Two peaks of Communist organization in the US are typically identified in the historical record: the CPUSA in the first half of the ’30s and the Black Panther Party (along with the New Left in general) in the ’60s and ’70s.² The first peak coincided with the Great Depression. The CPUSA’s success in the Deep South must be credited to the fusion of Communists with the Black national liberation movement, which itself was a line attributed to firstly Black revolutionaries themselves and secondly the Comintern and its intervention in CPUSA supporting the Black Belt Thesis.³ The second peak was in many ways a reaction to the class collaboration and liquidation of CPUSA by Browderism and McCarthyism, and the disorganization of the party by internal revisionist lines and Soviet revisionist “peaceful co-existence” policies, in particular the abandonment of the Black Belt Thesis and the liquidation of the Black national liberation struggle and Southern CPUSA branches. The second peak was characterized by theoretical eclecticism, adventurism, and the failure to consolidate all Communist forces into a unified revolutionary party to wage class war. The material basis for these errors, of course, lie in the original settler-system itself and the later development of a burgeoning labor aristocracy within the US Empire.

Owing to these factors, there hasn’t been a successful Communist revolution in the so-called United States to this day. The CPUSA was routed by its own internal enemies (arguably, stemming from its foundation as a forced merger of two settler-chauvinist groups and the Comintern’s complete failure to deal with the Indigenous land question) and became a reformist social-democratic organ; the New Left, which failed to build the united front against settlerism and therefore did not survive state repression, was shattered into various remnants and cults and erased or recuperated into the “nonviolent Civil Rights Movement” narrative in US history books. Therefore, it is of interest to me when there is history to be relearned that is not the stereotypical “crazy revolutionary age where students committed terrorism” depiction of the New Left.

Contemporaneous with the Black Panther Party for its brief three years, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (1969 to 1971) was consolidated out of spontaneous Black worker’s uprisings after the 1967 Detroit Rebellion and the flowering of Black-led auto unions, student unions, and neighborhood organizations thereafter.⁴ Disagreements on whether to nationalize the revolutionary unions throughout the country or to consolidate and train members in Marxism-Leninism, and longstanding class tensions between workers and intellectuals led to a split, of which one faction merged with the California Communist League, later reforming into the Communist League, the Communist Labor Party, and finally, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America of which both authors of Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers are members of.

The bulk of Motown‘s contents is based on interviews with people who actually lived through the formative events that gave rise to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). What the authors of this book hope for, clearly, is that this book will be more than a historical curio for niche specialists, and that the knowledge of generations past will contribute meaningfully to the present struggle. In this sense the book operates more as a collection of testimonies about the Black revolutionary worker’s movement in mid-1970s Detroit than a critical movement post-mortem. This is a weakness of the book, in so far as it is minimally editorialized (and where there is analysis, points of sharp disagreement arise for me).

It is also important to note that previous works about the LRBW were composed by outside academics whom rank-and-file workers refused to speak to, as is addressed in the first chapter. This book, published through the University of Georgia Press, is based on the testimony of those who actually lived through the events. That it exists at all is both something sad and hopeful; we are merely reading a radical history in place of living through the revolutionary changes that the members of the LRBW hoped for. But we can be glad that this knowledge has not been consigned to the dust bin of history, as much as the bourgeois state would like it to be, and is part of our inheritance as Communists that will arm us for future struggles.

Motown generally moves chronologically. Since all people start off as children, that is where the book starts. It accounts for the origins of LRBW leading members as immigrants or children of immigrants to the Midwest from the Southern US (or in another view, New Afrikan diaspora) and their paths to political activity, whether born into it as the children of the advanced masses or through personal experiences with capitalism and national oppression. These children grew up in a US that won the Second World War and reaped the profits of the imperialist (re-)redivision of the world, that was organizing a globalized White Terror to massacre Communists (and leftists of all stripes), and had already “cleaned up” at home with the domestic innovations of Browderism and McCarthyism.

With the disembowelment of the CPUSA (where it was not already insufficient in addressing the national question in the US Empire) and the disruption of institutional Communist memory, new organizers were left with the task of essentially developing mass organs from scratch in a hostile landscape dominated by state-controlled collaborator unions. Fortunately, the actions of the state itself gave workers the impetus to organize themselves in defense against repression. The Detroit Rebellion of 1967 was touched off by the police raiding a blind pig (unlicensed bar), one of the many that served as a node of social reproduction for factory workers. The heavy-handed state repression that came down, principally on Black workers, kicked off their self-organization in Revolutionary Union Movements (RUM) the following year, principally through the use of the wildcat strike, against both the auto corporations and the settler UAW. These RUMs were consolidated into the LRBW.

What I find useful about this section of the book is the descriptions of practical mass activities and tactics that organizers took on to mobilize not only the sections of Black workers within the factories themselves, but also to mobilize the households of striking workers. In the context of the struggle of Black workers against white-chauvinist and class-collaborationist unions, the wildcat strike was their primary weapon, as the disproportionate placement of Black workers in the most difficult, unsafe, and tedious jobs gave them control over specific choke points in the supply chains of major automobile manufacturers. Wildcat strikes were publicized and made into mass actions by the use of printed materials (especially the newspaper format, directly inspired by Lenin) circulated by high schoolers and use of existing cultural forms like music and poetry. The mass movement also had the services of radical lawyers on hand to defend workers from legal repression, though these intellectuals would later contribute to the split of the LRBW.

Specific material conditions (such as the proximity of bars to factories as an after-work socialization nexus) facilitated the mass movement, but in particular the effectiveness of the wildcat strikes and the RUMs themselves were based on the density of industry in the city. This tactic lost effectiveness as bourgeois counter-measures like offshoring and automation removed Black workers’ jobs and leverage. The wildcat strike cannot be repeated uncritically today (a point that is repeated again and again in this book), but must be related to organizational strategy under specific conditions at particular historical moments. Still, it is important to understand that previous generations of organizers did not fall into a stereotyped and mechanistic class-only or workplace-only style, but instead brought in all aspects of society possible to exert targeted pressure on specific contradictions.

Exemplary of creative organizing is how the RUMs brought in students and other non-workers into the movement, effectively supporting the workplace struggles by organizing entire neighborhoods for propaganda and logistics and to truly extend the RUMs into a mass movement. The book dedicates an entire chapter to the involvement of high school students (through the Black Student United Front) in the League and to the role of women in the day-to-day operations of the mass movement and especially in running Black Star Publishing. The LRBW conducted outreach to wives of striking workers to explain why their husbands were not working; the wives mobilized to support their husbands and organized themselves to take on many logistical tasks to support strikers (Scott and Katz-Fishman 2025, 82). The self-criticism on the treatment of women (especially the lack of women in the leadership) in the LRBW also is worth highlighting, though it appears that misogynistic men had not been quite as successfully weaponized by the state in the same manner that it was against groups like the Black Panther Party. In terms of obvious pitfalls that will destroy Communist organizations (or at least demonstrate their lack of internal democracy and inability to rectify themselves), the improper handling of patriarchal chauvinism and gender oppression shares the top spot with settler chauvinism.

On the topic of the split that led to the demise of the LRBW, the authors remain perhaps far more restrained than should be warranted (if I had to guess, to have those on the other side of the split consent to be included in the book at all). Though there are doubtless many sides to the narrative, it is commonly agreed on that there were two major factions of the split. The first faction, consisting principally of intellectuals, wanted to scale up the League and export its model to other cities in the USA, uniting revolutionary unions of Black workers nationwide in the Black Workers Congress (BWC). The second faction, consisting principally of workers themselves, wanted to develop and educate themselves in Marxism rather than nationalize the League. Importantly, the LRBW won workplace concessions around desegregation in the workplace and unions but did not fundamentally affect the exploitative class relations that workers experienced daily (Scott and Katz-Fishman 2025, 109).

These irreconcilable views led to the BWC faction resigning from the executive board and the education faction having to look afar for teachers themselves. They eventually found it in Nelson Peery of the California Communist League (CCL), and the remainder of LRBW was brought in to merge with the CCL, which (with many factions and organizations dropping in and out) eventually transformed into the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA).

The authors of this book remain cordial when discussing the other side of the split. Since I don’t need to, I will state that in my opinion, the intellectual elements who walked off the board were an opportunist faction who wished only to replicate and spread the LRBW model to other cities so that they could benefit from the larger movement personally as well as politically, with little attention to the burden this placed on workers in the organization, who themselves opposed it because they were already having difficulties maintaining the pace of organization in Detroit alone. Peery himself remarked on the fact that the LRBW had a lot of resources at its disposal thanks to its independent, self-funding Black Star Publishing press and the large amount of voluntary labor it was able to draw from Detroit’s Black working-class community. These were crucial resources to move the headquarters of the fused organization from California to Chicago.

