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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Settler Colony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Detweiller’s Gracious Gift 

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

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

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

Another source tells us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does this historical blindspot exist?

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

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

The Revolution Against Ecocide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I live in the Twin Cities. Most anti-ICE spaces you find here don’t mention anti-imperialism in their organizing. In general, the Twin Cities is dominated by two backward political tendencies. The first is a vague “abolitionist,” anarchistic tendency that lacks principled anti-imperialist analysis — these spaces do not express support for the Iranian government, Hezbollah, the other Islamic resistance groups in Palestine, or any perceived state or state-adjacent entities. Most groups of this tendency simply distance themselves from the responsibility to take a stance, and do not seriously consider the contributions made by the Islamic Resistance groups in the global anti-imperialist struggle, theoretically or practically. The worst will outright slander these movements, if pressed.

The second backwards tendency is led by the Four Opportunists (primarily FRSO in my locale) who largely tail other local opportunist figures of the NPIC in the Twin Cities. What both tendencies have in common is imperial chauvinism. This chauvinism is borne of their class position on the global stage and their programs reflect that. Actually winning a new world would mean they’d lose a lot in the process. How does this play into the general anti-ICE movement in Minneapolis? Why do we need an anti-imperialist, anti-ICE movement?

The principal contradiction of our time is still that between rich and poor nations, parasite nations and nations deemed exploitable and even erasable. Global migration today is a system of restricted mobility that benefits rich countries at the expense of poor countries. This system benefits workers within the core, not just a select few bourgeois. Lorenzo Delgado Araujo, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yanez-Cruz, and countless others were murdered by ICE and complicit federal agencies for the maintenance of the global imperialist hierarchy. Global North states and their mostly euro and euro-settler populations seek to cage Global South workers in their home countries where they can be superexploited by multinational corporations, their partner states in the North, and their neo-colonial allies. Deportation, rape, and internment all function to say to these workers, “STAY IN YOUR PLACE.” The miserable wages paid to workers in a country like Mexico, end up subsidizing 25-40% of the wages paid in the North.¹ Pulling from the same source, we can truly see just how much value drain there is from South to North as a result of these massive wage differentials:

“In 2023 alone, a staggering $135 billion was siphoned off from Mexico due to the underpayment of labor in the export sector. This figure is not merely an abstract number—it represents 7.5% of the country’s entire GDP and an astonishing 37% of its manufacturing GDP.”²

There is no productivity difference between a Mexican factory worker and an amerikan factory worker. Why would there be? The notion that there is some inherent value difference between Mexican and amerikan labor is a racist one. This national chauvinism undergirds the global division of labor.³ There is no economic law that says that these two people should earn different wages, it is instead a reality decided by global class struggle.

When compared to remittances,⁴ the $135 billion in drain is more than double what was sent home by migrants in the same year.⁵ The World Bank and other neo-liberal international institutions often claim that these remittances are a key factor in economic development for poor countries, but this is a lie. How can these meager remittances (in total $63 billion in 2023) compare to the amount of value drain in just the export sector alone in Mexico? What these institutions like the World Bank want is to perpetuate the myth that migration is good for poor countries, when in fact it only drains them of their labor force, stunts national development, and keeps them stuck in a cycle of unequal exchange which benefits a bourgeois-settler class alliance in places like amerika. The results of this are higher infant mortality rates, lower life expectancy, little to no government services, and malnutrition in the Global South.

Those who do make it North are sequestered to essential industries where they face horrible working conditions. There is little to no institutional support for migrants during periodic capitalists crisis or pandemics like COVID. Many can’t leave their initial employer due to laws around temporary work visas. This restricted mobility in the destination country allows employers to depress wages.⁶ Those who opt for more mobility without the sanctioned paperwork are put into a dangerous position, only made more visible since Obama left office, but with the same violent border apparatus at work.

The federal government’s continued murder of migrant workers feeds a bloodthirsty white supremacy born of these global class hierarchies. As imperial countries utilize genocidal terror to enforce these class divisions, the racist superstructure becomes an end in itself, beyond any purely economic motive. Samir Amin explains this as the genocidal solution to the global reserve army of labor.⁷ Pushed off their land in the countryside, displaced to urban centers within their home country, where employment is not guaranteed, many make the decision to emigrate North. Contrary to what liberal yard signs might tell you, migration is not beautiful under imperialism. The migrant worker must leave their home and by foot or boat, make the perilous journey to amerika or europe. Many hundreds of thousands die in transit and all this is by design.⁸ There is a killing for killing’s sake. Without understanding this dimension, we will fail to grasp the totality of the system in power. It operates on both an economic motive and a purely racist, genocidal logic endemic to amerikan and european nationalisms.

Amerika was born as a euro-settler slave empire and no matter how much people (even on the left) want to play 4d chess to recuperate some idealized vision of amerikan “values,” this effort will always be counter to anything oppressed people have actually experienced. This is anti-materialist and revisionist. The amerikan empire has for centuries maintained a system of unequal exchange between North and South, where wages are depressed and governments that seek to undo these unequal relations are overthrown. Resistance movements are ruthlessly hunted by neo-colonial state forces and amerikan backed paramilitaries like the contras in Nicaragua or the Grey Wolves in Turkey. The amerikan empire has never been a “nation of immigrants” or a “grand social experiment” in democracy. It has always been and always will be a settler-empire which sucks the global proletariat of its time, labor, and life. Failure to understand this fact means we will continue to seek false solutions or reforms within the amerikan framework. People will endlessly protest and campaign for things that cannot be achieved because the contradictions at hand are so antagonistic that the level of struggle proposed is wildly insufficient to attain them. Otherwise, they will claim false victories as they continue to underestimate the ways in which the empire can absorb their paltry demands while staying in the driver seat. Therefore, principled anti-imperialism must be anti-amerikan and we should not hide from that, but rather unfailingly push that line forward in mass organizations and pre-party formations.

While continuing to refine our means for resisting the imperial border apparatus (ICE, CBP, DHS, etc.), to make the anti-ICE movement truly anti-imperialist will mean that we Center the South in our organizing. What does “Center the South” mean? No materially backed internationalism is practiced in any meaningful way by USians. Not paying attention to the global situation means we miss the key ways the US empire reproduces itself. In the case of anti-ICE organizing, the situation within migrant’s home countries is only ever a footnote in anti-ICE spaces. When it does come up, its only ever a passing comment on direct military intervention in X country or coups orchestrated by the CIA and State Department. Unequal Exchange is never identified as the primary force motivating migration. This is due to the inconvenient implications such an analysis presents to people with a vested class interest in the amerikan standard of living. Ecuadorians make up the majority of Latin American migrant workers living in Minneapolis, yet there is little to no talk of how we can integrate an analysis of the revolutionary situation in their home country, into our solidarity organizing. Can Twin Cities leftists explain the recent history of Ecuador? Not only does this have implications for our strategy, but it affects the way we engage with migrant workers. You need to meet people where they are at, and part of that is understanding where they’ve been. There are complicated internal contradictions within the home countries of migrants that have implications for organizing with migrant workers in the imperial core. In addition, those workers are still connected to their home countries. Many send remittances home and at the very least they keep in contact with their families who stay behind. They have a vested interest in the well being of their home country and so should we if we are in true solidarity with migrant workers.

We must create a two-pronged approach to anti-ICE organizing. Centering the South in our anti-ICE organizing would look like us making deep, committed relationships with Global South liberation movements and asking them what they need materially to support their movements. I hear a lot about centering the oppressed in Minneapolis organizing spaces, but without any real efforts to practically center the most oppressed, much less the oppressed people geographically distant from people in the room. This must be support without stipulations as to their tactics, but it also needs to be support that is intentional. Understanding that there are likely many different groups trying to bring about a new society in any given country, it makes sense to take the time and effort to evaluate their specific political vision. Solidarity should be scientific, not paternal or savioristic. Therefore it is incumbent that those in solidarity do not shirk their responsibility to do a proper study of conditions in Global South countries, understanding that the best sources will be from these regions. Some questions for investigation might be: Is there a revolutionary situation in this country? What objective and subjective forces are involved? How do the revolutionary forces relate to the masses? What are their programs and general strategy?⁹ The more countries that are able to de-link from imperialism, the weaker the social bribe will be for workers in imperial core countries, creating more potential for a revolutionary situation.¹⁰ Unequal exchange must be addressed on a practical level and geographic distance must not limit the relationships we build.

Of course making a revolution in the imperial core is the most effective way to do internationalism, but that has not been so simple. Part of the reason has been the high living standards of large swaths of the populace. Revolutions do not happen just because someone wants it. People have to need it and simultaneously understand their agency in the matter. The other reason has been the subsequent revisionism which has confused the movement with regard to class struggle in amerika. The original class struggles were that of the slave v.s. the master and the settler v.s. the indigenous. These contradictions remain central antagonisms in the core of settler-empire. The workers movement has always sided with imperialism and yt-settler chauvinism. Ask Samuel Gompers or the CPUSA of the 40’s and 50’s. The principal struggle here in amerika is that over land and autonomy for the colonized. It is essential to develop international support for Global South revolutions, while also remembering that the internal colonies here are some of the weakest links in the imperial chain. As the state and settler masses continue their genocide of New Afrikans and Indigenous nations, we must also center these struggles in our overall strategy, rather than some vague “multi-national working class” struggle.

All who are active in anti-ICE work should make Spanish language learning a matter of organizational policy. There has been and remains a gap between the direct recipients of this pig terror and those in solidarity. Part of this is a lack of commitment towards personal relationships with these people. Something that will help is active work to overcome this language barrier. It will not be the only thing needed, but it will help. Even knowing some Spanish is better than nothing, but I implore you to take study seriously. Language adoption as an organizational policy should help negate the difficulties of language learning access barriers if you were to just go in on it alone. All migrants are under attack, so if your locality seems to have a higher percentage of people speaking something other than Spanish, then by all means dive into that language! Understand it will take a lot of time and you will often plateau, but that is the nature of organizing in general.

We must continue to combat ICE, DHS, CBP, and other federal agencies while understanding the very serious war we are in with amerika as a whole. These agencies play a crucial role in enacting the violence that maintains a global division of labor which creates the amerikan standard of living. This must be a war without terms, not because we want it to be, but because these agencies are essential to the current imperialist order. They will not be disbanded by politicians or well articulated speeches. The progressive aspect of the anti-ICE movement here in Minneapolis has been the elements who have put their bodies on the line to physically confront the enemy forces. While continuing to resist internment, deportation, and murder, we must also develop a holistic strategy to end the united states. The people of Minneapolis should know this from 2020. Politicians who promised to abolish the police were merely trying to demobilize an insurrection, and they fulfilled that task well. The same promises will continue to be made and broken by the settler state until the oppressed take matters into their own hands. The police, ICE, and CBP will exist until they are crushed.

“The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”¹¹

1. Crossa, Mateo, and Álvaro de Regil Castilla. “Value Transfer and Labor Arbitrage Based on Unequal Exchange: The Case of Mexico–USA”, Journal of Labor and Society 28, 2 (2025): 157-182, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/24714607-bja10183 ︎
2. Ibid. ︎
3. I use the term racism and national chauvinism interchangeably here, and while they are related, they are not the same. I merely do this as a colloquialism. Race and nation are important to differentiate because race obfuscates clear political objectives that national liberation demarcates more clearly, i.e. land as the basis of decolonization/economic autonomy and political autonomy. ︎
4. Any portion of wages sent by migrant workers in destination countries to their home countries. There is an extensive infrastructure built around fees and services related to sending remittances. This usually degrades the original amount workers send home. ︎
5. Ibid. ︎
6. In general, wages tend to equalize within countries due to the fact that most citizens can move freely from employer to employer. This is not the case for migrant labor living under a border regime which follows them even once they’ve crossed these fictious borders. Again, restricted movement is essential to global wage differentials. ︎
7. Samir Amin, “World Poverty, Pauperization, and Capital Accumulation”. Monthly Review 55, no. 5 (October 2003). ︎
8. Iker Suarez, The Migrant Genocide: Toward a Third World Analysis of European Class Struggle. https://anti-imperialist.net/blog/2025/08/15/the-migrant-genocide/ ︎
9. Torkil Lauesen, Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism.1986. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/68ed338d2e083114d762ecb7/t/6970c175092eb26a3852f785/1768997238857/Iskra+Books+-+Unequal+Exchange+and+the+Prospects+of+Socialism+-+w.pdf ︎
10. I do not mean to narrowly imply that conditions alone make revolution. I believe that many of the insights articulated by Grace Lee Boggs in Organization Means Commitment still ring true. There is a cultural backwardness in amerika, produced by these parasitic economic relations and white cultural imperialism, that we must fight internally. Objective and subjective forces must align for us to bring about the world we want. ︎
11. CLR James, The Black Jacobins. p. 78.1938. ︎

The Kebra Negast

In the 14th century, the ideological foundation for Ethiopia was written. This text, borne in the ancient clerical language of Ge’ez, was known as the Kebra Negast, or the Glory of Kings. This 900-page epic framed “Ethiopia” not simply as the highlands of Abyssinia but as the biblical and universal land of Cush. This was an ideological construct, an Ethiopian Zionism, that would be wielded to justify imperialist claims over the entire Horn of Africa. The Kebra Negast became the pillar of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and the Solomonic Dynasty that reigned from 1270 AD through 1974, facilitated the fusion of church and state, and most notably, served as the basis for Abyssinia’s European-backed crusades at the end of the 19th century that would lead to the formation of modern Ethiopia as a prison house of nations.

The Kebra Negast, in essence, named the leaders of “Ethiopia” as the direct descendants of the biblical Ancient Israel. It appropriated the name Ethiopia from the Bible’s Psalm 68:31, which proclaimed that “princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” 

As the epic is told, on a delegation to Israel, the Queen of Sheba (of “Ethiopia”) was wooed by King Solomon of Israel, and they had a night of passion. Back in Ethiopia, she had his child. She named that child Menelik, and when he grew up, Menelik traveled to Jerusalem to meet his father, Solomon. Solomon then recognized Menelik as his favorite child and tried to convince him to stay to be his heir. Menelik refused, opting instead to return to his mother. Resigned, Solomon sent Menelik away with a large company, including the first-born sons of his nobles and a congregation of Hebrew priests. Resentful that they were forced to leave Jerusalem, the priests smuggled with them the Ark of the Covenant, a gold chest that bore the very tablets that God himself inscribed the Ten Commandments in. When Solomon discovered the theft, he attempted to pursue them, but the ark’s divine power miraculously flew Menelik and his entire party to Ethiopia unscathed.

According to the legend, since then, the ark has been held in the Cathedral of St. Mary of Zion in Axum, located in modern Ethiopia’s northern Tigray province. Today, a constant stream of the devout huddle in the cathedral or congregate outside to bask in its glow. However, nobody besides the Guardian Monk (the highest ranking priest tasked with watching the ark for life) is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies where the ark is housed. All others, according to the Hebrew Bible, are strictly forbidden from looking at the ark lest they be struck dead by God.¹ Ethiopian Orthodox churches across Ethiopia and throughout the world are constructed as models of Solomon’s temple and contain within them symbolic replicas of the ark.  

Thus, Ethiopia’s mythical relationship to Ancient Israel is consecrated through Menelik I, the Ark of the Covenant, its Orthodox churches made in the image of Solomon’s temple with replicas of the ark, and the distinctive Hebrew traditions, practices, and language imbued within Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity itself.

The story of the Kebra Negast, placed alongside an excerpt from the Jewish text Midrash Tanchuma, shows clearly how Ethiopia as the holder of the ark meant it could best Ancient Israel and situate itself at the center of the universe:

As the navel is set in the center of the human body, so is the land of Israel the navel of the world; it is situated in the center of the world, and Jerusalem in the center of the land of Israel, and the Temple in the center of Jerusalem, and the Holy of Holies in the center of the Temple, and the Ark in the center of the Holy of Holies, and the foundation stone before the Holy of Holies, because from it the world was founded.²

Wielding the Kebra Negast

In the centuries following the Kebra Negast’s completion, the Abyssinian aristocracy, priests, and nuns acted as if they were descendants of the Ancient Israelites. Kings and emperors viewed themselves as Kings of Zion and they invoked Solomonic descent through their names and titles. Zara Yaqob of the 15th century wrote theological treatises that framed Ethiopia as the Ark’s resting place. Emperor Yitzhak (Isaac), took his name from the Hebrew Bible’s Isaac, a founding figure of Judaism. And centuries later, there was Menelik II, the emperor that carried out the European-backed crusades against the Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other nations at the end of the 19th century to establish the foundation of modern Ethiopia. 

The significance of Menelik II’s name was that, while wiping out the people in the south and east,³ sending Black Abyssinian settlers from the north into their lands to enslave them,⁴ carving out his gains alongside the European powers in the Berlin Conference,⁵ and mass–converting the survivors from their Indigenous religions and Islam to Orthodox Christianity,⁶ he was legitimizing his claim as the direct descendant of Menelik I, the prized child of King Solomon of Ancient Israel. Thus, contemporary with the genocide of Palestinians and occupation of Palestine by Jewish Political Zionism was the genocide and occupation of the Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other nations by Ethiopian Zionism.⁷

The Ethiopian Jews

All of this is to say nothing of the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews who reside near Gondar in Ethiopia’s northern Amhara province. The Beta Israel are both a source of legitimacy to Ethiopia’s claims to descent from Ancient Israel and a source of revulsion, given that Jews are viewed by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians as the betrayers of Christ.

To the Ethiopian Zionists, possession of the Ark, the Beta Israel’s habitation in Ethiopia, and the existence of Ethiopia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity is proof that the Jews of Ancient Israel were “restored” and perfected through their religion. In contrast to European Christian Zionists who played a crucial role in establishing ‘israel’ in Palestine (such as Arthur Balfour and Reverend William Hechler), who believed the world’s Jews must return to Palestine to eventually convert to Christianity and usher in the second coming of Christ, Ethiopian Zionism already proclaims itself the final, perfected version of Israel. Zion, not in waiting, but already fulfilled.

As the Kebra Negast reads:

The daughters of Jerusalem suffered disgrace, and the daughters of Ethiopia were held in honour; the daughter of Judah was sad, whilst the daughter of Ethiopia rejoiced; the mountains of Ethiopia rejoiced, and the mountains of Lebanon mourned. The people of Ethiopia were chosen [from] among idols and graven images, and the people of Israel were rejected. The daughters of Zion were rejected, and the daughters of Ethiopia were honoured; the old men of Israel became objects of contempt, and the old men of Ethiopia were honoured. For God accepted the peoples who had been cast away and rejected Israel, for Zion was taken away from them and she came into the country of Ethiopia.⁸

The Beta Israel endured brutal conditions in Ethiopia. Many of them looked to the Yishuv (early Jewish settlements in Palestine) and later, the newly emerging ‘israel.’ Over time, they saw it as their promised land and in small pockets began to “make Aliyah” — to flock there — undermining Ethiopian Zionism’s narrative of the perfected Zionist entity and bolstering israel’s claims to embodying Eretz Israel, the land of return for the world’s Jews. Given the Beta Israel were considered the world’s oldest practitioners of Judaism, their allegiance lent gravity to whoever could win it.

