On November 3rd, 2023, the Ready Reserve Force’s ship, the Cape Orlando, left Oakland for Tacoma, Washington, where it would be loaded with weapons for its final destination: the Zionist entity. In Oakland, after hours of picketing, protesters had noticed that the gate to the dock was not fully closed. They took advantage of this opportunity to storm the boat to keep it from launching. Eventually protesters were detained and the Orlando was permitted to continue its journey. At both West coast ports the ship was met with resistance, and in both cases this failed to block the boat.

    Working on intel reportedly leaked from a worker of conscience aboard the Orlando, organizations including Arab Resources and Organizing Center (AROC), Falastiniyat, Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) Seattle, Students United for Palestinian Equality & Return University of Washington (SUPER UW), Samidoun Seattle, Resist U.S. Led-War, and The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) Seattle announced that they would continue in Tacoma the fight Oakland had started. The Orlando’s docking was delayed, bumping it to Monday morning. Whether this was done in hopes of reducing the number of protesters able to join, as a way of pre-loading weapons onto the dock and staging police in advance, or both, remains uncertain.

    On the morning of November 6th, 2023, a crowd gathered hours before dawn at the Port of Tacoma to block the Cape Orlando. Despite the risks many working people may have faced from missing shifts, hundreds of people turned out at 5 AM in the frigid rain. Pickets were set up at multiple entry points to the relevant dock. Longshoremen refused to cross the picket lines, leaving the military to load its own boat. As the day wore on more people joined, with some estimates putting the turnout at around a thousand participants. On the water, Puyallup Water Warriors, an Indigenous movement focused on restoring Indigenous relationship to and law of land, launched a small canoe blockade in an effort to prevent the ship from leaving. The protest continued with an outpouring of support from the community in the form of delivered food, drinks, and supplies. Around midday, a protester at the northwestern picket spotted people moving weapons along the dock. After a frustrating conversation with an on-the-ground organizer, marked by a yellow safety vest and megaphone, the protester left the demonstration broken-hearted and demoralized.

    Unfortunately, despite massive turnout and early indications the boat was already being loaded, tactics remained much tamer than in Oakland. Between the layout of the port putting the ship approximately half a mile from the gate and police having staged in advance behind the gates, storming the boat wasn’t viable. Worse, the effort to block the boat from the shore had been outmaneuvered by pre-loading weapons onto the dock. Despite this early failure, there was no adjustment in tactics, no effort toward escalation. Instead, on-the-ground organizers announced victory late in the day, and told everyone to go home.

    In the days that followed a number of public criticisms circulated, primarily through anarchist publications and private social media accounts. (For publicly available accounts see Shutting Down the Port of Tacoma: Reflections from the Salish Sea, Critical Reflections on Recent ‘Block the Boat’ Actions in Tacoma, Another reportback from the Tacoma Block the Boat action, and Reportback from the Port Blockade in Tacoma.) Conflicted and confusing information circulated. There was one consistent through-line in every critique, however, which we firmly agree with: the declaration of success voiced by on-the-ground organizers, distinguished primarily by safety vests and megaphones, was a false declaration in the face of a clear and decisive loss. Though accounts vary on what was or was not loaded onto the boat, the fact is that tools of genocide were loaded onto the Orlando that day, bound for the Zionist entity. As the protester who spotted the weapons being loaded said between sobs: “I am seeing tools for killing people going on that boat, I’m seeing it with my own eyes. What the fuck are we doing here?”

     People had come to block the boat, not delay it an additional twelve hours. To hear loud declarations of victory while their own eyes told them they had failed left people feeling betrayed. The degree of demoralization that followed was a blow to the movement.

    Though the effort to stop the boat ultimately failed, this remains one of the largest direct actions for Palestine in the Puget Sound since the Al Aqsa Flood, both in terms of community turnout, support, and duration. For this reason it’s worth analyzing and learning from its successes and failures as we continue developing not only the movement for Palestinian liberation, but anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements everywhere.

    As we move through this critique we want to acknowledge the amount of conflicting information that has circulated. Furthermore, the time elapsed since the action has resulted in foggy memories with limited ability to confirm finer details. Paired with a stark lack of transparency from organizers, this makes a robust critique difficult. There may be missing details in some areas and an inability to corroborate details in others. Nonetheless, we feel a study of this action can provide valuable insight despite gaps. This action was significant in the region’s movement for Palestine, and sits within the context of the region’s long history of port blockades and direct action. There were also social-cultural elements present that have proven to be recurring barriers to building sustained and sustainable movements for liberation more broadly that we feel are important to better understand. To glean important insights from this action we wish to celebrate the successes we did see, and provide constructive criticism to improve future actions.

    Liberation will not come without collective action that effectively mobilizes the will of the people, whose labor power sustains the economies of genocide we’re fighting against. Participants dragged themselves out of bed before dawn not to work in service of capital, but to march into the frigid and cold Puget Sound autumn. In the wake of the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, it was uncertain what would unfold or what level of police repression should be expected, and still people came. Unfortunately the tendency to prioritize the symbolic over the material was on display in the false declaration of victory. This left participants visibly distraught at being unable to do more and vocally infuriated at being misled. The will exists, yet many people remain uncertain where to begin or how to become engaged with more meaningful action. As such, they are easily co-opted into liberal actions that primarily seek symbolic rather than material wins.

    Energy and passion such as that seen at the Block the Boat action must be effectively stewarded, organized, and directed. This is best done by a well-organized revolutionary vanguard party with a strategy accounting for regional particularities in culture, material conditions, and needs. Our goal in writing this critique is to contribute to a body of knowledge drawn from direct experience and critical analysis, a body of knowledge which we hope will support the strategic elements of building just such a party.

Mobilization

    Much of the success of this action was in mobilization. Riding high on Oakland’s courageous attempt to stop the boat, the people of the Puget Sound were eager for their chance to take direct action against colonial imperial forces.

     Despite delays and fairly miserable conditions, around a thousand people turned out to stand up for Palestine. Given a deeply ingrained risk aversion that limits the capacity of many mass actions, and an uncertainty about how police would respond, this is a win. Actions such as this can be seen as opportunities to begin developing much needed risk tolerance. In addition to the value of building theoretical knowledge and experience via praxis, building risk tolerance is crucial in moving the masses toward greater revolutionary potential. No clash happened that day, but it remains significant that people were undeterred when police donned riot gear. Even more so, those experienced in the brutality of the George Floyd Uprisings were observed talking less experienced participants through ways to navigate violent escalation. This kind of cognitive practice can be effective in eroding risk avoidance and building confidence in those otherwise inexperienced in such risks.

    The longshoremen’s respect for the pickets led to an additional twelve-hour delay and forced the military to deploy their own personnel to load the ship. This was widely understood as the primary success of the action and demonstrates clearly the strategic utility of keeping up-to-date knowledge about local union protocols. Identifying points of union influence in key industries and developing an understanding of how to apply pressure to these points can bolster our actions with minimal additional effort. Wherever we can build working relationships with local union members across diverse industries, all the better. Given the sharpening contradictions locally, nationally, and globally, building these inroads now may create future opportunities to re-capture union power that has been co-opted by neoliberal imperialism.

    An additional success to be noted is the cost that both the delays and the need to bring in the military to load the boat must have incurred. While no hard numbers are available for assessment, the raised cost of business is important in sabotage-oriented strategies, which we’ll return to later.

Indigenous Leadership

    The day prior to the action there was an impromptu pre-brief facilitated by the Water Warriors. This came about due to community members missing updates about delays to docking and arriving early. The Water Warriors demonstrated exemplary leadership by calling all who had arrived together, namely representing Freedom Road Socialist Organization and Unity–Struggle–Unity Press as well as some others who were unaffiliated.

    The Water Warriors laid out a detailed plan while avoiding over-disclosure to preserve security. Their outlined plan for a water-based canoe blockade prioritized concrete, material impact and demonstrated strategic foresight and a commitment to effective communication, collaboration, and action. They shared their plan to take their canoes into the bay and hold the line for as long as possible. They also shared with the group how they could be supported, including keeping watch from the land and sharing pre-brief information with comrades so other protesters could plan accordingly. The meeting was brief, perhaps twenty minutes or so, before the Water Warriors departed for a prayer ceremony, which meeting attendees were invited to join.

    Despite the explicit request of the Water Warriors to communicate information from the pre-brief to comrades, concerns later arose about a lack of effective communication and coordination between organizers and the Water Warriors. Many protesters on the ground had no idea that the Water Warriors were going to be conducting a water-based blockade. While it’s not always necessary for every protester to be kept in the loop about every move, the request of the Water Warriors that information be passed along clearly indicates a desire for as many people as possible to be kept in the loop. (While this author recalls reading a critique focused on this subject, it has since proven elusive so we’re unfortunately unable to provide additional citations. If any readers are familiar with this critique we ask that you share it.)

    Here we again see a need for improved communication, as well as an increased attunement to Indigenous leadership. There is also a clear indication for non-Indigenous organizers and participants to ask Indigenous leadership how to best support their action(s). We must endeavor to gauge the willingness for escalation as well as the degree of violent retaliation oppressed parties are willing to bear. This is key not only to following Indigenous leadership but to centering the most oppressed and therefore most affected among our ranks.

    The lost potential of this pre-brief to improve collaboration and communication reminds us of the importance of pre-briefs. Pre-briefs have repeatedly proven to be vital to participant coordination and collaboration as well as action success in other instances. For this reason, we should always strive to coordinate an accessible and well-communicated pre-brief as an expected part of praxis. This is best done with a structure that facilitates effective communication and cooperation not only between participants but also between participating groups, and even across ideological lines. This creates opportunities for improved collaboration toward a much-needed united front.

    The settler-colonial relation continues to determine the form of advanced capitalism we organize against. The sovereignty of Indigenous nations everywhere is routinely violated to bolster capital and facilitate further violations elsewhere: the sovereignty of Adivasi nations in India is violated to plunder resources that fuel weapons production. The Puyallup nation’s sovereignty over their own land and water is violated by the transit of military weaponry made using those same resources. All this for the purpose of violating the sovereignty not only of Palestine, but of West Papua, the Philippines, La Guajira, and many, many more. For this reason it is vital that revolutionary groups and movements build solidarity and coalitions with the Indigenous nations whose territories we are collectively struggling on. Colonialism and capitalism are symbiotic, violent, extractive dynamics which threaten us all, regardless of skin color or national origin, due to rising fascism and the worsening climate crisis. As such, revolutionaries must build strong coalitions with all of their natural allies. The success of the social revolution hinges on the liberation of all oppressed people.

    An apparent lack of intentional and direct collaboration with the Water Warriors fundamentally weakened this action. A parallel failure to broaden the scope of the struggle for Palestine by centering the relationship between Palestinians and the Indigenous nations of so-called America was a failure to bring to light the underlying causes of genocide faced by both peoples. Explicit and intentional collaboration with the Water Warriors undoubtedly would have strengthened this action and elevated both its material and social-cultural impact.

    Bearing in mind that Indigenous communities are not a monolith, those of us who are settlers must endeavor to connect with and build good relationships with the nations whose lands we occupy. No opportunity to engage with Indigenous nations should be missed. Social investigation to not only better understand the priorities of Indigenous nations and leadership, but also to locate and build coalitions with the most politically advanced individuals and groups within these nations, is necessary. Their knowledge and perspectives should shape the struggle against imperialism in the belly of the beast. This is especially vital given that this struggle is unequivocally a struggle against the foundations of settler colonialism as embodied and enforced by the so-called United States both locally and abroad. Even if Indigenous peoples aren’t able to participate in the action itself, inviting an opening ceremony led by representatives from local nations (as seen in Seattle’s Marches for Palestine collaboration with radical members of the Duwamish nation) supports the building of these much needed relationships and coalitions.

Community Care

    There was an abundance of care on display at this action. Car shuttles, coordinated autonomously in some cases and with support from Democratic Socialists of America in others, decreased worry about parking, walking long distances, towing, or surveillance by police. Overall this increased accessibility. Hot drinks and food were coordinated, as well as supplies such as umbrellas, dry socks and gloves, and hand warmers. Community members made multiple supply drops and participants helped distribute these across pickets.

    This coordination additionally provided an avenue of participation for community members otherwise unable to directly attend without undue risk (parolees, for example). Such care-taking and socially reproductive labor maintains momentum and morale not only in one-off actions but for revolutionary movements more broadly. The importance of this often overlooked labor cannot be overstated: this socially reproductive labor is the backbone upon which sustainable and effective revolutionary movements are built. Without this labor, actions such as these become non-viable, and networks of communication, including organization relationships and coalitions, disintegrate. This is the work that can and should move us from spontaneous action toward long-term, structured organizing that sustains movements. This is the work that, when strategically and intentionally undertaken, can close the gap between who can and can’t join us in struggle.

    However there were notable strategic and structural gaps in care. For example, while chants and rousing speeches are important parts of keeping people engaged at actions, we’ve spoken with many who report that these become draining and redundant at longer actions. While plenty of people on the ground encouraged one another to rest, there weren’t concerted efforts to create rest zones. Providing intentionally structured time and space for people to rest and recover also opens opportunities to invest in education and agitation. Similarly the construction of small fires to serve as warming stations supported participants to stay longer on a very wet and cold day. With improved structure and organization, such spaces could easily have been utilized toward social investigation and much needed coalition building.

     Small educational groups bolstered by hot food and drinks could have elevated rest zones into spaces for reproductive labor in support of broader movements for liberation. As Mao said in The United Front in Cultural Work, the cultural and educational work required to “to transform the thinking of the masses” cannot be undertaken in haste, and must primarily center the needs of the masses. Meeting the basic human needs of food, drink, and rest at an action where the masses are present and already politically engaged is a prime opportunity to initiate this work. Pairing the tending of basic needs with education and agitation has a long history in revolutionary action globally, from the free meal programs of the Black Panther Party to the cross-caste Communist organizing of post-colonial Kerala, India and beyond. The potlatch of Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples, of which sharing feasts and giving gifts are important aspects, were long banned in part due to their potential to facilitate the organizing of Indigenous resistance to occupation. These historic lessons should not be forgotten.

    We must constantly ask ourselves, who are we implicitly excluding from our movements? Better understanding who we implicitly exclude and how we do so is vital to building a robust foundation for revolutionary care and reproductive labor. This must necessarily go above and beyond ensuring meals and water are available during lengthy actions. Increasingly working people don’t have the resources necessary to support taking time off work to participate in the struggle. If we’re not finding ways to address this, our actions and our movements will stagnate or shrivel. To this end we must consider what our organizations can do to support worker participation in our actions. What is needed to make our actions more accessible to workers who can’t afford to take the time off work? How can we organize to address those needs? In collaborating with Indigenous and other oppressed peoples, how do we ensure that we are safe and principled collaborators? Taking considerations like this seriously demonstrates that we do care about these communities and will devote time, energy, and labor not only to addressing their needs but also to making our movements accessible to them. This is key to building the foundational trust required for building meaningful relationships and effective collaboration.

        At actions like these plenty of people deeply entrenched in liberalism will be content to march in circles, chant, and go home. What we saw on the ground demonstrates that these are not the only people showing up. The despair we witnessed as people realized weapons were being loaded, and the rage, bitterness, and even disgust expressed as people realized the failure of the action and dishonesty of on-the-ground organizers, tells us that there are many, many people whose passion needs a home. Even more than this, they deserves competent, professional leadership that is able to effectively direct that passion toward revolutionary ends. This means on-the-ground leadership capable of discerning these dedicated individuals from those entrenched in liberalism, who are able to conversationally engage them without succumbing to the pitfalls of lecturing or proselytizing, and get them plugged in to revolutionary organizing above and beyond the event that brought them into the streets. (We recommend Secrets of a Successful Organizer for specifics on what this can look like.) Vitally, we must ensure that our organizations are already well-structured, with clear programs outlining immediate goals and work. This will prepare us to meaningfully direct the time, energy, and labor of these individuals toward gaining material victories, enabling them to see the strength of their own impact sooner than later. This is necessary not only for getting buy in, but for meaningfully developing these individuals’ political consciousness and revolutionary potential.

        As contradictions continue to sharpen, we must see it as our responsibility to connect with the people who are willing to put their bodies on the line, but may not know where or how to begin. These are people who are primed to develop a revolutionary analysis of current conditions and a robust understanding of what needs to be done to make meaningful change. With well-developed, experienced, accountable leaders and a well-structured party, we can be the leadership they deserve and prevent them being co-opted by liberal and/or reactionary forces. Too often we’ve seen Communists and Communist organizations regarding the politically underdeveloped masses with something like pity, or worse, disdain. These attitudes result in missed opportunities for meaningful education, agitation, and effective organization that can build out a revolutionary base in the pursuit of escalating revolutionary action. This is crucial as contradictions sharpen toward a breaking point.

    Care for the people in our movements also requires honest and transparent communication. A false declaration of victory triggered rightful feelings of demoralization and grief. It prompted significant suspicion from those who had given their time and energy: were the organizers even on our side, on the side of Palestine? Some of the organizations involved here have been involved in other direct actions, such as AROC Bay Area organizing the more militant Oakland Block the Boat, or SUPER UW’s short-lived occupation of a Boeing-funded engineering building at the University of Washington. JVP Seattle is well known for their civil disobedience and non-violent direct action, including blocking the doors to Seattle’s federal building, and have supported more militant actions such as those conducted by SUPER UW.

    However, it was unclear who the on-the-ground organizers were. Whether those individuals who carried radios, megaphones, and marked themselves with safety vests were members of the organizations who made the call remains unclear. While the spirit of community care would indicate a need for the kind of honest communication and effective critique that builds bridges rather than burning them with regards to the orgs that called for the action, it remains unclear whether on-the-ground organizers were “on our side.” We wish to treat these organizers not as enemies of the people, but as individuals with good intentions who were and are still learning how to most effectively translate those intentions into meaningful impact (as most of us are). Yet the lack of clarity with regards to on-the-ground leadership makes effective discernment here difficult to impossible. This indicates further the absolute necessity of ensuring leadership transparency. This isn’t only an essential aspect of ensuring that accountability is viable, it’s also essential to preventing the very real risk of infiltration and sabotage. The security risk of being unable to verify the affiliation of on-the-ground organizers cannot be overstated.

    Without assuming association or alignment of on-the-ground organizers with any of the named organizations, the failure of these organizations to engage in critique of on-the-ground organizer conduct is important to note. This avoidance of critique in symptomatic of an organizing culture that prioritizes friction-less “unity” and relationships without tension. This betrays an internalized liberal tendency described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail as a preference for “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” We need more than just friction-less relationships at the next action. We need a sustainable, long-term movement capable of learning from its mistakes and growing into a force that can stop a genocide. This is not possible in the confines of a negative peace. It requires generative tension, and leadership mature and experienced enough to navigate such tension without allowing it to devolve into infighting, drama, and movement fracturing.

Goal Construction and Considerations

    Unclear or unattainable goals and ineffective strategy leads to confusion, failure, and disillusionment, and will negatively impact participants, actions, and the movement as a whole. As organizers we must ensure our goals are realistic and achievable, have sound strategies for achievement, and clearly communicate them to participants.

    The prominent belief among protesters was that they were stopping weapons from being loaded onto the boat, which turned out to be non-viable. Even if weapons hadn’t been pre-loaded onto the dock, it’s important to be realistic about the military’s willingness to escalate against civilians standing between them and their weapons. A goal of fully stopping weapons loading with a blockade was likely a nonstarter – unless, that is, protesters had been ready and willing to escalate. In light of this we have to ask: were protesters prepared to escalate, and to what degree were they prepared to escalate?

    This is incredibly challenging to assess on the ground, especially when you’re dealing with hundreds of people coming together across a range of ideologies and levels of political development. While there were those in attendance whose readiness and willingness to escalate was on full display, these individuals were in a stark minority. Realistically, a significant portion of new allies to the Palestinian cause in the Puget Sound are, by the nature of the region’s demographics, white and middle class. While these demographics are experiencing increasing politicization under fascism, worsening climate change, and increasingly sharpening economic contradictions, it’s important to understand where the political development and consciousness of these demographics is and the ways in which they’ve been historically shaped by liberal and reactionary politics. Despite their willingness to come out in the cold and rain and face police in riot gear, it’s safe to assume that the majority of protesters weren’t prepared for a violent escalation, let alone leading or participating in such an escalation themselves.

    There were additional, physical factors curtailing the possibility of escalation without militant organization. The layout of the port made charging the docks difficult without individuals able and willing to scale fences, or alternatively cutting through the fence. Beyond the fence, the distance to the dock was such that making it to the boat without being intercepted was unlikely. The port overall is also particularly susceptible to kettling, and this would have been especially true on the dock.