Opportunism does not necessarily blatantly look like “selling out” because opportunist goals can align with revolutionary ones, even if the basic motive is unprincipled self-gain. Had the BWC plan been unanimously agreed upon by the Executive Board, the result of pursuing pure quantitative increases at the cost of educating organizers and workers to a higher level of theoretical understanding would have been the growth of a theoretically underdeveloped mass movement, unable to mount a challenge against its leadership clique and thereby reduced to following the clique’s whims instead of being able to sum up and readjust revolutionary strategy in a rational manner. The example of PSL and its literally idealist Socialist Consciousness Thesis, and the recent wave of resignations by principled Communists from that party is instructive for what consequences arise from pursuing quantity over quality, though the errors of the Mensheviks and their disdain for qualitative party-building predate the PSL. These were errors that should have been obvious to the intellectual faction and it is likely that intellectual petit-bourgeois prejudice against workers also played a role in fomenting the split.⁵

Related to this lack of editorializing, perhaps in reaction to the rampant sectarian nationalism (one might be reminded of the Jewish Labor Bund’s insistence on the exclusive right to organize Jewish workers, which was correctly repudiated by the RSDLP and other internationalist Social-Democratic parties at the time) in New Left, oppressed-national, and Communist organizations of the ’60s and ’70s, the analysis of the Multi-National Working Class is the one which shapes the entire book.⁶ In short, the thesis that the revolutionary class in the US Empire must be the “multi-national working class” ignores the stark fact that settler workers, as a class, subjugate colonized workers whenever they are united in class organs and that white supremacy is not a one-sided invention of the settler bourgeois class, but rather, a two-sided gentlemen’s agreement between the settler masses and the settler rulers. The formation of the new revolutionary vanguard party in the US Empire will not be guaranteed unless this reality is understood for what it is and all backdoors for white supremacy to sneak in through are hermetically sealed shut.

Nonetheless, the impact of practical experience in the LBRW integrated with Marxist education (as described in the last chapters of Motown) shows clearly in the lifelong dedication of individuals to the revolution (whether they are organized in the mass movement or in the LRNA and other organizations). At the same time, the failures of all revolutionaries up to the present day demonstrates how deeply embedded settler consciousness is even in those who truly do desire revolution. But, consciousness is a subjective factor that can be changed. Today, where the US Communist movement barely qualifies as a movement and continues to harbor red liberals and chauvinists of all stripes, and the advanced masses are drawn to ineffectual anarchism and adventurism because no current Communist organization has the ability to actually lead them to revolutionary action, reconstituting the party by principled, disciplined struggle and dialogue is the most urgent task to be taken by serious Communists.

I write this review as part of this disciplined struggle; there is no time to waste. As is emphasized in the final chapter of Motown, the working and oppressed masses are already on the move: the Communists must lead the way and not drag at the tail of the mass movement. With the climate apocalypse on the horizon, it is no longer a choice between socialism or barbarism; it is a choice between socialism or extinction.

Despite its editorial mutedness and disagreeable analysis of present day conditions, Motown is a book that should be read especially by those who are already familiar with the New Left and those seeking precedents for neighborhood and workplace organizing in oppressed-nationality communities. To pull a quote from Motown itself:

Survival of humanity and the earth requires all us to take up this revolutionary work. The revolutionary horizon is within our grasp. Make it happen!

1. The first chapter of Motown makes this exact same point about the academy and bourgeois media in general. ︎
2. The following summary of US Communist history relies on “A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words” by G. Gracchus and Settlers by J. Sakai. ︎
3. The book Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism by Frank Chapman covers the history of the intersection of Black nationalism with Communism; it specifically credits the Comintern’s outside intervention as a kind of “adult in the room” into intra-CPUSA debates to the correct line taken up by CPUSA during this time as regards the Black nation in the United States. Chapman was personally involved in politically lynching a member of Chicago FRSO who questioned the mythology of Black internationalism in 1935 around the Ethiopian-Italian war and advocated for the support of national liberation struggles within Ethiopia. J. Sakai also lauded 1935 as an example of Black internationalism in Settlers. ︎
4. There is a brief section that describes the LRBW forming their own Panther chapter to avoid conflict with them. This speaks to a lack of political stringency on the part of the Panthers and to the issues with a purely numerical view of organizing. Unfortunately the book does not opine so much about the different versions of Black nationalism promoted by the Panthers and other groups such as Nation of Islam. This was a missed opportunity in my view. ︎
5. If I had to speculate from the account of their behavior (specifically their disapproval about workers educating themselves while proclaiming Marxism to be the guiding ideology of LRBW), it appears that the intellectual faction drew upon an opportunistic reading of Kautsky’s political consciousness thesis as expounded on in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. In essence, Kautsky’s thesis states that no class struggle in of itself is revolutionary; workers on their own can only develop trade-union consciousness and organize towards reformism. Socialist, revolutionary, political consciousness must come from the outside. This political consciousness originates from petit-bourgeois revolutionary intellectuals who fuse with the worker’s movement, providing political consciousness to the advanced ranks of the workers, realizing the proletariat as a conscious class-for-itself, and orient it towards the goal of social revolution. Shifting the meaning of words, one could argue that it is not the place of workers to be educated but that workers need to be under the firm and enlightened hand of a small elite of revolutionary intellectuals. ︎
6. Informing the bulk of political-economic analysis and thus strategic orientation is the thesis that automation, robotics, and AI/LLMs are developing a “new mode of production,” which is overstated in my view. I would point to the chief driver of the weakness of the Communist movement in the US and extending existing weaknesses caused by settlerism from the ’80s to present day, being the increased exploitation of the Global South (through industrial offshoring) resulting in the extension of the labor aristocracy and its settler unions, and the atomization of remaining proletarian workplaces through techniques such as digital securitization, external contracting, gig work, and other technological and organizational innovations on part of the imperial settler-bourgeois. However, even with all of their tricks, the bourgeois cannot outrun the law of the falling rate of profit and the fact that the machinery of society still remains in the hands of the colonized working class worldwide. ︎

Peoria is an average, mid-sized city in central Illinois that boasts the largest park district in the state.¹ Any resident of the city will tell you that these parks are used extensively for public events, by local clubs, associations, and anybody who wants to hike and/or bike through nature; all carefully maintained by an army of 144 full-time staff and around 1,400 part-time employees during the summer.² Considering the benefit these lands bring to the public, it is no surprise that there would be public outcry when a case to facilitate the O’Brien Steel company’s purchase of part of Detweiller Playground was rushed through courts last November.³

O’Brien Jr., a trustee for the nonprofit in charge of (supposedly) maintaining the park property, is also the executive vice president of O’Brien Steel company.⁴ A man so principled in duty that he is selling the land to himself. It is no wonder, then, that such secrecy clouded the court case last year; the media exposure of these backdoor deals has put the company in a bind and raised citizen environmentalist opposition to the sale.

The citizen opposition to the deal, consisting of concerned local residents and activists, gets to the point: this was a shady deal done out of sight of the news media and the public. The citizen opposition makes the argument that this land is useful and good for the public, and this is true. Even on an overcast day with cool temperatures, anyone can sit at the picnic tables and observe ordinary families use the playground, take the trail, wander around the fields, or go down to the docks. Not only do humans derive enjoyment from the playground and marina, but other animals live there and enjoy the park too. The citizen opposition is correct in every sense of the word to oppose this deal.

The mysterious confluence of private for-profit and nonprofit interests we see is not exceptional to Peoria, or even to Illinois. This is how, on a fundamental level, capitalism works. And it functions excellently. It is well known that members of Congress trade in stocks in a lively manner, that hankering Wall Street investors and hedge fund managers watch Trump trade stocks to inform their own decisions, that elected politicians often end up on corporate boards after their term is up, that insiders and fraudsters of all types make bank on cryptocurrency and Polymarket gambling rings, and there are too many examples of backdoor deals that go on daily and hourly to list here.

Apologists for the free market insist that these are exceptions and surface blemishes on the ideal of capitalism. But to the contrary, we insist the only version of capitalism that exists is the one that is put into practice. People and things are not free-floating ideas in the consciousness of individuals; people and things are engaged in real situations and real relations. They must be judged from their practical results. It is only by starting from analyzing objective reality that we can discover how something works.

We must investigate: What are the practical results of capitalist society on this land? What are its peculiar characteristics?

The Settler Colony

In the so-called United States, capitalism is intertwined with settler colonialism. Capitalist development in Europe, kickstarted by the looting of overseas colonies and human trafficking, dispossessed massive amounts of peasants of their land and diminished prospects for the offspring of the artisan and merchant middle classes. Those who could not live off of the land or off their small crafts or off of trading had to go begging for jobs in workshops that expanded into factories. They made less than the money they needed to live, and when they did live, they lived in cramped, squalid conditions.

The conditions of proletarian poverty drove waves of land-hungry settlers to the “New World.” That meant rampant land speculation, the “clearing” and subjugation of the Indigenous peoples already inhabiting the land, and their reduction of numbers by genocide and the trafficking of enslaved (primarily, West African) labor to replace enslaved Indigenous labor. In North America, these processes resulted in the creation of the settler nation, glued together by the invention of “whiteness” and common experience in colonial conquest. The settler-colonial system ensures that the settler nation lives off of the exploitation of the Black nation (and other national minorities) and the remaining Indigenous nations which, starting from the New Deal onwards, have been given paper governments which primarily facilitate neocolonial resource extraction. Neocolonialism means that, despite paper promises for Indigenous sovereignty in the form of federally recognized tribal status and governments, the US government and the settler-corporations still dominate the lives of Indigenous people, politically, economically, and environmentally.