In fact, on his first visit to Jerusalem in 1924, Haile Selassie (at the time known as the Crown Prince Tafari Mekonnen under Empress Zewditu) rebuffed an inquiry by the Chief Rabbinate of the Yishuv into improving the lot of the Beta Israel. “The history of the Ethiopians and Israelites indicates that these two nations are similar in race… in regard to the Jews known as [Beta Israel] and located in Ethiopia, we will always try to give them our help and protect them from every evil,” he replied.⁹ Holding fast to its Zionist claims, for many more decades, Ethiopia would refuse to give its stately blessing for Beta Israel migration despite ongoing israeli pressure.

Simultaneous Crisis Draws Together the Twin Zions

In October 1935, the Italians unleashed a full-scale attack on Ethiopia as a prelude to World War II. Oromos, who since the era of Menelik bore a deep resentment for Abyssinian rule, seized the moment to reclaim their lost freedom. In 1935, the Raya and Azebo Oromos attacked the Abyssinian armies traveling to and from the Battle of Maichew. In 1936, the Oromo of Jimma attacked and expelled Amhara officials and thereby demonstrated their rejection of colonial rule. In western Abyssinia, the hereditary rulers of the Oromo declared their independence and formed the Western Oromo Confederation (WOC), offering themselves as a mandate territory of the League of Nations.¹⁰

The same year the WOC was formed, Emperor Haile Selassie, by then known as the “Lion of Judah,” fled Ethiopia, avoiding Raya and Azebo Oromo land as he left. In his crisis, the first place he went was to Jerusalem. He arrived just as the Palestinians had initiated their general strike and began their armed struggle in what would be known as the Arab Revolt.¹¹ Selassie, who only years prior had codified in the 1931 Ethiopian Constitution his descent from Solomon and Sheba,¹² arrived to a wave of sympathy from the Zionist press.¹³

The struggle of the Oromo and Palestinians had created their respective antagonists’ crises and made their need for unity apparent. Even then, Selassie still held fast to Ethiopia’s ancient claims to the Beta Israel and Judaism while casting the Yishuv as simply a nascent phenomenon. In a prepared speech to the Hebrew press, he asserted:

I visited the Land of Israel in 1924, and I find that there is great progress in this country. I know that the Jews are quiet people and dedicated to peace. Of course it is also known to you that in Ethiopia there are Jews of an ancient race who live in complete harmony with all others. They preserve their religious traditions and no one hinders them. Please know that we appreciate the support that the Jewish people have expressed for Ethiopia, and we hope that the Jewish press will continue to support us.¹⁴

Of course, such struggle between Zionisms coexisted with a necessary unity imposed by heightening struggle from without. David Ben-Gurion, later the first prime minister of israel, recognized that the crisis in Ethiopia was also a crisis for the Zionists in occupied Palestine:“We knew that what is going on in the world has an impact on what we do in the Land of Israel. That beginning of the crisis should be seen not as April 19th [the outbreak of the Arab Revolt], but in what happened a few months earlier in Ethiopia.”¹⁵ 

A resolution was worked out. Orde Wingate, the same Christian Zionist British captain who formed the Haganah (the precursor to the israel Defense Forces) that crushed the Arab Revolt, a hero to the architects of the Palestinian Nakba,¹⁶ would enter Ethiopia in 1940 to lead the force that defeated the Italians and restored Selassie to the throne.¹⁷  In Wingate’s own words, it was “for the sake of Zion.”¹⁸

The Beta Israel Exchange

Decades later, when the military government that deposed Selassie had its back to the wall, owing to the national liberation struggles of the Eritreans, the Oromo, the Somali, and the Tigray nations, Ethiopia would begrudgingly use the Beta Israel as a bargaining chip. So long as it was done in secret, to avoid tarnishing Ethiopia’s Zionist claims and undermining its credibility to the oppressed world that had taken up anti-Zionism, israel could receive loyal new Black Jewish settlers, who themselves gained in escaping their oppression in Ethiopia. In the act itself, Ethiopia laundered the racial cover it received on the world stage to israel — and conveniently at a time when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had made inroads into Black Amerika¹⁹ and israel faced the wrath of the world for its support of apartheid South Africa. The Beta Israel then settled Palestinian lands, filled the ranks of the occupation army, and took up highly visible political and cultural posts. In return, Ethiopia received weaponry, security expertise, and economic aid to crush the rebellion of the oppressed nations within itself.

Ironically, the brutal, racist israeli state would come to treat the Beta Israel just as poorly as the Ethiopians did. Given that many of the Beta Israel fled persecution to a promised land, they were unquestionably loyal to the israeli Zionist cause. It meant that, even if most of them would come to face abject conditions — from forced sterilizations, to staggering poverty, and rampant police killings — their propensity for revolt was quite low. Thus, while Ethiopia could acquire from israel the means to extinguish the oppressed — primarily the Oromo — the Beta Israel were a useful dumping ground for antagonisms borne from the struggle of the oppressed — particularly the Palestinians. In this regard, the two entities quite literally reinforced each other.

Tewodros’ ambition

The Deir-al-Sultan Monastery

Though Abyssinia (the northern entity that preceded modern Ethiopia) had all the makings of Zion, the one thing it lacked was direct control over the holy city of Jerusalem, which it claimed descent from. Since Christianity was embraced in Abyssinia as early as the 4th century, Jerusalem held a special place in Abyssinian culture, with monks and pilgrims flocking to the city and dwelling there. In the late 12th century, King Lalibela built his own version of Jerusalem in his capital of Roha. Exchange flourished for centuries until Abyssinia’s decline upon defeat by Ahmad Gragn of the east, who occupied its highlands beginning in 1527, as well as the rise of Ottoman rule in Palestine. In this period, Abyssinian presence in Jerusalem became reduced to one monastery known as the Deir-al-Sultan.

The Deir-al-Sultan sits on the roof of the Chapel of Saint Helena that was part of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City. For some time, Abyssinia’s claim to the Deir-al-Sultan served as a powerful symbol of its historic ties to the city. However, in 1838, a plague wiped out its monks, and with permission from the Armenian Patriarchate, the Egyptian Coptic monks in the neighboring monasteries moved in and laid claim to the Deir-al-Sultan.²⁰ Three years later, a new group of Abyssinian monks arrived and accused the Copts of unfairly seizing the site. This marked the beginning of a long-term conflict.

The Rise and Fall of Tewodros II

In this period, a man by the name of Kassa rose to power, inheriting a weak, divided Abyssinia. An ancient prophecy, known as Fekkare Iyasus (The Explanation of Jesus) foretold that a king named Tewodros would save Ethiopia from destruction and rule for around 40 years.²¹ Kassa harkened back to this prophecy and took the name of Emperor Tewodros II.

Upon taking power, Tewodros II wielded this divine mission to grease the wheels of his imperial ambitions. He revived vigor around the Kebra Negast and sought to reclaim the Deir-al-Sultan, on which the Ottoman Turks sided with the Egyptians.²² This was considered a great humiliation and drove Tewodros II’s burning desire to take Jerusalem by force.²³ While ensnared in war on all fronts, in October 1862, he sought sympathy from Queen Victoria as a fellow Christian monarch and a self-professed descendant of Ancient Israel and wrote to her:

Since my ancestors, the kings, have until now offended our creator. He had handed their kingdom over to the [Oromo] and the Turks. But now, ever since I was born my Creator has raised me from the dust and given me power and placed me over the kingdom of my ancestors. By the power of God, I have dislodged the [Oromo]. But when I told the Turks to relinquish the soil of my fathers they refused; and so, by the power of God, here I am about to struggle against them.²⁴

Before Tewodros II could even dream of Jerusalem, he faced many obstacles, including Oromo militias in Wollo, rebellious nobles in Tigray, Egyptian pressure from Sudan, and Ottoman expansion along the Red Sea coast. He could not defeat them all. In fact, the Foreign Office in London failed to even pass the letter to the Queen,²⁵ given it sought appeasement with the Ottomans who occupied Jerusalem. Evidently, Tewodros II was not an ally but a nuisance. As a last ditch effort, Tewodros imprisoned missionaries and representatives of the British government. In response, a British expedition led by General Richard Napier faced Tewodros II in the Battle of Magdala in 1868. The British defeated his forces and freed the hostages. Rather than surrender, Tewodros II committed suicide, ironically with a pistol gifted to him by Victoria.²⁶ His dream was to remain unrealized.  

In Lieu of Conquest

Licking their wounds, subsequent emperors and rulers would have to abandon direct conquest of Jerusalem and opted instead to shore up Abyssinian presence elsewhere in Jerusalem to lend credence to its claims of having direct, holy ties to the city. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Abyssinians acquired houses and lands in west Jerusalem. Meanwhile, a succession of emperors built Solomonic churches and monasteries, such as the Debre Genet monastery, and many other buildings. By 1905, the Ottoman authorities designated this part of Jerusalem as Haret al-Habash, what is known today as the Ethiopian compound centered on Ethiopia Street, a lasting imprint of Ethiopian Zionist claims to descent from Jerusalem.

The fate of Deir al-Sultan’s keys remained in flux for another century after Tewodros II’s death. Diplomatic struggle over the monastery occurred throughout, including on Selassie’s 1924 tour when in Cairo he submitted a request for the keys directly to the highest level of the Coptic Church and the Egyptian Prime Minister.²⁷ Of course, he was resoundingly rejected and would not see success until the later period of his reign. In the meantime, he sought conciliatory measures, such as an arrangement with the Greek Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem where he acquired a room in the monastery of Abraham which was connected by a door to the Deir-al-Sultan — among other backroom deals.²⁸ These were, of course, token arrangements.

The Forging of Twin Struggles, 1960s-1970s

The Naksa

Palestine and Oromia would see a new period of converging struggle. At the end of 1964, the Palestinian national liberation movement’s Fateh began launching guerrilla offensives against israel under the front organization Al-Asifa. Al-Asifa’s first communique proclaimed:

From our people, steadfast to the limit, and from the conscience of our battling homeland, our revolutionary vanguards burst out, believing in the armed revolution as the way to Return and to Liberty, in order to stress to the colonialists and their henchmen, and to world Zionism and its financiers, that the Palestinian people remains in the field; that it has not died and will not die.²⁹

In this mounting struggle, israel retaliated against the guerillas and neighboring Arab states. Syria and Jordan especially were caught in the middle and vacillated between supporting the Palestinians and fighting against them. This escalated into the Six Day War in 1967 and culminated in the Naksa — the day of setback. Here, israel, in conventional warfare, defeated Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq in six days. It captured the Golan Heights, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and Sinai. Up to 325,000 Palestinians were displaced. Though 1967 was a setback, it opened the way for the Palestinian guerillas to take leadership of their own struggle and break away from the humiliated Arab armies.

Macha-Tulama and Bale

Along with the Palestinians, Oromos had their own developments in the 1960s. In 1963, Oromo intellectuals, army officers, soldiers, students, and merchants used a loophole in Ethiopian law to form the Macha-Tulama Self-Help Association. In its constitution, the Association established two objectives: First, to establish schools, health clinics, and roads in Oromia where they were needed. Second, to build churches and mosques while provisioning financial and legal assistance for disabled and unemployed people.³⁰ In essence, “the first set of objectives aimed to improve the welfare of the Oromo nation; the second sought to mobilize the Oromo people toward a common goal by undermining the colonial policy of divide and rule based on religion, class, and region.”³¹ The Association achieved such widespread popularity that within three years, membership reached more than two million.³² It was effectively operating as “a government within a government.”³³ And among its membership were not just Oromos but were 26 leaders from other colonized nations brought to heel under Menelik II, including the Afars, Sidamas, and Walayitas.³⁴

During this time period, Oromo peasants in eastern Bale began a massive armed rebellion against land alienation, heavy taxation, maladministration, and Ethiopian occupation as embodied in the presence of Amhara landlords. In the rebellion, the movement’s leaders united the Oromo with Somalis under the banner of Islam to fight the Ethiopian state. Together, they mounted decimating attacks on landlords concentrated in the local towns.³⁵ The landlords were no match for the peasants, who used guerrilla tactics and at one point held 75% of the Bale region while encircling the provincial capital of Goba.³⁶

The two movements in Bale and Macha-Tulama weren’t only simultaneous, but actively linked up and coordinated with each other. Ahmed Buna, a schoolteacher and member of the Association who would go on to co-found the Marxist Oromo Liberation Front, smuggled the leaders of the Bale armed resistance to Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) in 1965. While there, the leaders discussed how best to coordinate their activities. Mamo Mazamir, one of the revolutionary members of Macha-Tulama involved in the discussions, lucidly analyzed the Oromo struggle and pledged solidarity with the rebels of Bale:

The history of mankind shows that a people who rise in the struggle for freedom and independence, in defiance of death, are always victorious. The life and death struggle of the oppressed masses in the Ethiopian Empire against the hegemony of the Amhara and their allies headed by American imperialism is a sacred liberation struggle of millions of oppressed and humiliated people. That struggle will surely intensify in the course of time, as the oppressed peoples organizational means and consciousness become deeply rooted. As learnt in discussions, the Macha and Tulama democratic movement, which was created to raise the consciousness of the Oromo people is in the present situation working day and night to put in hand coordination activities that are within our reach. In fact, the militant members are working now on the means of organizing a nationwide people’s movement which is based on realizing the aspirations of Oromo people. Please, keep up your heroic armed struggle, defending every inch of the Oromo nation to the last drop of your blood. The decisive war of resistance you are conducting in Bale will, despite the maneuvers of imperialism, Zionism and local reaction, be victorious. We shall continue doing everything we can to keep in touch with you.³⁷

The communique from Al-Asifa and these words from Mazamir demonstrate that the Oromos and Palestinians were two fronts of the same struggle. They were both conscious of themselves as nations with a right to self-determination and they knew that their enemy was imperialism and Zionism. And in the exact same moment, the two fronts were unleashing a struggle to the death to liberate themselves from Zionist imperialist oppression.

Eventually, Ethiopia, whose intelligence by that point, according to an israeli historian, was “literally run” by israel,³⁸ were able to crush the Macha-Tulama movement by framing, torturing, and killing its leaders.³⁹ With the help of the israeli counter-insurgency and Anglo-American demolitions experts, it defeated the Bale Revolt,⁴⁰ and left over 700,000 dead.⁴¹ From this defeat, the Oromo peasantry suffered; 36.5% of the administrated land in the district where the rebellion emerged was confiscated by 1968. By 1970, the leaders of the Bale Revolt negotiated amnesty for themselves and ended the revolt.⁴²

A Resolution Between the Twin Zions

That same year, the israeli government, newly bolstered by its spoils from the 1967 war, marched in, changed the locks of Deir-al-Sultan, expelled the Coptic monks, and handed the keys to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, even defying a ruling by the israeli Supreme Court to return the key to the Egyptians.⁴³ That lock-changing marked a resolution in Ethiopia’s century-long pursuit of the Deir-al-Sultan key that spanned multiple emperors and rulers. And by doing so, the two powers did not just merely resolve a monastic dispute, but through defeat of Palestinian and Oromo resistance movements, and the conquest of their respective lands, consecrated formal unity between the Ethiopian myth of Solomonic descent and the israeli Zionist myth of Jewish return.

Of course, the driving force of their convergence was not conspiracy, but the struggle of the Oromo and Palestinians that drew them together. The two entities were forced to an agreement that could accommodate both Zionisms, a necessary qualitative leap in unity between the two oppressors.

Meanwhile, capturing Jerusalem brought sheer ecstasy for the israeli Zionist project and gave it a base to further expand its territorial ambitions. In Ethiopia, the access to the Deir-al-Sultan similarly brought celebration and helped cement its spiritual claims to Ancient Israeli descent. With this arrangement, when israel strengthened, it could only legitimize Ethiopia more. It was in Ethiopia and israel’s utmost interest to band together to crush the Oromo and Palestinians.

In the diplomatic realm, such mutual interests of Ethiopia and israel were referenced through incessant overtures to an “ancient” relationship stretching back to Biblical times.

The Birth of the Oromo Liberation Struggle and Contact with Palestine

The embryo of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) was within the Macha-Tulama movement. Its primary founder, Baro Tumsa, became an active member of the association as a student, where he served as a legal advisor while also coordinating the youth wing.⁴⁴ Goaded on by the government’s escalating violent suppression of the Macha-Tulama movement, Baro and his comrades formed clandestine study circles while secretly distributing propaganda.⁴⁵ They established relationships across Oromo society within and without Oromia, including with Oromo students at Haile Selassie University who played a central role in the student movement that toppled the emperor in 1974.⁴⁶ Similarly, they established relations with other colonized nations, such as the Sidama and Afar, and other liberation fronts, such as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF).⁴⁷

At the same time, Oromo revolutionary Elemo Qilxu, who was living in Aden, Yemen, established relationships with the Yemeni, Syrian, and Iraqi governments, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF).⁴⁸ Other Oromos received military training in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Iraq, and Syria. They opened offices in several Southwest Asian and North African countries already aiding Palestine, most notably in Damascus and Beirut.⁴⁹ In 1969, Abbaa Gadaa Jaarraa and others went to Iraq to receive guerrilla training for seven months.⁵⁰ Then, on their journey to Hararghe in East Oromia, Jaarraa and 38 other fighters were captured, disarmed, and imprisoned by the Somali government for five years.⁵¹

In 1972, Baro sent Getachew Baissa, Mitiku Terfassa, and Yusuf Bakar through Somalia to receive military training in Vietnam, the DPRK, China, and throughout SWANA where they learned from Palestinians. The Somali government, then led by Siad Barre, which at the time possessed its own Pan-Somali ambitions in reuniting Ethiopia’s Ogaden region and East Oromia with itself, refused to help the three. Only Bakar was able to make it to Yemen, while Getachew and Mitiku returned to Oromia.⁵² Years later in 1975, Baro sent a second delegation of six Oromo university students to Somalia to receive training and secure support for the Oromo national movement. These were Muhee Abdo, Aboma Mitiku, Demisse Techane, Zakariyas Hassan, Hashim Gobana, and Mohammed Ibrahim Khalil. The Somali government rebuffed them and advised them to go to Aden to work with Bakar. [53]

Unperturbed by the Somali government’s arrest of Jaaraa, Elemo persisted on, traveling to Finfinnee to link up with the emerging Oromo political group led by Baro Tumsa, which formed the central coordinating body of the OLF in 1974.⁵³ From there, Elemo moved east to begin the armed struggle against settler colonialists between 1973 and 1974. In these early battles, Elemo and five others were killed, causing the group to disband. But, not before they killed or wounded several enemies.⁵⁴ Out of this early armed struggle, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) was formed.⁵⁵

In 1974, the Ethiopian emperor Selassie fell to a tidal wave of discontent. In the power vacuum, the Derg military government seized control, while two Ethiopian political parties, the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON) and Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), contended with the burgeoning Oromo national movement. And though they called themselves socialists, what they both had in common was their rejection of the Oromo right to self-determination, decolonization, and the Oromo colonial thesis that stated that Ethiopia colonized the Oromo with the help of European imperialism, and imprisoned the Oromo and other nations during the Scramble for Africa.⁵⁶

While the OLF considered that the colonial question was principal, requiring either full separation of Oromia from Ethiopia or the establishment of a democratic multi-national federation or confederation, the Ethiopian socialist parties liquidated the Oromo question into a larger class question. They simply treated the Oromo land question as indistinguishable from the feudal question without the need for political self-determination for the historically oppressed Oromo nation. Given that many Oromo students and intellectuals were either thoroughly imbued with Ethiopianist ideology, or themselves possessed their own personal interests intertwined with Ethiopia, they joined these Ethiopian parties while deeming the OLF “narrowly nationalist.” MEISON would ally with the Derg and EPRP would lead the opposition to it. Both, unable to shore up the colonized majority due to their own chauvinism, would eventually be savagely liquidated by the Derg.

