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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In terms of its size, dynamism, and degree of global integration, China’s market economy is extraordinary. Though it’s known officially as a “socialist market with Chinese characteristics,” its market features far predate the 1978 decision on “reform and opening.” The reformist Chinese growth model has always been characterized by a distinct pragmatism. This involves integrating macro programming and regulations, a mix of public and private ownership and control, market allocation to various degrees of resources and distribution, bureaucratic cronyism in productive and business organizations, and international “free trade.”

This model is the outcome of decades of adaptation and innovation. While much has been written on pre-nineteenth century Chinese economic strategy, far less attention has been paid to the wartime fiscal and monetary experiments undertaken during the Communist Revolution. In an effort to rectify this oversight, I review revolutionary economic policy from the 1920s until the 1940s, reflecting on its theoretical and institutional implications. 

The pacified empire

The unified Qin–Han state originated from an amalgam of the annals of Warring States around the same time as the rise of Rome in the Western Hemisphere. While the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, imperial China outlived it and subsequent empires. This longevity was in part rooted in its socioeconomic arrangements. Trade had flourished early with extensive internal and external networks across continental and maritime expanses, encompassing numerous silk roads and transportation routes to reach many societies and cultures. 

Prior to 1800, the Chinese, Indian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, and Arab economies were weightier producers than their counterparts elsewhere.¹ In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith recognized that “China is a much richer country than any part of Europe,” despite signs of stagnation.² Instead of an industrial revolution, the Chinese accomplished an “industrious revolution,” argued Giovanni Arrighi, consistent with a Smithian path of “natural progress of opulence” rather than the “unnatural and retrograde” European path of interstate rivalries over power and colonial extraction.³ China at its splendor was so wealthy, thanks to regions like the Yangzi Delta, that while Europe was compelled to adopt machines to cut labor costs, “China didn’t ‘miss’ the industrial revolution—it didn’t need it.”⁴

By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, China had become the largest trader on the silver standard, contributing to the emergence of global capitalism but without transforming into a colonial empire. In a review of Chen Huan-chang’s 1911 The Economic Principles of Confucius and his School, John Maynard Keynes noted China’s trimetallic system dating back to “the remotest times,” observing that in the use of paper money, the Chinese “long anticipated other peoples.”⁵

Accordingly, “cooperative banks” were invented around 220 AD, and, in subsequent centuries, developed into government and shadow banking of coins, notes, bills, bonds, and “flying money”—money certificates to “control the price of all commodities.”⁶ In place of the liberal legal institutions, credit systems, and public budgeting that characterized early modern Europe, the Chinese economy operated through informal arrangements of properties and contracts, claims and debts, rights and liabilities, which relied on personal and family ties, townsmen associations, and other private partnerships.⁷ Ingenious transactions and lending in China’s commercial centers notwithstanding, underdeveloped financial infrastructure and stimuli of the economy came to be a competitive disadvantage. The “pacified empire,” Max Weber remarked, was a contrast to war-financed “varieties of booty capitalism” in Europe, where states enriched themselves “through war loans and commissions for war purposes.”⁸

Economic difficulties and political turmoil around the transition from Ming to Qing were an instance of the financial weakness of the Chinese imperial monetary system. Under Europe’s financial hegemony, major inflation in China was directly caused by the depletion of silver inflow in the seventeenth-century world crisis.⁹ En route, European ocean vessels linked American cotton and mining products derived from slave labor and trade from Africa with the Chinese-Indian-Arab markets. Gunder Frank recounts this gigantic trading triangle in which the Europeans took out American silver to “buy themselves tickets on the Asian train.”¹⁰ Finding itself a “bottomless pit” for the influx of American silver and its monetization, China became dependent on foreign currency supplies and offshore exchange rates. This was not only economically but also politically costly, as the monetary arbitrage from the externally forged silver standard undermined the Chinese state. Foreign banks and other financial institutions had also come to China since the late-nineteenth century, hence the formation of a Chinese comprador class of financiers and financial brokers who locally facilitated imperialist super profits and rents.

Lacking the capitalist mechanisms of creative destruction and limitless accumulation, the premodern Chinese economy followed its own patterns of evolution—or involution, as some economic historians prefer to characterize it. Examples of its working methods are many: state depots of an “ever normal granary” (changpingcang) to balance seasonally fluctuated grain prices and regional price differentials; periodic government procurement of other essential goods in preparation for disaster relief and the easing of lean time market pressure; and recurrent reforms to unify taxation, regulate commerce, and calibrate competition. These ideas and institutions, refined over successive dynastic regimes, have been studied by economists, historians and sociologists in a growing scholarship of comparative economic history. 

Among the most well known classics is the Guanzi (seventh century BC). Two millennia before the advent of classical and neoclassical economics, this economic-philosophical text, believed to be a reflective record of the economic principles discussed between the Duke of Qi and his prime minister Guan Zhong in the Chun-Qiu period, can be read contemporarily. The core argument is a “heavy-light” distinction in the hierarchy of importance attached to goods in their production and trade, which determines the need for, and techniques of, official pricing. To ensure adequate supply of the “heaviest” items, for example, the government must “stabilize the price of grain in order to stabilize the overall price level and the value of money.”¹¹ On Salt and Iron is another famous classic, a collection of documents on the salt and iron debate between the realist Guanzians and the moralistic Confucian literati. At a West Han conference (81 BC), the former group as policy advocates promoted state intervention as an obligation for economic prosperity and price stability. The latter group, on behalf of aggrieved producers and merchants suffering predatory officials, lamented a foregone age of pliable governments.¹²

Following the Wu emperor (141-87 BC) who endorsed rounds of monetary reform, central monopolies of salt and iron developed, and became a staying policy. The state reined in fierce competition among the large landed and mercenary interests. These events were analytically narrated in such writings as “treatise on foodstuffs” and “usurers.”¹³ Ban had incorporated what was earlier documented in the “biographies of usurers” (book 129) and “a treatise of leveling” (pingzhun shu, book 30) by Si Maqian in the Records of the Grand Historian. The pingzhun officials were assigned to the balancing act of market stabilization by organizing “selling [crops etc.] where and when they are scarce and dear, and buying them where and when they are bountiful and cheap.” This particular conception and measure of pingzhun, together with the heavy-light differentiation based priorities, are perhaps the most outstanding of the ancient economic wisdoms in laying the policy foundation of China’s future economic performance.¹⁴

Power and adaption

In contrast to China’s pre-communist economic history and thought, wartime communist economic management has been largely neglected outside of China. The fusion of old wisdoms and novelties in this unique experience, however, deserves greater attention. 

The story begins with the first tide of the labor movement in the early 1920s. The Communist Party of China (CPC) and its Trade Union Secretariat resolved to amalgamate political and economic class struggles. Its earliest experiment with shareholding cooperation was a self-managed cooperative for the coalminers and railway workers in Anyuan, Hunan, in 1923. This effort initiated the use of membership “red shares” and coupons. Mao Zemin, a younger brother of Mao Zedong’s, was twice its general manager. After the Guomindang (GMD) right wing slaughtered tens of thousands of communists and sympathizers in 1927, the CPC retreated from urban agitation and recruited at the rural margins. In these areas, cooperative farms, workshops, credit, trading and remittance networks developed widely, with voluntary participants as shareholders of specialized or multifunctioning cooperatives.¹⁵

The cooperatives were also a vehicle of mutual aid and political education. Yu Shude, a party veteran since 1922, recognized that “creating collective power through cooperation” was a means for the vulnerable majority of the Chinese population to forge political ties. The ultimate aim was to replace private property, but “before the new social organization can be established, cooperation is the rescue for petty producers.”¹⁶ This idea was popular, and it echoed in the non-communist reform movements for Rural Reconstruction and Popular Education.¹⁷ It later accented the national rural cooperative campaign of the 1950s and was revived through the “Marxist theory of cooperation” to legitimize collectivization in the early 1980s.    

The uneven nature of Chinese development and the temporal-spatial specificities of the Chinese revolution bore significant implications for the revolution’s economic orientation. State building in the People’s Republic thus began in the rural peripheries decades before the CPC came to national power, with the strategy of “encircling the cities from the countryside.” The revolutionary bases were created and expanded in discrete territories to break the weak links of counterrevolution. This was possible because imperialist powers and their local pillars in China were divided, and conflicts among the warlords were pervasive. In his analysis of how the small, separatist red regimes could survive privation and isolation, Mao highlighted semi-coloniality and the indirect nature of imperialist rule. 

In the absence of an integrated national market, the red forces could carve out their own territories around the borders of several provinces away from the counterrevolutionary strongholds. However slim, the opportunity gave rise to the daring endeavor to build the “armed independent power of workers and peasants” as a “movable counter power.” Ultimately, the revolutionaries sought to aggregate a historical bloc out of this “state within the state.”¹⁸ During the next waves of revolution, they were vindicated, as a single spark did start a prairie fire.

Mao was writing in the mountainous provincial edges where the first Chinese red army regiments battled to win a primitive home as the cradle of an armed revolution. The Jinggang base was the first among communist local regimes to survive attacks by extreme adversaries. For the base, economic viability meant life or death. 

Central to the party’s minimum program was land revolution. This revolution was of epochal significance in overturning China’s thousands of years old “feudal” (a borrowed term in the communist vocabulary) order, which entailed the polarity of land concentration and landlessness, the collusion of landlords and bureaucrats, widespread miseries and stalled modernization. The communists sought to alter the division between capital accumulation and productive investment which resulted from land purchases and usury. By the same token, as the landed, money-owning, and power-holding classes were jointly destroying the agricultural base of Chinese society, the country’s legendary but stifled productive forces were invigorated thanks to the redistribution of land.

In the following two decades, the CPC carried out this effort while remaining sensitive to changing political circumstances. Policies on land redistribution or rent reduction engaged the regional communist governments, the red army, the trade unions, peasant associations, women’s federations, and other mass organizations. Without the economic conventions directed by a landed and patriarchal gentry, the party prioritized productive self-sufficiency, popular livelihood and military provision.

Trade was a predominant priority for impoverished red regions. Tungsten mining in the Jinggang mountains, for instance, was an indispensable source of income, hence the trading of ore with non-local merchants in return for certain daily necessities and badly needed medicines for injured soldiers. Over a series of military victories, the Chinese Soviet Republic was declared in the town of Ruijin in Jiangxi from 1931 to 1934, which commanded dozens of border region soviets nationally. This was a turning point in communist state crafting. 

But these enclaved regimes had to quickly develop commercial and financial ties. The joint-stock Zhicheng Bank in Shenyang is a good example of efforts to accomplish this. The bank was a vital asset of the party struggling to provide the isolated Northeastern Anti-Japanese Aggression Volunteers with medical and arms supplies.¹⁹ Just as remarkably, the party ran a commercial station in Hong Kong as a mission facility in the lifeline of its base areas and guerrillas. Qin Bangli, a banker in training and brother of Bo Gu, politburo general secretary from 1931 to 1935, was a “capitalist in practice but communist by conviction” who “scrimped every Hong Kong dollar he could” from business for the revolution while his family lived in a bare rented apartment.²⁰

Despite a battle for self defense, the red regimes were repeatedly overrun, cut off from one another, and economically strained. The central soviet experienced dramatic shortages and inflation, and consequently its authority had to resort to barter borrowing in 1934. Losing Ruijin to the GMD military extermination campaigns in the same year, the communists embarked on the epic long march and relocated their counter-state headquarters in Yan’an in northern Shaanxi (Shanbei). A special troop of the long marchers shouldered the soviet treasury in gold, silver, banknotes, and minting machines trekked a perilous 6000-mile journey. 

The relaunch of the soviet central bank in 1935 was based on these capital funds and the reserves of the existing local soviet bank. Soon after the three red field armies joined forces in Shanbei in 1936, they were restructured under the second CPC-GMD united front of the national resistance war and fought the Japanese and their puppet army in the most arduous conditions. By the end of 1945, the communists were in control of vastly enlarged “liberated areas” of ninety million people, or one fifth of the national population behind the enemy lines. Gathering momentum during the civil war, the now renamed People’s Liberation Army (PLA) took offensives to liberate north China and by the early summer of 1949 crossed the Yangzi river to seize the south. The US-backed GMD forces crumbled and fled to Taiwan. 

The communist managers strove to foster subsistence and commercial agriculture as well as rudimentary industries with a facilitating ownership structure, schemes of subsidies, tax breaks, and other incentives. The red army depended mainly on resources from the battleground but also ran military clothing and munition factories. The “campaign for mass production” in the Shan-Gan-Ning border region from 1940 to 1946 engaged all the government and army units; party and army leaders were each assigned quotas of labor or products to fulfill. This movement ensured that the main communist regional powers would be economically viable. It also initiated a proud tradition of self-reliance and the army’s productive and constructive roles in peacetime. 

The huge Huaihai campaign in the winter of 1948–49 also demonstrated how the sweeping land reform and related socioeconomic policies decisively changed the outcomes of the war. Thanks to the enrollment of recently landed peasants, the PLA was able to defeat the far better equipped GMD army. Division after division of the GMD army defected to the PLA on the spot, choosing to fight for their own land. 

Undoubtedly, the fact that the communist local blocs had sustained themselves since the Yan’an era, with some even growing into economic strongholds, helps explain their success. They selectively re-appropriated methods from a splendid civilizational tradition and invented their own. A most salient example was the purchasing of harvest in times of abundance and its distribution during lean times. Salt monopoly had also been adapted to manage the market and secure revenue. Though they lack a systematic economic ideology, these policies captured and nurtured market opportunities for common economic life, especially in trade within and beyond their borders.

Regional communist fiscal and monetary policies

The communists initially used portable mining machinery to strike coins as the circulating subsidiaries to silver dollars. These became the standard national currency. Although the images appeared crude (see the portraits meant to be of Lenin below), “what these coins may have lacked in appearance, they made up for in integrity.” That is, the communists were honest in their dealings with the peasants, and ensured that their coinage maintained good weight and fineness—in contrast to alternatives which had varied weights and qualities.²¹

This applied to the earliest red paper notes as well, which, despite a ragged surface, were promised at full value. Mao Zemin, now the Governor of the Chinese Soviet State Bank founded in 1931, together with Lin Boqu and Deng Zihui, Ministers of Economy and of Finance respectively, devised an independent regional money called guobi in July 1932. With the aim of creating a unified financial system, the guobi was declared the only acceptable currency for taxpaying and other formal payments. 

