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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobilization

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

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

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

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

Indigenous Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community Care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goal Construction and Considerations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflection and Feedback

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communication is Key

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

An International Solidarity Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Strength of People Power

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

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

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

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

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

Informal Structures and Movement Security

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

Communication is a Practice

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

On Urgency

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

On Logistics

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

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

On Propaganda

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

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

On Organization

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

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

On Structure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Movement Resiliency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t. Warren’s politics were class peace and reform. He treated Communists as class agitators, but he also ruled consistently to “soften” the excesses of capital.

The Warren court went on to decide some of the most important cases in modern Statesian jurisprudence. Brown v. Board of Education, ending legal segregation, Loving v. Virginia, outlawing antimiscegenation laws, Griswold v. Connecticut, establishing the right to birth control, and four major criminal cases that established the rights we think of as fundamental to the criminal process: Gideon v. Wainwright, the right to a court-appointed attorney, Brady v. Maryland, the right to be given exculpatory evidence held by the state, Wong Sun v. United States, granting the right to suppress evidence that was obtained by the police illegally, and Miranda v. Arizona, the right to be informed of your rights when you’re arrested, the famous Miranda warning.

Among these progressive expansions of individual rights was Robinson v. California, the case that the current Supreme Court has just limited to its facts and robbed of any precedent-establishing power. What did the Warren court hold in Robinson? That it was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th amendment of the federal constitution to criminalize a “status” over which a person has no control. In that case, the court struck down a California law making it a crime to be addicted to drugs. The fascist court of John G. Roberts, Jr., has just held, in the newly issued City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that the Robinson ruling doesn’t apply to the homeless. This is just the latest in the Roberts court’s piecemeal march against established Warren precedents, and represents nothing less than the sharp contraction of the U.S. empire.

Warren and the Apogee of Empire

By 1953, the war had been over for eight years. Europe lay devastated. In 1948, Truman enacted the Marshall Plan, pumping U.S. capital into areas Washington’s elite thought might be vulnerable to Communism. It was a kind of economic GLADIO, a stay-behind program (and if you don’t recognize GLADIO, that’s worth reading up on). The world war hadn’t ended before the Cold War began, and the U.S., its domestic production untouched by the conflict, stepped out of Great Britain’s shadow to claim hegemony over the West and proclaim itself the sword and shield of the Euro-American capitalist class.

Eisenhower was the first truly post-war president to preside over this new American empire. In a sense Warren and his court, which lasted until 1969, was an extension of the ruling class politics of the age. What was this policy? The expansion of New Deal-type programs — which Warren had attacked before taking the bench — and the creation of a new Pax Americana. Under Eisenhower, post-war imperial wealth flowed from all corners of the globe and it was used to establish social security, the interstate highway system, and NASA. Instead of the growth of social democracy and the welfare state, as seen in Europe, class struggle was suppressed in the U.S. through the expansion of public infrastructure and the goodwill (read: self-preservation) of the capitalist class, which gave out robust pensions, employer-provided health insurance, etc. These benefits fell primarily to the “white” workers, which by now included formerly “non-white” ethnicities from Europe such as the Irish and Italians. The class struggle was thus forced underground during this period, and it manifested explosively in the struggles for national liberation that shook the country from the mid-50s until the end of the 1970s.

We needn’t prove Warren’s personal motivations as Chief Justice to make our case. In fact, from all outside appearances, he genuinely believed in the principles he espoused through his decisions. But such is the case with many bourgeois politicians. They earnestly believe their class ideology. The fact that it serves a class purpose operates on a level below their conscious understanding. It is typical for members of the ruling class to be thoroughly seduced by the self-justifications and illusions that make up their class morality.

Above all, it is this legacy of bourgeois morality that the ultra-fascist majority on the Roberts court have set as their target. As arch-reactionaries, they are working to roll back the clock and restore the early 20th century pre-Warren legal landscape. They are ushering in an era of naked class domination, stripped of the comfortable fat provided by the loot of empire.

Grants Pass is a Return of Labor Discipline

To understand Grants Pass we have to look at the direct precedent that the Roberts court has overturned. The case in question is Martin v. Boise, a 2019 decision concerning unhoused people that was issued by the Ninth Circuit federal Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit covers the geographical area of Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, California, and Arizona. According to the 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report released by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, 40% of the country’s entire unhoused population lives within the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction. As the fascist justice Gorsuch, author of the majority opinion in Grants Pass, noted, “homelessness in this country has reached its highest levels since the government began reporting data on the subject.”

The Martin ruling made it unconstitutional (within the Ninth Circuit) for a state to enforce criminal penalties on public camping if the city in question lacked sufficient shelter beds to house its unhoused population. The legal rationale is dull, but in essence the court held that it was a violation of the 8th amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment to jail houseless people simply because they had nowhere to stay, especially if the city lacked sufficient public relief. The Martin decision was predicated on the Warren court’s Robinson ruling, where the court held it to be a violation of the 8th amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause to criminalize addiction.

City of Grants Pass arises from a Martin injunction brought by Gloria Johnson and John Logan, who challenged the city’s public-camping laws. They brought a suit as a federal class action, representing “all involuntarily homeless people living in Grants Pass.” A panel of the Ninth Circuit found that Johnson and Logan faced a credible threat of punitive action from Grants Pass and that all unsheltered people in the city were “involuntarily homeless” because the city’s unhoused population exceeds available shelter beds. The city, desperate to retain its punishment power and other tools of state repression, sought a rehearing en banc by the entire court; it was denied. 

Grants Pass filed a petition to the Supreme Court for certiorari (certification that the issue be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States). The cities of Albuquerque, Anchorage, Chico, Chino, Colorado Springs, Fillmore, Garden Grove, Glendora, Henderson, Honolulu, Huntington Beach, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Murrieta, Newport Beach, Roseville, Saint Paul, San Clemente, San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan Capistrano, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, and Westminster, the National League of Cities (representing over 19,000 other American cities and towns), the League of California Cities (representing California’s 477 cities), the League of Oregon Cities (representing Oregon’s 241 cities), the Association of Idaho Cities (representing Idaho’s 199 cities), the League of Arizona Cities and Towns (representing all 91 municipalities in Arizona), the North Dakota League of Cities (representing 355 cities), the Counties of Honolulu, San Bernardino, San Francisco, and Orange, the National Association of Counties (representing all 3,069 counties of the U.S. empire), the California State Association of Counties, the Special Districts Association of Oregon, the Washington State Association of Municipal Attorneys, the International Municipal Lawyers Association, the District Attorneys of Sacramento and San Diego Counties, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, the California Police Chiefs Association, the Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, California Governor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and 20 other states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia) all joined the city to support the petition for certiorari.

All the lackeys of law and order, all the petty bourgeois strivers and graspers, all the pigs and their captains, all the fascist forces of the Western United States, put their names on the petition and many of these wrote briefs in support of Grants Pass, begging for Martin to be overturned. The Roberts court was only too happy to oblige.

The Unhoused: Proletarians and the Reserve Army of Labor

The unhoused generally fall into one of two categories when it comes to class. Either they are themselves working class proletarians, who work by wage labor, or they are sub-proletarians, thrown out of the labor force entirely and denied any means of support. These are people who would otherwise live by wage labor, who have no substantial property or investment in the machinery, land, or other tools by which society produces the commodities that are its lifeblood. Many unhoused people were sheltered proletarians or even petit-bourgeoisie only a short time before they became unhoused. With the dismantling of the feeble safety nets erected during the imperial apogee by the “liberal” crowd of Clintonites in the 90s, it has become easier than ever to fall out of the sheltered working classes and enter the ranks of the sub-proletariat, the great unhoused.