Thus, surrounded on all sides by a hostile military government, obstructionist neighbors, and settler “socialist” parties, in their May 1975 pamphlet, titled “The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation and Amhara Despotism,” the OLF clearly placed its liberation struggle right alongside the Palestinians. At the time, the Palestinians were similarly facing down Zionist occupation, betrayal from Arab regimes, and relying on allies ensnared in bourgeois state building.

In the pamphlet’s closing, the OLF resoundingly stated:

The enemies of our revolution are many, and they are organized under different banners of reaction, which could very easily be related to the root of settler colonialism. Hereby, we call upon all progressive Organizations and Democratic Forces to hear our battle cry for our political independence, progress, and Socialism. Thus, our struggle to deface the colonial aims and imperialist reaction will continue until victory. World progressive forces, unite and struggle for worldwide total victory. Long live the world struggle against imperialist forces and colonialism. Long live the Oromo people’s revolution. Long live the Palestinian revolution. Long live the Eritrean, Afar, Somali, and other oppressed peoples’ revolutionary struggles. And down with Abyssinian and Zionist settler colonialism. Down with imperialists and reactionaries. Ever forward with victory.⁵⁷

In sum, the OLF, the highest expression of the Oromo nation’s aspirations, saw itself as an inviolable pole in the anti-Zionist struggle, inseparable from the struggle of their comrades in Palestine.

All of the above, then, induces a series of questions. What could Zionism be but the mythological ideology of settler colonialism? What could support of Ethiopia be but support for Zionism and the occupation of Palestine from the rear? What could be the negation of Zionism but the struggle of the Oromo people, consciously and inviolably fused with that of the Palestinians?

References

1. 1 Sam 6:19 (English Standard Version). ︎
2. Midrash Tanchuma, Kedoshim, Buber ed., trans. John Townsend (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1989), Kedo. 10, https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma_Buber%2C_Kedoshim.10.2?lang=bi​​​​​​​ ︎
3. Harold Marcus, “Motives, Methods and Some Results of the Unification of Ethiopia during the Reign of Menelik II,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Haile Selassie University, 1966), 269–280. ︎
4. League of Nations, “Perpetual Servitude Resulting from Defeat,” Report of the Committee of Experts on Slavery, C.240.M.171.1935.VI (Geneva: League of Nations, 1935). ︎
5. Bonnie Holcomb and Sissai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1990), 103. ︎
6. Ibid, 289. ︎
7. Ibid, 71–125. ︎
8. The Kebra Nagast, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), chap. 87, 147–48. ︎
9. Haggai Erlich, Alliance and Alienation: Ethiopia and Israel in the Days of Haile Selassie (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2014), 28. ︎
10. Ezekiel Gebissa, “The Italian Invasion, the Ethiopian Empire, and Oromo Nationalism: The Significance of the Western Oromo Confederation of 1936,” Northeast African Studies 9, no. 3 (2002): 76. ︎
11. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 32. ︎
12. “The Constitution of Ethiopia,” 1931, https://ethcln.com/system/files/ethiopian-constitution-of-1931.pdf. ︎
13. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 35–40. ︎
14. Haaretz, May 19, 1936. ︎
15. David Ben-Gurion, lecture to the Council of the Histadrut, February 1, 1937, Ben-Gurion Archives, Item #88003. ︎
16. Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1972), 58–59. ︎
17. Simon Anglim, Orde Wingate and the British Army (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 57–144. ︎
18. Avraham Akavia, “Orde Wingate,” in The Friends of Israel (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1950), 94. ︎
19. “Jackson and Arafat Confer in Lebanon,” New York Times, September 30, 1979. ︎
20. Stéphane Ancel, “The Ethiopian Orthodox Community in Jerusalem: New Archives and Perspectives on Daily Life and Social Networks, 1840–1940,” in Ordinary Jerusalem 1840–1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City, ed. Angelos Dalachanis and Vincent Lemire (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 50–51. ︎
21. Ras Iadonis Tafari, THE EXPLICATION OF JESUS [Yeshua]: FIKARE IYESUS: A Raw Translation in English (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012). ︎
22. “The Amharic Letters of Emperor Theodros of Ethiopia to Queen Victoria and Her Special Envoy,” Journal of Ethiopian Law 14, no. 1 (March 1989): 115. ︎
23. “The Ethiopian Community in Jerusalem from 1850 to the Conference of Dar-el-Sultan 1902: The Political Struggle for Independence,” in Ethiopian Studies: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference, Tel-Aviv, 14–17 April 1980, ed. Gideon Goldenberg and Baruch Podolsky (Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema, 1986), 487–500. ︎
24. “Amharic Letters,” 115. ︎
25. British Museum, “Maqdala Collection,” Contested Objects Collection, accessed July 8, 2026, https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/maqdala-collection. ︎
26. British Museum, “Maqdala Collection.” ︎
27. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 28. ︎
28. Stéphane Ancel and Vincent Lemire, “Across the Archives: New Sources about the Ethiopian Christian Community in Jerusalem (1840–1940),” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 71 (Autumn 2017): 109. ︎
29. Mu’assasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyah, Al-Watha’iq al-Filastiniyah al-’Arabiyah li-’Am 1965 (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyah, 1965), 1. ︎
30. Asafa Jalata, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 75. ︎
31. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” American Journal of Islam and Society 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2009): 103, https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v26i3.385. ︎
32. Asafa Jalata, Baro Tumsa: The Principal Architect of the Oromo Liberation Front (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 131. ︎
33. Olana Zoga, Gizat na Gizot: The Macha-Tulama Association (Addis Ababa, 1985 Ethiopian Calendar), 37. ︎
34. Asafa Jalata, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 75. ︎
35. Mohammed Hassen, “The Oromo Nation under Amhara Colonial Administration,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44, no. 3 (1981): 36. ︎
36. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” American Journal of Islam and Society 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2009): 104, https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v26i3.385. ︎
37. Borana Tullu, “The Bale Oromos’ Armed Struggle, 1963–1970: A Basic Lesson for the Oromo National Liberation Movement,” Saba Oromo: The Journal of Oromo Students in Britain 1, no. 1 (1980): 25–26. ︎
38. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 137. ︎
39. Norma J. Singer, “Ethiopia: Human Rights, 1948–1978,” in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, ed. Robert L. Hess (n.p.: [s.n.], 1978), 663–678. ︎
40. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 26, no. 3 (2009): 104. ︎
41. Asafa Jalata, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868–2004 (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2005), 184. ︎
42. John Markakis and Nega Ayele, Class and Revolution in Ethiopia, 1st American ed. (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1986), 53. ︎
43. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 189. ︎
44. Asafa Jalata, Baro Tumsa: The Principal Architect of the Oromo Liberation Front (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 90. ︎
45. Ibid, 31. ︎
46. Ibid, 101–110. ︎
47. Ibid. ︎
48. Ibid, 181. ︎
49. Ibid, 155. ︎
50. Ibid. ︎
51. Ibid, 131. ︎
52. Ibid, 155. ︎
53. Ibid, 132. ︎
54. Ibid, 181. ︎
55. Ibid. ︎
56. Ibid. ︎
57. Oromo Liberation Front, “The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation and Amhara Despotism,” 9 May 1975. ︎

I love Iosif Stalin. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to write about Iosif Stalin. Not even Stalin himself knew how to write about Stalin, though he knew that Stalin the Figure was not Stalin the Person and behaved accordingly. In terms of the person, he left no diary or journal for his innermost thoughts, his personal letters were carefully guarded, and he was generally not one to doubt himself or write about doubting himself. Into this hole has flooded a deluge of words about Stalin’s personality and psychological makeup, like the nonsense spouted first prominently by Trotsky and Khruschev, and then remixed in a thousand variations by the liberal academic publishing complex. Needless to say, there are abundant biographies about Stalin, and few of them are serious and even fewer are good.

Most of the English-language biographies are on the level of Sebag-Montefiore’s orientalist Young Adult historical adventure fiction.¹ In terms of serious study, Stalin’s tenure in the USSR has gotten a better shake than the man himself, with the rise of the revisionist school of Sovietology in radical liberal academia (surprisingly, one man did not have absolute power over an entire society!).² And even from the Communist side, historical biographies of Stalin published during his rule took care to buff out his sharp points and polish his face smooth — as much as Stalin himself did not enjoy it, he resigned himself to becoming an idol for his people.³ Post-de-Stalinization defenders like Domenico Losurdo and Ludo Martens are much more concerned with Stalin and the USSR more broadly, than they are with the man himself, as a person.

Who the hell was Stalin? No one knows, I’m afraid. But there might be a good guess.

In 1987, Ronald Grigor Suny set out to write another Stalin biography to add to the pile of Stalin biographies in the world. It took him until 2020 to finish the project, as the Soviet Union collapsed in the interim. But besides the unpleasant fact of the capitalist holocaust, this cracked the former government’s archives open to Western scrutiny. Dr. Suny had a field day, digging through pretty much all documentary materials available on Stalin’s pre-revolution life, and produced a 896-page tome of Stalin’s life before the October Revolution. Good for him! He was lauded and attacked for his book, by the peanut gallery of respectable socialists and rabid anti-Communist dogs.⁴

Move over, Stephen Kotkin. Suny’s on the scene!

Suny’s book, based on his excessive archival trawling, makes the argument that the young Stalin can be divided into three phases of his life: Soso, the faithful seminarian, is not Koba, the unseasoned rebel, is not Stalin, the Marxist professional revolutionary. Suny, unlike pretty much every other Stalin biographer, actually has a wide breadth and depth of knowledge of the revolutionary Caucasus, which he exercises to great effect, filling pages on the nuances of Georgian Social Democracy and the various environments that Soso, then Koba, then finally Stalin moved through. He lays out in fine-grained detail how those environments shaped Stalin’s development, his personality, his preferences, and ultimately the man who would be the Stalin we all know and love (or hate) and how Stalin in turn impacted Georgian and Russian Social Democracy as an activist-organizer-revolutionary. How dialectical!

I imagine the book will be tedious for the reader who just wants to know what hijinks our buddy Koba is getting up to next. As an avid hoarder of facts, I really enjoyed those tangents on politics and culture. As distant as the Tsarist-Russian revolutionary milieu seems to us today, filtered through time and historical mythology, it is helpful to remember that these were ultimately just people trying to figure out how to win against their oppressors and then build the first long-lasting socialist experiment in human history. In other words, they had their own version of inane discourse and difficult personalities. The young Koba, too overconfident, kind of an asshole and schemer, is either relatable because you’ve been a Koba or you’ve had to deal with a Koba.

Though Suny is hostile to the later Stalin in power, he treats the young Stalin with a rare amount of care and empathy. Stalin’s personal life (or, whatever existed of a personal life for a professional revolutionary) is elaborated based on actual documentary evidence instead of the sensationalist rumor-mongering that Stalin biographers often indulge in and the real friendships that Stalin had at the time are named for what they were, even if they later ended very badly.

Where the book is weakest is towards its end, where Suny forecloses Stalin’s trajectory into the revolution eating its children, typical of academic petit-bourgeois pessimism. Trillions starved, etc. But arguably what is most valuable about this book is less than what it details about specifically Stalin’s early activities and personal development, but much more about what it details, through those long tangential passages, about the revolutionary Tsarist-Russian underground, about the cruel reality and life-or-death stakes of fighting an autocratic regime in a peripheral region of a reactionary empire, the nagging national question and the various ways that Communists reconciled (or didn’t) with national liberation, and yes, what it details about the nuances of party-building in Tsarist Russia and its borderlands. Suny commentates from outside these internal splits and dynamics within Russian Social Democracy with more than a century of ironic hindsight, but these are debates that the revolutionaries took seriously at the time and so does he. And so should we.

It would be preposterous to suggest that Tsarist Russia is a mirror of the modern day US Empire– and yet, the challenge remains the same for all Communists: how do we build the party to seize power from the bourgeois state? After all, if the particular characteristic of Tsarist Russia was the autocracy, then the particular characteristic of the US Empire is settler-colonialism, a kind of decentralized autocracy. Perhaps Stalin’s experiences in the underground organizing reading circles with students and workers, his brief stint with legal union organizing, his leadership of armed militias during the height of reaction, his activities as a Bolshevik traveling agent always one step ahead of the Okhrana, and finally his role as a tribune of the people in the interim between February and October provide a clue as to what Communists should expect from their work as the US Empire crumbles. Perhaps we should have a closer look at what it actually took to sustain an underground network and an aboveground movement and draw appropriate lessons from it for today, while keeping in mind that our adversaries are just as well-studied as we are.

In lieu of a numerical rating, I’ll tell you who I think should read this book: Baby Communists who only know the myths of anti-Stalin, obsessive enthusiasts of Soviet revolutionary history, active Communists engaged in the hardest questions of national liberation, and anyone who’s read any other biography about Stalin at all.

1. The clearest example of this is his Young Stalin (2007). This critique of Montefiore can be found almost verbatim in the pages of another of the Big Stalin Biographies, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power by Stephen Kotkin. ︎
2. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously is a group biography that argues that the functional dynamic of the top Stalinist leadership was as a team. Stalin was the team leader who delegated responsibilities and had final word on team inclusion or exclusion, but relied on the loyalty and agency of his teammates to carry out day-to-day governance. Stalin’s team did not mindlessly bend to his will; he had to argue his case convincingly and rely on a combination of argument and intrigue to get his team members on board with certain strategies or tactics. ︎
3. Briefly, for more on this, there are these two letters: (1925) and (1938). ︎
4. Funnily enough, Suny wrote about the reception that his book got in third person about himself. ︎

Editor’s Note: In the continued flood of members leaving the Party for Socialism and Liberation many have been earnest in their desire to ensure the movement can learn from this organization’s impending collapse. This week we are publishing five new letters outlining various struggles within the organization and its utter inability to solve any internal contradiction.

The first letter conveys the collective frustrations and justified disgust of a NYC District Committee elected by membership to advance base-building, and undermined at every turn by a “duplicitous” central leadership. The next perspective (as well as the last) outlines not only years long struggles between the Salt Lake branch of PSL and national leadership, but the utter lack of any kind of institutional structures to help local leadership through internal or external struggles. Rather than play a guiding hand, national liaisons actively undermined criticism and struggle in favor of putting personal and political differences under the rug—hoping that through liberal interpersonal kindness contradictions would cease and the branch would wholly submit itself to the whims of Brian and Ben Becker (read more here). A majority of the letter writers have spent a significant portion of their lives in dedication to this opportunistic and parasitic organization. Rather than making the most use of these dedicated comrades, national leadership and national liaisons found every way by which they could miss-place this revolutionary energy into work that will never bring about the authors’ revolutionary aims.

Despite the betrayal by this so-called party, some of these letters still express hope that the PSL is capable of change, and that the members within have the means to change it. This could not be further from the truth. The PSL is an opportunist organization of the highest order which fundamentally cannot be saved. As more and more information is brought to light on the undemocratic behaviors of the organization’s central leadership, cover-ups of abuse, refusals to engage in criticism or collective struggle, and the strict enforcement of settler lines on colonial and anti-imperalist questions—there can no longer be any doubt that the PSL exists solely as a mechanism to de-fang the revolutionary movement by misleading earnest radicals into a counter-revolutionary machine. If you are a member you must leave, if you’re a group of disgruntled members leave together and contact the All-Empire Worker’s League. It is time to bring an end to this bloated carcass of a so-called party, to leave it festering will only bring further rot to our revolutionary movement.

The letters have been reproduced nearly exactly as they were received. Minor corrections were made to formatting, citations where added for some quoted text, and names of local members have been redacted. Regarding the redacted names, abbreviated letters have taken their place and our editors have attempted their best to maintain consistency with the references to named individuals. There are a handful of exceptions, with important targets of criticism (Ben/Brian), as well as public figures within or formerly within the organization being fully named. Walter Smolarek’s letter, which is frequently mentioned in the following documents, was published last week by our Editorial Board.

To all those who have been harmed by the PSL’s actions, and its further in-actions, we give our love.

In Solidarity,

Editorial Board of Unity Struggle Unity

NYC District 1 District Committee Letter:

Dear comrades,

We are writing to submit our resignation as the District Committee (DC) of District 1 (Brooklyn and Staten Island) of the New York City Branch and as members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Each of us entered this organization with the intention of dedicating the rest of our lives to it because we genuinely saw it as the most viable vehicle for the advancement of socialism in the United States. We were thrilled to have been elected by our members on the specific, openly-stated mandate of advancing base building in our district. We are resigning because we have come to know with full clarity that it is impossible to carry out that mandate from within the PSL.

We have known for some time that there is an opposition to base building that goes to the top leadership of the PSL, and that the democratic space to put forth our ideas on their political merit is intentionally and underhandedly shut down, both of which we have each experienced individually and collectively. As leaders within the New York City branch, we work in constant close proximity to a clique of national leaders (they call themselves “the center”), headed by Ben and Brian Becker, who have their office here. Publicly and with general membership, they agitate about the need for the working class to get organized. Privately, they are generally hostile to deep organizing work in favor of an agitation-only approach: constant mobilizations, forums, tabling, and flyering. When the PSL creates new organizations, they are primarily as fronts for PSL agitation, rather than means of raising the organizational level of the working class as a whole. Because of the proximity of the NYC branch to this clique of national leaders, we do not functionally have a Steering Committee (SC) that is empowered to draw its ideas and analysis from its membership’s practical organizing or a concrete analysis of our local conditions. We are not provided the practical skills or orientation to durably organize the working class of New York City. Any promising attempts at this kind of organizing are intentionally undermined. This has led to the deep political underdevelopment of our branch.

Those of us who believed that there was any democratic space in our branch were thoroughly disabused of that notion by the NYC Branch Conference held this past March, the first ever such gathering in the history of the PSL. Its stated role was as follows:

1. To directly address the stated challenges and harness the immense potential of our growing branch, we take inspiration from the Party Congress and propose the establishment of an annually occurring Branch Conference. This conference will serve as a dedicated forum for strategic alignment, democratic deliberation, and collective leadership development.
2. The Branch Conference will be constituted by a broad representation of the branch’s membership and activity, representative of the branch’s on-the-ground realities and diverse experience.

