Editor’s Note: Aside from a few minor copy-edits for consistency across the piece, the letter has been republished in its original state.

The following is a letter I wrote to my comrades on June 4th, 2026, in which I formally withdrew my membership from the PSL. I debated whether or not to post it here publicly, and initially decided to post it with the PSL’s name redacted. However, in light of the recent wave in resignations, particularly that of Walter Smolarek, a member of the Central Committee and a 17 year veteran of the PSL, I have decided to post my own letter in full in solidarity with the numerous other comrades who have arrived at the same conclusions and quietly or vocally resigned.

Before I continue, I want to clearly state that the problem is not the individual comrades in individual units, these units are often filled with the most genuine, kindhearted, and passionate people whose energy and time are currently being exploited by a corrupt party. These comrades believe the work they are doing is toward the stated goal of a proletarian revolution, which is why they are defensive of the party and their work. It should be noted that the PSL’s central leadership does not represent these comrades as a whole, and as Walter’s letter points out, there is absolutely no transparency regarding the PSL’s decisions, and this has intentionally cultivated a membership that cannot see the corruption and has no real system in place to challenge it.

The PSL’s internal response to Walter’s letter contains the same deflection I encountered anytime I lent constructive criticism or voiced concerns to leadership. There is only a superficial acknowledgement of “organizational issues,” while the purpose and intent of the criticisms are shifted to personal grievances and a “misunderstanding” of the party line. This shift away from the central thesis of Walter’s arguments, which are overwhelmingly and demonstrably not about a petty personal grievance or a misunderstanding of PSL’s “political line,” is manipulative and dishonest.

Rather, his thesis is a confirmation of a current of dissatisfaction running across Party chapters nationwide, the same conclusions that I, and evidently many others, arrived at independently. It is now apparent that the inferences I drew are, in fact, an accurate description of the PSL’s actual internal workings. And while I affirm the patterns he documents, I do not endorse or validate Walter’s past or present conduct and have found many inaccuracies in his letter that I will detail at a later date. He offers no real criticism of the PSL’s participation in bourgeois elections, and he does not reckon honestly with his own role, as a long-tenured member of the leadership, in many of the errors he describes.

The PSL is already mobilizing its members on social media to discredit the validity of these criticisms, dismissing them as the work of wreckers, that to circulate these criticisms while the organization is “under state scrutiny” is doing the work of COINTELPRO. This is deflection, a pattern of PSL’s central leadership to avoid accountability. A party genuinely worried about infiltration and wreckage would tighten its analysis and its accountability, not move to crush valid criticism. And importantly, naming a pattern of structural rot is not sabotage, the rot is the sabotage, and will ultimately be the party’s own downfall if it does not address it.

I actively pursued membership with the PSL around April of 2025 and became a candidate in June of the same year. To be clear, I did not finish the candidacy classes necessary to become a “full” member, and this was deliberate because the classes, as I note in my letter, were filled with numerous historical/theoretical errors that sought to guide the conclusions of comrades away from their historical intent. In my repeated attempts to address my concerns about the PSL’s political education, strategies, and structure with various levels of local leadership, those concerns were often repeated back at me as though I had simply “misunderstood” the PSL’s political orientation, as though, because I did not understand it, I had not engaged with it, had not finished the classes, and was therefore incapable of grasping its purpose.

Effectively, regardless of how analytical, precise, and specific my concerns were, I was told by local leadership, in so many words, that it was my own deficiency for not “getting” the purpose of our feckless strategies, rather than that I fundamentally disagreed with them. The PSL is deliberately obscuring the fact that these are not trivial differences or simple “disagreements,” their behavior is a named ideological-political tendency within the history of revolutionary movements and parties, and that this tendency is inherently antagonistic to the working class.

The focus of my letter is on the tendency of opportunism (namely, right-opportunism) and revisionism within the party which I ground in the theoretical works of Lenin, Mao, and other revolutionaries. Importantly, my critique of this tendency is not purely theoretical, but is also based on the astounding amount of negative feedback from members of my community that have made me realize how dangerous this tendency is to the proletarian movement. The party’s leadership is deeply disconnected from the needs of individual units and the units themselves are disconnected from the masses.

The overarching thesis of my arguments is that the PSL has wrongfully titled itself the vanguard of the working class while distorting the meaning and function of the vanguard in revolutionary history. “Vanguard” is a relational term, there is no such thing as a vanguard party without the overwhelming support of the working class behind it. That support is not won by presenting the masses with “correct” ideas, it is built by fighting alongside them, by embedding ourselves in the real conditions and struggles of their lives.

The PSL’s work is not organized at the center of the our class’s struggle, it happens at the margins of it, orbiting leaderships own political line, brands, calls to protest or “boycott”, rather than the lived struggles of those exploited by the capitalist system. Because the PSL’s leadership is itself severed from the masses, it can only relate to its own units through top-down command, issuing directives that do not arise from any real struggle of the working class. Nor is there any channel running the other way to surface the needs and conditions of different regions back up to leadership. This is why so many of these commands make no sense on the ground, why, for instance, the PSL can insist on agitating for a nation-wide “general strike” without any of the infrastructure necessary to support one.

As I diagnose in my letter, this is a form of opportunism, called commandism. However, this opportunism cuts in the opposite direction as well, in which the PSL constantly tails after the spontaneous consciousness of the masses, echoing their own sentiments, rather than raising them up. Both of these signal a party that, regardless of how many people show up to our actions or vote for our candidates, is deeply disconnected from the actual daily lives of the people.

That is, turnout measures how many people we can mobilize for an afternoon or election, not whether our work has sufficiently elevated their consciousness by being connected to their struggles. A party with no meaningful connection to the masses is an irreconcilable contradiction. Stalin makes this most explicit in Foundations of Leninism, where he states that the party is “the vanguard of the working class,” but only insofar as it merges with the class, absorbs its best elements, and is connected to it by “a thousand threads.”

Walter offers numerous examples of commandism in his letter that we can draw from, and I touch briefly on my own, but it’s important to understand (as I’ve already stated) that this is a historical ideological-political pattern. In the 1970s, thousands of leftists turned toward Marxism-Leninism and began building new revolutionary parties in a period that came to be known as the New Communist Movement. By the 1980s it had largely collapsed due to relentless sectarian splits, dogmatism, and international communist crises. As it fell apart, organizations tried to account for what had gone wrong, and one of them, the Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee, wrote a study that named these organizational failures. Their description of commandism reads quite similar to what we experience now:

The discouragement of independent thinking and discussion in the party leads to an overdependence on leadership. We have noted the crucial role of organizational leadership. Yet if only officially sanctioned ideas have a place in the party, it can quickly develop a bureaucratic spirit: leaders command, members become ‘employees’… Commandist parties quickly tend toward dogmatism because the cadres will not or cannot take responsibility to apply the organization’s line in an intelligent way to the specific circumstances they face. Even though the members of the organization may discuss how to apply the line, their discussions cannot get very far–because applying a political line in a concrete situation requires dynamic understanding rather than dogmatic memorization. In this atmosphere members avoid reporting problems or failures for fear of being thought disloyal or defeatist.

In our movement, commandism has often reflected the leadership’s mistrust of the members (not to mention their mistrust of the masses) because of the members’ low level of political development. Yet commandism is not a cure for uneven political development; it is a prescription for continuing it. Commandism can never result in members gaining that critical grasp of Marxism-Leninism necessary to develop communist leaders and cadre.

The PSL, as Walter points out, is about as far from being the “vanguard” of the masses as a supposed “revolutionary” party could possibly be. There is a culture of deflection and a refusal to engage in meaningful criticism, in which anyone, or any group, who criticizes, distances from, or rejects the PSL is treated as little more than a “hater” or even a fed. The PSL encourages comrades to dismiss those who distance themselves from us as simply not understanding democratic centralism or Leninist organization, when in reality this is a gross negation of the mass line which only harms our work and our connection to the proletariat.

The PSL manages and contains working-class energy rather than organizing it in the direction of independent proletarian power, becoming what Lenin called a “bourgeois labor party.” Lenin explained that the opportunists are “better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie itself,” because they perform a service for capital that capital cannot perform for itself, which is keeping the proletariat tied to safe, non-threatening, system-preserving activity.

Those who earnestly seek to see the dictatorship of the proletariat in our lifetime must abandon the opportunists, and must realize that their energy has been driven into non-threatening measures that drill their passion into the ground. In the past, when the PSL has had membership ruptures, many of those comrades never rejoined any organization or returned to political work at all, which is far more a victory for the ruling class than for the PSL or the proletariat.

So, comrades, I ask you not to lose sight of why we joined the PSL in the first place, and to understand that there is a great deal of work to be done, and that every day we spend with a party that has abandoned its revolutionary premise is another day without challenging the ruling class, another day it gets to inflict violence on the masses. The remedy for this diagnosis is to complete the task set before us by Engels and sweep away the “colossal pile of garbage inherited by tradition,” namely opportunism, by going to the workers and the oppressed to engage in revolutionary mass organizing at the heart of class struggle.

We cannot allow ourselves to be lost to the wind, nor can we abandon the tasks before us. If comrades read this and are inspired to persist in our historic task of revolution, please reach out so that we may coordinate and determine the path forward!!! Had Lenin remained within the undivided RSDLP, the Bolsheviks would never have formed, and the October Revolution would never have happened. Lenin explained in an issue of Iskra that “Before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation.” You do not stay in the ranks of an ineffective, corrupt party, even when the alternative is a significantly smaller group.

As Comrade Mao said, “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”

Assalamu alaikum Comrades,

I want to begin by explaining how incredible I think each of you are and how much you’ve all inspired me. After having to start over in a state where I knew so few people, watching ICE terrorize my new home and feeling completely powerless without a community to fight back with, I joined the PSL, and it gave me both a community and a sense of purpose. Because of you all, I have so much hope for the future, and I genuinely believe that a revolution in our lifetime is possible and inevitable.

However, I have decided to discontinue my membership with the PSL.

This is a decision I have been dwelling on for months, one that has tugged at my heart and led to immense guilt. My decision to leave has absolutely nothing to do with any of you, and I am so grateful to have struggled alongside each of you. Lenin was famous for announcing his departure from an organization and distributing it to the membership, so, in the tradition of Lenin, I will offer a clear explanation of why I’m leaving. Criticism is a longstanding tradition of revolutionary parties, and I genuinely hope my criticisms are understood in good faith, rather than as an attempt to sow disunity.

My decision rests on fundamental disagreements with national’s political orientation and strategies that, from my perspective, have led to a significant gap between the national leadership and the needs of local units. I have voiced many of these concerns in internal meetings and in private to leadership, and though I genuinely appreciate our incredible unit leads, leadership, and other comrades for patiently discussing them with me, I have not been able to reconcile them.

There is a tendency that continually emerges within revolutionary parties, one that every single revolutionary has had to reconcile with in the past, this tendency is what Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and others have identified as the biggest threat to revolutionary parties. This tendency is opportunism, and importantly, it isn’t a moral failing of individuals within the party, nor is it intentional! Its a structural drift that, according to Lenin and Mao, must continually be combated to prevent this tendency to cause the party to abandon the revolutionary cause altogether. A party that has drifted towards opportunism will still present as a Marxist-Leninist party.

And, indeed, the PSL identifies as Marxist-Leninist, its public political analysis is generally correct, and its propaganda and longer-form content retain the language and conclusions of Marxism, these are what drew me to the party in the first place! Diagnosing opportunism requires an analysis of the political character, content, and action of the party and continually holding it next to the ultimate objective, which is a proletarian revolution. This letter will break down my primary concerns with the party’s political character, content, and action by continually grounding it in the objective goal and pairing it with the wisdom of our revolutionary predecessors. My concerns break down into a few primary categories: political education, party propaganda, failure to convert spontaneity into action, lack of underground work, and electoralism.

(Addendum: I would like to note that the PSL carefully distances itself from identifying as a Marxist-Leninist party. In both their “About” and their “Party Program” sections on pslweb.org, the party never mentions Lenin at all. Instead, they frame themselves as simply ‘Marxists.’ They never specifically utilize Leninist or Marxist phrasing such as “vanguard,” or “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and instead soften these terms with less descriptive language. These specific terms are not “communist jargon” you can abandon for accessibility, they are literally the dividing lines that separate Marxism from reformism.

In The State and Revolution, Lenin writes that someone who extends the recognition of class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a Marxist, everyone who accepts class struggle but stops short of the DotP is a reformist or opportunist. This is an extension of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he is clear that the transition between capitalism and communism is the revolutionary DotP. Comrades, we must recall that the Gotha is a furious polemic against a socialist party watering down its program with vague, conciliatory language to make themselves palatable.)

Political Education

Beginning with political education. As Lenin states, “there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory.” Marxists have gotten a reputation for obnoxiously harping about the need to read theory, this has been exacerbated by those who treat Marxism as a dogma that must be strictly adhered to and applied. But Marxism isn’t a dogma, is it comrades? It is a science! And like any other science, it must be approached using skepticism, observation, hypothesis, and application, but we can build on the existing scientific research instead of starting from scratch. If enough evidence has disproven our hypothesis, we can begin to reanalyze and rehypothesize, rather than continue on without question (that would be dogma).

Theory represents the practice and research of revolutionaries who came before us, who diagnosed the problems in our society and how to address them, with each building off the work of the last, and all grounding their theories in the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. For a revolutionary party, theory is indispensable. Many challenges that Marxists face today are the same challenges that revolutionaries of the past confronted. Reading, understanding, and applying theory not only helps us become better agitators and propagandists, it equips us to make the right analysis and decision in a time of crisis.

Perceptual knowledge comes from our direct experiences with the world, and these perceptions are what help us to realize things like the unfairness in the justice system, wealth inequality, or that everything feels bad all the time. These data points reflect certain realities of the objective world, but they are one-sided and superficial, an impression that reflects things incompletely without revealing their essence. Rational knowledge is what you get when those scattered impressions are synthesized into an understanding of the why and the how. This synthesis helps to explain the laws and relations that produce these impressions. This is, as some of you may know, an overly condensed explanation of Mao’s theory of knowledge which isn’t limited to book clubs and study groups, it requires reflection and is incomplete without actual practice. Practice is what makes theory dialectical and material, rather than purely ideological.

The reason why many of us became leftists is because of this perceptual knowledge that helped us identify the impressions of capitalist exploitation in the world, rational knowledge is what leads us to become Marxists, and application is what transforms us into revolutionaries; this application is what produces new theory. Anyone can recognize and diagnose problems within society. But without taking these observations past their impressions, they will be captured by the ruling class, converted into an understanding that is compatible with ruling class ideology. Due to the nature of ruling class cultural hegemony, their conclusions are what seem most natural or inevitable to us. The theory is what produces the difference between a Marxist and a leftist.

This is why we need revolutionary theory. However, it is entirely unnecessary to start at step zero and to insist on rediscovering, by our own trial and error, things that were settled ages ago. The same way we wouldn’t need to come up with our own theory of gravity in order to understand that what comes up, must come down, as this has already been extensively tested and iterated upon. In the same way, revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin put Marx’s existing theories to the test and developed them further, which other revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro have done with Lenin’s ideas. The body of theory is the rational knowledge of the entire international proletarian movement!

However, theory without application is useless and produces dogmatists who are incapable of acting. As Marx said, the point of studying theory and discussing it is to change the world! Rational knowledge is only verified and developed when it is put to the test in our own material conditions, which is why every revolutionary party should pair practical application with a continual study and revisiting of theory. This doesn’t mean that “right” ideas come only from those who’ve read every volume of Das Kapital. The masses often have many right ideas, but those ideas are usually isolated to individual issues, and our role as revolutionaries is to systematize them into something coherent, a strategy. We cannot do this without theory.

In the PSL, theory is de-emphasized in practice. Our political education often vulgarizes theory and simplifies it to the degree of obscuring it altogether. The format is accessible, which is lovely, but this format cannot and does not supplement engagement with the revolutionary theory and pedagogical discourse that produces rational knowledge. The most important part of theory is NOT the conclusions drawn from it. The value of reaching the rational stage is understanding the analytical movement from impression to essence, so that we can perform that analysis ourselves on new conditions.

The PSL’s political education condenses almost two centuries of Marxist theory, supplemented with other PSL publications, all of which are secondary sources that place a barrier between us and the words of the theorists themselves. In the instances where actual theory is studied, it is often paired with study materials provided by the PSL. I’ve been informed that this is only to provide historical context, which is frequently what makes theory so difficult to absorb (so true). However, as I will demonstrate later in my letter, historical context is not neutral, and providing it pre-interpreted is where the PSL’s conclusions get inserted into the theory itself. (Note: It has been revealed that this is intentional, not incidental. In this letter I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I would revoke today.)

Leadership has framed the PSL’s resources as a pragmatic means of continuing education, one that alleviates the burden of study, which is time-consuming and often inaccessible. But theory isn’t just reading or learning, it is a cycle of analysis and application, and it is the PSL’s responsibility to treat political education as a continual project of sharpening our analysis and strategy. This isn’t to say we should hand comrades a stack of texts and wish them luck!

A presentation of historical context, in a classroom setting guided by analysis and dialogue, lets us develop our analytical skills against the texts themselves. A summary of that history paired with pre-determined discussion points intended to steer comrades toward a fixed conclusion does not. Education is the investment a party makes in its members to produce capable, confident revolutionaries, and the decision to de-emphasize it in favor of PSL-produced summaries is one I fundamentally disagree with.

Lenin himself already assessed the pragmatism in de-emphasizing theory in favor of practice, his conclusion is that there is no middle ground between ruling class ideology and Marxist ideology, without a full understanding of Marxism we will default into ruling class ideology. This default to conclusions that are acceptable to the ruling class, which is subconscious and unintentional, is what produces opportunism. This is what happened in Lenin’s time, in his polemics against the “Economists.”

These were Marxists who believed they should focus on the workers’ immediate economic struggles, wages, hours, conditions, because that is what workers “actually respond to,” and that they should meet workers where they are rather than ply them with abstract theoretical demands. They thought this was the practical, non-elitist, mass-connected approach, and they accused Lenin’s emphasis on theory and professional revolutionaries of being aloof and disconnected from the “real movement.”