    Given these material realities, blocking the loading of weapons onto the boat was probably not achievable, even if it was an admirable intention. It’s clear in hindsight that there was a gap in understanding between many protesters and organizers on what blocking the boat meant exactly. Specificity would have set clearer expectations and may have prevented or reduced demoralization over the outcome. It could also have provided a clearer roadmap to what needed to be done to meet goals and what strategy and tactics would have best supported a successful and effective action. For example, a better understanding of what it would take to meet stated goals may have highlighted the tactical value of a water-based blockade, and thus the necessity of effective collaboration with the Water Warriors (though, as previously stated, this would ideally already be on the forefront of organizer’s minds).

    Furthermore, establishing a clear metric for success would have better enabled organizers to assess and communicate the state of things. This would additionally have supported protesters in interpreting the outcomes on their own.

​Setting the Terms of Engagement​​​​​​

    Under the above conditions “blocking the boat” simply wasn’t tenable, but that doesn’t mean all disruptive action was a lost cause. Making something as costly and inefficient to do as possible is a useful mechanism of sabotage, made clear by the CIA’s own Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Successfully undertaking such a strategy requires first and foremost an honest assessment of our capabilities and limitations. In our assessment, a core factor undermining the ability to effectively execute such a strategy comes down to this simple fact: organizers allowed the enemy to set the terms of engagement.

    The public call to block the boat in Tacoma allowed authorities to coordinate a preemptive response, as evidenced by pre-staged police with riot gear and advanced loading of weapons onto the dock. When delays were announced, organizers also delayed the onset of the action. In other words, the state was permitted to set the day and time of the encounter, which enabled them to pre-load weapons onto the dock and put cops in place to guard them. This ensured any attempt to block loading couldn’t be successful.

    While it’s safe to assume there was planning behind the scenes during delays, there were tactical adjustments that could have been made during this time which were overlooked. Again, explicit collaboration with Water Warriors during this time may have brought to light alternate approaches, including a better supported and more robust water blockade. There are certainly more than enough people in the Puget Sound with their own canoes and kayaks who could have been recruited for deployment of a water-based blockade under the leadership of Water Warriors. On land there was significant risk of kettling, with the layout of the port providing little option for tactical withdrawal in the case of police or military escalation. Scouting during delays could have supported the development of more robust strategy including more tactically effective deployment locations, courses of action, contingency plans, redundancies, etc.

    One alternate approach could have seen a blockade of railways leading into and out of the port (taking inspiration from the 2017 railway blockades in Olympia) deployed on the intended day and hour, refusing to capitulate to the state’s delays and endeavoring to prevent the weapons from being loaded onto the dock. With this approach, protesters could have been alerted to and prepared for a multi-day blockade. The community networks that mobilized could have additionally prepared for supporting a long-term blockade.

     Bringing more tactics to bear would also have strengthened the action. There was functionally one tactic at play: a picket blockade. Without a robust strategy for escalation utilizing diverse tactics and an ability to adapt to changing conditions on-the-ground, this approach is extremely limiting. We’ve seen through other actions that multiple tactics can be deployed at once or at a steady escalation, reserving the ability for those unprepared for escalation to remain engaged at a tactical level matching their ability and risk tolerance. What we saw at this action was functionally a “green” picket with mass-mobilization, but this could (and should) be expanded on. While those ready to participate but not yet ready to escalate could continue participation in a green picket, a “yellow” option could have formed a buffer between “green” and “red” roles. Yellow roles could have occupied space in the form of die-ins or sit-ins, retaining the option to comply or refuse cooperation with dispersal orders. In this formation, “red” teams could build barricade structures (such as those built using pallets and other debris sourced from the port itself) and establish body-based blockades utilizing chains, sleeping dragons, and other tools to hold space for a much longer duration. In tandem with a water-based blockade, these different tactical approaches would have supported one another for a more deeply entrenched and militant action. As noted in our A15 critique however, it’s important to research the capabilities of local state actors when it comes to “apparatus removal,” and adapt accordingly. It would also be necessary to have contingency plans in case of preemptive arrests and suppression.

     It’s important to critically reflect on factors that may lead to early arrests and how to mitigate these in order to hold the barricade for as long as possible.* Inspiration should also be taken from strategies and tactics such as those that allowed a 2021 blockade of the Port of Seattle to block unloading of an Israeli-operated cargo ship for nearly two weeks. This will help shape a more effective disruption of economies of genocide via more effective disruption of supply chains these economies depend on.

    In consideration of alternate strategies, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that sabotage may have been the most effective means of blocking the boat. While we’ll leave the specifics of what sabotage could mean to the imagination, this does highlight again the necessity of considering the balance of willingness to escalate and risk aversion. This is a long-term and widespread strategic barrier which we should all endeavor to find ways to address according to the resources and limitations of our regionally-bound cultural and material conditions, in preparation for moments like these.

    Any of these approaches to improved preparedness and setting the terms of engagement would have required significantly improved structural coordination between organizing groups and their leadership. Similar to concerns we had about the structurelessness of the A15 movement, a lack of structure here posed serious limitations. These include limitations on effective reconnaissance, strategic planning and implementation, and effective management of the forces that were mobilized, not to mention collaboration between participating groups and organizations. These are all necessary components of setting the terms of engagement and positioning ourselves with as much strategic strength as possible, and are best established through long-term, well-structured organizing.

Reflection and Feedback

    In the face of serious criticisms related to declaration of false victory, poor communication, and lack of transparency, a member of ILPS offered to host a call via Signal to provide space for people to voice concerns and brainstorm improving future collaborations.

    It’s unclear whether any on-the-ground organizers were involved in this session or not. It appears that, aside from ILPS, the organizations that made the initial call weren’t responsible for calling or hosting this meeting. Whether or not they had representatives present is unknown.

     Nonetheless, the invitation to discuss criticisms and facilitate learning for future implementation remains a good model to use for all direct actions, not just those that go south. Creating spaces such as this for open discussion of critiques, facilitated with humility, are vital to maintain ongoing learning and growth. This is in turn vital to maintain an effective, adaptable, and ever-evolving movement in the struggle for liberation. We can’t improve without feedback, so we must always strive to ensure space and humility to receive it.

     In that spirit, debriefs should always be incorporated into every action plan. They should be announced in such a way to ensure all participants are aware and have the ability to join if desired. In other situations we’ve seen debrief dates and times announced during pre-briefs or otherwise in private communications where all participants are present. Depending on the size of the action, multiple de-briefs at different dates and times to accommodate a variety of scheduling issues is effective for ensuring maximum participation and by extension, maximum feedback to learn from. In this case an announcement could have easily been made at the same time that loss was announced or via the announcements chat set up prior to the action. Planning in advance for debriefs would have supported the facilitation of multiple debriefs accounting for varying scheduling needs.

    Unfortunately, barring notes from a comrade who was able to attend the meeting, it seems the results of this debrief weren’t made public. (If any readers are aware of published critiques from this session we invite you to share a link.) Given the highly public scrutiny of this action, criticisms and lessons from this reflection should have been shared publicly to support collective learning and growth. This would have also demonstrated improving communication and transparency. It may not have fully repaired the ruptures that occurred but it would have been a good start. Of course any such sharing would need to be done with optimal opsec in mind, with more sensitive information being shared through private communication networks between associated organizations. The lack of any public self-reflection or self-critique perpetuates the mistrust incited with the false declaration of victory and the ineffective communication surrounding it.

Final Thoughts

    Tacoma’s Block the Boat action started as a potent, rich moment of empowerment for people across ideological lines and levels of political development. It failed to deliver on this promise, leading instead to substantial disillusionment, frustration, and broken trust. 

    Clear and direct communication is not optional. Poor communication between organizers and participants laid the way for demoralization and mistrust. Ineffective communication of goals led to significant misunderstandings and confusion. Failure to disseminate information discussed in the pre-brief left many out of the loop and resulted in a poorly-supported deployment of the Water Warrior’s blockade. Effective communication is best supported by clearly defined and understood structure, roles, and task delegation, all of which will ultimately improve action efficacy and movement sustainability.

    Any success in revolutionary struggle requires exemplary coordination, collaboration, and communication, as well as heightened strategic and tactical consideration. It also requires that organizers have a good idea of what is required to escalate an action, in this case from a picket to an entrenched blockade, or potentially even sabotage. The capacity of the people to escalate, to meet the violence of the enemy, ebbs and flows. It changes with changing material conditions, which are rapidly evolving in the so-called United States, creating a moment ripe for revolution which we must not fail to meet. The revolutionary is a role emerging from the necessity of escalation. This role is fulfilled not only through the explosive and sometimes violent nature of revolutionary action, but also by educating, agitating, and organizing wherever we can during the lulls between escalations. As Communists in the belly of the beast, we must be both looking for opportunities to increase risk tolerance and political development in the people, while navigating the need to build a robust, revolutionary movement making use of current material and social-cultural conditions.

    Finally, our actions and movements should, wherever possible, follow Indigenous leadership and take cues from Indigenous liberation movements and freedom fighters. Especially as settlers occupying Indigenous land, it is our prerogative as communists to elevate radical and revolutionary Indigenous leadership and consistently assess how best to struggle alongside and bolster our Indigenous comrades. We cannot effectively collaborate with our natural allies if we allow unconscious colonial bias lead us into the trap of co-opting or sidelining radical and revolutionary Indigenous leadership, actions, and movements. This is as much about the efficacy of action and sustainability of movements as it is about deconstructing colonial systems through our own actions on the ground.

    We call on all radical organizations to earnestly assess their relationships to the Indigenous nations whose lands they occupy, and determine practical courses of action to build on or improve these where necessary. It’s additionally vital to assess our practices of communication, community care, utilization of revolutionary strategy and tactics, and political education. These assessments must be done regularly to ensure we are maintaining the most adaptive and revolutionary praxis. Only then can we begin to achieve real, material wins rather than the shallow, performative demonstrations our movement has historically tended towards.

*Endnote: Some resources for consideration in planning such actions include Instructions for an Armed Uprising (1868), Joint Doctrine for Barriers, Obstacles, and Mine Warfare (last updated in 1999), and Field Manual 3-90: Tactics—also see Guerilla Warfare and Marxist Revolution Index on Marxist Internet Archive. Information in these resources may need to be adjusted to account for changes in material conditions since the time of publication, but may provide some tactical inspiration.

The blurb for this workshop was:

Join us for a teach-in on how to build out winning campaigns to change policy and laws through grassroots power. At this educational event, we will discuss how to go from activism and advocacy to organizing and running campaigns to win lasting change.

In clear terms, this blurb outlined CPUSA’s tactic. It was a baby’s first workshop for those who wanted to exercise their bourgeois-democratic rights of voting, make petitions, and have meetings with elected officials. It promised to teach the most basic skills of doing so, all within a liberal framework of the free competition of ideas. In that sense the ideological content matched the label on the box.

But why would the ostensible Communist Party be engaging in this type of activity of liberal miseducation? And why host it at a white church (a tellingly white church) instead of at one of the numerous Black churches in segregated Peoria?

Because essentially the CPUSA has no interest in uniting the revolutionary masses of the US Empire. CPUSA has all the interest in the world, however, in reproducing its membership of radical-liberals, and securing the greater white networks of support that make that reproduction of the activist-organizer caste possible. In no stage of this process does the leadership have an interest in actually making revolution. Whether this idea of hosting a liberal workshop was stochastically generated by Peoria CPUSA’s own reformist-minded members, or if a directive came down from a higher body, it makes no difference in so far as the results are the same: a counter-revolutionary tactic for a counter-revolutionary strategy wielded by a revisionist and settler-chauvinist organization whose sole purpose is to reproduce the conditions of its own existence.

Political Miseducation

The workshop revealed a lot about the class character of the attendees and of the presenter. With the exception of the author, all attendees were white, with a few visibly queer people, split between the younger cohort (young adults) and the older (around or past retirement age). During introductions, the main concern of the attendees was the fear of the general crisis of American imperialism and the resulting blowback on the domestic front. The desire for some people was a return to “normality” and for others an ascent to a better society. Primarily, the attendees were motivated by subjective factors (moral outrage, political opposition) rather than objective necessity.¹

H. began by highlighting Black Lives Matter and the reform to eliminate money bond as a success of the kind that he intended to convince attendees was primary for political change.² This is of course in line with CPUSA’s social-democratic political outlook — revolution is impossible (or ill-advised), so socialism must be won piecemeal by political struggle encapsulated within the liberal law-and-order rules. Mass mobilization is a tool for these ends.

Our presenter further defined organization as a disciplined craft, as an exercise of collective power. Whose collective power? The power of the “99%” against the “1%”? The Poor vs. The Rich? The power of the white liberal against the white conservative? Why this emphasis on discipline, which is obviously needed for any type of sustained human activity, but no emphasis on scientific class analysis? One of the handouts (a reproduction of a copyrighted worksheet sold by a liberal career-NGO professional) helpfully defined a variety of “roles” one might play within a liberal campaign, proposing that each liberal organizer assort themselves based on one’s own personal talents and passions. Of course, there is no room to discuss the actual efficacy of a “diversity of tactics,” but instead different responsibilities are presented like roleplaying classes that each individual selects like players at a game table. This embodies the voluntaristic, amateur nature of CPUSA and of liberal organizations in general: organizing is something that people do as a hobby because they feel morally compelled to, not because otherwise they will not survive their conditions. When there is no imperative for survival, when the margins for mistakes are large enough, there is no selective pressure to correct mistakes at all.

Our presenter stated that the goal of organizing is to win real material benefits for “the people” (defined in abstract, totally absent of class and other internal contradictions). But what is a victory? A bill reluctantly passed in the Illinois State House of Representatives? Tiny reliefs in funding packages? Again, one only has to look at CPUSA’s line to understand why they push this dead-end incrementalism, which in reality means temporary concessions against a systemic onslaught of deprivation and predation by the bourgeois class, doled out primarily to the white-settler population. Of course, for the settler labor aristocracy and settler petit-bourgeois, it makes sense to struggle within the settler-colonialist system. But for the precariat and the colonized, much less so.

Our presenter claimed that the large, systemic problems of society must be sliced into smaller, winnable issues; that by dealing with smaller issues, one can defeat large problems because society-wide problems are “too big” to conquer outright. He took the example that an attendee volunteered of systemic ableism, cut it down into a problem of inaccessibility for a historic building, then proposed that the organizing solution would be a campaign for funding to renovate the building or zoning law changes to require accessibility. This is the misshapen dialectic of the general and the particular, the abstract and concrete in action utilized for liberal metaphysical practice.

Two strategic interpretations arise from this tactic, neither which are revolutionary models: either the system is “too big,” invincible, and therefore one must carve out spaces of exception via reforms, or by fighting for reforms one can finally defeat enough enemies to get to the Final Boss and then win against the “too big” problem of society. The first reaches the radical zenith of running off into the woods to start a settler-commune in disastrous retreat; the second proposes that Big Ableism (and all of its fellow distinct -isms) lives in a specific office in the White House and must be defeated there. In any case, this model of slicing oppression like a sausage fails to understand that Big Ableism does not exist as a concrete phenomenon, but rather ableism saturates social dynamics in general, as part of the class struggle as a whole. This too repeats for other “axes of oppression” which are always already part of the class struggle.

H.’s primary metaphor utilized for this workshop, to get from an undesirable present state to a desirable future state, is the bridge. To build a bridge requires knowing a source, destination, the conditions of traversal, the resources at hand, and whatever else. In this metaphor, progress is cumulative and linear (though not necessarily sequential; one can build parallel bridges). Each bridge must be constructed via a campaign to unite the “base” through interpersonal relationships, common agreement on sausage-slice issues, and strategic agreement. Of course, the idea of coalition-building and drawing in a number of organizations (of what class character? Again, unanswered) becomes primary here, with the potential base sorted into fixed tiers of “unconnected,” “supportive,” “activist,” and “core” categories (vanguardism with the serial numbers filed off). The same old canard of “diversity of tactics” is repeated. Experimentation is important, yes, but if political struggle is to have a scientific component to it, useless tactics must be discarded and successful ones must be replicated. One cannot permit themselves or others to repeat harmful tactics if they want to win.

Next, our presenter instructed us that communication for a campaign must be done like any other electoral campaign, with pitches and volunteers and donations, etc. What is interesting is that throughout the presentation, the enemy is unspoken, and only given concrete form as targets of isolated issues, never to the level of implicating the whole system of liberal democracy and its underlying imperialism and settler-colonialism unto itself. This can be partially chalked up to the requirement of a “non-partisan” workshop, but the silence on the general class struggle in society is deafening. Again, for a so-called Communist Party workshop!

The final apparatus that our presenter wished to impart on the class was the concept of a campaign lifecycle (a variant of this model) and self-critique. Not “self-critique” in those words obviously, and certainly not to critique individuals for the purposes of ideological development or to escape the entire paradigm of liberal organizing itself, but rather as a checklist to improve upon liberal organizing and to propagate electoralism into the infinite future. The phases of the campaign lifecycle may well be effective in guiding our liberal reformists in spinning their wheels into the mud as each successful campaign is rolled back by their fascist brethren. As for Communists, we desire real advancement.

Before the Q&A section, our presenter advised us on further reading: March by John Lewis (who is the archetypical representative of nonviolence); No Shortcuts by Jane Mallery (who proposes the united front of social progressives and settler-unions); Let This Radicalize You (towards left-populism and left-eclecticism) by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba; and Roots to Power by Lee Staples (who spouts even more left-populism and left-eclecticism)… Nevermind any scientific socialist texts!

During the Q&A itself, our presenter fielded a question about environmentalism and possible stakeholders adequately. Then one of the attendees asked how unions, if they were forbidden to strike by law, could have any actual leverage on politics. This was dismissed as an “out of scope” issue. Yours truly asked about examples of past successful campaigns and current ongoing ones by CPUSA, but was told that this was a “non-partisan” workshop and to speak with the presenter after class.

All in all, what a strangely liberal class for the Communist Party to put on! That is, if you take the Communist Party at their word, which we shall not, and examine only the workshop and not the situation in which it was placed, which we shall do now.

Class and Nationality in Peoria

Originating from the onset of European colonization, the settler-colonial political economy of the US Empire generates and maintains a specific settler consciousness for the white population: a sense of liberal humanitarianism and universalism, of free speech and debate of ideas, and of the civilizational battle for democracy against undemocratic (“barbaric”) forces, be they Native American, the descendants of enslaved Africans, Palestinian, or Russian. In the practical sense, this means that white people and their thoughts are quite literally valued more than the colonized peoples and their thoughts, in both the economic sense and political-economic sense. Settlerism, whose social basis (those who are racialized as “white”) has increased over time and which also admits individual nonwhites on a case-by-case basis, creates the bourgeoisfied proletariat (labor aristocracy) and petit-bourgeois,³ whose mobilization is much more politically impactful and legitimated by the extant bourgeois-democratic order than the mobilization of the colonized proletariat and the precarious white proletariat.

Peoria, due to historic redlining and ongoing national oppression, still remains one of the most segregated cities in the Midwest. The Joint Commission on Racial Justice and Equity of Peoria County maintains its own set of arcGIS map data and comprehensive tables for the purposes of assessing national oppression, as well as comprehensive statistics assessing the prospects of different racial groups in Peoria County. Informal apartheid is reflected in the income gap between white and Black households (and other statistics related to pollution, employment, etc.), and in the political organizations that populate the area. Further complicating this picture is the high population of bourgeoisified proletariat and petit-bourgeois in the city of Peoria, such that in 2024 a combined 33.7%of the workforce earned more than $100,000 per year and 66.0% earned more than $90,000 per year⁴ with an average home ownership rate of 57.5%; these are all statistics inflected by national oppression, at the county-level the average white household earns $63,100 annually compared to $30,400 for Black households.⁵

Owing to this demographic composition, Peoria is politically quiet with a handful of left-liberal organizations compared to a college town such as Bloomington-Normal or Urbana-Champaign. CPUSA, the Democrat Party’s 50501, the Green Party, as well as local single-issue formations and the recent addition of the crypto-Trotskyite Workers Strike Back organization occupy organizing spaces. All these exist with heavy overlap, sorted more into personality-based cliques and aesthetically sectarian friend groups than representing any substantial political disagreement. So are the activist NGOs in Peoria present: including but not limited to Peoria Proud, ACLU, League of Women Voters, and, of course, the Unitarian Universalists (UUes).