Despite the above, which the membership voted to ratify at the Branch internal, previously the nominally highest body of the branch, the Branch Conference was a farce of democracy. None of the base building experience that had accumulated in our district, by far the largest of the 3 districts in the branch, was included in the topics of discussion. In response to the document one of our members submitted on the base building work in his unit, a member of the Central Committee (CC) privately characterized it as a sign of the “anarchistic” tendency in Brooklyn toward mutual aid in a remark to a member of the former D1 District Committee. The document was not taken up for discussion at the conference. During the conference, when our members contributed their views on why the branch should take up base building, another member of the Central Committee openly stated, “The PSL is not a base building organization.”

In sum, we learned that a separate, unelected body had decided on the entirety of the conference agenda, which they organized to favor lengthy presentations by members of the center led by Ben Becker, followed by relatively short periods of discussion. They also decided that we, as elected delegates to the Branch Conference, would vote on a series of resolutions in the final half-hour of the two-day conference, resolutions that reflected the presentations of the center and were crafted by the aforementioned unelected body. When delegates motioned to request clarification on, amend, or table these resolutions, Ben Becker angrily hovered over the mic, eventually castigating the delegate who motioned to table a resolution that mandated the NYC Branch to commit to funding “a new center” as a top priority, declaiming that he didn’t understand why any member wouldn’t immediately understand its necessity. Most delegates had just heard of “the center” for the first time that day, when it was mentioned during a fundraising presentation that preceded the vote on resolutions. When a delegate asked for some definition, another member of the Central Committee dramatically hushed the crowd. We were all left without any clarity on where the center ended and the leadership of the NYC Branch began. Although the delegates voted to put the resolution to a vote by the incoming Branch Committee, the resolution was never raised in that body and it was subtly alluded to at a Branch Internal to appear as if we had voted in favor.

Despite all this, we had believed that it was possible to protect the space within our district for deep, neighborhood-specific organizing work to continue and struggle for a political realignment of the organization based on comrades practical exposure and assessment of its value. However, as the results of this work and comrade’s confidence in it has grown, we have only faced increasing and more direct pressure to squander it from the Steering Committee, and members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee. Often this was done under the guise of directing us to cancel any local activities or otherwise divert the necessary forces from it for the sake of clumsy agitational initiatives, attending recorded webinars, or ensuring maximum member attendance at mobilizations that do not draw from the working class in neighborhoods we organize in. This was done by design, even as the number of members in our branch exceed 280. Other times this was said directly. In a private conversation with one DC member, Ben Becker derided mass organizing for “tethering us to the lowest common denominator of our class.” His disgust for our work and our class is truly appalling.

The open, undemocratic attempts this past week by the top leadership of the PSL to crush our work has pushed us to the breaking point.

Last week, we circulated a strategy document for our district, which was a normal act for an incoming leadership body whereby we undertook an assessment of the previous period that reflected the work of our members, in deep conversation with them, and produced a strategic orientation and an accompanying set of tactics by which they could concretely measure their work going forward. We simultaneously shared the document with our Steering Committee liaison. Instead of receiving our ideas as a valuable contribution to the organization, one of us was called into a meeting with our liaison to be definitively told that our district’s strategic orientation to base building represented a “departure” from the strategy of the New York City Branch, and the national strategy of the PSL. When asked for clarity on what that strategy was, our liaison described it as (limited to) intervening in spontaneous mass movements and agitating for socialism.

In our strategy document, we defined base building as “a historically communist, long-term strategy of increasing the relative organization and strength of our class through working alongside it, winning its credibility, and building our influence. Practically, this is accomplished by committing to particular local areas, weaving ourselves into the fabric of their struggles, earning the leadership of our class, and positioning ourselves to lead the uprisings to come.” We see base building as the only way to durably build the level of working class organization needed to eventually wage revolutionary struggle, and the only way to durably build mass socialist consciousness. Alongside communist cadre, our class must go through its own practical experience by which it comes to see the correctness of our ideas. Simply relaying those ideas is not enough. That is to say, we see base building as the only viable long-term means of achieving the PSL’s stated political program.

In the week following the distribution of our strategy document, the Steering Committee, which contains members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee, coordinated inactive rank-and-file members of the District to discredit the elected leadership of the district by disrupting the planned unit meeting discussions of the document, and further by sending this same group of members, which includes a current Steering Committee member, to disrupt our planned district retreat where we presented and facilitated discussion on the strategy document. After the retreat, we learned from multiple other comrades that this group had all been reading their talking points from a shared, pre-prepared document, and were text-coordinating throughout the meeting. These members have been entirely absent from any of the local, neighborhood work that the district has carried out the past year. For some of them, it was their first time attending any sort of internal Brooklyn meeting in years. The points they raised on both occasions were not based on the political merit of our ideas or the work of active district members, but instead relied on personal attacks against us and pulling rank based on seniority. At the retreat, when we presented a new mass organizing project that we are undertaking, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, for the first time to the whole district, this group sought to sour the broad member support for the project by launching pre-prepared attacks that accused us of wasting Party resources and “gaslighting” our members. Not only were these bad-faith criticisms based on distortions of our position, they were blatantly disrespectful to seven non-DC comrades who presented on the Freedom Center and to the others who had been leading this organizing and thoughtfully discussing and assessing this work for months. We were disgusted by this display of disrespect for our members and our class. It further cemented our certainty of the deep unseriousness of the leaders of this organization.

In addition to these open attacks, behind closed doors we have been undermined by the highest body of the entire national organization. We had invited (now former) Central Committee member Walter Smolarek to speak at our retreat, to which he accepted. We had cited his Liberation School article, “Dual Power and Serving the People in the U.S. Revolutionary Movement,” and experiences building the Philadelphia Branch in our strategy document and were excited for our members to hear remarks from a long-time national leader on why communists should care about the organizational level of our class, and for Walter to learn more about the base building projects in our district. Late into the night before our retreat, Ben Becker convened the Standing Committee of the PSL to vote to block Walter from speaking. We were not provided any explanation.

We were pushed over the edge by our experience at the Branch Committee meeting this week. Four of us are elected members of the Branch Committee and the remaining two are observers. At the meeting, we explicitly asked for clarification on whether the view of the Steering Committee is that our strategic orientation to base building is incompatible with the strategy of the branch and the party. While we had already accepted this, we owed it to our membership to raise this question with the highest body available to us. We also asked for an explanation of the attempt by the SC to undermine the democratic processes of the preceding unit meetings and district retreat, and for the author(s) of the shared talking points document to be identified, because rank-and-file comrades had raised this as a major concern. SC members lied to our faces about the coordinated nature of the attacks and avoided our question about the document entirely. Instead of providing clarity, the Central Committee members who participated in the discussion (with the exception of Walter) concealed their true views on base building, offering confused assertions that they were open to the deep organizing that has gained momentum in Brooklyn, but simply have concerns rooted in their political experience that base building doesn’t work. They concluded the discussion by asserting that it would continue within a smaller body, a future meeting between the SC and DC. The next day, Ben submitted a document to the Branch Committee that opens, “I’m all for neighborhood organizing.” We know this is another lie.

Following the BC meeting, Walter reached out to us. He shared his disgust at the duplicitous conduct at the meeting and informed us that many of the branch and national leaders present had been secretly strategizing for months to crush our neighborhood organizing and other PSL mass organizing efforts across the country. They have counter-organized members of the district to oppose this work. The recent Conference on Organization was designed with this purpose.

Further, Walter shared his resignation letter with us and plan to submit it. His experiences affirm so many of our own. One of us who is employed at the national office that houses some party staff, including members of the national leadership clique, has been repeatedly summoned to a Steering Committee member’s office to defend and explain decisions made by the DC and unit leads to prioritize their neighborhood organizing work. She has been reprimanded, told that these decisions are “unacceptable,” and pried for information. A number of us were previously members of other branches that have have historically had more autonomy, given their distance from these national leaders, and were shocked by the political underdevelopment of the NYC branch when we transferred. One of us has experience as a member of the SC of another branch, where he was directly told by Brian Becker that the branch had to cease its base building work in favor of an agitational flyering initiative.

We were outraged and horrified to learn that the national leadership has been conspiring behind our backs for months to put a stop to our district’s deep organizing work, and to crush the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, which our members have been building with great effort and political seriousness. We don’t see any point in continuing to engage in a farcical process to “resolve” our political disagreements with a leadership this duplicitous.

Our commitment to the members of our district, whether you choose to leave or stay, remains just as strong and sincere as it ever was. For a long time, we believed it was not only the best approach but our responsibility to shield you from the rot at the heart of this organization and the hostility of national leadership to your work. We wanted to protect the space for you to carry out the work you had seen was correct from your own practical experience undaunted by the serious deficiencies in the organization. We have reached the point where that is no longer possible. We have done our best to guide you through this period on the strength of your own practical experience and have reached the end of that runway. Now we must speak plainly. We do not see this organization as able to be reformed nor do we see the fundamental contradiction between base building and an agitation-only approach to be resolvable within it. We have taken the decision to resign with the utmost seriousness and consideration, not only for its implications for our lives, but that of our members, and our class, to whom we hold the highest fidelity.

We are so proud of the ways you have grown as leaders and organizers alongside us. The past several months of training ourselves to become cadre, organizers capable of helping our class to realize its power, and the beautiful, real work of building durable relationships with the organic leaders of our neighborhoods have forever fortified us with a living accountability to our class that far supersedes our commitment to the PSL. We understand why an undemocratic leadership who relies on our warm bodies to unquestioningly carry out their ideas would go so far to keep us from this work. The sober reality is that the ultraleftist rigidity they engender systematically underdevelops the organization and renders it incapable of becoming a serious political force in this country with a mass base. This deeply saddens us. And we agree with Walter that it would be irresponsible for us to continue building this organization.

Given the magnitude of our political difference with national leadership, the lack of democratic mechanisms to continue our work, and our real opportunity to start something new, we have decided to leave the organization with Walter.

We are setting out to continue our work and to build the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, an example of what we see as a definitive example of the next phase of our organizing: a mass organization that formally fuses cadre with the working class by way of base building. We have a proposed interim structure that will allow this work to continue, along with the base building work in Sunset Park, and for us to retain our community partners from across Brooklyn.

We hold great confidence in our ability to continue this work without the PSL. We have largely built it with our members and with our class without branch support in the form of connections, material infrastructure, ideological guidance, or practical skills, and with a great deal of constant undermining. We are excited about what we can build with full organizational focus and capacity.

In terms of what broader organizational form comes next, we second the point in Walter’s resignation letter about it being too early to announce a full political program, but we are committed to building a project on a national scale. We know this will be difficult, but as communists we are committed to doing the difficult, necessary thing, rather than remaining in an organization that we do not believe in and whose national leadership is conspiring to crush the strategic approach and work that we wholeheartedly believe to be politically and historically correct. We invite you to leave with us and we also invite you to continue working with us in good faith as members of the PSL if you see fit.

It has truly been the honor of our lives to serve as your District Committee.

With unshakeable conviction and revolutionary love,

Your D1 District Committee: D. K., E. C., J. R., J. M., M. T., and R. H.

L.M’s Letter:

Dear comrades,

I am writing to submit my resignation to the party.

I write to you with both regret and excitement. As a portion of my total life I have dedicated more of my life to the building of this branch than any other member in the organization. With the leave of absence of Comrade Q I have spent more time in the party than any active member. I was 19 years old when I joined the party eight years ago. I was arrogant and didn’t know anything about organizing besides my limited experience with Planned Parenthood. I was honored to be elected to our first Steering Committee despite being one of our youngest members. The party provided me a political home, tempered my dogmatic and idiosyncratic understanding of theory and provided me a structure. I have dedicated my life to the party and more importantly to the class struggle. When faced with the choice of going to college to further my career prospects or to continue my work leading the branch I chose the party. I simply don’t know what it means to operate as an adult outside of the party organization.

This is why I am filled with a great sense of regret. I wish the party were the organization I thought it was. I wish that we were engaged in the work promised to us when we were recruited. I joined as a part of the first wave of socialist revival in the late 2010’s. Since then the movement and in turn the party have grown considerably and I have become increasingly aware of the limitations of the party to grow into the organization our class deserves and so desperately needs. I will return to these limitations but I must relate to comrades that I have experienced periods of extreme demoralization, not at the state of struggle in the US or of the supposed “backwardness” of our class, but at the state of our party. I’m sure many in our branch have had similar feelings in recent years.

Attached to this document you will find two letters. In the first of which you will find the resignation of Comrade Walter Smolarek. A comrade who joined when I was in 4th grade learning basic algebra. You may know him as the longtime editor of Liberation News and the occasional host of The Socialist program. Smolarek lays out many of the political as well as democratic issues with the PSL. This is why my writing today also carries a great deal of excitement. When I read Smolarek’s letter I felt a deep sense of joy because he was expressing many of the same criticism’s of our party I harbored. I have always made it a point to read every critique of the party I can so I could make a sober assessment of them. I have always found them to be unfounded and based in liberal and anarchistic ideals, until now. Prior to reading Smolarek’s letter I had already been considering whether to break with the party for some time. There is understandably little literature on when and how to split with an existing party. Lacking historical reference I created a set of criteria as to when a split is not only the right of a member but their responsibility:

• The party is organizationally or politically heading in a direction contrary to goal of revolution.
• The party is functionally not capable of reform through ordinary means.
• The member(s) splitting are capable of effectuating a split which has real potential to serve the goal of revolution.

The first two conditions are dependent on one another. If an organization is moving away from its revolutionary goals but does present the realistic possibility of reform towards such ends it is the responsibility of members to struggle towards that end. Let me not be accused of ultra-democracy because I believe if an organization is moving towards revolution even if it cannot be realistically reformed it would be wrong to effectuate a split because in this case the reformers would be those trying to turn away from revolution. However let it be said that inability to reform can itself be a hindrance towards the goal of revolution, especially when that horizon is not close at hand. The final condition has less to do with whether a split should be pursued and more with when. For a while I have been convinced that the first two conditions were met by the PSL. It was only with Walter’s letter that I became convinced that the third condition was met. I could have attempted to form a split months ago but I hesitated at the possibility of any new organization being isolated and suffocated due to its lack of support. This is what I told myself but it would be disingenuous not to recognize some cowardice in being afraid to take the dedicated cadre to do the hard work of building a new organization.

There may be some of you who think that splitting is inherently wrong as it weakens socialist organizations. To this my only response is that the party would not exist without the split performed initially by Sam Marcy from the Socialist Workers Party followed by the split of our founders from the Workers World Party. So the question cannot be reduced to splitters or non- splitters and must be taken on the basis of ideology and organization.

The second letter is something I wrote almost two years ago addressed to the Steering Committee outlining what I saw as the limitations of democracy within our branch. Although the letter was unsent at the time because I determined that our leadership was already struggling against growing factionalism within our branch I have shared it with multiple SC members in the years since. The purpose of its inclusion is to show that independent from Smolarek comrades across the nation, comrades you know, have been coming to similar conclusions. That letter to the Steering Committee was limited by the fact that at the time I thought the party could be reformed and that I limited my criticisms to the branch rather than the organization as a whole. In this letter I will attempt to address these limitations.

The PSL tries to critique American liberal democracy for its emphasis on the form of democracy without its actuality. We critique the idea that democracy is an event recurring every 2-4 years when we vote for leaders. However in function we accept a level of democracy which acts exactly like this. There is no effective recourse to hold elected leadership to account. In the first place our constitution has certain provisions which allow existing leadership an insurmountable level of control over the democratic processes. This is not simply democracy under centralized guidance but a hollowing out of democracy as a meaningful force in our party. The provision in the constitution which allows the central committee to appoint up to 40% of the voting members of congress allows existing leaders to hold a strong(if not insurmountable) plurality. Theoretically this plurality can be overcome but it is practically immovable. In effect it means that those who wish to change the composition of leadership or oppose the CC’s position must work to convince more than 4.5 times as many delegates as the CC does.

This is not to say that the CC should not be able to appoint voting delegates. In the years that I worked on the National Fund Drive Central Committee(NFDCC) I could have been the most diligent and politically apt comrade imaginable but since this work would not have been done at the branch level it would not be factored into members choice on whether to select me as a delegate. So in this manner there is a real need for the CC to have some discretion on delegates but 2 out of 5 delegates is an absurdity. The basic argument surrounding such a provision is that it creates a level of continuity. We should not throw away the concept of continuity but we must ask to what degree should it be prioritized over our ability to grow our working class democracy alongside the movement?

Secondly although the CC does not control a majority through the appointments they are also benefited by other extra-constitutional undemocratic practices. Chiefly a lack of transparency in the workings of leadership. Lenin was consistent in critiquing both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cadet parties for their lack of transparency. It was a point of pride for Lenin that all the problems inside the RSDLP were being laid bare so that workers could make up their own minds about the leaders and misleaders in their movement. In my letter to the SC two years ago I predicted that without transparency the SC as a whole would lose its legitimacy in the eyes of members since they could not see if it was a specific member or group of members behind a wrong headed tactic. This is also true of our national organization. We are able to see the reports from congress but without an ability to see the debates behind the choices we are unable to hold specific leaders to account. If our delegate voted contrary to our revolutionary values how would we know? How would we hold them accountable when elections came around for the next congress?

This is not a hypothetical question. Few rank and file members are aware that at our last congress some members attempted in good faith to disagree with the position put forward by the CC on the question of how to position ourselves relative to artificial intelligence. If we thought the CC was incorrect or that they mishandled the disagreement how would we democratically attempt to change the direction of the party on this vital question facing our class? As Parenti once said, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input.”

It seems as though such accountability and debate are anathema to those who currently run our organization. In pre-congress docs for years we have been told about the goal to massify the party. It is my belief that it is impossible to massify the party if we do not have a means by which to absorb and resolve the debates which will naturally emerge amongst our class. People can accept defeat in a debate on a specific proposal but they cannot be expected to take part in building an organization which doesn’t have any means by which to have such debate.

Many members have made arguments about transparency in recent months. Many of them have been in good faith. However there are members who have raised the banner of transparency from the SC only when it could serve their careerist ends. When they were in leadership they took advantage of this obscurity to misrepresent their fellow leaders to members. However as soon as they found themself in the minority transparency was an ideal to be fought for? No I doubt they will follow us because the cause of democracy and debate was a means towards their egoistical ends.

It is in light of these and other facts that I make the choice to forge a new path outside of the party. It is a difficult step, it is a scary step and there is no guarantees about the future. But I feel I owe it to my class to take it. I have seen too many hard working and genuine comrades become burnt out and turning away from organizing entirely due to struggling against the sins of our party. This is why a wrongheaded party is not just a mistake but something to be fought against as it siphons limited energy from our class that can be harnessed toward revolutionary ends. I have seen many leaders resign quietly. I respect this choice but I think it makes it difficult for the movement to learn any lessons for the future. In leaving the party I think it is vital that we do the work to reflect on the failures and limitations of the PSL as well as its strengths. Dialectics requires that we see the necessity for the party at a specific juncture in history and absorb its strengths while leaving behind as many of its issues as we can.