Lenin argued that they fundamentally misunderstood the task, which was to elevate the consciousness of the masses, and that because they refused to study theory, they could not see that all they were doing was tailing after the masses. This brings my opening quote from Lenin fully into context:

“Those who have the slightest acquaintance with the actual state of our movement cannot but see that the wide spread of Marxism was accompanied by a certain lowering of the theoretical level. Quite a number of people with very little, and even a total lack of theoretical training joined the movement because of its practical significance and its practical successes… Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.“

Public Propaganda

This leads me into political propaganda. Now, when it comes to the masses, they do not need to be experts in political theory, but it is our job as revolutionaries to bring theory to them. This doesn’t mean we should show up to No Kings chanting that the “bourgeoisie’s appropriation of surplus value from the proletariat is the primary contradiction that will lead to capitalism’s downfall!” However, we are supposed to use our understanding of theory to take the working class’s ideas and connect them to revolutionary theory in a way that they can grasp, and to continually raise their consciousness rather than just reaffirm what they already understand.

What I’ve noticed about the PSL’s agitation and propaganda geared toward the masses (think social media, campaign platforms, statements and speeches) is that it doesn’t seek to elevate the consciousness of the masses (though some of our longer-form content is better in this regard). When Lenin explained that the masses will always achieve a degree of political consciousness (”trade union consciousness”), he was trying to convey that the masses are fully capable of diagnosing the problems in their society based on their own experiences, as we’ve discussed. But this consciousness would not develop into revolutionary consciousness due to the hegemonic function of ruling-class ideology, which was always lurking in the shadows to redirect their political consciousness back into the system rather than away from it.

This is why populist phrases like “eat the rich!” and “people not billionaires” emerge organically from the working class! They’ve identified the economic element that leads to exploitation, but it is our responsibility to provide a class analysis that connects those phrases to the problem, capitalism. The masses are intelligent and will understand this. As Lenin put it, “the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.” When our propaganda only mirrors back what they already understand, we fail in our job to raise their political consciousness.

The Democrats and Democratic Socialists and other reformists center the entirety of their political agitation on socioeconomic “improvements” for the working class but they do not provide a class analysis. This is why Lenin explained that they “limit the tasks of the workers to a struggle for immediate, palpable results; they refuse to recognize that we Social-Democrats cannot reduce our tasks to those that are ‘attainable’ at the given moment… It is precisely the role of Social-Democracy as the vanguard in the actual struggle against autocracy to lift the spontaneous workers’ movement onto a higher plane, to raise it to its proper level of class struggle.” (Note: the Social-Democrats here are the Russian Marxists; Lenin would later break with this term.) Diluting our propaganda into left-populism that isn’t entirely dissimilar to that of the Democratic Socialists (like Bernie Sanders) is a grave error, as Lenin observes: “to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.”

What our propaganda should do is take that degree of spontaneous consciousness a step further by explaining that even if every billionaire disappeared, everyone’s material conditions would remain the same, because “billionaire” and “the rich” only describe a wealth category, and it isn’t the wealth in itself that produces systems of exploitation like wage labor and imperialism. In fact, not all billionaires are capitalists, plenty of capitalists are millionaires or small business owners. Whenever we simply reaffirm that billionaires are the problem, we allow the working class to conflate wealth with class, and we never help them understand that capitalism is the problem, and that IT needs to be abolished. We should have confidence in the working class’s ability to reason and to understand theory (insofar as it applies to their own conditions), and recognize that we may even have much to learn from them.

It is a common pitfall of leftists, not just Marxists, to underestimate the capability and smarts of the working class. Sometimes the argument is made that we still need to “dumb down” our agitprop because the average American reads at a sixth-grade level. This, too, is an excuse. Almost every historical revolutionary had to raise the political consciousness of an almost fully illiterate population. Lenin, Mao, Che, the Panthers, etc., all elevated the consciousness of a peasantry or working class that, in many cases, could not read at all! Lenin called out this tendency to belittle the masses’ capability as follows:

“Attention, therefore, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’ as the Economists wish to do, or to the level of the ‘average worker’… You, gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker’, as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation. Talk about serious things in a serious manner; leave pedagogics to the pedagogues, and not to politicians and organisers!”

Failure to Convert Spontaneity into Action

In the PSL, we have this idea that our primary tasks are to “popularize socialism” and “meet the moment.” Neither of these is inherently wrong. We should popularize socialism in the Marxian sense, and we should meet the moment. Wherever the masses are, as most Marxists argue, we should be there too, to listen to their needs, meet their needs, struggle with them, and elevate their consciousness. In the United States, the ruling class has successfully distorted the history and intention of protests, turning them into a pacifist performance, an outlet for working class rage. But even these entirely harmless, pacifist demonstrations are being pushed into less and less effective means (from protesting in streets to protesting on sidewalks, not being able to block traffic, police escorts, etc.).

As a result, protests are now viewed as a single solitary action lasting an hour or two at most, with everyone returning to business as usual afterward. Some on the left even refuse to attend due to the inefficacy of them. But protests contain immense potential, particularly for revolutionary parties, who should view them not only as a means to agitate and recruit, but as a way to turn the directionless rage of the masses into immediate, organized direct action. This shows the working class exactly what we are capable of while elevating their consciousness. If we show up to No Kings protests only to chant along with the masses, we once more fail to guide their consciousness a step further. As revolutionaries, we are the leaders of the proletarian movement, and it is our job to take the disorganized ideas of the masses and turn them into political action.

We should never push them to do something they aren’t ready for, but we should be able to gauge an individual situation and gently push them toward a more and more impactful flexing of collective power. This means turning pacifist parades into direct action by creating a list of demands, either in advance (with the entire objective of a protest oriented toward these demands) or being ready to create one and encourage a longer, sustained protest from the spontaneous one. This also applies to our current agitation for general strikes, which is one of significant error. When I’ve raised concerns about it, namely that it doesn’t make sense to agitate for one without the infrastructure to support one, I’ve been told that the PSL doesn’t intend to dedicate party resources toward building said infrastructure.

A revolutionary party that is only interested in vaguely gesturing toward the need for a general strike, rather than dedicating party resources and capacity to building the infrastructure, is unintentionally betraying its role as a leader within the proletarian movement. Strike funds, legal defense networks, food distribution, childcare, communication systems, and all the alternative systems are what sustain a successful strike. The historical strikes in the United States all had this infrastructure, built by communist or socialist organizers who prioritized these forms of organization. Such actions are prone to being co-opted by reformists, social democrats, and the ruling class, so it is paramount that communists build these networks rather than allow them to be diverted & squashed by counter-revolutionary forces.

The PSL’s stance on the current moment is what seemingly prevents national from directing resources and capacity toward this. However, Lenin firmly believed that the party should stay ready so it never had to get ready. In their own period of “counter-revolution,” the Bolsheviks did indeed prioritize propaganda and agitation. But importantly, they also used this time to build the skeleton that could support higher-stakes actions, like a general strike, but that often included uprisings many leftists would wrongfully categorize as adventurism. Take the 1905 general strike, which actually shifted the political climate to one of revolutionary potential. Lenin wrote in a letter that the endless deliberation over whether the working class was ready for xyz, or whether to escalate, irritated him. Let me provide the passage in full:

“I need hardly say that I do not undertake to judge of the practical side of the matter… However, judging by the documents, the whole thing threatens to degenerate into office routine. All these schemes, all these plans of organisation of the Combat Committee create the impression of red tape… disputes and discussions about the functions of the Combat Committee and its rights, are of the least value in a matter like this. What is needed is furious energy, and again energy. It horrifies me— I give you my word—it horrifies me to find that there has been talk about bombs for over six months, yet not one has been made! And it is the most learned of people who are doing the talking…. Go to the youth, gentlemen! That is the only remedy! Otherwise—I give you my word for it—you will be too late (everything tells me that), and will be left with “learned” memoranda, plans, charts, schemes, and magnificent recipes, but without an organisation, without a living cause. Go to the youth. Form fighting squads at once everywhere, among the students, and especially among the workers, etc., etc. Let groups be at once organised of three, ten, thirty, etc., persons. Let them arm themselves at once as best they can, be it with a revolver, a knife, a rag soaked in kerosene for starting fires, etc. Let these detachments at once select leaders, and as far as possible contact the Combat Committee of the St. Petersburg Committee. Do not demand any formalities, and, for heaven’s sake, forget all these schemes, and send all “functions, rights, and privileges” to the devil. Do not make membership in the R.S.D.L.P. an absolute condition—that would be an absurd demand for an armed uprising.”

This is why a firm grasp on the history of revolutions, revolutionaries, their mistakes, and their successes, all of which is contained within theory, is crucial to creating a revolutionary party capable of making the correct assessment and decision at a moments notice. Many Marxists would be shocked to find Lenin advocating for what many would classify as “adventurism.” But please understand that I’m not at all stating that every protest should turn into violent “Combat Committees” lol. As I’ve mentioned, a simple list of demands would suffice, and whenever the working class sees victories from these types of actions, it moves their understanding of working class power from the ideological realm into the material realm, making it tangible and achievable.

The PSL has an admirable degree of discipline and responsiveness. As I mentioned, I am continually inspired by you comrades and your ability to set aside your individual needs to respond to the cries of the people! However, our inability to convert spontaneous uprisings into direct action we can support is of concern. We often hold the attention of the masses in a time of crisis, but once the momentum dissipates, so does the attention we hold. Ebbs and flows are natural, but if we are not building infrastructure in the interim to actually prepare the working class for the next crisis, we will continue to lose them when momentum dies down.

Importantly, this cannot be the decision of one individual unit. Dedication to building infrastructure must be agreed upon by the entire party and prioritized by ensuring we dedicate appropriate organizational capacity and resources to it. This is a slow-burning, long term project that requires continual renewal of our dedication. There are days when the free breakfast programs of the Black Panthers didn’t have a single child in attendance, for example, but refusing to give up and maintaining these long term projects will ensure that we stay ready so we don’t have to get ready.

But unfortunately, we often must drop even short term projects to accommodate national’s orientation to prioritize, for example, door knocking. This frequently includes canceling existing actions, like book clubs or community defense meetings, in favor of these more “urgent” priorities. To be clear, I am not discussing when we need to urgently respond to a working class crisis such as ICE raids or emergency rallies! I also understand that we are limited in organizational capacity, and oftentimes we need all hands on deck to be effective in our other strategies.

However, the continual habit of dropping longer and shorter term projects for shorter term ones signals to the working class that we have no interest in seeing these projects through. This continual pivoting is a form of commandism, which is a structural problem when a party grows in size, but it is worrisome that we do not have (many) long term projects we’ve sustained for more than a year. Comrades, I ask you to look into the history of revolutionary movement building and find one movement that has not sustained long term projects! Worse, these pivots are rarely discussed among the units first. They’re decided on by central leadership, either at the national or district level, and comrades are expected to comply.

This is not democratic centralism; abandoning a project, whether at the local or national level, is something that requires discussion when it is not emergent. This is national’s orientation for how the party should be run, and many of you may be okay with this as a strategy, but my analysis is that we regularly sacrifice long term strategies for shorter-term ones that produce small “achievements” but never larger, meaningful “wins” for the working class as a proletarian movement toward the objective of revolution.

(Addendum: Upon reflecting on the PSL’s assessment of the “current moment,” I would like to further push back on this claim. If we look at the political analysis of the world, it is one of revolutionary potential, as evidenced by the political uprisings across the globe. This is not a time of low political action or consciousness; even in the United States, we have had more protests in the last five years than at any other point in history, and more people are turning up to explicitly political action by the millions. Yet we continually fail to raise this spontaneous consciousness further.

So, what is it, exactly, that the PSL means by “meeting the moment,” and what if the “moment” in question is rooted in the same poor political analysis of a leadership that is more concerned with optics and “building the party” than building the capacity to support THE moment for the working class? Because the leadership does not understand what a genuine revolutionary moment looks like, and because they are not cultivating comrades who are capable of utilizing such a moment, we risk squandering the opportunity to elevate the consciousness of the masses to usher them toward that moment.)

Participation in Bourgeois Elections

Seeing as this essay is already approaching 12 pages in its current form, I will keep this critique short but for anyone who is interested, I have written a longer form theoretical polemic and analysis critiquing participation in bourgeois elections for all Marxist parties. Effectively, we spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars within the four year election cycle on these campaigns. We are told that this is a Leninist strategy, but it isn’t really. Those who make this argument rely on Lenin’s polemic in Left-Wing Communism, where he criticized the German and Dutch left for declaring bourgeois parliaments “historically obsolete” on principle alone, he insisted that communists were obligated to participate so long as the masses were still engaged in them.

Once we contextualize Left-Wing Communism, we find that its argument does not map onto our current conditions. Lenin wrote within a climate of immense revolutionary potential, among a working class that was already heavliy organized and politically conscious, and within electoral systems (the tsarist Duma and the Weimar Reichstag) that have absolutely no resemblance to our red-tapped, anti-communist, anti-third party “democracy.”

The Third International, the authoritative codification of how Lenin’s tactics were meant to be applied, also clearly states that any participating party must identify openly as communist, draw a clear line of demarcation from the social democrats, treat elections as a tactic subordinate to other work, and that if conditions are ripe for (as an example) a strike, electoral participation should halt. Our candidates platforms in our recent Vote Socialist campaigns are indistinguishable from those of progressive liberals and social democrats. This is a form of opportunism where we flatten our message to “meet the masses where they are,” but only to keep them there, echoing their spontaneous consciousness rather than systematizing it and raising it a step further.

More importantly, people who turn out to vote are overwhelmingly the labor aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie proper. Roughly half of all adults earning under $50,000 and $100,000 did not vote in 2024. That is over 100 million eligible voters who did not vote. For comparison, only about 22% of adults earning $100,000 or more did not vote. Those who are the most impacted by the system (systemically the poorest, undereducated, marginalized) are those who have already given up on it.

And while statistics do not reveal the complete nuance or the entire picture of one’s class, and those who earn a higher income (such as myself) are capable of joining the proletarian movement, they’ve been repeatedly identified as those with the least revolutionary potential. Further, there are at least 27 millions more (the unhoused, the undocumented, the formerly incarcerated, those in US colonized “territories”) who are legally barred from voting, who our campaigns are also not reaching.

I am not saying we should refrain from participation altogether, but it should heed the contingencies laid out nearly a century ago that distinguish us from the bourgeois Democratic Socialists, and it should be deprioritized. Dedicating party resources to building the infrastructure for a general strike, which the working class has expressed interest in, would be far more valuable. This means establishing distribution networks with storage and pickup sites, neighborhood committees and coalitions, alternative systems to sustain the working class like community gardens (some PSL units in other states are doing this short term), training in first aid, self defense, and childcare.

(Addendum: I am saying that running in presidential and governor races is a woeful misallocation of resources, whereas running in smaller elections across more cities would be significantly easier to win and would have a higher probability of materially improving policy to aid our class, providing the support necessary to engage in class warfare.)

This is exactly what the Black Panther Party did! Their programs were dismissed by other leftists as pointless mutual aid, but they were tactical, a skeleton built to support the proletariat in a time of crisis rather than an end in themselves. As Huey P. Newton put it, they were “survival programs, survival pending revolution, not something to replace revolution or challenge the power relations demanding radical action, but an activity that strengthens us for the coming fight, a lifeboat leading us safely to shore.”

We know their method works here, that it has shaken the ruling class, and we have the Panthers’ own mistakes to learn from, which is again why theory matters. The PSL already knows how to do much of this work, but we don’t currently sustain it long term. We take these types of projects up for short periods and let them crumble in our absence, when sustaining them through the ebbs and flows is where the difficult work is. And much of it must be sustained independently of electoral or bourgeois arenas, so that when the state inevitably moves to crush it, we remain afloat.

In Conclusion

I sincerely appreciate those of you who’ve been able to read through this entire letter. Now, the reasons I’ve provided, for those of you still tuned in, may still seem trivial or unimportant, certainly not a reason to leave the party. But these reasons constitute Lenin’s definition of a party that has unintentionally abandoned the revolutionary premise of Marxism. Without theory, we cannot distinguish revolutionary work from work that only resembles it, and without propaganda that elevates consciousness, the masses will continue to be redirected toward ruling class ideology. This is a critique of the party structure, not of any individual comrades! As I mentioned, each of you is a dedicated, loyal comrade, and I do not question your intentions at all. But opportunism is defined by the use of revolutionary language to legitimize strategies that do not threaten the capitalist system, and that is effectively what our propaganda and political education have resorted to.

Lenin’s point in What Is To Be Done? was that there is no middle ground between revolutionary socialism and liberalism! Any de-emphasis of Marxist theory strengthens bourgeois ideology by default. What makes this dangerous is that the party, functionally, absorbs the energy of dedicated, loyal people who want to be revolutionaries and channels it into work that never actually threatens power, abandoning the necessary and patient work of developing leadership prepared to support the working class in times of crisis.

Every revolutionary leader you’ve ever heard of (Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro, Sankara, Minh, Luxemburg) identified opportunism as the greatest threat to revolutionary parties, more so than violent state repression, because repression leads to revolutionary clarity while opportunism eliminates or distorts it. The worst manifestation of opportunism is what Lenin identified as social chauvinism, when the party actually allies with the bourgeoisie and uses its organizational capacity to achieve their objectives. Lenin explains: “Opportunism is our principal enemy. Opportunism in the upper ranks of the working-class movement is bourgeois socialism, not proletarian socialism. It has been shown in practice that the working-class activists who follow the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeois themselves.”

(Addendum: the PSL has resorted to social chauvinism by mobilizing our organizational capacity to support legislation put forward by the Democratic party such as the recent redistricting in California.)

It may seem as though I’m purity testing the PSL and failing it simply because it doesn’t live up to my ideals of what a revolutionary party “should” look like, that all these theorists I’ve been quoting represent the standard I’m measuring the PSL against, and that we simply aren’t “radical” enough. HOWEVER, opportunism is a structural diagnosis with a long history within Marxist movements, and not a single revolutionary movement has avoided it. It is not representative of the individual moral failures of comrades and their work.