These organizations are mostly white organizations, in so far as they are dominated by white people, hold settler consciousness, and a faith in Law and Order. Black organizations such as NAACP, Southside Community United for Change, and the Black churches are also imbued with settler consciousness in so far as the political economy of the NGO as an organizational form plus the concessions of the settler state towards token political representation naturally produces such consciousness, and in so far as religion acts counter to revolutionary consciousness. Yet at the same time, this exists in tension with the national oppression experienced by Black Peoria and is reflected in their practice. SCUC in particular, a conglomeration of neighborhood associations (a liberal version of neighborhood councils) in the deprived Southside area, acts like an informal networking space between those particular organized nationally-oppressed reformists and Black (and other nonwhite) politicians. What distinguishes white from Black organizations is which community they recruit from and mobilize; Black organizations generally have less margin for error and less surplus labor to use up and as such are primarily focused on poverty (and the effects of poverty such as over-policing and incarceration) and intra-community issues, while white organizations have much more room for mistakes to be made and play in the field of “high” politics. Hence the segregation in Peoria remains despite everyone’s liberal best wishes that this ought not be the case.

To examine one white organization of interest: the UUes are a sociopolitical node for a specific kind of white progressive that has left even ostensibly progressive wings of Christianity but has not yet broken with religion entirely. Instead of Christian charity (paternalism), the UUes market themselves as a sort of Social Justice Church, which in practice means charity (paternalism) and reform campaigns. This mostly manifests in the form of encouraging their members to organize in settler-dominated reformist organizations, which perfectly lines up with the content of the workshop. In any case, like with other white churches, when attending their services one does not expect to see a lot of melanin. This makeup was reflected in the actual attendance of the workshop as mentioned before.

Compared to other small churches, which tend to be caught in a kind of money-sink death spiral due to a lack of attendees and therefore tithes, the UUes appear to be doing well. They run regular events for fundraising, they keep up charitable programs, they have a decent proportion of children to adults in the congregation. They are ideological left-liberals dedicated to land acknowledgements and statements of inclusivity and pulling isolated quotes from a variety of faiths in the pursuit of a homogenized liberal-universal spirituality. Committed to participating in protest theatre and nonviolent resistance, in agreement with the hegemonic imperialist logic of civilized democracies and uncivilized autocracies, in the end, they serve as release valves for white guilt and to redirect anti-hegemonic questioning into a reinforcement of the very same liberal political economy that has brought the world to this general crisis of imperialism. None of this is out of the ordinary for settler consciousness.

Revisionist Reproduction

So why would an ostensibly Communist organization host a reformist (liberal at worse, social democratic at best) workshop on organizing at the UUes, implicitly targeting that congregation for attendees? What value does Peoria CPUSA get out of trying to recruit these particular people into the habit of creating and leading reformist campaigns, and of eventually recruiting morally-outraged left-liberal bourgeoisfied proletariat and petit-bourgeois into their ranks?

Very simply put, Peoria CPUSA, whose founding members were originally the Peoria DSA chapter (DSA being another left-settler electoralist organization), is made of the same stuff as the UUes are, has an understanding with them and with the other liberal progressive organizations, and represents the CPUSA as a whole. Worse than any honest liberal formation which at least does not lie to your face about what it is, CPUSA proclaims itself to be Communist while eviscerating Communism of its revolutionary content. They strip all which distinguished Communism from the ideology of the social-imperialists of the Second Internationale — the class-collaborationists who welcomed the advance of fascism in their own countries against Communists, who sought to maintain the grip of their imperialist countries on their colonies within and without, whose mass base was the parasitic labor aristocracy they defended zealously. Worse than any honest social-democratic party which would at least proclaim itself proudly to follow this hoary tradition, the CPUSA offers the illusion of changing course through hypothetical line struggle, which would be productive in any well-formed Communist organization.

But the hypothetical remains unfulfilled. In reality, CPUSA is an anti-democratic organization which ruthlessly purges any genuinely revolutionary tendencies, such as in the case of the 2024 National Convention and the liquidation of the Austin chapter thereafter in order to maintain a reformist theory and practice. In their theory, the revolution must be carried out within the framework of bourgeois democracy, and the current crisis of imperialism must be soothed by the united front of labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois settlers to win more pieces of the imperial super-profit loot, and to win accommodations and assimilation for the nationally-oppressed and gender-oppressed into imperialism.⁶ In their practice, it means forever delaying and sabotaging revolution in favor of reforms, suppressing genuinely revolutionary impulses from their own membership, and in general shamelessly fulfilling a counter-revolutionary purpose on behalf of the bourgeois.

Through this investigation, we understand what Peoria CPUSA is doing as a reflection of their national organization and as a reflection of their environment. Their goal is to reproduce their own membership drawn from the “middle class,” to gain enough influence to successfully claim piecemeal reforms locally, and to morally justify to themselves that they are building revolution in the meantime. Once we know these facts, we understand that the central conception of building “collective power” is not meant to be taken in the abstract. It means, concretely, building the collective power of the labor-aristocratic and petit-bourgeois settler left, of re-legitimizing bourgeois democracy by winning small concessions as to stave off the desire for the whole pot of revolution in all of its total destruction of old social relations and forms and therefore the total destruction of US imperialism and settler-colonialism. We understand why CPUSA as a whole supports the Democrats: because they are ideological allies and dedicated partners who benefit from the arrangement — not because the left-bourgeois can be understood in any way to be the “lesser evil.”

1. For the queer white people, this factor is more wiggly in so far as the current bourgeois regime embarks on an exterminationist campaign against them; but, of course, whiteness gives one more room in the first place. ︎
2. Every year since the passing of the SAFE-T Act, held up as the golden standard of reform-oriented organizing by this club of CPUSA, there has been a concerted effort to gut and reverse the reform. ︎
3. Admittedly, the categories are blurry as labor aristocrats are often specialized laborers with the capital to become petit-bourgeois; by the same token petit-bourgeois often obtain labor aristocratic jobs when the going gets tough; this is a fact captured in the liberal “middle class” term. ︎
4. These figures was reached by grouping together all workers in an industry earning over $90k and $100k respectively, based off of their median yearly wages, dividing that by the total number of people in the workforce, then multiplied by 100 to get the percentages. ︎
5. Hispanic Peorians experience their own dire statistics; the lumping of national groups together however makes this data less useful overall in discussions of national oppression. Hispanic Peoria does have its own set of grassroots organizations, churches, and charities which serve the community. A discussion of the prospects of Hispanic, especially immigrant-based, organizations is out of scope of this article. But generally the same contradiction between the legal reformist framework and the realities of class and national oppression are present as in Black organizations. ︎
6. Gender oppression referring to both women’s oppression and the oppression of queer and trans people. ︎

The dialectical method represents humanity’s most revolutionary approach to understanding the contradictory nature of reality and its potential for transformation. In order to understand something as it truly exists in the world, we need to study it from many angles and perspectives. Knowledge is a process, and it contains lower and higher stages; these stages of understanding proceed from shallower to deeper understandings of any given subject. The subject of our report is a single city in Occupied North America: the city of Hartford, Connecticut. We cannot expect to understand the city’s conditions based on what we as individuals can see and hear. On one hand, an individual cannot observe every occurrence in the city at once. On the other hand, our human sense perceptions are inherently skewed. Sense perception is biased according to an individual’s upbringing, class position, and other factors which tend to form different worldviews in different people. Since our perception of the real world is inherently skewed, we use investigation to develop our understanding from the shallowest to the deepest level; from sense perception, to abstract knowledge, to theory. The correct understanding we develop from investigation serves as a stepping stone for addressing the contradictions we find; before we can hope to change the world, we must proceed from a correct understanding. Our social investigation in Hartford, Connecticut is an attempt to better understand the city’s local contradictions beyond what we study in headlines and data. Regional history is summarized from a de-colonial perspective beginning at the time of settler arrival; this marks the beginning of the local settler-Indigenous contradiction, with indigeneity manifesting and receiving shape through its antagonistic relationship with colonialism. Current demographics and recent population changes are displayed through maps. Gentrification is occurring, as can be inferred from the 53% population increase in the Downtown area in the last 10 years, but more investigation is necessary to view how this economic displacement manifests across national (racial) lines. Our findings indicate that national (racial) contradictions continue to define the overall distribution of power and wealth in the city. Hartford as a whole receives unfathomable benefits from the US-led exploitation of the Global South, but the wealth which is stolen from the international Proletariat is not distributed equally among USians. It is distributed through the national, settler-governed hierarchy. This is one reason why the overall economic position of Black residents in Hartford has not changed in any significant way since the 19th century. Our findings indicate that state welfare programs are increasingly unable to manage the class contradictions between US workers and their capitalists. The number of homeless continues to increase at a steady rate. There were 9.5% more homeless people in Hartford in 2025 than in 2024. Since 2021, the number has increased by a striking 45%, primarily due to rising housing costs. One specific manifestation of the crisis is a new prevalence of tent-encampments in the city’s parks. We hope this social investigation of the Park St. area will lead to clear-sighted organizing efforts based on a correct understanding of local, national, and international contradictions. More social investigations are necessary in other parts of the city, especially the North End.

Local History

The Connecticut River Valley was home to many Indigenous tribes before European settler colonialism. The area now known as Hartford was held by the Suckiag Tribe until they were ethnically cleansed by Dutch and English settlers. Suckiag was valuable due to its prominent position along the Connecticut River. Ever since the displacement of its Indigenous populations, the city now known as Hartford has been a “rearguard garrison”¹ for settler colonialism in Occupied North America and imperialism across the globe. When English Hartford was founded in 1636, the Connecticut colony consisted of scattered settlements along the Connecticut River. These towns acted in self governance for the first time to declare war against the Pequot Nation, which governed what is today southeastern Connecticut. Settlers from the river valley towns sent delegates to Hartford, where the colonial court issued its decree to recruit 30 men from each town to commit genocide of the Pequot. The English also recruited hundreds of soldiers from the Narragansett and Mohegan Nations to assist in the war effort. Together, they killed most of the Pequot and forced the survivors into slavery, with the English seizing all their land. The English successfully took advantage of the competition between Indigenous nations in Connecticut, a tactic of exploiting existing contradictions the modern U.S. state now regularly employs to destabilize nations. Of course, the temporary allies, the Narragansett and Mohegan, also saw all of their land – at first slowly, then all at once – stolen by settlers in the ensuing, decades-long land grab. 

Hartford’s dominant industries at this time were agriculture and rum distillation. Both were dependent on slave labor; in Hartford, Black and Indigenous enslaved people worked the farms, while in the Caribbean they harvested sugarcane that was fermented and shipped up the eastern coast to Hartford and other northern cities. These Caribbean plantations were made dependent on such cities for food supplies, because even though the islands could grow ample food, sugar was the only crop produced on the land since it was more profitable to sell. The Caribbean experienced waves of manufactured famine that continue to this day. Census data for slavery in Hartford only goes back to 1791. In that year there were 263 enslaved people in Hartford out of 2,764 in the state. There were 430 “free persons” (free Black citizens) in Hartford who were members of the city’s proletariat and sub-proletariat. The first recorded murder victim in Hartford was a Black man named Louis Berbice, murdered by his enslaver in 1639. The enslaver, Edward Opdyck, faced no punishment. 

From Garrison Town to Inventor’s Workshop

Hartford became a manufacturing city beginning around the 1850s, when Samuel Colt opened the largest private gun factory in the world. Colt revolvers were key to westward expansion, used by both individual settlers and the U.S. army. A half century earlier, Eli Whitney initiated the local mass production firearms industry with the interchangeable parts design, developed out of a factory in New Haven. A year later, he would invent the cotton gin, kickstarting an exponential expansion of slavery production and New Afrikan misery. Additional companies, such as Billings and Spencer, Spencer Arms, Winchester Repeating Arms, and Smith & Wesson have bestowed a historic tie between settler militarism and Connecticut. 

The city’s role in colonial occupation did not change, but its form of service took on a new, advanced appearance. Amerika’s new settler armies needed advanced, mass-produced weaponry that could overwhelm the western Indigenous nations still fighting for their national territory. Tucked away safely in the Northeast and bolstered by several centuries of superprofits, Hartford was well-positioned to serve as an inventor’s workshop for the next era of military technology. 

We see the same transition fulfilled today by “israel” in Occupied Palestine. The zionist entity is both a garrison launchpad for the U.S. in Asia, and the empire’s principal inventor of military technology. Their weapons are primarily used against Palestinians to continue the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Their secondary purpose is that of testing and experimentation; advanced technology is exported from occupied Palestine to wherever in the world the empire needs them for asymmetric violence, including U.S. cities such as Hartford. 

From Inventor’s Workshop to Financial Hub

Hartford’s modern image as a finance center is characterized by massive insurance companies whose offices take up most of the city skyline. Connecticut’s capital is the birthplace of the insurance business itself. River captains, dealing in enslaved people and foodstuffs for slavery plantations, wanted to avoid the expectable financial hits from the dangerous sailing business; storms, piracy, and disease were threatening enough to the capitalists’ fortunes that it benefited the overall class to compensate one another when an individual merchant lost their investment. Thus, they created a system of profit and risk sharing among the merchant class. The financial logistics of slavery laid the foundation for the emergence of the insurance industry. Hartford is still considered the insurance capital of the world, although there are fewer actual insurance employees working in the city than in the past. 150 of these companies generate $16 billion a year combined. They are centered in the downtown area and housed in the largest office buildings. This industry is, of course, white dominated.

Lastly, Hartford and Hartford county continue to serve the U.S. war machine with several weapons manufacturers. In West Hartford, the Colt factory produces M4 rifles that are continuously sent to Occupied Palestine. The modern “inventor’s workshop” has moved across the Connecticut River to East Hartford, where Raytheon operates a five-story “research” facility to engineer new weapons systems like radars, missiles, and drones for the US and its vassals. A short walk away, Pratt & Whitney builds engines for the F35 fighter jet. While many of these weapons workers are commuters, it is also the perception among community members that the companies are too powerful and entrenched for anti-imperialists to challenge them.  Tracking the city’s development from garrison fortress, to inventor’s workshop, to financial hub of global imperialism, can we really say Amerika was ever not fascist? No, we cannot; it is only the form and proximity to genocide that has changed. 

Demographics

The city has 17 neighborhoods, which are more sharply segregated by national and class contradictions than the average U.S. city. Population maps show that the New Afrikan population is primarily segregated to the north end of the city. The New Afrikan neighborhoods are separated from the Hispanic neighborhoods by insurance offices and the I-84 highway, constructed in 1964 to connect the downtown offices with the white suburbs in West Hartford. As in many cities, the construction of the giant highway through the city devastated the “minority” neighborhoods it crossed over. 

National Groups in Hartford according to 2020 census

Map of the I-84 Highway through Hartford

Although the downtown area saw the highest rate of population growth between 2010 and 2020 (increasing by 53%), this area is still notoriously empty at night and on weekends, when office commuters leave for the suburbs. Downtown is the only neighborhood with a majority white population in Hartford. Note that the North Meadows neighborhood has no official population, since the area contains the Hartford Prison and commercial businesses. (See below.)

Hartford Neighborhoods, Population Change 2010 – 2020

We began our social investigation at the intersection of Park and Main St. In 1969, this intersection was the site of an uprising of the Puerto Rican community against a white biker gang. As the story goes, a white man belonging to the Comanchero biker gang assaulted an elderly Puerto Rican, and the community decided they had had enough. The groups confronted each other in the streets, but Hartford police only arrested Puerto Ricans. This agitated the community even further. The cycle of protesting, followed by police repression, followed by even heavier protesting, would continue for weeks, until an even greater escalation occurred. On August 29, 1969, West Hartford police shot Dennis Jones, a 16 year old New Afrikan, to death. Two days after the murder, a slumlord tenement building burned down, killing three people. These two events were too much for the community to bear, and people took to the streets against both police and white-owned businesses in the north end. But unlike the “Comanchero clash,” this time New Afrikans and Puerto Ricans fought together. The protests spread from the Clay Arsenal Neighborhoods, through downtown, and into Charter Oak and South Green. By September 5, over 500 people had been arrested and 4 people were shot. 

1969 Hartford Uprisings, August-September 1969

This one and a half month period marks the most significant uprising of the oppressed communities in Hartford. Since then, Puerto Ricans have gained representation on the Hartford City Council, giving the community a chance for a larger “piece of the pie” of imperial superprofits. They now have a place in government to address economic inequalities and police oppression. Of course, representation in local politics has not smoothed over the glaring contradictions between different nations in Hartford. Puerto Ricans are still concentrated in specific neighborhoods that receive lower investment ratings than nearby white neighborhoods, and the contradictions of homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty are more present in the Hispanic neighborhoods than in the white-dominated West End. Puerto Ricans make up 74% of the Hispanics in Hartford, but there is a significant Dominican population (8%) now as well. 

Beginning each outing with a briefing of goals and logistics, we set out in both directions along Park Street and the surrounding area. Below are the major contradictions we observed. 

A Note On Methodology 

Methodology refers to a system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity. As Scientific Socialists, our area of study is the material world. Our activity is Social Revolution. This means that we study the material world in order to apply the data we perceive — creatively and usefully — towards our material goals. In the context of a social investigation in Occupied North America, our methodology guides us to find those pockets of space and human groupings which could be the situs of a Communist beginning. 

In practice, this means we need to do a cursory study of the local area before committing to a social investigation on the ground. This introductory investigation may require more than just visual information (the phenomena we can see with our eyes in a community). Most often, we will need to study economic and political data as well. For example, studying that an area has an average household income which is significantly less than bordering neighborhoods could clue us in towards an investigation in that area.  

We chose Park St. for several reasons:

1. The area has a high proportion of nationally oppressed people, primarily from Occupied Puerto Rico, but also from the Dominican Republic and other Spanish speaking countries. 
2. ICE has kidnapped more immigrants in Hartford than in any other city. 
3. Most of our political education work occurs in Hartford, making it the best area from which to draw labor. 
4. Visibly, we observe a high degree of homelessness in the Park St. area. 
5. The street has a number of empty residential buildings, indicating ongoing gentrification.

Groups committing to social investigation may use a variety of methods depending on their local area. We conducted our investigation using face-to-face conversations on the street level. Local zoning is commercial-residential, with all residences contained in apartment buildings (which prevented us from knocking door-to-door). We chose not to use a questionnaire, opting for open-ended questions that would generate the most variety of opinions. This was our first investigation conducted in this area, so we wanted to garner the widest possible web of information before narrowing our scope of work.

Homelessness

Roughly one third of the people we interviewed were experiencing homelessness of some sort. Some were living in a shelter or a halfway house. Others reported living outside in parks or under building edifices. One person reported an incident of homeless displacement by the city. According to the community member, a group of people were previously sleeping in tents at Barnard Park. The city reportedly moved them and their belongings to a larger park elsewhere in the city, after complaints of drug use. Of course, these community members reported huge difficulties finding housing in Hartford and Connecticut. 

For every one homeless person, there are 28 abandoned properties. At the site of the Comanchero riot, a new luxury apartment building sits empty. Buildings just like it are being built in several neighborhoods, increasing rent beyond what people can afford. For example, in the North End Blue Hills neighborhood, aging and starved of government investment, the Bowles Park Public Housing Complex was torn down to be replaced with Willow Creek. The new development having fewer dwellings is part of the reason why the Blue Hills population decreased 13% between 2010-2020. 

Of the people we spoke to who did have housing, many reported homelessness as the biggest issue in the city. Some had been homeless previously themselves. We also spoke to people who disparaged the homeless, to varying degrees, for presumed drug use and lack of social etiquette. Most, however, assign blame in both directions; they might blame the individual for poor choices, while the government is blamed for not helping them. There was a common understanding that the shelter and post-incarceration assistance programs do not help people find permanent housing. To this, several people brought up abuse that takes place within the shelter system.

In connection with the lack of housing, another major contradiction we observed is the dominance of slumlords. Just about everyone we spoke to who had housing was a renter. Most, if not all, complained about their rents going up every year. We could have asked more follow up questions about people’s specific living conditions, such as whether repairs are made, whether security deposits are returned, etc.  At times, our investigators were too focused on getting a general sense of the neighborhood’s problems, and this likely caused us to leave certain wells of information untapped. One reason for this error was that we were looking for broad themes of oppression, themes that could take center stage in a future agitation program. But any possible theme would depend on the experiences of individuals in the Park St. area, therefore we should have sought a detailed explanation of exactly why housing access is such an issue in the neighborhood. The individual and the whole are two ends of the same dialectic, and we should ruthlessly investigate both if we expect to organize in any community. Going forward, we have a better idea of when we need to ask more follow-up questions, and we declare our intention to do so in the future. As part of our investigation process, some of our investigators created a hotline for community members to report incidences of abuse by the structures that be. People can now report slumlords, police brutality, ICE activity, and other instances of oppression to this hotline. This reporting would not only continue the investigation process, but refer us toward material injustices which could form the basis of a future program. A future program could take on one of several forms: agitation, Mass Meetings, Community Defense or CopWatch, Red Aid (Communist form of Mutual Aid), or another experimental program that solidifies our contacts with the masses. 