I have witnessed resignations before and know I may be slandered for many things by the party. I know many of you are dedicated fighters for socialism even when we have disagreed we have fought side by side. My hopes are that even if we have disagreed in the past you will remember that I have always been open and honest about where I stand. I hope that this letter will help those of you who are dedicated to the class struggle to see the limits of the PSL. I invite you to embark with us on a new path to build the kind of organization we were promised when we were recruited.

In Solidarity,

L.M

D.W’s Letter:

Comrades I have chosen to submit to this branch as a whole my resignation, I have done this in violation of the constitution and by-laws because I agree with you all that our branch is in need of transparency to tackle the political disagreements that have paralyzed us for so long, and I believe comrades deserve to understand the type of organization that they are in. I know that this will be characterized in many ways, it may be described as uncomradely, it may be described as disagreement with the possibility of socialist revolution, it may also be characterized as an unwillingness to submit myself to democratic centralism or the will of the collective by accepting the outcome of the SC elections. I want to assure you none of these things are true. I declined nomination because I knew I couldn’t complete the term.

I joined the party 6 years ago because I believe that socialist revolution is not only possible, but that as a mother I have a life long duty to the struggle for socialism. It is not a matter of sentimentality but of practical necessity, it is in it’s actualization that my own children’s future becomes secure. In those 6 years I have spent 5 of them in various appointed and elected leadership roles the last 2 as a member of the Salt Lake Steering Committee. I have worked tirelessly to build our branch and the movement for socialism. I was the State Chair of the Vote Socialist Campaign, at my own expense I have attended international delegations, answered the call for out of state deployments, and earned the confidence of our comrades being elected as a delegate to the 6th Party Congress. I have not made this decision lightly, but I hope that by explaining how I came to it, each of you can make an informed decision as to where to direct your energy without false pretenses.

I am leaving the PSL because I no longer believe that it is capable of carrying out the tasks required of any party that hopes to call itself the vanguard, despite it’s ability to raise its profile and increase its ranks well beyond its current numbers. In my time in the branch there have been recurrent struggles over our approach to mass work and the actual practice of democracy within the party. Having to struggle through differing ideas about a question or practice isn’t inherently a problem. However I have seen how a lack of internal structures and an unwillingness of the National Party leadership to assert authority where necessary has allowed flagrant violations of our constitution and bylaws to occur on a regular basis with no accountability. I have seen over and over the tendency to smooth over disagreements and debates with rhetorical unity, obfuscating all manner of political differences. I have seen first hand how one on one conversations are used to prevent the emergence of disagreement, which almost always relegates the disagreement to the realm of the interpersonal. The consequences have been felt by everyone in our branch even though many of you lacked the information to understand what was happening. I will fully acknowledge that as a member of the Steering Committee I have participated in withholding information that I thought comrades deserved to have to make informed decisions, my only defense is that I did so inline with Party discipline and inline with the directives of the National Party leaders.

Many comrades trace the problems in our branch to the retreat after the Palestine movement began to fade. The issue of democratic participation in discussion and debate, and the responsibility of comrades to carry out the resulting work according to the principles of democratic centralism has long been a flash point. It was the final iteration of housing unit work building the Tenants Union of Salt Lake that offered us the first real test of party structures from my experience. This period in our branch was marked by lively debate in our units and a high level of engagement from rank and file members, members in the units had a high degree of input on how work was unfolding within the confines of building out the tenants union. As a member of the Extended Steering Committee and a lead of the housing unit I attempted to resolve a question about our strategy towards developing TUSL between my unit and SC members in the unit. We had diverging positions and ideas about the appropriate way to move forward so I attempted to resolve the disagreement through all of the channels available, using our constitution and by-laws to guide me.

After having several questions taken to a vote in our unit with the SC members in the minority, our unit attempted to carry out our collective decision, members of the SC used their influence to formally and informally encourage comrades to carry out the work in the way the minority voted. When this was raised to the full Steering Committee in an Extended Steering Committee meeting, it was decided that I would develop a proposal laying out the concrete path we would take to build TUSL, and the SC and Extended SC would vote on it to end the debate. The proposal that I put forward was adopted by the full Steering Committee and immediately SC members in the unit started advising the unit to carry out work in contradiction to the adopted proposal. In response I planned to call a branch meeting on the basis that the branch meeting is the highest body of the branch where I planned to call for a branch vote on the strategy of TUSL. Up to this point the Steering Committee members in the housing unit had pushed for disagreements between comrades to be resolved through informal one on one or small group discussion until they reached consensus instead of encouraging the debate and differences to be clearly discussed in the unit meeting for all members to understand. My position was that if a disagreement existed among the leadership body of the branch and the membership we should be open with the branch about what those disagreements were. Not only so that we could gain the input of the branch but so comrades could adequately assess the decisions of the leadership body and the individual members elected and appointed to it.

Through out this time I was engaging in debate and struggling openly about the direction that we went, however my genuine political disagreement was treated first as irritation, then as an interpersonal clash, and eventually as full blown insubordination and subversion of Party norms. While leadership was understandably frustrated that the branch was bogged down in internal conflict, the position I was putting forward was that in a democratic centralist organization we are expected to have intense debates and disagreements and when consensus cannot be reached we should vote and all be held accountable to carrying out the decision reached by the majority. Given that I had seen members of the SC refuse to accept the decisions of the majority in their unit, gossip about comrades, and move to overturn a decision they didn’t personally agree with, I lacked trust that leaders in our Party are actually accountable to the principles of democratic centralism in practice.

My insistence on bringing this disagreement to the full branch would also mark my first experience with members of the National Organization Department coming to SLC to resolve internal dysfunction. During that visit our liaisons met with the extended steering committee and asked why we were pushing for our proposal to go to a branch vote, I told them I believed I was following the method laid out in the constitution for resolving disagreements like this, I was told that the language of the “branch being the highest body” does make it my right as a member to bring any decision before the branch to vote on, but that isn’t how we handle things in reality. I agreed not to bring the proposal to the branch and our national liaisons helped us come up with a plan for moving TUSL forward which I took up enthusiastically, shortly after their visit the Steering Committee removed me from my role as deputy of the housing unit and removed Liz as the lead. Along with other long time members of the housing unit who had sided with my position in the debate, we were removed from housing work all together. There was never a reason given other than the Steering Committee had decided to do a branch reorganization and that is what the needs of the branch called for.

I must admit that my removal from housing work was a deep blow it was an area of work I’d done since before joining the party, I wrestled with feeling wronged and lied to and I questioned if the Party actually operated the way leaders said it did. I reflected and decided I could look at my removal from housing work as a personal attack, or I could see it as an opportunity to show the members of leadership that viewed me as combative that I was serious about party discipline. I put my all into developing the first iteration of an organized comms team in the branch right before the Palestine struggle would start picking up momentum. The uptick seemed to settle tensions in the branch for a while, we got into a regular work flow but as the movement endured for months we were faced with the question of developing a strategy for our work in the Palestine movement. This was something that the SC said they did not have the capacity to develop and said that it would have the unit take up. Myself and another leader developed a proposal that the unit voted in favor of. This strategy was then challenged by members not in the unit at the behest of SC members in the unit who disagreed with the strategy and found it too confusing for people to understand. This led to the strategy being put up for a vote in a special meeting where anyone from the branch was able to attend. Before this strategy was able to be adopted we had the 2024 SC elections where 3 long time SC members left the Steering Committee. With the election of a new steering committee the contradictions left unresolved from disagreements over the correct approach to mass work and base building and the correct approach to developing political strategy again came to a head immediately.

The period following the election of the 2024 Steering Committee was marked with an extreme amount of disunity internally because it was grappling with it’s members D and K breaking party discipline and sharing internal SC deliberations with a former SC member X and her partner N. This led to a campaign to create a faction in the branch where D and X were hosting secret strategy retreats with student comrades without the knowledge of the elected steering committee. Simultaneously N and X were actively calling decisions made by the new SC into question before the full branch, and used their informal relationships to gossip and disparage the new SC to emerging student leaders. The refusal of a highly respected former SC member to accept the legitimacy of the newly elected SC, represented the first time the authority of an elected Steering Committee as a body would be challenged in the branch. We would later learn in early 2026 that these strategy calls with N and X, never stopped, but I’ll write more on that later.

Following the departure of X, K, and N from the branch D remained on the SC, without K on the SC and finding himself frequently in the minority, he continued to meet with student comrades attempting to counter organize against the decisions of the SC that he personally disagreed with. While Devin was not solely responsible for the hardened positions within the SC, his repeated violations of the constitution and by-laws represented the primary contradiction preventing our branch from being able to become unified around a shared path. This culminated in irrefutable proof that he had knowingly encouraged comrades in Mecha to call a counter event to one he knew the SC had just voted on calling. The SC and our liaison worked at length to consolidate the student comrades being influenced by these actions and open the door for any questions about what they had heard from D and others, our mistake was in not being absolutely clear about what was happening and providing our perspective so that comrades could decide for themselves what to believe. At the time talking about the specific violations comrades had been carrying out was seen as a threat to the unity of the branch and our ability to win over those student comrades, who through no fault of their own had been mislead by leaders of the branch that they trusted.

The lull in the Palestine movement in the summer of 2024 and the final stretch of the Vote Socialist Campaign would follow a familiar pattern, D, L, and, I found ourselves faced with similar questions, and similar diverging understandings of what it meant practically to apply the party line on mass organizing and how we prioritize the interests of base building with the interests of flexibility to respond to the surges of the protest movement or other national campaigns like Vote Socialist 2024. This was also when the branch formally started approaching CU. As I mentioned above D was not alone in hardening the positions in the SC, during this time he did have moments of explosive rage directed at him in SC meetings by L. Instead of being called out directly in those moments, L was privately talked to later about the need to engage with D constructively. Unfortunately the mediation with members of National that was meant to finally resolve the underlying diverging ideas on the correct path for our branch was not scheduled by them. D’s position was that the best tool to build a relationship with CU was TUSL, L and I advocated for us to build an organizational relationship with CU as PSL, our suggested first attempt was in the final weeks of the VS24 campaign, the SC had decided to launch a branch wide push directing all activities to tie back to promoting the campaign. D agreed to talk with B and feel out how she felt about us doing outreach for Salt Lake Immigrant People’s Agenda and sharing materials about the campaign too where it made sense, he also got approval from the SC to bring a handful of comrades to participate. After several outings and no discussion about the Vote Socialist Campaign going on between PSL and CU leadership, Liz and I pushed for us to pause trying to build the relationship with CU until after the election. This was met with resistance from D and meetings with the SC grew increasingly tense. Around this time the SC found out that Devin was hosting a private Black August event with student comrades to do an independent study on the National Question despite members of the NOD actively trying to discuss those questions and provide clarity on them from National. This was the final straw for the SC in which we demanded the NOD take some sort of corrective action towards the factionalizing being carried out by an active SC member.

As a consequence D was asked to stop attending SC meetings and informed by the NOD that he would need to participate in party work with CU accompanied by a comrade who could report back what happened to the SC. Following the election in November the branch launched into interest meetings and in January of 2025 began preparing for the Jan 20th inaugural We Fight Back rally. We approached CU to collaborate and partner with us on the event which they agreed to, after a challenging start and misunderstanding about the social media announcement we pulled off a successful rally. Comrades expressed excitement about the success of those attempts, and the SC hoped to build on that. We attempted to launch an emergency response network that would be developed through organizing meetings held at the LC. Failing to establish any partners or real involvement from CU, we determined we lacked the man power to effectively create these networks with so many people in different areas. We stopped hosting the organizing meetings and attempted to determine a more comprehensive approach to the We Fight Back days of action as the No Kings movement was starting to develop. This would lead to a pivot away from CU and us looking for other opportunities to engage with immigration defense. Devin disagreed with this approach but was no longer in SC meetings, so he used committee meetings and unit meetings to raise what he saw as failures of the elected SC to secure the relationship with CU. Comrades not in the faction were seeing SC members give contradicting directives and were confused by the constant tension. As the end of the term was drawing to a close Liz and I informed our National Liaison that we planned to refuse to accept nomination and threatened to demotivate at the election if Devin was allowed to run without answering to the branch about his misconduct.

Agreeing that some sort of disciplinary action was warranted but unable to approve anything more within the NOD, our liaison told D he could not accept nomination for the 2025 term and that failure to change his conduct would result in expulsion. The plan after elections was to take up the question of immigration work, develop a strategic outlook for the branch, and plug D into work that he enjoyed. It was deeply important to the incoming SC to show him that we saw his contributions as a comrade and that we weren’t going to spend the term trying to punish him or get revenge.

After the SC retreat in April there was a flurry of activity we moved quickly to implement a structure that would allow for comrades to participate in the decisions about carrying out our work, but would centralize the relationship building and strategy development in the SC. It wasn’t perfect and the SC attempted to build a second tier of leaders through one on one asks and opportunities working closely with a handful of comrades. The limits of this were felt immediately, without the explicit role and responsibility of being an appointed leader in the branch comrades we hoped to raise up didn’t have the clarity about what we were expecting of them. Without a regular division of labor and regular meetings comrades were incentivized to pick only the meetings and events that interested them.

Another variable arising out of the SC retreat was the break up between A and L which created a dynamic where often L would verbally attack A and Dodge if they asked clarifying questions or suggested that there was disagreement with her positions. There were many meetings where we were unable to finish our agenda because L would storm out or shut the conversations down. For a lot of this period I attempted to play a mediating role where I was trying to translate the legitimate issues L had to the rest of the body, but also act as a support so that L didn’t feel attacked by the legitimate questions being raised by other SC members. This was an error because it reproduced the dynamic in which SC members and liaisons had one on one conversations to attempt to indirectly deal with the problem which only created the conditions for suspicion.

After an intensely scary experience at an immigration rally that A was the tactical lead for, police appeared to be kettling protestors and Liz in the lead truck got caught between them. She developed a deep distrust of other SC members acting in a tactical role. Only exacerbating this distrust were the tragic events at the No Kings rally in June. L and I had been the tactical and security leads, but after getting to the front of the march that had missed the end point at Wallace Federal, L and I were separated from the rest of the contingent. We had just brought the runaway crowd back around the corner, and were a few yards ahead of the Sky apartments when we heard the shots. We tried to get back to the comrades behind us and turned around not knowing where they had come from and saw Z. The next period was chaotic but at almost every turn we took to get back to the contingent police were charging towards us. Unable to find our way back we called A and told him to lead comrades out of there. Afterwards L experienced severe PTSD which she later expressed not feeling supported in by the SC.

All of these factors had the effect of creating explosive meetings that left every member of the SC stressed out about our weekly meeting. After coming back from Congress, M was assigned as our National Liaison because she would be able to provide the close consultation that the SC needed so that we could finally get work moving in our branch. After several attempts to talk to L and the SC together and individually, she asked L to take a leave of absence for a few months so that the rest of the SC could have some space. L refused and the NOD put her on an LOA from the SC but they did not want us to tell the branch in an effort to protect L’s privacy and to keep the peace. Complicating matters was a convergence of interests of L and D both wanting to engage in immigration work with Bailfund and CU. Liz then knowingly pushed bailfund in chats and directed her partners to lobby for bailfund in other committees against the directive of our liaison. In an unprecedented move in December the NOD formally suspended L for 6 months for uncomradely conduct and failure to abide by democratic centralism. This was the opportunity for the National Leadership to reassert norms and expectations in our branch that even elected members of the the SC are accountable to the constitution and by-laws. Unfortunately P left the party and we were faced with reality that we were starting completely over with a new liaison H.

The approach that H wanted us to take saw the issues in the branch as mostly rooted in the realm of the interpersonal. He spent more time communicating with D than he did asking the SC how things had developed in the branch. When presented with irrefutable proof that X and N had just told comrades to call for new SC elections because they had concerns about the disciplinary action taken against L, H asked if we’d ever talked to X and asked her to stop interfering in the branch, when we said we had and so had our former Liaison, he assured us that he would talk to her and tell her how serious what she was doing was and that she needed to stop. Then he told us the next step was a convo between A and D to determine if it was possible for them to move forward that was mediated by C. D and A reported extremely positive feelings about their discussion. However at the May branch meeting D would then ask A and O to motivate for U’s return and insinuated that to not do so would be undemocratic. Following that meeting he went out with student comrades and shared his disagreement with the SC’s approach to branch work.

Despite no evidence of real resolution, H provided the SC, D, J, R, and E with 4 points to serve as a basis for unity and turning the page in the branch. This is supposed to clarify the problems and help us understand what we need to do to move forward, yet it opens with a point about not litigating the past despite acknowledging we have differing interpretations of what happened over the last “few months”. When I asked how the NOD intended to ensure that the next SC put the agreement into practice and what they planned to change to provide the level of support that a brand new SC would need given the experience of the last two years where the needs of the party often meant that our branch was waiting for National to respond on disciplinary matters long after they needed to be addressed. H assured me they’d be in close consultation and available to support facilitating conversations about branch strategy including about CU with the branch, and that if a comrade were to violate the agreement they would be talked to because they shouldn’t be here. When I clarified, great so you’re saying the NOD is committing to expelling any member that violates this agreement, he said no, he couldn’t commit to that in the abstract.

Another example of the disconnect between the practice of our party and the way that it is defined in our constitution and by-laws was demonstrated when H came to SLC last week ahead of our nominations, the question of L’s suspension ending was looming. As a member of our central committee, he did not know what the suspension was for or how long it was. He told us it would probably be easier for her to meet with members of the SC and as long as she agreed to the agreement then she would also be able to come back. This was shocking to me, why doesn’t the party have some sort of standard practice for handling disciplinary measures? Why is there no record of the discussions or decisions of other liaisons to ensure continuity and fairness for members dealing with such things?

So far I’ve attempted to detail the understanding that I had as an SC member of the problems in our branch. These problems are not comrades, they are structural. L.M’s letter explains some of the possibility of effectuating change through the Congress. I however want to share my experience of how the Party Leadership handles debate and discussion when a controversy is raised. I have witnessed first hand a fellow congress delegate brought to tears on the congress floor for raising a passionate demand for a thorough analysis and debate on a party line. She was told that she was harming the unity of the party and that she needed to speak in favor of their proposal for ending the session on the AI question. They then asked other attendees to also speak in favor of it, without those comrades reading it ahead of time. All of this would have been concealed from the delegates if not for Kei Pritsker formerly of Break Through News, sharing those details with the whole congress on the basis that it was not the right way to engage in democratic debate and delegates deserved to know. Both of those comrades have since left the party.

I waited until today to send this so that I could hear the response from our National Leaders to Walters’s letter, I wanted to ask them what general lessons can leaders take from this to ensure the unity of our branches and I wanted to know what the Executive Committee sees as it’s biggest area of growth. I am a firm believer to fix a problem, you have to admit you have it first, I don’t believe that the Party is willing to acknowledge to it’s rank and file members the real truth about the way the party functions and the calculations that are being made in how their branch is engaged with. It’s obscured from us, and often under the pretense that we are missing context or can’t understand the complex background which made up a certain period.