It is identified when a party sacrifices the long term interests of the proletarian movement for short-sighted gains. It is also identified when the question of revolution is continually put off into the distant future and intentionally delayed, treating the masses and the climate as not yet “ready”! Personally, I find this assessment by Parvus (written in 1901, though for transparency, Parvus was a promising revolutionary before the material success of the war persuaded him to abandon the cause, nevertheless, his revolutionary theory remains decent) to be the most astute:

As is well known, it is the dictatorship of the proletariat that opportunism criticises most. It does not directly deny the possibility of realising it, but it doubts it, it pushes it as far as possible into the distance, and above all wishes to eliminate it from present-day political considerations. The conditions, it claims, are still so unripe that they are not yet ready for it. The conditions, claims opportunism, are still so unripe that if the proletariat were to get hold of the machinery of the state, it… would end in a colossal defeat for the proletariat. So, for the time being, we leave the running of the state to those who already do so… And we must regard with trepidation every electoral victory as a step that brings us closer… to our defeat. But due to the inconsistency on which opportunism depends, it of course avoids drawing this conclusion from its premise. But what does it offer us instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it no can no longer countenance as a political guideline? How is the proletariat to abolish capitalist exploitation if not by conquering political power? What should be done, how should the working class act in order to achieve this goal…

It is only logical that opportunism, having abandoned the hope of the political rule of the proletariat, should seek to mediate between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Where socialism has hitherto uncovered the fiercest class antagonisms, opportunism seeks points of agreement. It pursues a policy of compromise. It wants to break off the peaks, to bridge over the antagonisms. This is how the theories of adaptation, of growing over into socialism, arose, with which opportunism seeks to conceal the hopelessness of its standpoint from itself and from the world.

Allowing opportunism to remain unchallenged is tantamount to allowing the party to forfeit the revolution. We will continue to invest our time and energy into strategies that never pose a threat to the ruling class, we will tail after the masses to “meet the moment,” we will substitute left-populist sloganeering for class analysis, we will never earn the trust of the working class, we will make short-sighted pivots that sacrifice the long term project of cultivating the masses, and we will distort the revolutionary character of our messaging.

Worst of all, we will be unprepared to assist the masses in times of crisis. One of the most dangerous aspects of opportunism is that it is rarely intentional (though it certainly can be)! As Lenin states, the opportunist “does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless. Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.”

In conclusion, I hope my criticisms do not read as an attack on the decent, genuinely good work we have done for the working class. I am aware of how strong my critiques are, and how, like myself, many of you have found a political home and community in the PSL, and it is not my intent to diminish that. The point of this letter is NOT that the PSL’s work is totally pointless or unimportant, nor that everyone should abandon it. The PSL does meaningful and important work, and for many, that work is valuable enough to continue.

But I do not believe this work, in its current form, is building the infrastructure or capacity to support a proletarian revolution.

Though it may not be apparent to everyone reading this, I have tried to address these concerns with varying levels of leadership and to emphasize the need for improved tactics, strategy, and political education. Over the last year I have suggested internal book studies, strategic mutual aid, infrastructure building, self defense training, targeted strikes, and more. Many of these suggestions were supported by our (amazing) local leads, but they require the material support of the PSL’s central leadership, and cannot be carried out by one unit of 6 to 10 people. (Addendum: They have absolutely no interest in doing this type of work.)

I have insisted on different formats for our public-facing “meetings” and “forums,” which often become a lecture with preset discussion points. I’ve heard from at least a dozen people that this format alienates them from attending, people who came expecting their own observations to be heard and taken seriously as a contribution to the struggle, are instead lectured at and forced to engage in timed, predetermined discussions. This overly corporate formula for community organizing is what happens when leadership tries to formalize the cultivation of political consciousness in a way that is totally removed from the actual proletarian movement.

There is nothing wrong with having an agenda or discussion points to keep a conversation productive. The problem is that they reverse the pedagogy of the oppressed, resorting to a style of dialogue that treats the community as empty vessels to be filled with the “correct” knowledge and guided to the “correct” conclusion, rather than letting us be led by them and learn as much from them as they might from us. To assume that only we possess all the knowledge, and must therefore guide their conclusions accordingly, underestimates and, as Paulo Freire argued, dehumanizes the working class and their capabilities.

What has troubled me most in my time with the PSL is that every time I have offered productive criticism, a change of tactics, an improvement to our political education, I have not been truly heard. The responses from upper leadership are often so defensive that you would forget I am a member of this party who deserves to contribute to it meaningfully! My criticisms have, rather, been taken as an attack on you comrades and your hard work.

In my final conversation with [Redacted], I was told that the only way for me to “understand” the work is to “do it.” As if I have not attended dozens of protests and rallies, given speeches at them, driven 20-plus miles in the middle of a workday to defend my comrades from police, ICE, or counter-protesters, as if I haven’t been teargassed and shot at trying to aid my community and my comrades, as if I haven’t harassed my friends and family to vote for our candidates, as if I haven’t tried to bring the PSL to my Muslim community, as if I haven’t spent my own money, time, and energy struggling along the party line with everyone else.

As if it were not from these experiences that I made my observations and earnestly sought to contribute by analyzing where we could improve! For God’s sake, I have been in the PSL almost as long as I have lived in this state lol! It has been the center of my life here. How utterly demoralizing to have my critiques received as though they come from an overly dogmatic, unrealistic armchair revolutionary.

I ground this letter in theory to show that these concerns have a history, a solution, and a name. The PSL claims to be Marxist-Leninist and uses theory to justify many of its stances, and it is for that reason that I have brought theory into this discussion, to substantiate my perspectives with historical precedent, in the hope that they will be taken more seriously after my departure. (Addendum: I implore comrades to genuinely reflect on their work in the party and determine if that work is valuable enough to continue at all.) But I know leadership has meant no ill will and did not intend to push me away or diminish my perspectives. I know they are defending work they believe in, and I still believe in them as individual comrades.

Despite these efforts, despite my attempts to raise these concerns with higher levels of leadership, I have not been able to reconcile these differences. And because I cannot reconcile the party’s strategies, I cannot defend them. It is for these reasons that I have decided to leave the PSL.

I want to end with a special thank you to [redacted comrades] who have taught me so much through their own actions, who have offered me friendship and comradeship, who have had more faith in me than I have at times had in myself, and who I know will continue to do meaningful, hard work both in and out of the PSL, work that all future comrades can depend on to lead them toward the good fight. That love extends to each of you, and I look forward to seeing everything that you all will accomplish and cheer you on from the periphery. <3

Love you all! Salaam!

Recommended Reading:

• The Labor Aristocracy: The Material Basis for Opportunism in The Labor Movement
• Lenin’s polemics against the Economists
• On the Tactics of Opportunism
• The Foundations of Leninism – Theory
• The Foundations of Leninism – The Party
• BE CONCERNED WITH THE WELL-BEING OF THE MASSES, PAY ATTENTION TO METHODS OF WORK
• Mao’s Little Red Book
• How To Be A Good Communist

“Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency. Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism. People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well — they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves.” – Combat Liberalism, Mao Zedong, 1937

In order to combat the liberalism that grips the throat of the Communist movement in these occupied lands, it’s necessary to reflect on the ways in which liberal ideology and habits are uniquely expressed in the current historical moment.

1. “Someone Should Do Something”

The first type of settler liberalism is perhaps the most common among the settler masses. It is the “someone (else) should do something” type. These individuals are aware to some degree of the hardships and oppression faced by others (and often even themselves) but will at every turn find justification to externalize their responsibility to the land and the oppressed. “There’s nothing I can do” is the credo of the first type of settler liberalism. This first type can often be found twisting themselves into knots to politically justify their self-imposed helplessness, usually by blaming others for their failures. The fault is aimed upon the misleadership of the movement, their attachment to their luxuries and comforts, or their attachment to their personal safety. In the last case they will justify their inaction by inflating the threat posed by the settler state, painting it as an invincible force which must not be provoked to violence. This stubborn attitude leads inevitably to political nihilism or self-interested electoralism (or a deeply cynical overlap of the two). Many individuals who identify as communists, socialists, anarchists, etc but refuse to struggle for radical organization are in fact guilty of the first type of settler liberalism, and are simply using radical rhetoric and symbology to mask their complicity with the imperial system, consciously or not. The salve for this first type of liberalism is organized action with concrete goals, and a rejection of the habit of political performance devoid of substance.

The first type of liberalism has its most complete expression in the mass performative protest, wherein huge crowds assemble to loudly proclaim their demand for someone else to do something (legislators, the public at large, etc.) — or in other words, they proclaim their intention, in full view and supervision by the state, to continue doing nothing. Their purely rhetorical demands and their vapid politics mask the underlying reality that in practical terms they are there to struggle against escalation. Each “protest” prides itself on its mass participation, its multi-national representation, and has as its only concrete demand that everyone seeking to struggle against the state must instead co-operate with it. Consider the leadership of these actions — these are largely petty bourgeois protest organizers (e.g. take the national and professional makeup reported by the DSA’s own membership survey for instance), whose appeals to pacifism, “non-violent resistance”, and “peaceful protest” are largely conscious reactions to the accusations slung by bourgeois media: that protest organizers are enemies of the state, secretly in league with or being tricked by “the real bad guys”, who seek to disrupt peaceful democratic processes for nefarious purposes. Such protest organizers wish to maintain “good optics”, but good optics in the eyes of the bourgeois media only comes by bowing to bourgeois demands. When bourgeois media accuses protest groups of violence and crime, it’s a veiled threat: “whose side are you on, ours or theirs?” The protest leaders wish to avoid the struggles and sacrifices of the inevitable escalation of violence should they truly place themselves on the side of the oppressed, and so regardless of their intentions setting out, by adhering to bourgeois demands for “peaceful protest” they draw their line of allegiance firmly on the side of the bourgeoisie.

Protest leaders making appeals to pacifism are the white flag of surrender to the state. The red flags waved about at these legal protests are merely bait to draw the gullible.

2. “I Have To Do Something“, i.e. the Cult of Action

The inverse of the first type of liberalism is the “I have to do something” form of individual or organizationally amateurish spontaneous direct action. Individuals, either disillusioned by the prevalence of liberal rot in the movement, unaware of the real tasks before them due to inadequate education, or perhaps just mesmerized by fantasies of heroism, ignore the necessity of disciplined professional organization as a precondition for revolutionary activity, and carry out disorganized activity on an individualistic, amateur basis. This is certainly the most sympathetic type, and the closest to revolutionary action.

However, if these second-type individuals come together to form organizations guided by the same second-type error, they will remain limited to local work that can only react to the problems at hand (for example, providing survival services to homeless folks). They will be unable to chart a course for changing local conditions on a lasting basis (for example, by providing permanent decommodified housing to formerly homeless folks). Because immediate action takes priority ahead of political clarity, even the most effective and well-organized work is carried out on an essentially amateur and ad-hoc basis. Without coherent revolutionary politics as the baseline necessity for unity of work, there inevitably comes a point where some of the participants in these organizations have different ideas for what direction to take their work than a strictly revolutionary outlook would provide for. This produces an inherently unstable political unity that will inevitably lead to catastrophic splits.

The second type of settler liberalism has the most potential to become revolutionary, but only if a really revolutionary outlook takes firm charge of their activities. In all other cases, the activities of this type decohere the revolutionary movement by subordinating revolutionary politics to local matters and by misleading its participants. More often than not, participants in second-type organizing burn out entirely. This can be due to overwork, wherein unprofessional orgs demand excessive volunteer work of their most active and dedicated members. Liberal and hobbyist attitudes often dominate the membership of these orgs and such liberals and hobbyists will never do as much as they can on a consistent and long-term basis (because their priorities are elsewhere!) which places increasing pressure on the dedicated members to contribute more labor to meet the needs of the org. Organizational burnout can also be the result of sheer disillusionment with the possibility of a revolutionary mass movement. After all, when everyone around you claims to be a socialist but fails to live up to these claims in deed and do the work, or years of work go down the drain in an organizational breakdown, it can be very difficult for the local would-be revolutionary to see a path out of their political quagmire.

In the best case scenario, where this liberal approach to political struggle has led to the creation of an organization which is concretely providing for the needs of the community, serious and swift effort must be made by its members to seek the assistance of other, more developed, communist organizations in beginning the process of proletarian professionalization. These orgs may be called upon in sharing the duties the members have taken on, to ensure the services being provided are not interrupted. All possible measures must be taken to ensure the lives of vulnerable individuals are not disrupted or put at risk. The few tenuous roots we actually have in the masses must be carefully defended! Proletarian professionalization will be more fully detailed in a later article, but for the moment should be understood as the process by which an organization and its members adopt a militant, decolonial, anti-american political line both in word and in action. The liberal organization must be split in two: a semi-clandestine cadre org comprised of the revolutionary leadership, and a semi-open mass org comprised of the tailing elements under the control or guidance of the cadre org.

3. “The Multi-National Working Class”

The third type appears to be the most common type of liberalism found within the leadership ranks of the Four Opportunists and the litany of organizations and individuals which orbit and tail them. Each big national organization comprising the Four Opportunists has a slightly different flavor of the Multi-National Working Class line (henceforth referred to as MNWC for brevity), but they all follow a general trend of assumptions, divorced from historical fact and present reality, which pre-suppose the necessity of revolutionary leadership by the white working class.

MNWC is a smokescreen which smuggles white nationalism into the ranks of Communism. How is this the case? Proponents of MNWC may openly speak at great length, sometimes even to the exclusion of anything else, of the great and terrible crimes of the white settler nation, but they always deny the necessity of its complete subjugation and liquidation. They will dance around this denial by inventing mythical prophecies of a “multi-national working class” which will surely soon unite and overthrow their “mutual oppressors”, the big imperialist bourgeoisie (if only the divisive minorities would stop being so self-centered!). The crimes of the oppressor nation are offloaded onto the oppressor elites, denying the white working class’s complicity in Global Colonial Holocaust. MNWC launders this denial by ideologically positioning the white workers as oppressed comrades-in-arms alongside members of the actually oppressed nations, erasing the real material processes which reproduce national oppression in order to absolve themselves of the need to do anything which might jeopardize their material privileges. The MNWC proponents then have the gall to call upon the oppressed to adopt their line in the name of “multi-national unity” and will accuse those who reject this heinous demand of being “wreckers,” “ethnonationalists,” or worse.

What is wrong with this “multi-national working class” view? Why is it incorrect? The reality is that the white settler nation is an oppressor nation. Oppressor nationalities constitute a unique form of reactionary nationalism which derives its ideological cohesion from a cross-class collaboration in imperial conquest. Thus the mythological concept of “American equality” is manufactured along reactionary imperialist lines, sublating the antagonism between worker and bourgeoisie by externalizing and projecting it onto other nationalities. The oppressor nation’s very existence as both a political concept and material force is predicated on the subjugation of other nationalities, therefore the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism necessarily requires the overthrow and subjugation of the entire oppressor nation, not merely its bourgeoisie! The sublated class antagonism can only be restored by militant opposition to the white nation as a whole. The white working class — which serves as the muscle, nerves, and arteries of the white nation — has centuries of blood dripping from its hands on account of its evergreen allegiance to the white nationalist state, blood which has richly nourished the roots that firmly hold their feet in place. The white workers can only even begin to abolish their deeply rooted material positionality as the ever-loyal compradors of colonial genocide and environmental holocaust by completely uprooting themselves and entering life-and-death revolutionary struggle for complete independence from the imperialist system and all the benefits it offers. “Complete independence” should be taken to mean especially and most importantly independence from the land-expropriation regime of colonial private property, which necessarily preconditions unity with revolutionary national liberation. Landback.

The white working class, as a class, can never find unity with the workers of the oppressed nations — rather white individuals who break from white society will continue to find unity with the oppressed by actively seeking the abolition of the white working class. Revolutionary-minded settlers must engage in revolutionary reconstruction of their identities — participate in the creation of a new, anti-settlement, socialist identity — and purge themselves of their oppressor-national class ideology in order to fully participate in the political life of the new society. Only those whites who see this reality clearly and firmly grasp all its implications can be considered revolutionary. The so-called “communists” peddling MNWC should be exposed for what they are: liquidators of revolution whose principle concern, regardless of what other words fall out of their mouths, is the reproduction of white privileges predicated on national oppression. In a word, white nationalism.

The third type of liberalism is the most dangerous and insidious. Where ever it has ideological hegemony it slanders the international tradition of revolutionary communism by claiming its name and its inheritance. The third type’s leaders position themselves atop colonial corporations bearing red branding, whose sole business is selling bloody scraps of the flayed hide of communism on the political market. Their depraved insistence on flattening national oppression into a difference of opinions serves a concrete purpose, which is to sustain the ideological hegemony of white supremacy among even the most left-radical of settlers. This process reproduces the unity of settler colonial politics by reframing non-antagonistic differences (white worker and white bourgeois) as “antagonistic,” and reframing antagonistic differences (settler and colonized) as “non-antagonistic.” Thus a mythology of communism as a white movement is manufactured and turned against the oppressed, acting in lockstep with colonial white supremacy. A twisted reflection of liberation is waved before us promising us salvation if only we help the whites get better wages. As a consequence even those settlements with large populations of white radicals become rigidly and impenetrably white supremacist. A potential ally of the revolution is thereby turned into a militant defender of the spoils of colonial conquest.

4. The Bourgeois Media Revolutionary

All media of communications in the age of universal class dominance are necessarily class media, thus the political character of social media takes on the political character of the dominant class, and all aspects of the functional processes of social media become aspects of the functional processes of class development and class conflict. Social media, i.e. the dominant means of communication (in a previous age this was commonly newspapers) becomes a critical component of the class superstructure, and class oppression is in part structured through and embodied in social media. The flow of information through all channels is tightly regulated according to the interests of the dominant class, and in the case of social media this is most plainly evident in the form of “the algorithm,” but also is heavily influenced by and determinant of legal regulations, market structures and incentives, accessibility and infrastructure, location and language, and the daily habits, devices, and software used to access social media.

The fourth and final type of settler liberalism we will discuss here is the revolutionary of bourgeois social media. Often recognizing the above three types of liberalism as such, the liberal of the fourth type rejects the clueless misdirection of the first type, the amateurish tactics of the second, and the bureaucratic obstructionism of the third, and thus left with no apparent alternative political avenues to pursue, finally arrives at the point of individual or amateur online agitation. The fourth type sees clearly that all internal opposition to the imperialist state lies scattered and fragmented and atomized, unable to build sufficient strength to stand up on its own two feet, and they resolve correctly that the solution at hand is unity of action, and that agitation must be conducted towards such. Taking to the figurative streets of social media they shout their message from atop their soapbox and begin to develop a following.