Running a settler colony is not easy: when people are oppressed so extensively, they will resist with whatever means are at hand. Within the US Empire’s borders, domestic discontent by propertyless settlers and, more crucially, by the colonized working class, had to be pacified; imperial loot was redistributed to the former and repression was enacted upon the latter. Internal conflicts of settler colonialism are, in essence, exported via imperialism, which means rape and genocide across the whole world. Imperialism lowers the cost of labor and raw materials in the Global South by force; this stolen wealth bolsters the working class wages of the US Empire. The imperialist distribution of these kickbacks itself is stratified on class and national lines predefined by settler colonialism.⁵ This is, fundamentally, how our society functions on a day-to-day basis. It is no question that settler colonialism and imperialism inform every granular detail of politics within the USA.⁶

The foundation of our entire government and our entire idea of what constitutes “private” or “public” property rests on the conquest of preexisting Indigenous nations, the enslavement of the Black nation, and the exploitation/liquidation of oppressed national minorities (like the Chinese workers who died building California’s railroads, or the Latine laborers who work in the fields and factories). The foundation of settler society is the betrayal of every single promise made to peoples deemed non-human or “uncivilized.” These are facts that will not change with a simple land acknowledgement, nor they are privileges that will go away with piecemeal reforms to make settler society “more inclusive.”⁷

That is to say, no matter how correct the citizen opposition is in its stance against the subversion of public interests, no matter how militant it is in the fight to preserve a public good that is used by the working and oppressed masses regardless of nationality, the citizen opposition is also limited by its own views and existence as a progressive faction of settler society itself. When it is said that this deal undermines democracy and this deal takes away a public good, we must ask, whose democracy is it? Who makes up the public?

The answer is simply the democracy of the masses of settlers and the settler public (plus, the national minorities graciously granted use of public facilities). Our democracy is a paper democracy where in theory everyone is equal before the law and in practice it is economic power which drives political power.⁸ Our paper democracy allows us “protest” and “freedom of speech” for the stolen “public.”⁹

What is the specific history of Detweiller Playground, the Detweiller lands themselves, and how does it relate to the history of the settler colony?

Thomas Detweiller’s Gracious Gift 

Here is the story of how the Detweiller lands got into the hands of the public:

Let’s start with Captain Henry Detweiller, […] He was born in Larraine, France in 1825 and as a teenager found himself living here in Peoria, Illinois in 1837. He had a few jobs as a teen, but his heart and soul belonged to the Illinois River. He finally landed a job on one of the steamboats he loved so much and spent his life working on them, from deckhand to pilot to owner, becoming a local hero during the Civil War. In 1874 he finally retired from the river and went into the ice business here in Peoria, Illinois. […] Henry amassed a sizeable fortune as well as a lot of valuable land. His son and two daughters inherited all of the Captain’s assets, and set out to donate most of it to charities and the City of Peoria.

Thomas Hunter Detweiller took over his father’s business, and in consultation with his two sisters donated Detweiller Park to the Peoria Park District on July 23, 1927. The total land grant was 745 acres, and today the park board lists Detweiller Park as 601 acres. The gift later included some valuable riverside property where the old ice business once stood and an area set aside for a playground for children. Today there is a Marina within that land, and historians tell us that that was not the intended use of the Detweiller property.

Another source tells us:

The notable Illinois Riverboat Captain Henry Detweiller (d1907) had a deep love for the river, navigating riverboats up and down the Illinois. Upon retiring from navigating the river, he opened an ice business at the foot of Caroline St. The Captain was a successful businessman and accumulated wealth he left for his children. After his death, his son Thomas noticed “industry” was quickly taking over the Peoria riverfront and there was no place for the community to recreate and play along the river. As a legacy from the Detweiller family, Thomas set aside a piece of property that would belong to “the people” and be used for “public recreation and playground purposes”, in perpetuity.

Upon Thomas’ death in 1947, he gifted the land, the location of the Detweiller’s former ice works business, to the ‘People of Peoria’ through a trust—the “Detweiller Playground” (& Marina). A board of trustees and a trust fund was established in 1948 for care and maintenance of the land.

A classic American story! Henry, a young man from France, immigrates to the New World for a better life and becomes part of the working class of America. By hard work and ingenuity in running his small business he acquires land and a fortune to pass down to his son, who chooses to donate it to the public so that everyone can enjoy it.

Who were the workers who ran his ice business? From where did he acquire his land? What of the original inhabitants of the land, the civilizations that existed prior to Thomas Detweiller’s “gift”?

After the Taíno people encountered the bloodthirsty rapist Christopher Columbus in 1492, the European empires began to send colonists, soldiers, and traders who wished to make a fortune in the Americas. The nations that lived in what would become Illinois were related by the common Algonquian language family, including the Peoria People, whom the city is named for. The French gave these nations the name of the Illinois Confederation. Through germ warfare, trade, trickery, intermarriage, and divide-and-conquer tactics, the French colonizers staked out a vast claim on what would become the American Midwest and the interior of the American South. The purpose of this conquest was to secure a market for manufactured French goods in exchange for colonial raw materials, to boost nascent capitalist accumulation in Europe. This was no benign “natural market” but the seedling of imperialist domination.

This seedling would blossom fully into rampant settler colonialism with the inter-imperialist “French and Indian War,” after which the British Empire was “given” the French-claimed land in 1763 to expand their settler colonies. Decades before the land claims were transferred on paper, the nations of the Illinois Confederation already faced war and pressure from eastern nations, including the Iroquois Confederacy, who were themselves displaced by settlers. Disease and warfare from European settlers further slaughtered whole sections of the nations of the Illinois Confederacy. Although British defeats during the Seven Years’ War and the costs of garrisoning the colonies in general led to the empire restraining colonization and reserving the lands west of the Appalachian mountains for the Indigenous peoples, settlers continued to flaunt imperial law through murders and land-grabs no matter what their distant monarch said.

Two decades later, the inter-imperialist war of 1776, motivated in part by the class pressures of unlanded (and working class!) settlers seeking to breach the treaties set up by the British, would result in the independence of the US Empire. Unrestrained liberty to colonize what settlers viewed as “their” land, having already preemptively settled it in many cases with the accompanying violent means. The combination of unfettered colonization and knock-on effects from other nations facing settler aggression led to genocide waged on the Kickapoo People and other nations in Illinois, land concessions and displacement in 1819, culminating in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The act enforced the eviction of Indigenous peoples remaining in the area, resulting in mass deportations and forced marches to reservations in Oklahoma, essentially clearing out “living space” for white settlers.

Not every single Indigenous person left. Those who were able to stay on their land often were digested into settler society as marginalized national and cultural minorities (whether recognized by the federal government or not in the form of tribal status or NGOs), benefiting later from reformist measures and carve-outs won by radical Indigenous movements. However, the bulk of their nations were removed due to the genocide, leaving the remainder a tiny minority in the territory west of the Mississippi River.

Indigenous resistance to colonialism existed at every juncture of this history in the form of guerilla warfare, espionage, and diplomacy. The pan-Indigenous alliance formed by Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa across so-called Indiana and Illinois drew in nations from north and south to militarily resist the US Empire from 1812 to 1813. The sum effect of Indigenous resistance delayed the bulk of dispossession until 1830. Continued guerilla warfare prevented settler control over swaths of territory for several more decades. The Seminole Nation, formed from the remnants of several Indigenous nations and escaped African slaves, was eventually fractured and dispossessed, but a small group in the Everglades was able to fight the US Empire until 1858.

Taking this history into account, we find that Henry Detweiller entered the scene just in time to benefit from decades of targeted ethnic cleansing and freshly opened-up lands ripe for settling and capitalist exploitation. He would have been part of the economy that serviced the masses of settler-soldiers and their garrison-towns up and down the Illinois river. His workers would have been fresh immigrants escaping European conditions, likely from Ireland or Germany, or “native-born” settlers seeking upwards mobility through land and capital ownership.

Was the land truly gifted for everyone? No, it was not, we can say. No matter how much the story is repeated over and over again, with the enshrining of yet another white man’s name on Indigenous land, the truth still lies at the bottom of the pile of settler mythology.

Why does this historical blindspot exist?

Environmentalist and conservationist organizations have historically gone hand-in-hand with unfettered colonialism and imperialism.¹⁰ How else would you secure the lands you must “preserve” other than by military conquest and garrisons? How can you imagine preserving land “unused” by humans in any other way than denying Indigenous inhabitation and subsistence on that land? Moreover, despite the promises of old conservationism to preserve natural resources for “future generations,” the liquidation of the natural world, piece by piece, is inevitable, as long as capitalism exists. As long as our entire society is ordered around the pursuit of profit, public parks and public lands will not exist in perpetuity but as banked resources to cash in when the going gets tough. The future generations are nothing compared to the present needs of unlimited expansion, which is the organizing logic of cancerous masses.

