Grace Lee Boggs

I wrote Organization Means Commitment in the early 1970s in response to African American activists who, after reading the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party, were asking us what kind of organization they should build.

This little paper was our answer. I wrote but didn’t sign it because the ideas in it came from a number of sources, including the Conversations in Maine, and we were already putting them into practice. We never anticipated that it would be reprinted by Spear & Shield. And that many years later it would be read by Yusef Shakur in prison and help him think about how he should organize after his release. And that in 2010 questions would arise about who wrote it and who owned the reprinting rights.

In the early 1970s we had just emerged from a very violent and tumultuous decade. Urban rebellions had exploded all over the country. President Kennedy, Malcolm and Martin, Robert Kennedy had been assassinated.

In the midst of this turmoil Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, accompanied by a handful of armed youth, marched on the California state legislature to protest a ban on weapons and to announce the founding of the Black Panther Party. Overnight, this very visible defiance turned their new party into a mass party, attracting thousands of angry young blacks ready to confront the “pigs,” but also making it possible for the “pigs” to send agent provocateurs into the party to propose violent actions and crimes that would result in huge numbers of young lives being wasted.

Organization Means Commitment was written to project a very different concept of revolutionary organization and leadership, the kind that could only be developed by many years of patient and protracted theoretical and practical struggles. Creating this concept of leadership and of an organization involved: Creating an organizational structure to develop every member into a leader instead of depending on a few charismatic leaders, as the movement had done in the 1960s.

Distinguishing between Rebellion and Revolution. As we explained in Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century (RETC): Rebellion is a stage in the development of revolution but it is not revolution. It is an important stage because it represents the standing up of the oppressed. To make a revolution people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical leap and become more human human beings. In order to change/transform the world, they must change/transform themselves.”

Thinking dialectically, i.e., recognizing that reality is constantly changing; that an idea that is progressive at one point can turn into its opposite at a later point. Also, because in everything there is both the positive and negative, the responsibility of revolutionary leadership in times of crisis is not just to denounce or protest oppression but to project a vision that encourages grassroots creation of positive alternatives.

Making very clear that a revolution in an advanced industrial country like the United States must be very different from the revolutions that have taken place in Third World or developing countries. The rapid economic development of the United States was achieved by enslaving African-Americans and dispossessing and exterminating Native Americans. Therefore, the fundamental contradiction that was built into our founding and must be resolved by the next American Revolution is the contradiction between our economic and technological overdevelopment and our human and political underdevelopment.

Because we never lost sight of this fundamental contradiction, over the last thirty years we have been able again and again to project actions that challenge the American people to transform both ourselves and our institutions. Organization Means Commitment means committing ourselves to this kind of transformational organizing, organizing which does not mainly denounce and protest oppression or mobilize Americans to struggle for more material things, but challenges us as Americans to evolve or transform ourselves into more human human beings.

Recognizing that revolutionary leadership means more than just protesting oppression but also projecting a vision that encourages grassroots creation of positive alternatives designed to create more human humans, transformative organizing involves doing the work of loving each other in ways that seem ridiculous if we only think of revolutionary change as masses of people mobilized to make demands on a state. Because our historical reality has been shaped the actions of human beings who have internalized the contradiction between technological overdevelopment and human underdevelopment, even if we protest so effectively that we acquire state power, if we don’t change our ways of thinking and relating to one another, we will only further develop this contradiction with new people in charge. These changes must be rooted in love.

Because the next American Revolution must resolve this contradiction, the organizing that creates it will not simply be antiimperialist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, or anti-ableist. Instead, the love based organizing that creates the next American Revolution will recognize that all these ‘isms’ are the logical outgrowth of a system whose internal logic is shaped by the loveless contradiction between technological overdevelopment and human underdevelopment. Therefore, the only way to secure freedom from these forms of oppression to create the freedom to develop and practice new types of more human relationships. Only by developing these kinds of loving relationships can we as humans heal ourselves—and each other—from the damage done to us by an economic and political system bent on creating wealth at the expense of all living things. Through healing ourselves and our communities we can enable ourselves to stop reacting to oppression and begin the process of projecting healthier, more human alternatives that don’t benefit us at the expense of the rest of the world.

As Jimmy wrote in chapter 6 of RETC, “The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things.

We must give up many of the things which this country has acquired at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death….It is obviously going to take a tremendous transformation to prepare the people of the United States for these new social goals. But potential revolutionaries only become true revolutionaries if they take the side of those who believe that humanity can be transformed.” (Originally published in 1974; RETC was re-issued with a new introduction by me in 2009).

Almost forty years after it was originally written, the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership is publishing Organizing Means Commitment because its reprint by Spear & Shield as well as several recent questions raised by young people in reference to it tells us that it should be published. Because of these questions, we think Organizing Means Commitment has a role to play in nurturing the transformational leadership capacities of individuals and organizations committed to creating productive, sustainable, ecologically responsible, and just communities.

If it is read and discussed through local, national and international networks of activists, artists and intellectuals, we think it can foster new ways of living, being and thinking to face the challenges of the 21st century.

ORGANIZATION MEANS COMMITMENT

(Commitment Is The Key)

(Anonymous) Grace Lee Boggs

Introduction

As the US enters the 70’s, some people are beginning to discuss the question of how to build a revolutionary cadre organization. Most of those who are discussing it will never get beyond the point of discussion, while of those who are actually beginning to organize, only a minority will probably be around a few years from now.

This is because it is not at all easy to build a revolutionary cadre organization. It takes a lot of time and patience; a lot of hard work and struggle; a continuing relationship from and to the revolutionary and progressive social forces within your society; a continuing expansion and enrichment of your own revolutionary vision and that of the revolutionary social force; the ability to think independently as well as to accept discipline cheerfully; and unrelenting self-criticism and struggle to overcome your own shortcomings. This work and struggle, this time and patience, this continuing relationship, this expansion and enrichment, this independence and discipline, this criticism and self-criticism, can only come from a continuing commitment in theory and in practice to the conviction that at the heart of (every great revolution) is the urgent need to transform Man/Woman into a new and more advanced form of human being by means of struggle. The only justification for a revolution is that it accelerates the evolution of man and woman. The first thing you need for such a commitment is an unshakable conviction that Correct ideas matter and that once the correct ideas are grasped by the great masses of people, they become a material force capable of changing society and the world. In a country like the U.S. where there is so much respect for things and so little respect for ideas, the number of people with this conviction is still very small; and the number whose convictions cannot be shaken is even smaller. When your friends and associates accuse you of having too much faith in ideas or in “human nature,” it takes a pretty strong person to hold firm.

One of the most difficult hurdles that a cadre group has to overcome at its first meeting (and often at subsequent meetings) is the feeling among those present that there must be something wrong with them because they are so few. In a country like the U.S., where it is normal and natural to judge the value and importance of everything according to the size (the bigger the better), it is not easy to grasp and hold firm to the historical fact that every advance that has ever been made by humankind was started by a few people, often, to begin with, by only one individual, since every beginning can only be A beginning. Someone—it may have been a man or a woman—was the first to use a piece of stone as a hatchet or hammer or ax; in other words, to take the first step in tool-making (two million) years ago, which has now led to the machine age of lathes, punch presses, and dynamos. Similarly, someone—it may have been a man or woman— was the first to mold a pot out of mud…Elsewhere on earth, maybe another continent, or maybe only a few miles away, another man or woman at approximately the same time may have been doing the same things. But the first man or woman to take this first crude step in tool-making or pottery did not know this. Nor did he or she stop to speculate why only he or she or just a few others were taking this step.

The practice of judging a step forward in humankind’s productive or political evolution by the number of people involved is a modern, western, and especially American prejudice. When a handful of people met in 1921 to organize the Chinese Communist Party which now governs 750 million people, they knew, of course, that the party had to become much larger before it could lead the Chinese revolution to victory over imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism. But those present did not look around at each other and ask, ”Why us rather than anyone else?” They knew that anything which men and women create, any advance which humankind makes, must have a beginning and that every beginning must be made by those few individuals who choose to begin something because they feel it should be begun. Before something can GROW, it must first BE.

A. The Role of Revolutionary Cadre Organization

Building a revolutionary cadre organization is enormously difficult, but there is no mystery about the essential functions of such an organization. Just as the individual human being requires a mind to synthesize the many varied experiences which it receives through the senses, so the revolutionary social forces in a revolutionary period require a revolutionary cadre organization. Just as the mind acts as a center for the senses giving and receiving impulses, so the revolutionary cadre organization acts as a center for the revolutionary social forces.

Neither can replace the other; nor can either develop without continuing interaction with the other. They are the two poles of a developing and dynamic relationship, continually enriching one another in a never ending spiral process of “from the masses, to the masses.”

This dialectical concept is the key to the building of a revolutionary cadre organization.

The first task of a revolutionary’ cadre organization is theoretical analysis and synthesis. That is to say, the cadre organization must first reflect upon the specific social realities within which it is operating, with the aim of arriving at a clear conception of: A) How this social reality has developed historically, and B) The contradictions within this reality which are the basis for further development. The cadre organization must then, C) Define which of these contradictions are the principal and major ones requiring solutions if the society is to advance; and D) Develop a vision of what kind of new reality will be created by the resolution of those principal or major contradictions. Finally, the revolutionary cadre organization must, E) Determine which sectors of the society have the greatest potential for the struggle necessary to resolve these contradictions and create this new reality.

These theoretical concepts together constitute the ideology of the cadre organization.

After deriving its ideology from reflections upon the social realities, the cadre organization must devise concrete programs to go to the revolutionary social forces (masses, people) in order to mobilize them in struggles to create new reality through resolving the major contradictions of the society. In devising and projecting these concrete programs, the cadre organization must be concerned not only to increase the momentum of struggle and the physical power of the revolutionary social forces. It must also be concerned to bring about a transformation in these forces. That is to say, it must seek to increase their initiative, their critical, political consciousness, their sense of collectivity and responsibility, and the structures with which they can not only bring about the collapse of the existing oppressive society, but also create a new society.

