We sat down to talk with Em Cohen, whose meta-level critiques of general movement strategy and tactics we’ve deeply appreciated, and felt it would be valuable to delve into further. While Em frequently writes about Judaism and Zionism through the framework of “philosemitism,” in this conversation we chose to focus on a question that has been on many people’s minds: why hasn’t the so-called u.s. left, despite all of the efforts made over the last two years, been able to meaningfully intervene in a live-streamed genocide? And now that u.s.-led imperialism is descending into its death throes, unleashing some of the most naked expressions of violence we have perhaps ever seen, threatening to take out Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba even as it continues its whole-sale destruction of Gaza — where are we going wrong? We urge folks to check out more of Em’s writing and analysis at medium.com/@emcohen.

W4G: To start, could you talk a little bit about your critiques of some of the underlying frameworks that you think shape the strategies and tactics of the so-called “u.s. left?” You’ve written before about the way that there is a mismatch between the revolutionary-sounding rhetoric that we use, and the liberal or reformist nature of many of these tactics, which are designed to appeal to the moral conscience of the ruling class — or as you say, to simply register the fact of our dissent and nothing more. Can you give some examples of this?

EC: Whenever a situation provokes righteous anger, and society seems like it’s about to burst into flames, the popular protest organizations that have come to be known as the “u.s. left” jump into action. Like a well-oiled machine, they post the same graphic that they always post, with the same font and the same logos and the same endorsers, calling for another iteration of the same protest. If it’s not dubbed an ‘emergency action’ and announced that night, their faithful members spend the days leading up to the protest imploring everyone to show up and ‘bring all their rage.’

On the day of, they truck in loads of signs to pass out that make extensive use of radical slogans and imagery. They have a few organizers shout fiery speeches about people power, smashing imperialism, and freeing them all into sticker-covered megaphones. The crowd boos and cheers. Whenever the speakers mention some evil person or corporation or state, the crowd chants shame. Then the protest ends and everyone goes home. Over the next day or two, independent protest photographers comb through the footage they collected and make sure to post a bunch of really cool pictures and time-lapse videos showing just how many people came out.

The overwhelming majority of people who participate in this hamster wheel don’t think the protests they are calling for and attending will really bring about revolution. In fact, often, they’re not thinking of the protests in terms of the material at all. Think about how many times you’ve seen people chant “stand up, fight back” while marching peacefully down the street with cops next to them and when someone tries to actually act on the rage they are being told is legitimate and really stand up and fight back, the protest organizations’ safety marshals/peace police step in to stop them. It is not that they don’t understand what the words “stand up, fight back” mean, it is that they do not connect that slogan to the actual material reality of fighting in the physical world. It is simply a gesture, a representation of anger.

Protest in the so-called u.s. is a simulacrum of protest. While some of the components that make up a ‘protest’ are present, those that imbue the protest with its revolutionary character are absent. It is protest theater. This doesn’t just happen with protests, by the way. Rather, it happens with many different (formerly) radical methods of change-making. Over the past couple of years, many of the popular protest orgs have started calling for “strikes” that last one day, carry no strike fund, and basically only operate at the individual level—in the sense that the call is simply put out and individuals participate or don’t. These orgs put out graphics telling people to skip work and school, with ‘demands,’ and claim that this will grind the economy to a halt. The day comes and goes. No one really knows how many people actually heeded the call. No economic impact is ever really assessed. Did it work? Were the demands met? Does the organization even care? It’s a simulacrum of a strike.

Recently, some protest orgs did as they do and called for a protest outside of the jail where President Maduro is being held. Leading up to the protest, they talked about how Maduro must be freed by any means necessary. But at the jail, the protestors basically just stood around and chanted. None of the people who called for the protest or who showed up believed that that protest would have any impact on actually freeing Maduro. Of course, actually freeing Maduro would be quite difficult to pull off. But the difficulty of such an action is not the reason these organizations don’t earnestly try to achieve what they claim they want to. Rather, the call to free Maduro by any means necessary is totally compartmentalized from the material task of doing so. Again, the protest is separated from the material. Despite the chants and the demands and the slogans, the goal of the protest calling to free Maduro is not to actually free Maduro. The goal of the protest is to have the protest. To register dissent, to raise awareness, to speak out.

These ineffectual actions aren’t simply a product of bad organizing but rather of liberal, idealistic ways of understanding and formulating political struggle. You ask people how they are measuring if the protests they are calling for are working and they look at you like you are speaking another language. They aren’t thinking in terms of the protest ‘working.’ Rather, they protest because it is ‘good’ to protest and to show that we oppose what’s happening. There’s often this unspoken hope that the state will see how many people show up to the protests and will base its decisions on that. But then the protests happen and the state ignores them and the protest orgs keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Revolution is the process of totally upending society and this will only be accomplished with revolutionary methods. But the liberal idealist way of approaching struggle treats the methods as inconsequential; it is the ideas, the chants, the slogans, the images, not the methods, that matters. So to finish this long-winded way of responding to the question—if you want to assess whether a tactic is revolutionary or just revolutionary-sounding, look at the actual methods being used. The underground railroad wasn’t people marching peacefully in the streets and chanting that slaves should be freed, it was enslaved people freeing themselves. There were no gestures.

W4G: I can’t help but feel that so much of what you’re describing is rooted in the class character of much of what we call the “u.s. left” — people from a middle class or petite bourgeois background, or those aspiring to such a status — who are trying to show their solidarity with poor and oppressed people, either here or abroad. In other words, at the end of the day, the issues they’re protesting or organizing around remain largely abstract because they are not materially impacted by them, and so their outlook, which necessarily shapes their tactics and strategies, is rooted in idealism. In other words, they want certain conditions to change, but they don’t need them to.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with middle class people’s desire to show solidarity, and of course, it’s not to say that revolutionaries or revolutionary potential has never come from the petite bourgeois class—in fact, there are many examples to the contrary—but revolutions aren’t made from ideas alone. They have to take hold of poor and oppressed people, the people with actual revolutionary potential, by speaking directly to their material conditions.

Ali Kadri recently said something along the lines of: revolutionary potential belongs to the people who have no choice but to fight against the conditions of capitalism and imperialism. But today, at least in the u.s., this isn’t so simple, because substantial sectors of the poor and oppressed classes have been bought off, pacified, or straight up conscripted into directly upholding some of the most violent arms of u.s. empire—which is evident if you just consider the racial and class makeup of the NYPD, ICE, border patrol, the military, or even prison guards or wardens at this point.

At the same time, we can also say that much of what is driving the endless repetition of ineffective strategies and tactics on the u.s. left is rooted in subjective factors, too, which include defeatism—the fundamental belief that revolution in the core isn’t actually possible (“it’s never the right time for revolution”). And no, revolution is not just “abolishing” this or that thing, or scoring an occasional win by getting some company to divest, it is the total upheaval of the entire system and society. Defeatism may be latent or unconscious, or even obscured by revolutionary-sounding rhetoric, but as you say, in the case of the Maduro protest for example, there was never any intent to actually free him, only to publicly register the fact of dissent: “The goal of the protest is to have the protest.”

What this ends up doing is vastly narrowing the scope of possible strategies or tactics that are even on the table. At a fundamental level, the options seem to be either mass protests or autonomous direct action, which are often framed as opposites (symbolic vs. material) but end up producing similar results. While the mass protest appeals to the ruling class through a show of numbers that is not actually backed up by the material threat of violence that would actually make those numbers consequential, the autonomous direct action appeals to the ruling class through a show of force that is not actually backed up by the numbers that would make that force consequential.

And of course, both of these tactics also suffer from a lack of long-term vision, a roadmap, or the kind of organizational infrastructure that would allow them to happen not just sporadically, but regularly, and in ways that gradually up the ante in attacking the real levers of the capitalist machine. And so, to the ruling class, the autonomous direct action becomes just as much of an empty or symbolic threat as the mass protest, because both are saying, “do this or else,” but the problem is there is no “else.”

People often respond to this kind of critique by arguing that we can’t go immediately from A to Z, and that all of these tactics and strategies are actually “building power” in a gradual way that will eventually lead to some kind of victory. But if these strategies or tactics are in fact working, and will eventually lead to some sort of revolutionary rupture, how would we know that? Is there any concrete evidence we can point to that would show us whether we are on a path that is actually leading somewhere, as opposed to running in place on a hamster wheel?

Occasionally, of course, we have seen impressive numbers of people coming out into the streets and engaging in militant rebellions — in Los Angeles or Minneapolis during the recent ice raids, during the George Floyd Uprisings, and before that, the Ferguson Uprising, the Oscar Grant rebellion, etc. One could go back through the decades and point to many such moments, when people get sick of the old tactics, and hope glimmers for a brief moment. But the issue is that rebellions are sporadic and largely unplanned, and therefore die out, get crushed, co-opted, etc, perhaps for lack of the kind of organization and infrastructure that could seriously defend people from state violence, allow them to strategize against the enemy in longer-term ways, and most importantly, to allow them to grow and develop the rebellion into an actual revolutionary force. But perhaps for other factors as well.

With all that said, what are some ways you think we can get people to reflect on and seriously engage in the question of revolutionary strategy and methods? What do you think are some of the main barriers to this?

EC: People are so resistant to any questioning of either mass-based organizing or autonomous direct action. When you’re in an org that’s focused on mass-based organizing and say “hey, it feels like this isn’t working,” you’re immediately met with almost reflexive responses of “well what’s your idea?,” or “oh yeah? Then why don’t you go do direct action!“ as if direct action is the real answer to what is to be done and mass-based organizing is the thing we do simply because we aren’t brave enough to do direct action. This sets people up to view their options as either shutting up and doing something they don’t think is working, self-sacrifice in the form of individual autonomous direct action, or quitting entirely. This makes lots of people burn out and believe revolution isn’t possible in the first place.

This dynamic where people reflexively respond to criticism or even vague frustrations about things not working with attacking the criticizer, is a vicious cycle that leads to orgs increasingly being filled with dogmatic sycophants. Folks show up because they agree with an org’s rhetoric or a friend invited them. Over time, if they really are there to make change, they start to question whether what they’re doing is actually making a difference. If they bring those frustrations up, they’re immediately shut down. They either stop raising their frustrations or leave. This happens enough times and the thinking in the org becomes so rigid that active ideological struggle is impossible.

To a certain extent, I think the “well what’s your idea?” kind of responses are fair, or at least understandable. It sucks when someone complains and criticizes what you’re doing but doesn’t have any recommendation for what you should do instead. But the requirement that people have the answer before bringing up a criticism basically makes it impossible to ever criticize the larger issues in the first place. Sometimes a vague sensation of “this isn’t working” is really all someone can give. To put it a different way, it’s only the smaller problems or issues that anyone could reasonably have a concrete solution to before bringing up. For the bigger issues, though, the answer is almost always unclear—it can only be figured out over time by actively struggling to find the answer, working through different possibilities, and testing and analyzing the results.

People don’t want to feel totally powerless, and I understand why they would think it’s better to “at least do something” rather than nothing. But I also think we have to simply confront the fact that we don’t have the answers. I certainly don’t know what the answer is. But I think if you don’t know the answer to something, it’s better to spend your time trying to figure it out than to do something you know isn’t working.

There are also larger material barriers, such as the fact that lots of people who are members and leaders of the orgs that make up the so-called u.s. left ultimately benefit from the anti-Black Islamophobic colonial imperialist patriarchal world system. It’s really easy to not care about whether the methods are working or not when your survival doesn’t depend on them. If you don’t need the method to work, moral grandstanding is enough. I do think this plays a really big role here, and speaks to the compartmentalization between methods and rhetoric that I touched on earlier. Because people don’t need the methods to work, it’s a lot easier to not even think about the methods as actual tools for doing something. This is also one reason why so many on the so-called u.s. left are resistant to studying. Instead of viewing revolutionary theory as a resource that we can use to hone our ways of thinking, gifted to us by those who carried out successful revolutions in the past, studying theory is viewed as either a fun social activity or a chore.

Another barrier to seriously engaging with the question of how to develop new revolutionary strategy and tactics is the vulgar invocation of “the urgency of the situation we’re facing.” I have seen so many people downplay analysis and reflection and study as activities that should only take place when we “have the time.” This is the total backwards approach. It is not that the situation is so urgent that we can’t afford to spend time studying and thinking, it is that the situation is so urgent that we can’t afford to NOT spend time studying and thinking. The situation is too urgent for us to waste our time making the same mistakes that revolutionaries before us made and we can avoid making if we learn from them.

I do think most of these barriers can be corrected through serious study of political theory, especially studying as part of a good group. At least, I want to believe that. So, I’d recommend that people try to find others they can study revolutionary theory with. Books are great, but you can use podcasts, youtube videos, whatever. Just try to meet with people regularly and talk about what is and isn’t working, why things are the way they are, etc. Maybe set up regular phone calls with a couple of friends and talk about your political work, ask them hard questions and encourage them to do the same to you and seriously try to think through the answer without being defensive. Be curious and be critical.

I also think, in a very grim way, as climate collapse gets worse, as social conditions get worse in general, more and more people will find themselves in positions where their survival depends on the methods working and so they will have to struggle to figure out better strategies and methods.

W4G: It’s interesting that you highlight a lack of capacity for criticism and self-criticism on the u.s. left as directly connected to the prevalence of liberal / reformist strategies, even when the lack of tangible results is staring us right in the face. I do think it’s connected to the fact that again, much of the organizations on the “u.s. left” are made up of people from a petite bourgeois background. It’s not just that either. Too often, the people who make the decisions for a lot of these organizations receive their funding from donors that are directly connected to the capitalist class, etc.

Obviously the ruling class is not going to throw money at an organization or project that directly threatens its material interests, quite the opposite, and so many of these organizations will have to promote strategies and tactics that are intentionally designed to be ineffective or non-threatening. It’s not an accident or case of miscalculation. It’s designed that way, as controlled opposition. If someone joins an organization naively thinking it is actually invested in creating the kind of radical change that is advertised on its website at the level of rhetoric, and then challenges the leadership a bit too much, crosses the line a bit too far, asks one too many challenging questions, they will simply be expelled.

At this point I have to be kind of blunt and say that what I think is really needed is for more people on the so-called u.s. left to quite literally commit class suicide. Generally speaking, as people living in the imperial core, many of us are taught to aspire to bourgeois ideals and lifestyles in one way or another, even if we don’t necessarily come from that background. You could call it class aspiration vs. class status. So we have to commit class suicide, and the other thing is that we have to seriously de-identify with being Amerikan. We have to completely reject everything we have been handed by the u.s. empire, because they give us these things precisely to buy us off, to prevent us from doing what really needs to be done, and from uniting with the very people who are best positioned to do it.

I mean, if you are really serious about creating the kind of world you envision, again that is not going to happen just based on vibes. Are you truly ready to give up your subsidized apartment? Your salaried NGO or academic job? Your rock-climbing membership or weekend getaway trips and Air B and B’s? Your Netflix subscription? This isn’t about romanticizing revolution — I think it’s quite literally the necessary first step that has to be taken in order to deprogram ourselves from the horrifying matrix of propaganda, co-optation, and counterinsurgency that so many of us are completely bought off by without even realizing it. I really think we have to completely reject any careerist aspirations or neoliberal self-making projects laundered through entrepreneurism, social media influencerships, or the like in order to even begin to actually interface with reality—because so much of the lifestyle that is peddled to us is so skillfully designed to hide from us the very reality that the majority of the rest of the world actually lives in.