The bank issued public bonds and opened a range of banking businesses of deposit, mortgage, loan, credit funds, bill discount, and remittance in support of the local economy. To strengthen the newly instituted central treasury and secure a source of revenue for fiscal and military expenditures, the financial authority directly operated a state mining company. Most impressively, it also pioneered special trade zones to bypass the anticommunist embargo half a century before China’s reform-era special economic zones. Encouraging the export of cheap local products like grain, timber, paper, and ore, while importing locally wanted goods, the “state bureau of foreign trade” set up multiple offices and warehouses alongside the borders between red and white jurisdictions. 

The market logic and contradictions within the white regimes thus combined to generate a commercial boom in such places. The neighboring Min-Zhe-Gan soviet also used secret transportation routes with armed protection and invited outside merchants into its internal markets to boost trade. Its regional bank successfully made government offerings and was able to financially assist the central soviet.²²

In January 1935, the long marchers entered the small city of Zunyi in Guizhou and were stationed there for merely two weeks. They injected guobi brought from Ruijin into the market right away, pegging it to salt, the scarcest local commodity. Backed by the salt reserve seized from the warlords, the “red army notes,” as they were then dubbed, were received as “salt notes.” The purchasing power of the notes for salt and other basic goods was instantly stronger than any other currencies in the local market. Meanwhile, the exchange of red army notes with silver dollars was guaranteed by the soviet bank. 

The result was immediate and by any account a miracle. With its evident credibility, the new currency stimulated the market, aided the poor, and replenished supplies for an exhausted army. Before leaving the city, the bank opened a number of emergency stores for people to quickly use up their red army notes on materials or silver dollars, achieving almost complete withdrawal of the currency.²³ Unsurprisingly, the red banks which already existed in Shanbei had also pegged their currencies to salt. The shared tactic of salt monopoly continued after the arrival of the central soviet.  

In 1937, the communists formally launched their Shan-Gan-Ning Regional Bank under Cao Jvru’s governorship as the new soviet state bank replacing the Northwestern Branch under Lin Boqu since 1935. Confronted with critical economic and fiscal challenges in a poverty ridden region, and upon the issuing of the new border region banknotes or bianbi in various denominations on paper or cloth, Mao telegrammed the party’s policy leaders on August 17, 1938. He underscored monetary policy principles in the prolonged war against Japanese invasion: local base currency stability, avoidance of  oversupply and hence depreciation; sufficient bank reserves in kind as well as in Japanese puppet notes or weibi and the GMD national fabi; efficient external trade; and sustained army supply. The key was to “keep the value of our regional notes equivalent to or above the exchange rate of Japanese money.” Minor and less dependable currencies were also to be cleared out.²⁴

The “foreign” currency of weibi was held as the secondary reserve because “foreign trade” with the Japanese occupied areas was unavoidable for both importing essential industrial and consumer goods and shielding the bianbi against too much fluctuation. As for the fabi, given its domination in the national market as a relatively strong currency backed by the dollar and the pound (after the silver standard belatedly elapsed in China in 1935), it was also a necessary reserve for trade across red-white boundaries.²⁵ After the January 1941 Wannan Incident in which the communist New Fourth Army was unexpectedly attacked and nearly annihilated by the GMD, and with the Japanese occupiers pouring billions of weibi into the market to devalue the fabi, the communists had to alter their monetary policies.    

Each border region administered its own banking and taxation systems to promote local businesses while countering hostile market manipulations. The regional banks and tax regimes were relatively autonomous in their relationship with Yan’an, due to sheerly uneven economic conditions across regions and individually specific situations in the midst of war and revolution. As the institutions of the state within the state, they constituted a system separate from the national economic and financial jurisdiction. These institutions served as the guardians and facilitators of local economic resilience and hence the viability of the revolutionary bases. 

In the Shan-Gan-Ning region, government trading companies, such as the mainstay Guanghua Store²⁶ and many cooperative traders, participated in the “financial warfare” waged to defend the bianbi. They furnished vouchers or cash coupons tied to the red money. To strike fair distribution between revenue and tax burdens, the Jin-Cha-Ji border region introduced and amended its cumulative tax rules in the early 1940s. Party leaders and dispatched offices worked painstakingly to design a system of enhancing state fiscal capacity without overburdening common taxpayers.²⁷ To uphold the value of jinanbi issued by the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu region’s Jinan Bank, the regional government designated “foreign trade” denominated in it as the standard currency, and price control was instrumental for weibi holders to pay more for the same goods.²⁸

The odds, however, were enormous, and the bianbi did devalue on occasion. Shanbei had been hit by inflation from time to time due to a war racked economy and an adverse balance of payments. The export of salt, oil and other commodities was far from sufficient to offset importing locally unavailable manufactured goods.²⁹ The Jinan Bank was forced to inject extra notes and coins into the market to compete with the fabi and weibi which had been both banned but only ineffectively. They lingered as the bianbi was volatile. To contain the damage, the regional government kept the window of currency exchange legitimately open, while implementing ‘gradient’ rating differentials between the region’s central and peripheral areas. This move at least protected the value of the jinanbi in the core market of the red region and its assets and stocks.³⁰ A more effective way developed only later in the Shandong revolutionary base where the established monetary standards were resolutely abandoned.     

The Shandong regional Bank of Beihai, established in 1938, had since developed a cluster of divisions alongside the communist military advances in East China. The bank treated commerce as a weapon in the communist hands to integrate production, trade, and finance under a sustainable money and pricing regime.³¹ Xue Muqiao, chief financial advisor to the regional government in 1943–47, led an expert team to end the constant inflationary threats. The diagnosis was of a persistent inflow of weibi and a collapsing fabi. The Beihai Bank’s beihaibi or beipiao had already been declared the sole base currency in 1942, along with the financial authority’s stated mission of “issuing the kangbi, supplanting the fabi, and prohibiting the weibi.” (Kangbi or “money for resisting Japan” was another name for bianbi and here Beipiao.) This objective, however, did not materialize until nearly two years later, when the government achieved two preparatory objectives: possession of a sufficient stock of essential commodities to back beipiao, and parity of beipiao’s exchange rate for external trade. Steadily earning popular confidence and positive convertibility, this regional currency was consolidated to witness “good money driving out bad money.” As public and private traders and fabi holders either spent the money elsewhere or redeemed it for beipiao, the latter’s credibility accelerated. It became the most stable and favorable currency not only locally but also in the surrounding areas. 

Shandong was a model of communist regional economic governance, where farms, factories, shops, and other market actors came to flourish. Enemy currencies were expelled and trade thrived. The Shandong liberated areas became a resourceful base for the communist victory in the impending civil war. Xue explained this success through a strict limit on the quantity of circulating currencies and the red money’s overpowering market capture. “The law of ‘bad money driving out good ones’ discovered by the bourgeois economists’ could be reversed.”³² The fabi must be locally de-legitimized because its ongoing co-circulation would weaken beipiao’s self-defense and material reserves. 

Xue’s theory focused on the “material standard” (wuzi benwei) for paper money as opposed to the “universal gold standard.”³³ As mentioned, it was decided that the primary reserve for the bianbi was to be “goods, especially industrial goods.”³⁴ Only with such a material backing could the independently issued local currency hold on value and market confidence. Quoting Marx’s concept of money as commodities’ “general equivalent,” Xue argued that seeing the kangbi (bianbi) as “a castle in the air” without a metal foundation was mistaken. A currency could be pegged to precious metals or any hard currency as much as material goods. What mattered to the locals in the base areas was the worth of money materialized in physical rather than nominal forms. In Shandong, aside from producer goods, grain, peanuts, cooking oil, sea salt, cotton and other livelihood products were “the best guarantee” behind kangbi.

Responding to an American journalist who asked how beipiao had triumphed, Xue specified that “our material standard meant that we must monitor money supply according to the market demand. For every 10,000 yuan we issued . . . we would use at least 5,000 yuan to procure material goods.” With sufficient material reserves in place, the regional government could be a market regulator and price stabilizer by reflowing money from sales against inflation or increasing money to augment purchases and thereby neutralize deflation.³⁵

Towards the national planning and market

The protection and development of independent markets in communist territories required the designation of local base currencies supplied in the right amount at the right times. The red banks functioned as central banks while playing a range of microeconomic roles as commercial banks as well. The Northeast Bank followed this pattern to issue and solidify its dongbeibi after Japan surrendered. The revolution took the whole region in the next few years and turned the northeast into its own gigantic industrial and financial powerhouse. Both Dongbei and Beihai banks had thrived until the end of 1948 when the People’s Bank of China came into being in Shijiazhuang, Hebei, where the CPC leadership was getting ready to enter Beiping (Beijing). Formed through the merger of red Huabei, Beihai and Northwest Farmers’ banks, the communist national bank began to issue the first set of renminbi or “people’s dollars” on the eve of the founding of the PRC. 

The new state was confronted with economic chaos—acute hyperinflation, urban food shortages, and violent sabotage were symptomatic of a long mismanaged, deeply corrupt, and failing old regime. The crisis intensified with the 1948 GMD reform that introduced Golden Yuan Notes (jinyuanquan) to replace the severely depreciated fabi. Without minimal assurance in fiscal preparation and quantum of issuance, the note depreciated much faster than its predecessor and soon became nearly worthless. Relentlessly and soaring inflation directly contributed to the downfall of the GMD regime. 

A famous case of communist resolve was displayed in Shanghai upon the communist takeover. In early 1949, the municipal government transported a large quantity of cereals and other basic supplies into the city, bulk buying through government retailers to hasten price increases and then flooding the market with released stocks to bankrupt hoarding speculators. Differentiating between essential or heavy and non-essential or light commodities, the former were protected through a cost-plus formula for the latter. Skillfully utilizing market instruments to simultaneously depress both inflated prices and excess cashflow, the new authority swiftly restored the value of money and economic order.³⁶ Stabilizing the price of grain followed by intermediate consumer goods, the communists seemed to pick up on a traditional practice of purchasing the plenty to be sold in scant times. 

Winning economic battles nationally allowed coordinated state actions across regions. The wartime experiences proved handily valuable for the new state to manage economic recovery (while sustaining the war effort in Korea). In the process, the communist economic strategists also flouted the logic of a neoclassical postulate by stabilizing the price level before fixing the budget deficit.³⁷

Overcoming hyperinflation, financial breakdown, and speedy price stabilization also granted the rural powerholders a firm foothold in urban China. The enraged international ruling class had predicted that the rustic reds would not be able to manage large cities and the national economy, but this was soon disproven. 

A treasure trove

The demise of the old state and society paved the way for socialist industrialization without conventional market incentives or financial disciplines. Despite policy blunders and serious setbacks, the communist undertaking of “internal accumulation” was spectacularly developmental, both in physical infrastructure and in human development. 

Today, the importance of fiscal and monetary sovereignty and market stability remain crucial points of contention for developing and transitional economies around the world. Government reserves of essential goods, a public system of regional development banks, and the maintenance of a stable money supply are just some of the communist wartime policy experiments which bear contemporary resonance.

In reflecting on how the legal tender of bianbi was locally requisite forty years down the line, Xue Muqiao stressed its status as the only circulating currency vigilantly guarded in size and value. “The basic policy of monetary struggle” was to defend and consolidate the autonomy and security of the beihaibi market.³⁸ He contemplated that this understanding should be useful for those postcolonial nations still lacking the means to counteract imperialist money printing machinery, short-term bonds, and contagious inflation. Financial integration at the expense of autonomy in a speculative and crisis-ridden global market can be perilous.³⁹

Relatedly, the regulation of money supply continues to be debated. The provisional charter of the Chinese Soviet State Bank stipulated in 1932 that “money must be supplied in line with market demand” and “extremely cautiously” in an orderly manner, as again asserted at the second soviet national congress in 1934.⁴⁰ In addition to capping the size of currency circulation as an intricate artwork adjusted to changing demands, the rates of currency exchange were also closely monitored. In the 1940s, Zhu Lizhi, one time governor of the Shan-Gan-Ning regional bank had recourse to fiscal flexibility. Reacting to a hazardous budget deficit, Zhu elevated the bar on bianbi supply and encouraged business lending and mortgage loans to both monetize the deficit and provide for entrepreneurial cashflow.⁴¹ The one-sided austere methods, as he saw it, could harm liquidity and in turn worsen inflation.⁴²

State reserves also functioned as a price control mechanism. The material reserves behind bianbi balanced abundance and scarcity in the market and stabilized the currency through enabling government intervention. The financial authority could thus use its discretion to increase goods supply to lower prices against inflation or increase money circulation and buy in goods to hold prices against deflation. This “material standard,” set to constrain money supply and preserve the worth of unit money, was a token of communist financial governance banked on the regional political-legal power. An implication of this novelty in an age of unbridled financial capitalism could be the advantage of a strong real economy, for which the optimal fiscal and monetary means are yet to be worked out.