The cadre organization, in other words, must be concerned not only with the quantitative but with the qualitative development of the mass struggle and of the revolutionary social forces. It must take seriously the fact that all the people within a given society, including the revolutionary social forces, are shaped by the dominant values of the society. In the light of the revolutions that have taken place all over the world in the past half century, beginning with the Russian Revolution of 1917, anyone claiming to be a revolutionist must be willing to look beyond the question of power to what happens after the taking of power.

Hence, s/he must be concerned not only with increasing the anger and militance of the oppressed but also their determination and capacity to transform themselves. Otherwise, willfully or not, s/he is only preparing them for despair and hence for the leadership of demagogues, and s/he himself/herself is not a revolutionist, but a rebel or a demagogue.

At the same time the cadre organization is also providing the framework within which the cadre members themselves can be constantly transforming themselves into more conscious, more responsible, more creative and more critical human beings—to whom the revolutionary masses can increasingly look for leadership because they can recognize in them actual, living witnesses to the possibility of creating new men and women.

If the ideology of the cadre organization is sound; if its program meets the needs of the revolutionary social forces; if the cadre themselves are in a close and continuing relationship with these forces, then the revolutionary social forces will begin to struggle around these programs.

In turn, these struggles will bring about new situations, involving new contradictions and new conflicts. This means that the cadre organization must be continuously prepared to reevaluate its ideas of the social reality and to devise new programs to take to the revolutionary social forces.

Thus constantly deepening and enriching both their ideas and their relationship with the revolutionary social forces, the cadre never lose sight of their primary commitment to the revolutionary cadre organization. It is the center from which they go outwards and to which they return. It provides the framework within which they can be continuously re-evaluating their theory and practice and continuously transforming themselves so as to be better able to live up to the historic task for which they accepted responsibility.

B. The American Political Background

The difficulty in understanding the role of the revolutionary cadre organization does not stem from any intrinsic mystery in this role.

Rather, it stems from the lack of experience of Americans in the political process of continuing commitment to the kind of systematic, collective, dialectical, theoretical and practical struggle which is at the heart of a revolutionary cadre organization. For historical reasons, the approach of most Americans to social has always been a pragmatic or problem-solving approach which is essentially anti-intellectual. In what has been described as the “headache syndrome,” they react to and try to resolve each problem it arises, as if each were a sporadic, isolated or accidental problem in a system which is fundamentally sound, and therefore capable of quick and easy solutions.

In the recent period, confidence in the soundness of American institutions has plummeted, chiefly under the impact of the revolutionary struggles of Vietnamese people and the revolt of blacks. The result is that a great many Americans, black and white, no longer think of American problems as isolated or accidental. They have traced their roots to the “system” of “capitalism and racism” and concluded that a revolution is necessary in the US. They have further identified the chief revolutionary social forces to make this revolution as the blacks and other non-white (so-called) minorities.

However, for the most part, these people still strongly resist the ideas of committing themselves to the kind of collective and protracted struggle in the dialectical relationship to the revolutionary social forces outlined above. They no longer look at the problems of this society in a piecemeal fashion, to be solved one by one. But they still regard the revolutionary struggle as a series of isolated events, “happenings” and “experiences.” The result is that they do not have a framework within which to do the continual evaluation that is necessary, and their angry attacks on the system turn into abstractions and rhetorical denunciations.

Always “on the go,” attracted to whatever or whoever turns them on, they jump from one activity or group to another, judging the revolutionary content of that activity or group by its militancy or by the excitement and relief which it offers from boredom and frustration, i.e., quantitatively and subjectively. In the past few years, white youth, rebelling against the materialism and individualism of their middle-class parents, have been drifting in and out of communes and collectives.

They claim to be seeking collectivity but they are unwilling to make the long range commitment to any group which is the prerequisite to collective struggle and collective learning. As a result, the collectives and communes springing up and disappearing all over the country are little more than aggregates of subjectivities in which each individual is still doing his or her “own thing.”

These young people have substituted for the pragmatic, antiintellectual attitudes of their forebears, a new anti-intellectual attitude which is the unique product of the post-World War II society. Raised in a world of unceasing novelty and mobility, of revolutions in production and abundance in consumption, of instant communication and spaceship transportation, they have been culturally deprived of the experience through protracted struggle which has been the good and bad fortune of every previous generation, if only in the productive arena. As a result, they have an existentialist philosophy or the conviction that life consists essentially of momentary experiences.

In the 1960’s, this lack of experience in protracted struggle was not a serious handicap. In fact, in retrospect, it was an enormous advantage since it enabled young people to leapfrog the old radical organizations with their obsolete theories and programs (still stemming from the experience of 1917 revolution in Russia), and to create instead a new and unique style of politics. This “new style of politics” centered around the dramatization of confrontations which were then carried into every living room through television. Staging these confrontations and using the mass media with enormous skill, the movement leaders of the late 50’s and 60’s, black and white, were able to overnight bring home to the entire society the barbarism of US racism and the genocidal war in Vietnam. Radicalized by these methods young Americans, particularly young black Americans, exploded in the streets of practically every major city in the country, creating by the late 60’s a social crisis of unprecedented magnitude with the entire society.

However, while the social crisis was obviously maturing, no cadre organization was being created to evaluate the new reality and to give direction to the emerging social forces. The result is that today the great majority of Americans, both those who feel oppressed by the system and those who support the system because of the benefits they have received from it, are completely bewildered. They feel as if they were being tossed about in the eye of a great storm with no idea where they should go or how to get there. Likewise, in the absence of a revolutionary cadre organization, most young people who played such an important role in creating the movement of the 60’s have been without any framework within which they could collectively evaluate the situation and make new projections to the country, let alone transform themselves into more responsible, more conscious, more dedicated and more critical cadres. Left to their own individual devices, the great majority of them have drifted out of the movement or have gone the way of left or right opportunism. This is to say, many have become pure adventurists, making isolated and desperate attacks on the power structure or anyone who they think supports the power structure.

Others have become careerists, “on the go” in one way or another, as consultants, project directors, or staff persons supported by federal, city and state agencies and by churches and universities in order to coopt the “heavies” of the movement.

C. Commitment Is Key

Against this background, it should be clear why the first step of any group of people seeking to build a cadre organization must be the decision of each individual in the group to commit herself or himself to a collective, protracted struggle in a dialectically developing relationship with the revolutionary social forces [people]. Those who are convinced of the need for revolutionary social change and who, out of sober reflection on the concrete experiences of the recent past, have become convinced that spontaneous rebellions, revolts and confrontations—no matter how many or how spectacular—lead not to revolution, but to despair and confusion, should be ready to make this commitment out of their own volition.

If, among those who have come together to discuss the question, only two people are ready for this commitment, these two must resist the temptation to continue meeting with the others in the hope or illusion that by doing so, they will persuade the others to stop wavering and make a commitment to this temptation, they will discover in the end that they are left either with the same two people, or that they themselves have begun to waver, since the waverers are the ones who have behind them the pressure of the way things are, rather than of the way things should be.

The decision by a group of people, no matter how few, to commit themselves to this collective and protracted struggle and to reject “on the go” politics, shapes everything that follows. If their commitment is to become more than rhetorical “testifying,” they must now embark on the concrete steps necessary to create a collectivity out of their separate selves. As it is, they are still individuals, with their own very different ideas about what is and what should be, what they should do and how they should do it, what they can expect from each other now and what they should be able to expect from each other as they begin to struggle together.

In order for the group to start transforming their separate subjectivities, they must first arrive, through organized discussion and an agreed-upon method of decision-making, an agreement on the following:

1. Their ideology.
2. A program or programs for activity within a prescribed period, long enough for them to complete some projects, and yet short enough so that they can see the end at the beginning.
3. A structure within which they can carry out these programs and which will also provide for the continuing growth and developing of the group as a whole and or every member in it.
4. Standards of membership.
5. Methods for continuing evaluation of their activities and themselves.

Some or all of these may be modified in the course of the organization’s continuing development. Particularly in a revolutionary period, situations change very rapidly, and the ideas of the revolutionary organization must change accordingly. As situations change, different views over what should or should not be modified may at such time lead to such opposing proposals that those holding these opposing views cannot continue to co-exist in the same organization, and a split becomes unavoidable. But unless these changes or differences have developed in relationship to an original set of basic ideas, they cannot be dealt with as political differences, but will instead be interpreted as subjective or personality differences, with all the bitterness that usually accompanies such interpretations.

A (1): Ideology For the last 50 years most radicals in the United States have thought that it was sufficient to define the American historical reality in terms of Marx’s 19th century analysis of European capitalism and Lenin’s pre-World War I analysis of European imperialism, simply adding to these the analysis of American racism, usually interpreted as a manifestation of capitalism or domestic imperialism. In the past ten years, the New Left radicals have continued to define the American historical reality in these terms. However, in recognition of the postWorld War II struggles of Third World peoples inside and outside the United States and the increasingly middle-class character of the American workers, they have simply substituted Third World peoples for the working class which Marx and Lenin regarded as the revolutionary social force to destroy capitalism and imperialism.

None of these radicals, either in the past or recently, ever took seriously the fact that Marx and Lenin were both developing their theories in systematic reflection upon their specific historical reality, a totally different historical reality from what exists in the United States today. Marx was writing at the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe 100 years ago, and Lenin in backward Russia over 50 years ago, in periods when rapid development of the productive forces was the urgent concern of Europeans and Russians respectively. Today the United States is the most technologically advanced country in human history, producing goods and developing the productive forces with such rapidity that every politically conscious, socially responsible person is trying to think of how to slow development down. Far from being in material want, even the poorest layers of the population are constantly being courted by capitalism to buy, buy, buy; and state agencies subsidize these layers so their publicly-financed purchasing power can keep the economy going.