There is the root of the injustice and inequity we see before our eyes. It was not gifted to “everyone.” It was in fact taken away from its previous inhabitants, then declared to be special and set apart for the settler public to enjoy, neglected by rapacious capitalists through the instrument of the nonprofit board, and now, it is in danger of liquidation and conversion into capital, merely storage space, for the profit of a private company. From being a living thing, home to many other living things, it will be transformed into a dead space to pile on dead metal to furnish the conversion of more living things into dead things.

The Revolution Against Ecocide

Since the establishment of the first colony of the thirteen colonies that would eventually form the US Empire, the basic industries of the United States have been, in aggregate, an engine of Indigenous dispossession, Black slavery, and ecocide, the murder of the environment and the eradication of the ecosystems that make up this continent. What may happen to Detweiller Playground is yet another murder in a long spree of murders taking place all over the country, spanning more than two and a half centuries.

The citizen opposition to ecocide may succeed against capital. They may earn a stay of execution with their arguments even as the agreement hangs in limbo.¹¹ Much like the struggle against the imposition of data center construction onto towns, which are the most egregious example of how even settler democracy does not give capital any pause, they might win.¹² However, without opening the question of land and our human relationship to it as part of nature itself, without considering the aspects of class and nation, the only path of opposition to ecocide is incremental legalism, ineffectual protest, or occasionally, individual adventurism. The opposition, with their tools arising from settler-democratic norms and practices, may never need to reach for anything else for this battle. Peaceful protest and petition to the local settler government may be enough.

But capital and the profit incentive insists on growth for its own sake, like a cancerous mass, and the immune system cannot hold it back forever. The fundamental metabolic rift of capitalism is that the alienation from the land we live on, at the behest of increasing accumulation, has irreversibly disrupted ecological cycles and processes. The metabolic rift in the form of climate change manifests most severely: the earth is on track to surpass the 1.5°C average global warming benchmark as this year’s El Niño may herald even more warming in 2027 and bring more natural disasters. The imperialist genocide of the Palestinian people, fully supported, aided, and abetted by the US Empire, is an ecocide that is directly responsible for the acceleration towards climate disaster.

More than crude surgery, we need the most sophisticated forms of radiotherapy and chemotherapy to save the patient, our planet.

Our prescription is revolution. Revolution means the dismantling of the settler-bourgeois government and its privileges, the return of “public” lands and “private” property not to settler “public” ownership but to Indigenous stewardship and care. Revolution means that those who bleed and sweat every day in service to maintaining the vital functions of human society will have control over it. In short, revolution is the end of all forms of exploitation, of not only human but non-human living things, and the restoration of a relationship to the land which protects and nurtures the land, and each other as human beings. Revolution means dissembling the US Empire and the imperialist army, to give Palestine back to the Palestinians, to relinquish control over Indigenous land and make reparations to the oppressed nations of the world. Then, and only then, may the healing start at last.

“But the Indigenous people who live in Peoria are a tiny minority of the population and highly integrated into settler society,” one might say. “There is no war here to fight against settler colonialism, when the frontline is in Black Hills and Pe’ Sla is seven hundred miles away.¹³ How can we fight against settler colonialism in a place where it has already won?”

This is a small perspective. Peoria, like every other capitalist society, is sustained by exploited labor. The stratification of labor on national lines (Black and Latine workers, especially immigrants, face the sharpest class-national oppression) creates the conditions for the “middle class” indeed, settler society itself, to carry on as normal, while the labor of the petit-bourgeois and labor aristocratic middle classes furnishes imperialism at home and afar.¹⁴ The “middle classes” find their interests pulled both above in line with the capitalists and below in line with the lower working class; many of them become radicals from a combination of practical experience and Communist education.

Even settler workers, as a class actively bribed by both imperialism and settler colonialism, can find reasons to be dissatisfied with their current way of life. Pay attention to the numerous complaints of unsafe working conditions, abusive management practices, and racial abuse at O’Brien Steel itself! Do these workers support the expansion of their dangerous and exploitative workplace and more profits for their bosses, or are these workers the key element in stopping the deal, who can be drawn by the issues of workplace safety and disrespect from management and united with the citizen opposition to the land sale? It is Black and Latine workers here, who are forced to take the worst, most dangerous, yet the most important and critical jobs, who have the most leverage.

The settler nation, already full of fractures, must be further divided on class and gender lines.¹⁵ The settlers honest enough to see through the facade of settler society and to determine that their true interests lie in defection must be brought into the fold (by the truth and not by deceit!) of revolutionaries, and further developed into comrades and accomplices to the colonized peoples of the world. What we require to remake discontented settlers into freedom fighters is the political discipline that can only come from the Communist party with its roots in the class-national liberation struggles of the colonized working class, not a “Communist party” that represents the interests of colonizers.

If the US Empire’s early political economy was an engine fueled by Indigenous liquidation and Black exploitation, it quickly overflowed its borders to parasitize the rest of the world the moment its external fetters were loosened by the inter-imperialist war of 1776. Today the engine is one that profits handsomely from not only its internal colonies, but from international death and waste, and sustains its bourgeois class and its labor aristocratic working class on the dual pillars of the oppressed nations within the US Empire itself and the Third World peoples that global imperialism enchains. The very same machinery that drops bombs in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, and other “far” places is the one that is paving over the land within US borders.

To stop the engine, by any means necessary, is the highest political imperative of anyone who has continued interest in living on a habitable earth.

To the settler in opposition: motivated by your love of nature, your genuine commitment to democracy and the common good, however misled by settler society, we say that it is not too late. Commit yourself to landback, to Indigenous liberation, to decolonization and communism. Link your arms with the decolonialists and Communists and fight for their liberation. Betray your class and your nation and in doing so you will merely liberate yourself and the entire world.

1. Peoria is so average that there was even a phrase coined: “Will it play in Peoria?” This refers to performing arts shows previewed in Peoria. As of 2024, the park district has 29 parks and 66 acres of parkland per 1,000 residents. ︎
2. As of March 2026. ︎
3. The Detweiller Playground Board was actually working on selling off part of the land as far back as April 2025, but the plan was approved by the Illinois Attorney General in November 2025. O’Brien is listed on the board as of 2024 tax filings. Of note is the amount of assets that the board owns and the yearly expenditures. If the park is dilapidated and unsuitable for use, why is it not being maintained with these funds? The playbook is clear: take a “public” good, neglect and degrade it, then use its poor condition to justify its liquidation! This is the same tactic that conservatives call “Starving the beast” whereby reducing expenditures on social services by cutting taxes, those services perform more poorly, thus justifying more cuts. ︎
4. As of January 2025. ︎
5. As according to statistics collected by the US government itself, Indigenous people consistently report nearly twice as much unemployment as do non-Indigenous people. This statistic worsens with Indigenous people who live on reservations, which are neglected by the US government when not seized in pursuit of resource extraction or to develop industries for the benefit of settlers and the Indigenous collaborationist bourgeois. Indigenous reservations and Black neighborhoods are also disproportionately food deserts. The key distinction between oppressed nationalities within the imperialist countries and oppressed nationalities outside of them is that the former can enlist in the imperial military and thereby benefit from imperialist rape. That ex-military members from oppressed nations in the USA are easily discarded once their usefulness runs out demonstrates that no amount of individual collaboration with the imperial armed forces is enough to save anyone. ︎
6. See J. Sakai’s Settlers for a more or less comprehensive history of settler society. ︎
7. The following section of Indigenous history draws upon this article as well as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. ︎
8. The Civil Rights movement, itself torn with internal factions but united on the question of Black integration into settler society, existed on the right of national liberation movements (exemplified by the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party) in the heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. The organizing of this era won concessions from settler society against legal segregation and public lynch terror. Nonetheless, economic and spacial segregation still exists deeply in Peoria, lynching remains a mainstay of police terror all over the country, and persists in the private sphere. ︎
9. Working people have little free time to engage in electoral politics and oppressed nationalities are actively prevented from exercising even paper rights. The recent gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which used to (somewhat) prevent racial gerrymandering, will accelerate the latter trend even more. We are permitted to have “protests” in the form of liberal parades and rallies as managed by 50501 and the liberal-resistance complex. Protests that cause disruption or are escalated by the police are called riots instigated by “domestic terrorists.” Freedom of speech, especially of the kind proscribed by NSPM-7, is also on a contracting trend. ︎
10. Theodore Roosevelt, arch-imperialist and general showboater, was also a great outdoorsman and committed conservationist. ︎
11. As of April 25th, 2026, the issue would be revisited in mid-May, but this did not happen. ︎
12. The rush to build data centers to resource more and more energy-intensive large-language models goes hand in hand with the monopolization of computing power and the apocalyptic Silicon Valley “General AI” ideological project. Of course, the boom in construction jobs satisfies the collaborator unions who represent the labor aristocracy and their hanger-ons. Incidentally, this represents the true face of trade-unionist consciousness held by these workers as they are unable to see past the short-term gains for their workplaces for the long-term negative effects of the increased energy and water usage of data centers and the monopolization of computing capacity under the control of a few corporations. Labor aristocracy is obviously associated with settlerism but is not a complete correlation— many degree holders imported from outside the USA become part of the labor aristocracy regardless if they are white or not. ︎
13. As of May 4th, 2026, Indigenous youth successfully defended the Lakota sacred site Pe’ Sla from a mining company in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. ︎
14. “Middle class” refers to the petit-bourgeois and the labor aristocracy, which in the context of the USA have porous boundaries. The petit-bourgeois are people who derive their income from owning the means of production and employing workers and usually also work themselves because of the smallness of their business. The labor aristocracy refers to the upper layer of well-paid workers who have good benefits and lead reformist trade unions and other groups which prevent the development of revolutionary working-class organizations as well as a “peripheral” labor aristocracy, a kind of unorganized reactionary flotsam whose inflated real wages and access to credit exceed the costs of living (healthcare, housing, transit, retirement, etc.) thus making their immediate interests the preservation of imperialism. ︎
15. Simple exposure of settler workers to colonized workers in their workplace results in the subjugation of the interests of nationally oppressed workers to settler workers. Rather, there must be revolutionary, decolonial, conscious unions that aim to construct the Communist party as well as other organs which unite students, disabled people, and the unemployed population together. Gender oppression refers to both the oppression of women and to the oppression of LGBTQ+ people in general. The current exterminationist stances taken by the federal government against trans people means that, if organized properly, trans settlers will become an important asset in the fight for decolonization and for communism. ︎