1. Frank, Andre Gunder, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), ch. 4.  ︎
2. Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1776]1976), 30, 70–71, 210.  ︎
3. Arrighi, Giovanni, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007), 69. ︎
4. van Zanden, J.L., “Before the Great Divergence: The Modernity of China at the Onset of the Industrial Revolution,” Jan 26, 2011; Pomeranz, Kenneth,The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).  ︎
5. Keynes, J.M., “The Economic Principles of Confucius and his School,” by Chen Huan-chang, The Economic Journal 22:88, December (1912) : 585.  ︎
6. Keynes, 585-86.  ︎
7. Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Bin Wong, “Another Look at Credit Markets and Investment in China and Europe before the Industrial Revolution,” Yale University Economic History Workshop (2005), 14-18; Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch. 5; Rawski, Evelyn and Thomas Rawski, “Economic Change around the Indian Ocean in the Very Long Run,” paper presented at the Harvard-Hitotsubashi-Warwick Conference, Venice, July 2008.  ︎
8. Weber, Max, The Religion of China (1915), trans. by Hans Gerth (New York: Free Press, 1965), 26, 103–104, 61-62; Ertman, Thomas, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 74–87; Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), ch. 3.  ︎
9. Wakeman, Frederic, Telling Chinese History: A Selection of Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 27–35.  ︎
10. Frank.  ︎
11. Weber, Isabella, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 24–5; Wu, Baosan, A Study of Guanzi Economic Thought (Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Publisher, 1989).   ︎
12. Nolan, Peter, China at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), ch. 3; Weber, Isabella  ︎
13. Volumes 24 and 91 respectively, of the Book of Han, by Ban Gu (32-92 AD).  ︎
14. Sima, Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty, trans by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 89–100; Ban, Gu, Food and Money in Ancient China: The Earliest Economic History of China to A.D. 25, trans by N.L. Swann, Nancy Lee (Princeton, 1950) (New York: Octagon Books, 1974).  ︎
15. Chinese Cooperation Times, “The First ‘Red’ Stock of Anyuan Railroad and Mine Workers’ Consumer Cooperative,” March 25, 2021; Hu, Deping, “In Response to the Question Concerning Supply and Marketing Cooperatives,” China Green Development Society, November 10, 2022,   https://mbd.baidu.com/newspage/data/landingsuper?sShare=1&context=%7B%22nid%22%3A%22news_8738844951950484093%22,%22sourceFrom%22%3A%22bjh%22%7D.  ︎
16. Yu, Shude, “Lecture Notes on Cooperation at the First Training Class by the Chinese Disaster Relief and Charity Association,” 1925: http://www.coopunion.cn/news/zhuanjiaguandian/25bb209bcc4bc2160abc193f5a277db4.html; Yu, Shude, Lectures on Cooperation, (Nanjing: China Cooperation Study Society, 1934).  ︎
17. Hayford, Charles,To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).; Lv, Xinyu, “Rural Reconstruction, the Nation-State. and China’s Modernity Problem: Reflections on Liang Shuming’s Rural Reconstruction Theory and Practice,” in Tian Yu Cao, et al. eds. Culture and Social Transformations in Reform Era China (London: Brill, 2010), 235-56.  ︎
18. Mao, “Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?” October 5, 1928, Selected Works vol.1 (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, [1928] 1991); Mao, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” 5 January 1930, Selected Works, vol.1,(Beijing: People’s Publishing House, [1930]1991).  ︎
19. Xiang, Guolan, “Red Finance,” Kunlunce Research Academy, October 3, 2021.  ︎
20. Kelly, Jason, Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 26–29.  ︎
21. Kann, Eduard, “Paper Money in Modern China 1900-1956: Chinese Communists as Issuers of Notes,” Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong (1957): part 25; O’Neill, E. F, “The Copper Cash and Silver Dollar Notes of the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Workers’ and Peasants’ Bank,” in John Sandrock, The Money of Communist China (1927-1949) (Hong Kong: Shing Lee Company, 1989) part I; Sandrock, John (?), The Money of Communist China 1927-1949, part II: Money of the Base Areas during the War of Resistance against Japan 1936-1945.  ︎
22. Cao, Hong and Zhou Yan, “Mao Zemin: From a Peasant in Shaoshan to the Governor of State Bank,”Party History Review 6 (in Chinese) (2007); Xu, Shuxin, An Outline of the Development of Money in China’s Revolutionary Bases, (Beinging: China Financial Publishing House, 2008); Xiang, Guolan.  ︎
23. Wang, Zhongxin, “The Contemporary Relevance of ‘Salt Currency’ Created by Mao,” Kunlunce Research Academy, November 16, 2022.  ︎
24. Mao, “Fiscal Policy of the Border Region,”Collected Works of Mao, vol. 2, (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, [1938]1993).  ︎
25. Sandrock, part II.  ︎
26. Cui, Qimin, “An Analysis of the Guanghua Store’s Cash Coupons,” Modern Communication 17 (2019).  ︎
27. Li, Jinzheng, “Background: the Introduction and Revision of the Unified and Accumulated Tax Rules in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region During the Anti-Japanese War,” Studies of the Soviet Areas: 4 (2022).  ︎
28. Liu, Haibo, “An Analysis of the Revelation of Monetary Work in China’s Revolutionary Bases,” Global Finance no.6 (2013).  ︎
29. 29. Zhu, Lizhi, Zhu Lizhi on Financial Governance, (Beijing: The CCP History Publisher, 2017).  ︎
30. 30. Liu, Mohan, “Fiscal Wisdom of 土八路,” Huarun Magazine 7 (2022): 258.  ︎
31. 31. Weber, Isabella.  ︎
32. Xue, Muqiao, “The Battle of Currency in the Shandong Base Area,” in Selected Economic Essays, Ch.6, Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, et al (1984): 64–71.  ︎
33. Xue, Muqiao (1996), Memoirs. Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Publishing House.  ︎
34. Mao “Fiscal Policy of the Border Region.”  ︎
35. Xue, 65–67.  ︎
36. Weber, Isabella, 84, 102–03.  ︎
37. Weber, Isabella, 80.  ︎
38. Xue, 67.  ︎
39. Xue, 70–71.  ︎
40. Yu and Zhang. ︎
41. Zhu, 5, 44.  ︎
42. Yu, 9.  ︎

The United States of America isn’t a nation-state. It never has been; it never can be.

This may be provocative to some, but there is no denying it once the actual structure of the state is understood. This isn’t a historical point of curiosity, but the bedrock on which the United States has been built and continues to stand to this day.

If the United States isn’t a nation-state, then what is it?

Above all, the United States is a settler-colonial state, and it has remained a settler-colonial state for well over three hundred years, going back to when the territories that would go on to form its constituent parts were ruled by the British crown from across the ocean. European settlers of different nationalities crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind increasingly precarious class positions, to seize Indigenous land for themself by force. For this purpose, the Indigenous peoples were murdered, expelled, and forced into unequal treaties that weren’t worth the paper they were written on, until gradually the settler colony turned into an independent, continent-spanning empire that reigned supreme from coast to coast.

In the meantime, the settlement of the so-called ‘New World’ combined with the globalization of trade brought a new horror with it: the transatlantic slave trade, resulting in the abduction, purchase and enslavement of millions upon millions of Africans to provide forced labor on the other side of the world. In the prosperous lands of the so-called American South, ripe for exploitation after the native populations had been expelled or exterminated by the settlers, slavery created the foundation for the quasi-aristocratic planter class. This relation would form the backbone of the southern plantation economy, so vital for primitive accumulation, which paved the way toward fully developed capitalism in North America, by appropriating the labor of the enslaved African masses.

All of this finds its expression through the central ideology of this American settler empire, creating justification for the crimes and consolation through the crimes’ artificially constructed necessity in one: White supremacy.

So far, this should be a relatively agreeable understanding of American history, even if expressed in sharper terms than one would find in the average acknowledgement of historic (always historic, never current) brutality. All but the most reactionary Americans generally conclude that slavery and the genocide of the indigenous peoples aren’t something that should be celebrated long after the fact, and even they will usually admit that racism ‘played a role’ in it. The issue is that the hegemonic narrative starts to become confused and downright bizarre at the latest when assessing everything following the post civil war reconstruction period—a period that is criminally misunderstood by many, which contributes to the confusion—and is given over to historical narratives that are pure expressions of liberal ideology, which insists that equality in the United States is aspirational, and slowly (but surely!) ‘history’ is moving in that direction. Its proponents, often across party lines since internalized white supremacy is genuinely bipartisan, might ask:

Did we not abolish slavery?

(Ignoring the astounding continuity between the modern American prison system and the legal reconstruction of slavery after the Civil War.)

Did we not give the Indigenous peoples rights to their land?

(Ignoring the forced assimilation once the process of extermination was concluded, and the continued existence of the reservation system on tiny fractions of their land.)

Did we not give civil rights to everyone?

(Ignoring the complete banality of formal rights in the absence of equality in all political, economic, and cultural spaces.)

Are we not a nation of immigrants? Are we not all human? Are we not all Americans?

This ‘we’—the worst kind of we, the chauvinist’s national we—is imaginary in all capitalist states, but it is especially empty in the context of the US empire. There is no American national identity with any content beyond propagandized adherence to the symbolism, slogans and personality cults of the settler state, mixed with what is essentially commodity fetishism. The exception is the one identity that outright fascists try to revitalize out in the open, and liberals try to obscure with an incoherent ideology of moral progress: Whiteness—an ever-expanding and yet brutally limited category built around the exclusion of the actual nations within the empire’s borders.

Some of these nations carry names and are recognized by the US as a token gesture, and even that much was often bitterly fought for: Sioux, Cherokee, Shawnee, Navajo, and a hundred more Indigenous nations split into disparate tribal reservations by the process of genocide, displacement and subjugation.

Just as the settler state fragmented Indigenous nations, it forged new oppressed nations through slavery and annexation. Enslaved Africans, ripped from their home continent, transported across the ocean, and over generations deprived of much of their cultural heritage and even their language, formed a distinct national identity through the shared experience of enslavement, liberation and struggle against white supremacy. Similarly, although in less acute circumstances, the people subjugated by the conquest of the western territories once held by the Mexican state were subsumed into the empire, but not into whiteness, and without that, never raised to the status of settlers. When we speak of nations, we mean communities forged by shared history, territory, and struggle—not mere cultural identity. The Black nation in America, for example, like the Indigenous nations in their modern form, was created through violent subjugation and resistance against it. All of this, from the first settlements to the modern condition, exemplified by the underserved reservation and the ‘inner-city’ ghetto, only leaves one conclusion:

The United States isn’t a nation-state. It is a prison—a “prison of nations.”

And it isn’t the first of its kind.

When the Bolsheviks prepared for revolution against the semi-feudal Tsarist state—the original “prison of nations,” as Lenin referred to it—the task of national liberation was often at the forefront, and often controversial; from the question of how to deal with bourgeois nationalism to autonomy for the colonized tribal nations of Siberia. The experiences of the early Soviet Union show that dismantling empire requires combating national chauvinism with proletarian internationalism, which necessarily includes the right to national self-determination.

Consequently, the nations chained by the empire must be liberated from it—this goes for the less than United States now, as it did for the decrepit Tsarist Autocracy a hundred years ago. Let’s take a closer look at the similarities and differences, and what concrete lessons there are to learn for today’s liberation struggle.

The National Question — From Empire to Union State

Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

This, in three words, can be understood as the official ideology of the Tsarist state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was in many ways its answer to surging bourgeois national movements all over Europe, including within the borders of the empire. We will focus on the “Nationality,” which would be better described as national supremacy and primacy of the “Great Russians”— we simply call them Russians today, and the name already contains a hint of their supposed role in the eyes of Tsarism, as a guiding nationality for the “lesser” peoples.

Lenin describes the use of this supremacist ideology, as it was expressed by the proto-fascist Black Hundreds movement and endorsed by the Tsar:

The conditions of life of this vast population [the oppressed nationalities] are even harsher than those of the Russians. The policy of oppressing nationalities is one of dividing nations. At the same time it is a policy of systematic corruption of the people’s minds. The Black Hundreds’ plans are designed to foment antagonism among the different nations, to poison the minds of the ignorant and downtrodden masses […] This dirty and despicable work is undertaken, not only by the scum of the Black Hundreds, but also by reactionary professors, scholars, journalists and members of the Duma. Millions and thousands of millions of rubles are spent on poisoning the minds of the people. — Lenin, National Equality, 1914

So, how are these conditions resolved, and how do they relate to socialist revolution? The most obvious answer, the “common sense” of today’s liberals, as it was of liberals of the last century, is the establishment of legal equality. This was obvious to everyone except the most reactionary chauvinists. Even the 1906 constitution gave token concessions to the national minorities, and finally, the February Revolution of 1917 abolished the remnants of official national discrimination, especially severe against the Muslim and Jewish minorities of the empire. The success of the Bolsheviks was not needed for this hollow “equality under the law,” instead, they went far beyond. While Kerensky’s government of national defense quickly became a government of national oppression, attempting to keep the prison of nations intact by all means—a cause soon taken up by the White Army, much to their detriment—the Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular often against fierce opposition, insisted on the uncompromising right to national self-determination and secession by oppressed nations. This position was kept up during the entirety of the civil war—the only debatable exception is the Red Army’s seizure of Baku to secure an oil supply for the nascent proletarian revolution, and even there, a government of Azerbaijani communists took the lead.

For the Bolsheviks, the national right to self-determination was the basis of proletarian internationalism:

In this situation, the proletariat of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognize, not only fully equal rights for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession […] Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers. — Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914

It is no coincidence that Lenin would later stress the negative influences of Great-Russian chauvinism on the early Soviet Union, and, with that, the centrality of combating it. It is no coincidence either, but rather a direct expression of this policy, that the Union Treaty of 1922, which formally established the Soviet Union, enshrined the right to secession for the constituent socialist republics, that the Soviet Union returned land seized from China and Mongolia by the Tsarist autocracy once the revolution took root there, and that where policies of russification or national suppression were implemented the offending members were expelled from the party without hesitation. This program was applied to all colonized nations, from autonomy for the tribal peoples of Siberia to demanding equal rights for those colonized by the imperialist states across the oceans.

The so-called American left should be ashamed that a party leading a revolutionary conflict in one of the most underdeveloped regions of Europe was miles ahead of them when it came to the question of national self-determination over a hundred years ago. In fact, they often reproduce the exact chauvinism so sharply attacked by Lenin.

Of course, not all of this survived into the era of consolidation under Stalin’s leadership, but that is a discussion for another time—the general principle and its importance should be clear:

The October Revolution did not lead to the foundation of a ‘Great Russian Soviet Republic’, and neither can an American revolution lead to the foundation of an ‘National American Soviet Republic’. The right to national self-determination and secession must be upheld under all circumstances. In fact, these rights become only clearer in the American case, because of the class structure inherent to the settler state. Let’s talk about that in more detail.