All too often they fail to see that the soapbox itself was issued to them by the bourgeoisie, and that the crowd gathering around it was brought to them by the bourgeoisie. Both the entertainer and their audience begin to perceive that new, more radical, and more revolutionary thought is growing in strength as the audience grows. The parasocial relationship that forms between this bourgeois media personality and their followers convinces both that a qualitative change is occurring, and that this strategy is working.

Thus placated, the aspirant revolutionary and their audience endlessly tread water and swim in circles through the very same morass containing the above three types of liberalism. A bourgeois social and economic dynamic develops to support and reproduce these relationships, wherein the bourgeois media revolutionary becomes a petty bourgeois proprietor of an entertainment business peddling their political message.¹ Constrained by the censorship of advertisement and sponsorship deals, and the censorship of algorithmic content delivery, and the self-censorship implicit in “building a brand,” in marketing their ideas and so on to an audience of largely petty bourgeois radicals, the fourth type completely loses sight of the revolutionary horizon and drowns their own ideals in the murk of class naturalization. The class character and therefore class function of their activities and of the social media environment they perform their activities in is rendered invisible. They lose sight of the class character of the practical aspect of their activities and place exclusive focus on the theoretical aspect of their activities. The class content of the dialectic of theory and practice is flattened to the “pure” class content of the theory, and unable to move forward with this alone their practice devolves into an endless campaign to struggle for a “pure” understanding and approach to revolutionary politics.

For the fourth type, the universal is subsumed into the particular, the concrete totality of political practice becomes the theoretical and the struggle therein,² and every difference of opinion in strategy threatens the shaky and unstable practical basis for the work. Every theoretical disagreement in effect becomes a disagreement in practical activity and threatens a split, and the long-term outcome of this tendency is the regular fractal fragmentation of political unity into sects and microsects, whose re-building and re-coherence is only ever a temporary illusion of misunderstanding to be exploded back into disunity at a moment’s notice. The incoherence of the movement, in the eyes of individuals immersed in this environment, thereby becomes exclusively the “fault” of everyone else except the individual or organization in question. Criticism and self-criticism are seen as wrecker behavior and defeatism. A deep emotional insecurity is produced, and the necessity of candid discussions on the class character of these activities is subsumed into the cold detachment of bourgeois “professionalism” — rather than proletarian professionalism, which necessitates an ability to receive and give criticism while recognizing one’s place within a collective whole, the “professionalism” of the bourgeoisie is the competition of individual brand management; each criticism received as an existential attack, produced in an environment where a brand only strikes at another to climb their dazed body like a ladder.

“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs”

To presume that theoretical struggle can precede organization is to misunderstand the purpose of both. A proletarian approach to politics can only be an organized approach. Regardless of their level of theoretical sophistication, any given single individual or undifferentiated mass of informally or loosely associated individuals can never practice proletarian politics. “Discourse cycles” must give way to formally planned inter-organizational struggle, the terms and purview of which must be agreed upon in advance by the organizations in question. The principle of democratic centralism, of freedom of criticism and unity of action, can then produce the conditions for proletarian discipline, wherein individuals are held accountable by their organizations who in turn hold one another accountable through inter-organizational criticism. Unless political struggle is consciously structured as disciplined and co-operative organizational struggle, theoretical struggle remains the exclusive domain of artisanal craftsmanship. No matter how intricate, sophisticated, beautiful, and scientifically precise the artisan’s craftwork is, it remains the exclusive domain of petty bourgeois production and will not advance to the status of proletarian production without a conscious plan for building organizational discipline. This is the basic precondition for any forward motion.

1. At times a more “grassroots” “community” may form instead of an individual and audience, wherein the individual and audience comprise one another. “Communities” can take many forms but generally have an amorphous or nebulous structure largely reproduced by the content delivery algorithm itself (typical of platforms with follower and group systems), or are rigidly contained within walled gardens of activity (e.g. platforms with discrete “servers”). In any event however, the underlying bourgeois base relations reproduce the bourgeois superstructure by the same process patterns as the individual-audience dialectic described above, albeit with a greater emphasis on accumulation of social capital rather than money capital. ︎
2. The ideological expression of the revolutionary purist however often takes a contradictory appearance to the above, wherein the “practical” aspect of the work is articulated as primary. This excessive focus on practice ahead of theory becomes the theoretical over-emphasis, and therein the Cult of Action is reproduced. The Cult of Action demands the perpetual subordination of theory to practice, but in doing so misunderstands the purpose of theory and merely rigidly adheres to a “practice first” theory. ︎

Bad rules make for a broken organization.

Enter the Stack.

If you’ve ever attended an academic conference, you already have some idea on how the Stack works. Participants can raise their hands at any time, including (and perhaps, primarily) while someone else is speaking. The hand is seen by the facilitator and then the person is added to the bottom of the “Stack,” the list of people waiting to talk. (Presumably this is modeled after the computing concept of sending something to the stack for processing). When the person presently speaking is done, the next person “on the Stack” can speak.

Hopefully, you can already see the problem inherent in this “method.” It was introduced, as far as I can tell, during the Occupy movement. It quickly became the procedural rule de rigueur for all kinds of supposedly radical meetings. Second only to the idea of open membership (in which anyone who shows up to a meeting is considered a member of the organization for the purposes of decision making), this process is perhaps the single most disorganizing element introduced in the left milieu this century.

“The purpose of taking stack is to facilitate discussion and decision making in which all participants have an equal say in the conversation.” So is the Stack described in a 2010 web post by the “Cultivate Coop” website. (The Cultivate Coop is an organ of the Reformed Church in America, and receives money from places like the Eli Lilly Foundation). This is precisely the central problem with the Stack. In an effort to equalize meetings, the Stack instead enforces a vulgar egalitarianism that destroys the capacity to work. [1]

Should Everyone Have An Equal Say?

Emphatically, we must answer this question: NO. At first blush, this will undoubtedly offend the sensibilities of many, particularly those with unexamined or unreconstructed liberalism that still needs interrogating. A brief examination of the issue should be sufficient to set these reservations aside and dispel the mistaken belief that all people should have an equal say or that every contribution is inherently valuable.

Let’s start with the most extreme example: should a federal agent or a fascist have an equal say in a socialist meeting? You might object that we would never let such a person into the meeting in the first place. Fine, but what if they disguise themselves as a well-meaning socialist who’s just “asking questions?” Don’t we need a way to stop this kind of interference?

In a more anodyne and everyday example, let’s take the academic conference as a model. Anyone who’s ever been to hear a paper or a talk given has seen the person who takes the mic with the pretense of asking a question, but who instead goes on at length about their own interests, or research, or supposed insights. This type of groan-inducing off-topic interruption may be bearable (may be!) in an academic conference, but where there’s real work to be done, it’s an unforgivable waste of time.

In fact, we don’t really want everyone to have an equal say. We want to prioritize comments and questions in a pretty obvious way. We should give priority to statements and questions that are:

1) informed;

2) directly relevant to the discussion;

3) concise; and,

4) non-repetitive of other statements that have already been made.

Stack does not prioritize these statements. In its most general form, the Stack rules actually have no way of selecting for statements or questions at all. There’s no way to force the group to vote on something, there’s no way to cut off irrelevant statements, etc. without relying purely on the charisma of the facilitator or the tacit consensus of the group. If the meeting relies on this kind of informal methods to silence off-topic comments, it can rely on those same methods to silence on-topic, relevant, comments.

In fact, because you can claim the floor long before you take it, Stack promotes disjointed, circuitous, and repetitive meetings. People replying “on the Stack” may very well be responding to a minor point made five or six speakers ago – and for that speaker who was criticized to answer, they, too, may have to wait on the stack until their commentary is no longer relevant. There are modified Stack rules that allow for direct comments, etc., but this relies on the action of the chair. At that point, you should transition over to a more chair-driven set of rules that allows structure and intervention.

What Works?

The easiest answer is just to adopt Robert’s Rules of Order. The things that encourage and promote useful and meaningful debate in formal meetings are:

1) Time limits for speakers;

2) The floor may be claimed when it is open only – that is, no lining up on the side and waiting to have your “say”;

3) Speakers may only be heard once on any given point unless no one else wishes to speak; this can be waived where, for instance, a question has been directed to someone in particular;

4) The facilitator can override off-topic comments as out of order;

5) Some way to challenge the facilitator’s ruling.

This prohibits, for instance, someone from claiming the floor to bring up new business while old business is still being debated. It ensures that meetings follow a predictable flow that can be established. No business should be discussed until a decision is taken on the matter at hand – whether it’s to table it to another meeting, or to hold a vote. These rules require action. Off-topic derailment is prevented.

This isn’t debate-club pedantry. It’s the foundational organizational tool that permits organizations to combat intentional derailments, sea-lioning,[2] the Gish gallop,[3] bad faith arguments and interruptions, or indefinite delays in addressing important issues.

If your organization uses the Stack, get rid of it. Immediately. Adopt almost any other set of rules. It is prohibiting you from acting – and if it’s not doing that right now, it’s only a matter of time before it will.

[1] Open meeting structure allows anyone to come into a meeting – let’s say, an Occupy or Palestine solidarity camp – and start adding things to the agenda, or debating topics that were previously not up for debate. This is why we urged all Palestine solidarity encampments to adopt strict rules about who was a “member” during the Student Intifada. This, we can safely say, did not happen in most instances. As a result, for instance, the students at Brown were betrayed by their “committee” – an unelected body of organizers – when they gave in to Brown’s phony concessions for “studying divestment.”

[2] A common online right-wing technique, this is the innocent “just asking questions” trick of peppering a speaker with multitudes of questions that require long and complicated answers. This wears down the speaker, and eventually derails meetings.

[3] A technique wherein the speaker says so many incorrect things at once that it takes an exponentially longer time to explain all the incorrect statements and address them sufficiently, again, leading to a meeting being overwhelmed or shutting down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whenever an organization is founded for the purpose of advancing revolutionary struggle, you have to establish minimum principles with everyone involved (“what’s an organization?” start here!). These are usually written out in a form that all the prospective members read over and agree to. The list of principles is called the organization’s points of unity. It represents the issues around which membership is unified. These should be as broad as possible to permit continued internal struggle over details.

In order for an organization to function, it must be ideologically coherent. Every meeting can’t be a relitigation of the basic questions (do we support violent revolution? are we reformists? what theory do we agree on?) — that way lies both madness and liberalism. Without points of unity, an organization cannot make headway. It spends all of its time treading water, debating over and over again on topics that should be closed.

You’ve probably been in meetings like this. Something is proposed that seems like it should be agreeable. People start to agree to move forward on it as an action item. Suddenly, someone takes the floor and questions the very principles on which the proposal is made. The meeting quickly devolves into a debate club about whether or not the organization “has the authority” to “make this kind of decision,” or whether “we really want to be opposing the police directly” or some such pablum. The entire night is wasted. You won’t even be able to address other potentially actionable items because you don’t meet again until next week.

Points of unity spell out the ideological commitments that all members of the organization agree to in order to become and remain members. They allow the membership to ensure it has a sufficient ideological coherence that it can come to agreement on actions. The points of unity essentially create the basic ideological character of the organization, and help ensure that even new members adhere to the ideological direction that it intends to move in. These are critical in a revolutionary organization, because the immediate horizon must always remain revolution, and deviating from that goal is what creates rampant opportunism and tailism (like that experienced within the Four Opportunists).

What Do We Need to Agree On?

Your organization, in order to be an effective revolutionary fighting-force, and in order to express class-power, should, at the very minimum, be prepared to agree on the fact that Marxism-Leninism is the revolutionary theory that guides your actions, and that it is a living doctrine comprised of the culmination of all experiences and theory from the entire history of the class struggle rather than a dead orthodoxy to be transmitted from dusty books.

The minimums required for a principled formation with a proletarian outlook in the imperial center are:

• Decolonization
• Sex liberation
• Disability liberation

Other commitments are up to your individual organization to determine based on its theoretical understanding of what is necessary for a revolution and for total liberation. Remember, without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

What Other Purposes Do Points of Unity Serve?

When you are ready to begin work with another revolutionary organization, you should compare your points of unity and determine what degree of unity exists between the two organizations. Understanding strategic and theoretical overlap can help you quickly identify shared areas of work.

We are in a moment when the Communist movement for liberation in the US, Canada, and Mexico needs to unify. This is the period in which we must unite all that can be united. If your points of unity show sufficient unity with another organization’s, you may be able to simply unite the two organizations and operate with more available resources and labor, coordinate more efficiently, and accomplish greater and greater feats of revolutionary action.

For Example…

If you need help drafting your points of unity, we have an example from a real, existing organization.

The River Valley Liberation Organization has the following points of unity that help it remain coherent and ideologically aligned:

Article I. Ideology.

Section 1. The ideology of the RVLO is Decolonial Marxism-Leninism.

Section 2. Marxism-Leninism is a living body of revolutionary theory and method; it is the culmination of revolutionary experience from the whole history of the class struggle.

Section 3. This cell shall take ideological and practical guidance from the relevant experiences and contributions of revolutionaries from every land and region.

Article II. Self-Determination.

Section 1. All peoples have the right to self-determination.

Section 2. This cell shall work toward the universal realization of that right within and without the existing US empire and its junior partners of Canada and Mexico (the US-led bloc), that is, the decolonization of North America, as a precondition for a just society.

Section 3. The anti-colonial and national liberation struggles constitute a special stage of the social revolution.

Section 4. The social revolution includes the liberation and self-emancipation of the Black nation of New Afrika, all pre-columbian Indigenous peoples, and the US Empire’s colonial territories.

Article III. Sex Liberation.

Section 1. This cell shall study a revolutionary materialist feminist theory and work to enumerate and expand it.

Section 2. The materialist feminist theory shall be distinguished from the reformist and unscientific feminist trends by: (i) recognition of gendered oppression as structural and (ii) recognition of the failure of reforms to bring about true emancipation.

Section 3. This cell is committed to depatriarchalization, entailing the full legal emancipation and structural liberation of women, LGBT persons, and gender-variant persons, and all efforts will be taken to ensure this is practiced in the cell organizations.

Section 4. This cell shall vigorously defend the rights of women, LGBT persons, and gender-variant persons within its membership and shall endeavor to make study and work accessible and safe for such persons through a process of internal depatriarchalization.

Article IV. Disability Liberation.

Section 1. This cell agrees that the abolition of disability as a social structure and the liberation of disabled persons is a vital component of the social revolution.

Section 2. This cell shall ensure that disabled comrades and members are included and empowered to participate in all branches of this organization’s work and study.

Towards the Formation of a League

The RVLO is a Member Organization of the All-Empire Worker’s League. By joining the League, the RVLO adopted the League points of unity as well. The League principle allows small local organizations to band together in a form that is more coherent than a coalition, but something less than the militant party-to-be, which must still be formed out of the broadest possible consultation with Communists across the US settler-empire.

We urge all local primary organizations that have compatible points of unity to begin building or joining secondary organizations that allow them to coordinate their efforts and move toward organizational unity. The AEWL is an all-empire secondary organization, collecting and coordinating the efforts of a number of local organizations with the plan of building up the necessary consensus to form the militant party of the (new) new type necessary to confront the settler state.

If you believe your organization is already unified around a line that is compatible with that of the AEWL, we urge you to reach out and begin discussions. If it is not yet unified, we urge you to work on your internal development until you reach unity on these questions.

The AEWL points of unity are:

1. The overthrow and total abolition of the fundamentally illegitimate and irredeemable United States and its junior partner, Canada;
2. Black and Indigenous sovereignty over their respective indigenous homelands and/or rightfully claimed national territories, in forms that will be collectively and democratically decided by each people, nation, and community on its own terms, on the basis of mutual respect for the right of all peoples to self-determination;
3. Partition of any remaining (that is, unclaimed) territories into a centralized union of local socialist states, wherein self-determination for all oppressed peoples, nations, and communities is guaranteed;
4. Reparations in the forms of wealth, land, and labor, to be forcibly extracted from the U.S.-Canadian imperialist and settler bourgeoisie, landed colonial aristocracy, and other exploiting classes, as well as from the colonial police and imperialist military, and justly redistributed to the victims of U.S.-Canadian colonialism and Western capitalist imperialism;
5. A program for structural depatriarchalization, focused on true emancipation for women and LGBTQ+ people; the reorganization of social labor, the labors of production and reproduction, on gender-equal lines; the abolition of all outmoded institutions, industries, and medical, professional, and cultural practices that rely on gendered violence and maintain gendered oppression; justice for all victims and survivors of sexual violence — in short, the beginning of the end of gendered oppression in all its forms;
6. Preparation for humanity’s collective survival of the ecological devastation wrought by modern colonialism and capitalism in the pursuit of worldwide environmental justice through internationalist cooperation and reparations;
7. Abolition of outmoded and inhumane models of “justice,” including modern police, jails and prisons, psychiatric “hospitals,” and other such institutions, to be replaced with models of revolutionary justice;
8. Defense of the revolution, including the ruthless defeat and suppression of all reactionary classes and counter-revolutionary forces, especially the forces of white supremacy, within North America, through an organized and sustained campaign of Red Terror;
9. Internationalism, put into practice by supporting the independent economic development and self-reliance of the world’s underdeveloped countries and regions, by forming comradely alliances with socialist countries, and by supplying aid to revolutionary struggles across the world;
10. The democratically self-determined, cooperative, ecologically sustainable development of socialism in every state that emerges from the total decolonization of the North American continent, planned and administered by the revolutionary Dictatorship of the Oppressed.

Preliminary critique of the work has focused primarily on the erasure of transmisogyny, a particularly glaring omission given the author’s supposed inclusion of “marginalized genders”. This omission, coupled with an essentialist theoretical framework pulled from a radical feminist tradition, lead to the necessity of the piece’s retraction. The Red Clarion seeks to lead the communist movement towards the best path of sexual liberation, which necessitates a dialectical and scientific approach to understanding and combating sexual oppression. The conclusions reached in the article rely on a haphazard array of correlated data that are then assumed to be set phenomena across the breadth of patriarchal societies. The following criticism looks through these major flaws, and opposes the conclusions reached thereafter; as USU struggles towards unified clarity on these vital theoretical positions, we will move towards the publishing of a definitive piece regarding where the movement must take the issues of sexual liberation.