The unhoused already suffer a number of critical disabilities inflicted on them by “civil society” before we reach the question of criminalization. Lacking a permanent address and in many times deprived of a stable telephone number, the unhoused are generally prevented from voting by registration requirements. This means the lofty list of cities, towns, counties, etc., that filed to support the City of Grants Pass in its bid to criminalize homelessness were elected without input from the very population they want to police. This is what we mean by class domination. (In the case of the rest of the working proletariat, this relationship is slightly more disguised; because we can technically cast a ballot, and we are often duped into thinking the ballot matters.)

Marx calls those who are kept out of work the relative surplus population (meaning, those people who are, relative to the active work available, kept as extra or surplus without employment) or the industrial reserve army. By limiting the number of jobs available and ensuring that every proletarian and sub-proletarian who isn’t working lives in squalor and near-death, the capitalist class “forms a disposal industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost…. [I]t creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.” Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 3. At the same time, this industrial reserve army creates a source of extra labor with which to break strikes and serves as a club to discipline the labor force. 

Imagine, for instance, that you work in a McDonalds or an Amazon warehouse. The conditions are atrocious in this particular location. Wages are being docked or withheld illegally, people are being disciplined for nothing, and you aren’t being allowed to take your breaks. You decide to unionize to force the owners to the table; after all, if everyone threatens to walk off the job, they’ll have to make concessions. If you’re in a city where there is a very large unemployed or under-employed population, the owners might simply say “Fine,” discharge you and all your fellow would-be unionizers, and hire replacements from that unemployed labor force — that industrial reserve army.

This helps keep down wages even before we begin to account for the widespread U.S. practice of utilizing basically free prison labor. Criminalization gives capitalists the chance to make use of that free labor because the habitually unhoused will be arrested again and again, and eventually be given sentences of imprisonment that turn them into a state workforce. This is state-labor-for-hire without compensation, all perfectly legal under the 13th amendment to the constitution, which outlaws slavery except as punishment for a crime. After all, about one-third of all California’s firefighters are judicial slaves.

The effect of this ruling on wages and benefits occurs purely by operation of the underlying political economy that will result. It doesn’t require an active conspiracy on the part of the court, the cities, the sheriffs and police, or anyone in the entire chain of command that will ultimately enforce the punitive bans that wind up criminalizing homelessness. Even if, at each step in this process, the agent of the state is merely expressing an honestly-held dislike of “public vagrancy” (and the Gorsuch opinion is brimming with classist descriptions of public defecation and children wading through used needles), it will have the same ultimate effect. More enforceable criminal penalties means more prisoners; it means more court fees; it means, therefore, in states where inmates are forced into slavery, a larger free laboring population. This means the cost of labor will fall relative to its value as more laborers enter the market. Businesses will have the choice between hiring free workers, who might be disobedient, agitate for a rise in wages, etc., or paying the state money to make use of a captive work force. The market price of labor will therefore fall. This, while we are experiencing the sharpest rise in cost of living since the inflation crises at the close of the 1970s, ensures that more workers will be made unhoused as their wages fall, and a downward pressure will continue to be exerted on wages.

The more precarious a workforce is, the more subject to random arrest and search or other punitive measures, the less likely it is to seek redress through unionization and organization. That lesson was demonstrated by the poultry industry when they simply had their unionizing workers deported en masse.

Marching Counter Clockwise

This decision is part of the court’s broad assault on the Warren-based state, the administrative state (that is, the delegation of rulemaking authority from Congress to the administrative agencies), and, critically, the legal regime of unionization. The ultra-fascist justices have rejected a century of precedent and appear intent on ushering in an era of labor-discipline that resembles the U.S. of 1900, before the labor struggles that established the legal right to unionization and prior to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. The Grants Pass decision fits neatly into this plan to march backwards, into a pre millenarian century.

The door now stands open for the re-establishment of the debtor’s prison in name as well as form. Although the judicial system has long practiced a kind of debt imprisonment in actuality, in form the debtor’s prison is often seen as a quaint Victorian curiosity. There is much less need for covert imprisonment-for-debt now that the highest court in the country has ruled that it is permissible to make homelessness illegal. Yes, certainly, there is an act that these laws proscribe (sleeping in public), but the act is inextricably tied to the status that Gorsuch claims they aren’t criminalizing. The Supreme Court has legalized the debtor’s prison, has given its blessing to the mass incarceration of the unhoused, and has created the conditions for a massive reactionary backlash.

We can see it in the language the majority uses, through Gorsuch. He disdainfully complains that a Chico, California homeless shelter wasn’t sufficient under Martin, even though it “included protective fencing, large water totes, handwashing stations, portable toilets and a large canopy for shade…. Why? Because, in that court’s view, appropriate shelter requires indoor, not outdoor spaces.” Gorsuch has described a concentration camp for the unhoused and mocked a court for holding it insufficient.

This is the future imagined by the Roberts court. Of course Gorsuch defends the concentration camp. When the Supreme Court issues a decision, it isn’t merely making a legal ruling, it is communicating with the parties and potential future parties. The parties to this case weren’t merely the City of Grants Pass, Gloria Johnson, and John Logan, but also every one of the thousands of cities and counties, sheriff’s associations, police groups, district attorneys, state’s attorneys, and other agents of the bourgeois state apparatus. The lurid language that Gorsuch uses is a signal. Justices choose their words carefully. We must be prepared. The state is. They are preparing labor camps for the houseless, “shelters” with protective fencing and a canopy for shade. Taken in the light of the other rulings the Supreme Court recently decided, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, which we discussed when the year began, the intention of the court is clear. They aim to strip administrative agencies of their power, destroy the NLRB, and subject working people throughout the country to a regime of labor discipline by police control.

Thanks to the workers’ sacrifices, their bosses, the owners, big shareholders, corporate executives, and high-level management of the big shipping firms, both U.S.-based and international, have made record-breaking profits during the COVID-19 pandemic. In that time, the stockholders’ and stockbrokers’ proverbial “line,” the rate of profit, has been consistently going up, with a record for shipping industry profits set in 2021 getting successively ”smashed” by last year’s margins.

Now these 22,000 and more workers want a contract. They want their wages raised to match inflation, expanded benefits and pensions, and job security. Their representatives have been negotiating with the shipping conglomerate capitalists, represented by the Pacific Maritime Association, an international shipping monopoly trust, since May 2022. Negotiations have been slow and painful.

Union representatives are vocally holding their ground. “We aren’t going to settle for an economic package that doesn’t recognize the heroic efforts and personal sacrifices of the ILWU workforce that lifted the shipping industry to record profits,” said the ILWU’s president Adams.