Police

Several community members reported feeling a sense of danger on and around Park St., especially at night. They reported high rates of crime and heavy drug use. When asked about solutions to these problems, several responded that more police were needed. This was a relatively prominent idea of a solution for many people. A slightly lower number of people had nothing but bad things to say about the Hartford police. They reported corruption, harassment, and a lack of material assistance from the police. Based on these conversations, the contradiction between police and the oppressed communities is not the sharpest contradiction in this part of the city, currently. However, this is an issue that needs to be “brought back” to the people in subsequent outings. Hartford currently has 3.42 police officers for every 1,000 residents, while the national average in cities of similar size is 1.6. Hartford already has over twice as many police officers as comparably sized cities. The city spends 8.8% of its budget on police. Hartford is happy to throw as much money as possible into the police force. 

However, the community either does not perceive this outsized number of police, or the police do not prevent crime in the way community members expect. We know that the latter is the case, and that police do not prevent crime. In order to bring this issue back to the community, our investigators need to explore some tactical questions that get to the heart of the fundamental antagonism between the community and the police force. Some questions we may wish to put forward are: 

• What kinds of crime do you perceive most in the community? 
• If the current number of police is not enough to prevent crime, how would increasing their numbers address the problem?
• How could the community itself perform the task of protecting local residents?

We should also bring forth the current statistics that show an already outsized police force to cast doubt on the idea that more police would reduce crime.  

Occasionally, the people we were interviewing would ask us about our ideas for solutions to these contradictions. We generally responded with a critique of state institutions and the fact that they do not help the people. We highlighted the need for grassroots organizing that did not simply participate in the election cycle. Most responded positively to these ideas, and were happy to share their contact info to keep up with our progress. On this note, we could have done a better job at seeking the community’s participation in the social investigation itself. A common goal of social investigation is to recruit those you are interviewing – the people who actually live there – into the project itself. 

Individualism 

Individualism was a very common outlook among the people we spoke to. In regards to problems in the city, one person phrased it as “caring but not caring.” We have heard nearly verbatim reports from other social investigations in the past. Previously, someone phrased it as, “It’s like I give a fuck but at the same time I don’t.” This tells us that community members perceive the contradictions around them, but do not believe there is any movement currently capable of addressing them. The result is a recognition of existing oppression, and perhaps feeling bad about it, but not yet taking the crucial step of organizing the community. 

Mutual Aid Groups

We encountered one mutual aid/ charity group, Food4Lives, conducting a free lunch program in Barnard Park. The organizers were from a different area, considering the large amount of cars they brought. They serve meals once a week, drawing crowds of over 50 people each time we see them. We did not interact with the group, mainly because all of the members were busy serving meals to the large crowd. We were also somewhat skeptical of what information the organizers could provide on the local community. In hindsight, this was an error on our part because we should not neglect interacting with organizers who may be from outside the community, especially considering we are also not residents of the Park Street neighborhood. We did speak to some community members who were waiting in line for food, who reported that the group has been serving meals consistently for several months. 

Based on their website, Food4Lives does not appear to have a firm ideological standpoint besides feeding the homeless through regular meal services. Their vision is “a community where homelessness is addressed with compassion, empowering every individual to rebuild their lives.” We will make sure to interact with the group the next time we see them in person. In the meantime, our investigators should brainstorm ways in which we can constructively struggle alongside existing charity groups such as Food4Lives. 

From Investigation, to Agitation, to Organization

Social investigation is an important first step to community organizing, but we cannot investigate forever. Once enough information has been gathered and the key contradictions are identified, the organizers should collectively synthesize this information before returning to the community with the “new” information. To “synthesize” means to combine a number of things into a coherent whole. By synthesizing contradictions, we are taking the reported issues and connecting them to the capitalist system as whole. Therefore, when we return to the community with this synthesized information, it is not “new,” but it is being presented in a different form.  

The agitation stage can take the form of speaking with people, posting flyers, or other creative means of propaganda. Whereas social investigation is primarily about listening to the concerns of community members, agitation requires a more mutual conversation. Social investigation is listen, listen, listen, while agitation is listen, respond, listen, respond. It is a conversation in which we expose the contradictions in their barest form, while gauging the community member’s own opinions and political consciousness. 

For example, we know that homelessness is a fundamental law of capitalist development, that this sub-proletariat serves as a reserve labor pool for the capitalist, and that the Amerikan welfare system tries to paper over this contradiction with a small percentage of imperialist superprofits. In the social investigation phase, we hear all varieties of opinion on the homelessness question. We hear both sympathy and chauvinism from property owners. In the agitation phase, we may push back on chauvinist ideas from the petit-bourgeois, in order to investigate which, if any, progressive causes can be used to organize small property owners. For example, a renter may say something along the lines of, “I feel bad for the homeless and I know pushing them out won’t solve the problem, but I hate it when they trespass on my property.” A statement like this shows at least some level of consciousness on the homeless question, but there is still a clear element of respect for private property and a short term interest in labor discipline against the homeless. This sentiment is also another example of individualism; empathy for the homeless person is subverted because they are being personally impacted in a negative way. While we may not fully challenge these ideas on a social investigation, we should challenge them when we return to the community for agitation. 

Among those already displaying a revolutionary, or at least anti-state, consciousness, we can take the conversations much further, and even begin to approach the person’s thoughts on organization. 

We should expect the politically advanced individual to hold unacknowledged contradictions in their ideology. For example, a person may agree with the need to organize the community, and to hold mass meetings outside the electoral framework. In this same conversation, the same community member might express the long term goal of setting up a non-profit organization, applying for grant money, and other forms of integration with the state. We would agree with the need for grassroots organizing and mass meetings, but would almost certainly disagree with the notion of embedding ourselves in the non-profit complex. Those grants generally come with strings attached. The agitation stage is the correct time to pose these problems to the community member, to start a conversation around correct organizing models. 

The agitation phase should be used as a precursor to more grounded and collective forms of organization. We have identified the mass meeting as one possible method having significant potential in many oppressed localities. The mass meeting is not a new concept, having been utilized by Indigenous nations for centuries, as well as among the “heretics” in Medieval Europe. In more recent times, both the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) took their original forms through a series of mass meetings. For more information on the Mass Meeting, read The Mass Meeting by the Red Clarion. 

Investigation Never Truly Ends

While we emphasize the need to create organizing models that extend beyond the initial investigatory phase, there is also the need to continuously analyze the situation through a dialectical lens. The contradictions are fluid; they may be exacerbated or reduced by a number of factors, especially the state, which may or may not make concessions depending on the situation. To say that the investigation never truly ends means to affirm our role as dialecticians, always looking to criticize and improve our past analyses. 

The All-Empire Worker’s League encourages all its member organizations to conduct propaganda among the masses with revolutionary potential. If you or your organization are interested in beginning or refining a social investigation, do not hesitate to reach out. 

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

1. A garrison refers to a fortified location from which military campaigns are planned and enacted against outside groups.
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On April 15, 2024, a series of coordinated but autonomous actions were conducted across the globe with the goal of disrupting the genocidal war machine propping up the zionist entity’s genocide in Gaza. The tactic of choice was economic blockade. Initially concentrated within the so-called United States, organizers hoped to have enough of an economic impact to force the imperial superpower to rescind its unconditional support of its colonial outpost. As word spread between organizers and activists internationally, the scope expanded to include a number of actions in other imperialist and settler countries. While the hope of forcing imperial powers to stop their support for genocide ultimately failed to materialize, there are a number of lessons to be drawn from this moment of decisive and principled escalation. We hope to highlight these lessons so that future actions may build upon them.

At the core of A15 was a dialectical navigation between national and local organizing levels. Organizers understood the necessity of collective action to effect meaningful change, and with this understanding started an ambitious project in the pursuit of a free Palestine. Recognizing the necessity for actions to be tailored to the material conditions of the regions in which they were occurring, organizers established a strategy of regionally-bound autonomous actions to facilitate collective national (then international) action. This resulted in an implicit national-local organizing structure lacking strong centralization, but which ensured action did happen.

It worked like this: national-level organizers spread the word of their intention to facilitate a nation-wide economic blockade. Organizers and activists from all over the so-called U.S. were invited to an initial online “All Cities” meeting where the idea was more thoroughly fleshed out: autonomous actions would be regionally organized against the largest, most influential, local economic target. The target didn’t have to be explicitly tied to the zionist entity and its genocidal pursuits, since the U.S. Empire’s war machine is ultimately powered by the entirety of the imperialist economy. The idea was to “stop pulling the levers of the machine,” even if only for a day, in the hopes of frightening the parasitic class facilitating genocidal violence. Actions were coordinated to occur symbolically on April 15th, tax day, in acknowledgment of the role U.S. tax dollars play in carrying out the genocide.

Several cities dropped out during the short period allotted for planning, but when April 15th arrived, dozens of cities around the world (including Melbourne, Dublin, London, and Toronto to name a few) saw blockades temporarily stop the flow of capital, or rallies, marches, and walkouts in solidarity with blockades. Participating groups took a variety of strategic approaches with different types of targets, but physical blockades emerged as a common strategy. Many arrests were made, and at time of writing, some legal battles are still being fought as a result of the A15 actions. For the purposes of this analysis, we will be focusing on national level organizing and the blockade of the SeaTac airport which was organized and executed in the Puget Sound. We invite those familiar with other actions to consider contributing their own regional analysis.

The ambitious scale and scope of A15 was admirable, and in some ways a wild success. Dozens of autonomous blockades were coordinated around the world, the significance of which cannot be overstated given the difficulties and barriers of mobilizing even one large group in one city. The size and spread of the mobilization garnered widespread mass media attention and, despite the undefined parameters, successfully centered economic impact as the primary strategy. At the same time as we celebrate the successes of A15, we feel it necessary to analyze its failures.

Critique is a necessary part of continuously improving our strategic orientation and tactical approach in order to learn and adapt in the pursuit of liberation. Through an analysis of available evidence, we’ll articulate both the successes and shortcomings of A15. Ultimately A15 proved the will of organizers and activists to escalate in their effort to shut it down for Palestine. Successes were shaped and limited by a number of strategic oversights and shortcomings, such as an extremely limited timeline for planning and execution. A number of social, cultural, and interpersonal barriers also emerged, including communication pitfalls, aversion to conflict and critique, and most prominently, the myriad troubles that emerge from a lack of coherent and mutually agreed upon structure. While A15 demonstrated the willpower and capacity of people to come together for wide-spread and coordinated collective action to stop a genocide, it also demonstrated prominent barriers the imperial core’s “Left” must directly address and overcome in order to effectively strike the beast from within its own belly.

Communication is Key

The A15 actions can claim a number of successes. At the national and international levels, organizers tapped existing connections to establish a broader communication network and coordinate collective action. Given the scale and number of actions, A15 quickly gained widespread media attention, presenting organizers an opportunity to make their actions double as propaganda. The communication network allowed organizers to coordinate support, resources, and messaging to the public. Here in the Puget Sound, local successes were due to existing affinity groups and informal activist communities. Their existing connections with one another and experience in mobilizing for previous movements supported quick mobilization. Ultimately, the execution of a collective action on such a scale proved its efficacy in terms of uniting a movement and proves the capacity for future actions.

An International Solidarity Network

One of the key factors in A15’s success at the national and international level was the establishment of an international communication network to coordinate collective action. National organizers had stated an intention to maintain the A15 network for the purposes of facilitating similar direct actions in the future. While this intention hasn’t manifested in the wake of the action, the network’s use leading up to and during the action contributed to the overall success of A15. Additionally, because of how widespread the A15 Actions were, organizers were able to garner substantial mass media attention, if only for a short time. The principal success of the A15 Actions at this level, however, was in demonstrating the strength of collective action and international solidarity, highlighting the strategic necessity of building these kinds of connections and strengthening our ability to do so.

Organizers were able to effectively collaborate and coordinate on a global scale because of the existing connections that organizers and activists built during previous mass movements, such as the George Floyd Uprisings. Information about the initial “All Cities” meeting was disseminated to different organizations and individuals in cities across the country, and eventually around the world. At this initial meeting individuals from the same city were able to connect with one another to build regional organizing teams which would then take the lead on planning an economic blockade tailored to their region’s material conditions. Communication networks that balance centralized coordination with regional autonomy enable organizers to collaborate and act collectively across regional boundaries, but the finer details must be determined at a local level to ensure the efficacy and relevancy of the action and its impact on the locale.

Routine national meetings ensured organizers across the world clearly understood the goals of A15 and dispersed ideas for what actions might look like, as well as a generalized understanding of the legal needs of direct actions, such as legal observers, bail funds, and other legal support. These meetings served to fortify the collective element of the action. During meetings some groups were connected to necessary legal resources (or given information on how to do so), and those with less organizing experience were able to connect with more experienced peers to facilitate knowledge and resource sharing. The A15 network was always intended to be a hub of support and solidarity and this was most evident in the early days of organizing.

At the time of this writing, the surviving A15 network exists in the form of an “All Cities” group chat. Members share updates about ongoing campaigns related to Palestine (such as one group’s project to bring potable water into Gaza) along with ways to support those campaigns and requests to connect with organizers in different cities or nations. For quite a while the chat appeared dead, but it came back to life on the night the Freedom Flotilla seeking to bring aid into Gaza was targeted by a zionist drone strike (the first of multiple such attacks) with detailed emergency calls to action being shared. Similar calls have since been shared. At one point, there seemed to be an effort to coordinate another mass economic blockade which failed to take off with the same gusto as the original A15 plan, with only a few responding to the initial proposal and discussion dying off rather quickly. To our knowledge, no action manifested from this, though the particulars of why this might have been remain unclear.

Just as important as internal organizing communications are external communications. Direct actions such as these pose a powerful opportunity to communicate to the world at large about our causes. Organizers should be adequately prepared to utilize captured media attention to this end, with materials designed to educate and agitate, not simply to spread awareness. It is therefore important to think about highly visible actions in terms of propaganda. As communists, our goal is to lead the masses in a revolution; such leadership requires trust that our actions are for their betterment. This is not to say that we should obsess over the optics of our actions, especially characterized by bourgeois media. Rather, consideration should be given to reaching the masses through an antagonistic media apparatus. Messaging should make our intentions clear in order to support raising bystander consciousness, cultivating understanding, and instilling revolutionary optimism. Creating a plan to interface with the public through media is critical to maintaining a level of trust with an organization and swaying other workers.

As a result of this national and international collaboration and solidarity, groups acting autonomously across the world executed dozens of direct actions despite short notice. This international coordination for Palestinian liberation was a potent indicator of what is possible through intentional, focused collaboration and unwavering solidarity. This was by and large only possible as a result of a communication network linking organizers together. Solidarity is our strength; we can’t build a new and just world alone.

The Strength of People Power

In the Puget Sound, major successes revolved around tapping established communities to quickly and effectively mobilize a significant number of participants. On very short notice, organizers were able to pull together an airport blockade that shut down traffic into the airport for around five hours with no injuries and no confirmed security leaks.

For this action, organizers cultivated maps of the target area to survey and select an ideal choke point. Later, reconnaissance was conducted to establish a more thorough understanding of the area, identify staging locations, and plan for action execution. Organizers tapped pre-existing affinity groups and reached out to some additional Palestine-focused organizations to rally forty-six people to participate.

Accounts of the action indicate that a car may have been used to create an initial stoppage in traffic, with organizers feigning that the car had stalled to create cover for deployment of the blockade. Protesters “locked in” at the site using the sleeping dragon tactic: they chained themselves together with their arms threaded through PVC pipes to ensure responding police couldn’t simply cut the chains. This lengthened the duration of the blockade and increased the resources required to remove the protesters from the site.

Operational security practices were implemented at a heightened level, with a keen awareness of the risk of leaks and potential impacts thereof. Encrypted Signal chats with disappearing messages were used for some communication early on, and a pivot was made to all in-person communication due to concerns about the spy-ware nature of much of modern communications technology.

The successes of the SeaTac airport A15 blockade were largely due to the numbers available to organizers. Not all actions will have as many organizers or participants available, nor do all actions require such numbers. The key take-away here is that actions must be scaled to the real capacity of the moment. This fact also works in tandem with the level of centralized organization required for particular actions. How many people do we need to be successful in a particular time frame? How centralized does the planning need to be to achieve its goals? What level of operational security is required to protect organizers and participants? Setting achievable goals allows for sustainable and consistent work and victories. As Mao teaches us in On Guerrilla Warfare, we must only engage in battles in which we are guaranteed victory.

Informal Structures and Movement Security

There were many lessons learned not only from the successes of A15 actions, but also from some critical failures in the planning phases that luckily did not result in worst-case scenarios. Excruciatingly short timelines bred a number of issues at the national level, from poorly considered media strategy to inability to fulfill promises and achieve unspecific, difficult to measure goals. On the local level in the Puget Sound, a complete lack of structure facilitated interpersonal breakdowns which posed a number tactical and strategic barriers. In consideration of these oversights and critical failures, there were many areas for improvement we can learn from. The most powerful lessons learned center on the necessity of giving ourselves time to develop effective strategies, be intentional in choosing targets and tactics, and more.

Communication is a Practice

At the national and international level, many identified shortcomings stemmed from the short timeline for planning and executing a national, then international, economic blockade. There was a little less than two months’ notice that there would be an “All Cities” meeting outlining the idea and intention behind a forthcoming national economic blockade against the United States — The Empire. Paired with the time needed to plan and host these initial meetings, this left organizers at the international, national, and local level with about a month and a half to identify targets, gather intel, set goals, plan, and execute.

On Urgency

The short time allotted for organizing these actions undermined the potential of a wide-spread and well-coordinated economic blockade in a number of ways. There is an undeniable urgency when people are being murdered en masse, but the way that urgency was treated in this case reflects a common tendency of organizers within the imperial core to treat the fight for liberation as a sprint rather than the marathon it is. Urgency requires not just timely action, but effective action. The minimal time allotted to plan and execute these actions had multiple impacts. Limited time to recruit participants meant many actions were quite small and therefore limited in what they were able to do. The pressure to pull together actions quickly meant that some organizers weren’t able to pull any action together at all, resulting in a number of cities dropping out altogether when they realized the severity of this limitation. Limited time to do recon and establish contingency plans also meant that riskier targets with larger potential impacts were off-limits for many. Finally, there were a number of actions which were sloppy and ineffective, not because the organizers themselves were sloppy or ineffective, but simply because they didn’t have the time to coordinate something better. The key takeaway from this is that we must be honest about and take seriously the time needed to effectively set our goals, plan for them, and accomplish them. Failure to do this undermines our efforts and betrays the people we are fighting for.

On Logistics

National organizers had offered in All Cities meetings to provide local organizers with support in accessing or connecting with resources including bail funds and legal support. Although never explicitly mentioned, offers of mentorship were implied. While some areas were able to receive support and guidance from the national level organizers, others in need of similar support were left with little or none. Many actions were able to coordinate their own support with the help of experienced organizers on their teams, but for others, the inability to access rigorous legal support was a deterrent to planning higher risk actions with more potential for greater impact. While the autonomous method of organizing was successful overall in this instance, more time and resources could have improved centralized organization and increased support and guidance from national level organizers. This would have supported better developed and more effective actions.

Furthermore, the economic impact of the blockades was much smaller than organizers had intended, and as a result, these actions were not successful in applying economic pressure great enough to threaten the Butchers of Gaza or their enablers. The idea of not limiting targets only to businesses directly participating in the slaughter of Gaza was simple, straight forward, and well intentioned. However, without greater numbers (both of actions and of participants) this spread the movement thin and diluted the message being sent. More time to plan and coordinate between cities would have enabled more robust, targeted actions, and as such, would have produced a greater economic impact. Consider the effect of multiple cities coming together to target their state’s largest weapons manufacturer rather than staying focused on unrelated industries in their own cities, for example.

On Propaganda

A banner reading “Our Taxes Are Funding Genocide” was displayed alongside Palestinian flags at the SeaTac airport blockade, highlighting the significance of tax day for the action and reminding onlookers of the way in which the United States government makes its citizens complicit. There was little planning or strategy for communicating to the media or the masses beyond this, however. Unfortunately, the opportunity to also highlight the ways in which the imperial core’s whole economy supports genocidal colonial and imperial violence, the intricacies of which aren’t easily recognizable or intuitively understood by the majority, was missed. In cases where targets aren’t explicitly related to the genocide in the same way a target like Boeing or Microsoft might be, it’s important to consider how to communicate these complex economic relationships in a way that is concise and accessible to your average working person.