However the Party also is raising up many cadre who will be capable of winning, because the rank and file members that join this party do so on the basis that they are really building what we say we are. I cannot stay in this party because if I did I would have to lie to my comrades about where I stand. I refuse to accept that we must keep making the same mistakes, or to cover up the mistakes and mishandling of our branch on the basis of false unity.

For those comrades that read this and have questions, I will be honest with you. For those that want to stay, I’m rooting for us to see revolution in our lifetimes. For any comrades that read this and feel like me that you cannot go on this way any longer, rest assured you are not alone and we welcome you in charting a new path.

With Revolutionary Optimism,

D.W

Logistical Question

There is an inherent complexity in this break that due to our longstanding position within the party we have been entrusted with the control of the 501c4 which holds the financial resources of the branch. It is our belief that in any meaningful split with the party there is cause for a just division of resources as we just as much as you have build those resources and intent to use them for revolutionary ends. However the party has historically held the position that anyone who leaves the party due to political disagreements is counter revolutionary and persona non grata. Therefore we make the offer that we sit down for negotiations as to a reasonable division of resources. For legal reasons the 501c4 cannot simply give a large portion of funds to an individual. Therefore we offer to put down several months rent and continue to pay for the existing subscriptions the branch has(canva, comcast, zoom etc.) until such a time when the branch can set up its own 501c4 which can legally receive its share of the funds. Once said organization has legal standing we can begin the process of the aforementioned negotiations to find a means by which to perform such a division.

L.M’s Letter to The SC:

Comrades of the steering committee,

I have long had questions about the real practice of democracy within the branch. I have at different points voiced aspects of these questions but I must reflect upon my own unwillingness or inability to formulate them in any systematic manner. The fullest exposition of these doubts was raised after the SC changed its policy regarding observation of their meetings, which happened in the last few months after I had attended a few such meetings. Comrade A was kind enough to have a call with me to try and explain the reasoning for the change and to hear me out for well over an hour about my concerns. It was my hope that such concerns would be brought to the SC but so as to return his kindness I would like to formulate these concerns so that he doesn’t have to represent a comrade in their absence. I also would take this opportunity to flesh out my arguments—with the benefit of time to research—and respond to some of his initial counter points. In a sentence my concern could be put that unity requires the light of open debate to build. I intend to show that this isn’t just an ideal of “freedom of criticism” but a result derived from the experience of the socialist struggle. I hope that the good faith extended to my initial doubts raised with comrade A will continue in the reception of this piece and that anywhere in which I err I will receive a similarly good faithed critique.

Our current SC has inherited certain issues which have pre-existed its election and I do not envy your task in trying to handle these historic weights on your back. I think the previous SC(that prior to the election of D.W) identified an aversion to disagreement whether that be in professional or interpersonal spaces. I think in general our culture encourages us to look for some higher structure to resolve debates whether that be the boss, HR or the police. Further I think the culture within Utah makes such open disagreements extra uncomfortable. That SC assigned readings which dealt with disagreement and has proposed a mediation process both of which were oriented toward the productive resolution of primarily interpersonal squabbles. I think these are good steps but I think they fail to address that unless we can have productive, democratic and professional debates we will never become a party of a class; a party which can absorb thousands, hundreds of thousands of members. As we grow so too will the contradictions and divergent opinions within our party. Our strength will be in our ability to maintain these contradictions while still being able to act decisively.

One of my long-time concerns is the lack of awareness within the rank and file membership of the real debates and divergent tendencies of our branch. I think this has been caused in the first place by the aforementioned aversion to open critique but also by the tendency for debates to be held in one on one conversation or in conversation between rank and file members and leadership. I will make reference to debates within our TUSL and pre-TUSL work which I think are both emblematic of the issues and were where many members first realized these challenges within the branch regardless of their divergent interpretation of events. The first example will reveal that I do not see myself as above the critiques I level at our branch.

Early in the debates around our housing work, comrade L and I thought there were certain tendencies which revealed a lack of understanding about party principles and the practice of democratic centralism. Specifically around our openly identifying as socialist and putting forward a concrete party program. While we had done some work to make these critiques in our meetings around specific tactics we were employing she and I also went to comrade A to voice our critiques. I believe in a healthier environment and with greater experience we would have made these critiques plain within the bounds of those housing meetings. Over time we did not feel that these concerns were properly addressed within the body and it became clear that there were differing tendencies within our work. These tendencies began to solidify as they tend to into blocs however these blocs and their positions were hardly clear to newer members both of the branch and the committee. Especially when the LC committee was dissolved and absorbed into TUSL the history of the debates was not clear to members. Many of these disagreements over tactics took place between formal and informal leadership in private chats. When you enter a committee and you witness what had at that point become a heated debate without the context it is easy for what were at their core political struggles to appear as interpersonal or petty squabbles. This appearance would inevitably become reality as the increasingly solid blocs had no real method by which to settle their differences. These issues were only exacerbated by problems which have been recognized by subsequent steering committees of the inconsistent reporting of committee work to the SC by its members. Comrades who had legitimate political lines, regardless of their veracity, were viewed as obstinate. The question of their continued membership within the party was even raised. We speak of resolving interpersonal issues but we have had little discussion of how it was a failure of branch structure that they became interpersonal in the first place!

I apologize for the digression into branch history but I feel that it will be helpful in understanding my concerns and why until recently I have had fear to raise them. I appreciate that we are in a less tenuous position as a branch and I believe the work of this and the previous SC have gone a long way in making me feel able to raise real concerns without being viewed as the branch “reply guy” or as contrarian. However as stated I feel we need to continue our work in order to become a party which can claim for itself the place of vanguard. Namely I think while the debates have somewhat simmered down we have not addressed the lack of political openness necessary to have real legitimacy.

In my call with comrade Q I raised my concern that we as a branch do not know what the SC is discussing nor do we know the results of the discussion. I gave the analogy to if the public were unaware of who voted for a specific bill in the houses of the senate. How would we know which senators to condemn and to protest? Which to vote for or against? We would view such lack of openness as a severe lack of accountability and a testament to a lack of democracy. This is the reality within our branch. Comrade A raised a counterpoint that he did not see it as a fair comparison as there is a large qualitative difference between a bourgeois congress and a revolutionary party. I would ask what are these differences? First that they hold state power and secondly that they are viewed by the general populace as more legitimate than our party. The first of which is the goal of all parties which have ever existed and thus I do not think should be relevant to our discussion on democracy. The second I believe only proves my point. They are viewed with greater legitimacy than our party and if they hid their deliberations as we do to our members they’d lose legitimacy as a whole rather than of this or that part of their body. This or that leader.

Much has been made about projecting unity from the SC for fear of exacerbating the fractures within our branch. I ask, does hiding your disagreements build real unity? Or does it lend to the discrediting of the whole membership of the steering committee? When three of you make a bad call and we, the rank and file membership, are ignorant as to the two dissenters, how are we to hold you accountable at the next election? How are we not to condemn the whole of the SC for its errors? Despite pedagogy becoming a buzz word within our branch we have shown little interest in the education of our membership about the tendencies within our own branch.

Let it not be said that this is just my opinion. As I raised in my call with Comrade Murphy the RSDLP was the only party within Russia to go to such lengths as to publish the minutes of its congresses. In his work, “But Who Are The Judges” Lenin went so far as to critique the liberal party, the Cadets, for their lack of openness:

“The liberals sneer at the struggle within social democracy in order to cover up their own systematic deception of the public in regard to the cadet party…There are no records of the proceedings of the cadet congresses. The liberals issue no figures of their party membership either as a whole or by organizations. The tendency of different committees is unknown. Nothing but darkness…Lawyers and professors, who make their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and praise open activity by parties while actually flouting the democratic principle of publicly and concealing from the public the different political tendencies within their own party.” (bolding is my own)¹

Let it be remembered that the RSDLP was an illegal party! Which we are not! Yet we feel so unconfident in our disagreements that we hold ourselves to a lower standard. Not just for the public but for our own members? In gleaning lessons from historical examples it is necessary to move beyond the simple question of what was done but to the political purpose for which it was done. Toward this end Lenin’s critique of the Socialist-Revolutionaries is more exemplary:

“[D]uring the period of the greatest liberties, the period of most direct influence upon the masses, they concealed from the public the existence of two different tendencies within the party. The differences of opinion were as great as those within the Social-Democratic ranks, but the Social-Democrats tried to clarify them, whereas the Socialist- Revolutionaries tried diplomatically to conceal them…’Not to wash one’s dirty linen in public’ is a thing the S.R.’s are adept at. The trouble is they have nothing to show in public but dirty linen. They could not tell the whole truth about their relations with the Popular Socialists in 1905, 1906, or 1907…Our Party’s serious illness is the growing pains of a mass party. For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organizations of the Party are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built, and we are building it. We have succeeded in putting the views of our two currents truthfully, clearly, and distinctly before everyone. Personal bitterness, factional squabbles and strife, scandals, and splits—all these are trivial in comparison with the fact that the experience of two tactics is actually teaching a lesson to the proletarian masses, is actually teaching a lesson to everyone who is capable of taking an intelligent interest in politics.”²

The RSDLP made its disagreements public but we as a branch can’t even acknowledge them to our members!? The purpose of open debate as revealed by this quote was to instruct and build the competency of the class in understanding its leaders, misleaders, and the real political lines they represented. If there are fractures within our branch as Comrade Murphy put it we are doing all of these class fighters a disservice by hiding them under diplomatic language! We are treating those who are the most committed to the struggle with kid’s gloves. When we ought to be educating them as to the real sources of division. Is the cause a fear that they won’t understand these divisions? Or is it that we ourselves do not? And thus cannot claim any right as educators. If it is the former I say you are casting doubt on our members and their ability to understand politics intelligently. If it is the latter then it is your responsibility as leaders to stop pussy-footing around issues and get to the heart of matters.

As a more modern reference to support my position let us look at the wikileaks of the DNC in its attempts to obstruct the primary election of Bernie Sanders. When these leaks were revealed a great mass of his supporters saw what Marx and Lenin had said countless times: when the working class wins by the rules the ruling class will do everything in their power to subvert the rules. As such the democrats lost a great deal of legitimacy. While I don’t think we would go to such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not open, in this most open of times for organizing, we risk losing legitimacy if the ruling class should ever reveal the lack of unity amongst our leaders.

If the lack of transparency should be doubted I will make reference to one of the few real debates I was witness to. Before the policy of SC observation was changed I was at a meeting where you voted on the proposal raised by comrade Hovermale in regards to our masking policy. After an intense debate, which left some comrades visibly on the verge of tears, a vote was taken to settle the matter. Three comrades voted in favor and two against. I must admit I was grateful a vote was even taken. However since this vote I have not witnessed, and I may be wrong, any announcement as to this new policy?

This leads into my concerns about the policy about SC observation. Whereas the previous policy allowed one to attend any SC meeting save the portions regarding matters of membership and security now members are expected to provide a concrete reasoning behind their observation. How is one ever expected to do so in this reality in which we actually live when the questions being discussed by the SC are not published? When the ongoing position of the SC is to not reveal the debates going on in its halls? Whether intended or not this policy makes observation of your actions almost exclusively by invitation.

I want to be abundantly clear that I do not advocate for any form of ultra-democracy by which every choice is debated by the full membership. Rather I call simply for real mechanisms by which that membership, which elected you, can hold you accountable. To quote Michael Parenti, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure,open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry,”³ or in this case members.

When I brought up the importance of publicizing the minutes of their congress to comrade A he raised a good question about whether the RSDLP had a similar policy for their local bodies. While I still would like to better understand how they were organized locally I think this misses the historical trees for the forest. As we repeat often there is no one mode of organizing which is eternally correct. My point thus far has been about the Leninist principled commitment to educating the masses as to the different shades of opinion within the party. It must be repeated that the RSDLP existed as an illegal party and we do not. Even within the context of intense political repression of the RSDLP their newspapers did publish their disagreements within the St. Petersburg branch. Our party does not have such localized newspapers as modern communication technology has allowed for a greater degree of centralization through the apparatus of Liberation News.

The last point I will address regarding comrade A’s reply to my initial concerns was that he said comrades in national said they felt we had allowed too much debate to occur without a unified response from leadership leading to fractures within our branch. While he would not share specifics which might be relevant to my reply, on first glance I cannot accept this position.

As stated earlier it was our lack of openness in regards to debate which led to fracturing and the development of petty squabbles. Had leadership issued a unified response during the intense period of debate within TUSL it would have been based on largely unreliable reports from the SC and would only have led to resentment not to real unity. Perhaps if the SC at the time had a real unity based on accurate reporting of the events such an assessment would be correct but as I’ve said in previous meetings: one can declare unity between a hair brush and the kingdom of mammals but this does nothing to give the brush mammary glands. Unity is to be won, not declared.

In conclusion, I don’t have a perfect solution to building unity within our branch which must be built by concrete struggle over our real disagreements but we only do ourselves a disservice by glossing over these disagreements with diplomatic language. I have raised the need before to have real meeting procedures for debate and resolution and I feel I was viewed as being overly formalistic but it is through such procedures that the ruling class has learned to maintain its hegemony regardless of their personal disagreements. If we are to build a truly mass party which can maintain the disagreements which will inevitably become more intense I think we ought to learn from them.

If I did not view the SC and our party with a certain level of legitimacy and hope for our ability to overcome such struggles I would have already left to organize somewhere else. My real hope is that we can shine a light on our disagreements so they can be resolved, not in an anarchistic fashion of perfect consensus but through us being able to disagree and submit to the will of the majority. I hope for no more than something accepted by Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and the whole of European social-democracy in the 20th century: democratic centralism.

In Solidarity,

Comrade L.M.

Anonymous Letter:

Hi all, I am writing this letter to express my resignation from the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Growing this organization has been the major focus of my life for the past 7 years, and I do not make this decision lightly. However, through my experiences with national leadership, especially after moving to NYC 2 years ago and operating in close proximity to the Center, I no longer believe this organization to be capable of bringing about broader, meaningful change for the working class in this country. While in NYC, I have been involved in trying to base build with my class, a strategic orientation that is so diametrically opposed to the PSL’s strategy of agitation and protest that the highest levels of PSL leadership have worked to undermine and sabotage base building work in Brooklyn. My belief in the need for socialism and working class organization is as firm as ever, which is why I believe it my responsibility to take the best possible road to build working class power, which is outside the PSL. I joined the PSL in Pittsburgh shortly after graduating college, but I met the party in Boston as a student at MIT. My first exposure to the PSL was a few weeks after Trump was elected in 2016. My initial enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders turned into a deep disillusionment with the electoral system when the DNC systematically sabotaged his candidacy, and this led to a search for new ways to fight for change outside the electoral system. My first ever protest was the night after Trump’s election. I began getting involved with some student organizing and attending more protests regularly around Boston. My decision to join the PSL came as PSL members built the MIT graduate union from the ground up. I saw how involvement in the union built power to fight for meaningful change for people I knew, and how being a part of a union changed people’s outlook from cynical to hopeful and empowered. I wanted to learn to organize from the people capable of building something as impactful as the MIT graduate union. I was the 5th member in the Pittsburgh branch at the time I joined in March 2019. My time there was mostly consumed by attending protests throughout multiple mass upswings, from the 2020 BLM uprisings to the Roe v Wade decision getting overturned to the Palestine movement. I became well-versed in the rinse-and-repeat cycle of tactics I later learned was the essence of PSL life: protest, flyer, forum, protest, flyer, forum. I knew it was insufficient. I knew we needed to go deeper. I experimented with new ways of organizing around widely felt issues, but attributed any lack of success to my relative inexperience as an organizer.

In summer 2024, I got a new job and moved to Brooklyn. I was excited to learn from new mentors and develop my ability to organize from those in the leading branch initiatives that included writing software for a member management system, creating an education portal for socialist political education, advising PSL members across the country on legal rights when being charged for free speech activity, and more. I was asked by Brian Becker to leave my software job to go to law school, then a few months later asked by Brian again to make staying up-to-date with AI development my main political focus, Brian seemingly having lost interest in encouraging a contingent of comrades to attend law school. I felt the effects of whiplash at the changing speed and urgency for an extremely wide array of national priorities, almost none of them having anything to do with organizing our class. I eventually dropped involvement in the majority of these responsibilities to focus on neighborhood organizing in Brooklyn.

In summer 2025, I was asked to attend the 6th Party Congress as an observer. When a debate around AI was sparked, I was asked to be involved in the resolution as a professional machine learning engineer. I took part in “secret” meetings which consisted of numerous meetings with a small group of about 8 people, including the person who raised criticisms of the party’s AI position. At the same time, the person who raised criticisms privately expressed concerns to me about the nature of the Congress and the lack of comradely debate. At the time, I didn’t understand her concerns and tried to use my role to keep the peace. When asked by national leadership to get on the mic in open discussion about AI to share specific talking points while establishing my authority on the subject of AI, I complied. However, this experience left a bad taste in my mouth and the comrade who raised the debate in the first place shortly thereafter left the organization.

Shortly before the Congress, the PSL made the “Sick of ICE” sick outs in solidarity with immigrants a primary focus of political activity. As a liaison with two branches, I was tasked with ensuring those branches carried out this national priority. In an internal meeting, I raised that the steering committee of one of those branches received broad pushback around the initiative and the branch was not enthusiastic about participating. These criticisms were on the grounds that a general strike could not happen by raising a call on social media and that this looked immature. A central leader of the PSL, instead of being open to criticism, instructed me to intervene more forcefully in instructing the branch to carry out the directive, insinuating that they simply misunderstood the task. A few months later, the central directive of the PSL became the general strike orientation. In a national leadership meeting, Brian Becker motivated for the need to agitate around a general strike and that the task at hand was to raise the working class’s consciousness around the need for a general strike. I was disturbed by his orientation. It contained a number of completely ahistorical interpretations of the Russian Revolution, and completely ignored that a general strike can only be possible through a very high level of organization of the working class. After this, I became increasingly embarrassed by PSL national directives with which I increasingly disagreed, especially including a polemic against the leaders of the Minnesota Model, a statewide coalition of unions, community organizations, and other progressive groups aimed at building working class power who had also raised the call for the January 23 Day of Truth and Freedom in response to Renee Good’s murder. I had already considered the Minnesota Model a template to aspire to, and became incredibly frustrated when PSL leaders openly denigrated the leaders in Minnesota and took credit for the success of January 23. Since then, I have become increasingly aware of the undemocratic nature of both the New York city branch and the overall national organization of the PSL. I have witnessed both Ben and Brian Becker ridicule comrades I deeply respect, both in private settings and in open meetings such as the NYC Branch Conference. I have witnessed coordinated efforts by national leadership to stifle political debates around base building to reaffirm agitating for socialist consciousness as a higher strategic objective. I see base building as a common sense focus on organization of the working class instead of the PSL’s obsession with endless agitation. The fact that base building is such a major threat to the PSL that a debate around it cannot even be allowed leaves me with little hope in the future of the organization.

Through these experiences and many others, I have come to the decision over the course of the past year that I must continue building working class power outside of the PSL. This is an organization that is deeply politically flawed and whose leadership naively believes that agitation and mobilization alone can bring about revolution. If this weren’t bad enough, any democratic pathway to change this orientation is stifled or shut down before a debate can even occur. I believe that in order to win, socialists must organize the working class. I look forward to continuing to fight to make this vision a reality.