Yet, instead of analyzing this new social reality with the seriousness with which Marx and Lenin analyzed theirs, most radicals have simply reacted to the revolt of Third World peoples by casting them in the role which Marx and Lenin gave to the working class. Subsequently, as if vying for the leading role on the stage of this social drama, other groups, victimized and alienated within the society (women, youth, prisoners) have begun to substitute themselves for blacks. Now, some radicals, reacting to the chaos and absurdities into which this kind of rivalry to take the center of the stage is plunging the movement, have fallen back on the working class as hero, hoping against hope that spreading unemployment, inflation, taxes and other economic miseries may yet turn the working class into the revolutionary class which Marx’s 19th century analysis called for.

Instead of just reacting to rebellions and to each other as these organizations are doing, the revolutionary cadre organization must make its own serious analysis of the unique historical development of the United States and of the new social tasks which have been uniquely posed as a result of its unprecedented material development. It should then be able to recognize that the major contradiction in this country is not an economic one, but rather the contradiction between this country’s extremely advanced technological development and its extreme political and social underdevelopment. This contradiction is manifested in the preoccupation of its people with their own private pursuits and their material comforts and in their lack of political consciousness and social responsibility, as well as of genuine self-governing institutions which could encourage the development of political consciousness and social responsibility. It can then be seen that the chief purpose of the revolution is to accelerate the rapid growth of political consciousness and social responsibility in the people so that they can put politics in command of economics, instead of being ruled by economics as they are today.

A (2): Program

Mass movement groups are reactive, issue-oriented groups who are constantly plunging into activity around the innumerable issues, usually defense issues, which are constantly surfacing in this period, such as “Free the Prisoners,” “Free Angela Davis,” “Abolish Stress”

“Bring the Boys Back from Vietnam.” The result is that most of them disappear as rapidly as they appear. What usually continues is: A) either one of the Old Left organizations (CP-USA), SWP, PLM, etc.) or B) cliques of individuals who are often clustered around a particularly charismatic individual or one who is particularly gifted at fund raising or C) social groups of alumni or veterans of various struggles in the 60’s.

Few of these, if any, have ever sat down to work out a program that a half dozen people could carry out over the period of a year in order to build themselves into a viable organization with their own collective identity and specific contribution to make to the overall movement. Most of the so-called revolutionaries in the US can rap about the need for a planned economy or for the reorganization of the entire united stales from top to bottom. But they never have taken the time to think through the program for even a small cadre organization: a clear conception of the purposes the group is trying to achieve, the methods by which they propose to achieve these purposes, a proposed time schedule, including deadlines for each step of the program, and the specific step-by-step processes.

When an organization works out clearly such programs, it also establishes a basis for the evaluation of its programs. Thereby it does one of the most important, yet deceptively simple, things that a revolutionary cadre organization can do: learn from experience or develop its theory from social practice. Nowhere more than in the US is it so necessary to recognize and emphasize the importance of learning and the development of theory through a continuing relationship of your theory to practice. This is the only way to combat the powerful tendencies in this country to empty rhetoric (or talk without practice), and mindless activism or reactionary militancy, i.e., militancy to prove one’s militancy or because it is fashionable to be militant, rather than to act because one has some deeply felt convictions about the way man/womankind can and should advance, and realizes that these convictions can only be tested in social practice. .

Therefore, in the initial period, the main programs of a revolutionary cadre organization should be internal programs. That is to say, they should be consciously aimed at transforming those who have come together on the basis of commitment to a collectivity, with a powerful sense of their developing and continuing collective identity and purpose. The first year programs of a cadre organization should center chiefly around the following:

A) The theoretical strengthening of the members (political education).

B) The development of the literature of the organization and the skills of the membership to enable them to take the ideas of the organization to the masses (propaganda).

C) The increase of the organization’s members (recruitment).

The Propaganda Program of the organization is crucial to the development of the revolutionary struggle since as it cannot too often be repeated, once the correct ideas are grasped by the masses, they become a material force capable of changing society and the world.

Particularly at this stage in the struggle, the major emphasis of the organization’s propaganda must be on expanding the vision and increasing the critical political consciousness of the people, i.e., inspiring them with the broad purposes of the struggle and developing their capacity to de-mythologize and de-romanticize. To mobilize the masses in struggle or to increase their militancy without at the same time expanding their consciousness of their responsibility and capacity to create “new men and women,” is only to lay the groundwork for their despair.

In mapping out the Recruitment Program of the organization, great care should be taken to make the process of recruitment a selective one, aimed at slow and qualitative growth, rather than rapid expansion, taking care not to judge the growth of the organization by the numbers of its members, rather than by their commitment to the ideology and programs of the organization.

In the matter of recruitment, the cadre organization has few models to go on. In the past, it was ridiculously easy, particularly for a worker or a black person, to acquire membership in the CPUSA or the Trotskyite parties. The organizations, except for relatively brief periods right after the Russian Revolution had so little contact with the workers, and even less with blacks, and so few workers or blacks were attracted to these organizations, that each one became a kind of “prize;” so that if he or she showed any sign of being willing to join, the organization virtually subsidized them, sending them around the country on tours for the party so that the party could present a public image of black or worker membership.

Since the 60’s, on the other hand, thousands of young people have been attracted to the new political organizations of all persuasions, ready to drift into (and out of) these organizations with the same lack of commitment as they have given to ad hoc organizations, particularly if the mass media has given these organizations any publicity. In turn, these organizations, living for the moment and for the spotlight, have recruited furiously in order to give the impression of a large public following. In the recent past we have had some instructive experiences with organizations who have expanded rapidly for the sake of and with the help of the media. Often they have discovered that they were recruiting many police agents. Even when this was not the case, they have still been at the mercy of their new members, most of who were attracted to the organization in the first place by the image of confrontation which they got from the mass media and who have therefore led the organization into confrontation after confrontation, until its entire energies and resources were exhausted in defense activities.

For all these reasons, it is important that the revolutionary cadre organization seek to avoid both rapid expansion and any kind of publicity, in full recognition of the fact that any rapidly expanding or publicity-oriented organization has no chance to do the learning and developing which are absolutely essential to preparation for rapid growth at a later stage of the protracted struggle.

For the same reasons, a cadre organization must acquire its basic finances from dues paid by its members and from the strictly political activities of the organization (sales of literature, public meetings, etc.), and not from grants or funds from private or public agencies. The danger is not that these agencies will put direct pressure on or try to dilute any militant activities which the organization may want to engage in. The corruption is much more insidious, arising from the fact that external funding deprives the organization and the membership of the opportunity and the responsibility to develop and lest their own commitment and their own ideas.

Structure

Regular meetings at least once a week and always starting on time, the keeping of minutes at every meeting and the reading of these minutes at the subsequent meeting, and a clearly-organized agenda for each meeting, are the elementary structural requirements for a revolutionary cadre organization. If it seems strange to emphasize what should be obvious, it is because these are not at all obvious in the “on the go” political atmosphere of today’s movement, which is more likely to call meetings when the spirit moves it, to disdain the keeping of minutes and to regard presentation of an agenda as incipient bureaucratization or elitism.

Through regularly scheduled meetings, each member begins to internalize the structure of the group as part of his or her own living routines. Through the promptness with which every member arrives at the meeting, the unity of every one starting together is established.

Through minutes a group takes responsibility for its programs and procedures from week to week and begins to get a concept of its own development as historical. Through a clearly organized agenda, the essentials of which should be the same from week to week, every member can be preparing between meetings for his or her participation at the meeting, thus creating a framework for the maximum participation of each member.

At the beginning of each meeting, the Chairperson is the one responsible for preparing the agenda. This can then be revised by the membership who must accept the agenda in its final form before the meeting proceeds. This apparently simple situation is an example of the leadership-membership relationship which is essential to the development of a revolutionary cadre organization.

The establishment of structure with which leadership and membership can be developed is a very difficult problem inside the United States. On the one hand, there is a strong tendency in ordinary non-political working people to hold back and wait for direction from those who they may consider to be more capable or experienced, i.e., to see themselves as permanent rank and file. Coupled with this is the tendency to rally around and rely upon charismatic leaders to lead them out of the wilderness of oppression.

Movement people, including young blacks, also tend to be caught up in this “cult of personality.” But there is an even more widespread tendency among young people to regard any leadership as “elitist” and “bureaucratic” and to insist instead on what they call “participatory democracy” or the uninterrupted rule of the rank and file.

Although apparently contradictory, both the “cult of personality” and the “ultra-democracy” of young people actually stem from the same existentialist, ad hoc approach of movement people to revolutionary struggle. Constantly on the go from rally to rally, living for the psychological impact of each meeting on their feelings, they are not concerned with the development of collective struggle, but rather with their own momentary feelings as individuals.

The structure of the revolutionary cadre organization, on the other hand, is created to develop a dialectical, i.e., a developing, relationship between the leaders and members of the organization analogous to that between the organization and the revolutionary social forces. The important difference is that the members of the revolutionary cadre organization elect their leaders out of their own ranks, choosing those who they believe to be the most capable of guiding and directing the organization, and holding them responsible for giving such guidance and direction.

This is one of the many ways in which the revolutionary cadre organization is constantly making creative use of the dialectical interplay and tension between the two opposites, Democracy and Centralism, for its own collective development. Or, to put it another way, it is precisely because collective development is so critical to the essence of the revolutionary cadre organization that it is able to make conscious and creative use of the interplay between the two opposites, Democracy and Centralism.

