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.

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.
   ︎
2.  World Population Review, calculated at roughly $9,000 per individual.
   ︎
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).
   ︎
4.  According to the USDA.
   ︎
5.  Bureau of Labor Statistics.
   ︎
6.  Per child, according to a LendingTree study.
   ︎
7.  All homeownership rates taken from the City of Boston, Research Division and Planning Department, “Boston by the Numbers: Housing,” 2013.
   ︎
8.  According to U.S. census data collected during the 2023 American Community Survey.
   ︎
9.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Local Police Departments 2000.” 
   ︎
10.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    ︎
11.  Bureau of Justice Statistics “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2000,” (Jul. 1, 2001).
    ︎
12.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2020 – Statistical Tables,” (Sept. 29, 2023).
    ︎
13.  U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Government current expenditures: State and local: Public order and safety: Police,” retrieved from FRED 9/2/25.
    ︎

Introduction

Digital communication dominates much of Communist organizing. With the advent of easy access to modes of communication such as email, web forums, social media platforms, and SMS & RCS messaging, organizers have shifted a large part of their information sharing channels to digital means. Many organizations eschew in person meetings all together in favor of audio or video calls. This shift has followed a broader cultural trend with little criticism from socialist and Communist formations. Criticisms that have been shared generally stem from the anarchist sections of the national movement and are not taken as seriously by the Marxist sections.

The predominance of digital communication, specifically the forms of the group chat and the video call, has changed how organizers relate to each other and the conditions of the struggle. In many ways, these new forms of relating to each other have allowed for incredible connections between organized Communists and the masses. 

Services such as the Internet Archive, the Marxist Internet Archive, and many independent publications make the entire history of revolutionary literature easily and freely accessible. As one comrade puts it, “Marx wanted to read a book in French, so he bought French language copies of his favorite books and translated them word for word. All we have to do is find a pdf!” A wide range of podcasts, blogs, newsletters, and social media posts continue to proliferate Communist ideas. Apps like Zoom, Jitsi, and more allow organizations to hold education events such as study groups with attendees from around the state, country, or even the world. However, these connections have led to scant material organization. Many Communists communicate digitally, but do not relate to each other primarily as comrades. They produce Communist media and meet when possible, but do not develop materially powerful Communist organizations. Despite the commonly touted mass character of social media it has not proved very effective for bringing the masses together to fight for proletarian interests, nor for bringing organized Communists into materially consolidated formation. In fact, undisciplined argumentation carried out on social media has played a major role in the fracturing of the Communist movement in Amerika. Much of this digital arguing has been carried out in the name of struggle, without interrogation of class character of the digital programs by which the communication is taking place. 

Over time a reliance on digital means to communicate has formed. The causes of this reliance have been explored at length, but the effect on Communist organizing created by it has yet to be deeply interrogated. The predominance of digital communication is both a product of the physical social fracturing of Amerikan workers, while also now being a factor in prolonging the stagnation of the movement. Dependence primarily on group chats and Zoom meetings to facilitate organization generally results in an ineffective primary organization, as the physical presence requisite for developing political power among the proletariat simply does not exist. In the context of creating Communist revolution, this physical presence must be understood as the basic factor of material organization. The organized far-right is developing survival programs in the regions outside major cities and towns, and their power is not derived from digital communication networks. As Phil A. Neel says in Hinterland, 

“By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups [as the Oath Keepers] become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions. In fact, Kilcullen points out that in such situations (epitomized by all-out civil war), support for one faction or another simply does not follow ideology. People don’t throw their weight behind those they agree with, and often many in a population can’t be said to have any deep-seated ideological commitment in the first place. Instead, support follows strength, and ideology follows support.”

We, the organized Communist movement in Amerika, do not currently have the power to combat these fascist forces. We must begin developing a material political base through material connections with the proletarian masses, and we must develop our primary organizations on material bases, lest they fall into the liberal trap of perpetually seeking influence rather than power. We must learn from the errors of the Young Hegelians and seek not just to work in the world of slogans, in the world of media, but in the world of the material.

Secondary to such inefficacy, some philosophical and linguistic contradictions arise. When fostering material relationships between comrades becomes secondary to maintaining digital relationships, material is deprioritized. Idealism is a belief system that is constantly being socially reinforced. We must steer the masses towards materialism, while studying the philosophy and constantly attempting to rid our organizations of Idealist conceptions. There is a uniquely digital idealist obfuscation of the difference between material reality and virtual reality. This foggy distinction has been wholesale accepted by Amerikan society. We must push back against this obfuscation, and make clear that organizations facilitated primarily through digital means are not materially Communist in the sense that said relationships will not develop forces towards proletarian interests. 