Facing the Settler — Finding an ‘American’ Proletariat

The argument that is about to follow is the exact type of argument people in the West who imagine themself as prospective revolutionaries don’t like to hear. That makes the argument all the more important, considering most prospective Western revolutionaries never engage in revolution. I’ll try to be gentle.

Unlike in Tsarist Russia, where the ‘Great Russian’ proletariat became one of the chief revolutionary forces for the reasons discussed in the last section, the vast majority of American settlers, even those among them who are supposedly proletarian, have always been complicit in the reproduction of empire. To be clear: This isn’t a moral judgement on individuals, but rather an attempt to approach the objective class relations within the boundaries of the US state, and understand where revolutionary potential can be found and under what circumstances. Without that, making revolution is an impossibility.

To explain the particular class position of American settlers, we should talk about J. Sakai’s often maligned but rarely seriously interrogated polemic ‘Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat’. He didn’t try to be gentle. His fundamental position is that the vast majority of white workers in the US have always constituted a privileged labor aristocracy, ultimately in alliance with the bourgeoisie when it comes to the subjugation of colonized nations. They are settlers, which, in turn, reflects on the self-conception of the American left if they falsely identify them as the primary revolutionary class.

Sakai states this position on the history and present of the American state and with that the American left, explicitly:

The imperialists even concede that their standard ‘U.S. history’ is a white history, and is supposedly incomplete unless the long-suppressed Third-World histories are added to it. Why? The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn’t true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left. Theirstory keeps saying, over and over: ‘You folks, just think about your own history; don’t bother analyzing white society, just accept what we tell you about it.’ — J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

What are we—those of us not interested in reproducing national chauvinism with our analysis of class relations in the US—to make of this? Well, for now, let’s take Sakai’s arguments seriously.

One of the most destructive tendencies of the American socialist movement has been to view the struggle of the oppressed nations against the empire as ‘merely’ an incidental part of the larger struggle against capitalism. This tendency will acknowledge that white supremacy is a central issue, that indigenous self-determination is vital, that reparations for slavery may be necessary, and so forth, while ultimately seeing all of it as an afterthought compared to the ‘real’ fight for socialism. These ‘lesser’ issues are relegated to the eventual destruction of the white supremacist bourgeois state, which will presumably unfold in the revolutionary process that is, for the foreseeable future, exclusively unfolding in their heads.

On what terms is this real struggle supposed to take place, then? The Bolsheviks understood the necessity of a combined struggle on all fronts, so what do these ‘Euro-Amerikan’, self-declared revolutionaries have to offer? They would never say it out loud because that exposes the blatant white supremacist logic beneath, but ultimately they conceive the revolutionary process as one advanced by the white majority, which should ‘accommodate’ or ‘integrate’ non-white proletarians into the larger struggle. And just in case it needs to be said: No, claiming you ‘don’t see color’ like a caricature of the worst kind of liberal, doesn’t change the ideology of this surface-level integrationist tendency, and its complete inability to conceive of a general liberation struggle against the American bourgeois state by those who are actually subjugated by it.

In reality, and this is absolutely vital to understand, the revolutionary process is one and the same as the struggle for self-determination by the proletarian masses of the oppressed nations. They have never been truly integrated by the settler state, and face it as the most severely exploited people within the empire’s borders.

Ignoring this inevitably reproduces white supremacy, and ultimately is an expression of the settlers’ concrete class interest of maintaining their comparatively privileged position as part of the global imperialist hegemon’s labor aristocracy, petit bourgeois landowners, and at the very top, as the imperial bourgeoisie. This is rarely understood in those terms, but is crystal clear when viewed through the historical failures and capitulations of the American union movement and various communist organizations—as Sakai does—which were dominated by a settler majority.

At best—and it really isn’t good at all—it results in treating the conflicts of the oppressed nations, and with that, the vast majority of the most acutely exploited proletarians, as secondary, as it has been done over and over again by class-collaborationist unions in the United States. Instead, the goal is to win concessions from the spoils of empire.

Sakai makes special note of this in his characterization of early trade-unionism:

Underneath the surface appearance of militant popular reform, of workers taking on the wealthy, these movements were only attempts to more equally distribute the loot and privileges of Empire among its citizens. That’s why the oppressed colonial subjects of the Empire had no place in these movements. —J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

At worst, we can see the results in parties like the CPUSA, which gradually turned itself into a sad, parasitic entity attached to the Democratic Party—and with that to the settler state—by abandoning even the semblance of revolutionary action. Why? Because once the Civil Rights Act established formal legal equality, they had exhausted their wedge issue, which initially led them ‘across racial lines’, and reverted to the lowest common denominator for all practically exhausted and theoretically confused communist parties: reformism thinly veiled by red flags. To this day, the CPUSA blatantly denies that anyone except the American bourgeoisie can be understood as settlers, while appropriating the language of national liberation—they, too, have made the ‘prison of nations’ comparison, abusing Lenin’s work only to retreat to the equivalent of a ‘Great Russian’ chauvinist’s position on the matter.

A crass difference can be seen between organizations taking on the role of de facto collaborators with the empire, and those that actually presented a threat to it by focusing on a proletarian liberation struggle, and connecting it to the larger fight against world imperialism. There is a reason why the Black Panther Party became the most advanced communist organization the US has ever seen before it was suppressed, why militants of the Black Liberation Army were killed and hunted down without mercy, why the Indigenous-led Red Power movement was torn apart with armed force and the violence of courts, and why even the generally more ‘moderate’ Land Back Movement and Chicano Movement are under continued surveillance and pressure by American state institutions. They present a real threat by uniting the proletarian masses of oppressed nations within the Empire’s borders in the struggle against the bars of their collective prison.

These movements prove liberation must begin where the empire’s violence is most acute, not where settlers feel most comfortable.

The Terms of the Struggle — Shattering the Prison

Ultimately, the American left has two choices: continue as the empire’s useful idiots, or finally recognize that liberation won’t come from the settlers, but from those they’ve imprisoned in the boundaries of their state. Of course, it is no coincidence that the largest sections of the so-called left have not recognized this, since it is in their class interest as labor aristocrats to close their eyes, and the others are pulled along by their sway in organizations. Class suicide—actively working against one’s own class interests, in more than words—is rarely an appealing notion, and neither is the prospect of a grueling revolutionary struggle that will, for some time at least, shatter the established value chains, reduce living standards and cause panic among those used to living off the superprofits extracted from the labor of the third world and the land of subjugated nations.

This can be no excuse. Facing reality is always preferable to idealist fantasies and lies, produced to enable a false radicalism that is ultimately destructive. Lenin was quite clear on that matter, and the role of such delusions in revolutionary situations:

After their first serious defeat, the overthrown exploiters—who had not expected their overthrow, never believed it possible, never conceded the thought of it—throw themselves with energy grown tenfold, with furious passion and hatred grown a hundredfold, into the battle for the recovery of the ‘paradise’ of which they were deprived […] In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other. — Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

All of this does not mean there is no role for white Americans in this struggle—quite the opposite, in fact, because they have the veil of protection granted by white supremacy others are not afforded—but without understanding their own position, they are bound to reproduce completely dysfunctional and often outright reactionary tactics. And while whiteness is generalized, there are, of course, differences in the concrete class positions of white workers in the United States, ranging from fully integrated labor aristocrats in the empire’s metropoles to the historically superexploited workers of the Appalachians—the fact that this needs to be addressed is already a concession to white fragility, but I want to anticipate the inevitable outrage in the comments somehow.

At the same time, the objective existence of oppressed nations must be seen as an opportunity. The most elemental task of any revolutionary organization is to find a revolutionary class to make revolution with, not as an appendage, not as an imposition, but as one of them, leading the struggle in the clearest possible terms. This is the task of the vanguard party—not to ‘include’ or ‘consider’ the proletarian masses, but to take a leading position from within the proletarian masses.

Consequently, in the United States, the task of this revolutionary organization is not to convince oppressed nations or settlers that they must work together, on a vague and entirely ahistorical and anti-materialist basis akin to liberal denial of the most severe expressions of white supremacy, but rather that their collective liberation is one and the same task. This is what the most advanced socialist organizations like the Black Panther Party advocated for, despite distortions to the contrary that attempt to deny the colonial nature of the state:

The dissolution of the American settler empire, the destruction of the bourgeois state, the establishment of workers’ power, and the uncompromising right to self-determination, autonomy and secession for the nations imprisoned in the boundaries of the empire.

The terms of this struggle are clear—the prison of nations must be shattered.

Factions, Splits, and Entryism in the US Communist Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

At her nominee’s acceptance speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris declared her intent to chart a path “forward to a future with a strong and growing middle class, because we know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success and building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” This intent shows both an honest understanding of the nature of the U.S., and the crux of why voting for Harris is utterly opposed to any principled, long-term progressive strategy to erect a more democratic state in the bounds of what is now considered the U.S.

For most in the U.S., the middle class means little more than the average level of affluence: the “normal” unit of family defined by a lack of excess opulence or any ever-present risk of destitution. Harris herself evoked this aesthetic through her personal history: “The middle class is where I come from. My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means, yet we wanted for little. And she expected us to make the most of the opportunities that were available to us and to be grateful for them.” Her professed aim to expand her history to the rest of the U.S. populace via an “opportunity economy” means emphasizing the implications of this view of the middle class: that those in poverty are failing despite the economic system, rather than because of it, and that those in the upper class are exceptional individuals who made exceptional use of the opportunities presented to them, rather than nepo-children who generate wealth through the poverty of others.

Every facet of the U.S.’s existence mirrors this logic of the middle class. We are called “Americans,” absorbing both continents into one spiritual center and making each non-White ethnic group a hyphenated variant of this title. Our corporate and military presence across the world is referred to as “global leadership” rather than empire, and the exceptional privileges derived from our imperial power are naturalized in the same manner that the popular view of the middle class naturalizes the merits of the bourgeoisie. “American exceptionalism” comes to rely on a worldview that makes U.S. dominance a natural consequence of reality, rather than an exception in any real sense of the word.

With the growth of poverty eroding the middle class and the slow destruction of U.S. global dominance heralded by defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the untenable gap between Americanism and reality is rearing its head, therefore prompting promises of state intervention to prop up the middle class from both Trump and Harris. These candidates’ policies have been forced to highlight the truth of the U.S. middle class: that its existence is a result of conscious political policy rather than the natural state of capitalist society. Contrary to the assertions of many leftwing intellectuals, the U.S. middle class is not a fabrication meant to obscure the divide between the U.S. bourgeoisie and proletariat, but a real economic phenomenon stemming back to the origins of the U.S. as a colony of White settlers escaping poverty in Europe via the theft of Indigenous land.

Economic classes are defined by their members’ relations with the means of production, and the arena of Manifest Destiny provided the conditions for a uniquely large petit bourgeoisie based in small land ownership, allowing for the mode of life evoked by Harris’s speech:

“When we speak of the small, land-owning farmer as the largest single element in settler society, it is important to see what this means. An example is Rebecca Royston of Calvert County, Maryland, who died in 1740 with an estate worth £81 (which places her well in the middle of the small-medium farmers). That sum represented the value of 200 acres of farmland, 31 head of cattle, 15 of sheep, 29 pigs, 1,463 lbs. of tobacco stored for market, 5 feather beds, 2 old guns, assorted furniture, tools, and kitchen utensils, and the contract of an 8-year-old indentured child servant. No wealth, no luxury, but a life with some property, food, shelter, and a cash crop for market.”

J. Sakai, Settlers

This condition of comfort without opulence offers an escape from the violence of traditional class conflict between a propertyless proletariat and a tight-knit bourgeoisie with a monopoly on state violence. Thinly-veiled in the picture of this colonist’s wealth is the trifecta of slavery, indentured servitude, and Indigenous genocide which permitted a wide petit bourgeoisie to develop and give the U.S. its unity and popular support for expansion. That we still have a large middle class in the U.S. is not a result of capitalist trends ceasing to apply to a U.S. which has nearly exhausted the loot of Manifest Destiny over more than two centuries, but a result of these forms of exploitation shifting and expanding to encompass the world and operate via modern, financial capitalism.

The threat of the Great Depression prompted state intervention in the capitalist economy, and with it, the U.S. turned towards a strategy of propping up its middle class via their entanglement in its financial institutions:

“Hoover’s administration instead implemented the Home Loan Bank System, which provided liquidity for banks affected by homeowners defaulting on their mortgages. A similar logic — of facilitating homeownership through government support of banks — was continued in the Roosevelt administration, in the form of the New Deal program Home Owners’ Loan Corporation … Promotion of homeownership was a strategic move, anticipating that workers who owned their homes would be more invested in the capitalist system, and less likely to overthrow it. By a similar logic, workers’ retirement plans have been entwined with the success of capitalist ventures. Pension plans, which guaranteed income for workers who put in enough hours, have vanished. In their place, we are left with 401(k)s and RRSPs, which shackle our hopes for a comfortable old age to the moods of the stock market and to the profits of the capitalists.”

Alice Malone, Concessions

This combination of state intervention and financial concessions to workers both kept the U.S. middle class afloat and brought their interests further into alignment with the success of U.S. imperialism, as the retirement plans of U.S. citizens become dependent on Western companies’ ability to remain profitable by keeping the wages of Global South workers low. The small ownership that defines the petit bourgeoisie is replaced by financial mimicry, as U.S. workers achieve middling affluence without actually owning anything:

“For both the example of homeownership policies and education policies, these initial relatively limited governmental forays into social concerns paved the way for bigger interventions. These bills and their successors resulted in real improvements in the lives of workers, but it’s crucial to note that these investments in areas such as education occurred through policy mechanisms like loans and were never cemented as permanent rights, as in socialist constitutions.”