The blurb for this workshop was:

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

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

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

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

Political Miseducation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Class and Nationality in Peoria

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revisionist Reproduction

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT IS A PIG?
A low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice, or the rights of the people; a creature that bites the hand that feeds it; a foul depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack.

On May 2nd, Rodney Hinton got into his car, struck a sheriff’s deputy, and killed him. This hits our moment like a body through a windshield. At Rodney’s first court hearing, cops filled the room to sneer at the man who had delivered such a monumental blow. The courtroom was a reverse slaughterhouse, pigs lined up to butcher the man.  Rodney walked by without flinching. He wore the wounds on his head from the windshield glass like a crown. 

We celebrate Rodney’s corrective and instructive action. The father of a murdered son has rejected the idea that the murderers stand above us, untouchable, and has dragged them down squealing from on high back into the dirt where they keep the rest of us. Here they become recognizable as an enemy we can fight. Here, at eye level, it is clear just how vulnerable they are.

There is a war raging in this country, and it has been raging for centuries. The current form of the police are the armed-to-the-teeth descendants of the slave catchers and “Indian” killers. Killing children is what cops do. If the dead pig Rodney hit didn’t, he trained the pig who did; they chugged beers over barbecue. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” only works if all the world shares the same vision. What we have are eyes glaring across established lines on a battlefield. When an enemy takes something from you, you better at least take as much back so the fight becomes winnable again. We celebrate this radical act of resistance, the same way we celebrated the eradication of every Nazi from Soviet soil, the triumph of the Vietnamese army over the U.S. imperialists, and the repulsion and humiliation of IOF ground troops by Palestinian freedom fighters. Each casualty of the enemy mortifies and terrifies them, because they only know how to wage a one-sided war. They don’t have the stomach for a real fight.

The pigs who filled the courtroom of Rodney’s first hearing and all the others who wear their uniform on this land feel this. The beasts huddle together, licking their wounds, offering themselves reassurances and prayers. They fear what it will mean if they don’t successfully crush Rodney for his defiance. They will continue to try to hide their vulnerability behind inflated budgets and military-grade equipment. They will mask their fear as rage and strike back on the oppressed with even greater fury. This is a call to everyone invested and sympathetic to the call of justice and liberation, we cannot let the pigs strike Rodney down and make him into a symbol. We must rise for him, demand his release, and fight for it! Celebrate it in the street, let every cop quake  knowing their enemies are everywhere and see them for what they are.

In this country-wide graveyard of the silenced and oppressed, we say, “Let a million Rodney’s bloom!” 

Life for unsheltered people is deliberately enforced hell. Private property rights criminalize their existence in virtually every space. Recent waves of anti-homeless statutes have criminalized homelessness across entire municipalities. When homelessness is criminalized everywhere, the only place left for unsheltered people to go is jail. The Supreme Court of the United States not only recognizes but approves of this state of affairs. This summer, the Court affirmed laws which criminalized sleeping in public spaces. Saddling the unsheltered with fines and criminal records will of course make it harder for an unhoused person to secure housing, but overt fascism can give no breathing room for these basic considerations. The pipeline from unemployment to jail is streamlined like never before.

What’s more, rampant criminalization gives license to those who would commit violence against unhoused people. Criminalization breeds dehumanization. In 2019, Randy Santos murdered four unsheltered people with a pipe as they slept in doorways and sidewalks in New York City. This is a process of dehumanization that comes directly from the bourgeois state. State governments encourage petit-bourgeois residents to see the unsheltered as something other, creatures to be feared, rather than people to be helped.

Unhoused people often shelter on public transportation. This is what Margaret, Simeon, Adrian, and the other elderly person were doing last Sunday night when they boarded Chicago’s Blue Line, one of only two lines that run 24 hours. They bothered no one as they slept peacefully on the dusty train seats. Surveillance footage shows a masked individual executing all four at point blank range shortly before 5:30 AM. They were shot as the train rolled into the Forest Park, Illinois terminal. Margaret was shot in the head and killed instantly. Simeon and the unnamed person died of multiple gunshots. Adrian, who was shot in the abdomen, was rushed to a hospital but did not survive. Police have charged Rhianni Davis, a 30 year old Chicago resident who previously worked as a security guard, with the murders. He was arrested the same morning on another train with a 9mm Glock 43. Investigators claim Davis is a forensic match to the six shell casings found at the scene. There is no established motive. 

Capitalism requires the constant generation of a relative surplus population to sustain the law of supply and demand of labor. Homelessness is not a crisis in America, it is a permanent and obligatory byproduct of our economic system. The number of unsheltered spikes during economic recessions. Regularly occurring economic crises are another absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. These crises become more disastrous in tandem with economic development. Capitalist regimes have developed various welfare systems to hamper revolutionary attitudes in times of crisis. Welfare systems are funded with the spoils of imperialist loot taken from oppressed nations, such as the shiploads of oil and natural gas stolen from Iraq and Syria. America’s welfare system has always been a poor cousin to its Western peers, but it faces little pushback from both the labor movement and a collaborationist “communist” party. The recession of 1973-1975 was not treated with the welfare band-aid. Instead, federal housing budgets were slashed, social service agencies were gutted, and the pace of deindustrialization picked up. This led to what is sometimes labeled the modern era of homelessness. Since homelessness has always existed, will always exist, must always exist under capitalism, the defining features of this modern era are increased visibility of the unhoused, abdication of the welfare state facade, and the barbaric labor discipline of anti-homeless laws.

Forest Park Deputy Police Chief Christopher Chin referred to Labor Day’s quadruple homicide as an “isolated incident.” There is nothing isolated about violence and dehumanization of unsheltered people. It all stems from “the bloody legislation against vagabondage” under which the unemployed are “whipped, branded, and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labor.” Horrendous attacks like that which occurred last Monday will only increase in occurrence as the empire continues its clay-footed march into fascism. Margaret Miller, Simeon Bihesi, Adrian Collins, and the other gentleman did not deserve to die. It is up to the advanced workers to develop the organizations — with discipline and Marxist-Leninist education — that will defend the unhoused masses from fascist violence. 

These plans were implemented on May 13. Water barricades were placed on Republic, between Liberty and Green Streets, for a six month trial period. In addition to this, fencing was built around a recreation center preventing homeless people from finding shade and shelter. All of this with the supposed purpose of stopping an “open-air drug market” and stopping crime.

But who is defining what ‘crime’ is? How is a church providing for the hungry viewed as “attracting” crime? Why is a child going hungry, in itself, not viewed as a crime when it’s perpetuated by our own government? The answer is that spikes in “crime” are nothing more than code for a rise in poverty and state repression. These have been caused by the worsening economic conditions in Cincinnati and the gentrification of the neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine.

The gentrification of Over-the-Rhine has been an ongoing process catalyzed by the murder of an unarmed Black man named Timothy Thomas in 2001. This was coupled with public outrage from the community in response to yet another murder of a Black person by police. The rebellion gained momentum; boycotts and protests put pressure on the city. The Black United Front and the Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement were just a few of the organizations involved in the struggle. To stomp this rebellion and ensure profitable control of the neighborhood, the  privatization of the public planning department in the form of a nonprofit development corporation named 3CDC (Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation) was implemented in 2003.  This process was dubbed “urban revitalization.”   