Though there was mass media attention to the A15 actions, it was short lived and confused. Reporters identified that these blockades were coordinated and therefore connected, but at the outset not all reporting outlets seemed to understand that these were actions for a free Palestine (though eventually this was reported more confidently). This confusion spread to non-mainstream commentators as well, including supporters of a free Palestine, whose confusion or misunderstanding of the actions at times led to reporting and analysis that was frustrated and failed to recognize successes. Many actions lacked banners, signs, or other means of clearly communicating the causes and intended effects of the actions, leading to confusion rather than clarification. Ultimately these actions largely failed to utilize the opportunity for effective propaganda.

On Organization

This high intensity, unbalanced planning is a consistent habit of the imperial core’s “Left.” This strategy of reacting rather than acting leads to intense burnout among organizers and difficulties sustaining long-term activity. Paired with rumors of conflict and infighting among the national level organizers, it’s unsurprising that the communications network has declined to the degree it has. This all gestures to the problem of structurelessness that followed A15 from the beginning: with no clear roles, guidelines or expectations on conduct, and no system for accountability, the A15 movement inevitably became a one-off moment with minimal continuing impact or legacy.

Though the international network that was meant to be established through the course of this action technically still exists, its current form is a far cry from what organizers originally set out to build: a space for continued national and international collaboration for increasing escalation in the pursuit of a free Palestine. Some of this collapse reflects a general need in leftist spaces in Occupied North America to build conflict resolution skills, increase distress tolerance, and implement effective methods for addressing harm. It also demonstrates the importance of understanding and identifying roles, and formulating a clearly understood and articulated structure to support adherence to expectations around conduct, facilitate conflict resolution, and effectively make and execute plans. Unfortunately, these issues of interpersonal and structural development have been repeatedly observed as serious barriers to building or implementing successful strategy, let alone building a successful revolutionary movement in the so-called United States.

On Structure

The issue of structurelessness appeared at the national level as rumors of conflict and infighting, but was well and truly on display at the local level. Without a clearly defined structure for organizers and action participants to operate within, one member was able to flood the Puget Sound organizing committee with their previously existing Affinity Group (AG). This ultimately led to the abandonment of all democratic processes and the de facto establishment of an in- and an out-group. The seizure of power by this AG led to a litany of safety and security concerns for organizers, participants, and the general public, ultimately resulting in an insignificant economic impact despite being publicly celebrated as a resounding success. Many of the issues discussed here are a result not necessarily of bad strategy, but of structurelessness. In essence, the failings of the Puget Sound A15 action is a case study validating Freeman’s thesis: the absence of a formal democratic structure only invites an informal reactionary one.

Once the original planning committee was flooded by the AG and a de facto leader emerged, an implicit social hierarchy quickly followed. While there was no intentionally defined structure, that does not mean an absence of structure. Rather, what formed in the absence of openly discussed and agreed upon structure was an unspoken but recognizable in- and out-group dynamic with deference to the implicit leader, who was then able to assume control over planning. This resulted in the discarding of the democratic process in order to focus on the preferred target of the unspoken leader, as well as select participants enjoying the privilege of having their ideas, concerns, and suggestions regarded seriously. The original lack of structural development appears to have arisen out of organizer naivety, and many of these original organizers withdrew from the project or were pushed out by the toxic dynamics that emerged in place of well-considered structure.

Citing security concerns, the group pivoted to in-person communications only, including daily meetings and sometimes multiple daily meetings with no plan (or apparent intention) to communicate with participants unable to attend. As a result, a culture of exclusion emerged. Working individuals, individuals with disabilities, and individuals with care-taking duties were effectively barred from participation. This strongly favored members of the aforementioned in-group, with some members of the out-group not being alerted to in-person meetings due to text communications being almost entirely abandoned. As such, many individuals who were not members of the in-group were pushed out of planning altogether. In essence, heightened security culture practices became an implicit enforcement of in-group/out-group dynamics and functioned to assure in-group dominance in the organizing process. Poor communication also resulted in numerous people appearing to be on completely different pages about how to handle the issue of independent press on the scene, leading to questions of what else people weren’t on the same page about. When participants voiced concerns about inaccessibility and exclusivity, they were roundly ignored, and no effort was made to find a resolution, increase accommodation, or improve communication. There was no follow-up with the individuals leveraging these critiques after they left the group.

Structurelessness also resulted in inadequate responses to safety concerns. One stark example of this was the handling of concerns about the potential for vehicular violence. When a member of the out-group raised this safety concern, it was brushed off as a matter of privilege. Later, a member of the in-group raised the same concern and was praised for doing so (though it is not clear that this concern was addressed in any practical way). Not only did such incidents reaffirm the in-group/out-group dynamic, it highlighted a lack of regard for participant safety or sustainability in the movement for Palestinian liberation overall. Beyond the tactical value of striving for safety, this example also highlights the fundamental strategic oversight of valuing high-risk adventurism over actions designed with safety and efficacy in mind: quickly burning through the risk tolerance of participants runs the risk of ultimately reducing our own numbers in the name of a spectacle, fundamentally weakening our position in future actions.

Many of these shortcomings would have been avoided with explicit communications about roles, expectations, decision making processes, and issues of accountability. Explicit communication would have supported more intentional collaboration, more effective adaptation in the face of critique, and could have avoided pushing people out, increasing the number of on-the-ground participants.

As previously noted, a greater allotment of planning time would have likely yielded a more robustly designed action capable of achieving greater success — this too was directly impacted by structurelessness. Already working on a tight timeline, a democratically selected target was rejected during an in-person meeting where only a fraction of participants were present. The time and effort spent on the original target had to be scrapped and restarted for the new target, leaving organizers with just weeks to plan.

Rallying forty-six people to join an action like this is a feat on its own, but the action would have been even larger with more time to recruit. More time would have allowed organizers to connect with local orgs and build better working relationships. With more time organizers could have also expanded their network rather than solely relying on existing affinity groups, increasing access to support, resources, and recruitment. There would have been more time to establish contingency plans in case something went wrong, and more time to work on additional materials to support the barricade or create clear and effective messaging.

It’s also worth noting that the Seattle Police Department developed an Apparatus Removal Team specifically to deal with sleeping dragons, making them uniquely capable of dealing with this tactic quickly and efficiently. This highlights the necessity of knowing our enemy. If this particular method must be employed in the Seattle area, utilizing a more effective variation is preferable. Styles of sleeping dragon which utilize barrels filled with cement through which the PVC pipes and chains are threaded, creating additional barriers to removal, have been used elsewhere and could serve as inspiration for out-maneuvering the Apparatus Removal Team. Researching SPD capabilities, getting materials, building these more robust sleeping dragons, and establishing and practicing methods for transporting and deploying them quickly and efficiently would have been viable with more planning time. This could have greatly increased the amount of time required for responding police to remove the protesters, increasing overall economic impact. Imagine if there had been time to plan for deployment of such a tactic with sixty, seventy, or even eighty participants.

The ultimate financial impact of the action was estimated to be in the low hundreds of thousand of dollars. To us working people this is a lot of money, but for the corporate ghouls being targeted it is barely even pocket change. It is significantly less than what was hoped for, yet it was celebrated as a resounding success, echoing concerns such as the false victory claimed at the earlier Block the Boat action. These concerns indicate two main areas for growth: 1) the ways in which goals are established, and 2) the ways in which we evaluate success.

Too often we’ve seen actions designed without clearly articulated goals in mind, or alternatively, with unrealistic goals. Setting clear and concise goals not only supports organizers in designing and executing an effective action, it provides a metric against which success can be measured. In the case of the Puget Sound A15 action, the goal was simply to “have a financial impact.” The fact that as little as a $100k impact could be called a success highlights how vague the goal actually is; despite discussion of the financial impact organizers hoped to achieve, specific numbers were never mentioned. This was a significant strategic weakness in the action design and planning. Without a specific and measurable goal, it wasn’t possible for organizers to calculate how long a blockade would have needed to be held. As a result, organizers did not design the blockade according to any specific length of time intended to meet a realistic goal. Furthermore, organizers must have a truly honest assessment of their successes and failures — victories should not be inflated and failures should not be minimized. To do so would be avoiding criticism and self-criticism, which is an integral part of successful revolutionary organizing. Refusing to engage in this process of (self) criticism, we lose the ability to facilitate learning, growth, and greater future adaptability and success. If we are to be serious about the cause of liberation for Palestine and all peoples, we must be serious about how we engage with critique.

Many of the issues discussed in this section would have been minimized had organizers established even a loose sense of structure, with identified roles and responsibility, decision-making processes, and systems for accountability. This is largely an issue of naivete on the parts of different organizers, but the constraints of an extraordinarily short timeline certainly didn’t help. Organizations require structure in order to effectively achieve their goals, and democratic processes must be core to the pursuit of equitable and just interpersonal dynamics within an organizing group. Organizers must maintain clear and effective communication to ensure that people understand what is expected of them and what they should expect from the organization. Organizers must also ensure that no one gets left behind. Security culture should be practiced in dialectical balance with consideration to accessibility needs of the people who make up the masses, most especially those with jobs, disabilities, caretaking duties, etc. Barring this, an action will never become a movement, and will instead become a quickly forgotten historical blip.

It is vital to note that all of these issues aren’t only a barrier to creating a successful action or movement, they are a barrier to developing effective strategy at all. Without an effective strategic outlook or orientation, getting something as ambitious as A15 off the ground and meaningfully achieving goals is next to impossible — as we have unfortunately seen in the aftermath of the day of action.

Building Movement Resiliency

The metrics for success and failure regarding the day of action were ill defined, but ultimately we understand that the broader goal was to mobilize in support of a free Palestine; in that regard, the A15 actions succeeded. The failures and shortcomings of the A15 movement lie not in the mobilization, but rather in the organization. Throughout much of her work, Jane McAlevey details the distinction between the two (see No Shortcuts), but to put it succinctly, Kwame Ture teaches us that “mobilization [is] temporary. Organization is permanent and eternal.” A15 was able to mobilize, but it was not able to organize. Without a clearly defined and democratic structure — both of which are equally essential to the health, longevity, and power of an organization — we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes ad infinitum.

The reason we see so much turnover and burn out among our organizers is not from an inability to mobilize, but a critical failure in establishing and maintaining organization. This is why we continue to see these outbursts of activism (e.g., Battle of Seattle, Occupy Wallstreet, George Floyd Uprisings, etc.), but not a sustained movement that will lead to revolutionary change. To remedy this, we must learn these important lessons and move forward to build stronger organizations that are capable of winning while withstanding repression.

In light of the lessons learned from this study, both in terms of successes and failures, we propose the development of regionally-bound organizations to facilitate the development of militant cadres capable of rapidly and effectively responding to and leading mass movements. While organizers in this case were able to get the word out to various cities, there have been countless other such attempts which have either fallen far short of their goals or failed entirely. The success of such future endeavors cannot be left to chance. These new organizations — free from the capitulationist, revisionist, and dogmatic tendencies of our movement’s leading organizations — could facilitate such communications, disseminating empire-wide calls to action in a more secure way than posting to social media, and structuring a response in collaboration with local coalitions and other ideologically- or issue-focused organizations. Beyond simply acting as a means to mobilize, putting time and effort into such development will lead our movements toward permanent organizational structures that can be adapted to the needs of the moment, helping to avoid the pitfalls of structurelessness observed in this study. These organizations will need to develop themselves based on their local conditions: organizational needs, barriers, available resources, class composition, geographic context, as well as a continually updated understanding of friends and enemies in the area. Such development will improve our overall strategic position, facilitate ease of collaboration within and across regional boundaries, and bring us closer to the permanent revolutionary organization we need.

It is evident, now more than ever, that we need our Party — the Communist Party that will lead our revolution and the liberation of this continent from colonial occupation and the world from imperialism. But as we are now still disjointed, uncoordinated, and disorganized, we must build the structures necessary to allow for its formation. This is possible only through developing our local means and capabilities, thus elevating class consciousness and proving we are deserving of leadership. Furthermore, principled organizations must coalesce into Intermediate organizations — an organization of organizations. This is the embryo of our new, revolutionary party. But what is the Party, what does it do, and what does it look like? 

The Party is the organized, conscious, and revolutionary vanguard of the working class — an essential instrument for the proletariat to seize and maintain power. Unlike our movement’s current leading organizations, who are unfit for revolutionary struggle, our new Party — a Leninist Party — will emerge as a militant, disciplined force prepared for revolutionary conditions. It is the most advanced organization of the working class, composed of its most devoted and politically conscious members. The Party leads, educates, and unites the working masses, serving as their leaders in the class struggle. It embodies revolutionary theory and action, guiding the proletariat beyond trade-unionism and reformism toward the overthrow of imperialism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Party is a tightly structured, disciplined organization with clearly defined and understood roles, centralized leadership, and structure that efficiently supports party work, mobilization, and both systemic and interpersonal conflict resolution. An ability to withstand internal struggle toward a unity of will is vital, with discipline toward minority compromise with majority will in the pursuit of much needed revolution. To support this, time and effort must be directed toward building robust, resilient communication networks, networks structured in consideration of striking balance between centralized coordination and regionally-bound material resources, needs, and autonomy. It is not a loose collection of sympathizers but a coordinated system of organizations bound by the principles of democratic centralism, adapting to shifting material conditions, and effectively coordinating collective action across regional boundaries. The Party functions as the highest form of class organization, uniting and leading all other proletarian institutions — trade unions, cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and more — under a single revolutionary direction. The work of the Party entails guiding the proletariat to power, consolidating socialist rule, and maintaining discipline by filtering out opportunist and reformist elements and investing the political education and development of its members and their associated communities. In short, the Party is both the mind and the will of the proletarian revolution: the organized force through which the working class acts as one to destroy the old order and build socialism.

We are not utopians, we are scientific socialists. Every action we take serves to better inform our practice. All self-conscious struggle brings us closer to fulfilling our historic task in overthrowing the imperialists. To end the tyranny of capital, we must first end the tyranny of structurelessness.

Attendance at the conference was split between two groups, voting members and non-voting members. Voting members consisted of those organizations which met the criteria outlined in the convention proposal: have a defined democratic structure, have a nominal commitment to Marxism-Leninism, and have at least five full and active members. Non-voting members were made up of organizations which either did not meet one or more of the criteria or did not grant its delegates the power to enter into preliminary agreements. Among the non-voting members were a number of observer organizations.

Outside of CCAP and CTRRG, the conference was attended by representatives from the Kansas Socialist Book Club (KSBC), Red Help Austin TX, the Atlantic Regional Communist Party (ARCP), the Shenandoah Valley cadre, Unity of Fields (formerly PAL Action US), the People’s University of Amherst (PUA), and Ocean State Student and Worker Alliance (OSSWA), among a few other unaffiliated individuals. Additionally, representatives from the Chunka Luta Network (CLN) and Red Sails were present online for a short while. Of these attendees, only CCAP, CTRRG, and the ARCP qualified as voting members, while Unity of Fields, OSSWA, and the PUA were in attendance solely as observers.

The conference opened with a “State of the Movement” address written and delivered by the CTRRG, which laid out the background for this conference and why it was deemed necessary. The piece assessed the conditions of our current historical moment, and concluded that no Communist Party exists nor has a legitimate Communist Party ever existed on this continent. Therefore, they posit, it is our role to build one. The piece explored the histories of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of China, which were formed through the unification of and struggle between different Marxist organizations and study groups. The principal method by which this happened was the formation of Leagues which unified small, local organizations into “organizations of organizations.” The League form existed as a step up from the local organization and a step below a party. Therefore, the intent of this conference was to struggle over this idea with other capable, principled Marxists and to establish such a League if the struggle led in that direction.

After the initial address, individual organizations were given the opportunity to present reports of their own. Reports were prepared and delivered by the Shenandoah Valley cadre, CCAP, the ARCP, Red Help, and KSBC. Each report explored the conditions of the struggle in each of their localities and centered on specific lessons each organization had learned from their experience organizing. The Shenandoah cadre shared the lessons they learned from a recent split in their organization, CCAP shared its plans for a cadre development program, the ARCP described organizing conditions in Canada and the tensions between settlers and the Indigenous, Red Help discussed their recent expulsion from CPUSA, and KSBC presented their plans for expansion and the process of their education program as well. Each report was followed by a period of discussion whereby people in attendance asked clarifying questions, critiqued elements of the report, and contributed any other relevant experience or information to the topic at hand.

Following the reports, discussion turned to the formation of a Worker’s League. It was during this time that OSSWA raised criticisms that they had developed of the idea of a League and shared their conception of the vanguard party. It was the opinion of these attendees that the reconstitution of the Communist Party should follow the example set by the Peruvian Communist Party using the strategy of concentric construction and clandestine organization. Debate ensued around the applicability of such a strategy to the conditions of the North American Empire, the efficacy of clandestine organizing as an ideological versus a tactical concern, and the method by which mass organizing relates to party building. Ultimately, the voting members agreed to move forward with the formation of the League, with the promise that they would interrogate the strategy of concentric construction and conduct an analysis of its applicability to our current conditions.

Of the three voting members present, CCAP and the CTRRG voted to establish the League. The ARCP, citing labor shortage in their current work, deferred their entry into the League until a later date. Additionally, a number of the observer organizations professed an interest in joining the League as either candidate or member organizations upon reporting back to their respective cadres.

At a special session of the General Body held on September 17th, CCAP voted to ratify the League charter and join as full members.

Analysis

What is a League and why did the conference set out to establish one?

The Lake Quonnipaug Conference came as a step in the strategy for party building as outlined by the prospectus of the Unity–Struggle–Unity Press organization, which is a strategy that we at CCAP have also arrived at and have chosen to adopt. This strategy, as demonstrated by the founding of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party of China, is characterized not by the direct growth of one individual organization that becomes the vanguard, but the establishment of unity between existing organizations and the formation of “organizations of organizations.” A League is such an organization, a second-order organization of which the membership consists not of individuals but of other primary, local, organizations. A League is not a party, however it is still an advancement in organizational complexity and capability over a primary organization, and lays the groundwork for the development of further unity and the eventual establishment of a party.

The purpose of the All-Empire Worker’s League is two-fold. On the one hand, it establishes unity between a number of existing primary organizations on the basis of a shared commitment to Marxism and a shared strategy for party building. It establishes a meaningful and lasting connection between such organizations whereby they are in active, formalized relation and communication with one another to coordinate efforts, struggle ideologically, and provide strategic resources between them. On the other hand, it serves as a living example of the strategy it is following. Ultimately, the party would be founded through the unity between a number of Leagues, therefore it is our aim to inspire others to create unity between principled Marxist formations in their own localities and form Leagues of their own. The All-Empire Worker’s League thus serves as an example that such a strategy is viable and provides a model for others to follow.

Our delegates felt that the conference itself was extremely successful, not only because it managed to achieve its stated aims. Possibly the most important and most valuable part of the conference was the connection made between the groups present. Many of these groups did not have formal communications with one another prior to the conference. Many had not even heard of one another. However, what we found was a collection of the most principled, most revolutionary, most dedicated comrades from all around the country who we established meaningful and lasting connections with. The conference served as a place for principled struggle, for sharing organizing tactics and strategies, for educating one another on our specific conditions and efforts, and for learning from the varied experiences of our newfound comrades.

Conclusion

All the proceedings from the conference including meeting minutes, copies of organization reports, and the Worker’s League charter will be published in full in the Red Clarion. We recommend that any and all comrades who are curious about the conference go and review the materials when they become available. Additionally, we recommend that interested organizations review the League charter and consider applying to join, or consider an effort to establish a League of their own with organizations in their specific locality.

Any questions about the League, the conference, or CCAP’s role in it, please reach out to us through Unity–Struggle–Unity, our Instagram, or our email: cincycap@protonmail.com.

The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, which would give birth to the Bolshevik faction and ultimately the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the science of Marxism-Leninism, held its founding conference in 1898 in the city of Minsk. The Communist Party of China was founded on July 1, 1921. In both cases, the parties were created out of the union of study circles as their principal element. The unification of these study circles into militant revolutionary parties was a necessary step on the road to social revolution. No such solid history undergirds the so-called “parties” in the U.S. and Canada today. Here and now, on September 7th of 2024, fully 126 years after the founding of the R.S.D.L.P. and 103 after the founding of the CPC, the date in the most powerful capitalist empire in the world might as well be 1897.