A major factor in the development of the obfuscation between these two distinct forms of relating to one another is the language with which the technology was/is still advertised with. Many terms used historically to describe the material world were adapted metaphorically to describe the “landscape” of the “digital space”. This language was presented to the proletariat by the bourgeoisie through advertising media. The rhetoric of this advertising was subsequently adopted on a mass scale by the Amerikan public. This language, and the rhetoric it’s based in, is simply inaccurate in describing the forms with which we communicate, and how that communication determines our relation to one another. If we as Communists seek to create lasting and effective organizations capable of working intra-formationally then we must understand how we communicate, how our communication fails, and how we primarily relate to our comrades. Do you relate to the other members of your organization primarily through digital means, or do you sit next to them? Can revolution be made by comrades who do not work next to each other? These questions are not insignificant, as we have seen many flimsy structures predicated on digital communication crumble in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings. For instance, many of the mutual aid organizations established during 2020 and 2021 have been unable to maintain structural formation, and the BLM movement has all but vanished.

Predominance

We on the left seem largely incapable of coming together physically. Facilitating even the smallest political organization is not a convenient task, least of all for those proletarians attempting to do so. With a labor force more socially fractured than ever it is exorbitantly difficult to facilitate spending time with one’s loved ones, much less dedicated political cadre. The immediate nature of SMS messaging makes it a very useful tool for proletarian life. Members of an organization who work one or more jobs will have trouble scheduling routine meetings in person. A group chat allows for many disparate people to communicate simultaneously without the hassle of a schedule being necessary. 

However, we have another option. The most advanced elements can consciously dedicate more time and more labor to the movement as it develops. We can drive to each other’s houses, we can organize within our community, we can perform effective fractional work among preexisting material organizations of the masses. Immigrant support groups, mutual aid groups, student study and action groups, anti-apartheid groups, Latino/trans/disabled civil rights groups, etc are where the intermediate and advanced elements of the masses are currently located. The intermediate elements are those people that show potential for being developed into organized Communists, while the advanced sections are already Communists, and going to them in person to listen to them is possible. They tend to be scattered, usually alone in their political understanding, but sometimes with small groups of like-minded Communist-sympathetic workers. We, the organized advanced elements, can organize centralized study groups that consolidate these intermediate and advanced elements from different backgrounds and develop them further, both practically and ideologically, into pre-party formations and eventual party cells. These material tasks are more inconvenient, but the convenience of digital communication comes at the price of heavy limitation and operational vulnerability.

Operational Security

It is vital to remember that these digital communication forms are owned by capitalists. Communists should treat every communication using capitalist owned technology as if it can be seen by the running dogs of the bourgeoisie. This is not to say technology such as Zoom or Signal shouldn’t be used, but that it is imperative we be conscious of who owns and controls the channels with which we communicate. These services are designed to collect data about the way we use them, about our habits, our relationships, the way we text each other, the way our faces move when we speak. The Israeli Offense Force has been (not so) secretly using digital facial recognition technology for at least a decade. The IOF trains Amerikan police and intelligence operators. This sharing of technology and tactics that led to the mass sharing of itemized data measuring the activity of human life has given the bourgeois and its lackeys a large vista of knowledge already. We should not continue giving our enemies information about us.

Speaking with comrades in a room presents far less inherent security vulnerabilities than texting them, as cell phones can be turned off or put in separate rooms. Physical presence also reinforces the sense of collective belonging that is so rare in contemporary Amerika. Such a belonging is, for many, a necessary prerequisite for constructive struggle. Quoting again from Hinterland, Neel writes,

“Since this material community of capitalism unifies only through a wide-ranging alienation that forces all individuals into dependence on its own impersonal infrastructure, the emergence of new, intensive communal practices are a recurring threat. All unity that is not the unity-in-separation offered by the mechanisms of the economy poses at least some level of risk, since such spaces offer the germinal potential of a dual, communal power capable of seizing and repurposing this infrastructure to truly human ends.”

The Social Phenomenon of Disability

While group chats and video calls can be very helpful for ensuring our disabled comrades can engage in organization, it must be asked what we are really saying when those comrades are constantly relegated to being represented by pixels on a screen. If we truly care about enabling everyone in our communities to organize we must first make it possible for them to come at all.

Predominant capitalist infrastructure does currently make disabled comrades less capable of materially engaging with the movement the same way capitalist infrastructure makes disabled comrades less able to materially engage with all of their surroundings. That is what disability is. We should recognize it and start establishing transportation networks and physical communication networks to actually allow everyone to engage materially, rather than accepting measly capitalist reforms that are insufficient for our task.