Most Americans find it difficult to understand the principles and practices of Democratic Centralism because Americans, generally speaking, proceed not from the concept of roles, but from the concept of rights versus privileges and prerogatives. This concept of rights, embodied in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, predisposes Americans to regard any relationship between individuals and leaders as an antagonistic contradiction and to look at every situation from the viewpoint of the individuals preserving his or her right from external infringement.

The concept of roles, on the other hand, involves looking at relations in terms of the development of the collectivity, whether this be the organization, the society as a whole, or any institution in the society. At the heart of Democratic Centralism is the question: “What functions must be performed by each part of the structure if the collectivity is to be able to act as and continue to develop into a strong nucleus of revolutionary leadership and as a framework for the continuing development and transformation of every member?”

It is necessary to have leadership within the structure of a revolutionary cadre organization because it is necessary to have some persons or a Central Committee that is playing the role of projecting and generalizing, unifying and coordinating. If there is no chairperson within a particular committee, or no Central Committee within an organization with a number of committees, who is playing this role as “center,” then there is only the plurality, the specificity and the variety of the members on the constituent committees. On the other hand, if the various members and the various committees who are responsible for specific programs, are not constantly developing their programs, are not increasing their contact with the revolutionary social forces, are not discussing issues and programs of the organization, and not developing their ability to think independently, then the unity of the organization turns into homogeneity.

This Discipline and Democracy are both part of the principles of the daily practice of a revolutionary cadre organization, not because they have been imposed or because they are guaranteed by statute, but because of the deep conviction of each member that these are both necessary to the development of the organization.

Every member is bound by the decision of the organization because every member realizes that without discipline, everybody and anybody could go his or her own way, do his or her own thing, and the organization would fall apart.

On the other hand, the leadership is constantly encouraging and seeking to create situations in which there is full discussion by the membership because it knows that if decisions are arrived at without the full democratic discussion and even debate of the members, the organization cannot penetrate to the issues involved in any decision or the dualities that are implicit in every unity. Leadership knows that agreement reached through a process of full discussion and debate is always more effective than agreement reached through unquestioning ascent. Leadership and membership both know that liveliness of mind must go hand in hand with Unity of Will if the organization is to develop. Structure should be the basis of flexibility, not rigidity.

Both leadership and membership in the revolutionary cadre organization is an art, in the sense that both leaders and members must learn to play creative roles in the development of their mutual relationship. There are no exact rules for the behavior of either leaders or members as there is in a scientific experiment, or in learning an athletic skill, where uniform conditions can be artificially set up and repeated again and again. However, experience has shown that certain procedures and attitudes can be immediately recognized as contrary to the general dialectical principles of Democratic Centralism.

For example, the “rotating chairperson” (which is often proposed in the name of “participatory democracy”), destroys the possibility of leadership playing its essential role as “center.” A chairperson must hold office for a period of time long enough so that s/he can develop the responsibilities of this role. On the other hand, a chairperson who is not constantly listening to the members of his or her committees will soon be speaking only from her or his limitations and will be unable to project to the members a unity which has the richness of variety embodied in it.

A chairperson must be efficient at running meetings, but she or he must also be willing to do “propaganda work” among the members of the committee individually, in order to develop a common language with them. A leadership which resorts to agitation and exhortation of the membership is usually one which has failed to fulfill its responsibility of projecting programs and positions which embody the relationship between what the organization is doing from day to day and the longrange role of the organization in the acceleration of the evolution of humankind.

If the leadership does not fulfill its role of projecting, creating and innovating but is only reacting to the membership, then the tendency is for weaknesses of individual members to surface, i.e., for individual members to “act up.” In this situation leadership feels threatened, is tempted to overact, reminding the members of their duties and of its rights, i.e., of the chain of command, and sometimes even to mobilize those members whom it considers more loyal and supportive against those who are “acting up.” But this type of administrative, disciplinary, commandist and subjectivist behavior on the part of the leadership cannot possibly restore the moral authority of leadership, since by definition the role of leadership is not a defensive but a creative one.

The organization must be constantly on guard against the tendency of members on all levels to self-cultivation, i.e., the use of the organization’s resources only for the development of the individual. On the other hand, if the leadership is not playing its proper role of encouraging the independent creativity of the membership, the tendency of membership is to slip into passivity, merely receiving and supporting instructions from the leadership. As the organization then begins to stagnate, leadership again is tempted to exhort the membership to greater efforts and liveliness. But this exhortation is futile, since by definition, agitation of the members is contrary to the role of leadership, and so forth and so on.

In all these ways, through living and often painful experiences in the correct and the incorrect handling of the very demanding relationships between leadership and members, the members of the revolutionary cadre organization and the organization as a whole begin to internalize the rhythms of the dialectical as contrasted to the administrative method. This internalization becomes decisive in the handling of contradictions between the organization and the revolutionary social forces; both in the struggle for power and in the even more important and awesome responsibilities that ensue after seizing power.

Standards

Every collectivity of any kind, whether an organization, a class, a race, or a nation, must establish standards, i.e., those values and patterns of behavior which all members are expected to strive to embody in their daily thinking and practice, chiefly in order to advance the collectivity.

A revolutionary cadre organization, on the other hand, establishes its standards not only to advance the group but in full consciousness of the group’s responsibility to advance the evolution of humankind.

Starting from the fundamental premise, a revolutionary cadre organization at this time must establish its standards in the light of two major realities: 1) the peculiar and contradictory character of the chief revolutionary social forces; and 2) the protracted struggle that will be necessary to bring about the revolutionary transformation of this society.

These realities make it essential that the revolutionary cadre organization adopt as its standards those values which have proved to be most durable and universal in the course of humanity’s millennia of development. Such values must include: love and respect for one’s own people, not for their sake alone but as a springboard to love and respect other people; respect for ideas; dedication; dependability; and discipline, self-reliance, and accountability; care and development of one’s body as well as of one’s mind.

Young people in US today, both black and white, and particularly black, are potentially the chief revolutionary social force for the overthrow of the present society. They are the ones most hostile to the present system and the ones with the maximum energy for fundamental social change. At the same time, these young people both black and white (the latter especially insofar as they have become alienated from their communities and are imitating black radical youth), are the ones most deficient and lacking in the above values. Hence they are “now” people for the most part, standardless and valueless.

Hence their “revolutionary” energies are most likely to explode in rebellions and rebellious activities of the most negative kind: dropping out, copping out, freaking out, “ripping off” and other helter skelter, individualistic and adventuristic actions. Rebels without a positive cause, they have no vision of what the struggle must be for and therefore no concept of the “new woman/man” who must be created through revolutionary struggle.

Typical of their inability to put the development of humanity at the center of their thinking is their endorsement and encouragement of “ripping off” merchants (as representative of the capitalist system) as if this could possibly leave unaffected the humanity of those doing the ripping off.

The result of these negative rebellions is that large sections of the population are becoming completely alienated from the perspective of revolutionary social change, either becoming passive and despairing, or in many cases, actively counter-revolutionary. Thus, instead of increasing the revolutionary potential, these potentially revolutionary social forces are actually decreasing its potential.

Most liberals, and these young rebels themselves, are reluctant to face the new reality which is being created by these negative rebellions. Instead, they excuse these rebels by saying that their attitudes and actions are “only” or “in the final analysis” the product of objective and historical conditions and therefore outside their control. They point to the post-war world of abundance and electronic media which have provided instant gratification of every physical and psychological want to the youth generation; to the barbarism of racism and the genocidal war in Vietnam which have demoralized young people by exposing the dehumanized character of American capitalism and imperialism and the American political-economic-academic power structure; and to the failure of the older generation over the years to resist this barbarism and inhumanity.

However, in citing objective and historical conditions as an excuse for the negative rebellions and rebelliousness of young people, these liberals and the rebels themselves are evading the crucial contemporary contradiction: that, on the one hand, these young rebels in their rebellions are the most complete expression of a corrupt valuefree society; while on the other, they are the ones with the greatest potential to bring this system to an end. In other words, the revolutionary cadre organization cannot wait upon the revolution to change the objective conditions that have produced these social forces as they are. It must find ways and means, within the present, to bring about the revolutionary transformation of these young people in order to make the revolution, i.e., in order to bring about changes in the objective institutions and conditions.

One of the most important ways that the revolutionary cadre organization can do this is by projecting and embodying in its own ideas and practices, the values which have proved most universal and enduring throughout the development of humankind; in other words, the revolutionary cadre organization itself must insist on the indivisibility of politics and ethics.

This indivisibility of politics and ethics is also indispensable to the development of the revolutionary cadre organization for the protracted struggle which lies ahead of it. Without the above standards, it is impossible for the cadre to develop trust in one another and from those whom they seek to lead. Without trust, no protracted struggle can possibly be successful.

In affirming the indivisibility of ethics and politics, the revolutionary cadre organization is breaking consciously with the political tradition which has dominated western thought since Machiavelli, five hundred years ago, created the science of politics as a question of strategy and tactics. Marx did not challenge this Machiavellian concept chiefly because politics was, secondary to what was happening in the process of production. There he believed, the very development of the productive forces and the struggles of the workers against exploitation, were creating in the workers the highest standards of collectivity, discipline and social responsibility. For Lenin, politics was much more important than it had been for Marx, but Lenin had conceived the revolutionary party chiefly as a means to increase the hostility of the masses to the system as a whole so that they could then be mobilized in struggle to overthrow the system.

Today, however, in the US in the last quarter of the 20th century, our historical conditions and therefore our responsibilities cannot be the same as Marx and Lenin. In the revolutionary forces with whom we are the most concerned, there is no lack of hostility and antagonism to the system as a whole. What they lack is a concept of: A) transformation of man/woman which must be at the center of revolutionary struggle; and B) protracted struggle. Together these require a new concept of the indivisible relation between politics and ethics.