Not only did the U.S.-Canadian movement never establish a solid foundation — thanks, in part, to the ComIntern’s merger of the CPA and SPA in the early 20th century and the failure to establish an organizational safeguard against the latent reformism and opportunism that already plagued those formations — we have a century of false starts and the wreckage they created to deal with. At the heart of what we can call the American errors are 1) the failure to establish national liberation of the Black nation and captive Indigenous nations as a special stage in the U.S. revolution due to the settler-colonial relations, and 2) the failure to establish gender liberation as a bedrock principle of Communist organization. I can confidently state that, had those issues been properly addressed by the overwhelmingly white petit-bourgeois leaders of the early CPUSA — had the party not sidelined and then expelled Harry Haywood and the other so-called “Black nationalists,” every other error would have been, if not avoided, at least avoidable.

The list of secondary and subsidiary errors made by the movement in the U.S. over the course of the 20th century is too long to enumerate today. Now, we must assess the current conditions and put forward a program and plan that takes these conditions into account. What are these conditions?

I. Rightism Predominates

The overwhelming tendency on the U.S.-Canadian left has historically been and continues to be the predominance of rightist deviations from Marxism-Leninism. This has manifested as opportunism — the adoption of politically popular but non-Communist positions to maintain personal power and popularity — as revisionism — the “revising” of Marxism to remove its revolutionary content — as tailism — the adoption of positions which are already no longer relevant to the masses and their consciousness because they appear to be “safe” — and as simple reformism. The reason for these deviations is manifestly a desire to preserve the system of capitalist exploitation because the corrupt leadership of these formations does not in fact desire a world in which the benefits of national oppression have been eliminated. If the choice, they reckon, is between being socialist but eliminating whiteness, or being capitalist but nice, they proclaim: “Let me be capitalist – but let me be white.”

In other words, the movement has never progressed in any meaningful sense beyond the social chauvinism of the Second International.

To protect their social chauvinist lines, the U.S. and Canadian formations have adopted a perversion of democratic centralism. They cannot admit full democratic participation within their parties because to do so would be to invite real revolutionaries in and jeopardize their century-long legacy of tailism and legal Marxism. Over time, as leadership became insulated from democratic pressure, they parroted the justification of “professional revolutionaries” to give themselves unassailable perquisites, such that leadership in one of these parties comes with stipends, apartments, and paychecks. Every word ever written by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or the founders of the CPC, can be perverted once the living legacy is gone. These parties have adopted the political slogans, but emptied them of meaning and now they spout them to justify the inverse policies of the historical revolutionaries. They are, in a very real sense, traitors to the cause of revolution.

II. Leftism is the Natural Response

The predominance of rightism in the movement throws up its own dialectical shadow: ultra-leftism. When it is impossible to participate in a party with a revolutionary line, and where the existing parties pervert and corrupt the revolutionary line into a reformist one, committed revolutionaries are prone to leftist errors. These are made as a result of the predominant rightist errors, and sometimes even made knowingly, as a corrective. But it is not the ultraleftist deviation that currently threatens the integrity of the movement. The ultraleftists could be brought back into the revolutionary fold of correct theory and practice if (and only if) the rightist deviation were defeated.

The most pervasive version of this ultra-leftist response is what we have jokingly called “anarcho-maoism” in the past. This is a form of extreme misreading combined with doctrinaire book worship of Mao Zedong while excluding the historical context of his works (for instance, the fact that the Communist Party of China was already iron-strong compared to the limp-noodle parties of the modern West) and to essentially read him as an anarchist. Anarcho-maoism focuses almost entirely on “doing the work,” and utterly rejects all attempts to produce and agree upon correct revolutionary theory as “philosophizing.” Anarcho-maoism advocates narrow, local work to connect with the masses above and beyond the work of organizing a functioning party. This is a dangerous deviation, because it deprives us of both the theoretical and practical basis upon which to build up the Communist Party.

Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement. 

Without the Communist Party, there would have been no new China.

III. The First Weapon of the Proletariat is Organization

All across the left, the mistaken call goes up: “just do the work.” Many sources tell us not to worry about the party-form, that we don’t need it yet or that it will arise “naturally” as we connect with the masses. This is a holdover or expression of the same anarcho-maoist ideology which we criticized above. It may also manifest as a type of Third Worldism in which the job of overthrowing the empire is shrugged off from its historical subject, the U.S.-Canadian proletariat, and thrust upon those who are already the most oppressed by the imperial machine, the Third World proletariat. These are two different types of ultra-left capitulationism, two different ways of ignoring the world-historic task set out before us, and ultimately feed back into the rightist belief that the United States capitalist empire is too powerful to be overthrown; the rightists and segments of the ultra-left both ask us to adopt a “holding pattern” until the day that American capitalism falters and a new horizon comes into view.

Other ultra-left sects demand immediate application of terror tactics, the formation of combat organizations, open revolt against the enemy state. This, too, is incorrect. Even in the conditions of a fully-formed party as in Russia, combat organizations of socialists were often used by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, to crack down on socialists, to jail them, to hang them. The use of terror split the socialists from the masses, who were not prepared for it, and isolated these lone terrorists; stranded and alone, they were unable to spark a mass movement.

If our weapons are not, at this stage, arms (guns, bombs, bullets) nor survival programs (food, shelter, showers), then what are they? The chief weapon of the proletarian class is organization. Although our enemy is already organized and supplied with both its main force (the state in the form of police and the armed forces) and its auxiliaries (paramilitary settler-garrison societies like the Oathkeepers), the strength of our enemy does not lie in its organization, but rather in its command of the productive property, capital, and political power. To challenge the concentrated power of the capitalists, which is everywhere funneled down from the glass and steel towers into the battering ram of the police on the street, we must be capable of exerting concentrated proletarian power.

Revolutionary capacity — proletarian class power — is a special characteristic of an organization that is organized in a certain way and which possesses an authentic connection with the masses and which develops and adheres to the correct revolutionary theory. The power of the proletariat is expressed in these two simple truisms:

1. The proletariat is the necessary workforce for all social production and,
2. The proletariat is the fundamental basis, the social foundation, of all capitalist society.

One proletarian alone cannot access the strength implicit in either of these statements. One proletarian cannot alone convince the class to resist the capitalists’ blandishments and lies. So long as the class remains disorganized, this power is latent, sleeping. Only once the class has become organized in a highly disciplined form according to true democratic principles and along Marxist-Leninist lines can it exert its class power. What is the vehicle for this organization? It is the revolutionary political party.

Will it be built spontaneously? No. Only through dedicated study, hard struggle, and long hours of labor will it come into being. The first task of every cell of the Party-to-be must be the production of new, militant, revolutionaries. That is one reason why Unity–Struggle–Unity is working with RedSails on a schema for a series of political education courses.

IV. A Party of a New Kind? No! A Party of the Correct Kind

We have already acknowledged that we lack this vehicle above, that there is no militant, disciplined, revolutionary political party currently organized on the correct lines that would enable the revolutionary class to exert its class-power here in the U.S. or Canada. 

What are the hallmarks of the vanguard party? In both Tsarist Russia and the Qing Empire, the Communist Parties were formed from the unification of study circles and struggle leagues: local, primary organizations that operated on the ground. We must study the party-formation period of these two organizations to learn the “secrets” of what came before. In Russia, where incorrect socialist theories made the formation of the party difficult, one of the preconditions of party formation was the demolition of those theories to pave the way for the R.S.D.L.P.

As Comrade Stalin wrote in the Short Course History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks), (and here, comrades, I apologize, as I will quote at length):

In a number of his writings during this period Lenin criticized the methods of political struggle employed by the principal Narodnik group, the “Narodnaya Volya,” and later by the successors of the Narodniks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries—especially the tactics of individual terrorism. Lenin considered these tactics harmful to the revolutionary movement, for they substituted the struggle of individual heroes for the struggle of the masses. They signified a lack of confidence in the revolutionary movement of the people.

In the book, What the “Friends of the People” Are, Lenin outlined the main tasks of the Russian Marxists. In his opinion, the first duty of the Russian Marxists was to weld the disunited Marxist circles into a united Socialist workers’ party. He further pointed out that it would be the working class of Russia, in alliance with the peasantry, that would overthrow the tsarist autocracy, after which the Russian proletariat, in alliance with the labouring and exploited masses, would, along with the proletariat of other countries, take the straight road of open political struggle to the victorious Communist revolution.

…

Of immense significance, too, was Lenin’s struggle against “legal Marxism.” It usually happens with big social movements in history that transient “fellow-travelers” fasten on them. The “legal Marxists,” as they were called, were such fellow-travelers. Marxism began to spread widely throughout Russia; and so we found bourgeois intellectuals decking themselves out in a Marxist garb. They published their articles in newspapers and periodicals that were legal, that is, allowed by the tsarist government. That is why they came to be called “legal Marxists.”

After their own fashion, they too fought Narodism. But they tried to make use of this fight and of the banner of Marxism in order to subordinate and adapt the working-class movement to the interests of bourgeois society, to the interests of the bourgeoisie. They cut out the very core of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. One prominent legal Marxist, Peter Struve, extolled the bourgeoisie, and instead of calling for a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, urged that “we acknowledge our lack of culture and go to capitalism for schooling.”

In the fight against the Narodniks Lenin considered it permissible to come to a temporary agreement with the “legal Marxists” in order to use them against the Narodniks, as, for example, for the joint publication of a collection of articles directed against the Narodniks. At the same time, however, Lenin was unsparing in his criticism of the “legal Marxists” and exposed their liberal bourgeois nature.

…

In 1898 several of the Leagues of Struggle—those of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Ekaterinoslav—together with the Bund made the first attempt to unite and form a Social-Democratic party. For this purpose they summoned the First Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (R.S.D.L.P.), which was held in Minsk in March 1898.

The First Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. was attended by only nine persons. Lenin was not present because at that time he was living in exile in Siberia. The Central Committee of the Party elected at the congress was very soon arrested. The Manifesto published in the name of the congress was in many respects unsatisfactory. It evaded the question of the conquest of political power by the proletariat, it made no mention of the hegemony of the proletariat, and said nothing about the allies of the proletariat in its struggle against tsardom and the bourgeoisie.

In its decisions and in its Manifesto the congress announced the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

It is this formal act, which played a great revolutionary propagandist role, that constituted the significance of the First Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.

But although the First Congress had been held, in reality no Marxist Social-Democratic Party was as yet formed in Russia. The congress did not succeed in uniting the separate Marxist circles and organizations and welding them together organizationally. There was still no common line of action in the work of the local organizations, nor was there a party program, party rules or a single leading centre.

For this and for a number of other reasons, the ideological confusion in the local organizations began to increase, and this created favourable ground for the growth within the working-class movement of the opportunist trend known as “Economism.”

It required several years of intense effort on the part of Lenin and of Iskra (Spark), the newspaper he founded, before this confusion could be overcome, the opportunist vacillations put an end to, and the way prepared for the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

In contrast, the Communist Party of China faced a relatively easier road to consolidation. The incorrect tactics, theory, and practice of the 19th century had already been exposed globally by the foundation of the Bolsheviks and the triumphs of October by the time the labor struggles intensified in China. There were no major competing socialist formations for the Communists of China to sweep away. Instead, Li Dazhou, a Chinese peasant born in 1889 who became the librarian and professor of Peking University in 1917 and who had fought for national liberation of the Chinese people, founded a study circle in Beijing that would become the core of the party. He also began to publish a Marxist newspaper designed to unify the budding Marxists in the country.

As a result of the leadership of Li Dazhou’s study group during the May Fourth Movement protesting the continued national humiliation of China under the Versailles treaty, Li’s protest against the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, etc. he became one of the leading lights of Marxism in China. Along with Chen Duxiu, Li built up the basic organizations that would unify to become the Communist Party of China.

Both the R.S.D.L.P. and the Communist Party of China were constructed not out of whole cloth; not conjured into being by the dictate of a central organ, but through the diligent creation and unification of local, primary, organizations.

V. But What is the Party of the Correct Type?

Let us look at the structure of the CPSU and the CPC, the debates around their forms and formations, to understand the structure of a Marxist-Leninist party, for we will not find it incarnated in the so-called “parties” of the United States or Canada.

The split between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in the R.S.D.L.P., which led directly to the foundation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was precipitated around the question of “Paragraph 1” of the party rules draft presented by Julius Martov for the second party congress, held in 1903. This concerned membership in the party and what was required to be a member. Martov’s draft became the party rules for the Mensheviks; Lenin’s, for the Bolsheviks.

Martov’s draft reads: “A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who, accepting its programme, works actively to accomplish its aims under the control and direction of the organs of the Party.” Comrade Lenin took issue with this formulation, correctly stating that this was “only an empty phrase. That Party members must work under the control and direction of the organs of the Party goes without saying; it cannot be otherwise, and only those talk about it who love to talk without saying anything… can the organs of the Party exercise actual direction over Party members who do not belong to any of the Party organizations?” Comrade Lenin’s reformulation was that members must belong to a Party organization.

And what does Comrade Lenin say about the Party at large? In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, he writes “The word ‘organisation’ is commonly employed in two senses, a broad and a narrow one. In the narrow sense it signifies an individual nucleus of a collective of people with at least a minimum degree of coherent form. In the broad sense it signifies the sum of such nuclei united into a whole…. the Party is an organisation, should be an organisation (in the broad sense of the word); at the same time, the Party should consist of a whole number of diversified organisations (in the narrow sense of the word).” He says, “The Party should be a sum (and not the mere arithmetical sum, but a complex) of organisations.”

At the same time, the Bolsheviks had to struggle mightily against the “circle principle,” the idea that individual party organizations had “rights” of their own. The party is more than just a sum of organizations, an organization of organizations, but a unity divided into cells. Comrade Lenin and the Bolsheviks also struggled over what democratic centralism meant. In 1906, Comrade Lenin published Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action in which he strictly defined democratic centralism’s relation to criticism. This is critical, because criticism and self-criticism is the chief weapon of struggle within the Party (which we will see when we turn to Comrade Mao’s On Correcting Mistaken Ideas In The Party and other writings): “The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies the universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.”

In our context, a primary organization is therefore the cellular network of Marxists working in any given region, enterprise, or locality and performing real work to develop its membership in political understanding of Marxism-Leninism as well as developing connections with the masses and elevating their consciousness. In essence, the organically-forming local Marxist organizations already engaged in real Marxist work, from ongoing logistics and survival mass-oriented programs to political education and cadre-building, are the basic stuff of which the Party will and must be made. In other words, the organizations that have sent delegates to this very conference are the building blocks of the Party-to-be. We will hear reports of work later today in order to more fully understand and communicate the conditions in each region that is represented here.

VI. Class Consciousness is Rising

What else typifies our current moment in the heart of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist block? The tide of class consciousness has reached a lifelong high. Why is this? To put it very simply indeed, we have come to the end of a long period of capitalist-imperialist stabilization in which Western capital was relatively more powerful and secure than it had been and we are entering — or have entered, with the outbreak of war in Ukraine and Palestine — a period of instability and crisis.

Beginning in 1991 with the forceful disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and the reopening of one sixth of the surface of the earth to Western capital and the depredations of its markets, the instability of the imperial centers in Washington, London, and Berlin was more or less ameliorated. This doesn’t mean there weren’t a series of crises within the Western block; the crash of 2008 and the Eurozone debt crisis of 2009 are stand out examples of the periodic capitalist crises evidenced even during this period of stabilization. However, the periodic crises did not throw the Western capitalist block into a sustained depression. The Western capitalists were able to crawl out of the occasional and intermittent holes into which they stumbled by virtue of the overall character of stabilization.

This period lasted roughly thirty years, between 1991 and 2019. In 2020, the COVID crisis erupted across the world and stabilization can be said to have come to a close. As the Western block began to decompensate, other signals of this shift in the overall character of capitalism emerged: the 2020 June Uprisings in the U.S., the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to prevent the joining of that country into the NATO block, the 2023 invasion of Palestine in response to the heroic October 7 strikes, etc. Civil unrest within the core of the capitalist block has become endemic, and periods of calm are relatively fewer and shorter between. Labor struggles have become more acute, and several major strikes have either been broken by the U.S. government or capitulated through their leadership. Standards of living are decreasing in the imperial core. Despite the muttering of bourgeois mouthpieces, actual wages have fallen sharply. The median household income in 2019 was roughly $69,000/year. At the current rate of inflation between 2019 and 2024, that would have had to rise to $85,000/year to maintain its equivalent purchasing power. In actuality, the median household income in the first quarter of 2024 is roughly $59,000/year. That is a fall of 14%.

The imperialist contract, the promise of superprofits in exchange for class peace, has broken down.

National consciousness is also rising. It is, in fact, national liberation that will provide the wedge that will split apart the capitalist block and put an end to the Western capitalist empire. Every time class consciousness rises and then recedes, it reaches a higher resting state and the next explosion of consciousness carries the high-water mark further and faster, leading to progressively more intense bursts of class-activity. The U.S.-Canadian proletariat is not yet aware of itself as a class-in-itself, but this awareness is growing. As the awareness of American imperialism becomes more widespread, the basic features of class are becoming more and more widely known. As the system of imperialist spoils and the distribution of imperialist superprofits breaks down, the working classes of the capitalist empire are beginning to rise, to look around them, and to realize their actual position vis-a-vis the ruling classes. Each failed rising creates a new population of activists who are aware, who are becoming more well-versed in organizing techniques and tactics, and who have seen the state repress their movement. There is a straight line through the sixteen years between Occupy and the 2024 Student Intifada.

It is now our task to harness that rising tide. The Communists must stand at the forefront of all progressive movements, and there is nothing more world-progressive than attacks on U.S. empire across the world. At this time, resistance against the imperial genocide of Palestine, backed by the U.S. colonialists for the security and profit of the zionist state, is the forefront of the class struggle. It is recognized as the forefront of the global class struggle across the world. This is our proving ground.

VII. Building Capacity, Building the Party

It is now our duty, then, to build the basic blocks of the Party-to-be so they can be united in an inter-circle struggle. Today we are taking the first tentative steps toward unification.  It may be that, like the first Congress of the RSDLP, we fail to achieve our lofty goals today. We have set our sights high. Yet, even should we fall short, the fires we light today will help us clearly see the way forward. 

In order to settle theoretical issues once and for all, we must have an organization capable of democratically debating them and testing them against the world through manifest practical action. That organization is none other than the Communist Party — I don’t say reborn or reforged, because the Communist Party in the U.S. Empire has always been compromised, going all the way back to its foundation. Let us say a real Communist Party of a type that has not been seen in the U.S.-Canadian block before.

The road to the militant party is long, but we are embarking on that journey today. We must create organizations capable of reproducing Communist cadre. We must pool our resources together, use the technological advances that unlock our capacity to work across regions, across cities, across the continent. We must labor diligently toward the day we can confront the enemy state.

History is with us. The time is right. It is the tidal force of history that brought all of us here today to embark on this great project. It is my suggestion — and to be clear, not mine alone, but developed with the other theoreticians at Unity–Struggle–Unity and the members of the Connecticut Radical Reading Group — that we must first unite in an organization of organizations, continue working toward a loose effective unity across the entire empire, then, when we have brought together those circles, to unify them such that they are no longer a federation of organizations but a single, powerful, militant, revolutionary political Party that can challenge the enemy state on every field: economic, political, military.

We propose today nothing short of casting the very metal from which the social revolution will be forged!

I haven’t posted about this yet, but I quit Communist Party USA in mid-November 2023. Since quitting, I’ve been focused on getting several major health issues treated, building the Flint chapter of the Michigan Mutual Aid Coalition (MIMAC), and in addition to our mutual aid work, trying to build the basis of an educational program that MIMAC can offer to the public. I wavered on whether anything worthwhile could come from going public about my reasons for leaving CPUSA, but until now, have kept it to myself.

However, after the events of the past few days, with the party purging clubs and members, I feel compelled to speak up and discuss the reasons why I decided to resign the CPUSA. Perhaps it will help others. I’m going to address my reasons for leaving by subject.

Disdain For Mutual Aid Work

Several of us from MIMAC, already Marxist-Leninists, joined the party in 2022, while continuing our mutual aid programs, which started in 2020. Our hope was to become part of a larger network of Communists and have more opportunities to be politically active in meaningful ways, including the possibility of showing clubs how they can set up mutual aid programs in their areas, because it’s a great way to help in the community and build trust with the masses – The Black Panthers demonstrated this. But our local leadership poo-pooed mutual aid as “ineffective” and “not worth it.” The metric being used was apparently the efficacy of converting MA recipients to dues-paying party members. Evidently they “tested” doing mutual aid work and opted against it, but from all appearances, the “test” was a one-off attempt, hardly a scientific method to determine whether it is worthwhile activity. MIMAC’s track record and history were minimized and dismissed.

MIMAC has been coordinating food rescue with grocery stores, big box stores, warehouse clubs, and restaurants since 2020. Our volunteers do weekly pickups, delivery to the MIMAC pantry space, where it is sorted and stored, then put together in boxes of supplemental groceries that are delivered to households around Detroit. The Flint chapter our family has been building has also done some food rescue and redistribution in our area, but much less frequently. We have also helped pickup donated household goods, furniture and the like and delivered to households in Flint. Our recipients rely on us and we are delighted to be able to help them survive through late-stage Capitalism.

