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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.” ︎

Factions, Splits, and Entryism in the US Communist Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

On June 16, 2025, days after the Paramount Insurrection and the popular attacks on the ICE facility at Delaney Hall, Unity–Struggle–Unity Press received a double criticism from our comrades at the Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness identifying two recent articles in the Red Clarion as “left-opportunist,” “adventurist,” “defeatist,” and “bowing to spontaneity.” These comrades ask for a self-criticism to be published by the Press containing the self-criticisms of the two authors and the Editorial Board (“any persons involved in the publishing” of the two articles). The comrades take issue with “Forward the Red Flag,” and “Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics.”

We disagree with the propositions put forward by these comrades and decline to offer such self-criticism. This article contains our response.

To begin with, we must clearly state the comrades’ argument: that the acts of Elias Rodriguez, and all support for those acts, constitute “left opportunism,” “defeatism,” “tailism,” and “adventurism.” The comrades counterpose the strategy of “raise[ing] consciousness for the ultimate purpose of raising the progressive movement’s consciousness.” What this raising of consciousness involves or how it is to be achieved, our comrades are not at all clear! Certainly, given their criticisms, they believe it does not include the denunciation of moribund parties when they distance themselves from political violence, nor can it encompass the defense of spontaneous political terror. Our comrades also warn us that Communists must not prepare the masses to confront the enemy state with guns and bombs. This, they caution, is “the line of an Anarchist!” They urge instead that we engage in a two-line struggle, although with whom is not clear. The masses? The would-be terrorists? The narrow field of other Marxists?

Before we respond to these criticisms, let us define our terms as Marxists understand them. Opportunism is the adoption of politically-expedient but incorrect positions primarily with the aim of capturing a popular sentiment. Adventurism is the action of “tiny groups” or whole parties without roots in the masses. Defeatism is the position that a revolution is impossible or that socialism cannot be achieved. Tailism is the adoption of positions that have already been made irrelevant by mass consciousness.

The comrades begin their criticism of what they identify as our “left” errors with a quote by Bukharin: “All the aims which a party representing the interests of its class vigorously pursues constitutes the party program.” To this we must ask: What is the purpose of this quotation? What party are our comrades referring to? What class? What program? These are things that do not yet exist. What bearing does the conception of a party program have on our activities? I do not understand the comrades to be arguing that there exists a positive party or program to adhere to. It is my hope that they do not refer to an existing class-in-itself, much less a class-for-itself, within the U.S. that constitutes a revolutionary base. No such class presently exists! It is our job to call that class into existence — indeed, it seems our comrades know (or perhaps instinctually felt) this, for they later quote False Nationalism, False Internationalism, “No revolutionaries find conveniently ready-made, pre-packaged, social bases, but must develop and build the masses and themselves in the same process.”

Indeed, we intend to provide an analysis of the immediately revolutionary strata in a forthcoming article, relying on a formula that compares an individual or household’s present wages to:

Wages
– Superwages
– State benefits
– Real property
+ Value of socialized benefits under communism

(which, not coincidentally, provides insight into the formation of a program, where we identify housing, healthcare, child care, education, transportation, food, and utilities as socialized benefits).

Our comrades clearly see the necessity of building the party, but in their eagerness, their analysis considers that party already built. They criticize anarchic tactics that the masses themselves are adopting. Very well! But they go on to criticize this Press for drawing from those tactics object propaganda lessons to rouse the lowest and deepest members of the working classes to act in their own defense. They mechanically repeat the adages of parties of the past, but the historical development of our present situation must be accounted for. The chief error of the CPUSA, etc., is a warmed-over Lovestoneism. This is the real defeatism! The class that should serve as the motor of the revolution has been completely disorganized over the past century. Its members have trouble even dreaming of a tomorrow free from the capitalist state and have entirely swallowed the Lovestoneite deviation. This cannot be combatted by struggling with other Marxists alone; only propagandizing on the actions and trials faced by the masses themselves can bring them to that understanding.

Indeed, we fear that our comrades have misidentified the masses entirely. “The collective,” they warn us, “is not ready for armed struggle.” It is the advanced masses themselves who are the very people engaging in violence in Paramount and New Jersey! Perhaps our comrades consider the sedate, middle-of-the-road centrist as the “masses.” Perhaps they envision Democratic voters as the masses. The masses, however, the revolutionary strata of the masses, are those who routinely do not vote. Their advanced elements are the Communists. Those coming into consciousness must be guided into our ranks in order to form the revolutionary party.

There is no division between us and the masses.

We are already embarked on the journey to form that party. It is the purpose of this Press and the All-Empire Worker’s League to make it a reality. We ask our comrades to consider advancing the project of forming the party, of adding their voice to the others that now flock to the red banner.

We cannot ignore the spontaneous movement of the masses — this is hardly “bowing” to spontaneity. To disclaim Elias Rodriguez or the Paramount Insurrection as adventurism is to split ourselves from the masses, to declare that the active portions of the masses are in fact not the masses at all. Under this rubric, the masses in motion will never be recognized. We cannot intend to go into direct conflict with the state while wringing our hands about violence against it. On the contrary, we are required to harness this spontaneous energy, not restrain it. The masses must be made ready to do violence. Our comrades accuse us, by refusing to condemn spontaneous terror, of “tailing” the masses. It is the attempt to restrain popular feelings that “tail” the masses — indeed, it is not possible both to bow to mass spontaneity and to tail the masses, for tailism is the adoption of positions that are already outdated, that the masses have already discarded as useless, that have outlived their usefulness.

The comrades also take us to be claiming that any and all anti-state violence heightens the struggle. We say no such thing! But, to deny the evidence of our eyes — the actual heightening of the struggle from October 7, to the Student Intifada, to Aaron Bushnell, to Elias Rodriguez, to the Paramount Insurrection, to Delaney Hall, is to risk a state of permanent tailism and obsolescence. Our comrades are wrong where they suggest that the spontaneous acts of any portion of the masses cannot drive struggle forward. They would, I think, struggle in vain to find any Communist who has held this view uncontested. Spontaneous acts can heighten the struggle, but when they are not guided by the organized party of the revolutionary proletariat, they risk defeat, disorganization, and co-option by the liberal reformist currents.

Although our comrades denounce CPUSA and PSL in words, their criticism in effect embraces the CPUSA position: to allow the “revolutionary” revisionists to teach the masses that Communism is passivity and cowardice.

Briefly, as to our comrades’ last section on safeguarding the movement, here, our comrades fully embrace the CPUSA position with only the slightest hedging. They hold that the security apparatus of the U.S. state requires us to “keep[] our people out of the enemy’s hands and… shield[] them from the political police’s awareness.” No revolution can remain underground. This is a call not to organize an aboveground, unrelated to any of the other issues our comrades address. There is risk. We must be prepared to accept that risk. Anyone who is not prepared to accept that risk is not prepared to be a revolutionary.

These statements also demonstrate a mechanical thinking; there is a dialectic between security and visibility. There is a contradiction between organizing the class and staying hidden. Right now, the disorganization of the class is its defining feature. This means we must overcome that disorganization by above-ground work.

We hope these thoughts are taken in the spirit in which they are meant. We invite our comrades to further conversations on this subject, and further struggle. More, we hope our comrades will take seriously our efforts to unite all that can be united, and, true to their own words, that the thing of greatest importance is the coherence of the movement, act to cohere it and organize it. Let us take concrete steps toward unification.

Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness (SCRC) Letter to the Editor

“All the aims which a party representing the interests of its class vigorously pursues constitue the party program.”

Nikolai Bukharin, The ABC of Communism

This article is a response to and criticism of the recent Red Clarion articles “Forward the Red Flag” and “Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics”. The article discusses specifically the left-opportunism present within both articles regarding the prevalence of adventurism, anarchism, and the general tendency towards the so-called “propaganda of the deed”. We see the defense or affirmation of these tendencies by Communists as opportunistic and defeatist. This is also an example of the present ideological weakness of the Communist movement in the imperial core. Ultimately, it is our understanding that moving beyond this current stage of development regarding the Communist movement, as well as the broader progressive movement, requires that all those who have embraced the Communist ideology further dedicate themselves to the development of a Communist program for revolution as well as the establishment of a legitimate Communist party to struggle out the way forward. This task necessarily demands that Communists refuse the opportunistic instinct to bow to spontaneous action, and instead strive to provide the Communist movement, and the progressive movement, that which it has historically lacked and still desperately needs, revolutionary class consciousness and organization.

There is a common refrain that those who critique in any way the spontaneous actions of individuals, such as the action undertaken recently by Elias Rodriguez, are counterrevolutionary, right-opportunists, or simply cowards. In some instances this line is proven correct, as in the instance of the capitulationist and defeatist anti-violence positions taken by the so-called Party for Socialism and Liberation(PSL)and the Communist Party of the United States(CPUSA) regarding the action. These positions, which totally denounced the action, the CPUSA calling for “militant non-violent protest”, are examples of the ideological weakness and counterrevolutionary limitations of these organizations. Both of these so-called parties refused to embrace a revolutionary line on revolutionary violence against the imperial/colonial violence that is regularly practiced by the enemies of the oppressed and working masses globally. In doing so both PSL and the CPUSA have revealed their inability to guide the conscious development of the Communist movement nor the broader progressive movement that seeks to overcome the present state of things.

“Now the struggle will be unfolding primarily within the revolutionary trend around the program, strategy and tactics of socialist revolution which is first of all a question of how is revolution unfolding objectively, the ideological line, and second of all what shall communists do about it, the political line.”

Committee for Scientific Socialism, History of Two-Line Struggle on Party Building

That fact acknowledged, the line that regards Elias Rodriguez’s actions not as adventurist but instead as “liberatory acts of spontaneous terror”(Gracchus) is plainly opportunistic. Spontaneous actions by individuals or by organizations that outstrip the current stage of development of both the objective conditions as well as the capabilities/consciousness of the subjective forces of progress is the essence of adventurism. Communists can and should understand the manifold reasons and forces behind all things in reality, however, there is a line between understanding and affirmation. It remains painfully true that the present organization of the Communist movement and progressive movement at large is currently incapable of stopping or even noticeably slowing down the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the Zionist entity and its master the USA. This reality is beyond regrettable and deeply shameful to admit, but more than this it remains necessary that this fact be acknowledged. The collective is not yet ready for armed struggle in part because they are not yet conscious of the necessity of armed struggle. Discounting the present state of the progressive movement and running ahead of it in practice without its unyielding support can only and has only resulted in activists, organizers, would-be revolutionaries, and their organizations being overwhelmingly targeted and destroyed by the enemy’s political police. The apparent lack of desire to combat and end this veritable hemorrhaging of our people from the movement at large is due principally to the worship of spontaneity embraced and proselytized primarily by anarchists.

There are certain ideological and political principles that all those who have chosen to embrace Communism and the struggle for its realization must also comprehend. These principles are borne out of the historical and current experiences of Communists struggling for revolution and the end to the rule of the exploiting classes. Opposing anarchism/adventurism and refusing to align oneself with the belittling of the conscious element is one such principle. Comprehending what we as Communists should know through both study and practice, that spontaneous actions cannot be depended on for the development and sustenance of class consciousness, is another aspect of this commitment. The Communists of this era should feel free to be inspired by the ongoing spontaneous actions and rebellions, these are clear signs that the forces of progress and resistance are alive within the masses of oppressed and working peoples. However, we should remember that our duty is to raise our consciousness for the ultimate purpose of raising the progressive movement’s consciousness. The forces of progress and resistance must be cultivated and developed into revolution; dependency on spontaneity has proven insufficient for this monumental task.

“Just as it is important to remember that theory is not just book learning, it is important to remember that practice is more than engaging in spontaneous struggle.”

I Wor Kuen (IWK), Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building

The claim within Forward the Red Flag that “one of the tasks of the Communists, especially now, while the revolutionary class in the West is scattered and incoherent, is to teach the masses to reach toward a revolutionary horizon; it’s to give the working class the power to imagine a future where they actually confront the enemy class and its footsoldiers not metaphorically, but actually—with guns and bombs” is not the line of a Communist but that of an Anarchist. Where they should argue for coherence of the Communist and progressive movements into revolutionary organizations, they instead argue only for confrontation with guns and bombs. Confrontation with guns and bombs is nothing new to the struggle against the settler-bourgeois state. Confrontation with guns and bombs, and the call for such confrontation, is not enough to develop class consciousness or foment revolution. Communists who know at all the history of the struggle here know this fact, because in the history of the struggle here it has not been enough. The weather in the Communist movement has unfortunately not changed very much since the seventies.