Methods of Evaluation-Criticism and Self-Criticism

After the completion of every project, no matter how small, there must be a thorough-going evaluation of the project by the revolutionary cadre organization. Were the purposes of the project fulfilled?

Were they clearly defined and understood by everyone involved in the first place and were they kept in mind throughout the project? Were the methods effective? Were they the best methods or the only ones that could have been chosen? Were schedules maintained and was every step of the process carried out? If some steps of the process were left out, was this harmful to the project or were some of them superfluous from the beginning? What were the achievements and shortcomings of the project, and what lessons can the group learn from it? What were the reasons for the breakdown or failure of the project at any point?

Which of these were outside the control of the group and which might be anticipated and prepared for in the future? What were the expense and income from the project? Was strict accounting kept at every point and made available to the group as part of the final evaluation? Was every member clear about his/her responsibilities at every stage of the project? Were the resources of the group (skills, contacts, equipment, time) adequate to the project as planned, or did the group exhibit overconfidence and impatience in the planning?

This kind of methodical evaluation is a concrete manifestation of politics in command. In other words, it stems basically from the philosophical conviction that in all relations between human beings and their environment, human beings must assume conscious responsibility for their actions and not resort to the vulgar materialism of always blaming others or outside conditions and thus seeing themselves as passive victims.

All this may seem very elementary and common-sensical, but it is far from being obvious, either in the general overall political atmosphere of this country, or in the particular atmosphere of the “movement’s” helter skelter, on-the-go politics. Americans generally tend to have a technical approach to every project, to try to overpower those whom they are seeking to influence or to defeat, by the sheer weight of their know-how and equipment. Or they have a “new frontier” approach: if something doesn’t work out so well, or things go bad, just abandon the project, or the place or the people involved in it, and go on to something or somewhere or somebody else. They are always running off to a new beginning.

Because “movement” people have failed to make serious examination of the American philosophical environment, they have simply carried these same attitudes into their own activities, simply adding their own special contempt for ideas and their love of rhetoric, their predisposition to spectacular confrontations, and their hunger for continuing emotional excitement. Engaging in activities for the sake of activism, and not in order to test dear convictions in social practice, they have rarely worked out clear programs with purposes, methods, schedules and processes, clearly defined, and therefore are incapable of careful evaluation. Hopping from one issue to the next, they have not even stayed together long enough to develop a sense of commitment to one another or to particular constituencies, which is a prerequisite to the practice of evaluation.

Reared in an economy of abundance, they have little or no idea of how many working people (who have had to sweat for every dollar) judge a political organization by the seriousness with which the organization handles the questions of finances.

When one realizes how deeply ingrained these helter skelter attitudes and practices are in the objective environment and historical tradition, one realizes how futile it is to depend on rebukes and reprimands to correct them. Rather, through understanding the historical and philosophical roots of these practices, the revolutionary cadre organization can arrive at a firm appreciation of why, by contrast, it must build itself step by step on completely different philosophical foundations, based essentially on the dialectical method of development through collective and protracted struggle.

The theoretical acceptance of this dialectical method, however, by no means guarantees that the attitudes and practices so deeply rooted in the history of the country will immediately disappear. To uproot and correct these attitudes and practices on a continuing basis, the revolutionary cadre organization must include a place for criticism and self-criticism on the agenda of every meeting.

The concept of criticism/self-criticism has become a popular phrase in the “movement” only in the last few years as a result of the role that it played in the protracted struggles leading to the victory of the Chinese Communists and which it continues to play in the building of a new society in China and in revolutionary struggles elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America. As long as the revolutionary movement all over the world was dominated by the D-day concept of revolution (which had been borrowed mechanically from the example of the 1917 Russian Revolution), criticism used to take the form chiefly of postmortem analysis. For example, one group or individual would insist that a particular setback in revolutionary developments in a particular country was the result of a mistaken policy and therefore of the group or individual sponsoring the policy. Simultaneously, the claim would then be made that if those in charge had pursued the policy of the critic instead, then there would have been success rather than failure. This kind of arrogant subjectivism and hypothetical after thinking is completely foreign to the concept and practice of revolutionary criticism and self-criticism.

Revolutionary criticism and self-criticism is based, first and foremost, on the dialectical concept of development through collective and protracted struggle. It involves the dear recognition that in every situation there is a contradiction which requires a choice between two roads, that no one is immune from making a mistake or wrong choice, but that the entire group, the individual making the mistake, and indeed everyone concerned with revolutionary struggle, can learn from the mistakes and wrong choices that have been made by the individual or group. Moreover, the recognition, the examination, and correction of mistakes and weaknesses all provide additional energy for the advancement and acceleration of revolutionary struggle. This is the dialectical concept of the “dynamic of error.”

In order for this “dynamic of error” to develop, the group must be united by certain common principles and ideas. All the members must be committed to common perspectives or a common ideology; they must share common standards, must be committed in time, and they must share a fundamental recognition of the role that struggle itself plays in developing. Without these common principles, criticism/self-criticism cannot rise above subjectivity and get to the essence of what is wrong in any particular situation, i.e., the objectivity of the mistake. Essential to the concept of objectivity is the recognition that the mistake is not just an accidental one, i.e., that it is not unique to the particular individual or to the particular occasion. On the contrary, it probably relates to the particu1ar historical environment or to the social background of the individual involved, e.g., intellectualism, technocratism, male chauvinism, permanent rank-and-file-ism. This objectification enables the entire group to raise its consciousness and helps others with the same background to be on the alert against specific weaknesses.

In the American social and political environment at all levels, it is very difficult to make this kind of objective criticism/ self-criticism a real part of daily life and practice. This again is for the very deep historical reasons already referred to, especially the tendency of Americans to look upon problems as nuisances and headaches, to be gotten rid of by some external means (e.g., pills), rather than as challenges from which one can learn. Therefore, the tendency is to cover up mistakes rather than to admit or grapple with them. Americans are also very preoccupied with their own personalities or individualities and inclined to develop guilt feelings about their own mistakes or as a result of hurting other peoples’ feelings, by pointing out mistakes. For example, an individual may apologize for making a mistake because he feels guilty, thinking that he or she is criticizing himself or herself when s/he is really just expressing subjective or personal feelings. Often what is put forward as self-criticism is simply self-protection, e.g., when an individual rushes to admit a mistake to avoid criticism or further examination of the mistake by others.

Subjectivity assumes many forms, e.g., the protection of one’s feelings or those of others; fear of hurting feelings or discouraging people by pointing out their mistakes; attacking those who hurt your feelings by criticism; fear of taking issues with others; not pointing out the person who makes a mistake or not pointing out a mistake at once but waiting until the persons involved are less emotionally caught up in their mistakes and then dealing with the question only as an abstraction and therefore without the sharpness which enables the maximum lessons to be learned by all concerned; hesitating to take issue with or criticism of the leaders; hesitating to criticize themselves for fear of undermining confidence in the organization (emperor protection); “selling” ideas to others rather than discussing and debating issues in such a way that members can make responsible choices; making excuses for oneself or for others when mistakes are made (not enough time, something else came up, conditions beyond our control, etc), thus being “understanding” and “sympathetic” rather than demanding on oneself and others.

All these are manifestations of liberalism which is part of the very air we breathe in the US. Liberalism or the evasion of responsibility is what most Americans mean by “freedom.” Freedom is the right not to be held responsible or accountable for one’s actions. Since this tendency is so powerful in the society, it is inevitably present in the organization. In the past the US has been able to survive liberalism because of the unique historical conditions of this country, particularly the “wide open space” which have allowed people to pick up and leave the scene of their mistakes. Finally, however, the chickens are coming home to roost in the country. In a revolutionary cadre organization, they come home much sooner.

Liberalism leads to the covering up of mistakes and therefore to the weakening of the organization. When mistakes are covered up, they also pile up to the point where it becomes impossible to isolate and correct the specific mistakes, and the organization is in danger of breaking up in demoralization and bitter antagonisms.

The above list of liberal weaknesses, incomplete as it is, is familiar to everyone who has ever been in any kind of organization. When one realizes how many of these have characterized one’s own practices in the past, it is easy to become discouraged, unless you keep in mind at all times the goals and methods to which you are committed and the collective commitment to this goal which will enable the organization to grapple with and overcome these weaknesses one by one, week in and week out, through criticism and self-criticism in the course of the protracted struggle.

Relationship With The Masses

Up to now, we have been discussing the revolutionary cadre organization’s relation with the “masses” or with the “revolutionary social forces,” as if these masses were “faceless masses” or as if these social forces were units of undifferentiated physical energy out in space somewhere. This is the way most radical groups talk and think of “the masses” and the “revolutionary social forces.” Fortunately, their conceptions do not correspond to the way things actually are.

Actually, “the masses” and “revolutionary social forces” already are bound together in varying degrees and in different ways, sometimes in actual organizations, more often by loose structures of various kinds.

For example, people live in particular geographical areas, work at particular places, join together because of ethnic, age, sex ties, or because of common cultural, religious, political, professional, recreational, economic or community interests that can range all the way from bowling to Community Control of Schools. They may organize rapidly in response to particular issues and then separate, each going his or her individual way, or they may try to find ways and means or reasons for staying together.

Particularly in a revolutionary period like ours [the 60’s], when large sections of the population have lost faith in existing institutions, the prevailing tendency in the country is centripetal. This takes organizational form in the tendency to form all kinds of groups. Some groups spring together as a result of spontaneous eruption or in order to make the struggle over a particularly burning issue more effective. Others are formed chiefly in order to give individuals a sense of belonging to some collectivity because they have lost faith in the nation. Others exist for no other reason than that the power structure needs them as channels of communication to the potentially rebellious sections of the society.