Holding their ground has historically paid off for the ILWU. Its workers are among the best-paid “blue collar” workers in the U.S., with full-timers earning a nearly $195,000 yearly income on average as of 2021. ILWU workers also receive “free” healthcare, large pensions, and other benefits. How have the ILWU workers won these gains? Their success owes partly to their tight organization and militancy, which goes down to the union’s roots: The ILWU was founded by Harry Bridges, a member of the Communist Party USA and a prolific labor organizer, who famously won a Supreme Court case against the federal government relating to his Communist activities. As a “red” union, the ILWU faced considerable state repression during the Cold War. The ILWU membership has also proven itself highly progressive: ILWU members regularly express solidarity with other union-organizing efforts and have also demonstrated and gone on strike against U.S. wars of imperialist aggression. In 2021, ILWU rank-and-file workers in Oakland, California refused to handle Israeli goods in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.

But the ILWU’s success also owes to its narrow exclusivity — an exclusivity that has been described as “gatekeeping” and even “aristocratic.” That’s a fundamental problem.

What are unions, and what is their purpose? A union is an organization of the working class, typically of the workers in a given industry or craft, who have recognized the need to combine as one collective force in order to struggle for concessions — higher wages, expanded benefits, safer working conditions, job security, etc. — from the bosses and managers. Unions are, at their best, not merely organizations of workers, but of the working class; unions are the elementary form of independent proletarian organization, and the economic struggle they wage is an elementary form of the proletariat’s class struggle against the capitalists. Unions are vital to the proletariat’s early development. For, as Lenin said, “in its struggle for power, the proletariat has no other weapon but organization.” Unions are organic vehicles of working-class power, and while they cannot be the “end,” they certainly are one vital beginning. 

That is exactly why the ILWU’s model is fundamentally flawed. Rather than a vehicle to serve the organization of all workers in its industry (i.e., all dockworkers along the U.S. West Coast), the ILWU is tightly barricaded, and serves only as a vehicle of a highly privileged fraction of skilled longshoremen, clerks, and foremen. Rather than a vehicle for the collective power of the whole dockworking proletariat, the ILWU exclusively serves the dockworking labor aristocracy — that upper stratum of high-skill workers who, owing to their high-demand qualifications, enjoy much higher wages and other benefits, a much lower rate of exploitation, and much better living conditions than their low-skill (ergo replaceable) and consequently lower-paid, more intensely exploited, and precariously employed proletarian counterparts.

Employment as a longshoreman with ILWU membership is highly coveted by West Coast dockworkers. But the union’s closed-access policy means that membership can only be obtained by those workers who are highly skilled, have “put in their time,” and know the right people. It can take years, even decades, for a worker to obtain ILWU membership; often, a worker needs to know existing ILWU members to obtain the necessary references to be admitted. This is not the normal course for unions. The ILWU chooses to restrict its membership in this way.

Once a worker obtains membership, they are segregated into membership tiers — “Class A” workers, the longest-standing and highest-paid members, “Class B,” and “casuals,” who receive much lower wages, lack much of the benefits of their higher-tier fellows, and are not guaranteed the same hours. While the ILWU proudly boasts of the working and living conditions enjoyed by its Class A members — and rightly so — it is cagey about the conditions of “casuals” and other lower-tier members, refusing to publicly disclose such details to journalists as a matter of policy.

Is this any way to organize an industry, let alone the whole working class? The ILWU’s membership policy more resembles that of a medieval guild, an organization built to serve the journeymen, or the “aristocracy of labor,” at the expense of the novitiates and excluded workers, than an industrial, proletarian union, an all-embracing organization of proletarian solidarity.

Likewise, there’s something not-quite-proletarian in the ILWU leadership’s methods of struggle, and in the way it related to the rank-and-file membership.

On Thursday, June 2, talks came to a halt, as the PMA capitalists and ILWU reached an impasse over pay and benefits. The next day, industrial action began: The union workers shut down major ports and terminals in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland in California and Seattle and Tacoma in Washington, “effectively shutting down” and “severely impacting” productivity, according to the PMA bosses. The Friday shutdowns were followed by similar actions the next Monday, June 5, when union workers walked off their day shift, forcing the largest terminal at the Port of Long Beach to close.

The bosses are getting nervous — but not fearful enough to concede. Rather than return to the negotiating table, the PMA is calling on the Biden administration to step in on their side, and convince the ILWU bureaucrats to betray the rank-and-file members.

Meanwhile, some union workers are losing faith in the ILWU bureaucracy and its opaque policy of cloakroom deals with the PMA capitalists. Despite purportedly serving as their representatives, the bureaucrats have consistently refused to share any information on the ongoing PMA–ILWU negotiations with the union-worker membership. The ILWU has agreed to a policy of non-disclosure — typical in union negotiations, but absolutely anathema to internal democracy.

The ILWU workers are taking militant, fearless, well-organized action from below to fight for their demands. Yet their representatives in the ILWU’s top leadership are shutting them out and keeping them in the dark. 

This lack of transparency is not some tactical necessity, nor is it an accident. Over the decades, ILWU bureaucracy has proven its ability to win gains for the union’s members, but it has done so largely by entering into a class-collaborationist alliance with the shipping industry capitalists and their bought-and-paid-for politicians in the Democratic Party. Behind closed doors — and even out in the open — they’re actually friends.

That’s why, for instance, back in October 2021, ILWU representatives met with President Biden, Vice President Harris, some of their cabinet, and various big businessmen for a cordial discussion that the union bureaucrats celebrated as a “historic White House meeting.” During a subsequent press conference, Biden personally thanked the ILWU’s president, Willie Adams, for doing his part to keep the workers working — and suffering disease and death — through the ongoing pandemic.

It is in this same spirit that Adams gave a glowing recommendation to Biden’s new Labor Secretary, Julie Su, while praising the administration’s outgoing Martin Walsh, who was instrumental in the Biden administration’s shameless betrayal of Rail Workers United in November. So much for Biden’s “most pro-union President in U.S. history” pledge! And so much for the cross-union solidarity so frequently preached by ILWU president Willie Adams.

At the end of the day, while they purportedly answer to and represent the union workers who elect them, the ILWU bureaucrats have more in common with the so-called “political class” in the federal and state governments than they have with their own union’s worker members. They would rather negotiate with the corporate executives, corporate attorneys, and other cronies who represent the interests of shipping industry magnates behind closed doors, shutting out the union rank-and-file; they would rather dictate a tentative agreement to the workers than seek the workers’ scrutiny, counsel, and approval on a democratic basis.

The opaqueness of the present negotiations, an attempt by the union bureaucracy to provide itself cover, in fact brings their collaborationist — we would say “opportunist” — character into stark relief.

Yes, the ILWU bureaucrats will flex their union’s militancy, the preparedness of the workers to take industrial action, to fight for their demands. Yes, the PMA bosses will get nervous, and call on President Biden to intervene. But at the end of the day, when the strike ends, the bosses and union bureaucrats will return to the negotiating table, eat calamari and lobster, drink whiskey, smoke cigars, and talk shop — shutting the workers out behind tightly locked doors.

Ultimately, it is the duty of the ILWU workers to extend solidarity to their fellow dockworkers, and their fellow workers in all industries — not only in the U.S., but the world over. They must demand that the ILWU open enrollment to all West Coast dockworkers. They must demand democratic transparency in ongoing negotiations from the ILWU top leadership. They must demand an end to the policy of class collaboration with the shipping industry magnates and their servants in Washington. And they must not wait — they must transform their union into a vehicle of the class struggle with their own hands, with their own voices, with their own workers’ democracy.