Alice Malone, Concessions

This lack of true ownership allows us to more accurately refer to the U.S. middle class as a class of small shareholders, or petit actionnaires, rather than a petit bourgeoisie. This distinction makes the U.S. middle class more vulnerable to the crises of the capitalist economy, hence the remaining trauma of the 2008 financial crisis. However, it also allows the petit actionnaires to assert a greater obfuscation of class conflict in the U.S. Whereas land or business ownership easily signifies a member of the petit bourgeoisie, the financially-enabled breadth of the petit actionnaire class means that we now have Trump’s strategy for upholding the middle class including protecting the privileges of coal miners. An industry steeped in “blue collar” aesthetics and proletarian property relations became a real part of the U.S. middle class thanks to the breadth of the petit actionnaire class, despite the particularly tangible impacts of capitalist extraction on their communities:

“As everyone knows, the rampant stripmining is rapidly destroying the area’s simple road system, choking the streams with corrosive coal refuse, fouling the underground water supply, and generally causing more physical and ecological destruction than repeated bombings. Harry Caudill, author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, says: ‘They’ve treated the region as if it were a colony. When they finish taking what they want from it, they’ll just let it go to hell.’
Why don’t the workers in this ripped-off ‘colony’ organize, seeing in a revolutionary change a way to keep the wealth for the community of their children’s generation? … The answer is that the majority of them welcome such exploitation, whatever the future price. Their community may have nothing, may be sliding back into an eventual future of undeveloped desolation, but right now those who have jobs are making ‘good bucks.’ The 5,000 coal miners have been earning around $30,000 per year, while the county’s per capita annual income is up to $7,000. (Written in 1983)”

J. Sakai, Settlers

That coal miners would continue to strive for the protection of their privileges despite the destructive impacts of their industry cannot be solely tied to greed. The inability to work for a holistic solution for their community’s impoverishment is a result of the petit actionnaire class itself. The category’s flexibility provides a boon for capitalists and a poison for its members, as the political combination that proletarian jobs usually encourage is offset by these workers’ dependence on the U.S. state and stock market’s ability to provide a middle class lifestyle. With the proletariat fractured by the dual forces of imperial, financial privilege and the long journey of manufacturing jobs to greater exploitation overseas, the only politically coherent class left — the bourgeoisie — takes the reigns of the petit actionnaires and leads them into marginal involvement in U.S. politics and petty negotiations for economic benefit, a pattern shared with the wider West:

“European workers have paid a great price for the few material benefits which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table … In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counter-balanced by increased costs of living.”

Walter Rodney, Fascism at Home and Colonialism Abroad

When Harris describes the strengthening of the U.S. middle class, she is actually describing the mechanism by which both the Republicans and Democrats keep mass politics in the U.S. tethered to their respective factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie. It is not a strengthening of democracy in North America, but the protracted removal of U.S. citizens from any sustained involvement in the political course of their society. For the majority of the U.S., political involvement has been reduced to bi-annual — if that — elections, where the populace selects leadership, but hardly ever asserts its mandate more than a selection between increasingly unpopular choices. The class conflict which gives proletarians a cohesive identity as an independent political force presents itself as an undesirable state of social failure to petit actionnaires who understand their affluence to rest in the security of U.S. empire. Therefore, Harris and Trump’s shared promise to restore unity appeals especially to the petit actionnaires disempowered by their reliance on bourgeois representation.

Yet the ability of the U.S. to maintain its petit actionnaires continually declines as the Global South’s economic sovereignty rises and wages within the U.S. subsequently stagnate or erode to maintain profitability. With the shrinking U.S. middle class comes increasingly “radical” political ventures, both in new parties like the Democratic Socialists of America and through new styles of politics within the main two bourgeois parties, i.e. Trump and his brand of populism. Neither of these routes offers a real break with the destruction of democratic and social rights in North America, because both are committed to the preservation of the middle class and the state apparatus which doggedly spurn class conflict. The common focus on a strong middle class and a unified, powerful U.S. on the global stage betrays the barren hand of cards available to Harris and Trump, who both struggle to convince the petit actionnaires of the “weirdness” or “radical agenda” of their opponent.

In other words, the logic of the petit actionnaire class means these would-be presidents must compete to present themselves as the inoffensive unifier that U.S. empire needs, but U.S. citizens at risk of poverty understand more and more that their position cannot be improved without drastic change. Hence, the bourgeois leadership embodied now by Trump and Harris moves towards agreement on those areas of policy which leave the capitalist system untouched while consolidating the empire’s White supremacist foundations, competing for a “tougher” image on border policy. With the feigned horror that the Democrats exhibited for Trump’s border rhetoric in 2016 fading into the mist, it’s no radical prediction that they will soon also echo the Republican calls for an invasion of Mexico.

For many leftwing North Americans, even what I’ve just predicted would not be enough to dissuade a vote for Harris. After all, we can already see many rationalizing the tacit support that a vote for Harris offers to her and Biden’s genocidal support for the Israeli war on Gaza. The logic goes that both Harris and Trump support Israel, so why not vote for the candidate who at least supports abortion and LGBTQIA+ rights as well? This logic is superficially valid. I adopted it myself as a vaguely-left liberal in the 2020 election, but the fact of the matter is that Biden’s election in 2020 has given us four years of journey back to the exact same conundrum. This result is not counter to the Democrats’ intentions, but a result of their strategies and the arena created by the dominance of the petit actionnaires in the U.S.

The Democrats know that a necessary slice of their electorate only votes for them due to the fact that they are not Trump on these democratic issues, and they would therefore be fools to actually address the threats to women’s rights and queer rights which give them this slice of support. The plethora of executive actions available to Biden for the protection of abortion largely went unused, and even in her DNC acceptance speech, Harris was careful to voice her support for abortion through the most passive means: “We trust women, and when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.” Given the impossibility of this outcome in a Congress defined by gridlock and with Republicans expected to gain seats, Harris is setting herself up to preside over another four years of democratic backslide, with the Democrats throwing up their hands and claiming to be bound by the Constitution. The reality is that despite the Constitution’s fundamental opposition to democratic freedoms, it avails the president with executive options that Harris will avoid not out of respect for the sacred law of slavers, but because packing the Supreme Court or establishing abortion clinics on federal land might attenuate fears of Republicans candidates while frightening centrist petit actionnaires into believing that the Democrats are threatening the U.S.’s precious unity.

The emptiness of Democratic support for abortion grew even greater with queer issues at the DNC, with trans people entirely absent from the prime-time speeches of the convention. This is a regression from trans Congress member Sarah McBride’s introduction at the 2016 DNC, a step backwards at a time where the Republican movement for a genocide of trans people is growing more explicit and bold. The same duplicitous rhetoric used by Democrats to excuse their inability to defend abortion will be applied to transgender rights, with the most notable accomplishments of Biden’s presidency on this front merely reaffirming existing legislation rather than pushing for new, desperately needed protections. While utterly unable to expand the fabric of democratic rights in the U.S., Democrats have shown themselves willing to fund the MAGA candidates furthest to the right, using fear to bolster their electoral chances at the long-term cost of legitimizing these candidates and growing their strength in the Republican Party.

At every step since 2020, the Democrats repeatedly show that voting for them for the sake of democratic rights simply does not work, regardless of their constant embroilment in the same genocidal imperialism as Republicans. The petit actionnaire class needs a renewed U.S. imperialism to survive without destroying the unity that gives the empire its lasting strength. The Democrats and Republicans collaborate to meet this goal, with Trump adopting Biden’s rhetoric on unity and Harris following the Republican’s rightward shift on the border and social issues. The DSA and other leftwing forces, in turn, tail the Democrats because the structure of the petit actionnaire class has left them without the independent political will to form a separate party, because the petit actionnaire class is existentially opposed to class conflict.

This is why the correct response to the 2024 election is neither candidate. Not because both are morally irretrievable, and not because refusing to vote will itself deliver the people’s democracy which we need. What we desperately need due to the class structure of the Global North is a proletarian political party which accepts the destruction of U.S. empire as a positive outcome and sees the defense of democratic rights as something which cannot be accomplished by a petit actionnaire class fundamentally dependent on bourgeois rule. When U.S. empire declines, the passivity which U.S. imperialism engenders in its citizens declines with it, and this trend must be the greatest motivator for North Americans to align with an anti-imperial party despite the material security offered by empire. The decline of queer rights and women’s rights is a natural consequence of imperial decay as the empire turns towards militarist escapades and internal regimentation to survive, and each vote for the Democrats saps energy which we must redirect towards building a political party capable of enforcing what they are unwilling to enact. If the Democrats passively accrue left wing support in 2024, the election’s farcical nature will be entirely the U.S. Left’s responsibility for our failure to capitalize on the lessons wrought in the past four years.

In 2025, we will have reached a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Someone born in the year 2000 will, in those short 25 years, have experienced multiple “once in a lifetime” events. These include worldwide recessions at an increasing frequency, a global pandemic that has claimed millions of lives, massive floods, wildfires, ever-worsening heat waves, and multiple U.S.-led or U.S.-directed wars in the Middle East, including most recently, the intensification of the ongoing Palestinian genocide by “Israel” which has laid bare the global resurgence of open fascism.

All the while, this 25-year-old individual has seen their wages stagnate in the face of inflation, making even the most fundamental necessities of life, such as groceries and stable housing, increasingly unaffordable. In short, things are pretty bleak.

But why is this? Why are things the way they are? Are these just random and unrelated events that make the lives of the vast majority of people more difficult? Is there little or nothing we can do about it?

Or, is there a thread that connects all these problems and crises together?

Marxists understand that the global capitalist system is that thread, and that the solutions to the myriad crises facing us will only come about by unravelling it and building a new social and economic system. Marxism is a method of analysis that allows us to bring the true nature of capitalism into focus, demystifying how our world works, and stripping back the layers of capitalist propaganda we have been fed our whole lives.

“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”

Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done (1902)

What is (and isn’t) Marxism?

Someone looking to bourgeois (capitalist) politicians, media outlets, and academic sources to find an accurate and fair description of Marxism, Communism, or left-wing ideas in general will have a difficult time. In most popular media, Marxism is either depicted as an outdated ideology that has nothing to offer a modern world, or as a dangerous “authoritarian” dogma that seeks to rule over people with an iron fist. But are these depictions anywhere close to reality?

Marxism is, of course, named after Karl Marx, the 19th century German political theorist, social scientist, and economist who (literally) wrote the book on capital.

His life’s work was explaining what capitalism is and how it relates to politics. Along with his long-time collaborator and comrade Friedrich Engels, he laid the foundations of what we call Marxism today.

However, this does not mean that Marxism begins and ends with the works of Karl Marx himself. Marx and Engels openly built off the work of figures such as Adam Smith, GWF Hegel, Robert Owen, and many others.

Since Marx and Engels’ time, a long list of theorists, activists, and revolutionaries have expanded Marxism and adapted it to different contexts and times. The strength of Marxism lies not in the perfect wisdom or character of one person, but in its ability to analyse the world using scientific methods that illuminate the fatal contradictions in capitalism.

Understanding capitalism gives us the opportunity and the ability to chart a course towards a better future. Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action. Marxism is the theory for the education of the working and other oppressed classes, and its usefulness is its scientific philosophy and methodology; not the personal opinions of Marxists or even Marx himself!

Scientific Socialism

Marxists often get accused of being naïve utopians, but in fact much of Marx and Engels’ early work was critiquing utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Marxists do not imagine a perfect socialist society and then attempt to impose that ideal onto the current reality. Instead, we use scientific methods (evidence, research, critical analysis, etc.) to help us understand the world as it is now, and how we can change it.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

When Marxists talk about socialism, we are referring to a political and economic system formed after capitalism has been overthrown by the working classes, but where aspects of capitalism still remain and are being gradually eliminated by the new socialist state. These lingering elements of capitalism include, but are not limited to: commodity production; the necessity of money; and reactionary ideologies such as individualism, national chauvinism, misogyny, and racism. The overthrow of the capitalist class and the establishment of socialism is, however, the first step towards resolving these lingering contradictions.

To achieve this socialist transitory stage requires the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. This is not a dictatorship of one person over all others, which would be antithetical to Marxism, but the overthrow of the current dictatorship of the bourgeois class of the few and the establishment of supreme power in the hands of the revolutionary proletariat of the many. There is no “one size fits all” solution. Socialism develops according to the unique conditions of each region.

Communism is a future stage of development under which the last remnants of capitalism and class society have been eliminated globally, and the need for a state to manage the many contradictions of capitalism has disappeared.

Dialectical Materialism

Dialectical materialism (diamat) is the core philosophy of Marxism. From this philosophy comes a scientific framework for understanding changes in the world, and more importantly, for enacting change ourselves.

Dialectical thinking is rooted in the principle that all things in existence are constantly interacting with one another, and that these interactions are the basis for change. Dialectics is based on logical constructs that contain two or more aspects that oppose, act on, and require each other for existence. In Marxism, these constructs are most often called contradictions.

Contradictions are in all things and are in constant motion. Nothing exists in isolation from everything else, and all things are in a state of constant change. If we want to understand something (be it an animal, a piece of music, a political ideology, or a global economic system), we have to understand the internal contradictions within that thing as well as the external contradictions. Internal contradictions are the basis of the thing while external contradictions are the outside conditions and forces interacting with it.

“In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis.”

Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (1937)

The internal properties of an egg will determine if the egg hatches into a bird or lizard, while simultaneous external conditions that surround the egg (like temperature and location) will determine whether it incubates and hatches, is cooked, is eaten by a predator, or simply rolls from the nest and is broken.

Fundamentally, a contradiction is composed of two or more aspects. The contradiction of capital and labour has two main aspects: the capitalist class and the working class. Both classes are required for the other to exist, but both classes are opposed to one another.

These opposing classes are engaged in a long struggle for dominance. Capitalists fight to maintain their control, and workers fight to gain control. When a social revolution occurs, the capital-labour contradiction inverts in favour of the workers, the workers become the ruling class, and suppress the capitalists

It will then be the job of the workers to gradually eliminate the conditions for class society until no class divisions exist. The capital-labour contradiction will finally be resolved.

Materialism

In philosophy, the word “materialism” carries a different meaning than its common everyday usage. Here, materialism does not refer to someone being materialistic, i.e., only being concerned with physical possessions or wealth. Instead, materialism is the understanding that the universe we live in is made first and foremost of matter. Our thoughts and ideas originate from and are only possible because of matter.