Because of this general self-structuring by the masses which is going on all the time, and because this self-structuring gathers momentum in a revolutionary period, the revolutionary cadre organization’s relations are basically not with single individuals and never with abstract generalized masses. Instead they are usually with particular groups of various kinds which can range from political to recreational to ethnic to economic. Usually most of these groups are going in their own separate directions which may be parallel or diverging but which rarely converge. However, again because of the revolutionary character of the period, there are many reasons why these groups should or could converge to go in a particular direction together or to conflict on particular issues. Usually a particularly raw issue is enough to bring them into conflict, although sometimes a counter-revolutionary or revolutionary group may for reasons of its own seek to bring about a clash. On the other hand, it is unlikely that the many groups which have within them the potential for united action in a revolutionary direction will work for any extended period of time unless under the open or quiet leadership of a revolutionary cadre organization.

Therefore, the more rapidly various sections of the population are in the process of self-organization, the more important is the role played by the revolutionary cadre organization. In anticipation of this increasing momentum towards self-organization as the crisis deepens, it is never too early in a revolutionary period for the revolutionary cadre organization to begin the painstaking task of organizing. In fact, all previous history (including that of the US in the 60’s) shows that once the dam of public confidence in existing institutions begins to break, the centripetal tendencies in the population far exceed the cadre organization’s ability to provide leadership.

Relations between the revolutionary cadre organization and other organizations fall into several distinct categories:

In all these relationships, the revolutionary cadres are always conscious of their interpenetrating role, i.e., “from the masses, to the masses.” In other words, they are using their contact with these groups to get a better idea of the stage of development of the social forces as well as to influence the direction of the social forces. In this interpenetrating dialectical relationship, they never lose sight of their primary commitment to the revolutionary cadre organization and the protracted struggle, no matter how pressing may be a particular issue nor how desperately a particular community or organization may want to turn over to the cadre members the main responsibility for leading that particular community or organization.

Conclusion

In the foregoing we have outlined the fundamental dialectical principles and some of the most important concrete practices of a revolutionary cadre organization as a developing reality. If the members of a revolutionary cadre organization are not constantly striving to internalize the dialectical principles motivating their practices, the organization sinks into routinism On the other hand, if they are not constantly striving to externalize the dialectical principles in concrete practices, the principles turn into empty rhetoric.

Many of those reading this pamphlet may vigorously disagree with what it sets forth. Others may draw from it the conclusion that a revolutionary cadre organization is necessary if there is going to be a successful revolution in the United States. Not all those who arrive at this conclusion are ready to build or join such an organization. Some may be against a revolution altogether. Others may say that they agree with the ideas theoretically, but that building or joining such an organization is a job for someone with the patience and the capacity to think more grandly. If, on the other hand, some readers decide that they do want to commit themselves to a collective and protracted struggle, they probably know one or two or a few other people who have arrived at the same point. These few people need some way to arrive at some kind of basic agreement on fundamental ideas and some knowledge of one another.

One way to do this is to form a revolutionary study group, in order to study previous revolutions and the specific contradictions in the United States which require resolution by revolution. The study of the theory and practice of previous revolutions is for the purpose of learning from them what is and what is not relevant to the specific contradictions of the united states [i.e., the relevance of a party and cadre organization). Through study of previous revolutions, we can gain an appreciation of the way in which revolutions have advanced the evolution of humankind, and therefore, a profound conviction that [our] revolution must also advance the evolution of man and woman. At the same time, through the study of previous revolutions, it should become clearer to us that every revolution is unique, the specific product of specific energies of specific masses, specific organizations and specific leaders in a specific country under very specific conditions, all of which have been developed over a number of years, at a particular time, in a particular historical period, and which therefore cannot possibly be repeated at another time and in another place. This general truth is of crucial importance in seeking to determine the specific contradictions requiring resolution in the United States, the first country in human history to face problems posed by economic abundance, the first people in human history to have discovered from their living experiences that material wellbeing does not necessarily bring happiness and therefore the people who have the privilege of pioneering the revolutions of the Twentyfirst century.

In forming a revolutionary study group, the purpose, procedures, schedules and responsibilities of each member, should be clearly worked out and accepted by all the participants at the first meeting. It is never a good idea to leave your purposes and procedures fuzzy in the hope that thereby you will keep some people with you who might otherwise be scared off by a straightforward statement of your goals and what will be expected of every participant. Nine times out of ten, this kind of liberal attitude does to prevent the eventual breakaway of the person or persons involved; it only postpones the crisis and makes it more painful.

A revolutionary study group should not be organized for the sake of study alone, but for the purpose of laying the basis for a revolutionary cadre organization. Therefore, participation in the group should be restricted to those ready to do the systematic work required for such a study, including reading, leading and recording discussions, disciplined attendance at regularly scheduled meeting, criticism and self-criticism, over a period of approximately six months. During this period some members are bound to raise the question of getting involved in struggle over some burning topical issue. This will be one of the group’s first tests as to who, if anyone, in the group really accepts the principle that “without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice,”

and that without commitment to collective and protracted struggle, there can be no successful revolution. Anyone who is not able to refrain from involving the group in topical struggles until it has at least worked out some minimum ideological understanding, some programs of its own and some structure and standards, is not likely to be much good for the protracted struggle.

In this way, not only the material studied, but the way it is studied is itself preparation for the organization of a revolutionary cadre.

Editorial Note: Below are two separate pieces, a leak and a republication, respectively: the leak is another internal message from the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the republication is a follow-up from ex-PSL member Marissa Sanchez to her last piece on leadership’s cover-up of Eugene Puryear’s assault of the author in 2020. Marissa’s piece can be found here.

As concerns rise within PSL over the systematic cover-up of sexual assault among the organizations leading figures the Central Committee has responded through a call for complete suppression of dissent across all clubs in the country.

Claiming to be a democratic organization that cares for the oppressed, the Leadership of PSL continues to make every attempt to cover up its long history of internal abuse through fedjacketing the rising number of members coming forward with their experiences, claiming that this flood of information is the result of fractions and the state department working to crush this party fighting for the people. Meanwhile tokenizing the few women who hold higher positions of leadership to claim that former members such as Marissa Sanchez have no right to speak out on the violent processes of “accountability” they were forced through as it met the party standards of the time—to argue that it was wrong is to break “party line.”

This is the behavior of a cult, not an organization working towards revolutionary struggle. Dissent and contradictions must be struggled through, not sidelined, erased, and further suppressed by those who’ve done wrong. The Central Committee of PSL claims that such violent tactics used against survivors is “Democratic Centralism” when in reality it is merely an attempt at ensuring abusers stay in power and while revolutionary energy goes nowhere.

Moving Forward

Message from the Central Committee to Local Leadership Bodies

Approved unanimously by the CC on September 15, 2026

Dear comrades,

We have heard from SCs in many areas that they have now had significant internal discussions on Marissa Sanchez’s letter, the NDC statement, the CC report, as well as the ongoing factional operation aimed at dismantling the Party. This has been discussed in units, branch committees and other expanded leadership bodies, internals, in one-on-one meetings, and other settings. The overwhelming majority of leaders and members nationwide are standing strong in defense of the Party that we have all collectively built together, and are eager to move forward with our important political work. This document offers you some guidance on how to do that. It is not for mass distribution to the membership.

Under democratic centralism, there is thorough internal discussion followed by decisions taken at the appropriate bodies, which have been elected democratically, and those decisions then become binding and executable.

NDC and Central Committee decisions

The all-woman National Disciplinary Committee been vested by the Party Congress with final authority on all disciplinary matters related to sexual misconduct, binding on all other leadership bodies and on all members. In 2026, the NDC thoroughly reviewed the 2020 disciplinary case involving former members Eugene Puryear and Marissa Sanchez. The incident took place prior to the NDC’s existence, when the Party, its depth of leadership, its staff and its institutions were much smaller.

The NDC review affirmed:

• That the disciplinary and accountability process in 2020 conformed with the Party principles and disciplinary protocols then operational. That if such an incident took place today, it would go instead to its all-women’s panel, and would follow the more thorough and elaborated processes related to sexual misconduct that the NDC currently uses.
• That people have the right to change their opinion on an incident, and on a disciplinary process they have been involved in. Marissa Sanchez, however, despite being involved in the creation of the NDC from its conception in 2021, for the next five years did not raise that she had changed her opinion, nor did she ask for the NDC to reopen the case.

The NDC’s review of that matter is now closed

The PSL Central Committee is the Party’s highest elected body between congresses. Its political and organizational decisions constitute the line of the PSL, and are binding on all PSL members as a principle of democratic centralism, and as a requirement of membership. The Central Committee, after thorough discussion, unanimously responded to the factional operation’s distortions in June. It also unanimously approved the “Comprehensive Report on the Marissa Sanchez letter” after a thorough discussion, laying out in far greater detail the support provided to her, how and why her relationship to the Party leadership changed, and how she intersected and coordinated with the factional operation. This report has been circulated to the entire Party membership and branches have had a week to adsorb its meaning and content. This report constitutes the CC’s definitive position on the matter.

Democratic centralism and defense of the Party

Under the Party By-Laws, “All members, including those who disagree, are duty bound to publicly defend and carry out these decisions.” That means anyone who cannot publicly defend the Party, its decisions, and the elected leadership bodies carrying them out, is in violation of the most fundamental tenets of Party membership, and must resign or be subject to expulsion.

The duty to defend the Party does not require each member to speak to each aspect of every decision ever committed in other people’s accountability processes from years ago. It means disputing the false narrative that the Party tolerates sexism in its ranks, and affirming that the Party has a strong record and strong processes that have empowered and developed women leaders at every level. It means disputing the narrative that the leadership is corrupt and undemocratic. It means standing by the legitimacy of the all-women’s National Disciplinary Committee, and the legitimacy of the elected Central Committee, which have comprehensively reviewed these matters and made their decisions, as they are authorized to do.