I really love the Mao quote that says, “In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” I actually feel like we need to take this much more seriously — that every idea we have is ultimately shaped by material conditions, that no one is immune from this. The idea that we can just think or imagine our way out of our class conditioning, that if we just become critical or intellectual enough, we can be immune from propaganda, is so sinister, and is really rooted in liberal idealism and individualism.

I’m not saying this to be defeatist or deterministic, actually the opposite. This was the whole reason they placed such emphasis on practicing “criticism and self-criticism” during the cultural revolution, because they understood how deeply capitalism and colonialism conditions people’s attitude and outlook and psychology, and that this is something we have to take extremely seriously. Again, not in a vibes-based way of “the personal is political” or “i need to work on myself” or “accountability processes,” but actually taking seriously the need to completely transform people into new human beings, that that is as much a part of the material process of revolution as redistributing land or wealth, and really understanding how long and difficult of a process that is. And maybe most importantly, that we can’t transform our consciousness alone.

We’re not used to relating to ourselves or each other in a way that isn’t thoroughly saturated with liberal and idealistic thinking. Which is why when someone says, hey, I don’t think this tactic is working, rather than examine that criticism for what it is (is it true that it’s not working? what is the evidence that it isn’t working? how are we interpreting that evidence? what other possible tactics could we use?) we instead become immediately defensive, and dogmatically insist that it is working, even if objective reality clearly shows otherwise. The only way we can explain this kind of reaction is that the person is motivated less by the desire to reach a tangible, objective outcome that really betters our collective conditions, and more by the desire to be seen in a certain light. So it’s individualism, idealism, and liberalism. If your goal was really to achieve change, and someone offered a criticism of your strategy to help you find a more effective one, logically speaking, wouldn’t you welcome that?

What you say about the need to see revolutionary theory as a resource, and that we are largely not seeing in that way, is so true. Like, we actually don’t have to start from scratch or just guess. We can build off of what people did before. Of course, conditions here are entirely different than they were in 1950s Cuba, but it is not that we live in a separate reality altogether, or that the laws of dialectical and historical materialism somehow don’t apply here. That’s just Amerikan exceptionalism. We can study what worked and what didn’t in other circumstances. We can consider whether past strategies make sense for our current context, or what about them needs to be adapted or changed. But again, we don’t just have to flail and guess and give up, or pretend like we have to invent something out of thin air, which is what it feels like we are doing a lot of the time.

The problem is that most of the people who are actually reading and studying past revolutionary movements with some level of seriousness and depth—the kind of study that could actually give us the roadmaps we need—are just sitting in their offices and publishing their articles on Jstor. So these ideas never reach the masses, which is where they actually belong. We need to find ways of translating these ideas to ordinary people, and largely that isn’t happening, because if a significant part of the poor and oppressed classes, the ones with actual revolutionary potential, have been conscripted into the military or ICE or the police, and the working classes have been bought off by the labor aristocracy and the spoils extracted from the global south, then the intellectuals, especially the ones who have radical ideas, have been bought off by academia or nonprofits and the like. And so while you actually need people from all of these sections of society to be working together in order to wage an actual revolution, in practice they have all been bought off in different ways by the different facets of u.s. imperialism. Because that is what it is designed to do.

But that brings me to my next question: in addition to strategies and tactics, you’ve also critiqued the kinds of default organizational forms that the u.s. left tends to fall into. Could you speak a little more on how we are limiting ourselves through a failure of imagination in terms of organizational forms?

EC: While there are hundreds of different ostensibly radical political organizations with different names and slogans and logos, the overwhelming majority of them fall into one of two categories: There are organizations that try to recreate what once was, and there are organizations that pretend they are not organizations.

The former groups are filled with people who pick some historical revolutionary group to dogmatically idolize and imagine they’re the vanguard of. The latter groups are made up of people who rhetorically claim to reject hierarchy and be above organization itself. Neither of these organizational forms are able to effectively confront the problems we face today, in part because they both, albeit in different ways, discourage active ideological struggle. Each of these types of organizations, again, in different ways, produces a rigid way of thinking that refuses to update to changing conditions.

When people start to become radicalized and search for an organization to join, they are almost always joining one of those two types of organizations, and because of the errors inherent to them, almost always end up burnt out by unfair divisions of labor (that typically fall along harmful race and gender lines), targeted by predatory creeps, or frustrated by chauvinistic behavior. After their experience, they either leave and try to find a different org, or they quit organizing entirely. But because nearly every organization falls into one of these two categories, the people who are persistent, who keep searching for better organizations, are repeatedly harmed until they either become so disillusioned with organizing entirely or they assimilate into the power structures of the harmful organizations.

In this way, the dominance of these two organizational forms perpetuates its own power and rigidity and endlessly chips away at any semblance of developing revolutionary potential. (So many radical organizations have absurdly high turnover rates that are only masked by the seemingly endless supply of new people who realize that the world needs to change.)

When you look at major cities, it appears that there are hundreds of organizations working on different political goals. But the reality is that it’s basically just a dozen iterations of the same org, which utilizes the same methods and tactics and which is made up of a rotating cast of the same small group of people. The different orgs are much more a product of interpersonal animosity than they are of genuine ideological, strategic, or tactical differences.

Over time, this failure has produced a “left” that is almost completely separated from the most oppressed masses, who (rightly) view popular “leftist organizations” as either nothing but a waste of time or as the enemy. The solution to all this is not yet another ideologically rigid organization trying to rehash the 1960’s protest movement or pretending like hierarchies are evaporated by claiming to reject them, but rather a rethinking of form—or, more accurately, a rethinking of everything altogether. Whatever it is that needs to exist for us to confront the moment we’re in doesn’t. We have to accept that.

W4G: So much of what capitalism does is give us the illusion of endless choice while really giving us no choices at all. When you were describing the seemingly endless choice of leftist organizations that one could ostensibly join, that quote about freedom under capitalism being the ability to choose between 20 different brands of toothpaste came to mind, which is something you’ve also written about in regards to the way social media has so deeply invaded the way we relate to each other, and thus also shaped the way we organize. You write:

In the same way that social media provides an endless selection of people to peruse, it provides an endless selection of political organizations to choose from. While it might seem good that there are endless organizations to choose from, allowing you to search for the organization that most perfectly matches your politics, in reality this leads to organizations held together exclusively by superficial bonds, filled with people who don’t know each other, don’t need each other, and don’t trust each other. And this is having disastrous effects on how people engage with political organizing.

It is somewhat incredible that even with the hundreds or possibly thousands of Palestine solidarity organizations that exist just in the u.s—and there have been so many that have sprung up after 10/7—none of them have been able to offer any real meaningful resistance to the ongoing genocide. I should be clear that I’m not dismissing any of the organizational efforts that have managed to offer very real, material and life-saving support to vulnerable people despite all of the odds stacked against them. What I’m attempting to do instead is zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

Part of me wonders how much of this is rooted in a refusal to take ourselves as seriously as revolutionaries in the 60s and 70s did. These were people who committed their entire lives to struggling against capitalism and imperialism. But in 2026, the idea of a “revolutionary,” especially in the imperial core, sounds laughably naive, deluded, romantic, maybe even arrogant (?) or some combination of the above. Revolutionaries are people who existed in the past, but not today. And to attempt to aspire to anything like that today would likely be met with extreme skepticism or ridicule. How dare we think so highly of ourselves. We should be more humble and realistic—better to be an “activist,” or “organizer,” some sort of regional or local specialist in a particular issue, like environmental issues, or prison abolition, which you can then confidently command expertise in by citing the number of years you have been a member of x or y organization, or been involved in x or y issue or struggle.

But that’s the problem. So much of u.s. left “organizing” has this quality of a side hobby, of “volunteering.” Something you fit into your schedule between work, dating, vacations, and hobbies in order to convince yourself that you’re “doing something” (as you said) or “giving back to the community.” Of course, much of this can be attributed to the realities of life under capitalism, and the fact that so much of our time is eaten up by the obviously very real need to sell our labor to capitalists in order to survive. But I don’t think it can be completely explained by this, either.

How would this kind of commitment to dedicating our entire lives to revolutionary struggle transform what kinds of organizations we could create? By “entire” I don’t so much mean in the literal sense as in the ideological sense—as in, your identity is not tied up in any kind of career, your life is not divided between your work and your hobbies and your “organizing,” but revolutionary activity takes priority and precedence over everything else even while of course you must work to survive.

What might be possible if we we had an organization that was based not on this or that particular issue, but on truly developing people’s revolutionary potential, in the fullest sense of the term, not just in rhetoric or branding or slogans, but in an absolute and sincere commitment to transforming ourselves into completely new people in order to build a completely new society? And that we were also extremely strict and principled about where we took our money from to prevent our politics from being compromised? What if we had infrastructure and mechanisms to ensure that people could dedicate themselves to this work entirely, without distraction? What if we began with very basic questions, such as: Who are the classes with the most revolutionary potential in the imperial core? In a settler colony like the United States (as opposed to a country in the global south) what would constitute the most revolutionary outcome on a global scale?

After all, this isn’t just any country we’re talking about, but a country with the most powerful military, economy, and propaganda machine that has ever existed in the history of the world. Even if it were possible, is overthrowing the state an optimal outcome? Or is the best we can hope for to weaken the u.s. from within to increase the possibility of revolution or at least sovereignty for countries in the periphery? If the latter, what are the most effective ways of weakening the u.s. from within? Given the nature of the surveillance state that we all live under now, what are the most effective organizational forms for achieving those goals? What are the most effective methods and means for communicating and spreading revolutionary ideas to people?

It seems to me that, like you said, rather than creating more and more leftist organizations, groups, podcasts and collectives that inevitably employ the same tactics due to their class makeup, perhaps we should begin to look at the common organizational structures—many of which will not announce themselves as “leftist” or “activist” —that already exist in oppressed communities, and by which they already organize themselves, even if not yet toward an explicitly revolutionary goal. Churches, mosques, networks of prisoners’ families, parents associations, things like this. These are all organizations, networks of people that are meeting a common, tangible need, that play a real social function for oppressed communities, unlike most “leftist” organizations, which are only based on a shared abstract ideal.

This isn’t to say that we should just parachute into these kinds of spaces. But my point is that maybe the organizational structures with real revolutionary potential are not the ones that outwardly announce themselves as such, and maybe more people on the u.s. left need to carefully consider and familiarize ourselves with the organizational structures that already exist among poor and oppressed communities, that aren’t led by or cater to the petite bourgeois activist networks.

For example, it was impressive to me to learn that the infrastructure for a state-wide work stoppage organized by prisoners in Alabama in the last decade was largely built out through pre-existing gang networks within the prisons. There are whole communities of mothers and wives in rural North Carolina who organize themselves on Facebook groups to inform each other about what is going on in a particular prison where their sons or husbands are caged. There are networks of semi-illegal buses that take people across the George Washington Bridge from upper Manhattan into New Jersey that charge a fraction of the price of the official NY bus system.

Let’s be honest: most of the people who exist in the worlds I described above are not going to join a self-described leftist organization. They are going to spend most of their time with other poor and oppressed people in their communities, and the networks and organizations, formal and informal, that they are going to spend the majority of their time in are ones that meet a common material need—again, something they need to survive, not just an idea they believe in. The problem with most self-described leftist organizations in the u.s. is that there is still this inherent class divide between the organizers and the communities they ostensibly serve, that can’t be overcome by just offering occasional mutual aid services. Even if these services do meet a tangible need and help to at least ameliorate some of the intolerable conditions produced by racial capitalism, they are not for the most part using the kinds of methods or tactics that would actually enable or empower whole communities to actually self-organize, to seize power for themselves, on a scale that is significant enough to really shift the balance of social and economic forces in a serious way.

Of course, we have many labor unions which are made up of and organize among poor and oppressed and working class communities—but these unions do not have anti-imperialist politics. They are simply fighting for a bigger share of the imperial spoils. Which is why none of them were mobilized to stop weapons shipments at any point during the last several years of the accelerated genocide in Gaza. So it is not just a matter of methods or tactics, but of politics. We can have effective methods or tactics, we can read Secrets of a Successful Organizer back to back, but if we are not guided by the right principles or politics, we are still going to be ineffective. Like yes, congratulations, we raised the pay of New York City bus drivers by $2/hour. Unfortunately the U.S. is still beheading babies in Gaza and cutting off the fuel supply of entire populations in the global south.

There are many organizations that say that they are doing things like “mutual aid” or “social investigation” — that they are actually engaging with and organizing among and empowering poor and oppressed communities. But usually this amounts to a handful of, again, middle-class activists handing out food on the weekends, or going around with a clipboard and talking to some homeless people and asking them what their concerns are, because Mao told them that was what they were supposed to do in order to be serious revolutionaries. Unfortunately, though, I don’t think this is a winning strategy, because at the end of the social investigation, or mutual aid shift, most of these people are going to go back to their gentrified neighborhood, or maybe their non-gentrified neighborhood, but they are not living among the people whose needs they are ostensibly serving. They will publish their results or photos on Instagram—again, the intention being to prove to other middle-class activists that they are doing real revolutionary TM stuff. Or they do it for a few years in their twenties, only to burn out and eventually apply to that master’s program because the class forces pushing them in that direction eventually get too strong to resist through sheer willpower alone.

At the end of the day, no matter how much “mutual aid” or “social investigation” they do, a lot — perhaps not all, but a lot — of these activists are not committed to actually transforming themselves on a fundamental level. They are more so acting like anthropologists of the poor. It takes a long time and a lot of dedicated effort to really get to know a community, to earn their trust, to develop a real understanding of what they are materially struggling around and then to be able to meaningfully offer the kind of tangible support that might begin to allow them to create material change — again, for themselves. You can’t just walk around a homeless encampment with a clipboard or a bag of groceries a few times, or even a few years, and then call it a day.

If we really and truly want to put an end to the horrors of capitalism and u.s. imperialism, we have to be honest with ourselves about a) what that will really take, and b) who is most likely to make that happen. I don’t mean in any kind of moral or idealistic sense, but from an analysis that is rooted in actual historical materialism. It is not going to be the middle class activists in DSA. It is not going to be the labor unions. It is not going to be a few mutual aid groups or autonomous direct action groups, as inspiring as they are.

As you say, we have have to stop projecting idealism and start taking a really hard and serious look at oppressed people’s concrete, existing material circumstances, with all the contradictions that that will inevitably entail, and then not just offering them services but actually and truly committing ourselves to being with them, living among them, studying with them, speaking with them not just a few times but continuously, again and again over a long period of time, thinking and acting with them, struggling alongside them, committing ourselves to understanding and serving them and developing some sort of honest trust that is not just based in offering a service.

To go back to the idea of being a revolutionary, it isn’t something to be taken lightly, or something that can just be done part-time. It’s a total life commitment. You can be a part-time activist but you cannot be a part-time revolutionary. And yet, the problem is that we lack the infrastructure and the revolutionary commitment to actually make continuous, long-term struggle a viable possibility for enough people.