In addition to this ideological and political failure, the author’s further claim that Russia “had to pass through Narodism before it arrived at Marxism Leninism”(Gracchus) unqualified by the fact that this passing only came as the result of bitter ideological struggle between the Marxists and Narodnaya Volya is questionable at best and undeniably problematic. This line lends itself to the legitimizing of the current anarchist trend in the progressive movement. The very trend that has done more to disorganize movements than to organize them, like with the STOPCOPCITY movement in Atlanta. Omitting this fact regarding the history of Communist struggle cannot go without direct criticism, therefore a written self-criticism is called for as a consequence of this lack of ideological and political consistency and quality. In addition to this call for self-criticism, a reading list will be provided for assistance with overcoming this lack of historical and ideological consciousness.

“Opportunism is the sacrifice of the long range interest of the working class for the immediate interests of a minority of the working class. It is bourgeois thinking developed as a trend in the working class movement. Common forms of opportunism in the working class today include such outlooks as reformism, trade unionism, national chauvinism, narrow nationalism and anarchism.”

I Wor Kuen (IWK), Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building

The author of Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics makes similarly opportunistic considerations of Elias Rodriguez’s actions. The claim that Rodriguez “tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the US-israeli empire”(Winter), seems to argue that the struggle til May 22nd had not been tangible, and is tangible only now that Rodriguez is in enemy hands and beyond our still limited/non-existent organizational capabilities of freeing him. Furthermore the claim that Rodriguez’s actions represent a “heightening of the struggle”(Winter) is also opportunistic. Is the struggle heightened every time an individual undertakes violent action against the enemy state? If so then this form of heightening is undoubtedly insufficient for heightening the struggle to the level of revolution, seeing that individual actions against the enemy state occur and have occurred regularly for the entire history of the struggle in the US and in the Zionist entity. The conclusion instead should have been, recognizing the insufficiency of individual spontaneous actions, adventurism, that Communists should further commit themselves to the consolidation of the movement for conscious collective armed struggle against the enemies of the colonized and exploited masses.

In their attempts to rightly critique the capitulationist and counter-revolutionary positions taken by PSL and the CPUSA, both authors go too far and lend their conclusions to anarchistic operations. They, like many in the progressive movement, are in awe of spontaneity and it leads them to uncritically support spontaneous actions committed by those who have insufficient faith in and understanding of the masses of this land. The current lack of a Communist program for revolution and the absence of a party are not license for today’s Communists to forfeit ideological principle for the sake of combating capitulationism, revisionism, and right-opportunism. What our movements lack it is incumbent upon the conscious element to develop and provide. That development still underway, failure to resist bowing to spontaneity is a harm to both the Communist movement and the progressive movements generally.

“The unity between ‘left’ and right opportunism is that both belittle the subjective factor in its ability to correctly assess the social conditions and in its role of consciously bringing politics to the masses and transforming the spontaneous movement into a class conscious one.”

I Wor Kuen (IWK), Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building

Elias Rodriguez should have been surrounded by comrades and acted with the unyielding support of the Communist and progressive movements as he undertook armed action against the Zionist entity and its factotums. That he went without these things is not his fault, but the fault of the current political and organizational insufficiency of the Communist movement. Until we have united our movement around a Communist line on revolution, a program, and until we have consolidated this unity through the establishment of a Communist party, people with the will to struggle like Elias will be left without in their struggle against the forces of reaction. If Elias Rodriguez “would not have done what he did, because there would have been a viable alternative”(Gracchus) then the conclusion reached by every Communist should be that Communists must provide the progressive movement, which is continually conveying a desire to struggle, its viable alternative to spontaneous rebellion. Such a viable alternative can again only be realized through the process of developing a truly revolutionary program and the establishment of a Communist party.

The principal responsibility for Communists in the imperial core is to lead and guide the development of the progressive movement, not tail the spontaneous rebellions that are the inevitable consequence of the constant exploitation and oppression wrought by the settler-colonial bourgeois state.  If the consciousness of the exploited and oppressed masses is limited, and it is, then the practice will also be limited whatever it appears to be at the moment. The principal task of Communists at this current stage of development is to cultivate revolutionary class consciousness among the exploited masses. Revolutionary class consciousness, more than just the acknowledgement of bourgeois exploitation and colonial/imperial violence, means being conscious of the need for and inevitability of the total dictatorship of the oppressed and working masses over and above the current ruling classes of oppressors. This kind of consciousness is not ready-made nor can it be the result of spontaneous or haphazard practice. For its development it requires dedicated ideological and political training in the theory, history, and practice of scientific socialism.

“No revolutionaries find conveniently ready-made, pre-packaged social bases but must develop and build the masses and themselves in the same process.“

False Nationalism, False Internationalism

Call for Self-Criticism from Red Clarion authors

To remain consistent with the goals listed in the Red Clarion mission statement; to develop revolutionary consciousness in the masses and a revolutionary vanguard party, and because you have declared yourselves Communists, we representatives of the Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness, who have united  to the same goals, are calling for a collective public self criticism from any persons involved in the publishing of “Forward the Red Flag” and “Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics” on the basis of these articles’ left-opportunism and affirmation of adventurism. We also request a public reassessment of spontaneity and left-opportunism, clarifying for readers that criticism of right-opportunism should not lead to the unprincipled affirmation of anarchism and adventurism generally.

If Communists allow the development of the revolutionary movement to remain at the level of spontaneous action, then we have chosen to sacrifice the future vanguard for moments of temporary excitement and acts of adventurism. Acts that more often than not lead to little more than arrests and movement stagnation must be struggled against. We suggest a thorough reading of the works listed in the provided reading list. We also call for a public reassessment of Elias Rodriguez’s action that emphasizes the importance of a legitimate Communist party to the consolidation of movement practice. Finally, it should be acknowledged that his action, and other such adventurist undertakings, are not required for the development of a legitimate Communist party.  In being critical of these mistakes, and struggling for a more-correct way forward, we not only allow ourselves to evolve, but also affirm the scientific character of our ideology. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge, correcting flawed practices, alongside comprehending the lessons from our revolutionary predecessors, is how the future we have united to building becomes inevitable.

“The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side.”

Mao Zedong, Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work

“We have the Marxist-Leninist weapon of criticism and self-criticism. We can get rid of a bad style and keep the good.”

Mao Zedong, Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Note on Movement Security and Care

Anyone who does not feel any concern at the thought/possibility/likelihood of themselves or others being arrested or targeted by the political police or the other organized servants of reaction either does not know the history of the struggle both here and abroad or has simply decided not to care. Whatever the reason, such a perspective on matters of movement security and longevity is objectively detrimental to the struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperial/colonial domination. This brand of amateurishness has resulted in scores of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries being brutalized, imprisoned, and murdered by the enemy state and their forces. Countless more have chosen to abandon movement organizing entirely on the basis of their negative experiences of engaging with the enemy. At present we have neither the organizational infrastructure nor the resources to protect those who have embraced the struggle. What is worse is that the progressive movement in general seemingly lacks the conscious belief that our activists, organizers, and developing revolutionaries should be protected, that their lives should be valued above and beyond mere spectacles for the masses that have long gone unmoved by mere spectacles.

The “goal of security,” as laid out by J. Sakai in Basic Politics of Movement Security, “is to protect the movement itself, to let the larger struggle against capitalism move forward.” Adopting a lackadaisical perspective on what individuals should be prepared to risk in the struggle, or how they should undertake risks, does not at all protect the movement, but instead views the very people needed to forward the movement as merely cannon fodder for the political police and the enemy state. No one should be expected to “throw their lives away” for the realization of the revolution. Lives must be given and dedicated to revolution, aimed at serving the revolution. The revolution is not served through getting arrested or brutalized by the police. It is not served when people imagine that the only or best way to confront or resist the violence of the settler-colonial bourgeois state is by bowing to spontaneity and forgoing conscious development. It is on the conscious element to ensure that every sacrifice, every gift of a life to revolution, has the impact on the struggle that such a sacrifice should always have. There have already been so many sacrifices, and there will necessarily be countless more to come.

The revolution is inevitable, but the process lags every time Communists concede to carelessness and defeatism regarding our movement, our responsibilities, the broader struggle, and decide to bow to spontaneous action. It is more meaningful to struggle for keeping our people out of the enemy’s hands and increasingly shielding them from the political police’s awareness. It’s more meaningful to work now on developing the networks, strategies, and organizations that will ensure, whatever ways the enemy state and the political police seek to attack the movement, the movement will continue moving forward. 

Reading List

• False Nationalism, False Internationalism, E. Tani and Kae Sera
• What Is To Be Done, Lenin
• On Practice, Mao
• Materialism and the Dialectical Method, Cornforth
• History of Two-Line Struggle on Party-Building, Committee for Scientific Socialism
• Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building, I Wor Kuen (IWK)

“The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty for a few pence. They cravenly preached ‘social peace’ (i.e., peace with the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the ‘sympathising’ intelligentsia.”

Perceptions of material and social precarity in the middle classes (principally settlers, petit bourgeoisie, and the imperialist working class) tend to produce two outcomes, both a product of the heightening of the international class struggle. In the first case, middle class precarity can produce real class consciousness, that is, proletarian consciousness. In seeking answers to the problems faced by the middle classes, a small contingent of radicals emerges who seek education on matters of class conflict, imperialism, colonialism, settler occupation, racism, patriarchy, and the international Marxist-Leninist, Decolonial, Indigenous, and National Liberatory traditions. In the second case, a broader movement of false class consciousness, that is petit bourgeois consciousness, emerges. The latter is what we’re going to look at here. What is false consciousness? This broadly refers to all forms of middle class consciousness which purport to be liberatory. Because of the diversity of interests represented within the middle classes, these forms of consciousness are equally diverse in content, though in practice they all point in the same direction:  continued bourgeois supremacy over the whole world. 

Contemporary liberalism for instance can be analyzed as a form of middle class consciousness: extolling the supposed intrinsic virtues of order and procedure, universal equality before the law, freedom of expression, and “non-violence” as a central tenet of political activity. In false consciousness, the individual begins with the assumption of an ideal reality towards which to strive, and through political action attempts to shape material reality according to these ideals. In actual practice, this produces a dogmatic approach to political activity where these central tenets of Liberalism are more important than the material outcomes. Why is this? Attempts to label liberals as unintelligent, misguided, or otherwise unaware of the contradictions within their approach to political activity are unsatisfactory, as can be quickly seen when these contradictions are pointed out in discourse, and liberalism demonstrates its boundless capacity to deny, distort, and excuse. What then is the material outcome of liberal political activity? Social and institutional inertia, the preservation of the status quo, and ultimately support for and defense of oppressive white supremacist regimes of settler-colonial occupation, and imperialist exploitation of the global south. It’s important to note here that these patterns are not necessarily inherent to any particular ideology, but to the class itself.

The professed ideals are a smokescreen for the material outcome, which is the real intended function of the ideology. This smokescreen serves mainly for the benefit of the ideology’s adherents, who easily learn to live with its contradictions by rationalizing their ideas as being broadly “correct” on the basis of their own material concerns. If they are comfortable, they feel their worldview is approximately correct. It is only when they experience or expect discomfort that they begin to change their worldview, and usually only by demanding the restoration (or increase) of privileges. This additionally serves the interests of bourgeois rule by keeping the politically active sections of the masses debating and disputing one another’s ideological conceptions — conceptions rooted in the material interests of different strata of the middle classes. These debates, while sometimes incredibly lively, all operate within the bounds of the overarching middle class interest of the continued maintenance of the settler empire, and at their most intense represent conflicts for control over the levers of imperial power, but never stray into the realm of revolution. While the right wing of the settler empire is happy to experiment with new methods of control and dominance in the face of crisis, the imperial left wing can only debate and denounce, or at most occasionally roll back or delay particular reforms taken by the right. This leads to a circular process, a sort of political holding pattern that can only react to events and retroactively justify inaction and passivity in the face of crises, rather than actively struggling to change reality. 

Whether their words say so or not, the liberal does not want to solve homelessness, because to do so would require the overthrow of the regime of private property which is fundamental to imperial land speculation, the surest path to “financial security” (that is, upwards class mobility) available to the middle class individual (which most commonly takes the form of “homeownership”). The liberal does not want to free Palestine, because to do so would be to shatter the legitimacy of the institutions which actively maintain the occupation of Palestine, and which at the same time actively maintain the occupation of stolen Indigenous lands inside the borders of the U.S. empire, and which actively maintain the continuing flow of inexpensive commodities and superprofit-inflated worker wages into the empire. 

The liberal may go as far as to couch their demands in radical language, but the demands remain reactionary nonetheless. In the case of homelessness, liberals will advocate for jobs programs, or zoning reform, or expanded homeless shelters, and so on, measures which may or may not produce improvements in the conditions of the homeless population, but which are ultimately aimed at maintaining homelessness as an institution by providing a harmless outlet through which to redirect any resistance against the private property regime. At the same time, the victims of housing exploitation are corralled along lines amenable to the bourgeois/settler state, and violence is employed against them should they resist or fail to comply with the measures imposed. The language may say “end homelessness”, but the demands say “the homelessness regime is in need of maintenance”. In the case of Palestine, the most popular of such liberal measures is the two-state “solution”, which seeks to divert the struggle for national liberation into a formalized acceptance of the occupation by Palestinians, and a concretized formalization of apartheid by the occupation. The language may say “Free Palestine” but the demands say “the occupation has a right to exist”.

