all emerge from a single source: the bourgeoisie.

The Atlanta Police Foundation, then, is best understood not as a slush fund or a shady organization behind the scenes, but rather as a de facto shadow government that actually runs the city on behalf of a mostly white bourgeoisie. And it follows that the local political and civic leadership is not a Black bourgeoisie at all, but a petty bourgeois faction at best, a gang of compradors at worst, always at the service of those with real power. This understanding clarifies the situation around Cop City substantially, and such clarity is something that the movement to stop the facility’s construction has far too often lacked. But not always.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in this whole sordid tale is that, while mostly white “leftists” of whatever persuasion were offering no analysis of the problem, inventing strategies based on that missing analysis and deriving faulty tactics from that bad strategy, there was an organization in the city that not only could have but was doing all of this better: Community Movement Builders, one of the best grassroots organizations in the city.

CMB is based in a neighborhood known as Pittsburgh, where the APF is currently building three homes under the auspices of its “Secure Neighborhoods” program. The group is loosely modeled on the Black Panther Party’s community outreach programs. They teach adult literacy and political education classes, organize community gardens, host lectures on various topics and otherwise defend the community’s interests. As the struggle against Cop City has progressed, CMB’s involvement has increasingly become showing up to do media damage control for the latest mess their white “comrades” have made. They have done an admirable job of this, somehow managing to not directly criticize their “allies” in public. This says a lot, both about their organizational discipline and the quality of the help they’ve had in the fight.

CMB’s most public face is a movement lawyer and organizer named Kamau Franklin, who has lately been interviewed by a wide variety of liberal/progressive outlets like Democracy Now. He is also a key member of a grassroots platform called Black Power Media, frequently appearing on their morning news program, The Remix Morning Show. Featuring a group of contributors such as Jacqueline Luqman, Dr. Jared Ball, Kalonji Chonga, and Kim Brown, with music by The Ear Doctor, The Remix airs four days a week. It, and Black Power Media more broadly, are the best on-the-ground source for news about Cop City and the class war in Atlanta in general.

Much of this essay has its ultimate roots in regularly watching Black Power Media over the last year and a half. Had any of the variously problematic caucasians discussed above done the same, things might have gone differently. Almost every day since the Cop City project was first announced, someone on BPM has been talking sense about it. This analysis can have no better conclusion than simply quoting them and their analysis of the situation and what must happen from here if the fight against Cop City, or any similar struggle, is to have any chance of success.

Kamau Franklin, speaking to Robert Scheer:

It’s extremely important that people realize that these police foundations are taking off across the country, they’re not accountable to public officials because they are private nonprofits… [Cop City] is basically their facility that they’re renting from the city of Atlanta for $10 a year…for the next 20 or 30 years. So this is completely not going to be scrutinized by the public or answerable through CC hearings. They will train as they see fit, as an agency set up to promote policing…I’m not sure who elected or decided that the APF should play a prominent role in “crime fighting” and or “training” of the police. They’re not elected to do so.

Jacqueline Luqman, Remix Morning Show, the day after the murder in the forest:

I want people to understand that the right wing, the system, the corporatists, the capitalists in this country, they are very patient. They play the long game and they recognize the difference between mobilization and organization. They understood, I think, that the uprisings in 2020 was great mobilization, it was a wonderful, global mobilization. But most of those people did not connect to actual radical anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, socialist organizations to organize for actually changing this system. And they knew that a lot of people, yeah people were responding to the horrible thing, the public lynching of George Floyd, and they were angry in the moment, but most of those people did not want to commit to actually changing their own world view. Most of those people, like I said, great mobilization, but a lot of those people thought well we’re going to change…the police without addressing the need to change this whole system. And that is, I think, the very foundational difference…between mobilization and organization. What should have happened, during that uprising, is that radical organizations should have seen a crazy influx of people saying OK I get it, this capitalist system is the problem, or help me understand how this is a bigger problem than just the police, it’s about an entire system, teach me, let me learn all these things. But can we be real? People in this country don’t want to, largely, change a system that has benefitted them, most of them materially, if they’re not working class and poor, really. And working class and poor people are kept so tired and worn out just trying to survive that the idea of organizing and committing yourself to this other thing is overwhelming for a lot of people. So the system was like: We’ll wait. And we’ll give this nice, a lot of white folks, a little taste of what we’ve been giving the Negroes and the Indigenous for all this time and then they’ll go home. The politicians will make some promises. And then they will think they have done something, when in fact the system just kind of hibernated for a little while during those uprisings, to a certain degree, and they waited til those well-meaning, mostly white folks went back to their regular lives where they don’t have to deal with this every day. Where they’re not interested in overturning capitalism. Where they see no problem with U.S. imperialism and they don’t want to know the connections between domestic racist police terrorism and U.S. militarism abroad, particularly focused and targeted at Africans and the global south. I really want people to understand how absolutely critical and important it is to be in organizations. This is not like a part time gig. It’s really not. Because 24/7 365 days a year our enemy is organizing. They are.

Ajamu Baraka, of Black Alliance for Peace, on the Remix Morning Show: 

This fantasy that Europeans think that they’re gonna be the leaders of some kind of process, of some kind of radical, revolutionary process in the U.S., is absurd. And basically, if it ain’t us leading this thing, it ain’t going nowhere…The white left has got to understand: you aren’t going to be at the center of this. Not anymore.

Author’s note: In the time between the writing and publication of this piece, Stop Cop City activists revealed plans for a music festival in the South River Forest, which is still under construction and heavy police surveillance. Additionally, activists on social media are promoting a public calendar for a “week of action” to stop Cop City that anyone can access and edit. Meanwhile, the Black Power Media youtube page was temporarily suspended this week after reactionary elements of the white left brigaded and harassed one of the contributors quoted above, Jacqueline Luqman, following her criticism of an anti-war rally organized by members of a far-right Libertarian Party caucus.