There is a reason why so many organizations on the u.s. left are filled with people who are either extremely young, in their late teens or 20’s, or elderly, perhaps retired, in their 50’s or 60’s. You notice that there’s this huge gap in the middle, because most of these 20 year olds, when they inch closer to 30, are going to start giving into the social forces that mold their class position. They’re going to go to graduate school, and start their careers. They’re going to get married and have kids and buy houses and cars. It’s a straight escalator from one thing to another, and people think they’re making these choices independently but there are these very real and powerful social forces that exist to take them out of the struggle. Perhaps after their kids are born, they’ll occasionally show up to a weekend protest with their toddler in a stroller and tell themselves that they are doing radical parenthood. I’m not saying people can’t have kids. But all of these ideas are tied up in class and property in a particular way, and it is that way for a reason. Idealism can only last for so long.

On the flip side, when people finally reach retirement age and their labor is no longer productive to capitalism, they will start to feel a bit lost, lacking in purpose, maybe lonely, so they will join an activist group as a way to “get involved” or “meet people.” But again, there’s this hobbyist quality to the whole thing. None of it is really serious. The basis of analysis is always the individual, their life, their preferences, their career, their goals, their aspirations and interests. It is not the collective, or collective need. This is how capitalism teaches us to think, and this is the governing logic of much of the u.s. left.

How do we get rid of this kind of conditioning? I think it is very difficult to reject these social forces. They are extremely real and extremely powerful. But again I think it has to begin with a real commitment to transforming ourselves, to totally rethinking our orientation toward struggle. To engaging in criticism and self-criticism. We need to learn to enjoy serious argumentation, to welcome being wrong or being convinced out of a previously held belief, not because we love debate for its own sake, but because we are sincerely committed to getting to the bottom of something, to really finding out the truth about it and not just copping out at “we can agree to disagree” or “you have this ideology and I have that ideology.”

Gravity is real! That is not up for debate or a matter of opinion! It has been discovered and proven! But somehow, we don’t treat social reality with the same level of seriousness, and just fall back into this easy idealism of, oh, well, you’re an anarchist and I’m a communist so we just think differently about this. This isn’t about dogma, it’s about being committed to figuring out what is actually real and recognizing that some ideas or strategies are going to lead to better or worse outcomes for real people leading real lives, depending on whether or not we got the math right.

This leads me to my final question, which is something we spoke briefly about before. What, to you, does true militancy mean? What does it look like? There is this tendency to reduce the idea of militancy to either rhetoric or actions, but it seems like there is more to it than that. Can you get into this a little?

EC: Militancy isn’t just chanting that you support the resistance or waving certain flags. It’s not something you say. I feel like there has been this really weird dynamic, especially over the past couple of years, where ‘militancy’ takes form in people trying to chant the “most radical” things at protests, and sort of laughing at or making fun of other organizations who they think chant “less radical” chants, as if the content of the chant is what matters. But it’s all still happening in the realm of ideas; It’s all still treating “the war” as something that is happening elsewhere.

So, I think militancy starts with acknowledging that we are at war, right here, right now. The state is waging war. It is waging war on the countries it is targeting with imperialist violence, it is waging war against the people of oppressed nations living in internal colonies within the imperial core, it is waging war against potentially insurgent elements. The most oppressed masses already know this, of course. But even though some popular leftist organizations might occasionally superficially acknowledge this in political rhetoric, it doesn’t seem to impact how they actually function as organizations.

Once you acknowledge that we are actually at war, then I think militancy can take shape. The specific chants don’t really matter all that much. What matters is skills, training, capacity, logistics—you know, the things that actually produce capable fighting forces.

Every so often, some video of Patriot Front or the Proud Boys training goes viral. I see leftist after leftist retweeting the videos of them practicing hand to hand combat or moving as a group. But the leftist response isn’t calling for the left to train, rather it’s usually simply making fun of the fascists for looking silly. The leftists laugh and shake their head about how silly the fascists look and then move on. I feel like this is another manifestation of people not really getting that we’re at war. How do you see the fascist enemy training and your response is to laugh, rather than think about what that means for you, for the most marginalized among us?

I also think of militancy in terms of forming objectives and assessing results. If a military general kept calling for their troops to fight the same battle plan over and over, and every time it was tried, the results were a bunch of casualties with no real gain, that general would be fired (or worse). But it’s normal to see the same leftist orgs call for the same protests over and over, with the same results: zero tangible gains but lots of folks getting sick, arrested, beat up, burnt out. We should be rigorously assessing the costs of these tactics and consciously deciding if they are worth it, not just using certain tactics because those are the tactics we are used to using.

Radical political organizations that want to embrace militancy should be studying, training, and directly trying to analyze and confront their internal contradictions. They should be trying to develop the infrastructure and skills that are necessary for struggling. They should be doing what they can to protect their members (and communities) from COVID and other dangerous health-threats—recognizing that viruses are also part of the war the state is waging. They should be thinking about loss of morale, about divisions of labor, about trying to constantly study what the state is doing and figure out why it’s doing it. In other words, they should focus on the material.

Now, please proceed to forget all of that. The matter is much simpler than you’d assume reading individuals like Althusser or Eagleton. The answer is found in this oft-cited but rarely understood section from Marx’s 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: 

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”¹

Let us narrow in on the key phrase, this time with some asterisks at the end of key words, and with a slash inserted in a key element: “The totality of these relations* of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises* a legal and political superstructure / and to which correspond* definite forms of social consciousness.” 

Read carefully and you will see why I have highlighted these words. The “real foundation,” the “base,” refers precisely and exclusively to the relations of production. No means. This has a very important consequence: The base is social. It is interrelational, interpersonal, describing real relations between real individuals. Production itself is a social activity. Therefore, the importance of economics is not “economic determinism,” it is social determinism. Social in a collective sense, beyond any single person’s will, but still social. 

And the superstructure is “legal and political.” If the base is the relations of production, it becomes necessary to point out that Marx has said that property relations are merely the same thing as relations of production but in the legal sphere. That appears to be the identity of our superstructure: The legal and political mechanisms by which the relations of production are made stable, which organically arise from the activities of the economy. 

So what about ideology, culture, so on and so forth? These are relegated to the third category, “social consciousness.” This “corresponds” to the base, rather than arising from it. That should not be too shocking: Just as language does not change overnight when feudalism becomes capitalism, because language is a medium of communication regardless of class, social consciousness in general exists regardless of class. The concerns of consciousness are inevitably tied into class, however. This is because, as pointed out, the base is already social. The activity of labor, as such, has a huge impact on a person’s consciousness. But so too does everything else a person does. To quote Marx again, this time from Theories of Surplus Value: 

“Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of any other production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which affect man, the subject of production, more or less modify all his functions and activities, and therefore too his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this respect it can in fact be shown that all human relations and functions, however and in whatever form they may appear, influence material production and have a more or less decisive influence on it.” ²

So what does this mean? It means, functionally, that the base/superstructure model is massively overblown. The base is taken to mean “the entire economy,” when it really means “the relations of production.” The superstructure is taken to mean “everything that is not economic,” when it really just means “legal-political structuring of productive relations.” It’s a metaphor which is very limited in scope. Before you cite Engels, keep in mind that Engels and Marx were not one person. They neither agreed all the time nor disagreed all the time. At any rate, the expansive version of the superstructure used by Engels was used by Marx, but only early on, and after that, he consistently maintained this legal-political definition. Engels simply did not realize this in his own later writings, and used the version Marx had already moved on from. The notion that expansive version is an advancement of the 1859 version is contradicted by the fact that Marx moved from the expansive version to the 1859 version. 

As for the forces, the instruments of production, their relationship to the relations stay more or less the same. Their exclusion from the base/superstructure model does not mean they float freely in the void. The only real note is that any notion of determinism stemming from them is undermined by the social nature of the relations of production, social in a manner which is very much impacted by ideology and culture. Culture has genuine weight here. Economics are normative from the start. 

The mode of production, often flattened into merely “mode + relations of production,” is much more than economics. It is an overall organic whole of relations which produce societies as wholes. The entire concrete totality of a given society in a given moment. There is no pure “capitalist mode of production.” There is only a self-differentiated social totality laden with endless determinations from economic to legal to conscious, with no separating topology. Social consciousness interpenetrates all elements of life because humans, as a collective, live every element of life. Determination, at best, exists in a law of large numbers. It does not magically come from the existence of a fancy new way of making shoes, even if that is an enabling factor. In practice, productive relations always flow into seemingly non-productive relations and vice versa. 

The mode of production as a social totality, which includes all factors which influence production and reproduction of the society writ large, with the economy as the conditioning factor which is nevertheless always already social, ideological, cultural, is the solution. 

As for operationalism, I am not demanding one abandon heuristic models for abstracting one element out and examining it. In fact, I’d very much still recommend splitting analysis into matters which are economic, legal-political, and what I call “interpersonal” (such as culture and ideology) for ease of use. But this should be done delicately and temporarily only. Why? Because this model risks implying that the economic and legal-political spheres of society are not interpersonal, are not social, are not ideological. The idea that they are not is precisely the sort of error Marx identifies in commodity fetishism. Treating the economy like it is self-contained and that everything else is merely epiphenomenal is an error we make at our own peril. As such, every effort should be made to be able to interconnect these spheres, in truth mere elements of one sphere, fluidly in analysis once the heuristic separation has outlived its usefulness. Marx’s own analyses never treated these issues as separable. Neither should ours.

1. Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,’ 2. ︎
2. Marx, “Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1,” 288. ︎

Factions, Splits, and Entryism in the US Communist Movement

“Of course, the parties of the Second International, which are fighting against the dictatorship of the proletariat and have no desire to lead the proletariat to power, can afford such liberalism as freedom of factions, for they have no need at all for iron discipline. But the parties of the Communist International, whose activities are conditioned by the task of achieving and consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat, cannot afford to be ‘liberal’ or to permit freedom of factions.”¹

This quote — a comparison by J.V. Stalin made in the decade following the October Revolution when leftwing parties split into anti-colonial communists and liberal social democrats — makes no compromises in the Marxist-Leninist view on factions within a revolutionary party. Factions crystallize internal discord into multiple poles within a party which divide its unity and impair it in a life-or-death struggle against the bourgeois regime. This is a simple and clear instruction for those in the Bolshevik Party when considered in tandem with the rest of Stalin and Lenin’s teachings on party unity: “Iron discipline does not preclude but presupposes criticism and conflict of opinion within the Party,”² but this conflict cannot be allowed to form factions or splits.

Yet for those of us who live in modern day countries such as the United States which host a competing cluster of social democratic and communist parties, it is a far more difficult teaching to implement. After all, the Bolshevik Party earned its role as the vanguard of the peoples of the Soviet Union during the crucible of the October Revolution, whereas the socialist parties of the United States are marked by stagnation, isolation, and exhausted prestige. Is one not violating party unity by leaving these groups due to conflicting principles, especially if they leave alongside like-minded revolutionaries? What about those practicing entryism, i.e. those who enter a party already conscious of their conflicts with its practices and principles, intending to either sway it from within or to split from it after gaining organizational experience and resources?

We see entryism and factionalism on full display with groups such as MUG (Marxist Unity Group), embedded in the Democratic Socialists of America. They explicitly identify as: “a DSA faction, and we aim to be a constructive one … we hope to rally the thousands of Marxists in DSA around a shared vision for our movement’s future.”³ While this strategy consciously violates the ban on factions of the Third International, its validity cannot be dismissed out of hand. After all, the Italian Communist Party, which played a decisive role in the fall of fascism and swayed Italian politics in the decade after the second World War, formed out of a split within the Italian Socialist Party. Was this not a product of factionalism?

The Italian Communist Party came to power in the same decades that the Comintern trained international cadres in Moscow⁴ and coordinated policy across the world’s revolutionary organizations. The Third International initially communicated with the Italian Socialist Party as a revolutionary peer, so how did it react to the violation of its ally’s internal unity? In the year preceding the split in the Italian Socialist Party, Lenin repudiated the attitude of communists within the Socialist Party who called for unity with its rightwing reformists:

“Serrati fears a split that may weaken the party and especially the trade unions, the co-operative societies and the municipalities. These institutions, which are essential to the construction of socialism, must not be destroyed—that is Serrati’s main idea … Serrati fears the destruction of the trade unions, the co-operative societies and municipalities, and the inefficiency and mistakes of the novices. What the Communists fear is the reformists’ sabotage of the revolution. This difference reveals Serrati’s error of principle. He keeps reiterating a simple idea: the need for flexible tactics. This idea is incontestable. The trouble is that Serrati leans to the right when, in the present-day conditions in Italy one should lean to the left. To successfully accomplish the revolution and safeguard it, the Italian party must take a definite step to the left.”⁵

Serrati cited a rationale which should be familiar to modern day advocates of ‘left unity.’ Our strength is limited, so we must put aside sectarian differences and weld ourselves together for the sake of the greater good! Never mind the fact that these differences concern the fundamental tactics and aims of the revolution, we can’t afford to lose any assets in the face of bourgeois reaction. This line of thinking captures a superficial logic, but it fails to grapple with the deeper danger of unity with unreliable elements. Is it worth retaining soldiers who believe victory is impossible on the eve of a battle? Each one discharged is another gun lost, but it may simultaneously be another traitor prevented from aiming that gun at your back because they sincerely believe that it is better to survive than die in a cause they have deemed hopeless. I describe the hypothetical traitor’s mindset in this way because it is precisely the kind of fatalism which infested the rightwing socialists of Lenin’s time — a pattern we are sure to see reemerge when communists reach success in the US. Himself a believer in the futility of a revolution isolated to the former Russian Empire, Leon Trotsky aptly describes the attitude of so-called revolutionaries when the October Revolution most needed their support:

“When the Soviet system was being instituted in Russia, not only the capitalist politicians, but also the Socialist opportunists of all countries proclaimed it an insolent challenge to the balance of forces. On this score, there was no quarrel between Kautsky, the Austrian Count Czernin, and the Bulgarian Premier, Radoslavov … Had Kautsky, Friedrich Adler, and Otto Bauer been told that the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat would hold out in Russia — first against the attack of German militarism, and then in a ceaseless war with the militarism of the Entente countries — the sages of the Second International would have considered such a prophecy a laughable misunderstanding of the ‘balance of power.’”⁶

These were prominent socialist leaders embedded in the countries most directly threatening the October Revolution. They did not believe in its success, so why mobilize workers and risk government repression for a mere blip in the revolutionary process? Kautsky announced in 1918 that “under the conditions of Russia’s life, the dictatorship of the proletariat threatened to lead to the political and social dissolution of the country, to chaos, but thereby also to the moral bankruptcy of the revolution and a preparing of the way for a counterrevolution.”⁷ This belief mutated from ‘merely’ casting doubt in the Bolshevik prospects of victory during their civil war, to labeling the October Revolution a coup d’etat, to finally outright justifying an uprising against the Soviet Union in 1925, calling for socialists to support an uprising against the Bolsheviks even at the risk of aiding the reactionaries hoping for a Tsarist restoration:

“Naturally, it is not impossible that reactionary elements might seek to exploit such an uprising to their advantage. But this very danger may make it all the more necessary for the Social Democrats to exert all their might to exert decisive influence on the uprising, and by no means to sabotage it.”⁸

Kautsky’s transition from seeing the proletariat dictatorship as a fluke to viewing it as an aberration to be overthrown shows the easy slide of rightwing deviation to counterrevolutionary, with the traitor in question sincerely believing in the historical basis of their sabotage. Kautsky’s attitude was far from limited to Germany. He was a theoretical inspiration for Lenin before their split, and he continued to influence socialists such as Pavel Axelrod and Fyodor Dan in the 1920s. It is in this context that we need to consider Lenin’s picture of party unity:

“Victory in the proletarian revolution cannot be achieved, and that revolution cannot be safeguarded, while there are reformists and Mensheviks in one’s ranks. That is obvious in principle, and has been strikingly confirmed by the experience both of Russia and of Hungary. This is a decisive consideration. It is simply ridiculous to compare with this danger the danger of ‘losing’ the trade unions, cooperative societies, municipalities, etc., or of their failures, mistakes, or collapse. It is not only ridiculous, but criminal. Anyone who would subject the entire revolution to risk for fear of injuring the municipal affairs of Milan and so forth, has completely lost his head, has no idea of the fundamental task of the revolution, and is totally incapable of preparing its victory.”⁹

Lenin made no quibbles that the solution to this danger was either the resignation of these reformists or their forceful purge from the party, going so far as to say that “it may even be useful to remove some very good Communists too, to remove them from all responsible posts, if they are inclined to waver, and reveal a tendency towards ‘unity’ with the reformists.”¹⁰ When we consider the Italian Communist Party’s split, we need to consider whether our evaluation of its tactics should proceed from the Italian Socialist Party’s point of view, or the PCI itself. From the PSI’s perspective, the split naturally constituted a weakening of their forces, but from the PCI’s perspective, it was a necessary fulfillment of Lenin’s advice. The reformists were ‘purged’ from the Party by the split itself. In this sense, the PCI would have more truthfully violated the Leninist concept of party unity and democratic centralism by remaining within the PSI and trying to influence its actions — at the cost of the whole party’s effectiveness and the revolution’s prospects of success.