With this analysis in mind, let’s now turn to the issue of middle class “communism”. On the 22nd of May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two staff members of the Palestine occupation regime, shouting “Free Palestine!” during the act. In doing so he tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the U.S.-israeli empire. This was, first and foremost, an act of radical love for and solidarity with the Palestinian people, the victims of the occupation’s genocidal onslaught. At the same time, this was an act of political desperation, a refusal to accept the normalization of genocide, whatever the personal costs may be. In doing so, Rodriguez called direct attention to the failure of the “Free Palestine” movement within the imperial core to heighten the struggle and bring tangible consequences to the perpetrators of the Gaza Holocaust. In one stroke, Rodriguez demonstrated that resistance is absolutely possible, and that those of us who have so far failed to organize militant violent resistance to imperial genocide are failing in our duty to uphold and defend the oppressed.

Seemingly frightened to the core at the dreadful thought of militant struggle against the state, the so-called Party “for” Socialism and Liberation, and the so-called “Communist” Party USA both immediately leapt to denounce this heightening of the struggle. Professing a commitment to “peace” and “non-violent struggle” these organizations have eagerly demonstrated in action the real aim of their respective programs: maintenance of imperial rule and the bourgeois monopoly on violence. We already knew this was the case, but the discussions erupting around these revisionist statements point in the direction of the future of this movement, and where the red line of class allegiance is to be drawn. Remember to ask: what is the material outcome of their political practice? This will inform us as to their actual goal, and in turn the outcomes of their practice will inform us as to their class allegiance.

The goal of the settler Communist, as a member of the international middle classes, is to leverage their material and social privileges in the interests of the international proletariat, with the aim of the liquidation and abolition of the settler class. The goal of the settler “communist” is to claim to fight for liberation in word while obstructing liberation in practice. They will therefore wield whatever institutional power they possess to effect this desired outcome. The CPUSA claims to fight for liberation in word, but in practice they canvass for bourgeois parties, instruct their members to “call their senator” in response to genocide, platform and defend zionists, and denounce violent struggle. These proponents of watered-down and sanitized “communism” are not doing this because they are unintelligent or ignorant or otherwise unaware of the aims of Communism, but because these actions serve their real material interests. During the First Inter-Imperialist War (1914 to 1918) the leadership of the Second International famously betrayed the aims of the Communist movement in favor of backing their own respective national bourgeois formations, not because they misunderstood the aims of Communism but because their aims were the interests of their own class, which at the time was benefitting tremendously from the expansion of imperialism and the intense exploitation of the colonized world. Today this opportunistic betrayal of the proletarian struggle repeats itself, as it has for most of the past century, in the settler-run “communist” and “socialist” parties. 

Marxism-Leninism has been proven, time and again through the history of the last century of class struggle, to be the most potent ideological tool wielded by the revolutionary proletariat. In this sense it is a dire existential threat to the continued privileges of the imperial middle classes, whose comforts are predicated on the very system which Marxism sets out to defeat. Despite this, it does not require any greater degree of cognitive dissonance (compared to adherents of liberalism) on behalf of the middle class radical to claim adherence to Marxism while rejecting it in practice. It is equally as trivial to wield the phraseology and aesthetics of Communism in the interests of the settler middle class as it is to wield liberalism for the same. The difference is that while liberalism is at present a decaying order, increasingly seen as obsolete by the masses, Communism is, after decades of decay and decline, currently on the ascent in international power and influence. It is therefore more urgent than ever that committed revolutionaries study Marxism. It is the development of mass consciousness which is the antidote to the opportunistic poison of middle class radicalism. Don’t just accept what we tell you to be the truth! You have to study, learn for yourself, and develop yourself and your understanding. Settler radical “communists” prey on youth and ignorance, turning potential budding revolutionaries into the footsoldiers of the perpetual counter-revolutionary holding pattern. Marching in cop-approved circles waving signs and decrying “violence” in word while supporting it in action as colonized people are actively being exterminated with your tax dollars feels wrong because it is.

Equally as urgent is the need to recognize the direction that settler “communism” is developing. No ideology is static while it has living adherents, and the ideologies of the middle classes are no different. As mass consciousness has developed and grown, the settler “communist” parties have been forced to take up the increasingly radical and revolutionary language of the proletarian struggle and distort it in order to adapt it to their aims. In recent years these parties have started talking of issues like settler colonialism, decolonization, national liberation, gender liberation, and so on. When they think they can get away with it, they denounce these issues as “un-Marxist”, “revisionist”, “ultra left”, etc. If they feel they can no longer hold back the tide of consciousness this way, they may adapt by accepting these ideas in theory while continuing to struggle against them in practice. Beware of “communists” who claim settler colonialism is no longer an ongoing structure, but an event of the past, or “communists” who promote a workerist agenda to the exclusion of Indigenous, Black, Queer, and women’s issues.

The old adage that if you “scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds” holds truer than ever today. Faced with culpability in the extermination of the Palestinians, liberals have roundly demonstrated their commitment to upholding the imperial order no matter the human cost. This development does not create fascists out of liberals, but exposes the classes invested in liberal ideology as being committed to the same interests as fascism. This commitment is inherent to the class, not to the ideology. Though liberalism is fundamentally incoherent, this is owing to its idealistic character which it draws from its reactionary class representatives. Marxism is not fundamentally incoherent, but middle class “communism” only superficially resembles Marxism, and in practical character functions identically to liberalism.

Does this mean that the so-called “communist” parties of the middle classes have more in common with fascism than proletarian Marxism? In most cases this still remains to be seen: will the settler “communists” change their allegiance when a really revolutionary international proletarian party emerges? For many, particularly among the disillusioned youth of the movement, the answer is certainly yes! For many others however, their commitment to the imperial order will win out. With the undeniable necessity of Marxism-Leninism becoming clearer by the day, many middle class radicals are even now preparing to either stem this tide for as long as humanly possible, or to subvert it to their own ends. “Marxism” which openly upholds such reactionary and counter-revolutionary values as US nationalism, the patriarchal family, “anti-woke ideology”, queer/transphobia, zionism, etc, has been emerging. And while the left wing of the middle classes can only hand-wring over the (potential) loss of their privileges and otherwise maintain the counterrevolutionary holding pattern, the right wing is openly preparing to mount a renewed offensive against the proletariat by consolidating the middle classes under the banner of “Marxism”.

We’ve seen reactionary middle class revolutions before. It bears reiterating that the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) called itself a “socialist workers’ party” because it was drawing on popular radical ideas of the time, portraying itself as a “sensible” third way alternative to radical Bolshevik terror and failing capitalism. In our time the ideas have changed somewhat, but the processes of class conflict are very similar in many ways. When our own NSDAP emerges it will drape itself in both the red flag and the U.S. flag.

What are the hallmarks of an organization which upholds false consciousness?

• Attempts to control members, rather than empower them. Members are isolated from their community rather than supported as Communists within their community.
• Stifles development through repetitive tasks and overbearing bureaucracy, rather than making development and the carrying forward of the struggle the key priority.
• Education takes a lower priority to “action”, rather than practice and study being treated as equally important aspects of the dialectic of development. Members are taught what to think rather than how to think.
• Opaque and/or impenetrable internal organizational functioning, instead of clearly defined rules which everyone follows and which everyone has a voice in the drafting and implementing of.
• Communications with central leadership are limited to commands that are carried down the line, rather than a dialogue.
• Leadership is upheld on the “strength” of their ideas, rather than on their contributions of labor to the struggle.
• Decisions are justified by appeals to the authority of leadership, “The Party”, etc. rather than democratic accountability. 
• Leaders are treated as rulers to be obeyed, rather than servants of the membership and the people.
• Ossified leadership structures, leaders are not subject to recall, elections do not happen or are designed to reproduce leadership power rather than empowering the general membership.
• Historical revolutionaries (particularly Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao) are treated as infallible prophets whose word cannot be challenged, rather than regular human beings whose ideas should be studied and understood holistically and within their particular historical contexts.
• Contradictions in the ideology, outlook, organizational functioning, decision making, theoretical disagreements, etc, are resolved with appeals to “faith” in the organization’s mission or leadership, or the words of the aforementioned “prophets”, rather than constructive struggle.
• Attempts to engage in constructive struggle are shut down, treated as “wrecker” behavior, or ignored, rather than embraced as necessary to the development of the proletarian party.
• Finances are kept hidden from the membership, and/or spending decisions are made without the consent of the membership, rather than being open and democratically accountable.
• The voices and contributions of members from oppressed populations (women, Indigenous, Black, Queer, disabled, etc) are dismissed, excluded, minimized, or otherwise disempowered or decentered, rather than being held as central to the proletarian struggle, and empowered and uplifted by the organization.
• Discussions with or about other organizations are discouraged or silenced, rather than being considered essential to the task of building unity among the Marxist movement.

If you feel like you or someone you know may be involved in an organization which upholds false consciousness, we have several articles which can provide further guidance:

• From USU: Cadre Development Literature, Organizing Theory
• On the Cult Form: The Cult Building Tendency
• On CPUSA: A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words, Against CPUSA’s Colonizer “Communism”
• On PSL: Revolution in Our Lifetime
• On FRSO: Colonizer “Communism” in the FRSO, The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO
• On DSA: Organize Within the DSA!, Uncommitted: A Lesson in Counterinsurgency

The struggle for the Party is at times a bitter one, and promises to only grow in contention as the proletarian movement builds momentum and begins to truly challenge the established “communist” institutions. Already many middle class “communists” resort to increasingly coordinated campaigns of harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence in order to assert the “legitimacy” of their particular organization. Committed revolutionaries must understand the backwardness of this approach: To assert authority without the backing of the proletariat, or to attempt to cudgel the proletariat into submission to “the party” can only ever at most postpone the emergence of the Party of the revolutionary proletariat. 

The Party will form the vanguard of the revolution only when the masses of the most oppressed internationally recognize it as their representative and their weapon in the class struggle, wielded by and in the interests of the international proletariat.

“Commodities begin to be exchanged because of an act of will: their owners agree to dispose of them reciprocally. In the meantime, people gradually come to rely on use-objects produced by others. Constant repetition makes exchange into a normal social process.”

“Our commodity owners learn, then, that the same division of labor that makes them into independent private producers also makes the social production process — and their relations within it — independent of them, the producers themselves: they learn that their independence from one another emerges in and is complemented by a system of all-around dependence on things produced by other people.”

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

Recently, Cde. Potato published a work in Red Clarion entitled “No One is Coming to Feed Us.” While the piece brings to the forefront important issues regarding food supply chains in the United States, its surface level analysis coupled with individualistic calls to action reflect a deeply disruptive tendency within the contemporary communist movement. This paper serves as a substantive critique to the faulty theoretical lines of thought contained within Cde. Potato’s piece, while also providing a new framework for systematically addressing political issues that will aid us in our struggle to obtain political power and bring about a socialist state.

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

As communists, using scientific analysis of contemporary and historical social relations to determine the correct path of revolutionary struggle is the key aspect of our work. What differentiates Marxism from other pseudo-intellectual attempts at social analysis is that humans are not prescribed natures as independent actors or socially dependent subjects, but are understood in their contradictory truth as both. As an individual you can act in ways that benefit both yourself and those around you. You can go vegan, reduce food waste and compost the rest, and even plant native flowers to help local pollinators. The issue with individual action lies not in its moral nature as a good thing that you should do, but in its quantitative relation to broader society. One person going vegan in a country of over three hundred million is going to have a negligible effect on average consumption habits and their subsequent environmental impacts. However, local concentrations of thousands of vegans and a national population of over a million can begin to introduce qualitative changes in broader society. This is the dialectical nature of social development.

Historical progressions in social-economic relations keenly reflect this process. The bourgeoisie did not always exist, nor did they simply emerge from the mist to bring about a new age of gunpowder and roaring steel. Instead they emerged slowly out of the contradictions of feudal society. These small groups of proto-bourgeois eventually found one another and began to organize towards the interests of their class. Bit by bit the bourgeoisie concentrated and began to disrupt the feudalist biospheres. By the time feudalist society caught onto this process it was already too late to prevent the capitalist age. Feudalist classes had two options: they could either consign themselves to a slow death or face the guillotine. The bourgeois eventually won their class war through bitter struggle and brought about the contemporary age, in which capitalism has subsumed and guaranteed the death of all former social divisions of labor.