Dan La Botz summarizes this history as follows in Cincinnati: A Decade Since the Rebellion of 2001 — What Have We Learned, Where Are We Now?: 

Cincinnati exploded in protest and rebellion in April and May of 2001 following the April 7 police killing of 19-year old Timothy Thomas, the fifteenth African American man under the age of 50 to be killed by the police between 1995 and 2001. While several of those killed had drawn guns and shot at or shot civilians or police, others did not have firearms or were killed while in police custody. Thomas, who had committed many misdemeanors and had several warrants for his arrest (but who had no record of violence) was nevertheless chased into an alley, shot and killed by a police officer. Thomas’s mother Angela Leisure showed up at City Hall accompanied by 200 other community members, almost all of them Black, to demand that city and police officials explain why her son had been killed, but police and politicians dealt with her contemptuously.… The Cincinnati rebellion of 2001 was the largest disturbance in the city since the ghetto rebellion of 1967 and the largest in the United States since Los Angeles riots of 1992 which began with the police beating of an African American man named Rodney King.

After the riots, a real estate consultant named John Alschuler based in Washington D.C. was brought in to advise the city of Cincinnati on how to best handle the situation: “Over-the-Rhine has to be restored as a mixed-income neighborhood where poor-, moderate-, and upper-income people all have a future… create a private entity with the capacity to deliver change at Fountain Square and Over-the-Rhine, devote capital to it, and hire the foremost talent in the country to staff it.” 

In 2003, Mayor Luken appointed P&G CEO A.G. Lafley and Federated Department Stores chairman James Zimmerman to “a new private, nonprofit group charged with sparking downtown’s struggling economic development efforts.” This would come to be the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp, otherwise known as 3CDC — a non-profit development corporation dominating what should be controlled by the people. During this time, the nascent 3CDC started sending out “ambassadors of goodwill.” The clear intention was to send out wholesome and cheerful representatives to the community, but in practice they acted as private security guards, enforcing the interests of the organization and its goals. They leveraged state power to “clean up” downtown. Instead of solving the underlying problems behind poverty and crime, they simply sought to kick it somewhere else.

         One of the ambassadors themselves admitted to the reality of their role. “We’re pretty much looked at as security guards who are setting a higher standard,” an ambassador said. They essentially acted as auxiliary police units. Ambassadors would patrol Over-the-Rhine and look in shop windows “for a signal from an employee that everything is fine or something is amiss.” If they spotted an “unruly customer” or potential robbery, they would call the police. Ambassadors dealt with “everything from drug addicts ranting and raving and threatening our customers to a fight breaking out…” said Gary Gabbard, manager of Donato’s on Main St. 10. Small business owners like Gary use what little power they have to be petty tyrants towards the impoverished and call upon auxiliary police units to police communities. Settlers collaborate with the state to act as ambassadors and subjugate marginalized groups. 

St. Francis Seraph — the church that has been frequently providing aid services to the community of Over-the-Rhine — had planned on converting a nearby portion of the church into a shelter through the nonprofit Tender Mercies. A member of the local neighborhood watch and various city officials claimed this would lead to increased crime and that the neighborhood was out of control.

“You can’t put investment dollars in a neighborhood that’s out of control,” said Chris Frutkin, owner of City Center Properties. “That behavior would never happen south of Liberty Street.” 

The lives of people are easily outweighed by numerical investments to Chris and the class of business owners. They’re more than happy to demonize victims of poverty to protect their own profit, and push narratives of crime being “out-of-control.” America’s economic and social system is maintained in part through stigmatization and individualism. It attempts to place any blame solely upon the individual. Poor people are painted with a general image of immorality; stereotyped as lazy, stupid, bad, or as violent criminals. With this falsehood, a person is able to justify walking past another human begging on the street in 100°F heat without a second thought. With this falsehood, members of a community can be lulled into inaction as repressive powers are built to crack down on them as soon as medical bills get too high or the stock market too low.

“We’re hoping that it could be a form of affordable housing with supportive services to get some of these people off the street into decent housing,” said Father Al Hirt, St. Francis Seraph pastor. “The Franciscans would love to see it used that way, more than some boutique hotel or something.”

Unfortunately, according to WCPO, this was not successful: “The nonprofit Tender Mercies had hoped to buy the St. Francis Seraph friary and applied to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency for low-income historic tax credits for the $21 million project. But the housing finance agency’s board declined to fund the project, according to a May 15 news release.”

Furthermore, the barricade has been a “success” for the settlers:

“So far, so good, let’s wait and see,” said Over-the-Rhine Community Council President Kevin Hassey. “I’m encouraged… there are more police in the area, particularly north of Liberty.”

The notion that crime is on the rise and needs to be rectified in the form of more police ultimately benefits the people in power — the landowners, the police, real estate developers. The police enforce their authority for the state, but that authority is not neutral, as their power is used to protect the interests of businesses to ensure profit and subjugation of colonized peoples. The planned barricade is a fascist attack on people who have been labeled by the state as deserving of extreme poverty and violence. Systematic inequalities perpetually enforced by the state are the root causes of homelessness.

This barricade is a manifestation of the police fulfilling their historic role as slave patrols. Increases in visible poverty and the misery it causes are due to capitalism and settler colonialism functioning to keep working and colonized people exploited — the necessary counterpart to the siphoning of wealth created by workers into the pockets of business owners. Over-the-Rhine isn’t the only target. Several neighborhoods in Cincinnati are also the target. Camp Washington is one example. The Camp Washington Urban Revitalization Corporation even got the neighborhood of Camp Washington selected by the Congress for the New Urbanism for a new renovation project that will displace the renters and houseless people in the area for a walkable neighborhood benefiting wealthier clientele. It’s part of a multi-faceted approach to continue the colonization of land in Cincinnati for increased profits. The iron fist of the state and the invisible hand of the “free market” are limbs of the same body of the illegitimate settler republic of the United States of America.

Police don’t prevent crime and don’t serve the people. They exist to protect the people in power. “Urban revitalization” does not benefit communities, but displaces renters and the houseless by increasing the property values of the neighborhood and drawing in a wealthier clientele. Urban revitalization utilizes the police to displace homeless people and victims of poverty so the land can be remade into luxury condos to make a profit and draw in wealthier white residents. This is exactly what happened with the murder of Timothy Thomas by Cincinnati police and this process is continuing before our eyes. It’s manifesting as a police barricade in the very same neighborhood.

Furthermore, 3CDC is continuing its mission of gentrification, better described as urban settler colonialism: Joe Rudemiller, vice president of marketing and communications for 3CDC said, “We’re going to try to replicate what we’ve done south of Liberty… and hopefully that takes care of some of the issues that we’ve been seeing. We are definitely seeing some challenges with safety up here, and that has been a pervasive problem.” This isn’t some past event to lament. Gentrification is a process that is happening RIGHT NOW and perpetuating white supremacy and impoverishment.

Remember that gentrification is not inevitable — stand up against business interests in your neighborhood! Don’t trust the police and real estate developers who seek to control the neighborhood on behalf of the ruling classes. Protect the homeless people in your neighborhood, and find solidarity against the ruling classes which will crush you both to put a penny in their pocket.

Sonya Massey is dead. She was killed on July 6 by the police state, in the form of white supremacist Sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson. Her murder should elicit rage, but you have no reason to protest this time according to Democrats. The pig was immediately disavowed, fired and charged with first degree murder. Just a Bad Apple. The criminal justice system is working exactly as intended for Democrats and everyone else who accepts Black People’s murder as a regular occurrence. 

Benjamin Crump, the celebrity-attorney representing Massey’s family, has already stooped so low as to thank presidential candidate Kamala Harris for a tweet promoting the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which failed to pass in 2021. The Act itself is an embarrassing half-measure that would do little to reduce the ever-increasing number of people shot, strangled, or run down by the statesian police. More embarrassing is the fact that Vice-President Harris and her fellow Democrat stooges completely dropped the issue after they failed three years ago. Sonya Massey’s execution was horrific enough to inject some life into the Democratic Party’s decrepit lip service machine. The machine produces words, but it runs on continuous supplies of blood from oppressed communities in the imperial core. Not just any blood tribute will suffice; only the most barbaric case of murder you can imagine will awaken the beast and get its mouthpieces to work their magic.   

Sonya Massey did exactly what the pigs told her to do before they shot her in the face. She called the Police after hearing people outside her home, but responding officers were immediately hostile towards her after it took 3 minutes and 50 seconds for Massey to open the door at 1 in the morning. Out of concern for an unidentified car in Massey’s driveway, police entered her home and demanded identification. Hearing the sound of water approaching boiling temperature, officers directed her to remove the pot which was on the stove. Massey immediately did so and moved to place the pot near the sink. The officer, seemingly afraid of the boiling water, backed away despite the distance between him and Massey as well as the impending kitchen island. Massey’s response to the officer’s behavior was either a joke or a comment of offense towards the officer’s implication she might hurl a hot pot of water across her living room. She said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” We will never know exactly what she meant, because immediately after saying these words Sean Grayson pulled a gun and pointed it at Massey’s head. He told her, “I’ll fucking shoot you in the fucking face” and approached the pot which he supposedly felt could threaten his life at any moment. Terrified, Massey apologized for the comment and tried ducking away from the gun that was now in her face. She could not outrun three bullets. Before the water had cooled, Grayson was making excuses and calling Sonya Massey a “crazy bitch.” The only mistake Sonya Massey made was thinking the pigs were coming to help her that night. Grayson’s mugshot would soon expose skull tattoos on his right arm which resemble the Nazi Totenkopf, or “Dead’s Head.”