This situation is again similar to the unity between soldiers. If the main force and its leadership discharge soldiers who believe victory is impossible, they are pragmatically adjusting to remove unreliable elements. If the leadership is hopeless and set to surrender, and a contingent of soldiers desert in order to wage their own guerilla campaign, they are operating on the same pragmatism, even if the form differs. As Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin would all agree, not every battle is worth waging, so the correctness of the action is not contingent on who is most belligerent, but who has reached both the correct analysis and the correct tactic reflecting that analysis. Our soldiers thinking of victory should be conceived as those who have faith in the overall prospects of revolution. Those who hold purges to be inherent violations of party unity do so because they “have no need of iron discipline”,¹¹ i.e. they have given up the battle before it is waged.

Therefore, when we return to the topic of MUG, the most questionable aspect of their program is specifically the fact that they continue to operate within the DSA with the intent of steering it from within, rather than splitting and forging their own path. The DSA itself is rife with factions and eschews any hint of iron discipline in favor of being a “big-tent.” In the words of one of its members, Zhao Levi, explicitly arguing for factionalism:

“The DSA is the clearest example of internal factions influencing the party to a revolutionary direction. Michael Harrington, the founder of the DSA, was both a Zionist and an avowed anti-communist, yet because of its democratic nature, the DSA has transformed to become firmly anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist. Unequivocable condemnation of Israeli settler colonialism and recognition of the Palestinian right of resistance and return have been successfully promoted by multiple DSA caucuses. Similarly, DSA caucuses have also openly fought for the censure of nominally progressive politicians who have condoned support for Israel, such Shri Thanedar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and have at times successfully pushed the organization to cease cooperation with such figures.”

One marvels at the immense accomplishment of being able to “at times” cease cooperation with Zionists. Even Levi’s claim that DSA is a “firmly anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist” organization is tenuous at best. Yes, the DSA passed a resolution this year to become a “Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA” with a lean 56% of the vote. It also failed to formally align itself with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or to adopt a resolution in favor of a single-state solution based on Palestinian sovereignty. This is hardly firm and barely anti-imperialist. It is also laughable to cite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a positive example of DSA organizational ethics. Yes, she lost their national endorsement in 2024. This was years after she refused to vote against funding the Zionist Iron Dome in 2021 and after she voted to quash the railroad strike of 2022. Furthermore, Ocasio-Cortez has only lost her national DSA endorsement. In a turn of events which directly reflects the anti-discipline of the DSA, their New York City chapter upheld her endorsement in 2024, and still has her image up in their list of endorsements as of the time of writing, fittingly sharing the list with Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani has already evoked the apprehension of those who celebrated his victory in the New York City mayoral Democratic primary. He has explicitly separated himself from the proposal of eliminating misdemeanor offenses and clarified that “My platform is not the same as national DSA.” The co-chairwoman of the DSA’s NYC chapter further elaborated on this point and tied it to the organizational ethos of the DSA as a whole:

“Grace Mausser, the co-chairwoman of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, said that the priorities of the national organization are not the same as those of the local chapter, which has autonomy to decide its agenda.

“‘New York City D.S.A. and Zohran share a commitment to making our city more affordable for working people, but that doesn’t mean that Zohran adopts every single position that New York City DSA or DSA national has taken,’ Ms. Mausser said in an interview. ‘Zohran’s been really clear that his platform and DSA’s platform are distinct.’

“While the local chapter endorsed Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy, the national umbrella organization did not. But it did celebrate his primary win over Mr. Cuomo, and even claimed some ownership of it.”

This haphazard juggling of endorsements is the natural result of the anti-disciplinary apparatus that MUG wants to claim ownership of. Members of the DSA itself have tired of this pattern of unaccountability among its endorsed candidates, particularly due to the fact that even if an elected member was purged from the DSA, their usual membership in the Democratic Party makes the DSA’s support an afterthought:

“The Democratic electeds are considered the crowning achievement of the DSA, but they’re really a noose around our necks. They are useful for the Establishment because they restrain social movements and redirect them back into the Democratic camp, where they are safely buried … Democratic politicians, whatever their background and starting point, will have a career only if they work to sustain their party and the ruling-class interests it represents. The more political sway they seek to have, the more they must align with the Establishment to get political backing from higher-ups, fundraising support, etc. … For Zohran’s campaign to warrant even critical support from DSAers, he must first declare total financial, organizational, and political independence from the Democrats. This includes both leaving the party and refusing to caucus with them.”

These proposals would be an essential first step to creating discipline in the DSA, but it is doubtful that an organization which barely managed to take a firm stand against genocide this year will be able to reach it anytime soon. The slim margins by which the DSA adopted its resolutions on Palestine are themselves a product of its ‘big-tent’ mentality. Consider how it has been dragged to its current anti-imperialist positions, and imagine how such an apparatus would function during a period of nationwide crisis. If its current inability to control its members is any indication, it could not muster the organizational strength to seize control of the state, much less to defend its gains. This truth again validates Stalin’s understanding of party ethics, i.e. that the parties of the Second International which allow factionalism have no need of discipline because they do not seek to seize power. They prioritize the appearance of internal democracy under conditions of peace over the preparation of a fighting organization suited to conditions of systemic crisis.

This is the apparatus that MUG wants to “transform … into an independent socialist party.” They see many of the same problems endemic to the DSA’s organization, but they are still set on capturing what they see as “the political home for this struggle.” Is this description accurate, and how does MUG’s strategy match up to the history of revolutionary parties? To expand on MUG’s understanding of the DSA, we can turn to the words of Jean Allen, its Interim Editor in Chief:

“The beauty of the Democratic Socialists of America since its rise has been its place as a staging ground for the transformation of theoretical tendencies into practices, its location as a multi-tendency organization, and its sheer size, dwarfing anything else which calls itself the US organized left. Combined, they have created an organization which has allowed the complete recasting of the Left’s fragmentation into practical terms. This has created a new and volatile politics which, due to its state of emergence, leads to often seemingly contradictory positions being held within one organization or one person. But this is for the best … For all its faults, the DSA has acted as a laboratory of the Left…”

MUG’s characterization of the DSA focuses on its ‘big-tent’ nature, meaning that MUG values the DSA for drawing into itself the largest number of leftwing militants as compared with any other party in the US. This is true on its face, but it substitutes the question of what organization is best posed to guide a revolution for the question of where leftwing debate is concentrated. While these questions can naturally overlap, a glance back through history reveals that functional splits from existing leftwing parties tended to be based on how best to organize the working masses, not how best to reach the biggest portion of the proletariat’s advanced elements. One of the PCI’s key leaders, Palmiro Togliatti, noted explicitly that the break with the PSI was intended to provide an alternative organization to the working class, rather than allowing the PSI’s monopoly to continue:

“The erroneous reformist and maximalist tendencies within the Socialist Party were overcome in criticism, but not in any successful action on a national scale. At that time, however, it was the only party, that is the only national political organization, available to the working class. It is for this reason that the Turin movement ended in the declaration that it was necessary to create a new vanguard proletarian party: the Communist Party.”¹²

Note how Togliatti specifies that no successful rectification occurred in the PSI on a national scale. This again evokes the most damning sin of the DSA’s organizational ethos—its utter lack of discipline towards members and chapters. When MUG declares that it wants to “realize DSA’s promise as a programmatically united mass Party,” it is essentially declaring that it is more beneficial to wage years of ideological struggle with other leftwing militants to then assert a proper mass-based strategy from above rather than using a break to build strength through a functional party from below. There is nothing theoretically preventing an individual DSA chapter from emulating mass-linked tactics, such as the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast programs for children. However, the lack of standardization across DSA chapters simultaneously means that it cannot be a uniformly mass-based party. As a result, what MUG sees as the concentration of leftwing debate in the US is more accurately conceived as a mere subdivision of a broad left fractured between the Communist Party of the USA, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, among many others.

While these other organizations may appear small compared to the DSA, the disorganization of the DSA into disparate chapters means that they are all — in effect — fragments of an organized left which has more publicity than actual unified presence in the lives of the working masses. This situation brings us from parallels with the situation of early 20th century Italy to that in the Russian Empire before the rise of the Bolsheviks. Even in 1917, the Bolsheviks were not defined by being the largest segment of the Russian left, which was instead the Socialist Revolutionaries, who were bolstered by wide swathes of the peasantry.¹³ In a parallel to the modern DSA, the Socialist Revolutionary Party was characterized by a big-tent mentality.

“the PSR was always remarkable for the range of diverse opinion that it contained. In part this stemmed from the aspiration of the party’s founders to absorb all of the populist groups that dotted the political landscape in Russia … It stemmed as well from the absence of a single dominant figure in the leadership, and from the organizational weakness that plagued the party throughout its existence.”¹⁴

The Bolsheviks did not focus on infiltrating and swaying this expression of Russia’s socialist movement. Instead, they focused on solidifying the ideological unity of their own, smaller fragment of the left, i.e. they repudiated the idea of a big-tent socialist party in practice by waging an internal ideological struggle against the seeds of factionalism:

“In the period of the formation of the Party, when the innumerable circles and organizations had not yet been linked together, when amateurishness and the parochial outlook of the circles were corroding the Party from top to bottom, when ideological confusion was the characteristic feature of the internal life of the Party, the main link and the main task in the chain of links and in the chain of tasks then confronting the Party proved to be the establishment of an all-Russian illegal newspaper. Why? Because, under the conditions then prevailing, only by means of an all-Russian illegal newspaper was it possible to create a solid core of the Party capable of uniting the innumerable circles and organizations into one whole, to prepare the conditions for ideological and tactical unity, and thus to build the foundations for the formation of a real party.”¹⁵

This struggle against ideological confusion was explicitly upheld by Lenin, even to the point of supporting both splits from the DSA’s ancestors in 20th century Europe and from leftwing deviations regardless of the potential disruption to the international movement:

“There is reason to fear that the split with the ‘Lefts’, the anti-parliamentarians (in part anti-politicals too, who are opposed to any political party and to work in the trade unions), will become an international phenomenon, like the split with the ‘Centrists’ (i.e. Kautskyites, Longuetists, Independents, etc.). Let that be so. At all events, a split is better than confusion, which hampers the ideological, theoretical, and revolutionary growth and maturing of the party, and its harmonious, really organized practical work which actually paves the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat.”¹⁶

MUG attributes their thought to “the Marxism of the Second International, and above all by those that kept its revolutionary spirit alive in the face of political capitulation: Lenin and the Bolsheviks.” The connection to Kautsky’s Second International is honest, but any ties to Lenin are selective at best and a manipulative farce to gather more radical communists at worst. The historical Lenin would encourage a break with the DSA, fully understanding the further organizational divide this would bring, rather than tolerating ideological confusion and disorganization dressed up in the folksy populist garb of a big-tent party.

Entryism is not only a practice of groups like MUG, however. It is an appealing prospect to individual communists due to the lack of resources and like-minded comrades they may suffer from in the disorganized political sphere. I myself joined my local DSA chapter in the early 2020s because I believed it was necessary to compromise ideological purity for the sake of practice, with a vague hope that I could steer the chapter towards Marxist-Leninist positions. I can say at this point that over a year of ineffectual practice with organized support is easily outweighed by ideological work as an individual, but that is only an anecdote. Many communists could convince themselves that joining ineffectual parties with the intent of steering them towards a different direction is an unattractive necessity of organizing which emulates the pragmatic attitude of Lenin:

“We cannot but regard as equally ridiculous and childish nonsense the pompous, very learned, and frightfully revolutionary disquisitions of the German Lefts to the effect that Communists cannot and should not work in reactionary trade unions, that it is permissible to turn down such work, that it is necessary to withdraw from the trade unions and create a brand-new and immaculate ‘Workers’ Union’ invented by very pleasant (and, probably, for the most part very youthful) Communists, etc., etc.”¹⁷

Were we to extrapolate this notion from economic trade unions to political parties, it would support the basic premise of individual entryism. However, this would ignore the preconditions that Leninists have placed on work within separate organizations. Entering into a reactionary trade union as a member of a communist party means having the backing and obligations inherent in that membership. One’s political bearing is monitored and informed by membership in a party, so they are inoculated against the reactionary background around them insofar as that party correctly applies its hegemony. An individual entering into a reactionary or reformist organization without this guarantee is likely to adapt to that environment rather than control it. This is not to say that an influx of members with competing ideologies cannot influence an organization, but it is much more likely to end in the confusion lambasted by Lenin. Communists enter into reactionary institutions to agitate for the class struggle within these forums, not to substitute them for their own organization. Togliatti noted the danger of unorganized protest within reactionary organizations when the Italian communists and other anti-fascists were agitating in fascist social clubs:

“The slogan ‘The Dopolavoro to the workers’ was justly criticized since it might have produced illusion that the Dopolavoro system as such could be taken over and transformed into a class organization. That cannot happen without a break in the fascist dictatorship. But can an individual Dopolavoro organization be taken over? Yes. Are the workers tending in this direction? Yes … Lately, there have even been reports of subversive songs having been sung in some Dopolavoro centers. This in itself represents the winning of some liberties. Then, the attempt is made to assume the administration. This is tried first in furtive forms: the old officer who accepts the supervisor but with the mental reservation of doing as he sees fit. This is an interesting but dangerous tendency. If we don’t put ourselves at the head of this tendency and channel it, not only will it not disturb fascism, but the organization will tend to adapt itself; it will adjust to the current situation. This is why fascism doesn’t always react openly against these organizations. Fascism adapts itself; and so the old officer imagines he is not adapting to fascism and then ends up by really adapting to it. This is where the danger lies: the adaptation of the workers and old officers to fascism.”¹⁸

While the nature of social democratic organizations and ossified communist parties naturally differ from these fascist clubs, the furtive attitude towards dissent Togliatti describes in these anti-fascist workers is a deadly vice typical of those isolated in opposed ideological territory. To avoid being in constant conflict with their fellow members, a communist in an social democratic party must constantly slip into the features of liberalism outlined by Mao Zedong. They must “let things slide for the sake of peace,” “indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one’s suggestions to the organization,” and “hear incorrect views without rebutting them.”¹⁹ I point this out not to shame any comrades for slipping into these vices. There is little point to shaming this conduct while the premise of their membership in these anti-vanguard parties is the primary contradiction.