This doesn’t mean that materialism is completely deterministic. We still (mostly) have control over our thoughts and actions. However, the choices we make are shaped by the material conditions we find ourselves in. The relationship between thought and matter is, like all relationships, a dialectical one, but matter is the primary actor. A carpenter makes the choice to act and turn a block of wood into a chair, but this is only possible because the physical properties of wood allow them to do so. No matter how skilled the carpenter, they cannot build a chair out of air because the physical properties of air do not allow it.

Historical Materialism

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

Historical materialism takes the principles of dialectical materialism and applies them to the development of society over time. Marxism identifies class struggle as the fundamental motive force behind human social development in class societies.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

By taking a scientific study of human history, we can see how the conflicts between different classes in a society, shaped by changes in the mode of production (how a society fulfills the material needs of its population), resulted in changes to the overall structure of that society.

For example, near the end of the Middle Ages, the development of mechanised production and an increase in global trade allowed for a small class of European merchants to grow their wealth and political power. Eventually these protocapitalists grew powerful enough to challenge and even overthrow the feudal nobility, giving rise to modern capitalism and the liberal state. But, by creating a new ruling class in the form of the bourgeoisie (capitalists), capitalism also created a new global working class (the proletariat). In doing so, capitalism, as Marx put it, created its own gravediggers, since the proletariat has nothing to gain by their continued exploitation under capitalism.

Historical materialism gives us the tools to understand historical events and observe general trends in present-day developments. It is not however a crystal ball that lets us predict exactly what a future socialist or Communist society will look like. We do not know, and cannot know, what shapes art, music, religion, sports, or many other parts of human society will take under a yet-to-be realised new socioeconomic order.

“Marxism comes to the world as an historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans or, let us go back to Asians; when the Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts. They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. So that method and factual data were obviously interwoven, and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting. It was the task of the Chinese to deal with that and to adapt it and to scrutinise it and see how it was applicable to their society. First and foremost, to be scientific, it meant having due regard for the specifics of Chinese historical and social development.”

Walter Rodney, Marxism and African Liberation (1975)

Oppression and Exploitation

Oppression and exploitation manifest in innumerable ways under class society. They are inextricably connected to and caused by the stratification of society into different classes. The purpose of oppressions may differ, but they all ultimately serve to benefit the ruling classes of said class society. In the present age these oppressions and exploitations serve capitalists in capitalist society.

Economic Exploitation

“Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That’s why I poop on company time.”

A common refrain

Economic exploitation—at its most fundamental—is extracting more value from a person’s labour than they are paid. Under the capitalist wage system, a restaurant worker might make 15 dollars per hour. However, in that hour as a result of their labour, they create 100 dollars of value by assembling and cooking meals.

Instead of receiving the full 100 dollars of value, the capitalist who owns the restaurant (the means of production), pays the worker only the promised 15 dollars, uses a portion to cover facility costs, and pockets the rest as profit. This profit is called surplus labour value and was created by the labour of the workers. The boss keeps wages as low as possible while ensuring workers remain unaware of this thievery.

You, as a worker, may feel like you are being cheated every day at work. This is because you are. At a fundamental level, we all understand this!

The economic exploitation of the worker—the extraction of surplus labour value—is the fundamental rule of capitalism. Without exploitation, the capitalist makes no profit. With no profit comes no capital accumulation, which is the entire goal of capitalism: endless profit.

The exploitation “of man, by man” works simultaneously with the exploitation of the land, oceans, and air as class society necessitates the extraction of raw materials without regard to what nature, and by extension ourselves, need to survive.

National Liberation, Decolonization, and Land Back

Marxists are internationalists. The liberation of humanity cannot happen unless all nations are free from colonial oppression and imperialist exploitation.

National liberation and self-determination includes the right to secession from oppressive regimes. This includes Indigenous nations within settler-colonial states such as: Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel.

In settler-colonial states the contradiction between the colonised nations and the colonising nation is the principal contradiction (the contradiction which informs all others), and not the contradiction between the (majority settler) working classes and the capitalist class (although this contradiction remains important). When this is the case, settlers of the dominant colonial state must embrace the concept of Revolutionary Defeatism by working tirelessly to ensure the defeat of their own settler-colonial nation state and liberation of indigenous nations.

It is the responsibility of all communists on this continent to combat settler chauvinism wherever it emerges among the masses, within our organisations, or within our party programmes.

“Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation.”

Vladimir Lenin, Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1904)

Against Racism and White Supremacy

Marxists are fundamentally opposed to racism and are at all times against white supremacy. This also means white Marxists make a conscious effort to challenge their own racism.

White supremacy is tied to capitalist exploitation and manifests through anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, Sinophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry. These chauvinisms are used to continually divide the working class and convince the privileged—in Canada primarily the white settler class—to view people of other races and nationalities as their enemy rather than the capitalists who exploit them.

Against Patriarchy and Misogyny

Marxists reject misogyny and patriarchal social relations and systems. This includes opposing sexist attitudes towards women and other oppressed genders, but also in seeking to abolish patriarchal institutions such as the nuclear family. Of course, this must also mean working against patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes and systems within our own organisations.

Marxist feminists understand that the liberation of women and all oppressed genders is not a separate issue from economic exploitation and other forms of oppression. The accumulation of private property was accelerated by tethering it to male lineage, where men in a family contributed to the fortune by their labour, to be passed down through the eldest son. Reproductive labour, that which reproduces the conditions for production (making food, keeping house, raising children), was placed on the shoulders of women as unpaid labour.

This delineation and subjugation of women is a necessary component of private property. Thus, we understand that women’s “liberation” under capitalism can only ever mean liberation for a relatively small number of wealthy, mostly white, and cisgendered women in the imperial core. The past liberal feminist movements have proven this. Despite winning women’s “freedom” to work, the subjugation of women continues as they are often still required to perform unpaid reproductive labour in addition to productive labour.

“The proletarian women’s final aim does not, of course, prevent them from desiring to improve their status even within the framework of the current bourgeois system, but the realisation of these desires is constantly hindered by obstacles that derive from the very nature of capitalism.
A woman can possess equal rights and be truly free only in a world of socialised labour, of harmony and justice. The [liberal] feminists are unwilling and incapable of understanding this; it seems to them that when equality is formally accepted by the letter of the law they will be able to win a comfortable place for themselves in the old world of oppression, enslavement and bondage, of tears and hardship. And this is true up to a certain point.
For the majority of women of the proletariat, equal rights with men would mean only an equal share in inequality, but for the “chosen few”, for the bourgeois women, it would indeed open doors to new and unprecedented rights and privileges that until now have been enjoyed by men of the bourgeois class alone. But each new concession won by the bourgeois woman would give her yet another weapon for the exploitation of her younger sister and would go on increasing the division between the women of the two opposite social camps. Their interests would be more sharply in conflict, their aspirations more obviously in contradiction.”

Alexandra Kollontai, The Social Basis of the Women Question (1909)

Against 2SLGBTQI+ Oppression

A proper Marxist analysis will demand the full liberation of 2SLGBTQI+ peoples everywhere and seeks to abolish homophobia, transphobia, and any other manifestation of anti-2SLGBTQI+ oppression. While it is true that, historically and presently, some socialist states have enacted homophobic and transphobic policies, we regard this as an error and a failure on the part of those particular states, some of which (such as Cuba) have admitted their faults and begun to rectify those mistakes.

People who don’t fit neatly into the restrictive boxes of sexuality and gender expression set forth by capitalist society find themselves at one of the sharpest inflection points! Their existence and desire to express their humanity are an affront to private property’s rigid gendered economic roles. These roles, and their resulting rigid social roles, are forced upon people, often violently.

Non-capitalist societies built on a communal way of living often respect gender diversity where labour is not as harshly delineated. Whether through colonialism’s centuries long attempts to exterminate Indigenous societies or capitalism’s further atomization and immiseration of all workers, both seek to crush gender diversity even as they may pay it lip service. Only through the liberation of all 2SLGBTQI+ peoples will everyone be free, and only through the destruction of capitalism and colonialism will 2SLGBTQI+ peoples be free.

Against Class Reductionism

Many “Marxists”, particularly in the imperial core, treat “economic” class (worker v. owner) as the only factor worth considering, ignoring that struggles like Indigenous/settler or imperial/imperialized struggles (as examples) are class struggles too. “Economic” class is critical to understand, but Marxist analysis does not begin and end there. A proper Marxist analysis includes a dialectical understanding of how various class struggles interconnect and affect one another.

The liberation of colonised peoples, the liberation of women, and the liberation of 2SLGBTQI+ peoples are class struggles. They need to be understood as being inclusive. To focus solely on one and not the other is reductionist and serves to fracture the movement.

Revolution, Reform, and Armed Struggle

“We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”

Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (1971)

Marxists are revolutionaries. We do not seek to simply soften the edges of capitalist exploitation, but to overthrow capitalism altogether. While reforms can be beneficial in the short term, the histories of reformist social democracies show that this path inevitably leads to a weakened working class movement, and so-called “socialist” leaders who are more concerned with keeping the status quo than fighting for liberation.

Additionally, social democracies have a strong tendency to be nationally chauvinist. Achieving marginally better rights for those within the nation while paying for it through colonial and neo-colonial projects is not socialism. Social benefits for people living in the U.S. and Canada (as part of the Imperial core) come at the expense of increased exploitation of the Global South and internal colonies.

This does not mean, however, that Marxists desire violence. We should seek nonviolent means to resolve contradictions and conflicts whenever possible. We also oppose reckless and adventurist acts of political violence that only put comrades at risk, encourage state repression, and impede the liberation of the working class and oppressed peoples.

Unfortunately, the reality is that there are few—if any—examples in history of a ruling class that gave up its power peacefully. Indeed, capitalist states have shown that they will go to any lengths to repress and destroy working class and other liberation movements, up to and including fascist coups against socialist governments, the assassination of socialist leaders, economic embargoes, and sabotage. Marxists understand that the working classes and oppressed nations must be willing and able to defend themselves and fight for their liberation by any means necessary.

Conclusion

“The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich business men owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.”

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1987)

In closing, Marxism is the key for better understanding the world we live in. But, Marxism not only offers a coherent worldview; it also gives us the theoretical tools necessary to enact change on our world. It is a methodology which continues to speak to the struggles of the downtrodden, which is why it has become the most commonly used and most effective weapon at the workers’ disposal to combat the capitalist boot on our throat.

Karl Marx understood that human beings are social creatures. We do not exist as isolated individuals, but instead yearn to be part of a community where we live, work, learn, and share our lives in solidarity with one another. Building a better future for humanity and ending the centuries of exploitation and oppression will require a collective effort unlike anything seen before.

While this might sound overwhelming, we can all start now by organising together in our communities and workplaces. We encourage you to join a revolutionary Marxist group in your area, or help organise one if none exist. We look forward to working side-by-side with you to build a better world for all.

It is with a heavy heart that I have to announce that I am left with no other choice than to leave the party. I don’t want to leave, however, ideologically, I feel completely disconnected; not to mention, altogether demoralized, and hurt.

In this letter, comrades, I’m going to say some strong things. As a member of the N.Y.-District Committee, the Brooklyn Club Executive Committee, former, N.Y. State Executive Committee, and former NY-YCL Co-chair, I ask that you give some, at least, miniscule space for my critiques that are, in truth, deeply caring. Even though they may sound strong, they are not bad faith (I have been in the trenches in this party, please do not insult me and accuse me of being bad faith.) Also, please note and understand, my analysis is on tendencies and not people themselves.

As someone who has given their labor to the party, emotional and physical, for 3½ years all while my daughter and I suffer the vice grips of housing precarity, I have given every morsel of myself, and now, I must walk away from what I feel, I’m so sorry comrades, is an organization, it pains me to say, is blatantly, glaringly, uncommitted to, at the bare minimum, engaging in new and reinvigorating theoretical and praxical organizing efforts; and seems to have a vested objective in keeping the party ossified and painfully static.

Briefly delving into an historical interrogation of the party, rightist tendencies have been an unbroken thrum in the party since, most say, the Browderite dissolution of the party. However, from my analysis, this thrum, though embryonic at the time, began to extend at least five years prior to Browder’s open turn to the right. We must acknowledge, also, what the brutal Mccarthyist attacks have done to the party and the lasting impression it has had on its trajectory. Nevertheless, the party’s rightist shift happened before the Mccarthyist hunt.

In essence, we’re still, in this present juncture, confined, no, mummified in, the Communist Political Association. Further, it is these rightist throughlines that Haywood himself spoke to and was subsequently ostracized for speaking against until he was formally pushed out.

I have, myself, witnessed these rightist throughlines — as many in the N.Y. district have, in fact. In the 3½ years that I have been a committed cadre member, I have always felt somewhat ideologically disparate from the party. However, I continued to try to organize with the party, hoping that if I remained a committed, good faith comrade and rooted myself in theoretical study and praxical work, the party would see the work other comrades and myself were doing and they would begin to hear us out a little bit more; and we could, therefore, at least, begin to engage in genuine line struggle. I was wrong and this was an idealist mistake.

The chairs of the Brooklyn Club really tried to encourage our efforts and uplift our work in and outside of every monthly meeting. I have to say, had it not been for my club chairs and comrades in the Brooklyn Club, I would have left sooner; and maybe my decision to leave may disappoint them and maybe some others. I’m very sorry, but I truly can’t continue to stay and give my labor to an organization that actively seems to be shunning militant Black Communists who refuse to engage in pacifist ideations.

I was hoping that at our 32nd convention things would begin to shift, incrementally,  towards a more militant line with more input from the delegates there who opposed “being mere appendages” to the democratic party (Marx and Engles March 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League). Again, I was wrong. 

However, even before the convention, I began to feel fractured from the party. Last August I wrote a commemorative piece on Dr. Mutulu Shakur, uplifting him as a militant and powerful revolutionary who contributed to the movement on many levels including with his world renowned acupuncture. I was told by Eric B. that this piece was not appropriate for People’s World because it celebrated Mutulu’s violent past, and that this was not appropriate for the mass readership of P.W. or helping to organize them. I later reached out to Eric and told him that my piece on Dr. Mutulu never even mentioned violence, it only uplifts his acupuncture work (because I knew if I mentioned anything about his committed militancy, it would be an issue.) He then admitted he never read my article, but that it can’t be published in P.W. Similarly, I wrote an article for the preconvention discussion entitled, Western Marxism: The Crisis of Words Over Deeds, I was also told this would not be published on similar murky justifications. My other preconvention contribution on Imperial Feminism was, albeit reluctantly, published after I told Eric I was not going to change or water down my thesis.