E.’s Letter:

Hello comrades,

I wanted to let you know that after careful and thoughtful consideration, I’ve decided to end my candidacy and stop pursuing membership in the PSL. This is a multifaceted decision that was not made easily or taken lightly. I have a few reasons, but before I get into that, I just want to make it clear that I am not interested in taking a break and coming back later; this decision is final for me and there is not room for negotiation, even if my concerns are addressed. I am sending this letter to our Ogden unit because I feel connected to each of you and care about everyone a lot, and I wanted to be as open and honest with y’all as I can.

First, it is important to clarify that I made this decision independently from D’s and L’s resignations. I have taken approximately a month long break and was not aware of their exit until Monday evening. I made this decision two weeks ago and have been trying to find my words since. I do find the things shared in their letters as well as Walter Smolarek’s letter alarming. It has definitely given me further confirmation that now is the correct time for me to exit.

I would be remiss if I didn’t address a few concerns I have had. In particular I have questioned the actual practical application of the constitution and bylaws for some time now, and I found myself returning to them and finding contradictions with what is written and what is practiced. On several different occasions, whether in readings, lectures, or communications, I have felt the familiar tinge of coercion that I know so well from being a member of the LDS church for 23 years. I have difficulty with the NFD, and as someone who is facing financial hardships, something about it has never sat right with me. Dues are something I can understand, but I have felt like I’ve been asked for money by National A LOT over the last year and it has made me uncomfortable. Especially when I don’t see the PSL doing anything that concretely improves the material conditions of anyone with those funds.

These concerns also coincide with the personal experiences of my best friend who was a candidate in another branch in another state. This branch knew of a city council candidate who was predatory and frequently sexually harassed queer youth in the community. My best friend informed their branch leadership and was promised the PSL would not endorse nor affiliate with that candidate anymore. This did not happen and the branch continued to affiliate with and support him despite the evidence. I tried telling myself “it’s just a bad branch” and realized how much that sounded like the oft repeated mantra I had while a member of the church, “it’s just a bad ward.” I know that what other branches do is their own business and not related to the Salt Lake City branch. However, for me it calls into question the integrity of National if things like this are able to happen on a local level.

When I consider also the things that Walter Smolarek wrote about in his letter, it brings many more questions to light about the actions and motivations of National. I have come to find that I no longer trust them, and so I can no longer pursue membership in this organization. I want to end by saying that the last year I have spent organizing with y’all has been life changing and I have learned so much. It has simply become clear that this is not the path that is right for me to take. Thank you for your time, and for everything this branch has taught me about organizing. I will carry this time and these experiences close to my heart always.

Thank you,

E.

Citations

1. Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. “But Who Are the Judges?” Proletary, No. 19., Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/05b.htm ︎
2. Ibid. ︎
3. Parenti, Michael. 2004. Superpatriotism. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 81. ︎

“Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency. Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism. People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well — they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves.” – Combat Liberalism, Mao Zedong, 1937

In order to combat the liberalism that grips the throat of the Communist movement in these occupied lands, it’s necessary to reflect on the ways in which liberal ideology and habits are uniquely expressed in the current historical moment.

1. “Someone Should Do Something”

The first type of settler liberalism is perhaps the most common among the settler masses. It is the “someone (else) should do something” type. These individuals are aware to some degree of the hardships and oppression faced by others (and often even themselves) but will at every turn find justification to externalize their responsibility to the land and the oppressed. “There’s nothing I can do” is the credo of the first type of settler liberalism. This first type can often be found twisting themselves into knots to politically justify their self-imposed helplessness, usually by blaming others for their failures. The fault is aimed upon the misleadership of the movement, their attachment to their luxuries and comforts, or their attachment to their personal safety. In the last case they will justify their inaction by inflating the threat posed by the settler state, painting it as an invincible force which must not be provoked to violence. This stubborn attitude leads inevitably to political nihilism or self-interested electoralism (or a deeply cynical overlap of the two). Many individuals who identify as communists, socialists, anarchists, etc but refuse to struggle for radical organization are in fact guilty of the first type of settler liberalism, and are simply using radical rhetoric and symbology to mask their complicity with the imperial system, consciously or not. The salve for this first type of liberalism is organized action with concrete goals, and a rejection of the habit of political performance devoid of substance.

The first type of liberalism has its most complete expression in the mass performative protest, wherein huge crowds assemble to loudly proclaim their demand for someone else to do something (legislators, the public at large, etc.) — or in other words, they proclaim their intention, in full view and supervision by the state, to continue doing nothing. Their purely rhetorical demands and their vapid politics mask the underlying reality that in practical terms they are there to struggle against escalation. Each “protest” prides itself on its mass participation, its multi-national representation, and has as its only concrete demand that everyone seeking to struggle against the state must instead co-operate with it. Consider the leadership of these actions — these are largely petty bourgeois protest organizers (e.g. take the national and professional makeup reported by the DSA’s own membership survey for instance), whose appeals to pacifism, “non-violent resistance”, and “peaceful protest” are largely conscious reactions to the accusations slung by bourgeois media: that protest organizers are enemies of the state, secretly in league with or being tricked by “the real bad guys”, who seek to disrupt peaceful democratic processes for nefarious purposes. Such protest organizers wish to maintain “good optics”, but good optics in the eyes of the bourgeois media only comes by bowing to bourgeois demands. When bourgeois media accuses protest groups of violence and crime, it’s a veiled threat: “whose side are you on, ours or theirs?” The protest leaders wish to avoid the struggles and sacrifices of the inevitable escalation of violence should they truly place themselves on the side of the oppressed, and so regardless of their intentions setting out, by adhering to bourgeois demands for “peaceful protest” they draw their line of allegiance firmly on the side of the bourgeoisie.

Protest leaders making appeals to pacifism are the white flag of surrender to the state. The red flags waved about at these legal protests are merely bait to draw the gullible.

2. “I Have To Do Something“, i.e. the Cult of Action

The inverse of the first type of liberalism is the “I have to do something” form of individual or organizationally amateurish spontaneous direct action. Individuals, either disillusioned by the prevalence of liberal rot in the movement, unaware of the real tasks before them due to inadequate education, or perhaps just mesmerized by fantasies of heroism, ignore the necessity of disciplined professional organization as a precondition for revolutionary activity, and carry out disorganized activity on an individualistic, amateur basis. This is certainly the most sympathetic type, and the closest to revolutionary action.

However, if these second-type individuals come together to form organizations guided by the same second-type error, they will remain limited to local work that can only react to the problems at hand (for example, providing survival services to homeless folks). They will be unable to chart a course for changing local conditions on a lasting basis (for example, by providing permanent decommodified housing to formerly homeless folks). Because immediate action takes priority ahead of political clarity, even the most effective and well-organized work is carried out on an essentially amateur and ad-hoc basis. Without coherent revolutionary politics as the baseline necessity for unity of work, there inevitably comes a point where some of the participants in these organizations have different ideas for what direction to take their work than a strictly revolutionary outlook would provide for. This produces an inherently unstable political unity that will inevitably lead to catastrophic splits.

The second type of settler liberalism has the most potential to become revolutionary, but only if a really revolutionary outlook takes firm charge of their activities. In all other cases, the activities of this type decohere the revolutionary movement by subordinating revolutionary politics to local matters and by misleading its participants. More often than not, participants in second-type organizing burn out entirely. This can be due to overwork, wherein unprofessional orgs demand excessive volunteer work of their most active and dedicated members. Liberal and hobbyist attitudes often dominate the membership of these orgs and such liberals and hobbyists will never do as much as they can on a consistent and long-term basis (because their priorities are elsewhere!) which places increasing pressure on the dedicated members to contribute more labor to meet the needs of the org. Organizational burnout can also be the result of sheer disillusionment with the possibility of a revolutionary mass movement. After all, when everyone around you claims to be a socialist but fails to live up to these claims in deed and do the work, or years of work go down the drain in an organizational breakdown, it can be very difficult for the local would-be revolutionary to see a path out of their political quagmire.

In the best case scenario, where this liberal approach to political struggle has led to the creation of an organization which is concretely providing for the needs of the community, serious and swift effort must be made by its members to seek the assistance of other, more developed, communist organizations in beginning the process of proletarian professionalization. These orgs may be called upon in sharing the duties the members have taken on, to ensure the services being provided are not interrupted. All possible measures must be taken to ensure the lives of vulnerable individuals are not disrupted or put at risk. The few tenuous roots we actually have in the masses must be carefully defended! Proletarian professionalization will be more fully detailed in a later article, but for the moment should be understood as the process by which an organization and its members adopt a militant, decolonial, anti-american political line both in word and in action. The liberal organization must be split in two: a semi-clandestine cadre org comprised of the revolutionary leadership, and a semi-open mass org comprised of the tailing elements under the control or guidance of the cadre org.

3. “The Multi-National Working Class”

The third type appears to be the most common type of liberalism found within the leadership ranks of the Four Opportunists and the litany of organizations and individuals which orbit and tail them. Each big national organization comprising the Four Opportunists has a slightly different flavor of the Multi-National Working Class line (henceforth referred to as MNWC for brevity), but they all follow a general trend of assumptions, divorced from historical fact and present reality, which pre-suppose the necessity of revolutionary leadership by the white working class.

MNWC is a smokescreen which smuggles white nationalism into the ranks of Communism. How is this the case? Proponents of MNWC may openly speak at great length, sometimes even to the exclusion of anything else, of the great and terrible crimes of the white settler nation, but they always deny the necessity of its complete subjugation and liquidation. They will dance around this denial by inventing mythical prophecies of a “multi-national working class” which will surely soon unite and overthrow their “mutual oppressors”, the big imperialist bourgeoisie (if only the divisive minorities would stop being so self-centered!). The crimes of the oppressor nation are offloaded onto the oppressor elites, denying the white working class’s complicity in Global Colonial Holocaust. MNWC launders this denial by ideologically positioning the white workers as oppressed comrades-in-arms alongside members of the actually oppressed nations, erasing the real material processes which reproduce national oppression in order to absolve themselves of the need to do anything which might jeopardize their material privileges. The MNWC proponents then have the gall to call upon the oppressed to adopt their line in the name of “multi-national unity” and will accuse those who reject this heinous demand of being “wreckers,” “ethnonationalists,” or worse.

What is wrong with this “multi-national working class” view? Why is it incorrect? The reality is that the white settler nation is an oppressor nation. Oppressor nationalities constitute a unique form of reactionary nationalism which derives its ideological cohesion from a cross-class collaboration in imperial conquest. Thus the mythological concept of “American equality” is manufactured along reactionary imperialist lines, sublating the antagonism between worker and bourgeoisie by externalizing and projecting it onto other nationalities. The oppressor nation’s very existence as both a political concept and material force is predicated on the subjugation of other nationalities, therefore the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism necessarily requires the overthrow and subjugation of the entire oppressor nation, not merely its bourgeoisie! The sublated class antagonism can only be restored by militant opposition to the white nation as a whole. The white working class — which serves as the muscle, nerves, and arteries of the white nation — has centuries of blood dripping from its hands on account of its evergreen allegiance to the white nationalist state, blood which has richly nourished the roots that firmly hold their feet in place. The white workers can only even begin to abolish their deeply rooted material positionality as the ever-loyal compradors of colonial genocide and environmental holocaust by completely uprooting themselves and entering life-and-death revolutionary struggle for complete independence from the imperialist system and all the benefits it offers. “Complete independence” should be taken to mean especially and most importantly independence from the land-expropriation regime of colonial private property, which necessarily preconditions unity with revolutionary national liberation. Landback.

The white working class, as a class, can never find unity with the workers of the oppressed nations — rather white individuals who break from white society will continue to find unity with the oppressed by actively seeking the abolition of the white working class. Revolutionary-minded settlers must engage in revolutionary reconstruction of their identities — participate in the creation of a new, anti-settlement, socialist identity — and purge themselves of their oppressor-national class ideology in order to fully participate in the political life of the new society. Only those whites who see this reality clearly and firmly grasp all its implications can be considered revolutionary. The so-called “communists” peddling MNWC should be exposed for what they are: liquidators of revolution whose principle concern, regardless of what other words fall out of their mouths, is the reproduction of white privileges predicated on national oppression. In a word, white nationalism.

The third type of liberalism is the most dangerous and insidious. Where ever it has ideological hegemony it slanders the international tradition of revolutionary communism by claiming its name and its inheritance. The third type’s leaders position themselves atop colonial corporations bearing red branding, whose sole business is selling bloody scraps of the flayed hide of communism on the political market. Their depraved insistence on flattening national oppression into a difference of opinions serves a concrete purpose, which is to sustain the ideological hegemony of white supremacy among even the most left-radical of settlers. This process reproduces the unity of settler colonial politics by reframing non-antagonistic differences (white worker and white bourgeois) as “antagonistic,” and reframing antagonistic differences (settler and colonized) as “non-antagonistic.” Thus a mythology of communism as a white movement is manufactured and turned against the oppressed, acting in lockstep with colonial white supremacy. A twisted reflection of liberation is waved before us promising us salvation if only we help the whites get better wages. As a consequence even those settlements with large populations of white radicals become rigidly and impenetrably white supremacist. A potential ally of the revolution is thereby turned into a militant defender of the spoils of colonial conquest.

4. The Bourgeois Media Revolutionary

All media of communications in the age of universal class dominance are necessarily class media, thus the political character of social media takes on the political character of the dominant class, and all aspects of the functional processes of social media become aspects of the functional processes of class development and class conflict. Social media, i.e. the dominant means of communication (in a previous age this was commonly newspapers) becomes a critical component of the class superstructure, and class oppression is in part structured through and embodied in social media. The flow of information through all channels is tightly regulated according to the interests of the dominant class, and in the case of social media this is most plainly evident in the form of “the algorithm,” but also is heavily influenced by and determinant of legal regulations, market structures and incentives, accessibility and infrastructure, location and language, and the daily habits, devices, and software used to access social media.

The fourth and final type of settler liberalism we will discuss here is the revolutionary of bourgeois social media. Often recognizing the above three types of liberalism as such, the liberal of the fourth type rejects the clueless misdirection of the first type, the amateurish tactics of the second, and the bureaucratic obstructionism of the third, and thus left with no apparent alternative political avenues to pursue, finally arrives at the point of individual or amateur online agitation. The fourth type sees clearly that all internal opposition to the imperialist state lies scattered and fragmented and atomized, unable to build sufficient strength to stand up on its own two feet, and they resolve correctly that the solution at hand is unity of action, and that agitation must be conducted towards such. Taking to the figurative streets of social media they shout their message from atop their soapbox and begin to develop a following.

All too often they fail to see that the soapbox itself was issued to them by the bourgeoisie, and that the crowd gathering around it was brought to them by the bourgeoisie. Both the entertainer and their audience begin to perceive that new, more radical, and more revolutionary thought is growing in strength as the audience grows. The parasocial relationship that forms between this bourgeois media personality and their followers convinces both that a qualitative change is occurring, and that this strategy is working.

Thus placated, the aspirant revolutionary and their audience endlessly tread water and swim in circles through the very same morass containing the above three types of liberalism. A bourgeois social and economic dynamic develops to support and reproduce these relationships, wherein the bourgeois media revolutionary becomes a petty bourgeois proprietor of an entertainment business peddling their political message.¹ Constrained by the censorship of advertisement and sponsorship deals, and the censorship of algorithmic content delivery, and the self-censorship implicit in “building a brand,” in marketing their ideas and so on to an audience of largely petty bourgeois radicals, the fourth type completely loses sight of the revolutionary horizon and drowns their own ideals in the murk of class naturalization. The class character and therefore class function of their activities and of the social media environment they perform their activities in is rendered invisible. They lose sight of the class character of the practical aspect of their activities and place exclusive focus on the theoretical aspect of their activities. The class content of the dialectic of theory and practice is flattened to the “pure” class content of the theory, and unable to move forward with this alone their practice devolves into an endless campaign to struggle for a “pure” understanding and approach to revolutionary politics.

For the fourth type, the universal is subsumed into the particular, the concrete totality of political practice becomes the theoretical and the struggle therein,² and every difference of opinion in strategy threatens the shaky and unstable practical basis for the work. Every theoretical disagreement in effect becomes a disagreement in practical activity and threatens a split, and the long-term outcome of this tendency is the regular fractal fragmentation of political unity into sects and microsects, whose re-building and re-coherence is only ever a temporary illusion of misunderstanding to be exploded back into disunity at a moment’s notice. The incoherence of the movement, in the eyes of individuals immersed in this environment, thereby becomes exclusively the “fault” of everyone else except the individual or organization in question. Criticism and self-criticism are seen as wrecker behavior and defeatism. A deep emotional insecurity is produced, and the necessity of candid discussions on the class character of these activities is subsumed into the cold detachment of bourgeois “professionalism” — rather than proletarian professionalism, which necessitates an ability to receive and give criticism while recognizing one’s place within a collective whole, the “professionalism” of the bourgeoisie is the competition of individual brand management; each criticism received as an existential attack, produced in an environment where a brand only strikes at another to climb their dazed body like a ladder.

“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs”

To presume that theoretical struggle can precede organization is to misunderstand the purpose of both. A proletarian approach to politics can only be an organized approach. Regardless of their level of theoretical sophistication, any given single individual or undifferentiated mass of informally or loosely associated individuals can never practice proletarian politics. “Discourse cycles” must give way to formally planned inter-organizational struggle, the terms and purview of which must be agreed upon in advance by the organizations in question. The principle of democratic centralism, of freedom of criticism and unity of action, can then produce the conditions for proletarian discipline, wherein individuals are held accountable by their organizations who in turn hold one another accountable through inter-organizational criticism. Unless political struggle is consciously structured as disciplined and co-operative organizational struggle, theoretical struggle remains the exclusive domain of artisanal craftsmanship. No matter how intricate, sophisticated, beautiful, and scientifically precise the artisan’s craftwork is, it remains the exclusive domain of petty bourgeois production and will not advance to the status of proletarian production without a conscious plan for building organizational discipline. This is the basic precondition for any forward motion.

1. At times a more “grassroots” “community” may form instead of an individual and audience, wherein the individual and audience comprise one another. “Communities” can take many forms but generally have an amorphous or nebulous structure largely reproduced by the content delivery algorithm itself (typical of platforms with follower and group systems), or are rigidly contained within walled gardens of activity (e.g. platforms with discrete “servers”). In any event however, the underlying bourgeois base relations reproduce the bourgeois superstructure by the same process patterns as the individual-audience dialectic described above, albeit with a greater emphasis on accumulation of social capital rather than money capital. ︎
2. The ideological expression of the revolutionary purist however often takes a contradictory appearance to the above, wherein the “practical” aspect of the work is articulated as primary. This excessive focus on practice ahead of theory becomes the theoretical over-emphasis, and therein the Cult of Action is reproduced. The Cult of Action demands the perpetual subordination of theory to practice, but in doing so misunderstands the purpose of theory and merely rigidly adheres to a “practice first” theory. ︎

These are the reasons the petty bourgeois socialists love Graham Platner. They’re reasons for principled Communists to dig deeper.