We must develop organizations with the material capacity to require able bodied members to lend their time and labor to those members experiencing disability. Seeking to change each individual member’s mind on whether or not they want to pick up the comrade that can’t walk nor drive ignores the organization’s responsibility to create structures that incentivize certain social behaviors over others. Having the organizational capacity to discipline members that don’t share in the labor of transporting comrades experiencing limited mobility ensures able bodied comrades will materially engage (albeit, lightly) in the struggle to end disability as a social phenomenon. As more comrades of all abilities are able to attend they will bring more accurate sense data to meetings, and the social-productive basis of disability will be laid bare.

Practical Issues

Within a Communist formation struggle is the necessary type of communication with which collective correctness is reached. Without the proper communication channel to conduct struggle an organization will fail to develop political positions or programs, as well as fail to mediate disagreements between comrades. In organizations that overly rely on digital communication the failure of struggle stems from the fact that the primary mode of relating member to member is incomplete. 

In many ways developments in digital communication have heightened the efficacy of certain aspects of pre-digital mediums, however the general understanding of engagement with physical mediums such as written/printed words on paper, or more specifically speaking to someone face to face are not idealized in the way the understanding of engagement with digital mediums tends to be. A group of people writing letters to each other would not call themselves a Marxist organization, nor a cadre. However the error is made with digital communication. It is thought that because we see the text, images, videos, audio, profile pictures, etc of these other disparate Communists we are in organization with them. The truth is Communist organization must be material, and its social basis must be material. Texting and video calls are not a material basis sufficient for struggle in the Communist movement.

The nuances of human communication extend beyond the capacity for photons to accurately represent. Approximations such as emojis or a raise-hand button fail to accurately replicate their respective real world counterparts. In group chats, frenzied influxes of messages are difficult to parse, as well as generally unfocused. Nuggets of truth are ignored, as is any message deemed unimportant or simply drowned out. Synthesizing new ideas from the hodgepodge of takes and quips, generally produced by Zoom calls and group chats, requires an immense amount of personal labor and organizational form. Such organizational form and labor capacity is usually lacking in organizations over-reliant on digital communication.

Here we see that labor capacity and organizational form are in vital need of development, as well as an understanding of the way these two aspects relate to what respective form of communication is primary. Often failures to develop these two crucial aspects are blamed on a lack of discipline practiced by its members. It is thought that if only comrades could use digital communication in a disciplined manner, then the organization would develop. However, as Communists we must recognize that general individual adherence to discipline is a direct outcome of an organization’s ability to promote and develop discipline. For example, take an instance from my own organizing experience in 2021. In a now defunct organization, the primary channels of communication were a series of group chats. More than seven respective group chats existed, their purposes not being worthy of note as they were never fulfilled. The only programs of activity were sporadic Zoom meetings. Decisions were chosen by vote of thumbs up emoji. Eventually the central committee decided to address the issue of organizational stagnation. This came after a vote was called in the general body group chat. Of twenty-six members only six voted. Had the vote been called at an in person meeting the issue of abstention could have been identified and struggled over. In such a case the struggle would take place within conditions conducive to development, as all members would be present and engaged at the same time. The group chat form does not allow for assurance that all members are engaged nor even present and is incomplete as a primary mode of relating comrade to comrade.

One way for a Communist formation to assure presence, engagement, and conditions favorable to development is to meet routinely in person. Routine meetings ensure allotted time to the necessary facilitation of a formation. Audio or video calls can suffice, but they are not ideal due to the nuances of communication obscured by the technological limitations discussed prior. An added effect of routine meetings is the reinforcement of organizational discipline. Through the struggle of facilitating in person meetings we learn valuable organizing skills, and practice fundamental aspects of discipline such as comradely communication and punctuality. In such a physically disconnected time for many people in Amerika simple socializing is largely in need of practice. We must actively teach ourselves collective social responsibility, starting consciously with those revolutionaries close to us.

Routine, in person meeting itself is not sufficient for the purposes of a Communist organization. Such a standing meeting acts as a material basis for struggle, but that basis must be struggled on to develop the organization. Unity must be assured through struggle over various topics consistently, lest false unity develop into a destructive force. 

For example, I was a member of a study org that met in person biweekly to study and conduct a business meeting. It went well, until a split occurred over the basis of the group being primarily friendly rather than on Marxist principles and a unity of purpose. This study organization had formed out of the liquidation of a former org that was based primarily in a series of group chats. Coming out of the first org we recognized the necessity of a material social basis. Coming out of the second study org we recognized the necessity of assuring unity. The primary factor that made the difference in establishing a social basis for proper, disciplined struggle capable of assuring unity in our now third form is the material nature of meeting routinely in person. 