The issue with the Mutulu piece happened a year ago, but I still stayed. I didn’t want to just leave. I wanted to stay and struggle for the correct line alongside my comrades. And, there were some strides made in terms of hosting some events and talks with people, but nothing structurally significant.

The convention left me confused and disappointed. All of the people who’ve been in leadership on the National Committee for the last 20 or so years, or more, were, again, nominated and voted in, with the exception of a few new additions all of whom are in alignment with Resolution 5. Facsimiles of the same sterile ideas. Not one voice of opposition was nominated. Many comrades raised their concerns and nominated other comrades in the opposition to be in the N.C. I also nominated myself from the floor… of course I was told I didn’t get enough votes. Voices of opposition and those in favor should have been counted aloud… they weren’t. A comrade stood up and called for a secret ballot, he was told he was out of order. The resolution was deferred to the incoming N.C., who, of course, passed it, but to provide a patina of democracy, asked people to submit “language suggestions.”

The party’s pivot to fighting against fascism (though this is critical) has severely truncated its socialist imaginary. This uncritical lack of examination of all the moving components of fascism and its chameleonic character; the way it morphs and transmogrifies itself in mode, but never in kind within the structures of capital, has not seriously been taken into account. Instead we are forced to accept haggard and warn ideas about the right danger; which is very real, we can’t deny this fact, but this undialectical approach disavows the strong liberal anchor that fastens the menacing drum of the far-right. Our party’s analysis, therefore, does not thoroughly account for dense and rooted liberal collaboration with fascism.

To heave against any ultra-left confusion, I’m not saying that Trump and the brigadier lynch terrorists are not an imminent danger to liberal democracy (which we ourselves have to interrogate; and which also was birthed from the mutilated blood of African and Indigenous people), I’m saying to place heavy emphasis on the chauvinist sadism of one party when both have a proven history of shared complicity; telling people to vote against MAGA-right forces while not placing brute class struggle as the spearhead and revolution as the ultimate aim, is duplicitous as best, willfully collaborationist at worst.

Again, so I’m not branded an ultra (although I know I am by some in the party), I am, to be explicitly clear, not denouncing the electoral struggle — the Trumpian white terroristic march is not to be minimized as there is a difference between a fascist movement and a fascist state — I’m merely stating that to marshal that over and against militant class struggle amputates any kind of socialist imagination in the collective consciousness and locks the masses of frustrated people into the imperial capitalist two-party dictatorship. Moreover, if all we’re ever instructed to do is vote against fascism using the broken vehicle of the Democratic Party, the possibility of a Socialist world is violently hijacked from us. And, instead of liberation being at the fore, it is peripheried and bartered in the name of what’s “practical.” Furthermore, practicality is employed to cut down revolutionary understanding and movement.

As a militant Black woman Communist, I feel completely alienated from my party. However, it seems to be a clear pattern in the party to shun Black Communists who hedge against Kautskyite pacifist utopias. Again, let me be clear, peace is our ultimate aim and we should pursue it wherever possible, but in order to attain that peace, a just peace not seeped in delusions about the outright brutality of the capitalist class, we must engage in class struggle with brute force. The most idealist and dangerous thing we can do is to think the ruling class and its repressive state apparatuses are going to let us just have a peaceful road to socialism when history has shown they will wholesale annihilate anything that even attempts to threaten their global nexus of blood and profit. Allende learned the hard way.

This is what happens when you trade placing the concerns of the most oppressed and allowing Black and brown people — who bear the brunt of capitalist degradation — to be at the helm of the movement, for a gutted and nebulous anti-racism campaign that doesn’t offer a root to stem analysis of the capitalist problem. 

There will be many more Black people who will pass through this organization and feel this daggering sense of alienation. Many more will be left feeling hollow and demoralized. A troubling pattern I experienced was the way Black comrades with more palatable, integrationist views integrationist not in the sense of an international cohesion around our shared aims of liberation, but integrationist in the sense of bartering liberation from capitalist asphyxiation for a rainbow coalition fantasy land that pushes revolutionary class struggle to blurred and forgotten margins — were instrumentalized over and against more militant comrades who do not hold pacifist, integrationist views. Militant comrades were scolded and infantilized for our views and told “Black people fought for the right to vote” in order to kill discussion around the party mostly centering the electoral struggle. Black people, may I add, fought for the right to be free, not to be the gutted appendages for a cadaverous Democratic Party. 

At our convention, well meaning white comrades were called racist by a white lady for challenging the Black comrade who believed it was important to adhere to and uplift the fight against fascism line and for Black people in this country to continue to use the Democratic Party, no matter how severely compromised, as a vector for change because, ” Black people built this country and fought for the right to vote.” The white comrades were chastised and called racist and were called upon to fight against their white supremacist behavior.

It is deeply insidious and manipulative to weaponize a person’s perceived Blackness and the fact that Black people were locked out of the right to vote in order to keep them psychically butchered and cleaving for life inside the Democratic Party; a party that has preyed on the socioeconomic strangulation of the Black community — a strangulation they themselves keep manufacturing so they can play good cop, bad cop with the lynch terrorists in the Republican party and obscure their role — for decades. What twisted manipulation it is to call white comrades racists for rightly countering the rhetoric of the Black comrade who employed the heavy adversity Black people face in this country sociopolitically in order to keep them from wielding their growing class awareness to struggle against the Democratic Party, and the two-party despotism as a whole, which seeks to maim their developing class consciousness and keep them enslaved to the Democratic Party, which is parasitically sustaining itself off the blood and labor of Black folk.

These events, as well as the more general streams of zionism that ebb through the party, made me really uncomfortable, and I did not know how to navigate these things with some of the Black and BIPOC comrades in the party who I felt sometimes took on the role of overseer to the more militant, non-pacifist comrades. Furthermore, you can’t uphold the legacy of Claudia Jones solely in words when you have a militant Black Trinidadian woman comrade who is left alienated and confused in the party. You must engage in revolutionary deeds, not barren words.

On another point, I’m not exactly sure what happened with the Austin Club, but from reading their statement and assessing conditions in the party, the dissolving of their club, in my opinion, was unfounded. It was purported that comrades in the Austin Club were inspired by and trying to incorporate in their practical work some revolutionary Black nationalist elements of organizing. Some members, from my interactions with them, have expressed disrespect and demeaning attitudes towards the Black Panther Party that they try to drape in the worn garb of “critique.” Interestingly, though, the same people who say they’re merely critiquing the Black Panther Party don’t seem to give the same grace and energy for critiques of our party. This is an outright misrepresentation and vulgarization of critique.

Reactionary wrong ideas have not only been allowed to develop in the party, they have been cultivated, and in some cases, encouraged to a certain extent. Making fun of the Austin Club because they draw on the revolutionary Black nationalism (in stark contrast to bourgeois nationalism) of the Black Panther Party is evidence of the deep throughlines of Anti-Blackness that courses through the party like a virulent disease that has been allowed to metastasize. 

While there are segments of the Western left that do overly rhapsodize only the armed tactics of the Black Panther Party — and we should acutely examine this — there is a pattern by some within the party, and the broader Western left in general, to cloak their disdain for militant Black Communists in “critique.” Black leftists who denounce the armed struggle often use “Black militant” as a paternalizing slur; and palatable leftists are used to scoldingly cut down non-pacifist Black Marxists.

The revolutionary nationalism of Harry Haywood, Thomas Sankara, Chris Hani, Steve Biko, Selma Francois, Maurice Bishop, Kwame Nkrumah, Lee Nelson Perry, Robert F Williams, Sengor Lamine, Queen Mother Moore, Cyril Briggs, Nat Turner, Denmark Vessey, Walter Rodney, Yusuf Salman Yusuf, Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin, Mehdi Ben Barka, Sékou Touré, Kwame Ture, Elain Brown, Huey, etc. all serve to strengthen and deepen the analysis of the world socialist movement. If comrades were given the proper theoretical guidance by the party, they’d know these very basic and obvious things are a part of the dialectical course of history. 

If the very framework from which we work is disjointed and muddled, everything which is built upon that will, henceforth, reflect that disjointedness. There doesn’t seem to be any real cohesion in the party in terms of practical work. Most of us, speaking for the N.Y. district, do work outside the party in other organizations; which is fine, but there doesn’t seem to be a weft connecting that external work with the party. Everything feels so disparate. 

Criticism/self-criticism, which is the very life-force of the Communist movement, is not practiced in our party. True and rigorous critique is altogether discarded in the name of accoladeism and self-aggrandizing empty statements that do nothing but atrophy the growing class awareness in comrades. Without the veins and arteries of criticism/self-criticism, we come to celebrate and uphold reformist ideas; demeaning and attacking anyone who dares challenge the liberal vague of delusion. To uphold destructive ideas using sporadic interjections of Marxists phraseology is to knife away at the global Communist movement. 

On the point of ultra-leftism; one can not deny that this tendency of frenzied petit bourgeois vicissitudes between Bakuninst terrorism and anti-revolutionary mania is a danger to building the global Communist movement. The party, contrastingly, does not have a serious ultra-left problem, it has a thoroughgoing right-deviationist problem. With all the scattered ideologies in the party ranging from elements of Trotskyism to the dominant social democratic trend, one can see how rightist ideas were allowed to seat themselves in the party and ossify it. 

Also, the term ultra-left itself is not a slur. It is not something you uncritically hurl at someone as an insult. It is an unblunted analysis of a tendency within Marxism. Allow me to draw your attention to one of the footnotes in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. In the text, Lenin goes into an explanation of the issue facing the Italian Communist Party with Bordiga and Turati. He goes on to affirm that Bordiga is correct in pointing out the destructive opportunism of Turati in him recognizing the dictatorship of the proletariat in words, but not in deeds, remaining seeped in parliamentarism. Lenin goes on to further castigate Turati stating, “Such a mistaken, inconsistent, or spineless attitude towards the opportunist parliamentarians gives rise to ‘Left-wing’ communism, on the one hand, and to a certain extent justifies its existence, on the other.” Rightist tendencies, in essence, births ultra-left confusions and imparts legitimacy to it.

In closing, when our party shuts down valid disagreement; when it seeks to quell voices of legitimate frustrations around the party line, it manufactures dissenting factions. We can not stay mute while the party traffics in economies of right deviationism. Confliction points will rise the more one seeks to suppress disagreement; that is the natural dialectic of political life. Party leadership must take responsibility for all the recent factions and splintering they’ve helped to create. Factions are also a natural outgrowth of being in a party. It is not necessarily bad, depending on varying context, of course, for factions to form: dissenting opinions inform and birth new synthesis. Party leadership also must grasp the stark difference between harmful factionalism and actual line struggle. The point of a party is to struggle for correct ideas that aid in hedging forth revolutionary movements, and when you cut off line-struggle, you asphyxiate the lifeline of Marxism-Leninism.

I can only hope that you can give a bit of space for my analysis and feelings. I can never hate the party. When my father died this past spring, the party was there; and they made sure comrades who, like myself, couldn’t afford to go to Chicago for the convention made it there. I have learned so much, and in my heart, I can never hold antipathy for the party, despite my well intentioned critiques maybe being misinterpreted. There are also many good comrades in the party, but I have to be honest, I often wonder what this even means when comrades, though they have good intentions, do not do enough to stand against the rightist ossification of the party.

I am not saying these things as some sort of learned person; I hold no fancy degrees, no degrees period, even. I’m saying this as someone — disenfranchised and gutted — who worked in a beauty supply in Brownsville Brooklyn for 16 years; I’m saying this as someone who was a young mother in high-school, as someone who is continually fighting housing dispossession, who came to the party for guidance, but many times felt shunned and lost.

I will, with everything I have in me, continue to organize around tenants rights, Black liberation, anti-imperialism, Palestinian liberation, Black womanhood, cultural work, unifying Korea, etc. as I did when I first joined the party 3½ years ago. As a steeled Marxist-Leninist, I believe in the party as the primary vector to help guide revolutionary change, and I’m hoping to very soon find one committed to this most vital effort.

In liberation,

Khadija.

I haven’t posted about this yet, but I quit Communist Party USA in mid-November 2023. Since quitting, I’ve been focused on getting several major health issues treated, building the Flint chapter of the Michigan Mutual Aid Coalition (MIMAC), and in addition to our mutual aid work, trying to build the basis of an educational program that MIMAC can offer to the public. I wavered on whether anything worthwhile could come from going public about my reasons for leaving CPUSA, but until now, have kept it to myself.

However, after the events of the past few days, with the party purging clubs and members, I feel compelled to speak up and discuss the reasons why I decided to resign the CPUSA. Perhaps it will help others. I’m going to address my reasons for leaving by subject.

Disdain For Mutual Aid Work

Several of us from MIMAC, already Marxist-Leninists, joined the party in 2022, while continuing our mutual aid programs, which started in 2020. Our hope was to become part of a larger network of Communists and have more opportunities to be politically active in meaningful ways, including the possibility of showing clubs how they can set up mutual aid programs in their areas, because it’s a great way to help in the community and build trust with the masses – The Black Panthers demonstrated this. But our local leadership poo-pooed mutual aid as “ineffective” and “not worth it.” The metric being used was apparently the efficacy of converting MA recipients to dues-paying party members. Evidently they “tested” doing mutual aid work and opted against it, but from all appearances, the “test” was a one-off attempt, hardly a scientific method to determine whether it is worthwhile activity. MIMAC’s track record and history were minimized and dismissed.

MIMAC has been coordinating food rescue with grocery stores, big box stores, warehouse clubs, and restaurants since 2020. Our volunteers do weekly pickups, delivery to the MIMAC pantry space, where it is sorted and stored, then put together in boxes of supplemental groceries that are delivered to households around Detroit. The Flint chapter our family has been building has also done some food rescue and redistribution in our area, but much less frequently. We have also helped pickup donated household goods, furniture and the like and delivered to households in Flint. Our recipients rely on us and we are delighted to be able to help them survive through late-stage Capitalism.