Anyone who calls themselves a communist must understand this process, as it is by the same means which we will bring about communism. There are no shortcuts or tricks that allow us to avoid direct confrontation and simply declare the world anew. We are as much subjects to history as we are its progenitors. Winning our war with the bourgeoisie will necessitate a strict dedication to proven revolutionary strategies and the scientific development of new tactics informed by historic failures and contemporary material conditions. The population of cadres politically developed enough to engage in such a struggle may still be small in number, but just as the bourgeoisie and feudal lords before them, we will achieve our social revolution through quantitative action.

Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for our movement. In the face of the end of unimpeded imperialist expansion, the liberal mask of the American empire has fallen. The bourgeoisie have turned their gaze to the core in the hopes that by ripping out the copper wire and using the floorboards as fuel they can hold out against a global turn towards anti-imperialism. We have seen this self-destructive tendency emerge in several ways. On the international scale, the American bourgeoisie have begun to forcibly open up the empire’s vassal states for rapid and brutal economic exploitation. This has primarily emerged through the use of economic crises induced via tariffs, the threat of annexing territories, and the move to end NATO to demonstrate the European bourgeoisie’s reliance on the United States as an occupational force. While these moves have shocked liberals within the imperial core, they are simply a continuation of the empire’s shift towards open imperialist brutality. The longstanding strategy of obscuring the violence necessary to maintain the settler and aristocratic laboring classes has been replaced with an ideological drive toward fervent celebration of complicity in the brutal murder of the globally hyper-exploited. With socialist and anti-imperialist resistance drastically reducing the ratio of surplus-value that can be extracted from the third world, the first world has been turned to as a fresh store of labor and resources prime for rapid primitive accumulation. 

On the national scale, we have seen the violent enforcement of the patriarchal social division of labor through the targeting of transgender people as a third sexed class. Making state backed and extralegal violence against transgender people an acceptable social reality makes all deviations from gendered norms, particularly those done by women (trans or otherwise), a viable marker for increased levels of exploitation. Regarding the nationally oppressed, the state has abandoned the policy of courting select segments of these populations to increase their tokenistic representation in the exploitative classes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and aristocratic labor to justify the continued brutal immiseration of the vast majority of their populations; replacing it with the open and fetishized brutality of their hyper-exploitation. This too is not unprecedented. Over the last two decades the state has forced migrant laborers into increasingly precarious conditions of survival through the slow erosion of legal protections, the expansion of surveillance, encouragement of settlers enacting extralegal violence, and the expansion of administrative violence through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Conditions of precarity that have forced this population into becoming a slave-like class of hyper-exploited laborers.

With capitalism’s barbarism now laid bare, millions have been galvanized to take action against these systems of exploitation. While the revolutionary energy of this moment is undoubtable, the ability of any of these movements to effectively harness them to bring about lasting social change is doubtable at best. Once again liberals squander this energy through haphazard and disorganized fits of reaction, such as the recent “economic blackout” that excluded small businesses from their supposed boycott of the American economy, or the national “hands off” protest which included an ideologically muddled list of complaints and no real demands. Those who have yet developed socialist consciousness mistake these protest movements as the means to develop and consolidate power. However, their lack of organization and long term planning leads to apathetic nihilism among the masses when the movements inevitably fail to achieve any of their idealistic goals. As long as there is no a communist party to lead the masses and uplift them from base trade union consciousness, these spontaneous actions will continue to act as a roadblock in the path of socialist struggle. To seriously address these crises requires us to direct our efforts away from spontaneous action, and towards the extensive construction of the communist movement’s organizational capacity. 

You can engage in this work by joining or organizing a local Marxist Leninist book club. After building up a solid base of educated and militantly consistent cadres can you then direct your organizations capacity around a central project, whether that be communal gardening, mutual aid, becoming an anti-ice rapid response network, etc. This tiered process of development will provide you the means to effectively harness local revolutionary energy to not only enact social change, but to slowly institutionalize your organization as a node of political power. This essential work on the micro level will aid in the eventual consolidation of these nodes into a communist party that can harness our collective power towards dismantling the empire once and for all. While the struggle may seem daunting, revolutions have never been won in a single decisive blow. Rather they have succeeded against all odds by dismantling the enemy piece by piece.

The Conquest of Crumbs

As communists in the heart of the imperialist core, there is a vast array of issues we must address to build the foundations for socialism. A key issue that is rapidly exacerbating social contradictions is capitalism’s tendency towards ecological destruction through the metabolic rift. Current production processes and consumptive demands outstrip our environment’s ability to reproduce the raw resources these commodities rely upon. A process from which we have witnessed the total destruction of biomes through pollution, over extraction, and the mass eradication of hundreds of species. Faced with the existential threat that climate change poses, the global bourgeoisie was faced with a choice: either perpetuate the capitalist system by having the state intervene in the process of accumulation so as to restabilize the environment’s process of self-reproduction, or remove all fetters and pursue accumulation at any cost in the hopes some miracle cure for climate change will come along. Being nothing more than soulless husks that physically embody the spirit of capital, the bourgeoisie enthusiastically chose the latter. The ramifications of which have only just begun to hit the insulated imperial core. As Cde. Potato notes in their work No One is Coming to Feed Us, the rapid spread of pollution, disease, coupled with climate change are overlapping factors that will cause serious disruptions in food supply chains. Conditions that require us to face a serious question, who will feed the people?

Cde. Potato’s answer to this question is rather slapdash. Instead of outlining tactics and strategies by which local orgs could begin building the logistical means to feed the masses, we are given six individualist actions one can take to help bring about ecosocialism.

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

1. Grow your own food as much as possible to get a functional understanding of what your local ecosystem can produce
2. Support the food sovereignty of Indigenous communities by learning about what they are already doing
3. Support migrant farm workers by learning about what they are already doing
4. Organize to end child labor and prison labor through boycotts, advocacy, and direct action
5. Support local farms with an emphasis on perennials and orchards. Trees take YEARS to replace, these are the farms we can’t afford to lose
6. Recognize that “farmer” is not a specific term that automatically means petit bourgeois. Focus on the ownership class of agribusiness or Big Ag.

The author’s call for everyone to learn how to not just grow their own food, but to can and preserve this food on their own demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how systematic this issue truly is. This call for individual and small group preparation for a food crisis calls to mind the settler-colonial prepper mindset more than an effective socialist strategy. There will never be the spontaneous emergence of enough gardeners and small scale farmers to feed the people. These pressing conditions require a deeper centralization of agricultural production, not its decentralization.

Let’s say that you, as an individual, want to become more independent from national and international bourgeois agricultural production. So you decide to grow some potatoes in your backyard. Let’s assume you’ve got a natural green thumb and through hard work you’re able to produce 80 potatoes each containing about 100 calories. Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day, that would result in only a 1.09% decrease in your caloric dependency. If you were to compare the value of each potato given the labor time it took to till the soil, add fertilizer, consistently water them, cover them with leaves so they don’t freeze, harvest them, etc., the amount of labor stored within each potato would far outweigh the price of any you could buy at the store. Attempting to produce your own food at home, while a lovely hobby, is a complete waste of socially productive labor, as the socially necessary labor time to produce these products at scale will always be far outside your capacity as an individual laborer.

If you wanted to reduce your dependency by 10% you’d have to produce at least 73,000 calories, and spread that caloric intake across several nutritional sources such as onions, potatoes, rice, and beans. Of course this work would be made easier in a collective, but doing so comes with exponentially increasing costs. If each person is working towards the same goal you have to produce 73,000 calories for every member within the collective, divided across X number of crops, times an array of values for each crop’s individual requirements for land, water, and labor time necessary to produce a decent yield. Not to mention the financial costs of tools, seeds, etc. Taking on such a monumental task requires one to effectively answer several questions. For example, how are you acquiring enough land to grow that many crops? The majority of people do not own several acres to just start a farm. Even in suburban areas you’d require several front-and-back yards worth of land to feed more than a handful of people. Furthermore, which members of the working class have enough free time to dedicate themselves to farming on top of their jobs and domestic labor? Existing subsistence farmers still rely on the daily work of the whole family to produce enough food to eat or trade to maintain themselves. Finally, where will you obtain the money to maintain this project? Your comrades may be able to chip in through dues, and perhaps well-off members of your community may donate to such a noble cause. Yet, as soon as a financial crisis hits your pool of funds will dry up. There is simply no way to succeed on this path without the substantial support of an emergent socialist state.

When it comes to Indigenous food sovereignty Cde. Potato tells readers to research what their local Indigenous groups are, offer up support for their food sovereignty projects, and to “…shift your mindset to default the authority on agriculture and land management away from profit-driven science and towards Indigenous knowledge.” While it is good for comrades to know the conditions of their local tribes, the lack of direction given shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of these tribes. Indigenous organizations already have to deal with the incessant ignorance of well meaning liberal “allies” that come to the table with no means or tools to aid tribes in their liberatory struggle, yet demand to be educated and cultivated as activists so they can achieve moral salvation. As communists we must avoid adding to this feckless pool of good samaritans, and instead work to achieve the organizational capacity to work with these tribes in coalition. To have cadres who can be put to work using spades to put spuds in the ground or be an active presence to help in the protection of Indigenous farmers from settler violence. 

Beyond this lack of political activation, Cde. Potato refuses to explain what the struggle for food sovereignty looks like in the United States. In the place of such an explanation readers are given a collage of random news articles about Indigenous organizations, federal programs, and small businesses, with no context given for what each meaningfully does in the long term struggle for tribes sovereign management of their own food production, consumption, and distribution. No thought is given to the ways in which ecological colonization, the capitalist enclosure of land, and the genocidal destruction of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and traditions has made many tribes’ traditional food systems nearly impossible to reproduce. Nor is there consideration given to the fact that not all tribes have a strong traditional relationship to agricultural production. Take the Northern Arapaho tribe. Situated in the plains, the tribe’s primary form of caloric intake came from hunting local wildlife and gathering wild grown food. This in turn led to periods of extreme precarity before the introduction of the horse and gunpowder rifle guaranteed a more consistent means to sustain the tribe on wild game (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 74-75). The same level of nutritional variety and food security did not rematerialize until the 1940’s with the emergence of family gardens and increased levels of small game hunting. Gains that were again swept away within a few decades due to capitalist and colonial encroachment (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 78-80). While contemporary efforts such as the Growing Resilience project on the Wind River Reservation was able to achieve some gains in food sovereignty through the development of home food gardens, further efforts are still drastically constrained by extremely limited access to resources and capital.

To understand what role we as communists can play in the work to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty it’s important to first contextualize the project within contemporary material conditions. Food sovereignty represents several political goals in one project: tribes securing access to plentiful and healthy food, the ecologically sustainable production of this food, and the means to develop agricultural production in relation to their own needs and ambitions. While each is key to achieving the political project as a whole, most Indigenous people in the United States struggle with either hunger or being able to regularly obtain nutritious and healthy food, so of central importance to the current struggle is securing access to food. When food sovereignty is brought up by non-Indigenous people the focus is rarely on ending the systematic colonial violence that is the infliction of hunger on Indigenous populations, rather the ecological benefits of Indigenous food systems are made to be the main focus. This is because liberal interests lie not in aiding Indigenous people in their struggle, but using their knowledge to save the Bourgeois and the settler-colonial classes that served as their foot soldiers from the environmental catastrophe they themselves brought about. 

Despite these ideals placed on the back of Indigenous tribes they currently do not have the means to fix over two centuries of genocidal environmental destruction. The level of development required for tribes to achieve food sovereignty may at first look nothing like the ideals of ecological stability or growing crops native to a geographic area. It may very well require industrial levels of agricultural development owned, operated, and managed by the tribes themselves. Instead of family and community gardens that feed a handful of people, it may look like the efficient use of socially productive labor through the implementation of heavy machinery, greenhouses, and a variety of other large scale forms of agricultural production. The burden of fixing climate change alongside feeding not just their people, but everyone who will remain on Turtle Island, is a burden that should not be placed solely on the back of these nationally oppressed peoples who are pushed to the absolute extremes of precarity. To expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fix the ongoing environmental catastrophe forced upon them with nothing but a small amount of individual financial, moral, or volunteer support, is not merely an absurdity, but outright cruelty.

If communists are genuinely interested in helping to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty, then we have to develop the means to materially support them. The collective efforts of a communist club can do far more to aid these tribes than any individual deciding on a whim to look into what’s going on. A club could work with food sovereignty projects by helping to organize a donation drive, volunteering club members labor to help build and maintain gardens or farms, or find other ways to provide material and logistical support like offering car rides or free mechanical maintenance. Instead of this ceaseless chatter about what Indigenous sovereignty could do for us, we should be figuring out what we can do at scale to aid in their struggles and fight to restore their land.