While the rejection of MIMAC work by the party was disappointing, I told myself it wasn’t sufficient reason to quit. Perhaps worsening conditions would cause them to change their minds, and even if they didn’t, I felt that this issue alone was not a cause for resignation, but I would not forget it if other issues arose.

Other issues arose.

Collaboration With Liberals And Democrats

Our MIMAC cadre had reservations about the way our district leadership discouraged mutual aid work, but was simultaneously insistent that members needed to volunteer to go knock on doors for Democrats, even being called upon to travel out of state to do so. That’s hardly revolutionary work here and now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and particularly since the Democrats are practically indistinguishable from Republicans in their support and defense of US Imperialism. Instead of being revolutionary, at this time in history, it is aiding our enemies. The Democrats are Bourgeoisie Capitalists – that is where their loyalty lies, and always will. Which is also why it was always so confusing to see Democrats like John Bachtell featured in People’s World in articles that serve the Democratic Party, but I digress.

The CPUSA statement on the attempted assassination of DJT was indistinguishable from Liberal responses. Looking at the statement from Socialist Party (I am not a member, I simply saw it posted on social media) on the matter, we can see what a revolutionary party response should look like, by way of comparison.

Member dues and fundraising monies are supporting paid leadership that isn’t actively working on building revolution, but instead throttling and squashing efforts to do so. It would seem that the CPUSA follows the same adage as Liberals and Democrats when it pertains to revolutionary changes: “Now is not the time.”

Rejection of Black and Indigenous Revolutionaries

It is not only a disappointment, but distressing to see the party rejection of the teachings of Black American Communists who correctly recognized their status as an oppressed nation within a nation under this settler-colonial system. To dismiss the work of those trying to emulate the important community service programs that The Black Panthers created and implemented by feeding people is mind-boggling. How can one expect people to fight against their oppressors on empty stomachs?

CPUSA leadership says that after investigation, they have determined that settler-colonialism is not the primary contradiction in the US. Who performed this investigation, and what sources did they consult? To reject the truth of settler-colonialism being at the root of oppressions against Indigenous and Black Americans – oppressed nations within nations – is a rejection of all Decolonial Marxist projects that have had to defend themselves against US settler-colonialism. How this can be reconciled without employing white supremacist arguments is beyond me. It is not a position I would be able, or desire, to defend.

Here is a passage from Kwame Ture and Charles V Hamilton’s book Black Power – please read it and think about what they would say regarding the outcome of the CPUSA investigation.

If one can look at the history and current conditions of Indigenous and Black Americans and still claim that they are not colonized by settlers, then nothing they say can be trusted, because they are either lying, or incompetent in their analysis. A Communist Party operating on stolen land obtained through genocide, that was industrialized using stolen labor, needs to prioritize the needs of the colonized and oppressed.

The US needs Decolonial Marxism, not a “Communist” party that weaponizes Democratic Centralism against members to ultimately defend the settler-colonial establishment.

Response To The Zionist Genocide In Palestine

Last October, I was distressed by the party response to the Zionist genocide, which includes tailing the “Communist” party of Isntreal on their position as to the solution in Palestine.

I came to the conclusion that could not in good conscience be a member of a party that does not center Decolonization and Land Back on its platform. If it couldn’t recognize this obvious need in Occupied Palestine, how could it have correct position on the US and its Settler-Colonialism?

I was urged by other Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Zionist members to wait for the convention, because there was a push by some members to correct party positions on Palestine and other matters.

Holy crows, am I glad I didn’t wait. The convention dug in on the incorrect positions, including having a representative – a Jewish settler – from the “Communist” party of Isntreal speak, who included Zionist talking points in their speech. This happened on the same day as the Nuseirat Massacre! Just abhorrent reinforcement of settler-colonialism and genocide.

Then to purge members who walked out quietly and without incident for principled reasons – and accuse them of wrongdoing for that and their mutual aid work? That’s something.

I have been disappointed that most of the major US Communist parties response to increasing Fascism has been to focus their attacks on the GOP, Republicans and conservatives. While I don’t dispute that Trump and company pose a threat, where have the protests against the increasing Fascism under the current Democrat, DNC, Liberal administration been, including but not limited to their support and complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, and their reaction to the anti-genocide movement and protestors?

While I doubt that this will make any difference in party leadership’s stance, in my opinion, CPUSA should be using party power and resources to support a 3rd party candidate with matching values, regardless of the likelihood of them winning.

The purpose of a Communist party is not to help Bourgeoisie candidates win in Bourgeoisie elections.

While Trump, his agenda, and his peers definitely pose a threat to increased domestic Fascism in the US, Biden and his administration have already increased Fascism both domestically and internationally. Why has the oppression, suffering, and slaughter of people outside of the US by the US not been met with the same urgency to resist against as the threat of the US population being affected? Our liberation is all tied to one another!

We Communists in the US are unwilling beneficiaries of US Foreign Policy – but beneficiaries all the same. How is it that there was not a stronger party response against the Palestinian genocide, and instead, coddling of the “Communist” party of Isntreal, which, when platformed at the party convention, included Zionist talking points – uninterrupted by leadership?

I made the correct decision to resign. I could not support these stances.

Remaining Members Personal Attacks Against Purged Members

Since the announcement of the purged clubs/members, I have seen some current CPUSA members focused and clearly emotionally invested in launching personal attacks against former members on social media. This is reminiscent for me of the treatment that the JW doomsday cult I was raised in manifests toward former members who are regarded as “apostates.” Meaning, it is cult member behavior. It’s extremely off-putting and alarming that this is the behavior these members consider acceptable and correct.

Is this the sort of activity the party wants to be represented by? If not, I wonder if they will be as decisive and severe in their actions against the current members exhibiting this behavior as they were against the former members being targeted. Time will tell.

So Now What ?

Now that I have shown you why I quit, and have criticized the party, many will ask, “then what should people do?” And I’m only going to tell you what I’m doing. I can’t tell you what the correct choices are for you. I am currently operating under the premise that these are the correct choices for me unless I discover that I’m wrong, at which point, I will reassess and adjust accordingly.

As I mentioned earlier, my own work with MIMAC, including the Flint chapter we are growing, is my focus now. I recommend joining or founding, then building up local organizations to help your communities get their needs met through food rescue and redistribution, seeking donations of needed items on behalf of those in need (furniture, clothing, household goods, etc) and then coordinating delivery of those items. Check with local business owners who might be inclined to donate things too. Add educational programs like read-alongs of history and revolutionary theory. We’re working on creating a Discord “Readers For Peace” group in our region where we plan to do weekly voice chats to read books together. We’re starting with Joel Andreas’ graphic novel ADDICTED TO WAR.

Literacy brigades are as badly needed here in the US now as they were in Cuba decades ago. They will look different, because conditions are different here and now, but they are very much needed. See these statistics from the National Literacy Institute:

Establish safe houses. They’re going to be needed, particularly as Fascism increases, which will happen regardless of who is in office, because that is the historical cycle we are in. The dying US Empire is lashing out at anyone resisting it, including here at home, as evidenced by the reaction to Anti-Genocide protestors, as well as the long history of state sanctioned violence against anyone attempting to wrest power away from the oligarchs who own most everything in this settler colony.

I’m a gardener and I share seeds. Check out the work of Urban Seed in Eastpointe, Michigan to get ideas on how to be of service to your community in growing food. In the same city, EP Free Store is not only redistributing donated items – they are serving lunches in the park weekly for kids who are out of school. Many kids rely on school breakfast and lunch programs during the school year that are not provided during the summer months. Feeding people is a way to help build community ties – and to get people to challenge their Anti-Communist indoctrination by seeing the deeds we Communists are choosing to do, instead of divisive Bourgeoisie partisanship.

These are some ideas, but certainly don’t represent the full scope of possibilities. I fail to understand why the CPUSA wouldn’t encourage and support activities like these, instead of de facto partnering with Democrats. Thankfully, it’s not something I need to wrestle with any longer, but I write all of these things in case you are struggling with it, dear readers.

In Conclusion

My motives in writing all of this include:

• Clearing up whether I am still a member of CPUSA (I am not, I resigned November 2023)
• Explaining my reasoning for resigning
• Recording the criticisms of the party that I am not alone in thinking
• Getting others to consider whether the CPUSA is in alignment with their goals as a revolutionary
• Defending the purged clubs and members against the incorrect accusations against them

I know there will be people who disagree with me, and I accept that. I am not interested in debating or arguing about it – I would rather spend that time doing constructive activities that help build revolutionary spaces.

I hope that if you are a CPUSA member who has been having doubts, you might find that you’re not alone in having those. If you’re considering joining, I hope these disclosures are helpful to you in determining if it is the right fit for you.

That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter. I need to get back to work on my own studies and so I’m going to wrap it up here.

Solidarity with all oppressed peoples! Our liberation is tied together.

On the evening of Monday, July 15, 2024, the Austin, Texas chapter of the Communist Party USA was liquidated by members of the Texas district committee. The district claims this vote was unanimous, but the representative from Austin was not made aware that this meeting was taking place, nor was she allowed to defend her club or participate in the vote.

The accusations made towards Austin comrades are factionalism and refusal to follow the Party line on four issues:

• Two delegates leaving during the “Israeli” speech at the National Convention in June 2024
• Not being fully on board voting for Biden/Dems – aka Resolution 5
• In house open discussion of the petition and reasons for its creation (we urged comrades not to sign it)
• Accused of “Black Nationalism” and following the Black Panther Party playbook with our mutual aid work

Let us address these accusations individually.

Yes, two of us left during the “Israeli” speech at the convention. Is quietly walking outside against the rules? No grand walkout nor vocal statement was made. We simply disagreed with what the man was saying, and thought that inviting him to speak after the Palestinian speaker canceled was bad optics. We stand by this belief. When should comrades dissent if not at the National Convention? Rather than having a comradely discussion on this issue, one of the Party co-chairs chose to make passive aggressive statements in her closing speech, “when you walk out on an Israeli comrade, you’re walking out on the working class.”

We disagree with the validity of her statement.

Free Palestine.

Yes, we dissented on Resolution 5, as did half of the delegates present at the convention. Again, when should comrades dissent if not at the National Convention? The Party claims that this “vote against MAGA” resolution is not a “vote for Biden” demand, although several Party members quite literally stated a need to support Biden and the Democratic Party during the shortened convention discussion.

On the last day of the convention, a white Party elder from Connecticut gave a speech calling all dissenters on Resolution 5 “racist” and “chauvinist” for refusing to support a genocidal, bourgeois administration with the statement, “Black and brown comrades fought and died for the right to vote, and you don’t want to?”

It should go without saying, but Joe Biden has a long history of racism against Black Americans. He is, right now, actively contributing to the genocide of the Palestinian people. Several Black and brown comrades spoke against Resolution 5, and a white woman accusing them of racism is disgusting and unacceptable.

Many of us were sent “A Comradely Petition” the week after the CPUSA National Convention. This petition was a demand to reopen discussion around Resolution 5 before the National Committee was slated to vote on it. The Austin delegation was in agreement that the petition was silly, and not the correct path forward, but that it was important to understand why it was created. Many rank and file comrades feel that they are not represented by the National Committee. The fact that the discussion around this contentious resolution was cut short added to those feelings.

All of the Austin delegates advocated against local comrades signing the petition. We did, however, give space for discussion at our local meeting. As many comrades were talking about leaving and searching for a new organization, we also gave space for this discussion. The discussion was very respectful and productive. Some comrades shared that they were ready to leave. Most stated that they preferred to stay and struggle under the Party banner.

A rat within our organization, who was not present at the National Convention nor at the local meeting, leaked internal documents to members of the Texas district committee. They used these documents without context to frame our discussions as “factionalism.”

Comrades, if you are suspicious of someone within your organization, trust that feeling.

The most bothersome reason for liquidation is this accusation of “Black Nationalism” levied because we read from members of the Black Panther Party, and participate in mutual aid work.

First, one major problem within the local chapter is that we currently have no Black members. Austin, Texas is the only growing major city in the US with a shrinking Black population. This is mostly due to rapid gentrification thanks to the ongoing tech sector boom and rising cost of living. Historically Black neighborhoods are being demolished for “modern” developments which have caused property taxes to rise rapidly and out of control. Austin is becoming unaffordable for much of the working class, but our Black and immigrant neighbors are the most affected by the rising cost of living.

Second, we see no issue with the concept of Black Nationalism as described by Malcom X and the Black Panther Party. While this is not something we, as a majority white chapter, are openly advocating for, why does CPUSA see Black Nationalism as a threat to their working class movement? It is up to those of us who do not live the Black experience to educate ourselves as much as possible on how to support our Black neighbors, their needs, and understand their experiences. Black Nationalism is simply self determination.

Third, mutual aid is the most important work we do in our community. Period. We were told that organizing with the lumpen proletariat is against the CPUSA Party Program. During our many reads of the Program, we have yet to come across such a passage. One major flaw in the Party is the lack of education around mutual aid and community defense programs, and some of us have brought this up on appropriate occasions. We do also participate in the local electoral struggle, as commanded by the Party.

Mutual aid is important for many reasons. The most obvious is that we are literally helping vulnerable people. Why would a communist not want to help those in need? It is also a way to meet and work with other individuals and organizations doing similar work in our neighborhoods. This is how we build alliances. It is also how we build community trust. “Communism” can be a scary word in the USA, and when people meet us out in the streets helping each other, we begin to build trust.

So this is what happened to the Austin, Texas chapter of the Communist Party USA. We no longer exist. Comrades were given the option to reapply to the Party and begin to rebuild from scratch. Everything we built over the last three years is gone. Most of us, including local leadership, are moving on. We have already begun to rebrand as a mutual aid organization, and have set up a meeting in a few weeks. We will be okay, and the work will continue.

Stay vigilant, comrades. Take care of each other. Support your community. We are all we have.

The Kansas Socialist Book Club (KS-SBC) Organizers thought they knew what they were doing, but after some deep reflection and self-criticism, as well as listening to the criticisms of others, they have come to the conclusion that the old model isn’t working and something must change. In a nutshell, it all boils down to professionalism and amateurish attitudes. 

Every revolutionary movement that has ever succeeded got its chops started as a scattering of Marxist study circles. There is a reason for this! Although practice is essential, it’s also true that as Lenin said “Without a revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement.”

Where the KS-SBC leadership, until now, made an error was in thinking the club’s activities equated it with an organization of the same caliber as the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik), the Korean Down-with-Imperialism Union that grew into the Workers’ Party of Korea, or the study groups that emerged in the wake of the Chinese May Fourth Movement which evolved into the Communist Party of China. The Organizers arrogantly but sincerely believed a revolution would spontaneously emerge from merely getting a bunch of people together into an online-only space and having them read a bunch of scattered texts, with absolutely no rhyme or reason to the curriculum other than “people said that’s what they want to read.” This is flat-out wrong!

This isn’t to downplay the significance or the accomplishments of the KS-SBC thus far. In the heart of GOP-Red Kansas, a strong pro-Palestinian Liberation movement has emerged in multiple cities such as Lawrence and Manhattan. Although there are myriad reasons for this, one cannot discount the ideological lessons in radical thought which have been absorbed by multiple protest leaders who organize this budding and still-evolving international solidarity movement. Particularly our study of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s book Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine was one of the most fruitful works that we studied collectively as a group.

An entirely new chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has emerged as well, led by a steering committee composed entirely of members who’ve attended various lessons of the KS-SBC. Say what you will about DSA, but if a book club is leading people into real-life organizing (however flawed that organizing or organization might be) then it cannot be discounted entirely as a failure. It sure as hell isn’t a success, but it’s definitely not a loss because it is being critically reflected upon, recorded, and shared with the broader public. In that sense what would ordinarily be a failure is dialectically inverted into a success.

People also found our lessons engaging. Clearly the KS-SBC was doing something right because many new people would show up every week, eager to engage with and digest political ideas that normally students pay thousands of dollars to take a semester-long course on. The KS-SBC offered this all for free to the community! If it didn’t have value to it, nobody would have ever shown up.

Yet despite these accomplishments, the situation in Kansas is no better off than it was in 2022 when things got started. And behind the scenes of the book club, a lot of things were going on. Comrade Persephone, the primary instructor, was extremely burnt out and fell off the radar. She was not alone in this. Other organizers came and went who taught lessons, and they all felt the same way: burnt out, exhausted, and not seeing a lot of the fruits of their labor.

Furthermore, the rotting ideological creep of opportunism, eclecticism and tailism still dominate the landscape of the political left in Kansas. This alone, much less the existence of a bourgeois state and the lack of a genuine mass revolutionary movement, are all the proof one needs to see that the Kansas Socialist Book Club in its present form is inadequate to the task at hand. If it is to succeed, a change must certainly be made.

In order to correct these errors and proceed down a revolutionary path, the Organizers of the KS-SBC have identified what we believe are the root causes that led to our stagnation and our atrophy. Thankfully, these errors aren’t lethal and can easily be reversed.

Self-Criticism by the KS-SBC Organizers

1. Lack of Ideological Rigor: The KS-SBC falsely bought into the absurd notion of the so-called “Big Tent.” This is a deceptively destructive idea. On its surface, it makes a lot of sense: diversity is a virtue, and the correct way to persuade someone is winning them over in the battlespace of ideas. This isn’t exactly wrong, to be fair. Diversity of thought is indeed a strength, and we should absolutely seek to persuade those comrades who hold sincere but incorrect views to our side. However, that’s not what the Big Tent approach actually does. Instead of thinking about it in terms of diversity, think about it in terms of chaos. If I’m trying to navigate a large group of people, we all need to have our compass bearings aligned. When we agree to march to the north, we want to first make sure that everyone’s compass is pointing towards the same north. What the Big Tent does is throw everyone’s compass into a frenzy and give everybody their own unique interpretation of what north means. This is unacceptable and wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it’s an active danger to the movement.
   
2. No Reproduction of Organizers: Burnout has been a HUGE issue for the KS-SBC up to this point. Every single individual who took on a leadership role eventually suffered from severe burnout and mental health consequences because they were overworked. The reason for this was because the Organizers were not taking conscious steps to reproduce themselves. The Book Club was successful at drawing many interested comrades into the fold. At the peak of its activity, it wasn’t uncommon to see as many as fifteen people in a weekly session. But that kind of work, on top of parenting, dealing with disabilities, having a full-time job, and making room for self-care and personal hobbies, is a hell of a lot of work to juggle. It’s even worse when there doesn’t seem to be much of a political result. Sure, people would show up. But what happened after? Nobody was being mobilized, nobody was organizing, and it felt like leading a Sunday school more than a revolutionary movement.
   
3. No Offline Analog: Revolutionary movements cannot occur purely online. The internet, for better or worse, is a part of organizing life for so long as the KS-SBC continues to be a book club. At the end of the day, folks have to meet up in person, face to face, and organize offline. The book club was purely online. This was an error plain and simple.
   
4. No Structure: The final nail in the coffin would be a lack of order and structure. For a bunch of self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, the Organizers didn’t have any of the democratic centralism, iron discipline, or organizational chops that Marxist-Leninists love to talk about. They were, for lack of a better way to put it, a couple of dudes and one woman who liked to read and talk about books. This amalgamation went a step further and decided to invite a bunch of random people into an online chat room to talk about the books. This in itself is better than nothing. However, a revolutionary organization of disciplined cadre, it is not.

How has the KS-SBC remedied the issue?

To say all of these issues are all solved and remedied would be just as much of an error — albeit a different sort of error — as the ones we were committing. What is happening is that we are attempting to remedy our errors. How are the Organizers correcting their mistakes? The answer is simple, comrades: we drafted bylaws!

The bylaws address every problem laid out above. They impose order and structure on chaos. They lay out an explicit and democratically agreed upon pathway to reproduce cadre. They also impose ideological coherence by requiring all KS-SBC Organizers while still allowing for diversity of thought, robust theoretical disagreement, and comradely debate. Finally, the Organizers are shifting emphasis onto in-person study throughout cities with our Branch system. This is being done while simultaneously preserving our capacity and ability to broadcast lessons online, so that those who cannot meet up in person still have the opportunity to get political education.

Addressing Objections

When bylaws were proposed way back in March 2024, a number of objections were raised by the members. The Organizers would like to take this opportunity to address such concerns.