Cooperation with leftwing or rightwing deviations of socialists is predicated on independent organization. This basic principle is why even the alliance of the communists with social democrats in the anti-fascist united front depended on communists possessing a party which protected itself from social democratic infiltration:

“The unity, revolutionary solidarity and fighting preparedness of the Communist Parties constitute a most valuable capital which belongs not only to us but to the whole working class. We have combined and shall continue to combine our readiness to march jointly with the Social Democratic Parties and organizations to the struggle against fascism with an irreconcilable struggle against Social Democracy as the ideology and practice of compromise with the bourgeoisie, and consequently also against any penetration of this ideology into our own ranks. In boldly and resolutely carrying out the policy of the united front, we meet in our own ranks with obstacles which we must remove at all costs in the shortest possible time.”²⁰

At every turn, we see Leninists asserting that ideological unity is the basic premise of worthwhile political action. In complete opposition to this premise, leaders of the CPUSA like Joe Sims call to “build the united front, to fight back on the basis of the issues without ideological preconditions, including those influenced by MAGA.” Trying to capture a reformist organization like this from below means starting from ideological confusion and hoping that a struggle with other socialists will eventually grant the opportunity for effective action. Refusing to accept this collage of parties in the US seemingly content with a fragmented left, means pushing for a new party which takes seriously the idea of being the progressive masses’ vanguard. However, this position alone is far from enough to achieve its intended outcome. There are plenty of small organizations in the US which understand that the CPUSA, PSL, FRSO, and DSA fail to lead the masses and often refuse to accept the settler-colonial contradiction key to analyzing US society. Declaring this incapacity and then founding a new party is not enough. It is essential to orient oneself around effective work. This work will allow us to build organizations from the resulting structures and mass links. Kim Il Sung made this clear, and he explicitly drew a distinction between this approach and the factionalists of the Korean context:

“Under these circumstances, the Korean communists are confronted with the most urgent task of founding a revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist party, drawing serious lessons from the communist movement in the 1920s. However, we cannot create a revolutionary party the way factionalists did in the past, when a small number of communists got together, without any organizational and ideological preparation, set up a ‘party centre’ and proclaimed the founding of the party.”²¹

“In going ahead with the formation of a party, we must, for a start, set up basic party organizations. This is of great significance not only for making the general preparations for party building more substantial, but also for striking deep roots among the broad masses when the party comes into existence. We must form the party not by proclaiming the party centre first but by setting up fully prepared basic party organizations and then steadily expanding them.”²²

The essential characteristic of these building-block organizations is their mass link. For a Korea occupied by Imperial Japan, that meant an “Anti-Japanese Youth League” and the “Association for the Restoration of the Fatherland” because Japanese colonialism was the primary contradiction constraining the development of the working class.²³ In the context of our North American Republic, the Black Panther Party demonstrated a parallel calculation when its founders began with armed surveillance of police in Black communities. Huey P. Newton noted how theory and practice flowed naturally from each other:

“Wherever brothers gathered, we talked with them about their right to arm. In general, they were interested but skeptical about the weapons idea. They could not see anyone walking around with a gun in full view. To recruit any sizable number of street brothers, we would obviously have to do more than talk. We needed to give practical applications of our theory, show them that we were not afraid of weapons and not afraid of death. The way we finally won the brothers over was by patrolling the police with arms.”²⁴

These examples of mass work raised the contradictions between the working class and their existing society in a novel way. They were tailored to the specific moment rather than simply providing mutual aid to the masses. Therefore, we can predict that the vanguard party which leads the working masses of the US out of its fascist death-spiral will answer the unique needs of its current moment in a way which heightens its conflict with the bourgeoisie. In the US context, this could look like the revival of Black Panther-style disruption of police and ICE agents through arms and legal expertise or it could manifest in community health clinics providing the care threatened by disappearing reproductive and trans rights. It could also come from a theoretical organ which connects with the masses in the manner envisioned by the “all-Russian newspaper” of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?. The exact form of this mass work remains to be seen, but the essential fact to remember is that effective mass work will be matched by a corresponding shock to the balance of forces within the US which will earn its practitioners the mass links and prestige to scaffold towards a mature party.

These features of mass work are why we must look beyond the existing large socialist parties of the US. The CPUSA, FRSO, PSL, and DSA are not identical, but they all suffer from a palpable stagnancy. Whereas the Black Panther Party and the CPUSA of the early 20th century found their way into the public consciousness by forging power for the working masses of the US and fear in its bourgeoisie, the modern socialist parties repeat the same tactics and phrase mongering without gathering their own distinct momentum. Even the DSA’s public presence is more the product of its mobilization for Democratic Party candidates than its achievements in the organization of the working masses. It lacks internal discipline while the modern CPUSA scorns preconditions on external unity, making them both appendages of the Democrats. While the rightwing deviations of these two parties have received widespread attention from communists, their counterparts to the left receive comparatively less scrutiny.

The PSL, while generally more disciplined in its rhetoric than the DSA and CPUSA, arrives at a similar state of affairs via different means. The organization’s 2022 constitution outlines basic notions of democratic centralism, but it simultaneously leaves massive gaps in its treatment of the organization’s members and finances, with zero articles restricting the purpose of its finances²⁵ and the only constitutional requirement of its members being a prohibition against seeking “gain or privilege from their membership.”²⁶ In an organization notoriously marred by accusations of covering up sexual assault, these gaps read less as oversights and more like components of a systemic pattern of an opaque organization style which makes it difficult to track accountability within the PSL. Perhaps there are more robust restrictions on its membership within the PSL’s bylaws, but neither the organization’s constitution, its bylaws, or an outline of its leadership structure can be obtained from the PSL’s online organs, further cementing its outwardly opaque style.²⁷

We must consider the PSL’s actions within this context. Like the DSA, I have no doubt that there is good work being done by individual cadres in local PSL chapters. However, this can amount to little without an effective center, and the PSL’s opaque style severs the symbiotic relationship which should be apparent between its lower organs and its leadership. The national PSL appears most prominently in its forays into the US’s presidential elections, earning public visibility and doubling its tiny sliver of the popular vote between 2020 and 2024.²⁸ While I am certain Claudia De La Cruz and the PSL’s central committee had no illusions about her chances of victory, it is less clear what they expected or wanted from this campaign or its predecessors.

Socialists have long elected officials to bourgeois legislatures in order to advocate for the class struggle from these offices and thereby “prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with.”²⁹ However, a financially and politically demanding attempt to obtain an office doomed from the outset does not result in the victory necessary to show the present political system’s bankruptcy by demonstrating the limits of elected power. Claudia De La Cruz’s campaign raised and spent $387,502.48, with the campaign’s energy largely aimed at getting its name on the ballot “in at least 22 states” in order to give “the campaign a potential path to victory.” Rather than focus its mobilizations and fund-raising on mass work or even the election of attainable offices, the PSL followed in the footsteps of the Green Party and Libertarians by prioritizing the publicity gained by a third-party candidacy over the revolutionary mass work which these funds and legwork could have been funneled towards.

The FRSO tends to be seen as the most radical of these parties, paying greater attention to the issue of national liberation in the US. However, in the theory of its leadership on settler-colonialism and — crucially — the organization’s conduct, the FRSO arrives at the same patterns of its opponents. Like the PSL, the FRSO is an opaque organization able to publish the programs produced by its congresses, but not the constitution or bylaws which guide its purportedly democratic centralist structure.³⁰ Like the CPUSA, the FRSO dutifully tails the Democrats in electoral politics, proclaiming in 2022 that “we must defeat any politicians running for office this November who hold a favorable view of Trump” and only reversing course and refusing to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024 due to the political visibility of the genocide in Palestine: “The specter of a Trump win should not give a pass to the candidate of genocide and war, namely Kamala Harris.” Did the Democrats only become a party of genocide and war in 2024? Of course not, the genocide in Palestine precedes October 7th and so does the Democrats’ support for Zionism. Leftwing loyalty to the Democrats in 2022 gave us such gleeful Zionists as Senator John Fetterman. The FRSO cultivates an image of being the most revolutionary of the large socialist parties, but it follows the trends of advanced mass consciousness rather than leading them.

The most concise demonstration of this fact lies in the FRSO’s name, because the FRSO is not a party in its self-conception, but an organization “building towards the creation of a new Communist Party.” This is a description which acknowledges the FRSO’s limitations in size and national reach, rejecting the concept that a party may be prematurely “proclaimed or declared into being.”³¹ However, it is also a damning self-diagnosis when we recall that the FRSO is four decades old. It declared in 2005 that “Overall conditions are good for building the struggle of the multinational working class.” Assuming this to be true, it has taken decades of heightening conditions for this organization to reach the maturity required to obtain headquarters, and it speaks on this accomplishment as if it is only the opening salvo of its party-building process: “We said we would secure headquarters, and we did. Now, we are saying we will build a new communist party in the United States, and we intend to do just that.” The FRSO talks like an organization on the cutting edge of the US’s revolutionary movement, but at every turn we find that its actions indicate a collective of revolutionaries caught in the tide of the maturing working masses rather than charting its own course.

Besides the stagnancy shown in the practices of the CPUSA, PSL, and FRSO, these democratic centralist organizations refuse to interact with each other with the clarity and aggression of parties vying for the position of the masses’ vanguard. Read any piece by Lenin published in the formative period of the Bolshevik Party, and you will find the most critical and sardonic treatment of his opponents within the party and in the competing anti-capitalist organizations. He was never afraid to name names or accuse deviating communists of serving the interests of the bourgeoisie. Now search the press organs of these three parties for comparable analyses of the mistakes of their competitors and the correctness of their own approach. In the FRSO’s Fight Back! News, PSL’s Liberation News, and the CPUSA’s People’s World, the closest example I could find was a book review from People’s World which attempted to — in typical CPUSA fashion — politely dismiss the validity of Black nationalism as acknowledged by the FRSO.

These organizations, always quick to lament the lack of unity in the US leftwing and deride the isolation of their ‘sectarian’ critics, seem to avoid justifying their own division into separate parties. It is a behavior which evokes the retort Lenin gave to Trotsky for his criticism of the Bolsheviks’ refusal to prioritize unity among communists:

“You consider that it is the ‘Leninists’ who are splitters? Very well, let us assume that you are right. But if you are, why have not all the other sections and groups proved that unity is possible with the liquidators without the ‘Leninists’, and against the ‘splitters’? … If we are splitters, why have not you, uniters, united among yourselves, and with the liquidators? Had you done that you would have proved to the workers by deeds that unity is possible and beneficial!”³²

The truth is that there are real differences between these parties which cause their division, and they — like their counterpart’s in Lenin’s time — recognize this implicitly but refuse to explicitly act accordingly. The absence of this mutual criticism means a tacit acceptance of the ideological borders drawn in the US left. To the members of these organizations, the best way to dispute my analysis of these parties is by explaining the strategies and victories which distinguish their party from its competitors. Any defense focusing on the growth of their own membership, their funding, or their vote pool only proves the obvious reality that anti-capitalist sentiment is growing worldwide. The best way to defend the vanguard potential of any of these parties is by detailing a recent history of what tactics have failed to produce momentum for the US left and how the party is acting to avoid this failure and using class analysis to chart a new course. Organizational secrecy is a valid argument in favor of a certain degree of opacity and against giving specific, sensitive information, but if we cannot compare tactics, structures, and actions, than we are handing the bourgeoisie a preemptive victory. As quoted at the beginning of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?:

“Party struggles lend a party strength and vitality; the greatest proof of a party’s weakness is its diffuseness and the blurring of clear demarcations; a party becomes stronger by purging itself.”³³

For those of us who are already disgusted by the stagnancy of the US left and eager to see the contradictions of the settler-colonial republic studied and torn wide, there are innumerable options available to start real revolutionary work which do not involve joining a party which squats on its part of the US left like a fiefdom. We need class analysis of the same style and specificity as Mao’s “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.”³⁴ We need work which generates a perceptible growth in the political maturity of the working masses. And organizationally, we need a style of discipline which understands splits and purges to be dialectically intertwined with unity. The aforementioned US parties are not stagnant due to some inexplicable stroke of misfortune. In an environment like the settler-colonial head of imperialism, the immaturity of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie’s ability to distribute the profits of imperialism to soften class conflict means that finding the correct class analysis, the correct form of work to raise the contradictions between these classes, and the right shape of the organization meant to lead them are each monumental tasks with no exact precedent to refer to. The first step to tackling these questions is not throwing yourself headfirst into the work, but recognizing that theory, mass work, and organizing mutually inform and produce each other. The vanguard party of the US context will temper itself by realizing the dialectic flow between these elements.