When addressing the conditions of migrant farm workers, Cde. Potato again refrains from fully addressing what these conditions are and how readers can engage in migrant workers struggles. The only direction readers are given is to follow United Farm Workers (UFW) “for updates and attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training if you can.” Information that is only useful if you live in California, as the UFW has little to no organizational presence outside of the state. Further, this call to action yet again shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of self-organized migrant workers. Workers who are expected to trust absolute strangers with not just their personal safety, but the safety of their family. An astounding amount of trust has to be given for these workers to tell a stranger they’re a migrant, particularly when ICE agents are rounding folks up while in plain clothes and many white people are more than happy to report migrants so they can take part in the spectacle of state enacted colonial violence.

Migrant workers can be found in every state of the country, doing not only local agricultural work, but much of the hard physical labor of proletarian jobs that the broad swath of Americans are totally uninterested in doing. Just as these workers can be found in every state so too can you find organizations fighting to improve their material conditions. Some states may have orgs dedicated to this specific struggle or chapters of national organizations such as the ACLU may have rapid response networks of trained legal observers who can show up to ICE raids to inform people of their rights and do everything within their legal ability to prevent an abduction. As an individual it is far more useful for you to get in contact with one of these orgs so they can train you and put you to use in the local struggle rather than simply keeping up on the news. What migrant workers need is not self-educated sympathy, what they need is organized groups of people who will fight to protect them from the violence of their employers and the settler-colonial police force that is ICE. Politically centralized orgs, even in some of the most rural and conservative states, have been able to use long term strategic planning to prevent both deportations and the construction of ICE detention centers. The only way migrants can regain any sense of stability is through the support of highly organized groups that provide safety through rapid-response networks, legal support, volunteer translators, or even the provision of daily necessities such as food and water.

Child and prison labor are similarly under-discussed by Cde. Potato. Child labor is nothing new to capitalist development. Whether it be in the cotton mills, coal mines, or modern day meat processing plants, the blood of child laborers has long served as a fountain of youth for the dead labor known as capital. Liberalism’s main function in the United States has been to obscure the violent exploitation contained within nearly every commodity so that aristocratic laborers can consume them without guilt, so they can eat their $10 cheeseburger without once thinking about the child who lost their hand carving up the flesh they now so greedily consume. The reappearance of such overt exploitation in the imperial core is merely a sign that the imperialist super-profits that once protected America’s aristocratic laboring class from such conditions have drastically eroded. All this change means is that to maintain current rates of surplus-labor extraction within the imperial core now requires adult laborers’ direct competition with child labor. This will continually get worse until we bring about socialism. Cde. Potato also engages in the longstanding myth that prison labor is a profitable enterprise, and thus believes a boycott could do anything to affect it. Prisons in America do not exist to produce a profit, but primarily serve to suppress and concentrate the nationally oppressed and precariat so as to sequester their classes revolutionary potential. The carceral state is a central foundation for maintaining the imperial settler-colonial state. These conditions cannot be ended without engaging in long term socialist struggle.

If feeding people is a genuine concern and if, as Cde. Potato argues, supporting local farmers is imperative to achieving this goal, then we must undertake a serious analysis of their needs and character as a class.  Despite Cde. Potato’s claims to the contrary, farmers are a petit-bourgeois class. Renting land, tools, and having to buy fertilizer do not disqualify farmers from membership in this class. If renting one’s constant capital is all it takes to not be a member of the petit-bourgeois class, then the local cafe or bakery owner is also a member of the working class because they have to rent the building in which their business operates. Whether they own or lease the land, becoming a farmer still requires having access to the capital and labor necessary to not just start their farm, but maintain ownership of it through the exploitation of surplus labor. This labor may come from their unpaid family members, migrant workers, or seasonal agricultural workers. Whatever the case may be, they actively engage in exploitation and thus cannot be labeled as peasants, proletarians, or even aristocratic laborers. Further, Their reliance on government subsidies and the willingness of locals to buy their produce at higher prices places them in a reactionary position against both the bourgeoisie and those that seek to overturn the state. Without state intervention their class would be fully subsumed by what Cde. Potato describes as “Big Ag.” Not only are they petit-bourgeois, but they serve as an active force of colonization.

It is a simple fact that anyone who owns land in the United States is an active participant in settler colonialism. On the east coast this participation is rarely seen and felt as there the tribes’ physical, social, and historical relationship to the land have been the most thoroughly eradicated. It is in the West, wherein lies the largest concentration of reservations, that we witness continuous acts of heinous violence inflicted on Indigenous populations. Police, white workers, ranchers, and farmers regularly engage in the trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of Indigenous peoples. White settlements built on reservation land expand themselves to further exploit native people and resources, while the means of social reproduction is restrained to conditions of utter desperation within the tribes. These conditions of precarity provide an opportunity for settlers to engage in further exploitation by getting Indigenous people addicted to drugs and alcohol. The war against Indigenous people never ended in the United States, the same tactics and tendencies have been in continuous use by colonizers for well over 500 years. Liberal society simply chooses to wash away the blood on its hands by silencing Indigenous voices and sequestering their violent subjugation to the least populated areas of the country. 

Local farmers are just, if not more, guilty of perpetuating this systematic violence. They have no legitimate claim to the land they till and grow food on beyond that which is enforced by the settler-colonial state. The right of eminent domain makes this relationship clear, as any land can be claimed by the state for the expansion of infrastructure to benefit the military and the national means of production. This makes their class one of highly concentrated, yet split reaction against all those who may attempt to expropriate their land and capital, i.e., the industrial bourgeois, the state, and Indigenous tribes.  This is why as communists we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the anarchist tendency to reduce every class and struggle to that of David and Goliath. Just because a class of people views the bourgeoisie as a threat does not mean that they are our ally in the socialist struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie’s reliance on the capitalist system of exchange to maintain their means of production and access to a wide pool of exploitable labor puts them in a natural opposition to the socialist cause. Even if that were not the case, Lenin’s critique of the cooperative movement remains a salient reminder of why we must struggle against these anarchist tendencies contained within Cde. Potato’s work:

“Do you really think that the capitalist world will pave the way for the cooperative movement? Capitalism will try to take power over the cooperatives by any means necessary. This ‘anti-authoritarian’ cooperative group of English workers will be crushed in the most ruthless way possible and will be made into servants of capital. They will depend on capital via a thousand threads so that the newly created trend, which you sympathize so much with, will be caught as in a spider’s web. Pardon me, but all of that is unimportant! Those are all details! What is needed is direct action of the masses, and as long as that is not happening, nothing can be said about federalism, communism or social revolutions. Those are all children’s toys, prattling without any firm ground under our feet, without power, without means, and it does not bring us any step closer to our social aims.”

Vladimir Lenin, A meeting between V.I. Lenin and P.A. Kropotkin

Capitalism will not allow you to leave its social relations! You can free yourself as much from their overwhelming pressure using collective farming, housing, cooking, etc. as a submarine can free itself from the pressure in the Mariana Trench by opening up its hatch. The capitalist class will smash you into mush just as it has done with every attempt at individualist revolution for well over two centuries. The choice is simple. Engage in vanguardist organization, or die being remembered for nothing but hindering the revolutionary movement. In order to win, these petit-bourgeois anarchist fantasies must be smothered in their bed, before we lose another decade to their cult worship of spontaneous and individual action.

If you want power you have to think as if you already have it. You have to think about how resources will be transported, you have to think about how people will be supported, think about where funds will come from, think about how to maintain people’s morale, and you have to take your enemies seriously. If we take for granted the fact that local farmers’ agricultural production will be of key logistical importance in the revolutionary struggle, then to prevent local farmers’ total capture by reactionary forces our short term strategy must be to direct the energy of their class struggle against our mutual enemies. Such work has already been done in getting farmers to join the ecological struggle against the construction of pipelines by arguing against the use of eminent domain and demonstrating to them how their farm could be destroyed if a leakage were to occur. Further work can be done to organize the struggle against factory farms due to their mass production of and spread of livestock diseases. Gaining the full trust of these farmers in the socialist cause will necessitate the construction of a sophisticated party that has the logistical means to ensure their goods are transported and traded at a fair price, can secure the maintenance of their means of production, and possibly reduce the economic pressures they face by providing free technical, mechanical, or physical labor through party cadres. To manage this contradiction of aiding this settler class and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, the emergent socialist state’s mass agricultural production must be placed under the management of Indigenous experts. Through this process the land and capital of industrial agriculture can be expropriated into the hands of Indigenous tribes, providing the foundation for the eventual expropriation of all settler-controlled land for the benefit of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples.

This paper is not a condemnation or a call to shy away from the necessary work to provide food security for the masses. It is however a call for comrades to recognize the path to do so is not an easy one with simple solutions. Taking on the task to feed the people is a vital struggle for our movement to take on, and doing so will significantly aid the development of our logistical capacity and political power. If your club or organization is interested in taking on this work then you should follow these steps: first, ensure you have developed the institutional means to take on and cultivate new cadres. If local needs outstrip your organization’s capacity and it collapses, that will harm the movement far more than developing the essential skill of patience within your cadres. Second, secure a regular supply of food through donations, organizational funds, or whatever means are at your disposal. Third, find and build connections with those in your area who lack the means to secure food on a regular basis. Learn their stories, struggles, and work to find out what they want and need. Fourth, connect with other organizations doing this work. Ask how they’ve come to their current strategy, what has worked and what’s failed, see if there’s any way you can support one another.

The struggle for a socialist world is not a game and there is no salve by which we can fix all the harm capitalism has brought upon humanity. The only path for liberation is to engage in massive struggle propelled through the people. As communists our responsibility is to become a collective leadership the masses can trust, to not just courageously overturn the present, but to safely guide them through this tempest with vision unclouded by idealism. When the people ask the question of who will come to feed them, our goal must be that it comes with the quick reply, “The party is here to feed you.”

Citations

Arthur, Melvin, and Christine Porter. 2019. “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 9 (2): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.012.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1902) 1961. What Is to Be Done? Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press.

Social revolution does not exist in the abstract; social revolution is always a concrete, embodied event or sequence of events. Those Marxists who make of revolution some nebulous virtue, rather than recognize it as a real process, are doomed to remain on the sidelines of the actual revolutionary movement. The social revolution comes clothed in actual struggles, and special tasks depending on where and when it occurs. This fundamental idealist error – the “pure class revolution” – has permitted the noxious rot of opportunism to destroy any chance for the Communist movement in the western imperialist powers. Because the leading “communist” organizations in those states refuse to grapple with the reality of the class structure in the imperial centers, they spend their time daydreaming, marching, and idling their time until a future where pure class revolution becomes possible – a future that will never arrive.

We Marxist-Leninists who truly understand historical materialism are left to pick up the pieces. For us to bring about the revolution in the imperial centers we must not only combat the powerful forces of the enemy state, but also their auxiliaries, the pure revolutionists, who insist on ignoring all existing conditions and carrying out their revolutionary daydreaming in a fantasy land based on their misreadings of past revolutionaries. Wherever these hollow revolutionaries spread their doctrine, they draw emerging class-conscious workers into their way of thinking; soon, these newly class-conscious workers are miseducated into becoming further ambassadors of the “pure revolution.”

While it is our task to build the revolutionary party in the United States-Canadian bloc, we must build it in such a way as to forever combat this source of opportunism and revisionism. Decolonial Marxism-Leninism is the only tool we possess that can inform the construction of such a party. Where the pure revolutionists decry that decolonial theory is the bane of Marxism, we know that it is only the bane of their fangless Marxism. They are terrified of it because it restores the fangs in the doctrine of social revolution.

Decolonial Marxism-Leninism embraces the two special tasks of the social revolutionary in the U.S.-Canadian bloc, namely the resolution of the national/imperial question and the woman question (which could more properly be phrased the domestic labor or reproductive labor question).

Decolonization is simply the national question applied to the conditions of the U.S.-Canadian bloc. The revisionists deny that there is a national question to address today. They often dress this denial in many colors; some say that there is no such thing as settler-colonialism, or that the period of settlement has ended and therefore settler-colonialism is wrapped up and done with. By this they mean that oppressed nations within the U.S. are not actually nations and therefore do not require self-determination. They subordinate the national question to the class question, and demand a pure social revolution in which the oppressed nations within the imperial centers must place their concerns for sovereignty aside. In fact, they deny a national struggle at all – these nations, which they have downgraded to ethnicities, must set aside their national demands. According to these revisionists, only the proletariat of each ethnicity need be approached and brought into the movement.

Do we need a special term to denote a kind of Marxism-Leninism that recognizes the need for the national struggle? Is that not the essence of Marxism-Leninism? Sadly, the term has been so perverted by the century of false struggle in the U.S.-Canadian bloc that we do need a special term. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxist-Leninists” (don’t laugh!).