Philosophical Issues

Aside from the practical issues, over reliance on digital communication can illuminate certain philosophical and linguistic issues. One such issue is the misconception that physical presence and communicating via digital media can be described as equally materially in the context of Communist organizing.

Communicating digitally and in person meetings are different in one key way: one is media, the other is not. Media represents the material world, and media exists in the material world, but a picture of a pipe cannot be said to materially be a pipe. One cannot smoke out of a picture of a pipe. As Communists we seek to work and struggle in the material world, not just the representations of it. Images produced by visual technology and the humans they represent are not the same. In person there is no bandwidth limit, there is no lag, there is no edge of the frame, there is no disparity in microphone quality. In person there are full, human people to relate to materially, to form organizations with. When these two real things are confused for each other, important distinctions between identity, speech patterns, and presentation crumble. 

Take, for instance, the lifespan of a working group for a now defunct organization I worked with. The primary mode of relation of the group was a weekly in person study session. Some members attended an International Working Women’s Day event which sparked discussion and education on the topic. A distinctly proletarian feminist philosophy was burgeoning in the organization due to the immediate threat of sex-assault. That and the social reinforcement of regular discussion and study. We talked about what we knew of manipulation and abuse, engaged with feminist art, and theorized how to ignite more involvement with the movement.

Soon after this feminist boom a member was expelled due to serious chauvinistic actions. Following their expulsion it was decided that a working group should be established to address the issue of gender chauvinism. This could have been a moment for progressive organizational development, but instead the group’s momentum was halted completely by the creation of the Prol-Fem Working Group group chat. Now that the focus of the group was digitally centered the engagement dissipated. 

What existed before was a loose, informal, material basis of regular congregation. By creating a group chat we replaced this congregation with a rigid set of points on a screen. The effect of removing the basis for social practice was clear: social practice slowed and eventually halted completely. 

We were correct to recognize that the group needed structure. Our error was that rather than interrogating the necessities for structure we created a group chat. It was the form of the group chat that de-prioritized the material content of feminism that we engaged with before, and presented a singular, digital structure to send information to. We needed material structure to formalize a special meeting of the working group, and establish necessary roles as the group developed. Instead we attempted to form structures digitally, removing the informal structure that did exist.

Without a basis of material presence social practice loses its importance and power. The material nature of Communist organizing is obfuscated when media is considered synonymous with material presence.

Conclusion

By idealizing forms of digital communication as spaces to organize within we severely limit our capabilities as Communist revolutionaries. To be “in” a group chat, to be “on” the internet is to interact with technology that accesses those forms of communication. It should never be confused with occupying space. In a time when that confusion is being so acutely exploited by the bourgeoisie to obfuscate the differences between media and reality, let us heed the words of Olufemi Taiwo literally when he implores us, “to build the kinds of rooms we could sit in together.”

So what’s the difference? Does it matter? Can we do Red Aid today? If so, what does it do? What is its effect? Can its purpose and form be the same as it was in 1969 (or Berlin in 1920)? There’s a lot of logistics and survival programs out there right now, being run by self-identified Communists in the U.S. and Canada. What are we to make of them? This debate has gone back and forth over the past decade. As always, it is most helpful to define our terms before we make any decisions.

What is Red Aid?

Red Aid differs from mutual aid in a few critical respects. Mutual aid is a way of organizing a community to meet its own needs; it is a kind of labor exchange where members contribute what they are able and take what they need. In a certain sense, it is an attempt to establish the political economy of communism in miniature. While mutual aid is often run by small(ish) anarchist circles, there’s no necessity that it be organized by the politically advanced or class conscious elements at all.

Red Aid, in contrast, is an explicitly communist strategy. Red Aid has to be run by a Communist organization. Although it can incorporate a labor exchange element as part of its overall strategy of organizing, there doesn’t need to be any such element for it to accomplish its primary goals. Red Aid can very easily be a unilateral form of aid directly from a Communist organization to a community. Unlike mutual aid programs, Red Aid is not performed primarily with community self-sufficiency as a goal. It doesn’t “develop dual power” or challenge the state system of distribution directly. Red Aid also differs from charity in that its goal isn’t merely to provide material necessities to make a difference in underserved communities by meeting their needs.

So what are the aims of a Red Aid logistics program, then? They are fourfold:

1. To create deep and authentic links with the lowest strata of the working class, that section which is least susceptible to the bribery of the labor aristocracy;
2. To identify and develop potential Communists from among that strata;
3. To learn the immediate needs of the class and then, using these three aims, to
4. Address those needs through mass meetings and other organs of working-class power; to organize the working classes and make them aware of their own existence as a class; to elevate class-consciousness and open a front of class struggle against the enemy.