Bibliography

1. Stalin, J.V. The Foundations of Leninism. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. (p. 106-7) ︎
2. Ibid. (p. 105) ︎
3. Points of Unity. MarxistUnity. Accessed August 29, 2025. https://www.marxistunity.com/. ︎
4. Togliatti’s Lectures on Fascism are an example of this educational exchange, being delivered in Moscow, 1935 to Italian working-class students at the Lenin School.
   Togliatti, Palmiro. Lectures on Fascism. New York: International Publishers, 1976. (p. vii) ︎
5. Lenin, V.I. “On the Struggle of the Italian Socialist Party.” Marxists Internet Archive, 2002. Originally published November 12, 1920. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/04.htm. ︎
6. Trotsky, L. Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1935. (p. 16) ︎
7. Kautsky, Karl. The Bolsheviki Rising. Marxists Internet Archive, 2002. Originally published March 2, 1918. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/03/bolsheviki.htm. ︎
8. Kautsky, Karl. Die Internationale und Sowjetrussland. Berlin: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1925. (p. 49)
   *Quote sourced from machine translation, original german quote below.
   “Natürlich ist es nicht unmöglich, daß reaktionäre Elemente eine solche Erhebung zu ihren Gunsten auszunutzen streben. Aber gerade diese Gefahr kann es erst recht notwendig machen, daß die Sozialdemokraten mit aller Macht darauf hinwirken, entscheidenden Einfluß auf den Aufstand zu bekommen, keineswegs ihn zu sabotieren.” ︎
9. Lenin, V.I. “On the Struggle of the Italian Socialist Party.” Marxists Internet Archive, 2002. Originally published November 12, 1920. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/04.htm. ︎
10. Ibid. ︎
11. Stalin, J.V. The Foundations of Leninism. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. (p. 106-7) ︎
12. Togliatti, Palmiro. On Gramsci and Other Writings. Edited and translated by Donald Sassoon. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979. (p. 174) ︎
13. Smith, Scott B. Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918-1923. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2011. (p. xii) ︎
14. Ibid. (p. xiii) ︎
15. Stalin, J.V. The Foundations of Leninism. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. (p. 89) ︎
16. Lenin, V.I. “‘Left-Wing’ Communism—An Infantile Disorder.” In Selected Works in One Volume: Essential Aspects of Lenin’s Contributions to Revolutionary Marxism, 516-91. New York: International Publishers, 1971. (p. 582) ︎
17. Ibid. ︎
18. Togliatti, Palmiro. Lectures on Fascism. New York: International Publishers, 1976. (p. 84) ︎
19. Mao Zedong. “Combat Liberalism.” Marxists Internet Archive, 2004. (Originally published September 7, 1937) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm. ︎
20. Dimitrov, Georgi. “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communis International in the Struggle of the Working Class Against Fascism.” In Selected Works: Volume II, 7-88. Sofia: Sofia Press, 1978. (p. 79) ︎
21. Kim Il Sung. Works 1: June 1930—December 1945. Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1980. (p. 163) ︎
22. Ibid. (p. 9) ︎
23. Ibid. (pp. 117, 164) ︎
24. Newton, Huey P. The Huey P. Newton Reader. Edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2019. (p. 59-60) ︎
25. Constitution of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Fifth Party Congress, 2022. (p. 18) Retrieved from https://dn721905.ca.archive.org/0/items/party-for-socialism-and-liberation-psl-constitution-2022/Party%20for%20Socialism%20and%20Liberation%20PSL%20Constitution%202022.pdf. ︎
26. Ibid. (p. 15) ︎
27. As of the time of publication, October 5th, 2025, there are no documents on the PSL’s leadership, constitution, or bylaws accessible on its main website, press organ, or theoretical mouthpiece:
    https://pslweb.org/
    https://liberationnews.org
    https://www.liberationschool.org/
    If someone is able to locate an avenue to finding these documents publicly available, please message me and I will update this article accordingly. ︎
28. The PSL earned 85,685 votes (0.05%) in 2020 and 165,191 votes (0.11%) in 2024.
    Gabbatt, Adam. “‘We Are Working-Class Women of Color’: The Long-Shot Socialist Run for the White House.” The Guardian, January 7, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/07/claudia-de-la-cruz-interview-socialist-candidate-2024.
    https://ballotpedia.org/Claudia_De_La_Cruz ︎
29. Lenin, V.I. “‘Left-Wing’ Communism—An Infantile Disorder.” In Selected Works in One Volume: Essential Aspects of Lenin’s Contributions to Revolutionary Marxism, 516-91. New York: International Publishers, 1971. (p. 547) ︎
30. As with the PSL’s website, if someone is able to locate the FRSO’s internal rules on its main online organs, please message me so I can amend this article accordingly.
    https://frso.org/
    https://fightbacknews.org ︎
31. “Class in the U.S. and Our Strategy for Revolution.” In FRSO Program, 17-25. https://frso.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/frso-program.pdf. (p. 24) ︎
32. Lenin, V.I. “Disruption of Unity Under Cover of Outcries for Unity.” Marxists Internet Archive, 1996. (Originally published May 1914) https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/x01.htm. ︎
33. Lenin, V.I. “Preface.” In What Is To Be Done?. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/preface.htm.
    (Lenin is quoting a letter of Lassalle to Marx from June 24, 1852) ︎
34. Mao Zedong. “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.” Marxists Internet Archive, 2004. (Originally published March 1926) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm ︎

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. 

In 2025, we will have reached a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Someone born in the year 2000 will, in those short 25 years, have experienced multiple “once in a lifetime” events. These include worldwide recessions at an increasing frequency, a global pandemic that has claimed millions of lives, massive floods, wildfires, ever-worsening heat waves, and multiple U.S.-led or U.S.-directed wars in the Middle East, including most recently, the intensification of the ongoing Palestinian genocide by “Israel” which has laid bare the global resurgence of open fascism.

All the while, this 25-year-old individual has seen their wages stagnate in the face of inflation, making even the most fundamental necessities of life, such as groceries and stable housing, increasingly unaffordable. In short, things are pretty bleak.

But why is this? Why are things the way they are? Are these just random and unrelated events that make the lives of the vast majority of people more difficult? Is there little or nothing we can do about it?

Or, is there a thread that connects all these problems and crises together?

Marxists understand that the global capitalist system is that thread, and that the solutions to the myriad crises facing us will only come about by unravelling it and building a new social and economic system. Marxism is a method of analysis that allows us to bring the true nature of capitalism into focus, demystifying how our world works, and stripping back the layers of capitalist propaganda we have been fed our whole lives.

“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”

Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done (1902)

What is (and isn’t) Marxism?

Someone looking to bourgeois (capitalist) politicians, media outlets, and academic sources to find an accurate and fair description of Marxism, Communism, or left-wing ideas in general will have a difficult time. In most popular media, Marxism is either depicted as an outdated ideology that has nothing to offer a modern world, or as a dangerous “authoritarian” dogma that seeks to rule over people with an iron fist. But are these depictions anywhere close to reality?

Marxism is, of course, named after Karl Marx, the 19th century German political theorist, social scientist, and economist who (literally) wrote the book on capital.

His life’s work was explaining what capitalism is and how it relates to politics. Along with his long-time collaborator and comrade Friedrich Engels, he laid the foundations of what we call Marxism today.

However, this does not mean that Marxism begins and ends with the works of Karl Marx himself. Marx and Engels openly built off the work of figures such as Adam Smith, GWF Hegel, Robert Owen, and many others.

Since Marx and Engels’ time, a long list of theorists, activists, and revolutionaries have expanded Marxism and adapted it to different contexts and times. The strength of Marxism lies not in the perfect wisdom or character of one person, but in its ability to analyse the world using scientific methods that illuminate the fatal contradictions in capitalism.

Understanding capitalism gives us the opportunity and the ability to chart a course towards a better future. Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action. Marxism is the theory for the education of the working and other oppressed classes, and its usefulness is its scientific philosophy and methodology; not the personal opinions of Marxists or even Marx himself!

Scientific Socialism

Marxists often get accused of being naïve utopians, but in fact much of Marx and Engels’ early work was critiquing utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Marxists do not imagine a perfect socialist society and then attempt to impose that ideal onto the current reality. Instead, we use scientific methods (evidence, research, critical analysis, etc.) to help us understand the world as it is now, and how we can change it.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

When Marxists talk about socialism, we are referring to a political and economic system formed after capitalism has been overthrown by the working classes, but where aspects of capitalism still remain and are being gradually eliminated by the new socialist state. These lingering elements of capitalism include, but are not limited to: commodity production; the necessity of money; and reactionary ideologies such as individualism, national chauvinism, misogyny, and racism. The overthrow of the capitalist class and the establishment of socialism is, however, the first step towards resolving these lingering contradictions.

To achieve this socialist transitory stage requires the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. This is not a dictatorship of one person over all others, which would be antithetical to Marxism, but the overthrow of the current dictatorship of the bourgeois class of the few and the establishment of supreme power in the hands of the revolutionary proletariat of the many. There is no “one size fits all” solution. Socialism develops according to the unique conditions of each region.

Communism is a future stage of development under which the last remnants of capitalism and class society have been eliminated globally, and the need for a state to manage the many contradictions of capitalism has disappeared.

Dialectical Materialism

Dialectical materialism (diamat) is the core philosophy of Marxism. From this philosophy comes a scientific framework for understanding changes in the world, and more importantly, for enacting change ourselves.

Dialectical thinking is rooted in the principle that all things in existence are constantly interacting with one another, and that these interactions are the basis for change. Dialectics is based on logical constructs that contain two or more aspects that oppose, act on, and require each other for existence. In Marxism, these constructs are most often called contradictions.

Contradictions are in all things and are in constant motion. Nothing exists in isolation from everything else, and all things are in a state of constant change. If we want to understand something (be it an animal, a piece of music, a political ideology, or a global economic system), we have to understand the internal contradictions within that thing as well as the external contradictions. Internal contradictions are the basis of the thing while external contradictions are the outside conditions and forces interacting with it.

“In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis.”

Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (1937)

The internal properties of an egg will determine if the egg hatches into a bird or lizard, while simultaneous external conditions that surround the egg (like temperature and location) will determine whether it incubates and hatches, is cooked, is eaten by a predator, or simply rolls from the nest and is broken.

Fundamentally, a contradiction is composed of two or more aspects. The contradiction of capital and labour has two main aspects: the capitalist class and the working class. Both classes are required for the other to exist, but both classes are opposed to one another.

These opposing classes are engaged in a long struggle for dominance. Capitalists fight to maintain their control, and workers fight to gain control. When a social revolution occurs, the capital-labour contradiction inverts in favour of the workers, the workers become the ruling class, and suppress the capitalists

It will then be the job of the workers to gradually eliminate the conditions for class society until no class divisions exist. The capital-labour contradiction will finally be resolved.

Materialism

In philosophy, the word “materialism” carries a different meaning than its common everyday usage. Here, materialism does not refer to someone being materialistic, i.e., only being concerned with physical possessions or wealth. Instead, materialism is the understanding that the universe we live in is made first and foremost of matter. Our thoughts and ideas originate from and are only possible because of matter.

This doesn’t mean that materialism is completely deterministic. We still (mostly) have control over our thoughts and actions. However, the choices we make are shaped by the material conditions we find ourselves in. The relationship between thought and matter is, like all relationships, a dialectical one, but matter is the primary actor. A carpenter makes the choice to act and turn a block of wood into a chair, but this is only possible because the physical properties of wood allow them to do so. No matter how skilled the carpenter, they cannot build a chair out of air because the physical properties of air do not allow it.

Historical Materialism

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

Historical materialism takes the principles of dialectical materialism and applies them to the development of society over time. Marxism identifies class struggle as the fundamental motive force behind human social development in class societies.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

By taking a scientific study of human history, we can see how the conflicts between different classes in a society, shaped by changes in the mode of production (how a society fulfills the material needs of its population), resulted in changes to the overall structure of that society.

For example, near the end of the Middle Ages, the development of mechanised production and an increase in global trade allowed for a small class of European merchants to grow their wealth and political power. Eventually these protocapitalists grew powerful enough to challenge and even overthrow the feudal nobility, giving rise to modern capitalism and the liberal state. But, by creating a new ruling class in the form of the bourgeoisie (capitalists), capitalism also created a new global working class (the proletariat). In doing so, capitalism, as Marx put it, created its own gravediggers, since the proletariat has nothing to gain by their continued exploitation under capitalism.

Historical materialism gives us the tools to understand historical events and observe general trends in present-day developments. It is not however a crystal ball that lets us predict exactly what a future socialist or Communist society will look like. We do not know, and cannot know, what shapes art, music, religion, sports, or many other parts of human society will take under a yet-to-be realised new socioeconomic order.

“Marxism comes to the world as an historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans or, let us go back to Asians; when the Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts. They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. So that method and factual data were obviously interwoven, and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting. It was the task of the Chinese to deal with that and to adapt it and to scrutinise it and see how it was applicable to their society. First and foremost, to be scientific, it meant having due regard for the specifics of Chinese historical and social development.”

Walter Rodney, Marxism and African Liberation (1975)

Oppression and Exploitation

Oppression and exploitation manifest in innumerable ways under class society. They are inextricably connected to and caused by the stratification of society into different classes. The purpose of oppressions may differ, but they all ultimately serve to benefit the ruling classes of said class society. In the present age these oppressions and exploitations serve capitalists in capitalist society.

Economic Exploitation

“Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That’s why I poop on company time.”

A common refrain

Economic exploitation—at its most fundamental—is extracting more value from a person’s labour than they are paid. Under the capitalist wage system, a restaurant worker might make 15 dollars per hour. However, in that hour as a result of their labour, they create 100 dollars of value by assembling and cooking meals.

Instead of receiving the full 100 dollars of value, the capitalist who owns the restaurant (the means of production), pays the worker only the promised 15 dollars, uses a portion to cover facility costs, and pockets the rest as profit. This profit is called surplus labour value and was created by the labour of the workers. The boss keeps wages as low as possible while ensuring workers remain unaware of this thievery.

You, as a worker, may feel like you are being cheated every day at work. This is because you are. At a fundamental level, we all understand this!

The economic exploitation of the worker—the extraction of surplus labour value—is the fundamental rule of capitalism. Without exploitation, the capitalist makes no profit. With no profit comes no capital accumulation, which is the entire goal of capitalism: endless profit.

The exploitation “of man, by man” works simultaneously with the exploitation of the land, oceans, and air as class society necessitates the extraction of raw materials without regard to what nature, and by extension ourselves, need to survive.

National Liberation, Decolonization, and Land Back

Marxists are internationalists. The liberation of humanity cannot happen unless all nations are free from colonial oppression and imperialist exploitation.

National liberation and self-determination includes the right to secession from oppressive regimes. This includes Indigenous nations within settler-colonial states such as: Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel.

In settler-colonial states the contradiction between the colonised nations and the colonising nation is the principal contradiction (the contradiction which informs all others), and not the contradiction between the (majority settler) working classes and the capitalist class (although this contradiction remains important). When this is the case, settlers of the dominant colonial state must embrace the concept of Revolutionary Defeatism by working tirelessly to ensure the defeat of their own settler-colonial nation state and liberation of indigenous nations.

It is the responsibility of all communists on this continent to combat settler chauvinism wherever it emerges among the masses, within our organisations, or within our party programmes.

“Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation.”

Vladimir Lenin, Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1904)

Against Racism and White Supremacy

Marxists are fundamentally opposed to racism and are at all times against white supremacy. This also means white Marxists make a conscious effort to challenge their own racism.

White supremacy is tied to capitalist exploitation and manifests through anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, Sinophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry. These chauvinisms are used to continually divide the working class and convince the privileged—in Canada primarily the white settler class—to view people of other races and nationalities as their enemy rather than the capitalists who exploit them.

Against Patriarchy and Misogyny

Marxists reject misogyny and patriarchal social relations and systems. This includes opposing sexist attitudes towards women and other oppressed genders, but also in seeking to abolish patriarchal institutions such as the nuclear family. Of course, this must also mean working against patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes and systems within our own organisations.

Marxist feminists understand that the liberation of women and all oppressed genders is not a separate issue from economic exploitation and other forms of oppression. The accumulation of private property was accelerated by tethering it to male lineage, where men in a family contributed to the fortune by their labour, to be passed down through the eldest son. Reproductive labour, that which reproduces the conditions for production (making food, keeping house, raising children), was placed on the shoulders of women as unpaid labour.

This delineation and subjugation of women is a necessary component of private property. Thus, we understand that women’s “liberation” under capitalism can only ever mean liberation for a relatively small number of wealthy, mostly white, and cisgendered women in the imperial core. The past liberal feminist movements have proven this. Despite winning women’s “freedom” to work, the subjugation of women continues as they are often still required to perform unpaid reproductive labour in addition to productive labour.