Many workers in U.S. shipping and transportation view ILWU members as a special class of labor aristocrats, who enjoy six-figure salaries, full benefits, stacked pensions, and ironclad job security to boot — and still demand more, even while the vast majority of transport workers are underpaid and overworked. In truth, the ILWU workers are right to demand more from the capitalists. But if the ILWU workers are not to be scorned as labor aristocrats by their fellow workers, then they must not rest content with exacting exceptionally privileged concessions from “their” capitalists. The ILWU workers, like the labor aristocracy in other industries, must take the initiative, and demand that their exceptional privileges be shared with the whole working class, from coast to coast, and in all countries.

Every summer, Portland becomes a hotbed for fascists. Those looking to earn their stripes by jumping unsuspecting queer people or harassing the unhoused enjoy an “open season” in the city. The people who claim to “protect and serve” the city are, of course, also inviting, perpetuating, and participating in the violence. Portland police Chief Chuck Lovell said in an interview that he is “optimistic that the bureau can fully restaff” and that “he’s happy with the kind of people applying.” Are these the same kind of people who collaborate with fascist organizations like Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, and the Ku Klux Klan?  Portland police have always had strong connections with the most vile and reactionary terrorist groups, dating back to the city’s founding. How can the people trust that these new cops will be any different? Nothing has fundamentally changed! The police only continue to maintain their reign of terror.

After over a hundred consecutive days of protesting during the George Floyd uprisings and an attempt to establish an Autonomous Zone in the city, the politically advanced elements in Portland have made it clear: the police are not wanted. Occupations were destroyed; houseless encampments were, and continue to be, ravaged; and chemical warfare was waged on the people, including the unsuspecting liberals trying to peacefully protest police brutality as well as those who had the misfortune of living near the “cool zone” (locations where police escalated violence). The many aid groups and community survival programs throughout the city are working tirelessly to serve and support our neighbors who are most in need. It’s the people who actually live here, unlike the majority of the PPB stormtroopers, that care what happens in Portland.

As Mayor and Police Commissioner, Ted Wheeler’s valiant attempts at curtailing police brutality and their more-than-occasional collaboration with other fascist organizations has, effectively, amounted to politely asking his cops to not do that. Clearly having everything under control, Wheeler was even tear gassed and maced by his own stormtroopers during his first and only attempt to align himself with protestors during the 2020 uprising.

The primary function of the police is to protect private property. Given Wheeler’s family history as an heir to a timber logging magnate — one of the biggest capitalists to settle in Oregon, even having a town named after his ancestor — his decisions as Mayor and Police Commissioner begin to make more sense when we understand that he is first and foremost a capitalist; the class the police truly protect. Knowing this, we can be assured that, when it at last becomes a question of defending his own property, his own “prosperity,” he will side with the dogs of the empire and sic his stormtroopers on anyone who dares to hold him accountable. 

Let us say it without equivocation, so we cannot be mistaken, so no one can say we meant something else: the cops, these rabid dogs, have no place in our city.  They have given us nothing but grief and hardship. From destroying the unhoused’s encampments to gassing us in the streets and in our homes, the police have shown their contempt for and their betrayal of the working class. Portland yearns for peace, but without justice, there can be no peace. We will not be free until we abolish the police, and, in its place, build a system that serves the masses and their will rather than the interests of the wealthiest few. 

Only through the abolition of the current state of things can we move forward to build a better world. Only socialism is capable of this task.  As long as private property exists, it will need police to protect it. As long as wage labor exists, it will need the dogs of the empire to break strikes and send us back to work. As long as the empire seeks to colonize stolen land and put the ghosts of those who occupied it before us — in stewardship, not in ownership — into the ground, it will need the police. But we, the workers, do not need them. The police are the first line of defense for the settler empire. To allow their ranks to grow is to give succor and aid to our enemies. For each cop hired, that’s food from a hungry worker’s child. For each baton-twirling trigger-happy goon given a badge, that’s another soldier in the enemy’s uniform.

We say no more.

The announcement of her forthcoming release follows the orca’s belated “retirement” last year. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut is the second-oldest known living orca in the world.

The Miami Seaquarium, its parent firm, the Dolphin Company, and that firm’s owner and CEO, Mexican multimillionaire Eduardo Albor, are hailing the announcement as a big win for animal rights activism. Albor has associated himself and his company with billionaire-funded nonprofit corporation Friends of Toki. He presents himself to the public as a concerned philanthropist, environmentalist, and animal lover.

The truth of the matter is that Albor is, first and foremost, a capitalist — a profiteer — and that his decision to release Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was made, first and foremost, because holding her in captivity is no longer profitable. She is too old to continue performing; the stress has undoubtedly shortened her lifespan, and would kill her if she were forced to continue. Her death by overwork would doubtless bring a wave of negative publicity crashing down on the Miami Seaquarium and its owner, damaging the company’s public image and, ultimately, hurting its bottom line. Now, after decades of profiting from her misery, the firm that owns Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut has agreed to release her. This is not charity. This is not justice. This is a public relations stunt.Meanwhile, since 2018, far in the “background” of the corporate media buzz surrounding the “philanthropic” pursuits of “concerned” capitalists, an Indigenous-led campaign for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s freedom has carried on, gaining international support. The campaign is directed by the Lummi Nation through their nonprofit organization Sacred Sea. The Lummi, also known as the Lhaq’temish, are a federally recognized tribe native to a part of the Salish Coast, with a reservation in present-day Whatcom County, Washington. The goal of Sacred Sea’s campaign is to “right the wrong of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s capture, and safely and responsibly bring her home to the Salish Sea.” To this end, the nonprofit has prepared a “comprehensive” operational plan, summarized as follows:

Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut lives in a concrete tank that is barely bigger than she is. She cannot dive and swim freely; she cannot escape the relentless Florida sun or hurricane dangers. The chlorinated water in which she swims is devoid of all life. Killer whales see with sound, as well as with vision. Her acoustic isolation is an extreme cruelty, akin to solitary confinement in a prison cell far from home.

By contrast, the Xwlemi Tokw [Lummi Home] that has been designed and would be custom-built for her is a large netted structure within a secure and protected area in her natal Salish Sea waters. She will have ample space to swim and dive; the waters will be full of natural life. She will breathe the air of the Salish Sea, she will hear the birds, keep company with the fish, swim over kelp beds, feel the pull of the tides and currents. We believe that water is alive, and has memory. Her home waters will embrace her. 

The Xwlemi Tokw will give access to spiritual practitioners, scientists, and veterinarians who will continue to assess and fulfill her changing needs. The Operational Plan details every aspect of the Xwlemi Tokw, including maintenance systems, long-term environmental assessment protocols, and on-site risk management.

Since the Lummi Nation’s 2018 resolution to fight for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s freedom and return, Lummi activists and their allies have employed protest and public awareness tactics. Moreover, according to Sacred Sea,

In 2019, two individual Lummi women invoked the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and announced their intent to sue Miami Seaquarium if the Seaquarium would not agree to collaboratively work out a plan to safely bring Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut back home to her family in the Salish Sea.

Whether such legal action would meet with any success within the white supremacist U.S. court system, dominated by capitalist and settler interests, is doubtful. But such “lawfare” tactics could prove ruinous to the Miami Seaquarium’s public image, and hit the firm where it really hurts: its revenue stream.

Fortunately for the Lummi Nation’s campaign, theirs isn’t the only potential legal threat the Dolphin Company faces.