This strategy can only be fully pursued by an entirely-constituted, working, militant, Communist political party. The movement in the U.S. and Canada isn’t yet at that stage, despite the claims made by the various reactionary organizations that they are a Communist Party. Why is it it the case that only a fully-constituted Communist Party can make full use of this strategy? Because the Communist Party:

1. Acts as a check and control on local party organizations and ensures they do not engage in reformist opportunism, tailism, or chauvinism;
2. Coordinates the areas of struggle of its local organizations to act in a unified way and ensure that all actions against the enemy are taken at the time most effective to keep the enemy off-balance and maximize the strength of the blow;
3. Collects and distributes resources and directs group labor so that these Red Aid programs can be well-funded and well-run;
4. Provides ideological training and uniformity to new members who enter the Party organization through Red Aid recruitment.

Despite this, even at our present stage, sufficiently large and developed local Communist organizations can effectively pursue a strategy of Red Aid, so long as it is coupled with an extremely robust political development program.

Logistics work requires consistency; it must occur on a regular, weekly basis to make inroads with the lowest strata of the working class. An aid program or station cannot be spotty or held at arbitrary times or places. Logistics workers must be reliable and dependable. Because of this requirement, there is a very steep minimum labor commitment necessary to keep a logistics station running.

For instance: three cadre-level members must be present for and prepare a food service each week at a minimum. Given two hours of preparation on, say, a Friday, and a four hour food service period on Saturday, that amounts to 6 x 3 or 18 labor-hours each week. An organization must either have an extremely committed and militant membership or a very large pool of cadre to draw on to maintain this kind of schedule. For instance, a one week on, one week off schedule requires at minimum six dedicated comrades who can reliably provide six hours of work every other week.

In small organizations, this degree of labor would leave little time for the critical work of internal political development and study, let alone other organizing actions such as publicly-facing development programs, marches, engaging with other organizations in the same locality or region, fundraising for arrested organizers, formation of community self-defense groups, etc.

Thus, while Red Aid can have an important effect on the movement overall, a local organization should not pursue it simply for the sake of “doing something.” There is a pressing feeling, especially from those of us with petit-bourgeois backgrounds, that we have to be “doing something” (cult of action!) and that “doing” should feel like going out into the streets to foment revolution right now. This ultra-left position is reinforced by the essentially rightist deviations of the already-existing U.S. and Canada-wide “Marxist” organizations.

In fact, however, you should realistically assess whether your organization has the capacity to meaningfully engage in logistics work. Typically this requires:

1. A membership of at least 10 cadre-level members;
2. Access to at least $100/week of materials for food service or other aid supplies;
3. A solid cadre-development program already in place.

If your organization does not already meet these requirements, it would strongly benefit from a period of development as a study group to strengthen it (see the USU handbook of the same name).

Building Logistics to Build the Party

We are still in the period or stage before a unified Communist Party has been formed in the U.S.-Canadian-Mexican bloc. We are the inheritors of a tradition of 2nd-internationalist social chauvinism that goes back to the late 19th century. The large organizations that claim the legacy of communism in this bloc are those that routinely engage in anti-democratic practices, shield abusers, cheat their memberships of money, and produce no meaningful contribution toward the revolutionary consciousness of the mass of people.

Thus, the overwhelming need for the Communist of today is to unite with other Communists and produce the Decolonial Marxist-Leninist Party. Regional leagues like the All-Empire Worker’s League have already begun to undertake that task. Local organizations that engage in Red Aid must do so with the understanding that their mission is to form one of the constituent elements of a convention organizing all Communist local organizations in the U.S.-led imperialist bloc into a single, decolonial, Marxist-Leninist party.

We’ve written a lot about the masses; we’ve written a lot about the advanced, the middling, the tailing — that is, what portions of the great mass of U.S. workers and small professionals are discovering their existence as a collective group with shared interests and goals. What we haven’t written about is the way in which people who are becoming disillusioned with capitalism, people who can see and feel that the social system and the way we live is wrong, brutal, inhuman, can be brought together. That task, the awakening of the discontented to the possibility of another world, another way of living, a real existence where people no longer exploit each other for economic gain, is fundamental to our mission of bringing about the advent of such a society.

Before learning theory, before studying Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Gramsci, Rodney, Cabral, people must want to learn. They must feel deeply that society as it exists is unjust.

The society we live in has worked out a kind of self-defense mechanism to deal with people who realize this. They get called burn-outs, idealists, unrealistic. The child of a professional family who doesn’t want to go into business as a CPA or a doctor or a lawyer is “troubled.” Because they’re told by everyone they know that what they feel is abnormal, that most people know the world is an unjust meat grinder, that they know the lifestyle the great majority of the people in the U.S. is based on the misery of others and they just choose not to think about it — this causes a kind of socially-induced sickness. The people who feel the most deeply and most humanly are constantly told that, far from being the most ordinary, they are defective.