“The proletarian women’s final aim does not, of course, prevent them from desiring to improve their status even within the framework of the current bourgeois system, but the realisation of these desires is constantly hindered by obstacles that derive from the very nature of capitalism.
A woman can possess equal rights and be truly free only in a world of socialised labour, of harmony and justice. The [liberal] feminists are unwilling and incapable of understanding this; it seems to them that when equality is formally accepted by the letter of the law they will be able to win a comfortable place for themselves in the old world of oppression, enslavement and bondage, of tears and hardship. And this is true up to a certain point.
For the majority of women of the proletariat, equal rights with men would mean only an equal share in inequality, but for the “chosen few”, for the bourgeois women, it would indeed open doors to new and unprecedented rights and privileges that until now have been enjoyed by men of the bourgeois class alone. But each new concession won by the bourgeois woman would give her yet another weapon for the exploitation of her younger sister and would go on increasing the division between the women of the two opposite social camps. Their interests would be more sharply in conflict, their aspirations more obviously in contradiction.”

Alexandra Kollontai, The Social Basis of the Women Question (1909)

Against 2SLGBTQI+ Oppression

A proper Marxist analysis will demand the full liberation of 2SLGBTQI+ peoples everywhere and seeks to abolish homophobia, transphobia, and any other manifestation of anti-2SLGBTQI+ oppression. While it is true that, historically and presently, some socialist states have enacted homophobic and transphobic policies, we regard this as an error and a failure on the part of those particular states, some of which (such as Cuba) have admitted their faults and begun to rectify those mistakes.

People who don’t fit neatly into the restrictive boxes of sexuality and gender expression set forth by capitalist society find themselves at one of the sharpest inflection points! Their existence and desire to express their humanity are an affront to private property’s rigid gendered economic roles. These roles, and their resulting rigid social roles, are forced upon people, often violently.

Non-capitalist societies built on a communal way of living often respect gender diversity where labour is not as harshly delineated. Whether through colonialism’s centuries long attempts to exterminate Indigenous societies or capitalism’s further atomization and immiseration of all workers, both seek to crush gender diversity even as they may pay it lip service. Only through the liberation of all 2SLGBTQI+ peoples will everyone be free, and only through the destruction of capitalism and colonialism will 2SLGBTQI+ peoples be free.

Against Class Reductionism

Many “Marxists”, particularly in the imperial core, treat “economic” class (worker v. owner) as the only factor worth considering, ignoring that struggles like Indigenous/settler or imperial/imperialized struggles (as examples) are class struggles too. “Economic” class is critical to understand, but Marxist analysis does not begin and end there. A proper Marxist analysis includes a dialectical understanding of how various class struggles interconnect and affect one another.

The liberation of colonised peoples, the liberation of women, and the liberation of 2SLGBTQI+ peoples are class struggles. They need to be understood as being inclusive. To focus solely on one and not the other is reductionist and serves to fracture the movement.

Revolution, Reform, and Armed Struggle

“We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”

Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (1971)

Marxists are revolutionaries. We do not seek to simply soften the edges of capitalist exploitation, but to overthrow capitalism altogether. While reforms can be beneficial in the short term, the histories of reformist social democracies show that this path inevitably leads to a weakened working class movement, and so-called “socialist” leaders who are more concerned with keeping the status quo than fighting for liberation.

Additionally, social democracies have a strong tendency to be nationally chauvinist. Achieving marginally better rights for those within the nation while paying for it through colonial and neo-colonial projects is not socialism. Social benefits for people living in the U.S. and Canada (as part of the Imperial core) come at the expense of increased exploitation of the Global South and internal colonies.

This does not mean, however, that Marxists desire violence. We should seek nonviolent means to resolve contradictions and conflicts whenever possible. We also oppose reckless and adventurist acts of political violence that only put comrades at risk, encourage state repression, and impede the liberation of the working class and oppressed peoples.

Unfortunately, the reality is that there are few—if any—examples in history of a ruling class that gave up its power peacefully. Indeed, capitalist states have shown that they will go to any lengths to repress and destroy working class and other liberation movements, up to and including fascist coups against socialist governments, the assassination of socialist leaders, economic embargoes, and sabotage. Marxists understand that the working classes and oppressed nations must be willing and able to defend themselves and fight for their liberation by any means necessary.

Conclusion

“The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich business men owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.”

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1987)

In closing, Marxism is the key for better understanding the world we live in. But, Marxism not only offers a coherent worldview; it also gives us the theoretical tools necessary to enact change on our world. It is a methodology which continues to speak to the struggles of the downtrodden, which is why it has become the most commonly used and most effective weapon at the workers’ disposal to combat the capitalist boot on our throat.

Karl Marx understood that human beings are social creatures. We do not exist as isolated individuals, but instead yearn to be part of a community where we live, work, learn, and share our lives in solidarity with one another. Building a better future for humanity and ending the centuries of exploitation and oppression will require a collective effort unlike anything seen before.

While this might sound overwhelming, we can all start now by organising together in our communities and workplaces. We encourage you to join a revolutionary Marxist group in your area, or help organise one if none exist. We look forward to working side-by-side with you to build a better world for all.

The scenes that come out of Gaza and out of Lebanon are horrifying. Children are beheaded in zionist airstrikes, corpses lay strewn across the dirt, burned beyond recognition. People sleeping in tents are bombed, entire buildings are leveled, its occupants to be buried under the rubble. Men, women, and children have not been spared. Children cry out for their parents that have been killed. Parents mourn the murder of their children. Aid workers, journalists, doctors, charity workers — none are  spared the brutal violence the zionists inflict upon the people they have dehumanized and view as enemies. 

Despite this relentless campaign of genocide, it becomes more and more clear with each passing day that October 7th started the countdown to the death of the zionist entity.

The Palestinian Front

Since October 7th, the zionist military has effectively reduced much of Gaza to rubble, bombing civilians and destroying houses, hospitals, and schools, they routinely show themselves to be impotent and incompetent in actual combat. The Palestinian Resistance circulates videos from Gaza daily, showing their heroic confrontations with the occupation army.

Zionist soldiers have become notorious for their fear of being up close and personal with the Palestinians they brutalize, and this cowardice has led to their army utilizing pathetic and embarrassing tactics within Gaza. Tanks running through rubble without infantry support are often damaged and destroyed by death-defying Palestinian ambushes. Palestinian snipers with homemade rifles snipe scores of oblivious zionist military officers. Resistance rockets annihilate cowardly troops huddled in ruined buildings. Gaza is this century’s Stalingrad, and everyone knows how that fight ended for the fascist invaders. 

In the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian people, steadfast with those in Gaza and facing a horrifying zionist military occupation have taken up arms in defense of their people. While the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) continues its role as nothing more than a comprador regime, the resistance organizations inside of the West Bank have been fighting back. Armed clashes and IED attacks are commonplace, particularly around Jenin.

The zionist entity has tried its hardest to hide the losses it has taken during its campaign of genocide. Reports leak out of funerals taking place daily which the zionist entity is eager to ignore and downplay. However, the zionist entity has for months complained about manpower shortages and, as of June this year, the zionist entity’s high court voted unanimously to begin conscription of the Orthodox Jewish community, a community which previously was exempt from mandatory military service, while also calling up for women to be incorporated into the armored corps. 

Furthermore, the IOF has complained about a shortage in tanks and ammunition, with many tanks having been destroyed or damaged in Gaza. A damaged tank is a tank unfit for combat until it is repaired and the necessary parts to repair them are also in short supply, as are  bulldozers and armored personnel carriers. 

In comparison to this, it has come out via a report in CNN that out of the 24 battalions of which CNN claims Hamas possessed before October 7th, only 3 have been destroyed by the zionist entity. The zionists, when faced with an enemy that can fight back, are shown to be toothless. Of course we need not rely on CNN for this information. CNN along with all other Western media outlets have always done their best to provide propaganda cover to the zionist entity and to whitewash their genocide. The Palestinian resistance, via spokesmen such as Abu Obaida, have told us that Hamas is still fully combat ready and engaging zionist forces across the Gaza strip. The resistance does not lie, they have not lied. We can trust their words as their actions continue to prove steady capacity to fight. We must also remember that this report by CNN launders zionist lies such as the supposed killing or capture of 14,000 Hamas fighters. The zionist entity labels everyone Hamas. They make no distinction between civilian and soldier. What we do know for certain is that everyday the Palestinian resistance confronts the zionist entity and with each confrontation, the zionist entity is exposed as a paper tiger. 

The Northern Front

The zionist entity has also suffered casualties along Palestine’s northern border with Lebanon. The war being fought between Hezbollah and the zionist entity is one that, once again, the zionist entity is trying to downplay. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has claimed that the enemy has suffered over 1,000 deaths and many more wounded since Hezbollah began its attacks in support of the Palestinian people. The northern front has further tied down thousands of zionist troops and their associated equipment that would have otherwise gone to Gaza, relieving pressure on the resistance there. 

The northern front has done more than just deplete the manpower and equipment of the zionist entity. Over 100,000 settlers are now internal refugees as Hezbollah continues to dominate in the north and dictate the battlefield. Northern occupied Palestine is now a deadzone where the zionists can no longer exert their influence.  Hezbollah has exposed that the occupation army’s prestige as an unstoppable, elite force is nothing but a lie. 

As previously mentioned, the northern front has created 100,000 internal zionist refugees, displaced from their squats in northern occupied Palestine. This exerts pressure on the zionist state as they fail in their task to protect their settlers. This pressure is further compounded when you take into consideration the protests that occur in support of a ceasefire with the goal of returning the zionist POWs.

The military losses suffered in Gaza and the West bank as well as along the Northern Front with Hezbollah must be understood within the context of the zionist entity and its prestige. It has long positioned itself as the strongest military in the Middle East, and for a time this may have been true. The Six Day War is often used as a symbol of national “pride” within the zionist entity — a time when it defeated the entire Middle East in less than a week. Since this time, it is no longer the military powerhouse it once was. 

Decades of being nothing more than a glorified police force which specializes in brutalizing civilians, it has blunted whatever “skill” it once possessed. As always, the imperialists have been shown to be nothing but a paper tiger. Regardless of this loss in military strength however, we must never forget the hundreds of thousands of lives the zionist entity has taken since October 7th and the hundreds of thousands more it has taken in the past. 

In 2021 and 2023, the zionist entity carried out two operations, Operation Sunbeam and Operation Firm Hand. Both operations were designed to “stress test” the zionists military on its ability to fight a multifront war. The Fronts which were considered were ones with Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Gaza and the West Bank were not considered serious problems and Yemen was not factored into the equation at all. Both operations ended in an zionist defeat. 

Today we see that militarily they cannot defeat the Palestinian Resistance or Hezbollah. Previously, both groups have beaten the zionist entity. The zionists were pushed out of Gaza in 2006, and similarly they were defeated by Hezbollah both in 2000 and in 2006. The Palestinian Resistance and Hezbollah were far weaker then than they are now, while the zionists were much stronger.

Tensions are heightening between the zionist entity and Hezbollah with full scale war on the horizon. Hezbollah released drone footage it captured over occupied Palestine highlighting targets that will be attacked in the event of full scale war. These targets include zionist air bases, the port of “haifa”, fuel storage facilities, and the Golan Heights. All areas will be attacked and hit; Hezbollah has the capacity to make good on its threats. If this were to happen, many more zionists will flee. With every military loss, every international condemnation, every economic loss, the viability of the zionist project disappears. 

The zionist entity right now is banking on American boots on the ground to save them. It cannot survive without American support. We’ve already seen how the Yankee imperialists along with their ever trusted lapdog Britain came rushing to its defense by attacking Yemen in a laughable attempt to end their blockade. Instead, both America and Britain were sent fleeing with their tails between their legs. 

The Palestinian resistance has already attested to the fact that they’ve been fighting American troops inside of Gaza, but we’ve yet to see a large deployment by America in support of the zionist entity. However, even with American help, there’s no guarantee of victory. In fact quite the opposite. America could not win a war against the Axis of Resistance.

It is believed that when war breaks out between the zionist entity and Hezbollah, Hezbollah will dominate the battlefield by firing thousands upon thousands of missiles into Occupied Palestine. The zionists believe that their Iron Dome will save them. It will not. 

The Iron Dome is often touted as one of the world’s most advanced air defense systems, designed to destroy incoming missiles. The zionists claim that the Iron Dome has a 90% interception rate. The truth however, is very different. 

In a report released by The Cradle, professor Emeritus Theodore Postal of MIT argued that the Iron Dome instead has an interception rate of 4 – 5%. The Iron Dome does not defend areas it has no coverage over, the Iron Dome also does not target every rocket, it targets the ones branded the most serious threat due to where it is hitting. Furthermore, the Iron Dome is mostly used to target cheaply made, slow moving Palestinian rockets, not the advanced missiles of Hezbollah.

Recent videos have been surfacing of Iron Dome Missiles malfunctioning, crashing and exploding inside zionist territory. Hezbollah recently launched a missile and drone attack against “Naharieh” military base. No Iron Dome interceptions occurred. 

The Iraqi Resistance

Militarily, the Iraqi Resistance has managed to hit the zionist entity consistently. In April of this year the Iraqi Resistance managed to attack the port of “haifa” with drones, targeting and successfully hitting oil refineries there. The American imperialists, the true masters of the zionist entity, still occupy parts of Iraq. This is despite the fact that the Iraqi government has asked the Americans to leave the country on multiple occasions. Because of this ongoing provocation by the imperialists, the Iraqi resistance has routinely targeted American bases inside of Iraq and Syria. 

A brief pause in these actions occurred for several months in hopes that now rounds of talks with the Iraqi government would convince the imperialists to leave. These talks having led to no meaningful changes in Iraq, the Iraqi Resistance is continuing its attacks on American military assets.  

The Yemeni Front

Yemen was quick to announce its support for Palestine. Every Friday since October 7th the Yemeni people have marched in millions in support of Palestine within the Yemeni capital of Sana’a. 

The Yemeni government under the leadership of president Abdul-Malik al-Houthi asked permission from the Saudi government for access to their land so that they would be able to march into occupied Palestine to fight alongside the resistance. This request was denied. 

Undeterred, Yemen has enacted a very successful blockade of the zionist entity in the Red Sea, in accordance with the Geneva Convention which calls on states to prevent genocide even outside of their own respective nations. 

Yemen has also struck the zionists directly, managing to fly a drone from Yemen to occupied Palestine and strike the ethnically cleansed city of Jaffa now known as “tel aviv.” This situation was an embarrassment for the zionists. A drone managed to evade its radars and air defenses and strike within the heart of their settler colonial project. For once, zionists no longer felt safe in the capital city of their bloody regime.

In response, the Western imperialist nations led by the U.S. sought to deter Yemen from this course of action, sending an aircraft carrier strike group into the Red Sea to conduct bombing raids on Yemeni soil. This has had no effect on Yemen’s determination to honor its international duties and continue the blockade. 

The Iranian Front

The attack that scared the zionists the most, however, came from Iran in April this year in response to the zionist attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria. The Iranian response targeted the zionist air base in “nevatim.” Although the zionist entity claimed the attack wasn’t successful, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The air base in question was the most heavily defended base in the Middle East. It was designed specifically to repel an Iranian attack. It was equipped with an integrated defense system, containing Iron Dome Batteries, Patriot Missiles, David’s Sling air defense missiles and U.S. THAAD ABM batteries. Furthermore, the base was protected by U.S. AN/TPY-2 X-band radar, one of the most advanced radar detection systems on the planet. On the night of the Iranian response, the U.S., Britain, France, and Jordan all came together with the zionist entity to try and destroy the missiles and drones that were fired at the base. In the end, the base was still hit.