Although we must draw from the entire corpus of works from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, we must also incorporate the critical analysis of the later 20th century from Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and George Jackson. The Russian and Qing empires did not engage substantially in the African slave trade or the Scramble for Africa – which is one of the reasons they lagged behind development of the European and colonial slaving powers – so the special task of national liberation did not take the form in the Tsarist or Qing empires that it must take here in the United States and its satellites.

To put it simply: the legacy of slavery and genocide at the hands of the settler population in the United States and Canada is not merely past, but continues on into the present. Combating this special form of national oppression is the task of Decolonial Marxism-Leninism. 

What Are the Central Tasks?

The formation of a guiding party is imperative for the revolutionary movement. It is impossible to form a militant revolutionary party while still being unclear about who our friends are and who our enemies are. Therefore, it is critical to the establishment of the revolutionary party-to-be for us to flush our enemies out into the open and draw a firm line against them. We want nothing to do with these pseudo-Marxist neocons, these Marxists-without-national-liberation; instead, we must actively seek to exclude them.

This can be done by openly embracing the two tasks of the social revolution in the U.S.-Canadian bloc: the liberation of the nationally oppressed through the establishment of national sovereignty (what our enemies contemptuously call “Landback ethnonationalism”) and the complete depatriarchalization of society. We must proclaim these tasks as the baseline for unity.

These tasks are the clothes that the revolution comes to us wearing, and they form a suit that would have been easily recognized by Marx or Stalin. They are the national question, as applied to the U.S.-Canadian bloc, and the question of reproductive/domestic labor, or the woman’s question, as applied to that same region. They manifest in the West as the tasks of decolonization and depatriarchalization, which are each composed of several necessary elements.

Departiarchalization must take the form of structural social changes, focused on true emancipation for women and LGBT people, the reorganization of productive and reproductive labor along 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; the exact programmatic answers to these questions, however, are outside the scope of this present manifesto. The need is currently to break with the opportunist elements of the Marxist movement, and that requires a firm and explicit program of decolonization.

Decolonization

Decolonization is the task of establishing national self-determination for the oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canadian imperialist bloc. The desirability of the national self-determination of oppressed nations is beyond the scope of this article. We urge you to study Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and the other Marxist-Leninists for the answer to this question.

Here we are speaking of real nations, not, for instance, the reactionary projects of Cascadia or the secession of California or Texas. The really-existing oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canada are the Indigenous nations, the Black nation, and the Puerto Rican nation. There may be others, but such a determination would need to be made by careful examination of the national question in each individual instance.

As for the Black, Indigenous, Hawaiian, and Puerto Rican nations, decolonization means:

1. Economic sovereignty – that is, land reform;
2. Political sovereignty – that is, the freedom to establish politically independent states; and,
3. Cultural sovereignty – that is, the freedom to engage in culturally significant practices.

To achieve these three parts or elements of the task of decolonization, we must commit firmly to a program that guarantees them. The party-to-be must promise, in action, that Decolonial Marxism-Leninism means:

1. The establishment of Land Tribunals to be carried out by the existing Indigenous nations and the guarantee to abide by all their decisions; these Land Tribunals to distribute the geographical territories of the continental U.S. and Canada, excluding the Black Belt, to the apportionment of the Indigenous nations or, should the Tribunals so decide, to set aside geographical territory for the  construction of a plurinational socialist state where no Tribune claims that territory as national;
2. The redistribution of all land in the Black Belt to the benefit of Black workers and farmers;
3. The redistribution of all lands in Puerto Rico and Hawai’i to the benefit of Puerto Rican and Indigenous Hawaiian workers and farmers;
4. The support of all forces that are actually national-liberationary in character regardless of their class composition;
5. The complete  destruction of the U.S. state and its departments at all levels; and,
6. The incorporation of national proletarian elements into the party-to-be with the structural guarantee of authority over all programs and strategy concerning land and liberation.

This struggle cannot be downgraded to a mere aspect of the overall class struggle. It is a task separate and discrete from the final social revolution — and a task that, if not undertaken, precludes the possibility of a successful revolution. The proletariat of the oppressor (“Great”) nation (the imperial whites) must be made to join with the struggles of their nationally oppressed siblings to control their own national destinies. This is the meaning of proletarian internationalism at this stage of the revolution. To the greatest extent possible, the party-to-be must encourage and prepare the oppressed national proletariat to command the new states that emerge, but this is not a necessary outcome, so long as the nation is freed from the shackles of economic and cultural control. Should it prove impossible to establish socialism in one blow, we must commit to a longer struggle. It may be that we must win each national revolution as part of a nation-democratic front and the struggle must then move to the contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the national proletariat. This would not be a defeat, but a victory! However, should we correctly navigate the struggle for self-determination, there is no necessary barrier to the emergence of the social revolution at once from the many national revolutions; that is, each national revolution may pass over into the social revolution.

On that same line, we Communists are not in a position to insist on the establishment of socialist construction within any of the resultant territories after a decolonial revolution. Without the establishment of sovereign national territories, national oppression will continue to persist and mar the construction of socialism. Should the Land Tribunals and land redistribution set aside or grant territories for the establishment of plurinational socialism, that will form the basis for a post-revolutionary socialist state. Should they decide against this, it will then pass to the proletariat of the former nationally oppressed nations to struggle within the new context for the victory of the social revolution.

What Is the Demand?

Marxism-Leninism is already decolonial at its very core. It is the science of liberation and its core is anti-imperialism. Decolonization is nothing more than anti-imperialism applied to the conditions of the United States and Canada. It is self-evident for any Marxist-Leninist who cares to apply the lessons of the Russian and Chinese revolutions to our current time and place. Why, then, must we add Decolonization as a term? Because of the perversion of Marxism-Leninism in the West.

Revisionist organizations have threatened to prevent the emergence of a real militant people’s party by devouring all the oxygen in the room, by misrepresenting the meaning of Marxism-Leninism, and by burying the truth in mountains of lies. Marxist-Leninists must not allow ourselves, the heirs of Marx and Lenin, to be drowned out by opportunists and chauvinists. Just as the Russian movement was forced to adopt the term Communist as opposed to Social-Democrat to distinguish itself from the social chauvinism of the Second International, we must do the same. The lessons of the Second International were never really learned in the West. We are fighting that same battle today in a disguised form.

So we say, down with the traitors of the Second International who dress up their chauvinism in fine-sounding socialist phrases and reduce the movement to serve as the ineffectual lapdog of empire! Instead we must forward our demands for self-determination and openly require the task be set forth as the foundational one for the establishment of a militant, revolutionary, Marxist party.

Though we object to numerous aspects of the article, we would like to focus on three key failures: (1) Sykes collapses class struggle down to a binary, (2) Sykes uses an inadequate definition of settler colonialism, (3) Sykes argues against strawmen, showing little evidence of having read theoretical works by those they are attempting to refute.

It is the duty of the Communist movement to study the actual reality around them, to adapt their theory to fit those conditions, and to use this theory to lead the working classes to victory over the old society. It is a serious perversion to study theory and demand conditions alter themselves to match what is written on the page. Sykes insists that the working classes of the U.S. empire’s oppressor nation have the same immediate material interests as the working classes of its oppressed nations and as the oppressed nations of the world. Only someone with fundamental misunderstanding of material reality or a mind completely rotted away by chauvinism could entertain this notion for more than a moment before discarding it.

It is, rather, our duty to identify the internal contradictions which prevent the working classes in the U.S. empire from uniting to destroy the capitalist-imperialist state and resolve them non-antagonistically. It is our duty to overcome those internal contradictions. It is impossible to overcome something that, like Sykes, you pretend isn’t there. A man with his eyes closed cannot bridge a gap: he must fall into it.

As a preliminary question, we must then ask: why has revolution failed to manifest in the U.S. and other imperialist centers for over one hundred years? Should we make the same mistakes? If not, what can we do to avoid them? Certainly not repeat the same tired chauvinist platitudes that destroyed our hopes at revolution in the 20th century.

Point 1: Sykes sees class struggle as a simplistic binary

Sykes describes the position of their ideological opponents in this way:

“[T]he basic argument from the proponents of this theory goes something like this: The United States remains today a settler-colonial state. People of European descent, regardless of their actual class position, are settlers, and are seen as continuing to benefit from and perpetuate a colonial system. In other words, the people of the United States are divided into two camps, with the colonized in one camp, and the settlers in the other. Some even go so far as to say that this makes up the principal contradiction in the U.S. This is furthermore viewed as a fundamentally antagonistic contradiction.”

In brief, Sykes accuses their opponents of collapsing class struggle into a binary, with settlers on one side and the colonized on the other. This accusation comes with some irony, as Sykes declares their own position to be one of collapsing the class struggle into a different binary:

“[W]e see a division of U.S. society into two camps. On the one hand there is the camp of the capitalists, and on the other the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and oppressed nationalities. The principal contradiction is therefore between the capitalist class on the one hand, and the multinational working class and its allies on the other, particularly the oppressed nations.”

Sykes goes on to propose that the “multinational working class and the oppressed nations” must form a “united front” against capitalism. We agree that the working classes must come together in solidarity to struggle against capitalism. However, we understand the working classes of the imperial core as a multitude of classes, often in contradiction with each other — gender, settler-colonial, and imperialist contradictions. The class struggles of U.S. society cannot be collapsed into two camps, except at the broadest level. These are the ultimately antagonistic camps of worker and owner — but that is not the only class antagonism that exists, that is not the only contradiction that exists.

Communists do not traditionally champion the proletariat merely because it is among the most oppressed classes or because it is a uniquely communistic class. Communists champion the classes most receptive to their message and who are best prepared to build a revolutionary movement.² In our conditions it is the colonized working classes who play this role. A Communist movement in North America must be led by centering decolonization and opposing settler interests. This is because the interests of the colonized are directly opposed to the immediate interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and so they are most in line with the interests of the international working masses. These decolonial priorities must inform organization structure, programming priorities and political education strategies at every level, and must certainly not be relegated to the realm of mere “special consideration.”

For example, resource extraction projects often find popular support among the white working classes that see them as opportunities for jobs that will keep bread on the table or keep gas prices low, which puts their immediate material interests at odds with the indigenous communities whose land sovereignty these projects violate, and instead aligns their interests with those of the bourgeoisie. As Communists, we know that it is also in the long-term interests of the white working class to respect land sovereignty, to seek sustainable energy sources, and for workers to own these productive means and not private companies.³ To resolve these contradicting interests and to unite these forces, it is essential that political education center decolonization and that institutional structures insist upon decolonial priorities over these immediate interests of the white working classes. 

Sykes does not recognize that the white working classes have real material interests in settler-colonial relations, insisting that it is only “the monopoly capitalist class who reap the super-profits from national oppression,” and denying that an entire ideological superstructure has formed to support these material interests of settlers (“those ideas [racist and white chauvinist ideas] are the ideology of the class enemy.”) Because these material interests are not acknowledged but are instead papered over, FRSO’s political program is unprepared to deal with contradictions between the colonized and the settler working classes. 

Point 2: Sykes presents a woefully inadequate definition of settler colonialism

Sykes defines settler colonialism as follows:

“U.S. settler-colonialism is a particular social formation with a particular set of contradictions at the heart of it. Historically it is a transitionary period in the early development of the capitalist mode of production. It is characterized by the dominant role played by the contradiction between settlers on the one hand and colonized people on the other. This contradiction is the main thing shaping the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production in the period of ‘primitive accumulation’⁴ during its nascent development. In this way, settler-colonialism fueled the rapid growth of the capitalist mode of production in the early United States.”

This definition requires settler colonialism to be transitionary, conveniently making it by-definition incompatible with capitalism. It is also a tautology: settler colonialism is a contradiction with settlers on one side and colonized people on the other. Furthermore, this definition fails to distinguish between colonialism and settler colonialism. These are modes of extraction and oppression with different characteristics, and this difference is crucial for understanding our present context. 

Let us contrast Sykes’s near-meaningless definition with definitions used by those who do argue that the U.S. is a settler-colonial nation. Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks, is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, an Indigenous studies scholar, and associate professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. He defines settler colonialism in this way:

“A settler-colonial relationship is one characterized by a particular form of domination; that is, it is a relationship where power…has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority.”⁵

For example, the Dakota Access Pipeline was proposed to run within 10 miles of Bismarck, ND, but because it would require additional new infrastructure construction, because it would threaten the water supply of the settler city, and because it would violate settler laws about residential zoning, it was decided that it would cross the Standing Rock Reservation instead. Indigenous land defenders waged years of struggle in the form of protests, legal challenges, sabotage, and eventually open violence. Though many settlers joined the movement, the majority of local settlers did not and were content to allow the project to continue. The state’s subsequent violent clamp-down on protests enabled the project to continue to completion. Ultimately, the settler state almost always sides with settler interests, which occupy a position of entrenched institutional privilege backed by the monopoly of violence wielded by the bourgeoisie. 