In a sense, this is true. They are defective from the point of view of the architects and engineers of society. They are gears with broken teeth in the eyes of the ruling class, the capitalist class, that group of bankers and industrialists who own everything yet do nothing. In ever-greater numbers, people are beginning to realize that their feelings of discomfort are valid — that they should feel moral outrage at the existence of sweatshops making fast fashion and child-slaves in the Congo mining minerals for their iPhones. Allowing yourself to feel that feeling is the first step on the road to awakening class consciousness. The second step is making the connection between that feeling and the way society is structured. The third step on that path is the realization that it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can do something about it.

In an ideal world, one where we’d already built a powerful working-class party that had gathered up all the theoretically advanced Communists together, we would have not one but many newspapers. There would be a mass paper solely to address those people that are still waking or who are awake but not yet willing (or able) to take the last steps to being militant Communists and then a theory journal for those militant Communists to  debate the truth, the best way to overthrow capitalism, etc. Because our movement isn’t unified behind that kind of party (despite what the poseurs at CPUSA say), we have been mixing those types of articles here at the Clarion. Our core readership is mostly already-committed Communists.

But we can’t rely on people coming to Communism spontaneously. We have to reach the group of people who are being torn out of their social positions — people being sidelined. Revolutionaries going back to Lenin have been warning about the pitfalls of relying on spontaneous action; it was only through conscious development that the revolution of October was possible. Without intervention, lots of those children of professionals or the relatively well-to-do will do what comes naturally as the inevitable result of spontaneity: burn out, become despondent and chronically depressed, or turn into anarchists.

In all likelihood, that means you, the reader, are either the Communist militant who has the task of helping people you know move from realizing that capitalism is a theater of horrors to real class conscious Communism or you are someone who has seen that things are bad and getting worse. Maybe someone sent you this article so you could know that you are not alone.

The next steps won’t feel like doing much at all because the truth is that this realization alone is not enough. You have to study. You’ve got to develop your understanding of how the capitalist machine works so you can help us all build weapons to take it down. Studying isn’t fun and it isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel like accomplishing anything, much less setting out to make a revolution, but it is necessary. We can’t avoid our mistakes without reviewing them and we can’t bring down an enemy that we don’t understand.

We’ve got to get together, not just on our own, but in groups, and start to put together an organization that spans the entire U.S.-canadian empire, examine and report on its local conditions in each region, and create a plan to annihilate it root and branch. We have to plan to unite with all the oppressed peoples — each of the Indigenous nations, the Black nation — and get ready to strike.

The work has already begun: the All-Empire Workers’ League and other similar groups are preparing to create a Decolonial Communist Party.

You should join us.

You are not alone.

Introduction

The socialist left up to this point has collectively failed to combat gender and sexual chauvinism, abuse, and misconduct within the movement. While sexual misconduct is abhorrent in any case, it is particularly egregious when perpetrated by Communists, who are supposedly dedicated to ending oppression, exploitation, and chauvinism in all its forms. 

A detailed, materialist investigation has not yet been completed that explores why sexual misconduct is such a pervasive phenomenon on the left. Perhaps it is due to the fact that such an act is so antithetical to what it means to be a Communist, that no one expects it to happen, and thus our collective guard is down against potential perpetrators. Perhaps it is due to the fact that Communist circles, by virtue of their “alternative” status in mainstream culture and political discourse, attract members of oppressed genders and sexualities, who are the primary targets of sexual chauvinism and violence. Whatever the reason, sexual misconduct is a pervasive and ill-addressed issue in left organizing spaces. It is so pervasive, that it is no longer permissible for Communist groups to take a passive stance towards sexual misconduct. In other words, it is not enough to hope that it won’t happen, at this point we must anticipate that it will happen and put measures in place to address it when (not if) it does. Measures to prevent sexual misconduct from occurring are necessary, but because the Communist movement is not separate and isolated from our existing patriarchal and sexually violent society, it will be impossible to prevent every instance. Therefore, it is necessary to prepare to enact swift and decisive action when the time comes.