Many people felt that the Organizers’ attitudes were undemocratic in spirit. To this, skeptical comrades are encouraged to take a gander at the Flint Hills Marxist Study Group page and see how the fine line between ideological rigor and democratic input is balanced. Nobody wants to be assigned homework, but at the same time every member of the server is here to learn. Part of learning means you take direction from people who know the material better than you do: that is to say, the instructors. Anyone who is uncomfortable with that idea is free to leave or simply not attend a lesson. Nobody is forced into affiliation with the Kansas Socialist Book Club, and everyone can vote with their feet if they so choose.

Furthermore, the Organizers recognize that despite the explicit reorientation in a Marxist direction, that they have cultivated a broad “leftist” space in Kansas. The Organizers don’t want to alienate comrades from the KS-SBC, even if they disagree with us by identifying as anarchists or Trotskyists or what not. So to clarify any doubts or misconceptions: nobody is being purged, and nobody is being kicked out. Rather, what’s happening is that the individuals who were already organizing lessons and putting in behind-the-scenes work are asserting boundaries as to what we will and will not teach. Those who put in the work of education ultimately get a say in how they organize and utilize their labor-power. This is one of the foundational beliefs of socialism.

To be explicitly clear: anyone of any left-wing ideology is welcome to utilize our Discord server as a space to conduct their own political education. There’s never been a rule saying comrades can’t use the server to host their own lessons. Anyone is welcome to use the KS-SBC server to discuss broader socialist ideas, even if those ideas aren’t Marxist in nature. Furthermore, comrades are not only welcome but also encouraged to coordinate with one another and meet up face to face to study in person. As long as the content of the lessons is not about preaching national socialism, then anyone is welcome to use the discord space for broadly “leftist” educational purposes.

The long story short is this: We’re not an anarchist book club. We’re explicitly Marxist and we are explicitly Revolutionary.

We welcome anarchist comrades to use our space to teach anarchism if that’s what you want, but don’t expect us to teach it to you. If you feel so strongly about reading Peter Kropotkin, or studying the legacy of the Krontstadt Sailors, then go voluntarily organize your own spontaneous affinity group and Do The Work, comrade! Though the Organizers of the Book Club might not agree with that ideology, they will still support you in this effort by offering the server as a space.

There is no encampment protesting the genocide of Palestinians at Kansas State University (KSU). Some may see this as a failure, but, as I will argue later on, I believe it demonstrates strength and professionalism of the organizers, the KSU chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA). The KSU YDSA was assisted by other organizations such as the Flint Hills DSA. However, it was the students who led the way.

The students were very clear in their demands: They demanded President Richard “Dick” Linton to resign from the U.S.-Israel Agricultural Co-Operative, for transparency in all investments of the KSU Alumni fund since its formation in 2014, and for that fund to completely and unconditionally divest from all “israeli” capital immediately.

This report takes the format of an After Action Review, or AAR, a methodology borrowed from the United States army. An AAR is a standardized methodology for conducting report-backs. It consists of answering four simple questions:

1. What was supposed to happen?
2. What actually happened?
3. What can be sustained?
4. What can be improved?

I encourage all comrades to study this methodology and replicate it in your own organizations, because it works. You may doubt me on this point. I’d simply retort that, so far, the feds have kicked our asses, so why wouldn’t we borrow effective techniques from the winners?

A final note: I wish to be abundantly clear that although I am a member of the Flint Hills DSA, I am not a KSU YDSA member. I speak here in my own capacity and not as a representative of any group. The KSU YDSA were the organizers of this event and all credit belongs to them.

The author of this report-back giving her speech in which she argues that the United States is an illegitimate government that should be subjected to subversive actions, and that this is the greatest form of solidarity the American people can have with Palestine.

To be clear: I am proud of the work we did, even if it wasn’t as dramatic as other encampments. Drama and flair are not always good. Though I would not at all classify it as boring, I would classify it as lacking in notoriety. Part of what makes an encampment appealing is that it makes for an attention grabbing headline. Students, particularly younger ones with less wisdom and organizing experience, tend to fill in the missing gaps with romanticized and idealistic notions.

Many organizers (and this problem is not at all limited only to students) think that the most important aspect of a protest is the spectacle of it. They also commit adventurist errors such as thinking arrests are a sign of commitment to the movement, rather than a hindrance. These muddied and erroneous thought patterns are remedied in one of two ways: through a careful study of theory and analyses (such as this article), or through battle scars won in struggle. When possible, it is always better to learn such lessons from the mistakes of others rather than from oneself.

Such romanticized, idealistic, and liberal notions of protest were thankfully absent from the KSU YDSA and their planning process. Seasoned community organizers were able to share our experiences collectively of arrests, police brutality, misguided ideals, and, ultimately, of failure. The students wisely listened and learned from our mistakes, and, as a result, none of them were repeated. This is commendable.

Nobody was arrested to my knowledge, and I was on standby to bail folks out of jail. The potential for fights was absolutely there, but not a single one broke out (not due to a lack of trying on the enemy’s part). Our formation defused tense situations with professionalism and ensured the safety of all participants from both law enforcement and their fascist goons.

With that said, I do have some advice to offer the students. I will remain constructive but will not hold back — just know this is in no way to denigrate the efforts of the student organizers, who did an amazing job. This is out of love for communism and a desire to end the genocide of Palestinians.

What Was Supposed to Happen?

This forms the base of my criticism. It is not clear what exactly was supposed to happen. We spoke of encampments and vacillated between the idea of establishing one or remaining mobile, but no plan was made clear until five minutes before the event. Various comments were floated, but there was never a single clear decision point made by the group. I will elaborate more upon this in the “What Can Be Improved?” section.

What I can say with confidence is that the organizers intended that the demonstration would last for an indefinite amount of time. The purpose of this event was also clear: the intent was to criticize President Richard “Dick” Linton for his presidency of the U.S. Israel Agricultural Co-Operative and demand his resignation. A bold demand for complete divestment was also made.

The demands of the KSU YDSA, in their own words, presented to University administration

What actually happened?

Planning

What actually happened was as follows: we started with a week’s worth of planning led by Cde. Nick in the KSU YDSA as well as with backup from the community. Cde. Nick is the public face of the protests, and his identity is publicly known to the university administration, so I will use it with his consent. I also use my name because I was a public speaker.

Planning sessions were lively and involved a broad array of both students and community members. Relations were cordial between the two, and I feel as though there was strong integration and respect. Although community members (such as myself, among others) did take on leadership roles, I personally believe that all of us were cognizant of the fact that we are subordinate to the students, and that we are members of their movement in a supporting role. I genuinely do not believe any community member ever tried to co-opt or commandeer the student movement. Even when community members disagreed with the students’ decisions, they still respected them and executed accordingly. In other words — there was good order and discipline. The errors of commandism and tailism were avoided.

Commandism and Tailism

Commandism is an error which occurs when Communists try to dictate to the people what they must do without properly consulting them or seeking democratic input from them. It represents a “left” deviation because it is a manifestation of the Communists being ideologically too far ahead of the masses. A commandist could very well have the correct political idea and the correct line, but, without buy-in from the people, and without their consent to Communist leadership, none of that matters.

In this context, commandism would look like me barging into a student movement and immediately giving orders to the students, telling them what to do, changing all of their slogans without consulting them, and generally acting like a dictator. What’s important to note is that commandism is not offering guidance or criticisms — all Communists have a duty to criticize and to advocate for the revolutionary line in every situation. However, the key word here is “advocate.” As Communists, we must be cognizant of when we are guests in someone else’s space and know when it’s time to lead versus when it’s time to only lend our support. A student-led protest is definitely a time when Communists should be following the lead of others. However, that does not mean that Communists shouldn’t offer information and advance a radical line.

The opposing error to commandism is tailism. If commandism represents the “left” deviation of being too far ahead of the masses, then tailism is a right deviation that represents lagging behind the masses. Commandism represents seeking no input from the masses; tailism represents letting the masses determine our political line irrespective of the masses’ level of consciousness and development.

Going to the masses to ask what their views are is correct and good. However, the masses are not a mystical entity. They are a group of people to which the reader and the author both belong. The masses contain multitudes of opinions ranging from fascism, through centrism, liberalism, and to social democracy, to communism. The average character of the masses’ politics will depend on the overall level of class consciousness and political education among its members. The Red Clarion offers a fantastic schema that explains this idea in greater detail.

So, in the context of rural Kansas, the masses can be said to firmly oppose genocide as the average level of political development. This is positive, encouraging, and correct. However, it is not true that the average worker in rural Kansas supports full-on liberation of Palestine. They do not support Hamas, PFLP, DFLP, PIJ, and other armed resistance groups. In fact, they are likely to accept uncritically the label of such groups as “terrorists,” and are more concerned with the cessation of only the most extreme forms of brutality, as opposed to ending the ongoing process of settler colonialism. The masses are starting to grasp at the correct idea, as they’ve clearly and righteously broken through the bourgeois propaganda which tries to justify genocide. However, there is still ideological work to be done — clearly liberalism still lingers though it is being steadily eroded away.

In this context, tailism might look like saying “Well, we don’t want to alienate people by endorsing Hamas or even armed resistance. We really want popular support, so we should keep this toned down. We don’t want to look like terrorists. Besides, people in Kansas don’t really give a shit about national liberation struggles in the Middle East. Let’s just tone it down and keep it reasonable.” Although there is clear concern here for peoples’ opinions, this concern is one of appearances and marketing, rather than a true two-way consultation which would inform organizers while sharpening the masses’ collective consciousness. The logic of tailism is not of deep respect for the people, but of deception and condescending refusal to challenge errors which evidently stand between the people and their own liberation.

Tailism can also take a more insidious form revolving around identity politics. Tailism might point to a Palestinian-led liberal organization such as Al-Haddaf K.C. and highlight the fact that Palestinian diaspora members lead this organization as evidence that we should follow their lead since this is a Palestinian issue, in spite of their liberalism. While it is always a good thing for Communists, especially white ones such as myself, to be cognizant of racial and other social dynamics at play in our organizing, what this amounts to is actually hiding behind whiteness to defend oneself from the vulnerability associated with taking a political stance.

Members of a diaspora community, like members of any community, have all sorts of opinions. There are liberal Palestinians, conservative Palestinians, nationalist Palestinians, Communist Palestinians, radical Palestinians and reformist Palestinians. Palestinians suffer from a unique and particularly egregious form of national oppression and settler colonialism which gives them a unique outlook. However, at the end of the day, they are just people, like anyone else. People have all sorts of views; some extremely backwards, some very advanced, and most falling in the middle. To assume that someone’s ethnicity automatically gives them a correct opinion would amount to a kind of tokenism and racism.

As stated before, I feel this group did a fantastic job at maintaining the correct ideological stance. Neither the mentioned tailist nor commandist errors were committed. The KSU YDSA deserves recognition for balancing this incredibly difficult line.

Planning Continued

Students were thorough and meticulous in their planning methodologies. They engaged in what I would consider a quasi-militaristic planning process — and I mean that in a good way! They considered organizational, physical, and material factors in their planning. For example, comrades wisely paid close attention to the weather. A big storm was brewing in the area, and there was a lively debate on how to handle that. The students ultimately decided “Rain or Shine, For Palestine!” even though the storm didn’t materialize until later that night. I commend the student-organizers for their attention to detail and consideration of factors that more novice and inexperienced folks might overlook.

Community members, in turn, heard the concerns of the students and supplemented them with supplies. For example, when I personally heard about the weather, I offered to drive to a local sporting goods store and purchase twenty ponchos for the core organizers to stay dry during the rain. I also purchased two cases of bottled water, knowing that folks often get dehydrated and forget to bring their own hydration sources. Because of my status as a labor aristocrat, I was able to peel away from work for an hour in the middle of the day to accomplish this task. Other community members, while they didn’t necessarily have that privilege, were able to contribute however much they could afford. In that way, the community listened to the organizers and took their lead. We pitched in with resources at their direction. The end result was a well-oiled risk mitigation machine. This is a methodology I strongly advise all other encampments to reproduce.

The Event

During the event, Cde. Nick gave a good speech arguing for full and explicit Palestinian liberation, praising the Intifada and affirming the right of Palestinians to resist their occupation — undoubtedly the correct ideological line. 

I gave a speech arguing that people must sabotage their workplaces, agitate among coworkers, and foster a general attitude of contempt towards the United States as the leader of imperial violence. My goal was to build support and consciousness of the need to overthrow the government as the best possible way that Americans can help Palestinians.

A Jewish student and scholar of the Torah gave a speech about the relationship (or lack thereof) between Judaism and zionism. He argued that zionism is not Judaism, and that Jewish values stand in firm opposition to the colonial brutality of zionist occupation. This anonymous comrade also affirmed the right of Palestinians to resist their occupation in no uncertain terms.

These explicitly political speeches were rounded out by other students coming forth to read poetry by Palestinian writers such as Mahmoud Darwish and Refaat Alareer.

At points, the event did show some signs of disorganization. Upon returning to the site of the speeches after a short break, I found folks had abandoned it. In the process of abandonment, they left behind a lot of litter. They also left behind the Bluetooth speaker used to give speeches. Given the heightened state of repression against Palestine organizers, I immediately began picking up the litter and cleaning up the mess by myself out of a desire to protect the students. Not only was this a simple step to avoid giving the administration more ammunition, it was simply the right thing to do ethically. All Communists should take care to leave a community space better than they found it after hosting a demonstration of this nature. After cleaning up and securing the equipment, I texted the organizers to ask for assistance, yet nobody responded until forty-five minutes later. It was a student attendee who happened to read our group chat, not a core organizer, who volunteered to help me transport and secure the goods. 

When I arrived at the new site of protest, on the corner of Bluemont and North Manhattan on the university property, I noticed a large crowd of about fifty to one hundred people. This crowd was diverse relative to the Manhattan baseline in terms of its racial composition and its age spread;it had student and community representation, and there were young children in addition to elders present. This is a reflection that our demonstration was doing something correctly. There were no phony and artificial divides here. One for all and all for one!

This may sound small for those in an urban environment, but to get ten people to show up in rural Kansas is a success, much less one hundred! Given the circumstances this turnout was impressive. Our last rally only netted forty at the most.

Zionist Agitators

After standing on the corner and waving signs and banners for an hour, the group decided to march to President Dick Linton’s house to set up an encampment on his lawn. This formation was eagerly tailed by both police as well as fascists. The police kept back at a distance and monitored things. They seemed to be actively coordinating with one another. However, I wanted to keep my distance for safety purposes, so I didn’t investigate further.

The fascists on the other hand, were all too eager to approach us. A group of six zionazi agitators from the Young Americans for Freedom student organization tailed our formation. They were evenly split between men and women, and all of them were white and seemed to be of a petit-bourgeois background, based on what students told me. The leaders of the group had a look in their eyes like that of a shark hungry for blood. It was clear to myself and other community members that they represented a threat that needed to be dealt with.

Given the large police presence, using violence was not an option. That would have constituted the error of adventurism, and would have given law enforcement the opportunity they so desperately craved to crack down on us violently. But it would have been a grave mistake to let the fascists simply pass us by just because their police handlers stood by in reserve.

Thankfully, my comrades had a clever scheme ready to use. A group of four of us, all queer individuals, three of whom are transgender, decided to confront the fascists with an interesting technique. This particular YAF group is famous for “just wanting to debate,” and so we indulged that desire!

Many comrades correctly caution against debating fascists. In this instance, we feel that it was actually the correct choice to engage them in debate. Firstly, none of us had any illusions that we were going to change their views. That was not our point of debating them; our intent was to use the debate as a stalling tactic. Fascists are often white egotists who love the sound of their own voice almost as much as they love the taste of a policeman’s leather boot. So, we used our womanly and nonbinary charms to let their egos feast.

The reason debating fascists is usually bad is because it gives them an audience to manipulate. However, in this case, by debating the fascists we actually denied them an audience. The only people around to hear our “debate” were the police, who had already made up their minds by virtue of wearing that uniform. Furthermore, we were able to stall and delay them by over an hour which gave the students ample time to set up their encampment without having to fend off violence by Nazi sympathizers. And because debates are completely legal, the police simply sat on the sidelines and watched.

No one was arrested. Nobody had to go to the hospital. The group remained safe as they set up their encampments. The police had to bog down their available manpower and resources to keep an eye on us and the fascists. The fascists were unable to find the encampment. Overall, I consider this a success.

Eventually we tired of this debate, and some comrades were starting to feel unsafe upon observing the fascists body language and aggressive posturing. This is entirely reasonable since our group was composed entirely of gender minorities. So, we decided, after over an hour of delay, to leave. Of course, we were trailed by the Hitlerites, but, by using techniques I learned in the army, we were able to lose them inside of the student union. That was the last anyone saw of them that evening. 

Encampment

I had to leave soon after dropping the fascists, but, from what I heard, the encampment was overall a failure. Only twelve students actually stood around the whole night, and the police swiftly broke up the encampment. Thankfully, no arrests were made. However, peoples’ tents were confiscated and the students were driven away by the police and warned that if they came back they’d be arrested and charged with trespassing. That dampened folks’ spirits enough, and sadly put an end to the K-State occupation of 2024.

What Can Be Sustained?

• Bonds between students and community. This model has continued on in our organizing, and it is one of the main reasons I credit the success of the YDSA and their efforts. Despite this close bond, it was clear to all parties that the students lead the effort and that the community was to play a supporting role.
• Planning for contingencies. In particular, considering the second-order effects of the weather and how it might affect attendance, planning for various contingencies, looking into the needs of the people such as hydration and snacks, and novel de-escalation techniques for dealing with fascists can all be sustained and even replicated by other Communists.
• De-Escalation Tactics. Nobody got hurt, the fascists never caught up, and police made no arrests. The fascists didn’t achieve their goals. I call that a win in the strongest of terms.
• Radical and principled messages. Despite the pressures from liberals and university administration, the YDSA remained steadfast in their unconditional support for explicit Palestinian liberation on Palestinian terms. They did not shy away from proclaiming support for armed resistance. Furthermore, they allowed radical speakers to give speeches that call into question the legitimacy of the American Empire.
• Political Education. Many of the organizers had attended various sessions of the Kansas Socialist Book Club’s series on the PFLP’s Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, which I credit for the radical messaging. Because the KS-SBC helped educate these organizers and students, they had a solid understanding of the theoretical basis of Palestinian liberation. This prepared them well for organizing this event.
• Clear, radical demands. There was no wishy-washiness and no beating around the bush with the group’s demands. They were bold, uncompromising, and radical. They were also specific, achievable, and impactful. They neither gave into liberalism nor bolster reformist illusions, and they were very politically relevant. These goals reflected a great deal of thoughtfulness and careful research from the students.

What Can Be Improved?

• The overall desired method of the protest was not at all clear. Did we want an encampment, or did we want to simply have one night of protest? This decision was never made clear. To improve this moving forward, organizers must ensure that a democratic decision is made one way or the other. Should changes be made once the original decision is arrived upon, then those changes must similarly be made in a democratic fashion and published clearly for the entire group to know.
• Undemocratic leadership. I commend Comrade Nick for his overall organization and skills as a leader. However, I did notice that he seemed to be exclusively running the show and that he didn’t seek much input from other students. This caused him a great deal of mental fatigue and stress, which we’ve discussed in individual conversations for hours since this event. As a result, I believe most errors of this can be traced back to the “Charismatic Great Man” style of leadership. It is a positive trait to be bold and ambitious! However, you’ll burn through yourself like dry prairie grass if you don’t let others take over some functions.
• Lack of operational considerations. A question I found myself asking was “How do any of these tactical considerations contribute to the strategic goals of boycott, divestment, and sanctions?” It seems like the group came up with the demands, and then the protest was something that happened because it was what everyone else was doing. But I did not see much discussion or linkage between the protest itself and how that contributes to achieving the demands.
• Unclear chain of command. There was no delegation of duties as far as I could tell. It was unclear who the point person was for each particular task. The only exception to this would be for the delegation of a media spokesperson, and the group handled this very well because everyone knew where to send all media questions. However, there were no other committees or chairpeople for important tasks. Everything was done on an ad-hoc basis, creating delays, stress, and confusion. So, moving forward, the group needs to democratically convene and decide on what positions are important, and appoint individuals to chair those commissions. The Red Clarion has a great example of a template for committees that can be used in the future for these kinds of protests.
• The encampment itself. Ultimately, a small faction of students decided to attempt an encampment setup. I believe, in retrospect, this proved to be incorrect. Thankfully, by the grace of God herself, no one was arrested or harmed. However, this presented an unnecessary risk. If the group had less luck, then we would be singing a different song right now. There were no supply lines, no chain of command, no structure or organizational capacity,  and no means to guard and secure the encampment. It seems to me that this decision was a foolishly impulsive one; participants wanted to camp out because that’s what other campuses were doing. While I can personally relate to the fear of missing out, it has no room in professional organizing.