We will first begin with the author’s failure to conduct adequate research on the subject at hand, exemplified by the following passage:

Regardless of if you watch porn, you experience the effects of porn. You are punished by the existence of porn. A study of over four thousand young people in Melbourne found that 59% of men had reported strangling their partner during sex, with 61% of women reporting being strangled, and 78% of trans or gender-diverse individuals experiencing strangulation. Importantly, 61% reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.

This passage mistakes shadow for substance. Sex work is not the base economic relationship from which patriarchal violence emerges, but rather the result of patriarchal economic and social relations that reinforce and reproduce patriarchal relations. In other words, sex work does not create the social exploitation of women, nor lie at its foundation. Sex work is the result of divided labor regime. The scientific study cited by the author directs us to this very same conclusion: “Pornography was the most common avenue by which people reported first hearing about choking during sex (34.8%), followed by discussions with friends (11.5%).”¹ In other words, pornography does not create sexual violence, but rather reinforces it; it is not the cause of sexual violence, but rather its result. Failure to recognize this dialectical relationship that makes sex-divided labor the primary aspect puts us off immediately on the wrong track.

Here we must also make plain a glaring error in our comrade’s citation. The author warns that “61% [of young people in Melbourne participating in the study] reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.” This statement is false. A vast majority (65.2%) of the study’s subjects learned about choking during sex via means other than pornography. This suggests that even if pornography was banned, this ostensibly violent sexual practice would still exist and propagate through other means of social reproduction. With 61% of subjects exposed to but not learning about sexual strangulation via pornography, the study does demonstrate pornography’s role in reinforcing risky sexual practices amongst the general population through repeated exposure. However, with subjects also being exposed to the practice via “…movies (40.3%), friends (31.9%), social media (31.3%), and discussions with potential partners (29.2%),” we cannot give serious credence to the notion that pornography itself is the (or even one of many) progenitor of sexual violence.² At the very least, the failure of the article’s author to catch such a misrepresentation of the study at hand is demonstrative of a methodological sloppiness that cannot be considered Marxist for its lack of an adequately scientific approach to analyzing these social phenomena. The study actually shows that those who “first learned/heard” about strangulation through pornography constitute a mere 34.8% of respondents. The 61.3% number is representative of those who were “ever exposed to strangulation in pornography.” Failing to distinguish these incident rates is a critical error. Despite this sloppiness, our comrade further digs her heels in:

Studies vary on how much of pornography is degrading, verbally and physically, to women and marginalized genders, but as we see rates of strangulation rising, we can rest assured that it is a significant portion. Moreover, a meta-analysis of studies has found that porn consumption is linked with an increased likelihood to commit an act of sexual aggression, even if the pornography was considered non-aggressive.

This passage demonstrates another significant error in the author’s manner of conducting research. When analyzing any phenomenon, particularly social phenomenon where variables cannot be controlled and holistically observed, the correlation of data does not mean there is a relationship of causality. While the research in question does demonstrate that those who consume pornography more frequently “are more likely to hold attitudes conducive to sexual aggression and engage in actual acts of sexual aggression” than those who consume it less frequently, or not at all,³ it does not prove that pornography is the source of these behaviors. Given that not everyone who consumes pornography is sexually aggressive, we can just as easily assume that pornography lends itself to reinforcing pre-developed behaviors.⁴ Only one of these positions lends itself to a Marxist framework of socio-behavioral analysis.

Pornography, just as any tool of bourgeois social reproduction, functions by providing moral licensing for individuals’ self-interested and exploitative behaviors. To argue otherwise would be to deny personal autonomy, and thus, moral responsibility for one’s actions as an individual. People do not enact sexual violence as a result of consuming pornography, nor even because they are raised in a patriarchal society. Every action one takes in committing sexual violence is of their own volition, even if these social phenomenon may prime them to view such behaviors as permissible. Despite her previous claims in the piece, the author demonstrates a clear lack of satisfaction with treating pornography as a systematic tool that “…emboldens preexisting attitudes towards women, towards sexuality.” For our comrade is not interested in dissecting the material base of sex work.⁵ Even one unfamiliar with feminist analysis can pick up on this from the author’s incessant focus on sexual anatomy; she uses the word “cunt” 14 times throughout the work. The author does not define this term beyond its vernacular usage until its sixth appearance in the piece, and then the definition she provides is the following: “Anyone, not just the prostitute, can be penetrated, anyone can be turned into a cunt, anyone can be dehumanized and alienated from their sexuality and their body.”

Given such an apt definition, we can indeed state that nearly everyone within bourgeois society has been turned into a cunt. Proletarian and lumpenprole alike are alienated from their bodies as they expend their brain and muscles to labor for those with capital to spend. Settler-colonial and imperialist societies alienate the masses from their sexuality by using the violence of the state to coerce them into cis-heterosexual social-reproduction, as seen through the violent criminalization of access to birth control, abortions, hormone replacement therapy, mastectomies, gender reassignment surgery, etc.

Rather than developing a theoretical framework that naturally includes all those who are subjected to the violence and exploitation of patriarchal society, the author vulgarizes patriarchal power into a class struggle of the penetrated vs the penetrators. Everyone, no matter their class or social position, is flattened to the supposed power imbued within their sexual behaviors. Even gay men are not free to be men, for “The receiver, the gay man, is therefore reduced to a cunt as well, an object made for penetration and degradation.” In this absurd calculus, one is either an all powerful cis-heterosexual man (the phallus) or the weak and wretched cis-heterosexual woman (the cunt), a theoretical framework so fragile that even a pebble could shatter it into a million pieces.

If “power” is indeed based on one’s relationship to Penetration, then what are we to make of the men penetrated by women?⁶ When presented without reference to social reproduction theory, this argument simply cannot be reconciled with Marxism. Does this simple act truly turn the system of patriarchy on its head, turning men from exploiters to the exploited? This is no idle question. With the study on strangulation reporting approximately 50% of straight male subjects having been strangled during sex,⁷ and if we accept the notion that this supposed sexual “degradation” is an extension of real material power, we can indeed state that, “The war on women has expanded and mutated once more; it’s recruited our fellow women…” For now men must be on the defensive from this supposed wave of woman-led sexual violence! With 60% of lesbians ever being strangled and 54% ever strangling a partner, and bisexual women respectively reporting 80% and 51%,⁸ Cde. Reed’s struggle against sexual domination would have to extend its front to combat this degeneracy amongst sapphic women. In our comrade’s struggle against supposedly anti-social sexual behaviors we must not forget the worst offenders, transgender people, among whom we witness the highest rates of sexual strangulation, 78% and 74% respectively.

Using the framework presented, one could argue that women who strangle men or women who strangle women are adopting the mechanisms of patriarchy for their own benefit; however, the question then would become “why are men overwhelmingly the oppressors, if acting out sexual violence is in-itself sufficient enough to make one an oppressor?” The article’s theory fails to provide any answer to this question.

Had the author given any thought to the conclusions readers would draw from her prescriptive moral stance on such sexual behaviors, she would have read the publicly accessible scientific paper she cited and come to a vastly different conclusion. From this clear negligence we can conclude that our comrade’s goal was not to provide a proper investigation of these systems, but to find data useful in propping up her positions. The framework provided by this article can only function under the bold assumption that every sexual relationship is either patriarchal heterosexuality, or an imitation of it. The author appears to use the high rate of sexual strangulation amongst transgender people as a means to spark readers’ rage against an imagined wave of cis-men strangling poor defenseless transgender women. This assertion completely disregards transgender people’s actual dynamics and conditions as a population. This essentialist framework gets transgender people killed.

Amidst the ongoing war against transgender people, in which transgender people’s presumed sexual behaviors are used to justify mass waves of social violence and murder, a prescriptive framework adds fuel to the fire by proclaiming non-violent and non-coercive sexual acts as inherently oppressive. When transgender people engage in these sexual behaviors, who is being oppressed?⁹ Transgender people are most likely to be in relationships with other transgender people. With studies on sexual orientation demonstrating that only 19% of transgender women, 2% of non-binary people, and 23% of transgender men are reported to be heterosexual in the United States.¹⁰ If we made use of the framework presented, the movement would have no choice but to condemn a majority of transgender people as irredeemable oppressors. Are we to take such an absurd system, that would make an enemy of a hyperexploited population for acts we have no business meddling in, and take it to practice within our movement? Our comrade may take moral opposition to sexual strangulation, but that in-itself is not a basis upon which a Marxist theoretical framework can be built. Such a framework must be based on an analysis of the material conditions at play, not idealist and puritanical notions on proper sexual relations. 

Sexual behaviors are reflections of social and cultural phenomena, but in isolation they tell us very little about contemporary material conditions. We must constantly go deeper. For example, the social root of something such as a leather fetish is likely a result of the materials’ historical use in military and police uniforms, providing the objects a socially constructed aesthetic of power and authority. So what are we to make of its prevalence in gay and lesbian communities? Due to extreme levels of state repression and violence, the social authority imbued within leather provides an outlet for participants to be humanized through symbolic access to authority and/or resistance to it. The fetish provides an emotional outlet for the constant pressure of social restraint. As a reflection of material conditions, sexual behaviors can act as a tool to reinforce exploitative social relationships. With heterosexual relationships requiring a particularly high level of internal analysis of relationship dynamics, given men being socially conditioned to engage in more aggressive and high-risk sexual behaviors. However, power is not determined in the bedroom. Power is determined by one’s relation to property. 

Historically women have been denied the right to property, actively excluded from economic production so as to be coerced into the labor of social reproduction. With the development of class society, the role of women was largely relegated first as an economic and diplomatic asset in their youth, to later be sold into domestic servitude as a wife and mother. It is only recently that western women have gained the “right” to be workers and not the property of men, a concession made in part to constrain the spread of achievements that resulted from the dauntless and bloody struggles of communist women across the globe and in part as a result of capital’s drive to proletarianize everyone — to dissolve all social relations. Despite patriarchal systems losing ground in this age of collapse for the capitalist system,¹¹ women have not yet been liberated from traditional socially reproductive roles, particularly those of marriage and prostitution. These roles have changed in kind with the economic basis of society. The marriage and legalized prostitution of Ancient Greece are far different in their structure than marriage and prostitution within the capitalist age.  

The piece posits that, within bourgeois society, prostitutes make up “… a class that is designed to be difficult to get out of, as a ruined proletariat, and is slated to be accessible to all men. The state may punish different classes of men more commonly than others, but she is still available to all men.” Further, the author denies these workers their position as laborers, arguing that instead of being members of the proletarian or subproletarian classes they are instead ‘public property,’ — hyper-exploited subjects forced into ‘a form of slavery that is distinctly female.’ If these laborers are truly turned into property or commodities to be bought and consumed, then why haven’t sex dolls and sex toys replaced their existence entirely? It is the same reason humans can never fully be replaced by tools or machines in the production process. What is being valued here is not the mere production of a commodity or the provision of a service, but human labor power. This is why prostitutes sell their labor in the form of timeslots, and clarify the kinds of specialized sexual labor they are willing to perform within specified time-frames. When one buys this form of labor they engage in a form of petit-bourgosie labor exploitation, and like any member of this class the buyer seeks to take as much from the laborer as possible for as low as the wages can go. 

Within the article this claim of prostitute as public property is justified by the argument that sex work cannot be comparable to other forms of labor, as “The prostitute is alienated not just from her profits or her work, but from her body and the most intimate parts of her mind” and that “She is often forced to remain in the prostituted class via coercive forces…” Is the woman working 16 hours sewing with docked wages for every mistake not also alienated from “the most intimate parts of her mind”? What of the railway conductors coerced by contract and federal law to be on call 24/7 while working at minimum 12 hours a day? Is not the denial of sleep and a home life alienating one from their own mental wellbeing? When it comes to coercion, what worker cannot claim the same? Many women in the workplace are sexually assaulted but are forced to either stay quiet or risk homelessness and starvation of both themselves and their families. Other workers are coerced into their labor through the seizure of passports or the pointed guns of the police and hired mercenaries. The bourgeoisie will always seek the maximal level of exploitation. When they buy your labor-power, they buy the contractual right to ruin your body, break your mind, and kill you if it’ll make them even a penny more in profit. The only limit to the bourgeois drive to create profit at the expense of the worker is the level of class struggle. The relative conditions of the working classes are a symptom of class struggle.¹² Whether you are a sex worker, manual laborer, service worker, etc. the capitalist system runs on the rule that you are disposable to the bourgeoisie.

But with its blind drive, its bottomless werewolf-hunger for surplus-labor, capital doesn’t merely push past the moral limits of the working day. It does the same with the physical limits, too. Capital usurps the time that the body needs to grow and develop, and also the time for maintaining the body in a healthy condition. It steals the time it takes to get fresh air and sun. It chips away at mealtimes, incorporating them into the production process wherever it can; as a result, food is added to workers as though they were merely so many means of production, or the same way a boiler is fed coal, machines are fed grease and oil, and so on. Sound sleep destroys and refreshes a person’s vital powers, enabling him to build up his strength, but capital reduces it to only as many hours as it takes to revive a totally exhausted organism […] Only one thing interests capital: the maximum amount of labor-power that can be activated in the workday. It achieves this goal by shortening the lives of labor-power’s bearers, just like a greedy farmer gets the most out of the land by rendering it barren.¹³

[…]

So from society’s standpoint, the members of the working class—including when they aren’t participating in the immediate labor process—belong to capital just as much as the dead instruments of labor do. Even their individual consumption is simply an aspect of capital. It is hard for the worker, that instrument of production endowed with consciousness, to simply run away, since it constantly sends his product from his pole to the opposite pole—i.e., capital’s. Individual consumption is the means through which workers maintain and reproduce themselves, but as it occurs, it constantly destroys their means of subsistence, ensuring that they will keep reappearing in the labor markets. The Roman slave was fettered with chains. Invisible ties bind the wage laborer to his owner: he merely seems to be independent. The constant turnover among the worker’s individual wage masters and the fictio juris of his contract keep this semblance in place. 

In the past, capital enacted compulsory laws whenever it felt that it had to assert its proprietary rights over free workers. Until 1815, for example, it was illegal for England’s machine workers to emigrate, and people committed this crime at their peril, since the penalties it carried were severe.¹⁴

If sex work does not constitute a special super-class, then how do we as communists position ourselves against this particular form of exploitation? To answer this we must first understand the socio-economic nature of prostitution. Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent feminist within the CPSU, provided a clear analysis on the subject: “Prostitution arose with the first states as the inevitable shadow of the official institution of marriage, which was designed to preserve the rights of private property and to guarantee property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs.” Further outlining its emergence within the capitalist age:

The sale of women’s labor, which is closely and inseparably connected with the sale of the female body, steadily increases, leading to a situation where the respected wife of a worker, and not just the abandoned and ‘dishonoured’ girl, joins the ranks of the prostitutes: a mother for the sake of her children, or a young girl like Sonya Marmeladova for the sake of her family. This is the horror and hopelessness that results from the exploitation of labor by capital. When a woman’s wages are insufficient to keep her alive, the sale of favors seems a possible subsidiary occupation. The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path.

Prostitution is a form of socially reproductive labor. Just as maids are hired to clean houses, nannies to raise children, and nurses to care for the old, prostitutes are hired to satisfy personal needs without the buyer being obligated to provide for the care of the worker until the grave. Prostitutes are domestic laborers. If they are in a waged relation which is exploited for profit, they are proletarian. If they are not, they are nevertheless subproletarian, as those excluded from social production.¹⁵ The nature of their work, that of socially reproductive labor, does not alter their basic relation of production.

It is here that class divisions make themselves the most evident. A white cis woman is far more likely to gain access to legal, or at least institutionally protected forms, of sexual labor than a Black and/or trans woman. With white supremacy and cis normativity further providing enough class mobility to allow her escape into the membership of the labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois classes. This was the purpose of western nations’ struggle against so-called “white slavery” in the early 20th century. White slavery was a nationalistic tool used to secure white womanhood from the exploitation of lumpen and proletarian sexual labor. It was never about protecting women from sexual labor, it was rather a “common fixation on protecting the purity of white womanhood, constituting an image of white women’s precarity that was only tangentially connected to the realities of women’s lives.”¹⁶ Reed’s reintroduction of the term is yet another example of her gender reductionist framework, which excludes all other forms of class, national, and disabled oppression. By systematically denying nationally oppressed, transgender, and disabled people from the benefits and wages of the upper classes, the necessity of survival coerces them to flood the market of sexual labor. The resulting reduction of wages and working conditions, alongside a crackdown on legal sexual labor, pushed members of privileged social classes from the streets and into domestic servitude as wives and mothers.

The consumption of sexual labor, particularly in the form of pornography, is so widespread in society that even moral condemnation will do nothing but harm the most marginal of sexual laborers. Laws seeking to limit public access to “sexually explicit materials” have been used to actively suppress access to resources for sexual education, birth control, and transition related medical care.¹⁷

While we could dive further in this historical and materialist analysis of sex work, the breadth of the theory’s deviation from Marxist analysis should now be abundantly clear. Despite her condemnation of liberal feminists for flattening the experiences of sex workers, the author actively chose to disregard the autonomy and humanity of sex workers so that their idealized forms could serve as a prop for her radical feminist analysis. By using the theoretical framework of Andrea Dworkin, a zionist and arguably transmisogynistic theorist,¹⁸ to position men as a cabal seeking the sexual slavery of all women (i.e., people of penetration), the author — in one masterful stroke — both eschews class analysis and creates a false solidarity with sex workers by flattening their varied conditions into one of a universal metaphysical precarity.  Instead of seriously studying the scientific nature of these classes and the material conditions that bring them about so we might properly dedicate ourselves to uprooting these systems of oppression, we are instead given a world that has been wholly abstracted into a totalizing struggle between “men” and women. 

In its conclusion, the piece proclaims that “Our war is not against sex workers but against johns, sex buyers, and consumers of pornography.” This statement serves no theoretical purpose. We can make whatever proclamations we like, but what matters is the rhetoric behind them. The rhetoric of the piece gives ample justifications to the reader for hunting down these progenitors of patriarchal violence while at the same time excusing class collaboration between women (penetrated, the subjects of violence) of all classes:

These commodified individuals are surviving under patriarchy, under capitalism, and under oppressive forces. Until they engage in traitorous behaviors such as, but not limited to; promoting an OnlyFans referral code to 18 year olds to make money off of their content, dressing in children’s clothing, dressing in ways that contribute to the sexual violence minority women and those in the global south face, and/or glamorizing the industry, they are our comrades in the struggle.