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture investigated the Miami Seaquarium, and reportedly found that Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was suffering in abhorrent living conditions. The water in her tank, drenched with chlorine, was “turbid” with filth, plastic, and chipped paint. She had endured years of malnutrition caused by the Seaquarium’s policy of chronically underfeeding her; her diet consisted of mostly rotten food, despite the objections of a veterinarian. She had sustained major injuries, including a jaw fracture, after being forced to perform dangerous jumps and somersaults, despite her advanced age. She was provided with no shelter from the oppressive Miami sun, which, in addition to painful overheating, can damage orcas’ eyes.

The protesting veterinarian would be fired by Miami Seaquarium shortly after the USDA’s report on Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s living conditions was published.

Now, in 2023, the Dolphin Company has at last agreed to cooperate in implementing the Lummi Nation’s “operational plan” for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s rehabilitation and rematriation to the Salish Coast. In all likelihood, mounting pressure from multiple sides was the true impetus for the Miami Seaquarium’s sudden “ethical” awakening. Capitalists know no other morality than the profit-motive.

The announcement of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s forthcoming release and reintroduction to her northern Pacific birthplace has again brought into the light that the horrific abuses of capitalism extend not only to humans and livestock animals, but also to any animal, no matter how rare or remote, that the capitalists can harness and exploit for profit.

All available evidence from scientific research indicates that orcas are sentient. They have magnificently complex social structures, rivaled in the organic world only by simian primates and elephants. They feel, by all appearances, a range of complicated and nuanced emotions and have intricate interpersonal bonds. They communicate with each other in something resembling language, and separate pods (small social units) even have varieties of this “language” resembling unique dialects. They are capable of abstract thought and planning, and of applying elementary logic and mathematics in novel ways in order to solve problems. They cooperate in teams when hunting, quite literally “herding” and corralling schools of prey fish, in a method known as “carousel feeding,” similar to how human hunters might pursue herds of deer or bison. They evidently have long memories, as pods can navigate thousands of miles of ocean together to complete regular migrations. Mothers affectionately sing to their calves, passing down “pod songs,” unique to each social unit, that the newborns remember and recite for the rest of their lives. The orca’s enormous, highly developed brain contains spindle neurons, a rare class of neurons associated with intelligence, found only in hominid apes (including humans), some monkeys, raccoons, and elephants. Most males live for 30 to 60 years; most females, 50 to 80 years, with some recorded living into their early 100’s.

While we believe that we should avoid anthropomorphizing (that is, reading human traits into nonhuman animals), it is difficult to deny that we can see many aspects of ourselves — our human minds, emotions, relationships, and societies — reflected in these animals. We can only speculate about the subjectivity, the mind, the internal life of an orca (in other words, what it is really like to be an orca, from her own perspective), but it seems undeniable that orcas, as with some other nonhuman animals, are endowed, in their own ways, with sentience.In a 2021 article, Lummi Nation leaders Raynell Morris and Ellie Kinley discuss the “people below the waves” in strikingly empathetic terms — terms of relatedness:

Our teachings hold that we have kinship bonds — as well as cultural and spiritual ties — to a particular clan of killer whales who live in the Salish Sea. They are our relatives, and so we call the J, K, and L pods of the Southern Resident orcas by their Lummi family name, Sk’aliCh’elh (Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut means “daughter of Sk’aliCh’elh”). 

We are taught that our Lummi and Sk’aliCh’elh families mirror each other. Our connection to the Salish Sea defines our people, as it does with the orcas. Salmon is essential to our identity and survival, as it is with the orcas. Our Lummi notion of “self” is inseparable from kinship and community; so, too, it is with the orcas. Family is sacred to us all…

In the 1960s and ’70s, about one-third of the Southern Resident orca population was captured and sold to aquariums and theme parks. For several decades, many of our own Lummi children were taken and sent away to boarding schools and foster care. Bringing those children back into our families and community has been healing. Sk’aliCh’elh children were sold to marine parks, where most of them died.

The authors also relate a heart-wrenching account:

This past spring, Lummi tribal members traveled to Miami and joined with members of the Seminole tribe, on whose homeland the Seaquarium is built, along with a nontribal filmmaker. After paying for their tickets to see “Lolita,” they took their seats in Whale Stadium, the arena surrounding Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s tank. The tribal members began to sing, drum, rattle, and pray. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut began her routine. The filmmaker, who had attended and recorded previous shows, noticed that Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was not responding to the trainer’s cues as usual. She would not perform. Many people have spoken for her, but we believe that this time, in the presence of ceremony, she was speaking for herself.  

Despite their sentience and our relatedness, when orcas are captured and forced into the inhumane and dehumanizing process of capitalist production, they, like all organisms, including human beings, are reduced to mere objects — commodities, profit-generating machines, privately owned means of production. A whole entertainment industry has been built upon kidnapping orcas from their natural habitats, stealing orca calves from their mothers, caging them in distressingly small and solitary enclosures, isolating them from fellow orcas and depriving them of social lives, perversely compelling them to breed and to bear offspring, subjecting them to cruel experiments, torturing them in order to “train” them as show animals, and forcing them to perform for crowds of human onlookers.

For her part, Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was forced to perform for over 50 years before she “retired.” Only at the relatively advanced age of 57 will she be allowed to return to the waters where she was born. Unfortunately, her release cannot be immediate: She first must be taught by veterinarian specialists how to hunt in a specially designed enclosure — for she was deprived of the chance to learn from her pod — and she needs to grow a substantial amount of muscle — for the conditions of her captivity, inhabiting the cramped tank to which she has been confined since adolescence, have caused her muscles to atrophy. Only after a few years of rehabilitation will she have a chance to find her way back to her pod.

According to Morris and Kinley, “Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut still sings the [pod song] her mother taught her when she was a baby. Family is everything to these killer whales. Bringing Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut home will heal a very specific wound: It will make her family whole again.”

We hope that they’re right; we hope that their prediction is realized.

We look back with horror, and rightly so, at the depravities of mass entertainment in past epochs — for instance, the bloodsport competitions forced upon Rome’s slaves in the Colosseum. Future generations will look back with similar horror upon the depravities of our own, capitalist epoch, and their horror will be no less justified. Our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their grandchildren, and on, will wonder with disgust at how we could abide the caging and torturing of sentient animals for the purposes of live mass entertainment and, above all, capitalist profit; they will judge us and our times unkindly; they will feel immense gratitude at the circumstance that they were born into a more civilized, repaired world, a world in which such barbarities have receded into history.

Why are we writing about this issue in a Communist newspaper?

Communism means the universal and total liberation of humanity from all forms, modes, and structures of oppression — including the abolition of all colonial regimes and the decolonization of all stolen and subjugated lands. Communism means not only the abolition of social classes and of private property, and therefore the elimination of poverty and exploitation, but also the abolition of all other manifestations of social and interpersonal violence inherent to class societies — an end to all wars, genocides, deportations, occupations, plundering, and other violence between populations. This has been well established since Marx. We hold that the first step in the long historical march of Communism on this continent, North America, must be, and can only be, its complete decolonization — the abolition of the illegitimate settler-colonial empires occupying it, the U.S. and Canada, the rematriation of all Indigenous lands, the liberation of all colonized peoples, and the eradication of all racism. Moreover, we believe that Communism would be incomplete, if we failed to also champion the liberation of nonhuman animals, to work for the ecological restoration of our planet — our only home — and to safeguard the continuation of life as we know it in this and future eons.