Patrick Wolfe, historian and scholar of Aboriginal history, described as a “cherished friend of the Wurundjeri” at his memorial service, said the following about settler colonialism:

“The primary motive for [settler colonialism] is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler-colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”⁶

That Sykes’s definition does not even mention territoriality is a critical error in analysis. In skating past the material basis of the settler-colonized contraction, Sykes appears to see the contradiction not as a material class relationship facilitating the violent acquisition of land and accumulation of power through control over land, but as a mere contradiction of identity. The colonized and the settlers may as well be two opposing football teams for all it matters to Sykes.

Wolfe also notes:

“Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory … The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In common with genocide as Raphaël Lemkin characterized it, settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.

…

In its positive aspect, the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler-colonial society. It is both as complex social formation and as continuity through time that I term settler colonization a structure rather than an event.”

Sykes merely views settler colonialism as an event. To them it is an ephemeral phase of the development of the contemporary state, a phase which has long since passed and only bears consideration as an academic matter. Sykes fundamentally does not understand what settler colonialism is or what it does, and was evidently not challenged by others in his organization. As a self-professed “revolutionary” organization operating within a settler-colonial system, FRSO can and must do better than this!

Point 3: Sykes argues against strawmen

Sykes sets out to refute “the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory” but does not name these opponents, nor quote them in their own words. Indeed, Sykes shows little evidence of having read many theorists of this persuasion at all. The crux of Sykes’s assertion that the U.S. does not remain a settler-colonial state is that this phenomenon happened a long time ago and the U.S. is no longer an English colony:

“[S]ome people believe it’s as simple as ‘once a settler-colony, always a settler-colony.’ This is metaphysical thinking. While it is true that the legacy of settler-colonialism in the United States certainly persists, the systems of oppression have not remained static. … As the capitalist mode of production developed, this transitional settler-colonial period had to give way to mature competitive capitalism, bringing forth new contradictions.

…

As the book An Economic History of the Major Capitalist Countries by Kang Fan puts it, ‘American victory in the war [of Independence] and the subsequent establishment of the United States overthrew England’s colonial rule in North America. Domestically, it swept aside many feudal remnants, and it opened the road for the development of capitalism.’ Lenin called the War of Independence ‘one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few,’⁷ and after that war the U.S. was no longer a colony.”

It is true that settler colonialism is not a static arrangement, this of course would be metaphysical thinking, if anyone were actually asserting this to be the case. Theorists that refer to the United States and Canada as settler-colonial states have also noted that socioeconomic relationships have changed over the last centuries. The argument, however, is that settler-colonial relationships that dispossess Indigenous people of their lands and self-determining authority continue to play a role in our society.⁸

For example, Glen Coulthard notes “the escalating onslaught of violent, state-orchestrated enclosures following neoliberalism’s ascent to hegemony has unmistakably demonstrated the persistent role that unconcealed, violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts.”⁹ Nick Estes, describing specific examples of violent dispossession of indigenous communities in the 21st century, states “settler states like Canada and the United States continue to settle the land, raping and killing Native women and Two-Spirit people in order to do so.”¹⁰ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues settler-colonial ideology continues to shape the behaviors and beliefs of both settlers and new immigrants:

“A ‘race to innocence’ is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression. This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country’s past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.”¹¹

Racing towards innocence themself, Sykes does not engage with these Indigenous scholars, nor, as previously pointed out, with any theorist that believes that “the United States remains today a settler-colonial state.” The result is that this “scientific” analysis falls apart when consulting the works written by theorists that term the U.S. a settler colonial state.

Instead of putting forth any effort to understand and critique the arguments made by those who call the U.S. settler-colonial, Sykes dismisses this position because his unnamed opponents are alleged to be petty bourgeois: 

“The petty bourgeoisie, the class of small business owners or petty capitalists, is under immense pressure  … from the working class on the one hand, whom they exploit generally, and the monopoly capitalists on the other hand, with whom they cannot compete. Because they are driven to ruin by the monopoly capitalists, and ultimately have no future as a class, they sometimes take up radical, even revolutionary, ideas, however inconsistently. … They are not members of the working class and do not grasp the centrality of the working class in the socialist revolution. They take up all sorts of petty bourgeois ideas about the backwardness or ignorance of the working class and take a pessimistic and defeatist attitude regarding the revolutionary potential of the working class. So, they seek revolutionary potential elsewhere.”

Those committing the “error” of asserting that the U.S. remains a settler-colonial state that are not merely petty bourgeois ideologues are instead naively trying to copy-paste their analysis of Palestine onto American soil:

“Second, many see the heroic struggle of Palestinian resistance against Zionism and wish to copy and paste an analysis of the Palestinian struggle onto U.S. conditions. Largely this comes from a desire to use what is happening in Palestine to draw attention to the need for revolution in the U.S. As admirable as this is, the United States is not Palestine, and so this obscures as much as it illuminates.”

True, the U.S. is not Palestine. But in what ways are they different?

“The U.S. isn’t an apartheid system, like ‘Israel’ or ‘Rhodesia’ for example. The horrific system of Jim Crow segregation that followed the betrayal of Reconstruction was itself uprooted by the Black liberation movement. While national oppression remains, de jure segregation no longer exists. The working class, as a result of its historical development, is therefore multinational in character.”

In what ways does national oppression remain? What are the forms it takes? Sykes doesn’t tell us. Certainly “du jure” segregation has long since been abolished, but that naturally leads us to ask, what about de facto segregation? What are redlining, gerrymandering, ghettoization, if not the contemporary form that racial segregation takes? Does the “reservation” system not qualify as an apartheid system? A “reservation” is a particular zone, whose borders are generally designated by the settler state, in which the Indigenous may exercise limited sovereignty and may enjoy the few special rights still afforded them by the settler state. Outside this zone these remaining privileges largely do not exist, and what few there are can only be accessed by registration of “native status” with the state. How is this functionally different from other apartheid systems? How does a native community – isolated and deprived of amenities like consistent access to electricity, sanitation, and clean drinking water – have identical class interests with a settler community? The suburban sprawl of settler communities, with their huge homes, lawns, commercial plazas, and roads and parking lots their cars, have paved over the land and natural resources which the indigenous used to rely on for life. To claim these two groups are, in the present moment, a single class is simply ridiculous.

If one wishes to truly refute settler colonialism as a discrete theory of class relations and historical development in the contemporary U.S. empire, one would have to actually engage with prominent theorists, in their own words, and present a real counterargument. Instead Sykes sets up a pair of easily dismantled strawman positions, tears them down, and calls it a day. 

Why Was This Article Written?

Sykes emphasizes the need to “understand the contradictions at work in society,” recognizing the stakes for this debate are high: 

“[I]f the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country. Indeed, such a view sees the ‘settler working class’ as instruments of colonialism, hostile to the interests of the colonized people, rather than viewing all working and oppressed people as natural allies in the struggle against imperialism, our mutual oppressor.”

In other words, the author asserts that if the theory of settler colonialism is correct, their own revolutionary program is incorrect and will not work. Therefore the settler-colonial theory must be incorrect. Rather than engage with the actual arguments put forth by theorists, Sykes sets out to collapse class struggle down to only that of workers versus capitalists, and builds their argument backwards to support this conclusion.

Of particular note is the author’s implied assertion that socialist revolution is impossible within the context of settler colonialism. This is not the conclusion reached by proponents of settler-colonial theory, but appears to be what the author believes is the necessary conclusion reached by settler colonial theory. 

Nick Estes documented the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline that brought together Black Lives Matter activists, revolutionary socialists, and poor whites:

“Political elites and corporate media have frequently depicted poor whites and poor Natives as irreconcilable enemies, without common ground competing for scarce resources in economically depressed rural areas. Yet, the defense of Native land, water, and treaties brought us together.”¹²

Aligning with the interests of the colonized is the clear path to unity and intensification of the struggle. We have to ask, then, if the proponents of settler-colonial theory are not incorrect, why does the author believe this obviates the possibility of building a multinational communist party? We certainly do not believe this. 

We can glean greater insight into FRSO’s position by breaking down its key points:

1. Settler-colonial theory asserts that the interests of the settler working class are hostile to the interests of the colonized masses.
2. Revolution can only be carried out by broad unity of the working masses across national lines.
3. If (1) is correct, then (2) is impossible to achieve. 

By process of elimination, we are led to conclude that:

4. The position of the FRSO is that revolution is only possible through the participation of settlers as a class. The settler-colonized contradiction must not be abolished as a primary revolutionary task, but relegated as a secondary consideration. 

Why not come out and say that then? Why cloak it in this obfuscating argumentation about how settler-colonial theory is petty bourgeois? Some insight may be gleaned from this earlier passage: 

“They [the ‘petty bourgeois’ proponents of settler colonial theory] are not members of the working class and do not grasp the centrality of the working class in the socialist revolution. They take up all sorts of petty bourgeois ideas about the backwardness or ignorance of the working class and take a pessimistic and defeatist attitude regarding the revolutionary potential of the working class. So, they seek revolutionary potential elsewhere.”

We can derive the following further conclusions from this: 

5. FRSO believes proponents of settler-colonial theory are searching for a revolutionary subject outside the “working class”.
6. Following the above conclusion (4), FRSO sees the “working class” as being chiefly comprised of the settler masses, and the colonized masses as being peripheral contingents of workers incapable of independent revolutionary action, or as groups outside the working class entirely.

This conclusion (6) is further supported by the final passage in the article: “Only the multinational working class, allied with the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities, can overthrow the rule of the capitalists, smash the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, build socialism, and end exploitation and oppression once and for all.” (Emphasis ours.) The liberation movements are here considered separate from the proletarian struggle, one which the “multinational working class” must ally with. 

Sykes attempts to establish that the “multinational working class” is a single revolutionary body above lesser considerations like nationality: 

“While national oppression remains, de jure segregation no longer exists. The working class, as a result of its historical development, is therefore multinational in character. This is because workers of all nationalities, both oppressed nationality workers and white workers, toil shoulder to shoulder on assembly lines and shop floors, in kitchens, warehouses and offices, from coast to coast. Even as national oppression puts greater pressure on oppressed nationality workers, they are still forged into one multinational working class together with their white siblings as they suffer exploitation together under the same bosses.”

However it is difficult to square this with the above conclusions. If Sykes’s position is incorrect and the interests of the colonized must be centered in order to defeat the settler state, then it follows that revolutionary organization must be built within the colonized masses first, and in the process their leadership will provide the basis for international unity within the U.S. empire. If proponents of settler-colonial theory are wrong, then certainly the above quoted passage is more-or-less correct, but how then are we to understand the general tendency of settlers to align themselves with the capitalist class? Importantly, neither position rules out revolution, only defining the overall strategy by which it is to be achieved.

This then explains Sykes’s assertion that proponents of settler-colonial theory are “pessimistic and defeatist.” Only if we accept the premise that the settler masses are the only class capable of leading the revolutionary struggle would insisting that they are incapable of revolutionary action on the basis of their settler identity lead us to the conclusion that revolution in settler-colonial states is simply impossible. This conclusion then leads us down the path of reformism or nihilism, a truly counterrevolutionary and reactionary mode of thought. 

But this is not scientific socialism. Many assumptions are being made without supporting evidence: 

1. The settler masses are the chief revolutionary subject.
2. Unity between settler and colonized is necessary for revolution.
3. The capitalist-worker contradiction supersedes national contradictions.
4. Unity between settler and colonized is possible on the basis of (3).

Far from clarifying the strategy for revolution, FRSO’s position muddies the waters of national oppression and settler-colonial theory. Far from presenting a unifying message, it attempts to build the case that issues of national oppression are secondary to the class struggle. By attempting to place national oppression in the backseat and “multinational unity” in the driver’s seat, FRSO once more sets down the worn and tired dead-end path laid by the CPUSA in the 1940s and 50s.

A Scientific Case for Revolution

Our position is this: the settler masses of the U.S. empire are materially invested in the perpetuation of settler-colonial property relations. Petty bourgeois ideological currents are predominant among the material beneficiaries of settler-colonial land theft and imperialist resource and labor exploitation.¹³ No class unity can develop among the settlers except through outright rejection of settler privileges. However, their privileged class position is fading as imperialism continues its historical decline. The “middle classes” are historically doomed, just as Marx observed in the Communist Manifesto. Furthermore, the question of national liberation in the U.S. empire is not separate or peripheral to the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, but is the most advanced form that this struggle takes.¹⁴

Our movement’s abysmal historical record is reflected in this – by failing to recognize the petty bourgeois tendency of the settler masses and the proletarian character of the movements for national liberation, and by nature of the settler masses being the majority of the population of the U.S. empire, our movement has historically centered petty bourgeois leadership and strategy, firmly positioning the interests of the proletariat in a perpetually secondary and subservient role. In order to carry out revolution this relationship must be reversed. We must center the struggle for national liberation and decolonization as the particular forms taken by the proletarian struggle in the U.S. empire. In doing so we can establish a clear revolutionary path forward, one which invites the beneficiaries of fading U.S. imperialism to reject their doomed privileges and join the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. It is not the colonized masses which must ally with the leadership of the “multinational working class,” but the settler masses who must discard their petty privileges in order to ally with the proletarian leadership of the colonized masses, and only by doing so can we at long last forge the basis for a truly multinational working class movement.