While the rejection of MIMAC work by the party was disappointing, I told myself it wasn’t sufficient reason to quit. Perhaps worsening conditions would cause them to change their minds, and even if they didn’t, I felt that this issue alone was not a cause for resignation, but I would not forget it if other issues arose.

Other issues arose.

Collaboration With Liberals And Democrats

Our MIMAC cadre had reservations about the way our district leadership discouraged mutual aid work, but was simultaneously insistent that members needed to volunteer to go knock on doors for Democrats, even being called upon to travel out of state to do so. That’s hardly revolutionary work here and now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and particularly since the Democrats are practically indistinguishable from Republicans in their support and defense of US Imperialism. Instead of being revolutionary, at this time in history, it is aiding our enemies. The Democrats are Bourgeoisie Capitalists – that is where their loyalty lies, and always will. Which is also why it was always so confusing to see Democrats like John Bachtell featured in People’s World in articles that serve the Democratic Party, but I digress.

The CPUSA statement on the attempted assassination of DJT was indistinguishable from Liberal responses. Looking at the statement from Socialist Party (I am not a member, I simply saw it posted on social media) on the matter, we can see what a revolutionary party response should look like, by way of comparison.

Member dues and fundraising monies are supporting paid leadership that isn’t actively working on building revolution, but instead throttling and squashing efforts to do so. It would seem that the CPUSA follows the same adage as Liberals and Democrats when it pertains to revolutionary changes: “Now is not the time.”

Rejection of Black and Indigenous Revolutionaries

It is not only a disappointment, but distressing to see the party rejection of the teachings of Black American Communists who correctly recognized their status as an oppressed nation within a nation under this settler-colonial system. To dismiss the work of those trying to emulate the important community service programs that The Black Panthers created and implemented by feeding people is mind-boggling. How can one expect people to fight against their oppressors on empty stomachs?

CPUSA leadership says that after investigation, they have determined that settler-colonialism is not the primary contradiction in the US. Who performed this investigation, and what sources did they consult? To reject the truth of settler-colonialism being at the root of oppressions against Indigenous and Black Americans – oppressed nations within nations – is a rejection of all Decolonial Marxist projects that have had to defend themselves against US settler-colonialism. How this can be reconciled without employing white supremacist arguments is beyond me. It is not a position I would be able, or desire, to defend.

Here is a passage from Kwame Ture and Charles V Hamilton’s book Black Power – please read it and think about what they would say regarding the outcome of the CPUSA investigation.

If one can look at the history and current conditions of Indigenous and Black Americans and still claim that they are not colonized by settlers, then nothing they say can be trusted, because they are either lying, or incompetent in their analysis. A Communist Party operating on stolen land obtained through genocide, that was industrialized using stolen labor, needs to prioritize the needs of the colonized and oppressed.

The US needs Decolonial Marxism, not a “Communist” party that weaponizes Democratic Centralism against members to ultimately defend the settler-colonial establishment.

Response To The Zionist Genocide In Palestine

Last October, I was distressed by the party response to the Zionist genocide, which includes tailing the “Communist” party of Isntreal on their position as to the solution in Palestine.

I came to the conclusion that could not in good conscience be a member of a party that does not center Decolonization and Land Back on its platform. If it couldn’t recognize this obvious need in Occupied Palestine, how could it have correct position on the US and its Settler-Colonialism?

I was urged by other Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Zionist members to wait for the convention, because there was a push by some members to correct party positions on Palestine and other matters.

Holy crows, am I glad I didn’t wait. The convention dug in on the incorrect positions, including having a representative – a Jewish settler – from the “Communist” party of Isntreal speak, who included Zionist talking points in their speech. This happened on the same day as the Nuseirat Massacre! Just abhorrent reinforcement of settler-colonialism and genocide.

Then to purge members who walked out quietly and without incident for principled reasons – and accuse them of wrongdoing for that and their mutual aid work? That’s something.

I have been disappointed that most of the major US Communist parties response to increasing Fascism has been to focus their attacks on the GOP, Republicans and conservatives. While I don’t dispute that Trump and company pose a threat, where have the protests against the increasing Fascism under the current Democrat, DNC, Liberal administration been, including but not limited to their support and complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, and their reaction to the anti-genocide movement and protestors?

While I doubt that this will make any difference in party leadership’s stance, in my opinion, CPUSA should be using party power and resources to support a 3rd party candidate with matching values, regardless of the likelihood of them winning.

The purpose of a Communist party is not to help Bourgeoisie candidates win in Bourgeoisie elections.

While Trump, his agenda, and his peers definitely pose a threat to increased domestic Fascism in the US, Biden and his administration have already increased Fascism both domestically and internationally. Why has the oppression, suffering, and slaughter of people outside of the US by the US not been met with the same urgency to resist against as the threat of the US population being affected? Our liberation is all tied to one another!

We Communists in the US are unwilling beneficiaries of US Foreign Policy – but beneficiaries all the same. How is it that there was not a stronger party response against the Palestinian genocide, and instead, coddling of the “Communist” party of Isntreal, which, when platformed at the party convention, included Zionist talking points – uninterrupted by leadership?

I made the correct decision to resign. I could not support these stances.

Remaining Members Personal Attacks Against Purged Members

Since the announcement of the purged clubs/members, I have seen some current CPUSA members focused and clearly emotionally invested in launching personal attacks against former members on social media. This is reminiscent for me of the treatment that the JW doomsday cult I was raised in manifests toward former members who are regarded as “apostates.” Meaning, it is cult member behavior. It’s extremely off-putting and alarming that this is the behavior these members consider acceptable and correct.

Is this the sort of activity the party wants to be represented by? If not, I wonder if they will be as decisive and severe in their actions against the current members exhibiting this behavior as they were against the former members being targeted. Time will tell.

So Now What ?

Now that I have shown you why I quit, and have criticized the party, many will ask, “then what should people do?” And I’m only going to tell you what I’m doing. I can’t tell you what the correct choices are for you. I am currently operating under the premise that these are the correct choices for me unless I discover that I’m wrong, at which point, I will reassess and adjust accordingly.

As I mentioned earlier, my own work with MIMAC, including the Flint chapter we are growing, is my focus now. I recommend joining or founding, then building up local organizations to help your communities get their needs met through food rescue and redistribution, seeking donations of needed items on behalf of those in need (furniture, clothing, household goods, etc) and then coordinating delivery of those items. Check with local business owners who might be inclined to donate things too. Add educational programs like read-alongs of history and revolutionary theory. We’re working on creating a Discord “Readers For Peace” group in our region where we plan to do weekly voice chats to read books together. We’re starting with Joel Andreas’ graphic novel ADDICTED TO WAR.

Literacy brigades are as badly needed here in the US now as they were in Cuba decades ago. They will look different, because conditions are different here and now, but they are very much needed. See these statistics from the National Literacy Institute:

Establish safe houses. They’re going to be needed, particularly as Fascism increases, which will happen regardless of who is in office, because that is the historical cycle we are in. The dying US Empire is lashing out at anyone resisting it, including here at home, as evidenced by the reaction to Anti-Genocide protestors, as well as the long history of state sanctioned violence against anyone attempting to wrest power away from the oligarchs who own most everything in this settler colony.

I’m a gardener and I share seeds. Check out the work of Urban Seed in Eastpointe, Michigan to get ideas on how to be of service to your community in growing food. In the same city, EP Free Store is not only redistributing donated items – they are serving lunches in the park weekly for kids who are out of school. Many kids rely on school breakfast and lunch programs during the school year that are not provided during the summer months. Feeding people is a way to help build community ties – and to get people to challenge their Anti-Communist indoctrination by seeing the deeds we Communists are choosing to do, instead of divisive Bourgeoisie partisanship.

These are some ideas, but certainly don’t represent the full scope of possibilities. I fail to understand why the CPUSA wouldn’t encourage and support activities like these, instead of de facto partnering with Democrats. Thankfully, it’s not something I need to wrestle with any longer, but I write all of these things in case you are struggling with it, dear readers.

In Conclusion

My motives in writing all of this include:

• Clearing up whether I am still a member of CPUSA (I am not, I resigned November 2023)
• Explaining my reasoning for resigning
• Recording the criticisms of the party that I am not alone in thinking
• Getting others to consider whether the CPUSA is in alignment with their goals as a revolutionary
• Defending the purged clubs and members against the incorrect accusations against them

I know there will be people who disagree with me, and I accept that. I am not interested in debating or arguing about it – I would rather spend that time doing constructive activities that help build revolutionary spaces.

I hope that if you are a CPUSA member who has been having doubts, you might find that you’re not alone in having those. If you’re considering joining, I hope these disclosures are helpful to you in determining if it is the right fit for you.

That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter. I need to get back to work on my own studies and so I’m going to wrap it up here.

Solidarity with all oppressed peoples! Our liberation is tied together.

On the evening of Monday, July 15, 2024, the Austin, Texas chapter of the Communist Party USA was liquidated by members of the Texas district committee. The district claims this vote was unanimous, but the representative from Austin was not made aware that this meeting was taking place, nor was she allowed to defend her club or participate in the vote.

The accusations made towards Austin comrades are factionalism and refusal to follow the Party line on four issues:

• Two delegates leaving during the “Israeli” speech at the National Convention in June 2024
• Not being fully on board voting for Biden/Dems – aka Resolution 5
• In house open discussion of the petition and reasons for its creation (we urged comrades not to sign it)
• Accused of “Black Nationalism” and following the Black Panther Party playbook with our mutual aid work

Let us address these accusations individually.

Yes, two of us left during the “Israeli” speech at the convention. Is quietly walking outside against the rules? No grand walkout nor vocal statement was made. We simply disagreed with what the man was saying, and thought that inviting him to speak after the Palestinian speaker canceled was bad optics. We stand by this belief. When should comrades dissent if not at the National Convention? Rather than having a comradely discussion on this issue, one of the Party co-chairs chose to make passive aggressive statements in her closing speech, “when you walk out on an Israeli comrade, you’re walking out on the working class.”

We disagree with the validity of her statement.

Free Palestine.

Yes, we dissented on Resolution 5, as did half of the delegates present at the convention. Again, when should comrades dissent if not at the National Convention? The Party claims that this “vote against MAGA” resolution is not a “vote for Biden” demand, although several Party members quite literally stated a need to support Biden and the Democratic Party during the shortened convention discussion.

On the last day of the convention, a white Party elder from Connecticut gave a speech calling all dissenters on Resolution 5 “racist” and “chauvinist” for refusing to support a genocidal, bourgeois administration with the statement, “Black and brown comrades fought and died for the right to vote, and you don’t want to?”

It should go without saying, but Joe Biden has a long history of racism against Black Americans. He is, right now, actively contributing to the genocide of the Palestinian people. Several Black and brown comrades spoke against Resolution 5, and a white woman accusing them of racism is disgusting and unacceptable.

Many of us were sent “A Comradely Petition” the week after the CPUSA National Convention. This petition was a demand to reopen discussion around Resolution 5 before the National Committee was slated to vote on it. The Austin delegation was in agreement that the petition was silly, and not the correct path forward, but that it was important to understand why it was created. Many rank and file comrades feel that they are not represented by the National Committee. The fact that the discussion around this contentious resolution was cut short added to those feelings.

All of the Austin delegates advocated against local comrades signing the petition. We did, however, give space for discussion at our local meeting. As many comrades were talking about leaving and searching for a new organization, we also gave space for this discussion. The discussion was very respectful and productive. Some comrades shared that they were ready to leave. Most stated that they preferred to stay and struggle under the Party banner.

A rat within our organization, who was not present at the National Convention nor at the local meeting, leaked internal documents to members of the Texas district committee. They used these documents without context to frame our discussions as “factionalism.”

Comrades, if you are suspicious of someone within your organization, trust that feeling.

The most bothersome reason for liquidation is this accusation of “Black Nationalism” levied because we read from members of the Black Panther Party, and participate in mutual aid work.

First, one major problem within the local chapter is that we currently have no Black members. Austin, Texas is the only growing major city in the US with a shrinking Black population. This is mostly due to rapid gentrification thanks to the ongoing tech sector boom and rising cost of living. Historically Black neighborhoods are being demolished for “modern” developments which have caused property taxes to rise rapidly and out of control. Austin is becoming unaffordable for much of the working class, but our Black and immigrant neighbors are the most affected by the rising cost of living.

Second, we see no issue with the concept of Black Nationalism as described by Malcom X and the Black Panther Party. While this is not something we, as a majority white chapter, are openly advocating for, why does CPUSA see Black Nationalism as a threat to their working class movement? It is up to those of us who do not live the Black experience to educate ourselves as much as possible on how to support our Black neighbors, their needs, and understand their experiences. Black Nationalism is simply self determination.

Third, mutual aid is the most important work we do in our community. Period. We were told that organizing with the lumpen proletariat is against the CPUSA Party Program. During our many reads of the Program, we have yet to come across such a passage. One major flaw in the Party is the lack of education around mutual aid and community defense programs, and some of us have brought this up on appropriate occasions. We do also participate in the local electoral struggle, as commanded by the Party.

Mutual aid is important for many reasons. The most obvious is that we are literally helping vulnerable people. Why would a communist not want to help those in need? It is also a way to meet and work with other individuals and organizations doing similar work in our neighborhoods. This is how we build alliances. It is also how we build community trust. “Communism” can be a scary word in the USA, and when people meet us out in the streets helping each other, we begin to build trust.

So this is what happened to the Austin, Texas chapter of the Communist Party USA. We no longer exist. Comrades were given the option to reapply to the Party and begin to rebuild from scratch. Everything we built over the last three years is gone. Most of us, including local leadership, are moving on. We have already begun to rebrand as a mutual aid organization, and have set up a meeting in a few weeks. We will be okay, and the work will continue.

Stay vigilant, comrades. Take care of each other. Support your community. We are all we have.