This supposed “marxist feminism” tails the utopian organizational strategy of anarchists and radical feminists, wherein the supposed abolition of the state, or relationships with men, will instantly bring about heaven on earth where power and patriarchy are no more. We have only to unite all sex-workers (except those that promote OnlyFans referral codes to 18 year olds, dress in children’s clothing, dress in ways that contribute to sexual violence, and/or glamorize the industry of course) with all women! This super-class of sex-workers-and-women will then… well, what? Rather than building a serious strategy to bring about socialism, these adventurous radicals seek moral salvation by cleansing the world in a purifying flood. As Anuradha Ghandy writes: 

To assert that gender based division of labor is the basis of women’s oppression rather than class still begs the question. If we do not find some social, material reasons for the inequality we are forced into accepting the argument that men have an innate drive for power and domination. Such an argument is self-defeating because it means there is no point in struggling for equality. It can never be realized.

The liberation of prostitutes – and of all those from whom domestic labor is forcibly extracted – comes from the organization of their numbers into a body capable of battling their oppression and all work toward that organization, not from the repeated imprecations to divide the world into sexual abusers and the sexually abused. As Marxists it is our duty to organize, to bring together those who have an interest in fighting for total liberation. The patriarchal state is surely our enemy, as is the concept of masculinity itself insofar as it stands for the theft of labor, but we must be ever wary of the liberalizing drive to universalize victimhood and create a universal victimizer. No matter how strenuously the piece demands the reader to understand that “cunt” is shorthand for being raped, that does not make it so, nor does it make the central division along which society is divided into the raped and the rapists.

1. Sharman, Leah S., Robin Fitzgerald, and Heather Douglas. 2025. “Prevalence of Sexual Strangulation/Choking Among Australian 18–35 Year-Olds.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 54 (2): 465–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y.  Pg. 470. ︎
2. Ibidem. ︎
3. Wright, Paul J., Robert S. Tokunaga, and Ashley Kraus. 2016. “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies: Pornography and Sexual Aggression.” Journal of Communication 66 (1): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12201.
   Pg. 201. ︎
4. The correlation between the consumption of pornography and sexual violence lies in the dehumanizing of the sexual laborers. Even if the viewer were to construct subjectivity for the participants, one that they must construct themselves, as pornography commodifies the alienated images of these workers as they perform sexual labor. The consumer of pornography is a beneficiary of the patriarchal violence that produces this commodity as it only exists for consumption as a byproduct of systematic patriarchal violence. ︎
5. “For the cultural feminists, heterosexuality is about male domination and female subordination and so it sets the stage for pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, and woman-battering…. In their understanding of material conditions, they have taken the physical fact of reproduction and women’s biological role as the central point for their analysis and concluded that this is the main reason for women’s oppression…. Reproduction means both the reproduction of the person on a day to day basis and the reproduction of the human species. But in fact, reproduction of the species is something humans share with the animal kingdom. That could not be the basis for women’s oppression. For in all the thousands of years that people lived in the first stages of human existence, women were not subordinated to men.” Ghandy, Anarhuda, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, 54-5. ︎
6. Obviously, the Marxist analysis is that all real power is founded somewhere in property relations, and that other forms of power are all ultimately mediated property relations. ︎
7. Sharman, et al. Pg. 472 ︎
8. Ibid., Pgs. 472-473. ︎
9. On a case by case basis, it is, of course, possible for transgender people to reproduce patriarchal oppression. Domestic abuse is one form this takes. However, this is far from as simple a proposition as the mechanical oppressor/oppressed relation presented by the article at hand. Indeed, is it not possible that the penetrator in a relationship can be abused? Is it not possible that the penetrating partner can change from one to the other? ︎
10. James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. 2016. “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.” National Center for Transgender Equality. https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf. Pg. 59 ︎
11. Marx makes note of this phenomenon in Capital, that the family loses its material foundation in the capitalist age as children become the collective property of bourgeois society and women are a constant reserve army of labor ever ready to replace men in the workplace. It is through latter socialist social revolutions that women’s liberation has since unfolded. ︎
12. This struggle can itself be enervating to class consciousness, as is the case in the imperialist centers where class struggle has produced not revolution, but an entrenched labor aristocracy. ︎
13. Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press, pgs. 235-236. ︎
14. Id. at 528. ︎
15. In a waged relation, a prostitute is paid a wage by an employer, who keeps the amount that is paid for the sex work. In a slave or semi-slave relation, the prostitute is essentially kept in bondage to a pimp or madam, and receives instead whatever goods they need directly from their keeper, rather than a wage. Those thrust into illegal positions are excluded from legal production. We here incorporate slave and semi-slave relations as subproletarian, for in the age of “free” labor, these are all classes that must sell their labor-power. ︎
16. Harris, Leslie J. “Conclusion.” In The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity, 149–60. Michigan State University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.14321/jj.2990357.11. ︎
17. These and related “internet safety” politics have a long history of particularly targeting transgender and queer people, making both digital and physical spaces more dangerous for these communities. This is a result of queerness and transness being ideologically labeled as sexually explicit, or otherwise as a harmful social disease (Brooke and Turner, 2025; Kayyali & Mithani, 2025). Lawmakers in the UK have sought to expand such existing laws to further require websites to keep track of users sex assigned at birth, a tool that will be used to heavily monitor and further suppress the transgender population in the country if it comes to pass (Santi, 2025). 
    Kayyali, Dia, and Jasmine Mithani. 2025. “Age Verification Is Locking Trans People out of the Internet.” Tech Policy Press. December 8, 2025. https://www.techpolicy.press/age-verification-is-locking-trans-people-out-of-the-internet/.
    Santi, Mariano. 2025. “Data Bill: First They Came for Trans People.” Open Rights Group. 2025. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/.
    Tanner, Brooke, and Nicol Turner Lee. 2025. “Children’s Online Safety Laws Are Failing LGBTQ+ Youth.” Brookings. July 9, 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/childrens-online-safety-laws-are-failing-lgbtq-youth/.
    https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/  ︎
18. Dworkin actively proclaimed women’s struggle for liberation as resembling the struggle of the Zionists for a state in which they could finally find safety from the hoards seeking their death and sexual violation. (Lewis, 2025). Her early theoretical positions on the subjects of transsexuality and criticism of bioessentialism — despite holding a contradictory stance that “One might argue for a liberalization of sex-based roles, but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.” (Dworkin, 1974, pg. 175) — has left a wide range of room for an ongoing ideological struggle on whether Dworkin would be supportive of trans liberation today. In Woman Hating Dworkin stated “it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by faulty socialization. More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society.” and “…transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency (see p. 185) as a transsexual.” (Ibid., 186). With her short term solution to this so-called emergency being that “…every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.” (Ibid., 187), with the end goal being the construction of an androgynous human community that would bring transsexuality to an end by subsuming it into “…new modes of sexual identity and behavior.” (Ibid., 188). Dworkin later gave considerable praise to and actively promoted Transsexual Empire, a violently transphobic work which targeted transition related medical care, and specific transgender women who were subsequently harassed by Janice Raymond’s followers out of public life. While later expressing her distaste of the work’s treatment of transgender people in a personal letter to Raymond (Duberman, 2020, Pg. 161), her lack of public retraction has allowed figures such as Raymond to continually lay claim to Dworkin as an essential figure in the theoretical framework of modern Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (Janice, 2021, pp. 41-47). 
    Duberman, Martin B. 2020. Andrea Dworkin : The Feminist as Revolutionary. New York: The New Press.
    Lewis, Sophia. “Are Women Weak Jews? On Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism.” Spectre Journal.  May 27th 2025. https://spectrejournal.com/are-women-weak-jews/
    Raymond, Janice. 2021. Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. ︎

Class politics, unlike liberal politics, do not function as popularity contests or efforts to mobilize already existing sentiments. In a liberal political contest, the ruling class puts up two potential politicians. Each of these potential politicians represent some interest of a subgroup of the ruling class, but are acceptable to a large portion of that class.

Liberals only consult the masses insofar as both factions try to temporarily mobilize some parts of the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie with the limited aim of getting the most paper votes for “their guy.” The ruling class does not want the masses to be constant participants in the political life of the country. Participation might lead the masses to develop an independent base of political strength, act independently of the bourgeois parties, and pursue their own interests, which would be at odds with the interests of the ruling class.¹

The liberal approach is typified by “door knocking,” “phone banking,” and fund raising. It does not raise consciousness, but is an attempt to elevate the involvement of petty bourgeois individuals in elections. Communists, who intend to undermine and destroy the orderly functioning of the capitalist state, should be involved in no part of that.

How do we interact with the masses? First, we have to know the most urgently felt needs of the people. Then, we have to use our knowledge of political economy, organizational theory, and historical materialism to fashion an answer for those needs. This answer must link the immediate need with the broader need for social revolution. Then, we have to return to the people and present them this answer and explain why it is the necessary step.

Step One: Social Investigation

It is not possible to bring about the social revolution by shouting at the people or demanding that they revolt. We have to share in the life of the people, connect with the people, and unify with them. Yelling slogans at the people and haranguing them into action is the kind of relationship most often assumed by the political lackeys of the ruling class to the masses. This is how liberal politicians behave: they pick an issue that they are interested in and then they shout their demands at some part of the working class and urge them to action by voting, pledging, or even turning out for mass photo opportunities. In this type of relationship, the masses are fundamentally passive. They are objects, not subjects. They are tools in the liberal political relationship, being wielded by the liberal politician.

For Communists, the masses are never tools. We do not cynically make use of the sleeping power of the working class. We are educators, and we must educate the masses so we can serve as their instrument. For Communists, the militant party is objectified, not the masses. The party becomes the weapon by which the working class strikes at its enemy; the working class is not the weapon by which the party strikes.

How do we make sure we do not allow this liberal relationship to creep into our relations with the masses?

Our best tool to accomplish this is the social investigation. We know already, through study and experience, that the answer to whatever problem the masses bring to us is rooted in the reorganization of society and the economy, the demolition of the capitalist system, and the end of the parasitic ruling classes’ exploitation of the global working classes. Ultimately, we aim to pave the way to the abolition of  exploitation of one person by another. Social investigation is the tool we use to identify the most immediate problems so we can bring this understanding to the masses.

Social investigation is not the same as mobilization. When we conduct a social investigation, we do so in the following way:

1. Gain the trust and confidence of the community. This can be done through service to the community (such as Red Aid).
2. Discuss things with individual community members. Ask them what their most pressing concerns are. Have them confide their issues. Keep detailed notes.
3. Collate your notes with all those taken by other social investigators in your unit. Identify commonalities and attempt to uncover the sharpest contradiction represented by the answers you receive.
4. Identify the underlying causes that generate the common concern. Conduct a class analysis of the situation. Devise a solution which is in step with the organizational program: one that does not rely on working with the capitalist state, that undermines faith in the state if possible, and that encourages the community to organize (that is, to form councils, hold meetings, and continue to have discussions).

Step Two: Propaganda

Connecting the outrages of the capitalist state and the ruling class with the concerns of the masses and stressing the necessity of complete social revolution is the work of propaganda. For every five minutes we speak of solutions, we must spend twenty-five minutes speaking of revolution. There are numerous tools to help the working class achieve this awareness, including:

• Community meetings;
• Posters;
• Pamphlets;
• One on one conversations;
• and mass meetings.

The mass meeting is the most powerful tool of revolutionary propaganda we can call on today. Mass meetings are large-scale community meetings; Communist organizers inform the community of their intent to hold a meeting to address the problem that was identified through the social investigation. This includes weeks of broadcasting the existence of the meeting to the community (“Come and meet with us on X time at Y place, we’re going to be talking about what we can do about Z”). 

When a mass meeting begins, the organization first frames the discussion by telling the crowd why they have gathered; information is used from the social investigation and repeated to the crowd (“Such and such number of people lost their homes in the last six months,” etc.). Once the issue is framed, the organization asks individuals from the crowd to come and speak on the question, to testify if they have the same problems that the organization has identified.

If things start to get out of control, or mass meeting members inject reactionary statements or politics, it’s up to the organizers to convince the mass meeting that these people are confused about the sources of their problems, and then to bring the meeting back on track.

Once the testimonies have gotten the meeting agitated and in agreement, the organization should then present its plan for how to combat the problem. Organizers should explain clearly how the plan strikes not only at the problem itself, but at its root – and how the problem is caused by the current manner in which society is organized.

This is how we connect meaningfully with the masses and drive them to the subjective awareness of their existence as a class.

The Meeting

Mass meetings require that your organization take certain preparatory steps to run them effectively. We recently published an article, “The Mass Meeting,” that addresses some of these requirements in some detail (as well as laying out how the mass meeting is the present vehicle of developing the Communist movement). Here, we will address logistical concerns around holding mass meetings.

Firstly, a space must be secured. This can be an outdoor location, a church basement, a meeting hall, a local union hall; anywhere that can host a large number of people. Your organization must have at least three cadre-level members and a total of at least five reliable people it can count on to effectively run such a meeting.

It is helpful to offer resources for those who are attending. Even something as simple as coffee and snacks can help bring workers in, but full meal services, wage assistance, or legal aid are all good options. This helps to transform the mass meeting from an event into a place in which the organization can continue to meet with the masses and deepen roots.

A sound system, platform, stage, or speaking rostrum can be very helpful. Your most outward-facing cadre-level member, who has a high combined development in both public speaking and theoretical advancement, should run the meeting by addressing individuals, soliciting their problems, and reframing them in a Marxist-Leninist fashion. This person should be directly accompanied by one other cadre-level member to help control the rostrum, stage, sound system, or what-have-you.

Three other members (at least) should be stationed around the crowd to help break up or mediate disputes and eject open reactionaries from the meeting. If there is food service, there should be at least three members dedicated to running a food and drinks table. Lastly, at least one of the cadre members of the organization should be taking detailed notes of the meeting. If the meeting reaches a higher degree of organization and appears to be on the verge of developing into a standing organ of working-class power, minutes should be taken.

1. Members of the petty bourgeoisie tend to be more politically active. This class is the mass basis for settler fascism that undergirds the entire US regime, and thus landowning petty-bourgeois professionals generally do see their participation in elections and politics as “beneficial” for their class (the lowering of capital gains taxes, inroads on some progressive issues, etc.). However, the revolutionary masses (the working classes, the lower ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, etc.) are not participants in political life. They do not hold office, they do not attend city council meetings, they do not, by and large, vote in local or federal elections, and generally consider the affairs of politicians to have little impact on their day to day lives — and they are correct in that assumption. They have been politically disenfranchised through the two party system. ︎

The labor union, prior to the entry of the US-bloc into the capitalist-imperialist competition at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, served as the “school” of collective worker action in Europe. It was never so in the US, because the US capitalists simply sent restive workers westward to conduct the continental equivalent of European imperialism but amongst Indigenous peoples. The early 19th century unions were illegal, confrontational, and engaged in direct battle with the bourgeoisie and their capitalist states. Although the western countries reeled from this conflict, they were able to manage the contradiction by doling out the rewards of imperialist exploitation. In Europe this manifested as social democracy; in the US, it took the form of Indigenous genocide and the internal Black colony. By the beginning of the 20th century, it was increasingly in the form of the creation of a “white” (Euro-Amerikan, as opposed to the earlier Anglo-Protestant) national project.

By this time, labor unions had become instruments, not of working class power, but of labor discipline. Unions were legalized and given a stake and a share in the US imperialist project. In this way, the unions were “housebroken” and the mass of the labor aristocracy was broadened just as the frontiers were closed and entry into the petty bourgeois homesteader class was restricted. Failure to recognize this fact (which is obvious to anyone who bothers to investigate for even a moment; see, for instance, the rates of equity held by US workers in real property — the average home equity held in the US is $300,000 — has driven many would-be Communists directly into the arms of reaction.

But what were the features of the labor union that made it a school of communism?

1. Workers were organized and developed experience organizing and running meetings, coming to collective decisions, and exerting power.
2. Collective grievances were compared and conclusions could be collectively drawn as to their source — the contradiction between workers and owners.
3. It was a venue through which the advanced elements and conscious Communist could draw intermediate elements and develop their class consciousness by propagandizing, not only the abstract, but around specific conditions affecting those particular workers.
4. It was directly antagonistic to the continued existence of the bourgeoisie and their state, at least until it was captured.

Present-day labor unions do not possess any of these features. Meetings are pro forma affairs, ill attended, and run by bureaucrats. The unions themselves are managed by professional union hustlers whose job security depends on their capacity to (1) deliver beneficial contracts, (2) come to an agreement with management, and (3) not break any laws, like the ones making it illegal to advocate for revolutionary consciousness or suggest a strike unless the union contract is up.

There is, however, an organ of working class power that possesses these features: the Communist-led mass meeting.

What is a Mass Meeting?

A mass meeting is a gathering of people in one place where they are led by the meeting’s organizers to debate and decide on issues that affect them. The character of the meeting will be determined by, in the first instance, the class character of those in attendance and, in the second instance, by the class standing of the meeting’s leaders. We can think of this as, (1) the potential character of the meeting and, (2) as the direction of change or realization of that character.

A single mass meeting occurs over a period between forty minutes to several hours and is a one-time event. There’s no guarantee that it will develop into a standing organ of working class power, but this question depends on whether the organizers have taken care to answer several underlying issues which will be explained below.

There must be advanced preparation. First, it is important to identify the locality from which the meeting’s attendants are to be drawn. This is ideally an urban working class neighborhood with a high number of nationally oppressed workers and a low rate of real property ownership. This is the mass base of our organizing efforts, and focusing on these areas will ensure a good attendance as well as both a receptive class composition at the meeting and increase the likelihood that anyone drawn into the organization as a result of the meeting will have a revolutionary class standing.