Basis Behind CCAP’s Bylaws

CCAP was formed, in a large part, in response to a series of sexual misconduct scandals that occurred in organizations in and around Cincinnati in 2020 and 2021. These included PSL’s sexual assault scandal in Philadelphia, which caused a massive, nationwide exodus from the organization, the interference into a sexual misconduct investigation within the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky chapter of the DSA by members of that organization’s own steering committee, allegations of sexual chauvinism that split the New Afrikan Black Panther Party and dissolved the Ohio United Panther Movement, and a sexual misconduct scandal that effectively dissolved Cincinnati’s Socialist Alternative chapter. The founding members of CCAP consisted of both former members of some of these organizations and new comrades eager to get involved, all disillusioned with the state of the movement by these organizations’ failures. It was clear to us that it would not do to join one of the existing organizations and that it was necessary to form our own, and one of our first points of business must be to formulate strict policies combating sexual misconduct.

CCAP’s bylaws and Code of Conduct take a zero tolerance stance towards instances of sexual misconduct allegations, from outside or inside the organization. First and foremost, before any investigation even takes place, the victim and other vulnerable persons must be protected. Upon receiving the allegation, the accused person is immediately suspended from all work and activities pertaining to the organization. The second consideration is discovering the truth through rigorous investigation and assessing the allegations for credibility. An emergency investigation committee is established, tasked with conducting the investigation and preparing the results to be presented to the governing body of the organization.

Above all, such actions must be enacted immediately. In a situation as serious as sexual misconduct, time is of the essence. If the allegations are deemed credible, the accused member is immediately expelled from the organization and banned from organization activities indefinitely.

Why so harsh? After all, as materialists, shouldn’t we believe that no one is inherently evil and that anyone can be rehabilitated? Shouldn’t we give the offender an opportunity to correct their behavior and redeem themselves?

It was the Chinese Communists who proved that a person can be re-educated and rehabilitated regardless of status or deed by successfully rehabilitating the last emperor of China and collaborator of Japanese Imperialism, Pu Yi. However, they also proved that doing so was a resource intensive process, in which Pu Yi was effectively imprisoned and made to attend numerous struggle sessions and lectures over the course of several years. As such, our question regarding rehabilitation is not whether it is possible, but whether it is realistic to achieve at the current moment. At a moment when the global organized left has been at its weakest since before the Russian Revolution of 1917, we are not equipped with the resources, authoritative bodies, stamina, or time necessary to rehabilitate a person who engages in so severe and so damaging an act as sexual violence. For the time being, our duty to combat chauvinism and oppression and to fight for the liberation of oppressed genders and sexualities outweighs any moral duty we may have to “save” any one individual from their own actions.

Sexual misconduct is one of the most evil actions one can engage in. It is purely about short-term satisfaction of one at the expense of another, and not just in the physical sense. The victim is more than likely to develop psychological and emotional damage as a result. Should the investigation find the allegations credible, there is no struggle session, no self-criticism that is capable of reconciling these actions and rehabilitating the perpetrator. They must be dealt with, firmly and decisively. They must be prevented from harming others, to the degree that the organization is capable of ensuring.

Example Bylaws and Protocols

Situations as serious and difficult as these cannot be trusted to instinct. Mishandling of sexual misconduct cases is one of the foremost killers of socialist organizations at the present moment. What is needed is in-depth, specific, and decisive protocols that can be enacted on the fly. In keeping with our push for unity and the fostering of new Marxist organizations to build the base of a new party, CCAP’s bylaws are presented below as an example from which to learn.

Excerpt from CCAP Code of Conduct and Criticism Protocol

Extreme Situations

In the event that a member or members are accused of extreme violations of the organization Bylaws/protocols, sexual misconduct, or being infiltrators/bad faith actors, a much more rigorous and strict process of investigation is required.

All accusations of this nature must be taken seriously by CCAP leadership and the following protocols must be enacted immediately:

Extreme Violations of Bylaws/Protocol, Category 4 or 5 Errors

Violations of this nature may involve engaging in actions that would endanger other members or members of the community, attempting to strong-arm decisions or refusing to engage with the democratic process of the organization, threatening other members, or engaging in bigoted actions/language on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, class or monetary means, etc.

When a member is accused of engaging in such activity, it must be brought before the Central Committee, either directly or through another committee’s acting Secretary. When such an accusation has been brought before the CC, they should take the following actions:

1. The accused member should be suspended and not be permitted to participate in organization activities for the duration of their suspension.
2. The Central Committee must create a mediating/investigation committee to conduct an investigation into the accusations and determine their merit. This committee should consist of no less than three members.
3. The investigation should consist of meeting with the accuser, the accused, and if possible, both parties together to talk through the incident. The investigators should meet outside of these meetings to discuss the content of the conversations. They must also review any evidence that has been offered to support a claim.
4. When all the meetings have been conducted and a decision has been made, the investigation committee must prepare their findings for a report to the Central Committee. The report should include the opinion of the investigators as to the validity of the claims and suggested action to be taken to resolve the situation. The investigation MUST properly document their process from beginning to end for review by the Central Committee.
5. Upon hearing the report and decision of the investigation, the Central Committee will discuss and vote to verify the decision and to decide what actions to take going forward.
   1. Depending on the severity of the infraction, actions to take can include either one or multiple of the following:
      1. Mandated readings, lessons, or struggle sessions to communicate proper protocol and conduct. Suspension should continue until the action has been completed and the accuser/CC is satisfied with their progress.
      2. Written apology to the affected parties to be made public to the wider organization membership.
      3. Demotion from a position of leadership with a minimum period before they can be elected again.
      4. Expulsion from the organization with a set time period before they may attempt to rejoin.
      5. Expulsion from the organization for good.

If a member has committed a serious enough violation to be expelled, the Central Committee must prepare a statement to be delivered to the General Body to give all members context as to the nature of the situation. Additionally, the entire investigation including all evidence should be made available to the General Body, which should discuss to verify the decision and assess the integrity of the investigation. If the General Body determines that the investigation was mishandled, the investigating committee and/or the Central Committee must be placed under review by an interim committee appointed by the General Body to determine how and to what degree the investigation was mishandled.

It is important for both the General Body and Central Committee to not only see that the situation has been resolved, but also that the integrity of the organization remains intact.

Allegations of Sexual Misconduct, Category 5 Error

Allegations of sexual misconduct are serious violations that require absolute priority from org leadership. Too many organizations have dissolved or faced extreme controversy due to inadequate handling of instances of sexual misconduct. If an allegation of sexual misconduct is brought before the Central Committee, the absolute first priority is that the immediate needs and considerations of the victim-survivor are met, and that any vulnerable individuals are protected. The second priority is that the integrity of the organization is upheld by taking swift action to investigate and determine the correct course of action to address the situation.

The investigation process should largely follow the process outlined in the previous section with a few key differences. Meetings involving both the victim-survivor and the accused being present should be discouraged. The victim-survivor should not be put in a situation where they can be retraumatized by their abuser. If the accused is found guilty of the accusations, they must be immediately expelled without possibility of rejoining. They should also be prevented from attending any events that CCAP is involved in in the future. To this end, the entire investigation including all evidence and proceedings must be made available for all members of the organization to review. Depending on the level of publicity of the case and factoring in the victim-survivor’s wishes of anonymity and publicity, the General Body should assess whether to make the documentation of the proceedings available to the public.

While we believe in restorative and rehabilitative justice, without systemic power and the resources to properly rehabilitate someone, the best course of action is to remove the abuser from their victim-survivor and any other potential victims among org membership and members of the community. With permission from the victim-survivor, other organizers in the city should be given a warning about the violator.

Excerpt from CCAP Bylaws

Article VI. Criticism

6.1 Criticism and self-criticism are central to the operations of the Organization and maintaining a healthy organizing environment.

6.2 The official process of delivering criticisms is outlined in the Code of Conduct and Criticism Protocol.

6.3 Criticisms may be brought to any member by any member regardless of the hierarchical standing of either member.

6.4 Members are expected to participate fully and enthusiastically in the criticism process.

6.5 Upon request by any party OR the elevation of a criticism to a more official matter, a mediator may be chosen to facilitate the criticism process given the agreement of all involved parties.

6.6 If a criticism is leveled at a member and a mediator (or mediating Committee) deems the criticism valid AND the offending party refuses to engage in the process and/or correct their behavior, that member’s good standing status may be jeopardized. Decisions regarding that member’s standing must be discussed by a mediating Committee and the verdict brought before a meeting of the Central Committee.

6.7 If a serious accusation or allegation of misconduct or abuse is leveled at a member by any person (inside or outside the Organization), that member will be immediately suspended, and an emergency Committee will be established to handle the case. After a thorough investigation of the case including consulting both the accused member and the accuser/victim, a verdict must be reached and delivered to the Central Committee and approved by the General Body. Members found guilty of engaging in misconduct or abuse will be immediately removed from the Organization.

Conclusion

It is not possible for a single organization to eliminate sexual misconduct within the entire movement, it must be done through coordinated and collective effort. As such, we highly recommend that any and all organizations adopt policies such as this in their bylaws and other governing documents, using the above-quoted sections as examples from which to pull. Not only will it help to protect the members within your organization, but also the community in which your organization is rooted. 

As Communists, we must set the standard for exemplary conduct and commitment to the cause, for we are the guiding light by which the masses will navigate their future. You have a duty to your organization and to your community to fight for the liberation of the oppressed and to challenge any and all weapons set against them. You must take a proactive stance towards misconduct, and together, we can change the character of the movement for the better.