What does My Little Totenkopf have to say for himself on the subject?

“Of course I have a cushion.” He means that his father financed his mortgage. Daddy was a state prosecutor in Maine and owned a law firm for 30 years. He also chaired the board of a non-profit with ties to powerful politicians. Grandaddy was a wealthy architect. “I don’t think that means I don’t work for a living. I don’t think it somehow offsets the fact that I did four tours in the infantry and served my country in intense combat.” He always wanted to be a soldier. He went to a series of private schools, then did three tours of duty in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, and then became a gun-for-hire. His Dad bought him a $200,000 house. He pays Daddy $954.83 a month for it. He bought his oyster company from a friend. Through that company, he owns a 6-acre aquaculture lease, a California Skiff, and equipment worth $100,000. He reportedly chooses not to draw salary so he can also collect his $5,000 monthly killer’s benefits from the VA. He does, however, pay his wife a salary. That way he can keep his disability, the clever clogs!

Imperialist murderer. Petty bourgeois business owner, paid on the taxpayer’s dole while he siphons money out through his wife. Defender of SS lightning-bolt tattoos as just part of “Marine culture.” Possessor of his very own Nazi totenkopf emblazoned right on his chest, which he covered up with more ink in October of last year after he decided to run for office.

Graham Platner is the settler-socialist everyman.

Some readers will undoubtedly remark that it’s easy to be a cynic. What’s not easy is unlearning all the rules society teaches us about how to evaluate someone’s politics. In fact, it’s hard to have hope.

The issues with the Amerikan state run deeper than surface critiques, which is one of the reasons why we can’t just vote our problems away. No politician that emerges organically from the bourgeois party system can ever serve our needs. That system exists to reinforce the control of the ruling class and secure the loyalty of petty bourgeois professionals, local business owners, HOA boards, Chambers of Commerce, and imperialist (traitor) unions.

In order to challenge the capitalist rulers of the Amerikan empire we need to do more than phone bank, door knock, fundraise, and vote. First, we must subject everything, every aspect of our lives and organizing efforts, to the most searching critical analysis. We can’t swallow the propaganda of the imperialists and their lackeys day in and day out, on the television news, in our favorite shows, written down in schoolbooks, and taught in lecture halls without internalizing at least some of it. We have to root it out.

What is Platner’s class position? What class does he represent? These are the questions that will tell us his true politics. These questions are the fundamental guide to revolutionary politics, and as long as we keep them at the forefront of our analysis we won’t be lured into blind alleys.

Platner is representative of the right-wing petty bourgeois trend in socialism that reduces all questions to economism. How can I get higher wages? How can I own a house? How can I get cheaper healthcare? As a result, that kind of politics reinforces rather than challenges the bourgeois state. This is because the bourgeois bargain that underpins that state and has underpinned it for the past century is that the petty bourgeoisie and the white labor aristocracy will support imperialist wars and the capitalist world order in exchange for some limited input in politics, access to relatively cheap land, houses, pensions, high wages, high purchasing power, and low cost consumer goods. This is what Platner and all the jarheads, big city socialists, and Sanders dead-enders are working toward.

Does that mean its categorically incorrect to run a candidate on a Communist ticket? No. Not at all! But there are prerequisites.

For a Communist candidate to stand on their own, they need to be part of an organization that can hold them accountable. They need an articulated Communist platform; that is, a platform that stands in directly opposition to the continued existence of the bourgeois state. They need political education, militancy, discipline, and they need to accept that they will immediately be attacked by bourgeois elements. The purpose of a Communist politician within a bourgeois system can never be to govern according to the bourgeois law, to compromise and horse-trade with the bourgeois state or its representatives. The point is to cause a rupture, to demonstrate the brittleness, the bankruptcy, and ultimately, the fragility of the bourgeois state.

That work begins with you.

Taking The First Step

Students in the US have organized hundreds of protests in 2026 to speak out against ICE and school boards that allow agents to abduct students. Their mobilization is partly a response to the city deportation sweeps and concentration-camp detentions, not to mention the filmed killings of Minneapolis protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti. More immediately, these sparks of mobilization come alive out of the palpable concern these students have for their “undocumented” classmates. ICE has kidnapped thousands of children, carrying them off to prison camps away from their families and any sense of enrichment. Families have described moldy, worm-filled food and undrinkable water. The trauma being inflicted against the kidnapped and separated families is unimaginable, and this is transmitted to their friends and classmates. Many radicalized students are now taking their first organizational steps and mobilizing protests against the deportation machine and their complicit schools. USU spoke to students in Connecticut who organized an “ICE OUT” protest from their campus to learn how students are organizing and what Decolonial Socialists can do to support them.

Many radicals can point to one specific world event or personal experience that permanently changed the way they see the world. For several of the Connecticut students, the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti marked a turning point in their consciousness.

“Seeing the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti was a radicalizing moment for me. It’s clear that ICE is an org that does not even care about the law at all. We have to stick together.“

Even for children growing up in an environment filled with police propaganda, subjected to constant diseducation and adult surveillance, there are moments when the star-spangled banner slips, exposing the true character of the settler police and military. Their violence is classically limited to the exploited nations: the Black nation, the Indigenous nations, Puerto Rico, and the millions of immigrants who came to Occupied North America seeking an escape from their countries even as Amerikan capital attacks them. The law as we know it today is expressly designed to oppress these national groups; not merely for the sadistic pleasure of oppression, but because it allows the white nation and its ruling class to steal more of their labor. The student protester above is correct to say ICE does not care about the law, but they should question what purpose the law serves at all in a settler colony like the US. It is clear that ICE agents are untrained, murderous cowards, but that isn’t really what makes them bad. A hypothetical ICE agency that performs the same tasks, but in a respectable and courteous manner, would still be equally reprehensible. Instead of attacking ICE for being law-breakers, we should attack them for breaking up families to sustain the regime of unequal labor that we have here.

The Protest

The protest was organized over the course of several weeks with social media and in-person conversations. A date and time was chosen and broadcasted. The generalized message of the protest: ICE OUT – Out of campus, Out of (the city), and Out of Connecticut. The students knew that their school would take steps to discourage them from walking out, but they were surprised by the Machiavellian manipulation the administration was willing to engage in. Administrators started off with the typical threats; whispers spread that students would be suspended or expelled for protesting.

“Leading up to the protest, our School Advisory Board announced that students could be suspended if they decided to protest or walk off campus. They definitely scared a lot of people away from protesting with us.”

But their real trick didn’t come until the morning of the protest. Before the first period, the school announced that a two-hour assembly would be happening that same day. They conveniently scheduled this assembly right before the student protest was set to begin. Some students weren’t sure if the protest was still happening. It was a deliberate attempt to corral all the students in the school into one location in order to mis-direct the protest towards a school-sanctioned event. The students knew what was happening, but some who planned to protest definitely got caught in the trap. One student shared their experience of avoiding the assembly police:

“It was bogus that they did that. Before the assembly started I got up and left. I tried to avoid the teachers and walked out. Then, right next to our meeting place, campus security and principals were standing. It felt like they were trying to intimidate us.”

These tactics from the school provide a great lesson for these protesters and all other students: the school will do anything to disrupt your protest if they feel like it could gain steam. They will call their own events at the time of your protest to confuse others, and intimidate you from leaving the assembly hall. They do this to co-opt your message, or destroy it entirely.

The protest itself lasted the entire rest of the day and ended after the sun went down. The students chanted on campus for around 30 minutes, then walked off. They marched down the adjacent streets toward downtown, continuing their chants and waving signs. Many drivers honked in support. One white man revved his diesel truck to blow exhaust at them.

The protesters went to city hall first to speak with representatives of the city. The protesters wanted to know if the city had a plan in case ICE showed up, what the plan was, and if the city had any information they could share.

“The city official we spoke to was very nice. They said they would create a website, prepare some Know-Your-Rights materials, and speak to their boss about releasing more information.”

This is not a plan at all. This is a promise to release information that is already publicly available, and will unfortunately not prevent ICE raids. Government officials will often use a bait-and-switch to mislead groups demanding change. A bait and switch refers to an appealing offer that sounds good, but ends up being illusory. Organizers are misled into a sense of comfort, and the sweet-talking local official ends up betraying the cause and siding with the enemy forces. For example, look to the federal government’s shuffling of ICE officials in the wake of the Minneapolis resistance. Officials get replaced, tactics are revised, but their mission does not change. ICE’s new plan for Minneapolis will still require the city to submit to DHS requirements and support more raids. And this is at the time when the city is still in a rebellious uproar. The local government might act like an ally when confronted by dozens of students, but the city would sooner collapse than disobey the ICE kidnappers.

After city hall, the protesters marched to the center of the downtown area, taking position on a roundabout with their signs. The attitude from the community was generally very positive. One driver even stopped so they could give the students larger signs they had sitting in their car. They remained there for several hours in the cold until it got dark. The students reflected on the emotions they felt that day.

“I had never gotten in trouble before, and I knew I would at least get detention. But our message was so worth standing up for that I would risk it for those more vulnerable. It was an incredible feeling to give voice to others who are too scared, and be their voice for the vulnerable.” 

The school ended up giving the students two hours of detention for interrupting the school day and walking off campus. A worthwhile trade off for every student we interviewed. They were proud to receive the consequences of speaking up for immigrant families.

What Comes Next?

The school continues its attempts to divert the students’ protest into a dead end. Less than a week after the walkout, school administrators announced they would be leading their own so-called protest in support of immigrant students. Yes, you read that correctly. The same people who did everything they could to stop the original protest from happening are now giving their “support,” so long as they can control the protest’s environment and limits. The students are facing a blatant attempt at co-optation: to adopt the students’ idea or tactic for the school’s use. This is a classic tactic of counterinsurgency, which we saw deployed time and again during the 2020 June Uprisings surrounding the murder of George Floyd.

People may question, “Why is it bad that the school is leading a protest? Won’t this allow the message to spread further?”

The staff-organized protest would claim the students’ action, strip it of all its radical content, and deploy it themselves for all to participate. The first negative effect is to completely remove the outside community from the protest. The school wants to rob the protest of any visibility off campus, as this would make it look like the school is losing control of its students. Visibility also risks more residents getting involved off campus, especially if the students make connections with outside groups. A social media post of the original protest generated over 600 comments. This kind of publicity is bad for the school; they’d much prefer to keep the protest contained on campus. The students have already shown their organizing capabilities by organizing a successful event on their own despite snares from the school, which can only hold them back.

The second negative outcome of the staff-led protest will be a gross distortion of the original protest’s message. It lets the school paint themselves as allies to the students, rather than their immediate enemy. It lets the same people who would threaten and intimidate students act as if they are on the same side, resisting against the Bad Guys in the federal government. The students’ protest sought to agitate against a complicit school administration and city government. The adult-led protest will be a performance, re-enacting the student-protest with a non-confrontational spin.

What Can be Sustained?

Bonds between students and the community

The students were correct to take their protest downtown rather than stay on campus. Many people in the city certainly heard of the protest and the committed attitude of the students. The next step is to follow up on this initiative by solidifying ties with friendly groups in the community. Immigrant organizations and progressive churches are one place to start.

Bonds with other students

Campus will remain a good place to organize as long as the school does not take any extraordinarily repressive measures. Flyers, speeches, and targeted conversations are some tools students can use. Ultimately, the students are in the best place to understand what works and what doesn’t work on campus. They should “cross the river by feeling for the stones” — take one step and look around before taking another. Don’t be afraid to experiment, fail, and get even better.

Organized Structures

As summer approaches, the students will lose the daily connection that going to school five days a week provides. To make up for this, and to take their organizing to the next level, the students could double down and create a firm structure through which to carry out any work they decide to take on. This would involve defined roles, basic rules, and regular meetings. For more guidance, we recommend Tend the Garden, What is Organizing, and The Study Group.

Political Education

Most of what we learn in school is either a half-baked truth or an outright lie. In order to unlearn their myths and stand with all oppressed peoples, we need to develop an internationalist consciousness. This kind of thinking ties our organizing to the billions of people living under the shadow of Amerikan domination; it does not come naturally to people living in the US. Anyone who disagrees probably hasn’t studied the material conditions closely enough. Development requires us to actively study political texts from a wide net and share our findings with others, like in a reading group. This is a form of collective learning; it is the mirror opposite of the top-down instruction students receive in school. Internationalism is, of course, already at the center of what the protesters are doing. They are standing up for students made to feel vulnerable by the state. Political development will be absolutely essential for avoiding the many traps that catch organizers seeking to change the world.

We leave you with the conclusion from a student’s speech on that cold afternoon:

“You just need to take one step; people are always saying that, ‘I’m just one person, I alone can’t make a change,’ but if we ever found out we all think the same way just think of the endless possibilities of what we could do. In writing this I am taking the first step for all of us. So now I will say: stay out of our schools, stay out of our communities, and stay out of our states.”

This is an attempt to broaden and deepen the theory involved by addressing these issues. First and foremost, the boundaries between types of labor-appropriation that are set out in the initial article are maintained and enforced by an identifiable, single, social force: transmisogyny. Where boundaries between cis men and women are concerned, misogyny is merely the attenuated form of this social policing. It is necessary to elaborate the ramifications of the fundamental social force that supports and enforces the gendered division of labor (which is the material basis of the social force itself) and creates the sex-division in society.

Transmisogyny As Foundational

The objective basis for the division of human beings into categories of sex is neither found in the field of medicine or psychology but is, rather, the result of labor expropriation. In fact, this labor expropriation appears to be the foundation of class society itself. So that some could benefit from the labor of others, early human societies established the social order of sex, or rather, the expropriators founded this division. Those that society sexed as “women” became the subject of labor expropriation by those sexed as “men.” All other “markers” of sex serve merely as justifications for this fundamental fact of basic material oppression.

In order to maintain that machinery, human society (now firmly in the control of its triumphant and self-created patriarchs) developed social tools and technologies needed to police the system of patriarchy. The need for clear lines dividing those who are subject to expropriation and those who benefit from it necessitated the formation of a social police force to uphold the boundaries of maleness and defend the patriarchal expropriators from encroachment. We might just as well replace the terms “man” and “woman” here with “domestic oppressor” and “domestically oppressed.” The boundaries being policed are first, between cis heterosexual men and gay men; then, between cis men and trans men; lastly, that boundary between cis women and trans women. “Am I allowed to exploit you without social consequence?” is the question that this social regime seeks to provide an easy answer to.

Misogyny is the way in which those who are performing the social process of sexing others – those who are, in other words, trying to sort individuals into the categories of “those I am permitted to exploit” and “those I am not socially permitted to exploit” – enforce the boundaries of those categories. Women are forcibly classed (sexed) into the category of domestically oppressed and as a result are subject to labor expropriation. The most intense and most basic form of this regime is transmisogyny.

Transmisogyny is the combination of misogyny and transphobia; transphobia being the way that those found to be in violation of the arbitrary and inconsistent standards that society judges one be “man” or “woman” are coerced into conforming to the standards of those categories or otherwise punished for such transgressions. The violent disgust performed by the transmisogynist serves to police each of those barriers, at the same time forcing the subject into a subaltern position vis-a-vis cis individuals and forcing that subject into the exploited sex-relation between exploited and exploiter; in essence, shunting all women into the role of domestically exploited.

The Economic Woman

Thus, we must not only corral our analysis in narrow categories, but rather remain alert that these categories are representations of complex inter-relations. The categories put forward in “Marxism and Social Reproduction” are the combination of two axes (man/woman, legitimized/suppressed) into four broad groups:

1. Legitimized men: cisnormative heterosexual men;
2. Legitimized women: cisnormative heterosexual women;
3. Suppressed men: trans men, “effeminate” men, men who are not strictly perceived as heterosexual or who are in actuality not strictly heterosexual;
4. Suppressed women: trans women, women who fall outside the cisnormative or heterosexual categories or who are excluded from white settler-colonial womanhood.

Here again we can replace the above “men” and “women” with domestic labor expropriator and domestically expropriated. As stated in the prior article, this system of categorization is based on the action of being socially sexed; it is the act of sexing that places someone into one of the categories. The manner in which they are sexed depends on the perceptions of the person doing the categorizing and what they “observe” or read into the behavior, appearance, etc., of the person subjected to sexing.

Because sex orders class, we can apply this analytical structure as a shorthand across the class boundaries to understand gradations within each class. That is to say, the only “real” economic woman – the group most subject to the oppressive structures of the social order – are proletarian women who fall into the fourth category of the suppressed woman. By working to liberate the suppressed woman, we challenge and attack the entire structure.

Forms of Liberation

How can we work toward the liberation of the suppressed woman? We must work toward the organization of women-as-women and bring about the subjective awareness of legitimized women and suppressed women who belong to the non-proletarian classes of the necessity of allying with and supporting their suppressed proletarian sisters. In order to bring this about, however, we do not begin among the legitimized women, but rather through the organization of suppressed women in the proletarian class while at the same time uniting the proletarian organizations of workers with the organizations of suppressed women. 

That is to say: we must organize the proletarian women, and in particular the trans proletarian women, as women first. From this base, we must then elevate the subjective awareness of non-proletarian women that they must join with their sisters; that they must annihilate their class to embrace their gender and work toward liberation. This truth must be laid bare: that one may retain the privileges of class or may liberate oneself from the oppressive structures of gender, but one cannot do both. At the same time, proletarian organizations of workers must be joined to this fight, understanding that the battle for total liberation has many fronts. Organizing where the contradiction is sharpest gets to the root of the problem.

Of course, more concrete analysis is needed. This is merely the outline of the problem and does not represent the myriad ways in which it may manifest; nor does this represent a timeless understanding of historical events, but rather is grounded in the ways in which gender and gendered oppression operate today. It is always possible that they will be different tomorrow, just as they were yesterday, on the historic scale.

This means that we should be forming trans defense organizations. They should begin among the suppressed women: combat brigades, medical networks, transportation, and alternatives to appealing to the bourgeois police must be established in all localities. These organizations can then ally with and incorporate suppressed men, maneuvering the economic/material man/woman contradiction into a non-antagonistic position while strengthening solidarity along the lines of the suppressed/legitimized contradiction. Finally, these organizations can and should become integrated, armed, wings of class-organizations struggling for total liberation.

None of this should be pursued in a mechanistic fashion or according to a formula; each locality will have to navigate the order of operations and the actual conditions and each organization will have to determine when and how to integrate, progress, and advance its local struggle. At some point in the near future, all local struggles will then need to fuse to an all-empire struggle.

From the point of view of legitimized-sex Communists, they must make all efforts to bring their struggles in line with the struggles of their suppressed-sex siblings. This means ensuring that their organizations have strong backstops against chauvinism: functioning self-and-community criticism is, of course, the foundation stone in this area, but is insufficient in and of itself. Dedication to suppressed-sex causes and physically putting themselves on the line for their suppressed-sex comrades – between them and the state as well as between them and “red” chauvinists – will go a long way toward bringing the movement into line.