Democrat opportunists were quick to gloat the captured moments of savagery as proof of the success of police worn body cameras. Do not let them get away with it! Such ridiculous claims should be met with ridicule and derision. Do not forget that police officers and prosecutors across the empire wanted body cameras for years. It might seem paradoxical, but law enforcement had everything to gain and nothing to lose from their introduction. The police killing of Michael Brown was a perfect opportunity for the pigs and reformers, led by Obama, to reveal their collaborationist nature. While the cameras were pitched as a solution to police violence, they were nothing but the latest iteration of modern police surveillance. We know this to be true because according to the Federal government‘s own studies, body cameras do not make police less violent. Their own studies prove this, along with the continued rise of police killings since their introduction. Body cameras continue to be successful in their intended purpose; prosecuting the poor and surveilling the masses. They are a regular tool in the prosecutor’s office when it comes to gathering evidence against impoverished people, but are rarely used against the police. Cops will deliberately turn off their cameras before an interaction in case they decide to brutalize or shoot anyone. Crucially, the police get first looks at controversial body cams and will restrict the release of footage until they can permeate a false, exonerating narrative into the ether. This is precisely what Illinois State Police did to Sonya Massey. They shot her and lied for over two weeks, describing her death by white supremacist bullets as self-inflicted. Such is the beauty of police reform. 

Be wary! They will not hesitate to use this moment for their own despicable ends. They will trot out some cowardly guidelines on New and Improved hiring practices for police departments across the Empire. They will demand millions of dollars in new funding packages for flashy training programs while the masses continue to sink into deprivation. Grayson will become a Christ figure for cops — given up for the sins of the system so that Democrats can declare it washed clean. They will pat each other on the back for being so transparent, go home to their respective galas, and tell their servants what they want for dinner that night. We need to ruin their party. Let the murder of Sonya Massey anger you. May it flow through your veins, into your arms and legs. She called them for help, they entered her home and shot bullets into her skull. Carry it with you on the bus, at the office, and on the commute home. Steel yourself for the fight ahead, and do not vote for cops. 

This is every night for Maura Todd and the other survivors of the incident in East Palestine, Ohio. It’s a new nightmare, one created by the malfeasance and thirst for profit of the Norfolk Southern Railroad, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Norfolk Southern Corporation. It’s a night any one of us might have, thanks to Norfolk Southern. And, you know what? Their stock is up.

It’s been over a year since the catastrophe: a thirty-eight-car train derailment, due to what Railroad Workers United (RWU) called a “hedge fund initiated operating model” of overwork and cut corners. A disaster made magnitudes worse when the chemicals within certain cars were intentionally set ablaze, unleashing a toxic smoke cloud that could be seen for miles. Residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area were forced to flee under threat of imprisonment, even while they  suffered the immediate effects of contamination.  As is typical with crimes of capitalism, the perpetrators have been let off with a slap on the wrist while the countless victims are left to fend for themselves. 

The victims in this case are truly countless. The contamination of the botched clean-up has spread to sixteen  U.S. States and parts of southern Canada. As a study conducted by researchers for the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), the largest network focused on recording precipitation chemistry in the United States, attests: “Observations showed the expected high chloride concentrations, but also unexpectedly high pH (basic) and exceptionally elevated levels of base cations exceeding 99th percentiles versus the historic record.” Base cations are positively charged ions that affect the alkalinity of surface soil, water, etc. Excesses in these and in pH levels will tip the scales of ecosystems and agriculture in ways that are difficult to predict. Although this pollution won’t cause death and destruction in surrounding areas, experts say it will have wide-reaching environmental damage. Basically, in order to avoid the fallout of a small leak, Norfolk Southern’s contractors created a massive plume of poison that rained down on a third of the country. 

RWU released a statement condemning Norfolk Southern. The statement  describes the combination of factors that make such disasters inevitable, such as ever longer and heavier trains, cuts to maintenance workers, limited training with high turnover, and crushingly long hours leading to rampant fatigue — all symptoms of a greater sickness that is the profit motive. 

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also criticized Norfolk Southern for its atrocious handling of the chemical leak. Five of the scattered cars contained vinyl chloride, a substance that is not only carcinogenic, but causes neurological damage, behavioral issues, and permanently alters liver function. Essentially, while the liver and kidneys can process vinyl chloride, the toxic byproducts of the process remain in the body much longer, creating unpredictable harm. However, vinyl chloride has a low exothermic rate – it doesn’t give off much heat. The possibility of that vinyl chloride exploding after the crash was extremely low. The already small chance of an explosive chemical reaction can be mitigated further by the introduction of several different “free radical stabilizers,” the most common of which is 4-tert-butylcatechol. This would have made the small chance of explosion a non-existent one, but by skimping on these simple preventative measures,  Norfolk Southern and its contractors decided to take a serious albeit manageable spill and transform it into an apocalyptic event. 

According to testimony emerging from the NTSB hearings, in the immediate aftermath of the derailment, Norfolk Southern refused to share vital information first responders needed to appropriately address the crisis. They refused to disclose what was in the cars, even while they set them on fire. Norfolk representatives ducked phone calls. They refused multiple alternatives, like the aforementioned free radical stabilizers, or waiting for the train cars to cool. The company even consulted with Oxy Vinyls, the manufacturer of the chemicals in question, and they were told not to vent and burn the vinyl chloride. They ignored the advice, then claimed the call never occurred. By throttling the flow of information, they created a condition of confused panic. Once this was achieved, they presented the “choice” to local responders: vent and burn, or potentially let the cars explode. The East Palestine fire chief said he was given thirteen minutes to decide. 

Capitalists created this crisis because they are motivated by a need for ever-expanding profit, they simply must pursue cutting corners, increasing exploitation, and deregulation. It isn’t a matter of individual greed — it is the necessary dynamic of capitalism. Capitalists then worsened this crisis for the same reason, as they’ve now been accused of enough times for them to issue threats to stop it. As Senator . J.D. Vance asked during a hearing in March: “A lot of people, including me, are wondering: did they do this not because it was necessary, but because it allowed them to move traffic and freight more quickly?” 

This is the reason thousands of people fled their homes, only half of which have been able to return after a year. This is why people’s pets and livestock coughed up blood and died; why peoples’ health worsened and health complications returned; why black clouds filled the sky, made up of the gas used to kill soldiers in WWI, which was then rained back down upon the soil, waterways, crops of a hundred million people. 

Combine the safety board’s criticism with the rail workers’ union statement, that the initial cause of the crash was a “19th-century-style mechanical failure” — an overheated bearing on one of the axles — something that should never occur in the 21st century, except for a callous disregard for public safety, and it is clear that our current political-economic regime is one of systemic arrogance and callousness. They make disaster inevitable because it is in their interest to do so, then they kill the chance of solutions because those suffering the consequences aren’t of their class. 

Officially, Norfolk Southern will have to pay $1 billion as consequence:

• A $600 million settlement in the class-action lawsuit that encompassed 31 individual claims and may likely preclude anyone within 10 miles of the crash from making any future claims.
• $235 million for all past and future clean-up costs.
• $30 million for groundwater and private drinking water monitoring.
• $25 million for a 20-year community health program.
• $15 million for a civic penalty.

Assuming that “affected area” means those in the immediate vicinity of the fallout, and not the sixteen states as well as Southern Canada, this is still a spit in the face of the people of East Palestine. People like Maura Todd, who had won a battle with cancer prior to the derailment, which, in its wake, has returned. Norfolk Southern will pay for Maura’s check-up, if they don’t manage to weasel their way out of that one. Her life-destroying treatment, on the other hand, is her individual responsibility. 

Throughout all of these detestable revelations, Norfolk Southern has maintained its PR campaign. The webpage they set up in damage control, “Norfolk Southern: Making it Right” promises: “We’re staying in East Palestine as long as it takes. As we move forward, we will continue to listen to the community, and we will continue our work to help the area recover and thrive.” Predictably, the true intentions of the capitalists lay beyond their hopeful press releases and social media. At every point in the NTSB investigation into the derailment and vent and burn, Norfolk Southern tried to hide the truth. Hiding records they claimed not to have kept about train car temperatures; ignoring demands for access to locomotive and event records until they could comb and erase all but 20 minutes of footage; even manufacturing evidence of chemical reactions using off-the-shelf vinyl chloride, which Norfolk Southern then demanded NTSB include in the investigation, and circumventing them and trying to pressure government officials — NTSB’s bosses — when investigators refused. The capitalists lied, threatened, and threw tantrums when the state officials didn’t do what they expect them to: heel and roll over. 

Of course, despite facing the public and promising to ensure this sort of tragedy never happens again, Norfolk Southern’s lobbyists and pet politicians have done all they can to ensure all regulations responding to this disaster are gutted or die outright. Politicians who used the derailment to attack Biden for the sake of their polling have forgotten such righteous anger the second their pockets got a bit heavier. The railroad companies closed ranks, the capitalists marshaled all their discipline, and Norfolk and its competitors joined forces to lobby and weaken the incoming railway regulation as much as they could. As executives celebrated the possibility of “real bipartisan change,” their cronies warned in private against “micromanaging” railroads, against “proposals motivate[d] by politics”. “I want a response from Norfolk Southern that we can look back five years from now, ten years from now, [and] we can be proud,” said CEO Alan Shaw to local reporters in January. What Shaw means is, “If we can get away with all of this, we’ll look back with a lot of pride!”  You can practically hear Shaw chuckling when you read this. You can hear the ice in his glass as he laughs over drinks, as he laughs all the way to the bank.