This attack was not designed to destroy the base, but instead to tell the zionist that Iran can attack it and hit it anytime it wants, anywhere it wants. The most heavily guarded base in the Middle East, receiving support from four different countries, at the cost of billions of dollars, and the missiles still hit their targets. 

Recently, the zionist entity carried out two assassinations. One inside of Lebanon, targeting a suburb in Beirut which has claimed the lives of 7 people, including 2 children, Amira and Hassan Fadlallah ages 6 and 10. They carried out a further attack inside Tehran, the capital of Iran where the leader of Palestinian Resistance group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, ascended to martyrdom. 

Now, the zionist entity sits paralyzed as it awaits an even larger response — not just from Iran for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, but also from Hezbollah in response to the assassination of a Hezbollah commander in Beirut, and from Yemen in response to the bombing of the port city of Hodeidah. The zionist settlers are currently huddled within their bunkers, their leaders hiding as well. Fear has gripped the zionist entity, and the response is coming. Now, Iran and its allies have refused talks to “de-escalate,” they’ve made it clear that red lines have been crossed and nothing will deter them from responding, not even if the response kicks off a regional war.

Once again, in preparation for this retaliation, more American and British military assets are being moved into the region. The collaborator Abdullah II, King of Jordan, has frantically tried to call on Iran not to respond and has prepared his country to defend the zionist entity. This will not save the zionists. Iran is smart enough to take the Western imperialists into consideration when it launches its retaliation. The greatest integrated defense systems in the region could not save the zionist entity last time, and it will not save them this time, especially as this retaliation will be magnitudes bigger than the last one.

Russia has recently begun delivering a myriad of weapons to Iran, mostly made up of the S-300 missile defense system, widely considered to be one of the best air defense systems in the world. This signals that Iran will expect further zionist aggression when it responds to the zionist assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. 

Iran is expecting a prolonged engagement with the zionist entity, and these air defense missiles will help protect Iranian soil and minimize any zionist damage to the country while also still maintaining a large capacity to strike and hurt the zionists directly. 

Deterrence and Escalation Management

We must also understand that the zionist entity has lost deterrence in the region. Within warfare there is an “escalation ladder” or “escalation management”. This measures and controls the escalation of a conflict, how hard one may strike in response to a certain action. The tamer the action, the tamer the response; the more severe the action, the more severe the response. American political scientist John Mearsheimer argues however that the zionist entity never operated on this principle. They operated on the principle of escalation dominance. When they were attacked, they’d respond with overwhelming force to deter their enemy. If one bomb hit them, they’d fire 100. If one soldier was killed, they’d kill 100. This was their method of deterrence and it has failed them. No matter what they do, the Axis of Resistance has shown itself wholly capable of not only absorbing the blow but retaliating just as strongly. The zionist entity no longer possesses deterrence. 

The Zionist Economy

The zionist entity is also becoming increasingly economically crippled. The port of “eilat” has declared bankruptcy thanks to the Yemeni blockade. The port of occupied Haifa similarly faces difficulties as routine attacks have impacted its revenue stream. In addition, with every zionist who is called up for active duty in the IOF, businesses lose workers. The Hebrew Channel “kan” announced that nearly 46,000 commercial projects within the zionist entity have collapsed since October 7th. The economy is failing and will continue to fail for as long as they are at war. Western aid has helped to stabilize it in some regards, but this is a temporary measure. 

The cost of war extends further. The price of military equipment shows a large disparity between costs for the zionists when compared to the cost for the Resistance. The standard rocket used by Hezbollah, the Burkan, costs $400 to manufacture. The primary rocket used by Hamas, the Qassam rocket, only costs $600 to manufacture. Meanwhile, a standard Iron Dome interceptor missile costs $50,000. Basic rules of warfare usually means that 2 rockets are fired for every 1 you intend to shoot down. This is to ensure that if one interceptor misses its target, the second one would get it. 

This means that the zionist entity, whose economy is in shambles even with support from its debt-ridden masters in Washington, could be spending $100,000 for every $400 or $600 missile it intends to intercept. It is estimated that Hezbollah sits on a stockpile of over 100,000 rockets. We do not know how many of these are Burkan rockets, but regardless the cost of shooting all of these down with Iron Dome interceptors would be in the billions. This is unsustainable for the zionists. 

In a war with Hezbollah, the U.S. has already warned that Hezbollah could overwhelm the Iron Dome via its ability to fire over 3,000 missiles everyday into the entity. The price of intercepting all of these would be enormous. More importantly, it’s something the entity is unable to do. 

International Pressure and the ICJ

On the world stage the zionist entity is becoming increasingly isolated. Many countries, mostly within the global south such as Colombia and Bolivia have severed all ties with the zionist entity. Certain nations, such as Spain, have suspended arms shipments. The real pressure comes from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). As of this moment, the ICC is seeking arrest warrants for Benzion Mileikowsky, or Benjamin Netanyahu as he calls himself now, and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

The big hit came from the South African case in the ICJ. The ICJ reaffirmed international law by ruling that the zionist occupation of Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem is illegal. It declared the zionist entity an apartheid state and ordered that the occupation within 1967 borders must end, that all settlements must be dismantled, and all settlers recalled. This applies major pressure not just against the zionist entity but also on its allies. Weapons shipments, for example, now stand in violation of international law as no nation can legally help in the occupation of Palestinian land. 

This pressure is good, but we must also sober ourselves. If the West has shown anything, it has shown that it does not care about international law. 

Internal Contradictions in Zionist Society

With everything laid out, a question must be asked: why is the zionist entity escalating tensions with Iran and Lebanon if it cannot win a war against them? The answer is simple: because peace will kill it. 

For the zionists this is seen as a victory. They struck a blow against Hamas, destroyed its leadership.. Or so they think. As Fred Hampton once said “you can kill a revolutionary, but you can never kill the revolution.” The zionists have assassinated various Hamas leaders over the years, including Hamas’s founder, Ahmed Yassin. This is nothing new to them and the revolution will continue. 

What must be understood about these assassinations is that they are not the actions of a strong country, but of a cornered, wounded animal. If the zionist entity is to survive, it must continue the war and escalate the situation even further. To stop now would be to lose everything. The zionist entity set the goals of this war as the total annihilation of Hamas, a goal it can never achieve. Hamas, along with the various other Palestinian resistance organizations such as the PIJ, PFLP, and DFLP, are the personification of the Palestinian will to survive. They are organizations born from the masses and reflect the will of the masses. Every new martyr, every Palestinian that is killed creates two more Palestinian revolutionaries willing to die in the fight to liberate their land. 

Despite this, the zionists fight on under the leadership of an increasingly erratic Mileikowsky. Due to the war goals he has established, if they were to sign a ceasefire now the zionist entity would lose face. It would be a strategic defeat for them and the end of Mileikowskys’ political career. Furthermore the cracks in zionist society would break the colony apart.

Prior to October 7th, the zionist entity was on the verge of a civil war. Mileikowsky was trying to take power away from the entity’s judiciary and supreme court which was met with fierce protests and riots. The zionist entity began attacking itself. These cracks haven’t gone away, they’ve grown wider. 

As a settler colony, the zionist regime must continually expand to survive. The contradictions of capitalism, of zionist society, are transferred onto the Palestinian people. The zionist entity has no proletariat, no working class, only settlers living a petty bourgeois lifestyle and a permanent underclass of occupied Palestinians trapped within its borders. What happens when that ends? 

The nature of the zionist state is to protect its settlers as they expand the borders and to uphold the petty bourgeois settler lifestyle that baits in more settlers. This, however, is something that is quickly failing. The settler state for ten months now has shown itself to be wholly unable to protect its settlers. Once the settler is not protected, the settler leaves. We’ve seen this throughout history. When the settler state falls, the settler flees in its wake. 

Since October 7th, hundreds of thousands of zionist have left the zionist entity and never intend to return. Thousands have been killed on the battlefield, tens of thousands more have been wounded. The zionist entity survives so long as it can continue to expand and this expansion can only occur via a willing settler population. However, its expansion is dying as it continues to lose the war. As it loses the ability to expand, the walls come crumbling down. Zionists will leave in droves, its prestige will be gone, it will lose everything. 

Right now the zionists sit in fear each night in bunkers throughout the occupied territories. They cower, awaiting the inevitable response from the resistance. The zionist settlers are now completely unsure of the state’s ability to protect them. Without that protection, settlers flee and new settlers will not arrive to replace those lost. 

It has been mentioned before that the ICJ ruled that the zionist entity is committing genocide, that it is an apartheid state and must withdraw from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jeruselum.. Once the international pressure is truly felt, the zionists will have no choice but to remove themselves from these areas. Once expansion stops, settlers stop arriving, and funding from zionist communities in America stops coming. The borders will stagnate and then, with the further flight of the settlers as their petty bourgeois lifestyle is destroyed the borders will shrink and eventually the entity will cease to exist altogether. Settlers fear the loss of their settler status. They fear having conditions placed upon them, of no longer being able to do whatever they want. 

The cracks in zionist society can be seen recently with the threat of civil war which almost kicked off just under a month ago. Nine zionist soldiers were arrested under charges of rape, which they committed on camera in “sde teiman.” The settler response to the arrests was widespread protesting, rioting, and armed settler militias attempting to seize a military base. The situation was so dire, zionist troops had to be redirected from Gaza back into occupied Palestine to deal with it. 

The protests which occurred were not out of anger over what these soldiers did, but out of anger over their arrest. This prompted a debate inside the zionist parliament over whether or not it was legal to rape Palestinians. Many came out in support of this “right” to rape Palestinains. 

Zionists, when faced with the slightest pushback on their status as settlers, when a small line was drawn over their treatment towards Palestinians, almost lit the fires of civil war. This is a monstrous society, but it is also a society which is not prepared for, nor capable of surviving, the conditions of an all out war. 

Another crack formed as well, where a zionist soldier opened fire on his superior officers, killing three of them and then committing suicide. There are other cases where zionist soldiers have committed suicide after returning from Gaza. The military is breaking down.

As mentioned previously, the zionist POWs held by the Palestinian Resistance have exerted tremendous pressure to end the genocide in Gaza to ensure the safe return of the zionist soldiers. Make no mistake, the average zionist settler cares not about the civilians in Gaza. Their opposition to the genocide comes only from the pressure exerted by the captured POWs. Without them, the zionists would not squawk. A poll carried out by the Pew Research Center in May, 2024 found that 34% of zionist settlers believe that the zionist militaries genocide (or as it was framed in the poll, “military response to Hamas in Gaza”) had not gone far enough. 39% argued it’s just the right amount, whereas only 19% argued that it had gone too far. 

This response is worse when broken down further. The divide between Arabs living as second class citizens within the zionist entity and the zionist settlers themselves can be seen in responses to the genocide committed by zionist forces in Gaza. 74% of Arabs argue that the zionist military has gone too far in Gaza compared to only 4% of the settlers. Without the POWs and the pressure they exert on the government of the zionist entity to end the war, there’d be no protests to end it. The settlers would not care, and out of fear of their lives from settler reprisals the Arabs would not speak. 

Conclusions 

The undeniable truth is that the zionist entity is on its way to collapse. Its attempts at escalating the conflict have only delayed the inevitable. The zionist entity has laid its face bare for the entire world to see. There is no returning to October 6th; its crimes have been burned into the mind of every person still human enough to feel anger at what it has done. Its economy is failing, its military is failing. It is facing a 6 front war which it cannot win. One cannot help but compare this situation to that of apartheid South Africa which attempted to fight a 5 front war. It collapsed just a few years later. The contradictions inherent within zionist society, which for too long has been pushed out onto the periphery, have begun to come home. The petty bourgeois settler lifestyle zionist settlers have enjoyed for so long is beginning to disappear. The invincibility these monsters have felt for so long is beginning to disappear and be replaced by fear. Palestinian liberation is on the horizon and it has been paid for by Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian blood. And therein lies the problem. 

The settler colonial entity would not exist if not for the Balfour Declaration signed by the British in 1917 which gave away Palestinian land to European settlers. The U.N. resolution in 1948 expanded zionism’s borders further, and now into the modern age, America, as the zionist entity’s modern day benefactor has kept the zionist entity afloat. 

Every bomb dropped, every bullet fired, every artillery shell that destroys a Palestinian home comes from the West. All the political cover such as U.N. vetoes comes from Western countries. The zionist entity is a Western satellite state to further Western imperialism in the region. The West created zionism and yet it is not our blood which is being spilt to kill it. Those least responsible for this monster’s creation are the ones who are having to spill their blood to defeat it. The response by the West more generally has been disappointing to say the least. 

Opposition towards the genocide has rarely escalated beyond peaceful protests which fall on deaf ears, save for a notable, actions by the organization Palestinian Action have seen the closure of several zionist military factories within the U.S. and U.K. Trade unions have done little to oppose the genocide. Communist parties have not done much more. Take America as an example. The United Autoworkers Union has recently decided to endorse Kamala Harris for President, the same Kamala Harris overseeing the genocide in Gaza, the same Kamala Harris which announced the zionist entities right to defend itself. The same Kamala Harris who greenlit the assassinations carried out in Beirut and Tehran. The “Communist” party of the United States of America “CPUSA” similarly have given their endorsement to the Democrats, citing the “threat” of republican fascism. Their only response to Gaza varies from holding Hamas as equally evil as zionism or claiming that Trump would somehow be worse for Palestine than Kamala. How can someone be worse when it comes to genocide one might ask themselves. The Biden administration has given its full support to the zionist entity, every red line has been a theater. In truth, the zionist entity doesn’t sneeze without first asking America for permission. To tail one bourgeois party as a result of a perceived threat from another, with no thought given to the third world whose people die everyday at the hands of both parties is an abandonment of Marxism. It is a spit in the face of the primary duty of communists within the era of imperialism. To shrug your shoulders and ignore what’s going on in exchange for focusing on petty concessions and flowery language at home is a rejection of the revolutionary and internationalist essence of Marxism-Leninism.

Through the blood of Martyrs the liberation of Palestine will occur, the zionist entity will fall, and this will be a time of celebration. But with every day of inaction in the west, more Palestinian lives are lost. More Lebanese lives are lost. More Yemeni, Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian lives are lost. Children with no parents, parents with no children. The old, the young, the sick, the healthy, the women, the children, the men, all will continue to be killed. How many more Palestinians must languish in torture camps, being beaten and raped? How many children must be torn away from their parents to be held in indefinite detention? How many more journalists must be killed? Aid workers bombed? Houses destroyed? Artifacts looted?  How many Palestinians must starve, how many must fall ill? How much blood are we willing to see spilt before we say “no more?” 

How much longer can the “pro Palestinian” members of the West continue to watch the genocide unfold from the safety of our own houses, surrounded by our families, and become enraged by the footage we see until we put down our phones and walk away?

Palestinians have no such luxury, they cannot ignore the horror which surrounds them on a daily basis. They cannot escape the violence, they are penned in. 

All members of trade unions, Communist parties, and anti imperialist organizations must pressure their leadership and formulate plans to pressure our own governments, by any means necessary, towards a boycott against the zionist, of an embargo, economic sanctions or even military interventions. Anything which will bring an end to the genocide and help liberate Palestine from the river to the sea.