1. J. Sykes, “Marxism-Leninism and the theory of settler-colonialism in the United States”, Fightback! News, December 4th, 2024. <link> All quotes derive from this article unless otherwise indicated. ︎
2. See, for example: Mao on the semi-proletariat versus the land-owning classes (<link>) and on all the classes of a nation united versus imperialism (<link>); Lars Lih on the Bolsheviks and the proletariat versus Tsarism (in Lenin Rediscovered (2008), particularly pages 6-7); Marx on the revolutionary potential of the Russian agricultural commune, contrasted to the Western European proletariat (<link>). ︎
3. In fact, Marx and Engels highlight the dehumanizing effect capitalism has on capitalists too, a dehumanization that would be abolished through the dissolution of capitalism. “The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence.” (<link>) ︎
4. Sykes also misunderstands what is meant by “primitive accumulation.” This is a basic or initial step in the process of capital accumulation, where resources, labor, land, etc. are violently appropriated and transformed into capital. This process necessarily occurs prior to the ability of wealth to function as capital, but it is nevertheless ongoing. See W.C. Roberts, What Was Primitive Accumulation? Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept (2017) <link> ︎
5. G.S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, “Introduction: Subjects of Empire” (2014). Emphasis in original. ︎
6. P. Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Journal of Genocide Research (2006). <link> ︎
7. The revolutionary nature of the American War of Independence has been challenged since Lenin’s time, see G. Horne, The Counterrevolution of 1776 (2014). ︎
8. For example, in 2017, the Canadian state upheld that corporations may continue to profit through the use of Indigenous territory against the wishes of the Indigenous communities affected. <link> ︎
9. G.S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, “Introduction: Subjects of Empire” (2014). Emphasis in original. ︎
10. N. Estes, Our History Is the Future, “1. Siege” (2019). ︎
11. R. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, “Conclusion: The Future of the United States.” (2014). ︎
12. N. Estes, Our History Is the Future, “Prologue: Prophets” (2019). ︎
13. D. Phos “Then as Farce” (2024) <link>, “The Middle Class Is Not a Myth” (2022) <link> ︎
14. In Accumulation on a World Scale (1970) Samir Amin identifies the emergence of the bourgeois-proletarian contradiction on an international scale, where the “center” nations of the capitalist world system occupy a bourgeois oppressor formation, and the “periphery” occupies an oppressed proletarian formation. This differentiation also occurs within the borders of center nations: “The mechanisms of centralization for the benefit of the dominant capital also apply as between the different regions of the center: the development of capitalism is everywhere a development of regional inequalities. Thus, each developed country has created its own underdeveloped country within its own borders.” ︎

This essay is an initial response as USU plans to publish a full critique of the article in the coming days.

I will attempt to illustrate my point using feminism as an example. Feminism and decolonial theory are in fact very similar, in that they are bodies of thought developed to address a specific axis of oppression for one section of society. As Marxists, we utilize feminism to understand the complex gender politics at play within society, between men and non-men of different classes and between men and non-men of the same class. Within the class of the proletariat there exist both men and non-men, and patriarchy not only complicates their relationship to one that is at times antagonistic, it shapes the form of the class. The struggle against patriarchy is a class struggle because the patriarchal relation is a relation of power and power is a function that is expressed through the class structure of society. The bourgeois class is overwhelmingly comprised of men. This is no coincidence, and feminism helps us understand this reality.

Decolonial theory, as utilized by Marxists, attempts to do the same thing, but for race, ethnicity, or nationality instead of gender. When the vast majority of the bourgeois class is made up of white people, it is, again, no coincidence, and it is critical to understand how this came to be and why it continues to be.

We can compare those who deny the importance of decolonial theory to those who deny the importance of feminism. For example, we can draw a direct parallel between the Communist Party of Great Britain calling “trans ideology” anti-materialist to J. Sykes calling decolonial theory a petit-bourgeois distortion. It is a lazy, dishonest, and anti-intellectual stance that refuses to engage earnestly with the study of the class struggle these misguided “Marxists” claim to be waging.

The failure of the Communist movement to contend with the realities of gender emancipation and national liberation are critical errors of the past century of struggle. The failure to contend with the particularities of these relations is one of the primary reasons why the U.S. working class has come nowhere near revolution in this country’s entire history. As such, it is absolutely critical for Communist organizations in this country to put forward a comprehensive and complete understanding of these concepts if they hope to be successful.

How does this failure manifest? It manifests in the simplification of the idea of class and of class struggle.

When learning the basics of any new field, the most effective way to create a base of knowledge is through simplification of complex ideas. We take, for example, the Bohr model of the atom and teach it to elementary school students. It is useful for conveying the concepts of a nucleus and the orbiting of electrons around that nucleus and the energy levels associated with different types of orbits. But this does not tell the whole truth, we don’t tell them that the Bohr model was disproved in 1920 and that the true form of the atom is far more complex than this. It would be counterproductive to teach an elementary school student quantum physics even though it presents a more accurate atomic model.

We can compare this to the simplified concept of class and of class struggle that we use to bring new people into the fold. It is quite straightforward to inform a learning Marxist that there simply exists a proletariat and the bourgeoisie and they have interests which are antagonistic to one another, and this results in the class struggle, and that the class struggle is resolved through socialist revolution. While this is all essentially true, phrased this way it is a simplification of the real world into an easily understandable model for new learners. The problem with Marxism in the U.S. is the lack of a vanguard capable of consolidating an education model that can churn out scientists of scientific socialism on a mass scale. Without such a vanguard, Marxists exist in a state of perpetual underdevelopment.

And so our big national parties, at whose feet we can lay this failure, assume simplified lines and present them as complete to each other and to the masses. While it can be useful in convincing the disaffected Bernie voter to join the Communist Party, it is a sorry excuse for intellectual and ideological struggle.

This is why J. Sykes has put forward poorly worded and poorly argued polemic decrying the body of decolonial thought as a petit-bourgeois distortion. It allows so-called “Marxists” to insist that nothing but class matters and that all struggles are created by class and thus subordinate to the struggle for socialism. It allows them to mischaracterize all decolonial theorists as white-hating ultras who deny the existence of the working class and its role in socialist construction.

To subsume the struggle against colonialism to the “working class vs the ruling class” automatically treats the working class as a single homogenous entity with no internal contradictions and struggles; no motion within itself. It denies the struggle that takes place within a class and the contradictions that are present between the advanced and backwards elements of that class. It denies that the struggle for national liberation, the struggle for gender and sexual equality, the struggle for the emancipation of disabled peoples, and the struggle for the liberation of undocumented workers all constitute class struggles. 

Much like proletarian feminism seeks to identify the class basis of the struggle against patriarchy, an analysis of settler colonialism in the U.S. is an attempt to elucidate the origins of the U.S. working class and to analyze the struggles within the class itself. When we utilize feminist theory to seek to understand the complex gender relations that operate within class society, we do not do so on the basis that all men are counter-revolutionary and therefore cannot make up elements of the advanced proletarian party. However, there are strains of feminist thought that see patriarchy as the source of all social ills, including class society, and there are strains that take a stance against all men as a class. However, these misguided beliefs do not mean that feminism as a framework and body of thought is completely wrong. We can obviously see the complex gender politics in class society today and we can even see that socialist revolutions do not automatically solve the problem of patriarchy, therefore it is something that must be incorporated into a complete Marxist analysis of class society and the struggle for emancipation of all peoples.

The same is true of decolonial theory. Yes, there are some distortions of the idea of settler colonialism that says all white people are enemies of the working class, but this is a flawed analysis. However, to abandon the framework altogether in favor of a reductive concept of a multinational working class to whom the colonial relation has no bearing is almost worse. To frame it as a purely petit-bourgeois ideological strain of thought is lazy and dishonest. When we analyze the colonial relations in this country, we do not do so to supplant an analysis of class, we do so to inform our analysis of class. The colonial relation is a class relation. The struggle for national liberation is a class struggle. Any analysis of class that denies the continued existence of the colonial relation and how it shapes class society is incomplete.

It can be tempting to discard the ideas of race or gender as immaterial, non-essential, or otherwise subordinate to the class struggle. At a first glance, we can see the social basis of these concepts. In other words, a gender or a race is not fundamental to what it means to be human; these concepts arose out of social relations and have no presence in nature and no material basis. Therefore, some would say, we must focus on the material fight, the class struggle. But class is also socially constructed, and it is class society which “invents” the concepts of class and applies material consequences to a person’s specific class status. In the same vein, patriarchy transforms the socially constructed concept of gender and gives it material consequences. Colonialism does the same for the concept of race. Because patriarchy and colonialism are products of a class system, this makes the concepts of race and gender class relations. This is not to say that all women or all Black people constitute single classes, but that a person’s gender or race are determinants of class. Under capitalism, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and the various minor classes in between still exist. We have not invented new classes, but we have illuminated elements of the origins of this specific class structure and identified what we call class determinants. 

Race and gender are social relations, elements of the superstructure, and therefore are subject to the conditions of the substructure, or base. But the relationship between the base and superstructure is not static, it is fluid. When studying two aspects of a contradiction, it is necessary to determine when and under what conditions the dominance flips and one becomes the other. The base shapes the superstructure and the superstructure maintains the base, but under certain conditions the superstructure also shapes the base. It is cases such as these where we can begin to understand how race, a superstructural relation, can shape class character. Under the colonial relation, a person’s race dictates a person’s class. In colonial Africa, the Europeans were not working the mines and plantations, they owned them. A person worked the mines because they were African and a person owned the mines because they were European. In the U.S., a person was a slave because they were Black and a person was a slave owner because they were white. Today, this reality has been buried beneath decades of assimilationism and obscured behind liberal radicalism. But there was no forceful overthrow of the colonial system, and because of this, it persists and shapes class relations to this very day.

Settler colonialism not only exists today, it shapes the internal struggles within the working class, and the shifting complexities of class loyalty, consciousness, and propensity for revolutionary struggle.

J. Sykes derogatorily remarks that proponents of decolonial theory are attempting to “‘copy and paste’ from the Palestinian experience” as if the struggle for national liberation in Palestine is wholly disconnected from the struggle for national liberation here. While it is true that the conditions in Palestine are not identical to the conditions in the U.S., the settler colonial relation in “israel” is a microcosm of the settler colonial relation here. Because the colonization of Palestine is not buried beneath centuries, it is easily observable. Coupled with this fact, it is highly intense due to the shrinking of the technological gap between the colonizers and the colonized, thus making it extremely visible to the entire world. The same cannot be said of the process of colonization of the continental U.S., which has become relatively dormant. However, there are clear parallels in the colonization of the U.S. and the colonization of Palestine. I have written about some of this history in my previous essay.

What Palestine is showing us is a clear picture of settler colonialism at work. We can see in this case the ways in which race (nation) is the axis of oppression. We can see the clear rift between the “israeli” proletariat and the Palestinian one, how the settler relation aligns the “israeli” proletariat with their own national bourgeoisie, and how our simplified model of the class struggle breaks down. No longer is there a single, homogenous working class that has a united interest. There are contradictions within the class itself, struggle and motion between different segments. This is not to say that an “israeli” is incapable of engaging in revolutionary struggle, but the “israeli” section of the working class constitutes its backwards element. An “israeli” who denounces the formation of the zionist entity, rejects their nationality, and joins the struggle for national liberation truly understands the meaning of class struggle. This would be the task of any true Communist Party in “israel”.

This analysis does not “copy and paste” the Palestinian experience into the American one. However, a magnifying glass held over the continental United States will reveal thousands of little Palestines waging their own national liberation struggles on every street corner of this rotten nation.

Our task as Communists seeking to unite the progressive elements of the working class and oppressed peoples cannot be to deny the relevance of the colonial question to the class struggle. It must be to expand our understanding as practitioners of the science of Marxism-Leninism, to understand the history of class and how class in this country is shaped, to embrace new theoretical contributions and to utilize them in our practice. Our task is to bring together the advanced elements of the white working class, oppressed nations, and oppressed genders and sexualities and direct them in their historical role as harbingers of a new and better world carried out through the utter annihilation of this settler nation down to its very foundations.

May 19th, 1918 in Brooks County Georgia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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