But even if he doesn’t, even if the most far-reaching and robust railroad regulations could, by some miracle, pass, it wouldn’t be enough. If somehow a class movement of railroad workers and East Palestine residents were to organize and rally, and every demand they made was met by policy and then implemented, it wouldn’t ensure this sort of disaster never occurs again. Corporations like Norfolk — all corporations — as we have covered, are motivated by profit, not greed. It’s not human sin that determines the fabric of our society, it’s material reality. Dynamics like these are ensured by material conditions. If one capitalist doesn’t pursue maximum profit by any means they can get away with, they will be outperformed by another capitalist that will. Our kind capitalist gets as a reward their worst nightmare: becoming a worker. Norfolk Southern has failed to meet profit projections for the last year. Within 2023, they had a revenue of $12.2 billion and operating costs of $9.3 billion (of that, the East Palestine expenses account for $1.1 billion, or just under 12%), leaving them with a profit of $2.9 billion dollars for that year, down 41% from the last. Despite this, Norfolk’s stock is rising. This doesn’t indicate the value of the company in any strict sense regarding profitability, but the confidence shareholders have in it, its value as a corporation. 

Where is this confidence coming from? It comes straight from Norfolk Southern’s willingness and ability to crush attempts at regulation, while putting on a nice face for the public.

Even if, by some miracle, laws are passed to protect populations and railroad workers, before such robust regulations could even be implemented, the railroad corporations would yet again pool all their might towards planning its destruction. We have the whole late half of the 20th century to look to for examples. While we should appreciate any regulations that might save lives and reduce suffering in the meantime, real victories can only be won by the organization of the very working masses who toil beneath the black clouds. The only way to ensure disasters like the one in East Palestine don’t happen in the future is for the working masses to win political power, and build a world that acts in the interests of humanity, rather than the profit motive.

Heavy equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. settled its most recent racial discrimination case this May after a federal investigation found systematic refusal to hire at least 60 qualified Black job seekers at the Decatur, Illinois plant between 2018 and 2020. The corporation, which holds $481 million in U.S. government contracts, agreed to pay $800,000 in back wages to the affected workers. 

The company’s history is littered with a pattern of systematic inhumanity. In a 2015, workers from the Aurora, Illinois facility sued the company over anti-Black harassment and discrimination, including white workers making racist “jokes” that referenced lynchings and Planet of the Apes, management punishing Black employees for mistakes made by other workers, and standard working equipment (desks, phones, and computers) denied to the only Black new employee of the quality inspection office. Black workers had brought their complaints to the company, which simply ignored them or targeted them further with retaliation.

A decade earlier, in 2003, two cases were brought to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over racial and sexual harassment at Joliet and Aurora facilities. Racist aggression specifically included white workers and supervisors whistling at Black workers, as one would whistle at a dog. The company refused to take action when made aware of this behavior. When it came to the “constant” sexual harassment, both verbal and physical, Caterpillar not only refused to discipline the aggressors but retaliated by firing women who exposed hostilities.

Two years later, Caterpillar was sued again, this time for their participation in a particularly heinous act of racism, namely, the 2003 murder of Rachel Corrie and several Palestinians during the ethnic cleansing of Rafah. The murderers were “israeli” colonizers, the murder weapon Caterpillar’s D9 armored bulldozer — gifted by the U.S. government to its attack dogs in the Levant. 

This was only one act of imperial violence using the tools built by this billion dollar company. A 2020 report published by Shoal Collective documented proven use of CAT equipment by the zionist occupation during the previous year, including, but not limited to: all 61 invasions of the Gaza strip, 41 demolitions of Palestinian homes, 3 demolitions of water systems, ecocide of at least 3,000 native trees, construction of 8 occupation roadblocks, and at least 2 instances in which the colonial regime destroyed the entire village of Al-Araqib. By February, 2020, the occupation had completely razed the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib a total of 173 times, genocidal destruction no doubt made possible only with the possession of CAT’s 65 ton beast. This is all, of course, only a limited snapshot of the corporation’s complicity in over 75 years of ongoing imperialist genocide.

But the U.S. Empire’s zionist hellspawn is only the inheritor of this cruel tool. The armored ‘dozer first saw use on the other side of the Asian continent, operated by the U.S. troops themselves to destroy Vietnam’s forests and facilitate the infamously bloody invasion. Like today, the military and its corporate contractors weren’t the least bit phased by mass condemnation of their brutality; brutality, life, and dignity, in the logic of capital, do not warrant a second of consideration in the race towards profit. 

Whether it’s destruction of life and land abroad or degradation and abuse of workers at home, Caterpillar’s corporate ethic is a mirror of imperialism. Not satisfied with squeezing the sweat and coin of the people within the U.S., CAT, like other cogs in the monopoly system, hungrily digs its claws into the throats of our kin around the world. That is to say, the mistreatment and vile destruction wrought by one corporation is not an anomaly, it’s the rule. It’s only with clear eyed recognition of our shared enemy that the working and oppressed masses can uproot these poisonous weeds.

Let us be perfectly clear: this tragic loss of life is directly attributable to the brutality inflicted on workers by arch-capitalist Jeff Bezos. For years, Amazon workers have been organizing around the truly inhumane working conditions in warehouses, including harsh temperatures, toxic air quality, insecure heavy machinery, and the notorious “time off task” policy that has led to workers being penalized for using the bathroom. Workers are constantly surveilled, denied breaks, forced to attend “all hands” union-busting meetings, and subject to hazardous working conditions on a regular basis. In fact, a few years ago, there was another case of a worker, Thomas Becker, dying on-site at this very warehouse, after security again refused to call 911 for half an hour. AEDs on site were nonfunctional, and when paramedics finally arrived, they were directed to go through security at the opposite end of the warehouse. Becker was pronounced dead once he finally arrived at the hospital.

These two deaths are but a drop in the bucket among the thousands of annual workplace deaths and millions of workplace injuries in the U.S. alone. The scale of this senseless brutality can hardly be understood by those of us who have become accustomed to the unrelenting abuses of the capitalist system. We might be tempted to shrug it off, and say “these things just happen.” But they don’t just happen. They are the result of deliberate policy decisions, made by those who value profit over everything. When given the option, capitalists put short-term gains over the safety of their workers, the stability of the environment, and the common good of society at large. 

To do anything less — to place the accumulation of capital in any position other than the top priority — is death for the capitalist. Locked as they are in constant competition with other capitalists, every drop of profit must be squeezed from the workers, like trying to wring water from a stone. They must maintain their position in the market at all costs, even the cost of human health. Some even go so far as to hire consultants to appraise the likelihood of workplace accidents, how much the resulting lawsuits and fees will cost them, and compare to the cost of maintaining a safe and dignified workplace. If there is even a penny’s difference between them, they will defer to the tyranny of the market, and consign their workers to death, mutilation, and psychological torment. To the capitalist, unmitigated suffering is simply the cost of doing business.

Every workplace protection we have, as insufficient as they may be, has been a concession wrested from the iron grip of capital by a united, militant working class. Whether enshrined in statute or encoded in union contracts, the health and safety of the worker is never assured under capitalism but for the strength of the working class itself. We have spent centuries at war with our bosses, and as many fights as we have won, we have lost many more. This war — the class war — has real life and death stakes. The ruling class is constantly engaged in an active assault on the lives of the working class, and workplace safety is a key battleground. Each victory on this front has come with a hit to the capitalists’ profits exactly as big as the gain to the workers’ safety. And in the wake of such gains, the reaction from the capitalists has been to immediately mobilize to regain lost ground.

Through the countless measures at their disposal — the media they control, the capitols they occupy, the courts they buy off, the union-busting firms they employ — capitalists have been able to invest immense sums of money into the project of ripping away every worker and environmental protection they can find. In recent decades, taking advantage of the retreat of union militancy, capitalists have steadily stripped away regulations, hollowed out the legal standing of unions, and laundered the otherwise-toxic notion that safety is secondary to economy. The brutalization of workers has only ever expanded in recent years, from the prevalence of workplaces run like prison camps by petty tyrants, to the violent resurgence of child labor. The bosses are winning, precisely because the working class has abandoned militancy and failed to uphold solidarity.

Injustices like the one at MDW2, while all too common under the harsh rule of capital, must never be accepted as inevitable. They are aberrations, assaults on human dignity that cannot be suffered any longer. Our only option is to strike back: to rally our ranks into a united working class army, riposte the capitalist aggressor, and destroy the very system that empowers them to destroy us. As long as the power to set working conditions rests in the hands of capitalists, tragedies like this will continue to rend our communities. How long will we be content to be sacrificed upon the altar of profit?