Morris and Kinley write as follows: “Our late beloved hereditary chief of Lummi Nation, Tsilixw, told us that if we heal our orca family, if we heal the salmon, if we heal the Salish Sea, we will heal ourselves. We believe he meant our Lummi selves and also, broadly, our human selves, our species.”

We believe it is the duty of every Communist to wholeheartedly support Indigenous liberation struggles, and to unite these struggles with the struggle against the capitalists — the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes and the poor of all countries, without distinction of ethnicity, race, or religion — the struggle for socialism.

Housing prices are skyrocketing, forcing impoverished people to move further out to the city’s edges and into a food-desert apartheid created by disappearing grocery stores and rising food prices. These struggles are exacerbated by deteriorating public transportation as a result of divestment and  increased policing, resulting in fewer social services and increased police terrorism. This is a horrific, but all-too-common, example of U.S. capital’s  assault on the working classes, which continues to intensify as another periodic crisis in capitalism looms. 

White people are indeed suffering the consequences of a settler-colonial empire in decline — an empire their colonizing ancestors built, and an empire they carried forward with a regime of racial apartheid — but these hardships are much more severe for working-class Black and Indigenous communities across Oregon. The same is true of other racially marginalized and nationally oppressed peoples across the state. Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest is grounded in settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and racist and xenophobic immigration and property ownership laws. Oregon became Oregon through the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous and Black people, mob and legislative violence against Asian immigrants, and the state-sanctioned support of white settlement, wealth, health, and property at the expense of all others. Oregon is a white supremacist state. Progressive? Hardly! Today’s problems have been centuries in the making. Consistent racist and patriarchal policy throughout the entire U.S. Empire’s history has brought us to this moment.

From 1804 until 1806, the U.S. Army Corps of Discovery carried out a military operation to chart the geography and learn how to economically exploit the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. This would become known, and is today taught to schoolchildren as, the “Lewis and Clark Expedition.” While an express goal of the operation was to study the terrain and wildlife, Lewis and Clarks’ notes also conflated the many Indigenous peoples with the flora and fauna. This practice went on to influence the historical work on the frontier until about the 1980s. Left out of the fictionalized, classroom retelling of the expedition are the indispensable contributions of Sacagawea, an enslaved 14-year-old Agaidika girl and child-bride of a French-Canadian fur trapper, and York, an enslaved 34-year old African man, whose request for his freedom was denied upon the expedition’s return. The violent coercion of Black and Indigenous labor quite literally paved the way for the settlement of Oregon. Once the operation had concluded, the U.S. military sent soldiers to establish forts along their expanding empire’s so-called frontier, with the express purpose of defending the encroaching white settlers and permitting them to conduct terror-raids and attacks of extermination against the Indigenous populations of the territory. These settlers were guided by Protestant ideas of private property, enclosure, and “rights of conquest,” as well as the wink-and-nod lie that the land was “uninhabited.” Fort by fort, settlement by settlement, the U.S. moved further West until its Destiny was made Manifest.

Just before the American Civil War, the provisional government of the Oregon Territory passed a law banning slavery. Far from a triumph of abolitionist progressivism, the same law required all Black persons to leave Oregon Territory at once. The white legislature then passed another law — one that forbidding free Black persons from entering the territory. The punishment for the violation of any of these new laws was public flogging, repeated every six months until the offending Black person left the territory — not dissimilar from the punishments enslaved would experience. 

The white property owners in Oregon passed these laws not only because the Territory could not be admitted to the Union as a slave state, but also because they needed to exclude Black people from the workforce, in order to prevent them from owning private property. Black private ownership of the land would undermine the white-supremacist order, predicated on the theft of Indigenous land and its repurposing into a “reward” for white settlers. Any white male could receive 650 acres of land upon arrival, plus an additional 650 if married, encouraging as many as 400,000 white settlers to flock to Oregon during the mid-19th Century. The ultimate goal of this policy was to relieve the economic (class) tensions on the East coast. To reduce the conflict between white workers in the East and their industrialist bosses, the government engaged in systematic dispossession of land in the West through broken treaties and military occupation of the “frontier.”

Oregon’s white supremacist policies of exclusion also applied to Indigenous people in the state. In 1919, an Indigenous Tillamook woman, Ophelia Paquet, wished to claim the property of her recently deceased white husband of 30 years, Fred Paquet. The Tillamook county court recognized her as his widow and appointed her as the administer of the estate. “Two days later, though, Fred’s brother John [Paquet] came forward to contest Ophelia for control over the property.” The legal battle took place over the next two years and was eventually seen in the Oregon Supreme Court. Despite John’s horrible reputation (described by a county Judge as “a man of immoral habits… incompetent to transact ordinary business affairs and generally untrustworthy”) his status as a white man under the Oregon miscegenation laws was enough to ensure that he won his case against Ophelia. Not only were her people dispossessed of their ancestral lands by the state, but Ophelia, as an individual, was excluded from legally reclaiming even a small parcel of that land under the new private property regime. 

These horrific events are merely local instances of the systemic dispossession of oppressed nationalities, primarily Black people, across the U.S. Empire. Property relations have always been racialized in this country.

One of the many Supreme Court cases that helped codify the boundaries of racialization in the U.S. Empire comes from Oregon. In 1923, an Armenian immigrant, Tatos Cartozian, gained citizenship; this was challenged by the state in 1924. Cartozian argued that he was a white man and was, by law, guaranteed a pathway to citizenship and the right to continue his business as a rug dealer. In the resulting 1925 Supreme Court case, United States v. Cartozian, the Court ruled that Armenians were white and not Asian based on the provided “scientific” evidence. Race is not a biological fact, but rather a social construct and a legal category. The boundaries of whiteness can be restricted and expanded to suit the needs of the ruling classes.

Oregon eventually “allowed” Black settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Black persons were relegated to the Albina neighborhood in North Portland through a myriad of interwoven systems of discrimination carried out by the state and private institutions, but most notably through a process called redlining — a process in which banks refuse to give mortgages to Black people or extract unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. During World War II, Portland’s Black population grew significantly, from roughly 1,800 to about 15,000 in five years. Three major shipyards were established in the Pacific Northwest, two in Portland, Oregon and one in Vancouver, Washington. These shipyards employed about 97,000 workers in total at their peak, and the prewar population of 340,000 was simply insufficient to meet the amount of ships commissioned by the U.S. Maritime Commission. Only fulfilling 27% of the commissioned vessels by the end of the war, it was clear that white male labor alone couldn’t maximize the market potential that was begging for ships. Thus, Oregon’s white capitalist class opened the doors to more workers and the general entry of women into the industrial workforce. To house the massive influx of people, Portland established a new, racially integrated city called Vanport to serve as temporary housing. The city was built in a dried lakebed between Portland and Vancouver and surrounded by locks to keep the water from the Columbia River out. Intended only to serve for the duration of the war, the buildings lacked foundations. In 1948 the locks gave way. Vanport was flooded, and the racially integrated, effectively autonomous, growing city was razed and swept away by the Columbia River. Portland refused to rebuild Vanport or compensate residents for the loss of property. The Black residents who could not find housing in Albina were then forced out of the area — through redlining. 