This duty to defend the Party does not stop our permanent task to improve the Party’s internal life and institutions. All conversations and proposals to improve the Party are welcome, if they are done in the spirit of making the Party a better instrument for our class, and premised on comrades’ own experiences with organizational life — not on the distorted “facts” or arguments of those who want to destroy the Party.

Individuals who cannot in good conscience carry out the duties of membership can still leave on friendly terms with the Party — but they cannot be members. If a member engages with these operations to destroy and dismantle the Party, joins in the effort to discredit or undermine the legitimacy of our elected leadership and institutions, or takes the side of the Party’s enemies over its entire elected leadership, they should not remain PSL Members.

Understanding the ongoing Attacks

Finally, we want to emphasize why defending the Party has assumed a particularly critical role in this stage of the class struggle. At a moment when the PSL is providing vital leadership on many fronts, NSPM-7 has reorganized billions of dollars in federal law enforcement resources to “dismantle and destroy” organizations it calls “domestic terrorists” based on their viewpoints and activism. COINTELPRO and other campaigns of state repression in US history primaily focused on covert attacks, to “foster factionalism” and “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” a targeted organization. The main three targets in such operations historically were an organization’s 1) reputation, 2) leaders and 3) finances.

The targeting of the PSL by right-wing media, politicians, members of Congress, and the Department of Justice is real, although we may not know the full scope of it for years. According to media reports, a federal grand jury has been convened in the Southern District of New York, targeting left-wing organizations in New York City, and this also includes The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, ANSWER and others. Grand juries operate in secret, compelling testimony from anyone they subpoena in environments without lawyers and where remaining silent leads to jail. According to media reports, the PSL was named by a senior Department of Justice official Harmeet Dhillon as a target to be “dismantled.” We have faced a broad and escalating range of state, legal, law enforcement and Congressional attacks in the last 9 months, with a new one almost every week.

There is also a previously secret factional operation, still ongoing after many months, composed of former PSL leaders and members, focused on trying to dismantle the PSL from within. The anti-Party grouping announced themselves to the world in June as if they were just committed to mass organizing, but appear entirely focused on recruiting people from our Party, and trying to destroy the PSL, rather than organizing towards their own vision. They have conspired to encourage small groupings elsewhere to conceal political differences and then resign. In one recent example, a factional member originally from New York used a false name to rejoin the Party in a new branch to help organize the resignation of members. Every day we receive new reports of these anti-Party forces probing current members, especially to uncover weak spots, gather grievances, identify salacious stories, and dig up details of past internal disciplinary proceedings. They want to find anything to drive a wedge between PSL members, to convince members they can’t trust their own experiences in the organization, and then combine all such stories into one singular narrative that the PSL leadership is nefarious and untrustworthy.

We are not asserting that these two operations to dismantle the PSL are necessarily connected. But either way, it is the most elementary duty of every Leninist to defend their Party in the face of any new attacks to destroy it. So long as these operations exist, and so long as the Party is a growing and formidable force, we can’t avoid that we will face different types of attacks. The Party would be weakened for the struggles ahead if it were to retain members who are not prepared to defend it.

The work of local leadership bodies

We have heard from all branches at this point. The developments of this week have understandably caused shock and distress. But our sense is that SCs everywhere are now determined to return to their work of strengthening the Party and organizing the working class. They are talking with whatever members locally they need to talk to, in order to make that happen. We recognize that some areas still have meetings planned around this matter, and these should proceed so that all members have an opportunity to understand the Party’s decisions, have their questions answered, and move forward in defense of the Party and our tasks ahead. Based on reports from around the country, we think this matter can be brought to a close in the next week. Those who want to dismantle the PSL have studied history, and know how organizations can simply become exhausted by internal issues and scandals. We will not permit that to happen, and have to return to the principles of democratic centralism to move forward.

We ask that your SC discuss this letter and reply in the next 24 hours to the National Organizational Department at pslnationalstaff@pm.me on the status of your area and next steps over the next week. We also encourage you to share your report with your national liaison. Please let us know if you need further clarification or assistance.

Who Gets to Write the “True Narrative”

Content note: Please note that this essay discusses sexual assault, rape, suicidal ideation, and organizational misconduct.

At the end of my original essay, I wrote about what I expected the PSL’s response to be. I expected them to defend their leadership and insist that the harm I experienced had been handled appropriately because I had agreed to the “process” at the time. I expected them to invoke the later creation of the National Disciplinary Commission (NDC) as proof of their understanding of sexual trauma.

In many ways, that is exactly the response they gave. And yet, I was surprised to realize that there was still some small part of me that hoped I would be wrong. That once faced publicly with the harm their decisions caused me, the Party might acknowledge that even if they believed they were acting correctly at the time, there were things they should have done differently.

That small part of me is sad and disappointed, but the larger feeling I am experiencing is anger.

Which tracks because, as those who know me well know, anger is much more comfortable for me than sorrow as an immediate emotional reaction. In November 2020, being assaulted by comrade Eugene Puryear overwhelmed even that instinct; I was not angry yet, only frightened, disoriented, and trying to survive what had just happened.

In some ways, I am relieved to feel that anger. It tells me that I am better positioned than I was then. That I have the capacity to confront their response rather than simply survive it. That I have built a life sturdy enough to hold me while I speak plainly about what happened and withstand the consequences of doing so.

I am specifically angry at things in their response I know to be outright lies. I am angry at their careful choice of language which diminishes my role and credibility while emphasizing Eugene’s stature, contributions, and humanity. I am angry watching years of my private messages, relationships, and behavior after my assault assembled into an argument about whether I am now entitled to understand what happened to me in the way that I do. I am especially angry that they would assert that my motivations are for some kind of personal or political gain. Or, worst of all, their insinuation that I may be an agent of our real enemies.

Some of their narrative affected me more viscerally than I expected. Their description of me “tearfully hugging” Eugene in the meeting led by Ben made my skin crawl. I remembered that moment, that room, and the person I was in it. I remember sobbing and telling them that Eugene mattered more. That he was a more important member than me. A more visible leader, a Black leader, a historian. I remember saying that if I couldn’t handle being around Eugene, that if one of us had to go, it should be me. I remember the sacrifice I was ready to make for projects I believed were bigger and more important than I was.

Apart from being angry, I am also somewhat nervous about writing another piece so quickly. My first essay took me a long time to write and even longer to decide to publish. I had years to think about what happened before I finally put those thoughts into words. Now, only a week later, I find myself responding in real time to an official Central Committee document about my own assault and its aftermath.

There is a large part of me that would rather not respond at all. But my original essay has over 36,000 views, and I know many people are trying to make sense not only of what happened to me, but of the competing account the Party has offered. I want to ask those readers to keep thinking.

I am not going to litigate every text message from six years of my life or respond line by line to every accusation about my motives and relationships. There are factual claims I will correct and choices in their narrative that deserve close examination. But I do not want their response to drag us away from the questions that matter most.

Because underneath more than one hundred lines of defense, accusation, private correspondence, factional intrigue, Fox News, and speculation about the state, the fundamental facts are not disputed: Eugene sexually assaulted me. I reported it immediately to Ben. Party leadership, specifically Ben and Brian, handled the response. The incident was kept confidential, even from other Party leaders. Eugene quickly returned to both public facing and internal positions of leadership.

These are not allegations. They are the Party’s facts too. The disagreement is now over what those facts mean.

The questions to be asked based on these facts are: Was the process that followed just? Was it actually survivor-centered? What does meaningful choice look like when someone is experiencing acute trauma? What responsibility does an organization have that cannot simply be handed to the person who was harmed? And what does the Party’s response tell us about how it understands accountability today?

The Central Committee calls its account the “true narrative.” I think we should look closely at how that narrative is being constructed.

The Decision I Never Should Have Been Asked to Make

On the one hand, the Party accuses me of distorting the PSL’s long history of taking sexual violence seriously and diminishing the important work done by the NDC. On the other hand, their own account acknowledges that when Eugene assaulted me, there was no NDC. They say there had “never been a charge against someone in the top leadership itself,” and that because I did not want Eugene to resign, “another accountability process would be devised in discussions with” me.

Their ultimate defense, in other words, is that I agreed to what happened after my assault.

In my original essay, I clearly stated that I said I wasn’t sure I wanted Eugene to resign. I wrote about participating in a meeting led by Ben and about additional conversations with Ben about me being assaulted. But what I understand now, and what I wish the Party would grapple with, is that I never should have been placed in the position of “deciding” what should happen with Eugene. That there is an important difference between giving a survivor agency and transferring organizational responsibility onto her.

Furthermore, Ben did not really ask me if Eugene should resign. The morning after being assaulted Ben told me Eugene might want to resign, and I responded that I wasn’t sure that is what I wanted to happen.

Most importantly, I was not considering that question from some neutral position. I was struggling to understand how someone I trusted and admired could have treated me so carelessly. I desperately wanted what had happened not to be real and for my life to return to normal.

I was also deeply embedded into the organization. I had built my entire life around the PSL. And in the days that followed reporting my assault to him, Ben was telling me in each conversation to consider how my choices could impact other comrades, projects and the Party’s political relationships.

I am not arguing that trauma rendered me incapable of making any decision for myself. Nor am I arguing that there was only one acceptable punishment the Party could have imposed. My point is narrower: my wishes in the immediate aftermath of being sexually assaulted should never have been treated as sufficient evidence that the Party’s response was just. Survivor agency does not mean making the survivor responsible for determining the future of the person who harmed her.