Next, efforts must be made to identify the most pressing concerns affecting the community in question. This is traditionally done by conducting a social investigation. During a social investigation, the organizers go into the community and have detailed conversations with residents and workers. The organizers must keep good notes and direct the topics of conversation into the following areas: (1) the biggest problems the interviewees face on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis; (2) the interviewees’ views on local political figures and bastions of state and civil authority (police, relief workers, religious institutions, local politicians, big politicians, etc.); (3) avenues of relief that are available for community members like local shelters, food pantries, etc.; (4) other local conditions that are particular to that area.

Then, the organizers must analyze the data they’ve gathered. It’s not enough to understand what people say on a surface level. To stop there would be to engage in workerist tailism. The data must be subjected to Marxist analysis, and problems must be understood not only in their surface manifestations, but also in the fundamental contradictions that are causing the problems identified in the reports and investigations. The sharpest contradictions responsible must be sought. The organizers must make explicit the links between these problems, the contradictions that underlie them, and the general tasks of the social revolution in the US bloc: national liberation, sex liberation, and proletarian internationalism. The organizers must have a firm grasp on decolonial, antipatriarchal, Marxist theory in order to avoid the reactionary-opportunist pitfalls that will present themselves.

This analysis is the same kind that’s done when an organization performs other general propaganda work. It is the linking of a particular grievance to the general capitalist system, as embodied concretely in the state and civil society, in such a way as to orient toward proletarian internationalism and a revolutionary outlook.

Once this analysis has been performed and an organizational “line” has been developed which connects the most acute problems of the area with the necessity for organized, antagonistic class action, the necessity to overthrow the bourgeoisie through revolution, the necessity for supporting or attaining national self-determination for the oppressed nations, of national-suicide for the oppressor nation, anti-patriarchal action, etc. — once this has been done, the organization must begin a campaign of mass agitation. A date, time, and place must be set for the mass meeting. Flyers and handbills must be drawn up and copied. Members of the organization must go into the community, armed with this material, and hang posters, have conversations, and hand out literature. The call should be clear: This is the problem; here are its causes; come to a mass meeting to decide (or learn) how to combat it.

If the investigative and analytical stages are carried out correctly, the agitational stage is sufficient, and the date and time are selected with careful attention to the general availability of the masses in the area, then the meeting should be successful. That is not to say that the first few calls for a meeting may not be unattended or sparsely attended. This is not only because of the errors an inexperienced organization is likely to make on their first or early attempts, but also because the organization will not be known and will not yet have currency among the masses.
It is worth noting that the Soviets and councils of the successful Communist revolutions were essentially mass meetings that took on standing form. Indeed, Indigenous nations have been holding mass meetings as the primary method of political engagement for centuries. (See, for instance, Kathleen Duval’s Native Nations: A Millenium in North America, for a survey of Indigenous practices. Random House, 2024). 

What Do You Need?

First and foremost, in order to run a mass meeting you must be organized, that is, you must be a member of a Marxist-Leninist cell that has a defined membership in which labor duties are required of members, has regular and consistent meetings and keeps records, and has written internal rules that govern its structure and actions. Without an organization, it’s impossible to direct a mass meeting effectively or to elevate a mass meeting from a one-time event into a mass organization capable of embodying the will of the working class, which is the ultimate goal.

Your organization must have a sufficient number of real, actually-working members to carry out not only the preparatory tasks, but also to run the actual meeting. We have found that five dedicated cadre-level members is an appropriate benchmark. Each of these five members should be capable of mass work, trained in historical materialist analysis, able to conduct searching social investigations and keep detailed notes, perform analysis on the fly, and have training managing a crowd.

You will also need at least rudimentary graphic design and printing capabilities to prepare the flyers and literature. Your organization will require the use of a large space, whether indoors or out-, to hold the meeting and should secure at least a simple PA system — a megaphone with a detachable mic will suffice. Preferably, all organizers should be able to dress in a manner that marks them out as members of your organization, whether it is a single article of clothing or a shared color. This will allow them to stand out at the meeting and help manage it.

Running the Meeting

It is wise to formally open the meeting by announcing that it’s beginning and asking the attendees to gather around the speaker. Ideally, the speaker will be elevated above the rest of the crowd for visibility and there will be room for at least one other person to stand up there with them.

A short speech is a good way to open the meeting. This should lay out the main topic, any critical ancillary topics, and connect the issue to the imperialist state and the oppressor bourgeoisie. This is a good time to begin getting the crowd involved. Simple questions that can be easily answered (even with just a “yes!” or “no!”) will prime the listeners for engagement and signal that this meeting won’t be a passive affair.

Once the stage is set, the meeting leader should ask the crowd if anyone present has experienced the issue which is the subject of the meeting. If the organizers recognize anyone in attendance who has a particularly good and demonstrative experience, it  can help to call that person to speak first. From this point, tactics will diverge depending on what the organizers intend to do with the meeting. If the goal is just to use the meeting to propagandize, generally elevate class consciousness, test the organizer’s own organization, and make connections with the masses, then the meeting can be comprised almost entirely of calling individuals up to the PA system to speak about their experiences while the meeting leader interposes questions, clarifications, and reframes the issues in a Marxist lens. Once the crowd has been sufficiently propagandized and exhibits a high degree of energy, the meeting leader can deliver a short closing speech to summarize what was said, to draw a broad connection to the capitalist state, to identify the ruling class as the collective enemy, and to stress the need for organization. The meeting leader should propose further meetings and discussions and clearly articulate what organization entails. These somewhat restrained aims are a good target for an organization’s first mass meeting, and may help it develop internal rigor.

That being said, the organizers should never attempt to restrain or repress the organically-occurring maturation of the masses. If the attendees want to engage in debate, discussion, adopt an organizational form, or even settle on concrete steps that can be taken to begin addressing the problem presented, they must not be delayed or put off. The organizers must be ready to capture the energy and foster any kernel of consciousness with real suggestions and real action. This should not turn into a run-away meeting in which the attendees decide to go to war with the state immediately, but neither should the organizers offer platitudes. Real steps may be required.

To that end, it would be wise for the organizers to become familiar with rules of procedure for running mass meetings as an organizational form. These may be home-made, but the latest edition of Robert’s Rules of Order contains good rules for a mass-meeting form that can help an organization run a meeting, maintain a good flow of conversation, and ensure that decisions are made collectively.

The Meeting is Not the End

The most important thing to impart is that the first meeting is only the beginning of organizing. If the organizers wish to push further with their meeting and the mood of the attendees permits it, they should call for a debate on action, set further meeting dates and times, and even consider calling for volunteer officers to serve as an interim executive committee to carry out decisions adopted by the meeting. This body of officers should hopefully contain a mix of the organizers and attendees, and should be subject to elections at the soonest possible opportunity (generally the next scheduled mass meeting).

The organizers should also urge attendees to join any public-facing political education classes they offer. Indeed, this is an excellent opportunity to urge attendees to assist in or join any of the organizers’ other initiatives: Red Aid, community self-defense, etc.

The critical thing is to continue holding meetings, to develop the attendees, and to drive struggle to an ever higher degree. The more meetings are held, the more the class consciousness in the area will be fostered. It is important to ensure that this consciousness does not develop in a reactionary direction, which is why the organizers must be well trained in the most advanced decolonial theory. Armed with the advanced theory and the energy of the masses, the mass meeting is the chief organ of class power available to us at this time.

This most recent scandal again demonstrates the inseparability of the structures of organizing we have criticized in the past from the perpetuation of chauvinism and abuse. As we have written about in the USU Prospectus, it is the top-down structure of major organizations like the CPUSA, PSL, RCI, and FRSO that engender the sort of anti-democratization and stagnant leadership that permit abuses like this to evade accountability to membership. We will offer criticism of that particular structure, and our feedback for what principled communists within and outside FRSO can do to prevent it. 

Following the exposure of a large Marxist organization for systematic permittance, compliance, and covering up of abuses, there is always a sense of hopelessness among conscious members and supporters of the exposed org. Many equate loss of trust in a particular organization with loss of hope in the movement for communism itself. To understand this, we must understand the reasons people overwhelmingly seek out larger organizations to subordinate themselves to, rather than forming their own groups from the ground up. These reasons are:

1. Political Underdevelopment: An individual new to Marxism assumes that an insufficient understanding of core principles and history will make any attempts at group formation, primarily through their own direction, careless or ineffectual.
2. Social Isolation: An individual who feels too socially isolated to begin the formation of a group — they do not have, or are not aware of, proximate access to other unorganized Marxists, and/or do not know where to begin to draw in the revolutionary masses. 
3. Fear of Redundancy: An individual who feels that to start from scratch in organization-building is wasted effort when a suitable organization of principled Marxists already exists within accessible distance. 

Political Underdevelopment

It is precisely the organized pursuit of Marxist understanding that laid the foundation for the emergence of nearly every successful socialist revolution throughout the world (Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, to name only a few). Therefore, if the underdeveloped comrade finds themselves unsure of where to begin, we cannot stress the importance of the study group enough. To study while the world burns is not to waste time, it is the only way to ensure we successfully douse the flames. 

To quote the USU handbook The Study Group:

Therefore, it is no idle fancy that we suggest the study group — the reading circle — as the focus of local work. The study group has historically been the way in which socialists educate themselves and each other. This is the methodology of early socialist development. We must consider ourselves to be in such a phase. We do not suggest the study group because it is simple or because it is the topic which we chose from a hat, but because it is a foundational type of primary Communist organization.

In fact, it is the overemphasis on “action,” before and above theory that will ensure precious time and energy be wasted, yet again. We often see the argument that, “Well, since the dialectic is practice-theory-practice, a group and its members must engage in practice first every single time, then study the results and modify next actions.” But this confuses our place within history; we wander the cramped halls of a library of failures, shelves stocked to burst with recorded practice.¹ What is the history of the Marxist movement in North America, if not the history of wheels spinning in place? This is not to suggest that there has never been progress, but those that did advance the struggle did so as far as they were able and willing to scientifically understand the conditions their actions existed within. 

Social Isolation

For the Marxist that is hesitant to undertake the building of a new Marxist organization due to isolation from other like-minded people in their community, we recommend the following (summarized from the relevant portions of the aforementioned Study Group handbook). First, investigate local conditions to determine demographics and needs. This will inform what the study group will initially set out to study and who in the local area will be most likely to be interested in revolutionary work. After this initial investigation, identify if there are any trustworthy individual Marxists nearby to assist in the formation of an Organizing Committee to adopt basic rules for the emerging organization and plan the first steps in putting it into motion. Whether an Organizing Committee is successfully assembled or the individual Marxist still finds themself operating on their own, they can proceed to the next step which is spreading the word of the study group through fliering or other outreach. We have seen the most success when the fliering advertises a specific text that will be read at a specific time and place, and that there is no expectation of having been familiar with it before the scheduled date.

If, however, the individual Marxist is not able to identify trustworthy individual Marxists nearby, nor engage in much of the on-the-ground investigation and spreading the word that the recommended tactics advise, we recommend getting involved in whatever local organizing is available for the purpose of identifying potential comrades to organize with separately in the creation of the study group. The individual should be wary of the ideological underpinnings of most local organizing, and keep in mind that the most vital work any individual Marxist can engage in is identifying others suitable for the creation of Marxist organizations. It is not the subordination of Marxists to local activism.

Fear of Redundancy

Fear of redundancy when considering building a new organization is, on its own, a valid concern. However, in understanding that it is valid, we must then ask, is the concern well-founded, is it sound? Let us assume, first, that it is. It is true that if you have a principled group of organized Marxists down the street, around the block, within a short bus trip or a bike ride away, then to attempt to build from scratch a new organization of Marxists to address the same community’s needs, to study the revolutionary science, or to otherwise advance the struggle, may be entirely redundant. Even in the cases of an existing organization formed to address a particular purpose (e.g. Red Aid, group study, community defense, etc.) that do not address a particular need an individual would like to organize around, it is in most cases best for that individual or group of individuals to make contact with the local organization and discuss the possibility of joining and forming a branch or committee to the organization that addresses the issue. This has the benefit of additional funding through dues, a preexisting and tested bylaws structure, and the input and labor of more people.

The alternative, more common case, is that through social media or word of mouth, the individual locates an organization of self-proclaimed Marxists, who identify with the same general tendency of the individual, Marxism-Leninism. The individual decides to contact the organization, which seems more than ready to receive and induct them into membership. The individual takes to the work with a sincere drive and passion. Likely, they become regarded by their fellow members as reliable and trustworthy. Principled. 

Then, weeks, months, years later, it happens. Maybe it happens all at once: the individual witnesses, or discovers, or experiences intra-org abuse. Maybe, at first, it’s a subtler, gnawing doubt: a confusing newsletter from leadership that vaguely gestures at some sort of conflict the membership must not allow themselves to be swayed by; the removal of a district organizer with no explanation due to “concerns of privacy”; a series of dead links to organizing cells that no longer exist, discussion of its members heavily discouraged. The more openly the individual confronts these moments of disconnect, these organizational hauntings, the more the individual realizes the organization has begun to shift and squirm around them. The individual’s reputation as trustworthy spoils, now other members seem nervous talking to them; their reputation as principled is outright questioned — “You’re behaving like a wrecker.” The secondary realization will not come easy, that the abuse is not some isolated tumor, but every muscle fiber and bone of the organization. It’s a nightmare, to push for a new life for everyone, only to find you’ve become embedded in a corpse. 

This is the reality of organizations like FRSO, RCI, and PSL. The members satisfied with working in a faux-radical reformist group stay, follow the rules (regardless of how these change based on leadership’s whims), and, understanding that their satisfaction with gradual change and improved conditions for the labor aristocracy is mirrored in the organization, remain unquestioningly loyal to it. Why wouldn’t they? As patriotic settlers and flag-worshipping elites show us, people become fiercely defensive of the structure serving their interests. For this loyalty, they are rewarded with advancement, leadership, maybe even the highest honor of all: full-time employment as a revisionist, maybe even with a corner office. The FRSO whistleblowers say this plainly (emphasis ours):

Each time leadership protects an alleged abuser, those who see the problem clearly either leave or leadership pushes them out, while those who can rationalize the decision remain. Over successive incidents, the organization becomes composed of people who have demonstrated willingness to defend leadership’s protection of alleged abusers. Leadership advances from this filtered pool.

Chrisley Carpio² and Michela Martinazzi³ were present for the Tampa and Gainesville incidents, and defended Dustin⁴ both times. Jared Hamil⁵ was the Tampa District Organizer in 2014. Fern⁶ was the DO of Gainesville in 2013 and Jacksonville in 2016. Sol Marquez⁷ defended Dustin in Tampa. They’ve all since been promoted to national leadership positions in FRSO.

Meanwhile, the members who are most desperate for real sweeping change, no matter how bitter the struggle, the most ready to be revolutionary, are resigned to the rank-and-file. These dedicated comrades are usually the most committed, initially, to the communicated “cause” of the organization. Usually nationally oppressed, disabled, queer, and/or trans, these members give their blood to the organization. It is useful to emphasize the ways in which the “multi-national working class” line that organizations like FRSO hold, and that we have criticized, helps to facilitate an opportunist position not just externally, but internally as well, as we now see clearly. It is by this line that opportunists can lecture members about how it is the advocacy against chauvinism and abuse which disrupts the “solidarity” and “stability” of this supposed multi-national working class. Real determining factors such as settler-colonialism and imperial superwages are flattened for the sake of a model that prizes false unity and not shaking the boat. Sometimes, in spite of being surrounded by this rhetoric, members try to struggle within the organization, like they were told to again and again, only to be stonewalled, silenced, disciplined, and gaslit. The system serves its purpose and crushes all attempts at real revolutionary struggle. Afterwards, these comrades are isolated entirely, betrayed, and often left too burnt out to pick the banner up again. Both leadership and the capitalist state are satisfied by this outcome. Leadership gets to continue its maintenance of a structure purged of genuine communists who may threaten business as usual, and the state eagerly pats them on the back for demobilizing these radicals. Is it any wonder these organizations have persisted in their current form for so many decades?

These organizations always set themselves up as the true inheritors of the future, in contradistinction to the tiny microsect or local study group.  This is how they market themselves — it is the only way they can justify their own drawn out existence. They say, “Well, what else are you going to do? Start a tiny group of three people that claims it represents the masses?” the same way  the Democratic Party defends its position saying “What are you going to do? Run as an independent?”. It is the same logic painted red and yellow. The rhetoric of the reformist clouds the horizon. This is repeated ad nauseum within these organizations and then repeated by members to people outside the group. Even when the principled communists flee these sinking ships in disgust still ready and willing to organize, too often does this toxic idea stick to them, signaling the sequel: the communist goes looking for another “big” org. 

It is crucial we do everything in our power to ensure this doesn’t happen. The choice is not between languishing in bloated reformist NGOs or isolated in some puny microsect for all time. This is a false binary. The true path forward is what has worked for most socialist revolutions around the world. The party of the people is not born from some downtown office that directs the formation of new cells like a chain restaurant establishing franchises. Rather, it is precisely the tiny, local group of principled communists that shifts history, step by step, until a leap and bound, to the party of the people. To summarize the portion on this in the USU Prospectus⁸: the correct path begins with the formation of the local organization, uniquely adapted to local conditions and able to establish roots among the local masses in a way these franchise organizations are incapable of. The local organization then reaches out to other primary groups of principled communists regionally and then around the country in order to collaborate, coordinate, and struggle in a process that eventually enables the establishment of real organizational unity. 

These local organizations are not subordinated to a tiny sect filtered through several vetting processes to remove any trace of real revolutionary consciousness. They democratically determine their own representatives to the second-order organizations they form to coordinate and reproduce their unity. It is through this initially, vitally horizontal process that a greater set of bylaws are written and ratified, a set of practices and standards. Through a series of conferences these local organizations eventually form the party-to-be. 

This is how the vanguard party emerges, not in the backwards manner that the CPUSA, PSL, and FRSO have undertaken. This top-down schematic followed by the chauvinist organizations is the correct blueprint only if your design is a weapon wielded against the people. We, however, wish to help the revolutionary masses build a great cannon to obliterate chauvinistic violence forever. The All-Empire Worker’s League has begun this process. 