During the Second World War, Oregon and Southwest Washington also dispossessed 3,676 Japanese of their property via Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin Roosevelt. The state imprisoned the Japanese at the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Center, known today as the Portland Expo Center. Upon their release, most families found that their homes, businesses, and personal belongings had been auctioned off by landlords or the state and were now occupied by white families. In commemoration, “Portland artist Valerie Otani created Voices of Remembrance (in the form of [traditional Japanese torii gates] most commonly found at the entrance of a sacred space)” at the Expo Center MAX Station. Each gate is adorned with hanging metal luggage tags to represent the individuals who were interned there. There is no sign or indication of what the art installation represents to passersby.

Throughout the twentieth century, Portland continued to wage economic warfare on the remaining Black population in the Albina neighborhood through various “urban renewal” programs. Programs like the 1961 Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project were established by city officials and were then awarded to private construction firms. From 1956 to the 70s, the city ripped through the neighborhood, splitting up the community with various construction projects and highways—specifically Interstate 5 and Highway 99 (ironically, OR-99 was named Martin Luther King Boulevard). Most notoriously, the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center expansion plan, which covered 76 acres of land,  dispossessed 300 Black families of their homes and businesses. The area was razed, but the hospital expansion was never actually built. Today, a fenced-off empty lot is all that remains. 

City officials had proposed the project at the height of the Black Panther Party’s Portland chapter. The Panthers had built interracial solidarity between the Black community concentrated in Albina and other poor communities, including white workers, in Portland. The City effectively ended the Black Panther Party’s solidarity work through aggressive dispersal of the Black community, robbing the Panthers of a place to organize. Today, minor and insignificant-looking signs dot the sidewalk of Albina’s North Williams Avenue — a pitiful attempt to tell the story of the historic neighborhood. 

Since the 1980s, conditions for Black people in Portland have not improved. Under the so-called Urban Renewal projects, Black residents were either forced out of their homes or continued to live in the increasingly disjointed neighborhood. Redlining has further prevented Black people from creating new communities outside Albina. Banks and policy-makers have worked hand-in-hand to prevent the reappearance of significant Black communities. Systemic disinvestment in Albina gave rise to further problems, ultimately resulting in more families abandoning their homes. Across the United States, the 1990s abounded with gentrification projects, and Portland was no exception. This project continues today with the unrelenting construction of expensive apartment buildings, expensive restaurants, and boutique shops in historically poor and majority-Black neighborhoods. 

Free and fair trade are nothing but capitalist fairy tales, meant to justify the obscene wealth of the rulers and the obscene poverty and deprivation of the masses. When the underlying logic of an economic system is to generate endless profits and amass unlimited wealth, why would the powerful allow “fair” competition? The capitalists and other property-owning classes mitigate competition through exclusion; they nurture and manufacture racism, misogyny, and other prejudices to suit their own ends. Whiteness is an elastic identity that can include or exclude groups of people depending on the needs of a given moment in time. Blackness, however, is a highly policed identity, allowing whiteness its elasticity through exclusion. Non-white nationalities, so long as they are not Black (or in the case of the U.S., Indigenous), may be incorporated into whiteness (i.e., Jews, Irish, Italians, light-skinned Latinés and Asians, etc.). The “right” to the various spoils of exploited labor is mainly bestowed upon those considered white, while privileges and benefits are granted to assimilated non-whites (re: Armenians). At the same time, the U.S. Empire frequently intervenes to thwart the “anomaly” of capital accumulation by Black and Indigenous people — those who cannot be subsumed by whiteness and the colonial project. The history of Portland provides a stark local portrait — unfortunately, only one among many across colonized North America — of how vile, cruel, and relentless the capitalist U.S. Empire is in its construction of race.

A Walmart spokesman gave the following statement regarding the closures:

The decision to close these stores was made after a careful review of their overall performance. We consider many factors, including current and projected financial performance, location, population, customer needs, and the proximity of other nearby stores when making these difficult decisions

This is a perfectly normal decision for any capitalist firm to make; it is the inevitable logic of the capitalist firm put into action.

Like all capitalist firms, Walmart Inc. exists for one reason, and one reason alone: to generate profits for its shareholders, especially the monopolist families who own the largest stakes. If one of its locations is “underperforming,” if it is failing to generate profits at an acceptably high rate, then the firm will dispassionately cut its losses and shutter its less-profitable stores — no matter how many workers are left jobless in the process,; no matter how the poorest and most vulnerable consumers in the surrounding community are affected. Such retreats are individually of little consequence to a massive firm: Walmart Inc. owns around 5,000 locations within the U.S. alone. Closing a few “underperforming” stores is nearly insignificant to the corporation’s monopolist major shareholders. And so, Walmart’s executives, as the dutiful servants of these monopolists, will reflexively amputate their “excess” properties without a second thought, the same way a millipede might instinctively amputate one of its own multitudinous legs.

All of this is straightforward enough. But the U.S. corporate media has an odd way of “interpreting” Walmart’s closures.

In a December 2022, interview with CNBC, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, made the following remark:

Theft is an issue. It’s higher than it’s historically been. [McMillon cites no evidence for this claim, because there is no evidence.] And we’ve got safety measures, security measures, that we put in place by store location. I think local law enforcement being staffed, and being a good partner, is part of that equation… It’s really city by city, location by location. It’s store managers working with local law enforcement. And we’ve got great relationships there, for the most part. That’s the way we approach it.

Note that McMillon regards the U.S. Empire’s police forces not merely as a public “service,” but as a “good partner” to the capitalists. His characterization is absolutely correct: the police in this country, as in all capitalist countries, exist not to “protect and serve” the people, but to protect the private property, and thus the profits, of the capitalists, and to serve the capitalists by repressing, through everyday brutality and terror, the poor and the racially oppressed masses — the so-called “criminal elements.”

When asked if it “matters” that police sometimes neglect to arrest shoplifters “below certain levels” — as if anyone should care that someone walks out of a Walmart with a few unpaid-for cans of food, or a pack of socks, or a handful of school supplies — McMillon replied with a warning: “If that’s not corrected over time, prices will be higher, and/or stores will close.”

McMillon’s warning is at best a half-truth. Shoplifting is an infinitesimally small component of that determination. But exactly how small?

Lost merchandise is known as “shrinkage.” According to reliable reports in the capitalist press — that is, by the capitalists’ own admission — Walmart’s shrinkage amounts to approximately $3 billion per year, against a nearly $300 billion in total annual revenue (or, a loss of about 1% of its annual revenue). Of this shrinkage, about one-third is due to normal accidental breakage, another third to “employee theft,” and the last third to shoplifting. Thus, in sum, shoplifting costs Walmart about 0.3% of its total yearly revenue — a drop in the bucket, and a drop that every retailer, from mega-corporations down to the corner stores and street vendors, accounts for ahead of time, in the form of insurance. In other words, practically speaking, shoplifting costs Walmart Inc. absolutely nothing whatsoever.

When Walmart and other retailers raise prices, the underlying reason is not shoplifting. Prices rise, generally speaking, as a “normal” adaptation to inflation. At certain moments, prices may also rise when certain capitalists gain a momentary advantage in the market — for example, when they’ve rooted out competitors and cornered the market, when they’ve formed trusts and achieved a local monopoly, or during moments of acute crisis, when demand spikes and it becomes possible to price-gouge consumers.

Why, then, do Walmart’s corporate executives and spokespersons claim that petty theft is to blame for rising prices? In order to cast blame away from their firm, as an actor within a capitalist market; in order to fool its consumer base into blaming the public at large, and especially the poor — those most likely, owing to the desperation of poverty, to commit petty theft. This scapegoating of the poor appeals to reactionaries, especially to middle-class “small business owners,” professionals, and wealthy homeowners, who share with the capitalists an interest in exploiting and repressing the working-poor.

Some corporate media outlets have latched onto McMillon’s “old news” December 2022 interview with CNBC. These outlets are now spinning a narrative that Walmart’s Portland closures were forced by purportedly “rampant” shoplifting and “record-breaking retail theft” — that the mega-corporation has been so horribly bullied, abused, and taken advantage of by local poor people that it now has no other choice but to abandon Portland. Apparently, we are supposed to believe that Portland has descended into a kind of hellish anarchy, with hordes of bandits roaming the streets, mercilessly driving retailers out of business — one stolen can of soda and bag of chips at a time.

The fascist Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, even went so far as to allege on Twitter: “This is what happens when cities refuse to enforce the rule of law. It allows the mob to take over. Businesses can’t operate in that environment.” Liberals, including Portland’s Democrat mayor, Ted Wheeler, quickly pointed out to Governor Abbott that several Walmart locations across Texas have closed in recent years — but this is beside the point.

Needless to say, this hellscape-Portland narrative is nonsense, and only the most gullible, slack-jawed, dead-eyed, corporate-media-poisoned dolts will buy it for a second.

Actually, there is nothing exceptional about circumstances surrounding the Portland closures. Portland has not, in fact, descended into a hellish chaos of roving bandit mobs, like something out of a post-apocalyptic action film.

In fact, Walmart’s announcements of closures in February included ten locations across several states, including Arkansas, D.C., Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin; only two of those listed were in Portland. At the time, the company announced that the closures were due, simply and straightforwardly, to “underperformance.”

Even some liberal economists — those who aren’t out for blood, for expanded police militarization against poor and racially oppressed communities, at least — have acknowledged the unlikelihood that Walmart is closing its Portland stores due to shoplifting. A better explanation is that Walmart simply failed to corner the market in Portland; its overall market share was smaller and less competitive, and thus less profitable, than it wanted, so it packed up and left to find more fruitful territory. In one article, a market analyst is quoted as follows: “Walmart typically needs to be where they can be a big player and capture all the shares. There are some locations where they’ve struggled to gain a strong foothold, and they’ve left those places.” This explanation, straight from the mouth of a liberal professional whose very job is to advise capitalists on profiteering strategy, is straightforwardly correct.

Why, then, is the U.S. corporate media shamelessly lying about a purported Portland “crime wave” forcing retailers out of business?

Because the U.S. corporate media, in all its shades, is the loyal mouthpiece of the ruling monopoly-capitalist class.

That’s why even an event as mundane as an enormous retail firm closing a few of its less profitable stores must be twisted by “our” corporate media into a Poor Law narrative about the rapacious, self-destructive greed of the stupid, unwashed, savage poor, who must be reigned in by “our” military-dictatorship police, lest these animalistic masses tear apart “our” country’s very social fabric by a thousand cuts of petty theft.

The U.S. corporate media’s hatred of and contempt for the poor masses knows no bounds, and its propensity to demonize these masses with clumsily spun narratives and outright lies is untempered by any sense of human decency, journalistic integrity, or shame. But this wretched profession serves a purpose: in broadcasting their hatred and contempt for the vast majority of this country’s, and the world’s, human beings, for the poor and the dispossessed, the corporate media talking-heads serve, day by day, to normalize the misanthropic ideology of the capitalists. Our rulers will gladly watch as we starve, as we succumb to plague by the millions, as we suffer daily state-terror at the hands of the fascist police — so long as they can stave off a decline in their rate of profit, just a little longer. But the rate of profit is declining all the same, for this decline is a process built-in to the capitalist mode of production; it is a fundamental law of capitalism, and it will bring even the biggest firms crumbling down, just as erosion flattens even the tallest mountains.

A little while ago, Red was given his final prognosis in the battle against cancer. He has only a few weeks left and is making his final preparations. We have to say goodbye to Red, but we aren’t saying goodbye to Red the soldier. We’re saying goodbye to Red, the gardener. We may miss his soldiering in the days to come, but it is his gardening that will have had the most profound effect on those around him and on the revolution that’s coming.

Around ten years ago Red and Lindsey, the Chairwoman of FTH, started up aid in their local community in Seattle. When COVID hit, they transitioned to a more intensive, full-throated community organizing project among the unhoused. For the first time in Seattle’s history, houseless encampments became permanent thanks to the suspension of sweeps and clearing laws. FTH and CRC are community survival programs with no precondition of adhering to Communist or even broadly leftist or progressive positions. Like all real red aid (as opposed to “red charity”), conversations about Communism and the road to revolution are never foisted upon attendees; their needs are met, by unabashed and unashamed Communists. And that’s the goal.

What is the difference between red charity, mutual aid, and red aid? Red charity is charity disguised as mass work — throwing food, clothes, whatever else at a problem without engaging with the masses or, alternately, demanding that those coming for help listen to a lecture about socialism. Mutual aid is the process of mutual — two way — exchange within a community to help meet survival needs. Exchanging labor on a collective farm, for example. But red aid is something altogether different: it is meeting the survival needs of the community while assisting in the self organizing of that same community. Giving the tools needed — mass meetings, procedures, and above all the answers to the burning questions that face the community that only Marxism can provide — while at the same time standing at the forefront of struggle.

This is what FTH and CRC provide, and what Lindsey and Red have worked to establish. As their work intensified, Red and Lindsey split up responsibilities between the “front of house,” that is, service and medicine handled by FTH, and “back of house,” that is, logistics, money, and protection, handled by CRC. Red has always worked to ensure that marginalized and oppressed individuals are placed into positions of power within both CRC and FTH — he trains, but does not command.

Red is a Taoist. As he put it, “it doesn’t make sense to expect a tree to be anything other than a tree.” For Red, it’s the revolutionaries who are the trees, the grasses, and the flowers. He cares for his cadre, learns what each member of his team is suited for, what kind of revolutionary work they naturally want to do (what kind of “tree” they are), and sets up networks of support to enable them to do that revolutionary work. He’s not a gardener of plants and flowerbeds, but a gardener of revolutionaries.

We will mourn the gardener but celebrate the garden. Over ten years, Red has helped to build a powerful engine of revolution. He has contributed to the safety and well-being of hundreds if not thousands of people served by FTH and CRC. Quietly, without drawing much attention to itself, a powerful seed of revolution is gathering strength in Seattle. That seed was watered by the Red Gardener. We may be losing Red, but his contribution to the revolution will live on — and when the revolution is victorious, those of us who knew Red will know that he forged the links in the chain of victory.

A comrade never fades away,

A comrade lives forever.

For though the body may decay,

The bond cannot be severed.

A comrade never fails to breathe;

Their voice is ours, unbroken.

Their struggle and their surety,

They live through words they’ve spoken.

A comrade’s earthly reach extends

Beyond their mortal tether.

A comrade never dies, my friends,

For struggle lasts forever.

Dremel, Requiem for Red