Looking Forward

We commend the efforts of our comrades to lay out a plan for agitation and exodus of members from FRSO. As challenging as it may be, it is often far more important that the most principled communists, with the capacity to do so without risking burnout, remain within the exposed organization. Not for anything so foolhardy as to “change the system from within” (you cannot negotiate with the snake from the pit of its stomach), but to agitate and heighten the struggle to a fever pitch from within. As they do this, these communists must seek out sympathetic comrades within who take these abuses seriously but remain unsure for the reasons above. Each rallying cry for justice will peel back the rotting mask of democracy from the revisionist’s face; the skull of reaction will be grinning, sharp, and naked. 

The strategy of agitating around an attempt to seize the structure and body of the organization from its center may be useful in winning over the sympathetic comrades mentioned above, still in the grip of the apparent hopelessness of organizing outside the vast structure FRSO operates. But just as the authors of the exposé recognize, this goal will never be achieved. It is like a radical program that “demands” the United States government liquidate its military. This is a goal of the radical movement, but it is not something that will ever be given, only seized. However, just as part of that recognition is seeing that the settler-bourgeois state machinery will be smashed and replaced with a new structure to defend the revolution of the oppressed, the agitators in FRSO must see the structure of FRSO not as something to be taken and used, but something to be left in the dustbin of history. It is not an organizational system useful to those of us who demand revolution, it is a multi-level-marketing scheme with a beret. 

It is the people you will find while raising hell that will be invaluable to you. You must link arms with the most solid, passionate comrades you can find and only jump ship when you have enough hands to commandeer the lifeboats. Treat the chaos of this scandal as a proving ground for the most trustworthy and audacious communists. When you find your people, we have some resources to help you get started. Just as we were honored to offer our feedback and labor to the reporters of this abuse, we eagerly await your input, curiosity, and fire; not just as members of Unity–Struggle–Unity, but as part of the All-Empire Worker’s League. Meet us, organized and principled, and be treated as you are, as you’ve proven yourself to be: comrades.

Contact the USU Editorial Board here.

Contact the All-Empire Worker’s League here.

Footnotes

1. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Marx. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852. ︎
2.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO, leader of the FRSO Student Commission, and president of National Students for a Democratic Society.” (Copied from source.) ︎
3.  “Member of the Central Committee, current District Organizer of FRSO New York.” Ibid. ︎
4.  “FRSO member who was accused of sexual assault in Gainesville, Tampa, and Jacksonville and protected by FRSO leadership. Left FRSO in 2018.” Ibid. ︎
5.  “Leader of Labor Commission” Ibid. ︎
6.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO. DO of Gainesville when FRSO protected Dustin Ponder in 2013. DO of Jacksonville in 2016.” Ibid. ︎
7.  “Leadership of Legalization 4 All and FRSO Chicano/Latino Commission.” Ibid. ︎
8.  Worth highlighting is the subsection of our Prospectus on FRSO specifically. Written years ago, before our criticisms of them for settler chauvinism and these most recent revelations, and thus offering them more good faith than it turns out they deserved, the section still holds up in diagnosing the issue of structure that produces FRSO’s moribund theory and practice: “FRSO recognizes in theory that primary organizations must be built. However, despite claiming that they are a pre-party formation and not a party, they operate like a party-in-miniature, with congresses, a Central Committee, and central decision-making. The efforts of local FRSO organizers are directed at creating primary organizations — the local is being directed by the center. This reverses the necessary stages of growth of the Party.” ︎

The existing countrywide formations that claim to represent some form of proletarian class-power (in whatever embryonic state) are hopelessly compromised. It has been one of the major labors of Unity–Struggle–Unity Press to investigate each of these organizations to determine the theoretical rigor, organizational design, and strength of principle. Since the foundation of this Press in 2022, we have investigated and determined that each of the major “Marxist-Leninist” groups — PSL, FRSO, CPUSA — suffer not only from fatally anti-democratic structures, but also from terminal and fundamental errors of theory that cannot be corrected because of the entrenched leadership and opportunism or chauvinism that still reigns in each formation. We have witnessed CPUSA’s disastrous embrace of social fascism at and after its last “convention” and the expulsion of the pro-democracy clubs, precisely as we predicted, and following the very same pattern laid out by the CP Canada a year earlier during their bankrupt “convention.” Indeed, by analyzing the conditions of CPUSA and CP Canada, we were able to warn that the CPUSA would repeat the errors of CP Canada and the result would be the same: that is what occurred.

Last year, we published a pamphlet (“Towards a New York City League of Workers and Students”) in which we established an analytical framework and plan for local organizing in a major U.S. city. This pamphlet applies the same methodology to the city of Boston.

It is necessary for the working class to possess a weapon to confront the ruling class. It is necessary for the working masses in the U.S.-Canadian bloc to be educated (and to educate themselves) on the duty of internationalism and to chart a path not toward the aggrandizement of their current positions, but towards the destruction of the imperialist state itself, in order to bring about not only the liberation of the oppressed masses of the Global South, but to secure its own liberation. It is necessary to strike at the chains the workers of the imperial centers have helped forge and to draw them away from the side of their “own” bourgeoisie.

The formation of this weapon of class-power is already under way. League-type organizations have been formed in several cities and localities in the U.S. This Press has been continuously reaching out to existing local Marxist-Leninist organizations in an effort to knit them together, to realize the completion of that weapon. The fact remains, however, that the number of existing organizations that are prepared to adopt a sufficiently (decolonial) Marxist-Leninist program is still too low. More organizations must still be formed. The advanced ranks of the working classes must be united with the most advanced theory. In order to overcome our numerical deficiency and the theoretical deficiency of the currently arch-chauvinistic movement, we urge the formation of advanced study groups in the major cities of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

We urge our readers to begin by reading our pieces on organization: “Organize!”, “What is Organizing?”, The Study Group, and “Towards a New York League of Workers and Students.” The purpose of the study group is not to simply remain a study group, but to gather who can be gathered and set the right foot forward in formation.

Why the City?

Marxist parties and modern socialism are the products of the cities. Even in semi-feudal or semi-colonial countries, the parties that eventually won the countryside were formed in the cities. Advanced workers are naturally to be found in greater concentration in the urban areas. This is where advanced industry, even in the “late capitalist” United States, is to be found.

The reasons for the primacy of the cities at this stage are many:

1. The living, working, and transportation accommodations of cities are social, as opposed to individual. Apartment buildings encourage the mingling of interests as well as social groups. Public transportation throws together all manner of people, but mostly working ones. Public spaces provide the opportunity to meet, interact, and spread ideas and literature. This is in sharp contrast to the atomization-by-design suffered in the suburbs where each “family” is cabined off from the other.
2. The absolute numbers of people living in urban areas mean there are more advanced workers overall available for organizing. When bystanders are drawn into the struggle by our actions in the cities, more of them are involved incidentally (and thus radicalized) than in rural areas.
3. Communication and meetings are both easier in areas with strong internal linkages — public transportation and public meeting places.
4. The supply lines of cities are narrower and more tenuous, easier to disrupt. Cities represent “nerve centers” of capitalist enterprises. Therefore, organized action in cities also benefits from a force multiplier as it can more easily affect larger numbers of capitalist organizations.
5. Politics are more “concentrated” and it is therefore easier both to exert leverage on politicians by means of class power where they live in the midst of the people or in places easily accessible by the people, and it is easier for local organizations to seize local political power. The degree by which workers outnumber the ruling class is heightened in cities where more workers are concentrated.
6. As the masses increase in size in an urban area, the state repressive machinery cannot keep pace. For instance, in 2022 Boston had 301.3 police officers per 100,000 residents, as comparable to the average for cities in the Northeast under 10,000 people (300 per 100,000). Because of the additional influence and power of large groups of people, this represents a force far less capable than that in small and medium-sized cities.

Class Analysis of the Boston Metro Area

The total population of the metropolitan area of Boston is roughly 4.9 million people. Of that, some 250,000-350,000 people are students in attendance to one of the 50+ schools of higher education in the region. The absolute population of students is higher than many mid-sized U.S. cities!

However, we must be cautious about the class-character of Boston as a whole. It is overwhelmingly petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic. This necessitates concrete considerations as to which professions to begin to organize in and around, which localities are necessary to organize, etc.

Here it becomes critically important to examine the question of national oppression: In 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reported that median net worth for white households in the metro area was $250,000, while Black households held a median net worth of $8.

There are, therefore, two routes toward establishing the primary organizations required to build a league in Boston. Both avenues should be pursued simultaneously by different groups, with the decision of which avenue to be dictated primarily by the differing access of the involved organizations to different communities, resources, and tools. Essentially, organizing must start among the proletarian/sub-proletarian populations and the petty bourgeois population and work toward unification into the league-form.

Boston Metro Is Over One-Third Petty Bourgeois

Taking data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wages reports, we can quickly see that the predominant minority of productive relations in Boston are petty bourgeois. There are, for instance, 276,210 management workers (8 of which are actually bourgeois CEOS), 234,750 business and finance workers, 136,640 technical workers in computers and mathematics, 64,870 architects and engineers, 64,140 scientists, 26,730 petty bourgeois legal workers, 40,070 media workers, 184,560 healthcare practitioners, and several thousand post-secondary teachers.¹ The total number of petty bourgeois occupations is around 1,023,528, which comprises 36% of the 2,794,300 members of the Boston metro labor force.

The petty bourgeoisie must be organized not along wage struggles, workplace improvements, etc., but rather along their progressive ideological lines. As we know, the petty bourgeoisie are a vacillating class; they are sometimes progressive, sometimes regressive, as befits their position between the waged workers and the ruling class. In order to organize them as a class, we must be attentive to the positions they have that are progressive; by focusing on these and directing their energy to ever-escalating struggle in that arena, it opens an opportunity to introduce political education into their midst. While we cannot expect the majority of the class to shed their petty bourgeois ideologies, there are benefits to the radicalization and education of even a minority, as this class has access to resources (both material resources and social connections) that would otherwise be denied a Communist league.

Most of the students in the Boston metro area are also from petty bourgeois households, and the temporary nature of being a student means that even when they are not from petty bourgeois extraction, they have a tendency to adopt a petty bourgeois outlook. Thus, student organizations should consider themselves to be part of this class-stratum and address their political development and strategies accordingly.

Those groups organizing among the Boston petty bourgeoisie must identify the most pressing progressive issues that confront that class or into which that class is willing to get involved. This will likely include confrontation with the federal government over the withdrawal of imperialist superprofits in the form of school funding, attacks on cherished liberal institutions, reproductive health, childcare support, etc., as well as LGBTQ+ defense and forms of anti-ICE defense. We should be striving to organize them along lines of national and gender solidarity: 1) nationally oppressed community defense, 2) ICE defense, and 3) defense of transgender people (and the sex-oppressed, to fight against the encroachment of patriarchal reaction). These defense organizations would be the most progressive and most liberatory of all possible lines the petty bourgeoisie can be drawn into.

By drawing the progressive petty bourgeoisie into illegal and anti-governmental actions, the mental deadlock that surrounds their inability to conceive of radical social revolution will be broken up. When they no longer trust the institutions of class-governance, they will become amenable to political education on the abolition of class society itself. This doesn’t, of course, mean that they should be immediately integrated without proper proletarian education!

Once a strong, proletarian core of organizations has been founded to provide itself as the anchor of a Communist league, those organizations that are primarily petty bourgeois or which are primarily organizing and drawing on the petty bourgeois class can effectively act in support of the proletarian interests in the area to relieve the immediate hardships affecting nationally oppressed workers and the lower strata of the proletariat, which include the presence of capitalist police in their communities, food and housing instability, etc.

Who are the Proletarians?

To determine where the revolutionary proletarian line falls, we first take those who are employed in proletarian (waged) labor and then compare the present income of that labor against the superprofits redistributed to U.S. workers by weighing it against the global median income. The global median yearly income is around $18,000 per household.²

We must then calculate the value of socialized services that are currently private and paid for out of wages in the Boston metro area: rent, healthcare, food, transportation, utilities, and childcare. These are…

Boston metro rent: $42,336/year

Healthcare: $18,000/year³

Food: conservatively, $9,000/year⁴

Transportation: $13,575⁵

Utilities: $1,560

Childcare: $22,000⁶

The total costs of these services, which would be provided by a socialized government and proletarian class-dictatorship, is $106,471. Even if the median Boston household income of $78,000 were reduced to the global average of $18,000 (a $60,000 loss), the median income proletarian in Boston would still gain $46,471 worth of services and socialized guarantees if the regime of private property were overthrown tomorrow.

This means that greater than half of all proletarian workers in healthcare support (184,000 total), food preparation (212,080 total), grounds and buildings maintenance (78,720 total), sales (216,980 total), administrative support (299,890 total), production (101,830 total) and transportation of materials industries (166,340 total) are in the strata of the immediately revolutionary proletariat.

Even if only 1% of those above workers were able to be mobilized, that would represent some 12,500 workers, a sizable revolutionary force.

Obviously, this is somewhat complicated by the ownership of substantial real property (a house or apartment) or other investment capital. Those proletarians who own real property must be generally excluded from the revolutionary strata and considered to be labor aristocrats, as they will obviously stand to lose that real property in the near term of any revolutionary movement.

The rate of homeownership in the entire metro area is only 35%. There are variations within the city, the highest area being West Roxbury (63.6%), the lowest Fenway/Kenmore (8.6%).⁷ The eight regions of the metro area with the lowest homeownership rates are Fenway/Kenmore, Allston/Brighton (21%), Roxbury (33%), Central (27%), East Boston (27.5%), the South End (33%), Back Bay (33.8%), Jamaica Plain (34.9%), and Mattapan (35.5%). According to the 2023 U.S. census data, Fenway/Kenmore has a median household income of $59,612, Allston/Brighton has $74,672, Roxbury $52,364, East Boston $92,079, South End $90,142, Back Bay $118,367, Jamaica Plain, $130,533, and Mattapan $50,946.⁸ It should come as no surprise that the nationally oppressed New Afrikan population in the Boston metro area is highest in Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester.

Organizing is highly encouraged in the Fenway, Allston, Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester areas. Oppressed national groups should be organized into fighting formations by Marxist-Leninists and made capable of ejecting bourgeois state agents, particularly police, from their communities. At the same time, organizations must be established by workplace in all areas where the contradictions are sharpest for the working class. These must be geared toward an eventual all-out confrontation with the forces of capital on the economic front (production, transportation).

Billionaires in their Midst

Of the class of big imperialists, 24 live in the Boston metro area. These include Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity, Robert Kraft, CEO of the Kraft Group, Jim Davis, owner and chair of New Balance, John Henry, owner of the Fenway Sports Group (married to the CEO of the Boston Globe) and Stephane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna. There are 27,000 millionaires living in the metro area, cheek to jowl with the working classes of oppressed nations that support their extravagant and wasteful lifestyles.

This means that mobilization against the ruling class can begin inside the metro area itself.

The Noose Is Being Fashioned

We have seen the continuous expansion and increase of local police departments on the ground over the past 25 years. In June of 2000, local U.S. police departments had 565,915 employees, including 441,000 officers.⁹ As of 2024, there are now 808,700 local police across the country.¹⁰ That is nearly a two-fold expansion of local police officers alone. There were 17,654 officers employed by INS in 2000, 10,820 employed by Customs, and 11,523 employed by the FBI.¹¹ In 2020, there were 66,215 Homeland Security officers (which absorbed INS and Customs) and 13,575 FBI agents.¹² There is no question: the local and federal police state is being expanded. Now, it is increasing with ever-growing speed. The proliferation of the Homeland Security “fusion centers” (see the Clarion article, “State of Control”), as well as “cop cities,” is accompanied by ever-expanding budgets for police departments to outfit themselves as soldiers ($65.7 billion in 2000, $176 billion in 2024).¹³ Now, the White House is federalizing National Guard units and deploying them to occupy U.S. cities — presently in the District of Columbia, and soon to be deployed in Chicago.

We must realistically consider whether the old planter ideology of racists like Thomas Jefferson (the “peaceful” extermination of Black slaves to remove the threat of rebellion), most recently reclaimed by open fascists and white nationalists (beginning with Charles Manson, but continuing with The Turner Diaries, SIEGE, etc.) has been adopted by the leading clique of the ruling class. These expansions of the police and their integration into a country-wide network and the federal armed forces are the opening moves of the complete liquidation of the oppressed and colonized nations. The Euro-American nation will operate the U.S. empire as an overseer herrenvolk state; an acknowledgement that the nationally oppressed constitute an internal threat to capitalist order.

The fact that this system is being assembled without significant opposition from any of the ruling class “progressives” or “centrists” (including the entire roster of Democrats and Independents) suggests that all elements of the ruling class are at least passively onboard with this project, and we should expect no relief from that quarter. This makes it all the more pressing to organize Communist groups that can, and will, combat it. Only with conscious elements in the lead can we ensure that Euro-American workers are broken away from “their own” bourgeoisie, the leading imperialists.

The urgent tasks of Communists are, with respect to the white “great” national workers (the national-oppresser, Euro-American proletariat), to break their dependence on the captured unions and to set them at odds with the big bourgeoisie, to instill consciousness of internationalism and national solidarity with the internal colonies and semi-colonies. With respect to the nationally oppressed and colonized people within the U.S., the task is to establish self-defense units and organizations capable of uniting into a leading party that will strike back at the state and its operatives.

There is presently an opportunity to do just that in Boston; to create local organizations that can unify into a metro-wide league, capable of acting in concert and preparing the way for the unification of all local leagues into a Decolonial Marxist-Leninist party.

1.  According to the 2023 survey by the BLS.
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2.  World Population Review, calculated at roughly $9,000 per individual.
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3.  Calculated per capita at $9,097 according to researchers at JAMA. “Tracking U.S. Health Care Spending by Health Condition and County,” Joseph L. Dieleman, Meera Beauchamp, Sawyer W. Crosby, et al. (Feb. 14, 2025).
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4.  According to the USDA.
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5.  Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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6.  Per child, according to a LendingTree study.
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7.  All homeownership rates taken from the City of Boston, Research Division and Planning Department, “Boston by the Numbers: Housing,” 2013.
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8.  According to U.S. census data collected during the 2023 American Community Survey.
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9.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Local Police Departments 2000.” 
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10.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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11.  Bureau of Justice Statistics “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2000,” (Jul. 1, 2001).
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12.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2020 – Statistical Tables,” (Sept. 29, 2023).
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13.  U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Government current expenditures: State and local: Public order and safety: Police,” retrieved from FRED 9/2/25.
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