There is a reason for this. Victims of sexual assault are often very close to the person who harmed them. Even when a victim knows that what happened was wrong, they may still have complicated feelings about the person who assaulted them. They should not be placed in the position of carrying the responsibility for what happens to that person as a result of the assault.

Taking that decision out of the victim’s hands helps create a more impartial process and, just as importantly, removes an enormous burden from the victim. Who should be allowed to focus on their own safety, healing, and what they need rather than feeling responsible for the consequences their perpetrator may face.

The extent to which I was being placed in a position to “determine” what should happen to Eugene was in itself traumatizing. It created guilt, pressure, and additional emotional harm; especially because I was then asked for years to carry on having a relationship with him as if nothing had happened. To work with him. To be in space after space with him.

A trauma-informed and survivor-centered process would have recognized this dynamic, recognized I was having an acute trauma response, and not placed the burden of determining my perpetrator’s consequences onto me as the person who was assaulted.

The Party’s response repeatedly tells us: Marissa wanted this. Marissa did not want Eugene to resign. Marissa did not want him expelled. Marissa participated in determining the consequences. These claims are presented as evidence that the Party’s process was appropriate.

But those facts do not answer my criticism. They are my criticism.

If the Party truly had a long-established political understanding of how seriously sexual violence must be treated, and how it impacts people who have experienced it, then that understanding should have guided its response precisely when the person accused was one of its most important leaders.

Whether Eugene remained fit to exercise political leadership after sexually assaulting another member was a question the PSL had to answer for itself.

The truth the Party does not want to face is that there was no real process taken up to answer that question. And that given the immense social, economic, and emotional pressures I was facing, that the decision to keep Eugene in the Party, in prominent leadership, and in a public-facing role was truly and ultimately the decision of two Party leaders, Ben and Brian Becker.

How a Survivor is Supposed to Behave

A significant portion of the Party’s response is devoted to proving that, in the months and years after my assault, I behaved like someone who believed “she had been supported”. They point to my continued Party membership and leadership, my relationships with Party leaders, and messages in which I sometimes spoke to or thanked Ben warmly.

They also make a very specific accounting of the people who they say knew about my assault. Their response has forced me to reconstruct those disclosures more carefully than I had wanted to when writing my original essay. I can identify four people who I remember knowing, under very different circumstances, that I had been assaulted while being on staff for the Party in New York. The Party appears to describe five. I do not know who the fifth person is, and I will not invent a memory to resolve that discrepancy.

Originally when drafting this response, I wrote a description of each of these four partial disclosures. I say partial, because in only one of them did I even name Eugene, but after some reflection, I do not feel the need to expose myself further in response to the Party’s own invasion of my privacy.

The point I need to make is that knowing I had been assaulted in New York is not the same thing as being someone I confided in about how the Party handled my assault. None of these partial disclosures were with comrades with whom I was freely processing what happened. In fact, there were multiple times I asked Ben about if I could speak to specific people, for example Kei Pritsker, and was told NO.

The Party nevertheless uses the idea that anyone knew I had experienced assault to construct an image of me as someone who freely confided in multiple trusted comrades and repeatedly expressed satisfaction with how my assault was handled. That is the account I do not recognize and which I am calling out as a blatant lie.

The contemporaneous text they reproduce, in which I say my meeting with Eugene “went good,” I assume was to Chris Banks. The “friend” I wrote about in my original essay who Ben said he, “Rather I hadn’t told.” I do not dispute writing it. I believed it when I wrote it.

(An aside: One of the most painful parts of looking back on my experience is that when I confided in Chris, despite the fact that he was the person who recruited me to the PSL, a friend who knew my family, as well as, my history of sexual violence and someone who I had tirelessly defended, Chris did not stand up for me or question Ben about how my assault was being handled.

In fact, while I was spinning out, suicidal, calling him crying, Chris “comforted” me by telling me about how he resented the consequences he was given for his own sexual misconduct and womanizing. He commended the Party and me for not putting Eugene through the same “pain” of being suspended and isolated like he was in San Francisco.

At some of the lowest moments in my life, when I was frightened and confused the person I confided in was telling me about the lasting costs of punishment.

I also have to state how upsetting it is to know from reading their response that the Party leadership is actively relying so heavily on Chris in their response to account for my mental state after being assaulted. That they are asking him to look through our private messages for things that can be used to smear me. Especially because Chris is himself a “former member”, but who has been quietly moved by the Party to Atlanta, after again having sexually inappropriate conduct. I wonder where the sexually explicit text messages describing how he would like to sleep with different Party members in San Antonio are? How is it that the PSL leadership is still working with him in such a trusted way if he is both “not a member” and has shown repeatedly through his own personal conduct over years his failure to understand the role his actions play in the lives of women?)

There is a difference between saying I thought I was doing okay and actually being okay; between saying a meeting “went good” and concluding the Party’s process was just; and between telling someone I was assaulted and telling them the Party handled my assault well.

The same problem appears in their use of my relationship with Ben. Even after being assaulted, I had continued to consider him one of the most important mentors in my life and to care about his family. Those things are true. They are not the same thing as saying he and the Party handled my sexual assault appropriately.

They even go so far as to describe me as going through an “intense break-up” during this period. I wasn’t. I was in fact caught up in a painful and unhealthy situationship. I was not in a committed relationship. It sounds like a small distinction, but the Party uses Ben’s supposed knowledge of my personal life as evidence of how closely he was caring for me. Instead, the error made me realize how poorly he was tracking what was happening with me even when I was right in front of him.

This is the larger problem with their “evidence”. I could have seen Ben as a leader and friend, while still feeling confused and upset by his actions. I could have remained committed to the Party while struggling with something that happened inside it.

Most troublingly, they write: “This is not the behavior and words of someone who was shunned or grievously wronged.” What, exactly, is someone who has been grievously wronged supposed to look like?

Was I supposed to leave immediately? Stop loving people I had loved for years? Stop participating in political work that structured my life? Was I supposed to understand my trauma instantly and perform that understanding consistently enough that, six years later, there would be no contradictory text message for the Party to find?

Too many women already know how dangerous this logic is. We know women in our families, our communities, and our own lives who were raped or abused by husbands and boyfriends and did not immediately leave. Some stayed for weeks. Some for months. Some for years. Some continued to love the person who harmed them, defended them, slept beside them, depended on them, or tried desperately to make the relationship work. None of that means the violence did not happen. None of it means they were not “grievously wronged.”

We know better than to ask a woman, “If he really harmed you, why did you stay?” We should know better than to ask me the institutional version of the same question.

My continued attachment to the Party is not evidence that the Party did not harm me. I loved the comrades. All of my closest relationships were inside the PSL. My livelihood was at times tied to it. I had spent years building the Party and believed deeply in the political project it represented. If we understand that a survivor’s continued attachment to a person who harmed her does not negate that harm, we should be capable of understanding that continued attachment to an organization does not either.

This is why I do not see the Party’s response as evidence that it has developed a deeper understanding of sexual harm in the years since my assault. I see evidence of the opposite. Six years later, they are still evaluating my account through how well my behavior conformed to what they apparently expect from someone who was harmed: Did I stay? Did I hug him? Did I ever thank Ben? Did I continue leading? Was there ever a moment that I said I was okay? This is not simply a misunderstanding of trauma. It reproduces a deeply gendered and, I would argue, misogynistic way of evaluating women who experience sexual violence: searching their behavior after the harm for evidence that the harm, or their later understanding of it, should be taken less seriously.

“Former Member Marissa” and “Long-Time Party Leader Eugene”

Language matters. Political organizations, perhaps more than anyone, should understand that.

The Party introduces me as “former PSL member Marissa.” In the same sentence, Eugene is “a long-time Party leader.”

Neither description is false, but neither is neutral. Wasn’t I also a long-time Party leader? I joined in 2015, spent a decade organizing with the PSL, worked full-time for the Party, helped build branches, recruited and trained members, served in various national leadership roles, and was twice elected to the Central Committee. Not to mention, Eugene is also a former PSL member, so to position us using these terms begs the question: Why am I defined by my departure while he is defined by his importance?

This is not because leadership status determines credibility. It doesn’t. I raise it because the Party chose these descriptors, and that framing continues throughout the response. My history is largely presented as evidence to be examined: my relationships, private messages, changing relationship to the Party, and behavior after the assault. Eugene’s history, meanwhile, is presented through his political value: his recruiting, mentoring, work in the Black freedom movement, skill as a communicator, and knowledge as a historian. None of his accomplishments tell us whether the process following my assault was just. Yet readers are repeatedly reminded of his value to the organization. Concern for his health is even raised.

That is one way a “true narrative” gets constructed: not only through which facts are included, but through whose authority is emphasized, whose is diminished, and how readers are implicitly taught to understand each person involved.

I Am Not Part of a Faction

I want to be unequivocal: I am not part of a faction of former PSL members organizing to destroy, dismantle, or split the Party. My essay was not written or published as part of a coordinated factional campaign.

Am I in contact with people who have left the PSL? Of course I am. I spent ten years there. Many people I knew, loved, worked alongside, and organized with have since left too. And yes, some of us talk about the PSL. We also talk about art, our work, our families, and how terrifyingly hot it has been outside.

Talking with former PSL members has helped me process an emotionally difficult and disorienting experience. We compare memories, talk about relationships we lost, and support one another as people making sense of our time inside a closed political organization.

But I am not building another organization with these people, recruiting PSL members, or organizing a campaign against the Party. I have organizing work of my own that is based in my immediate community. “Decapitating” the PSL is not it.

However, that does not mean I condemn former members who have chosen to build other political projects. I don’t. I am still a communist and a Marxist. I want communists organizing, experimenting, building organizations, and finding ways to make revolutionary politics meaningful to more people. If people who have left the PSL build organizations that contribute something valuable to the movement for socialism, I hope they succeed. That does not make me a member of those organizations.

More fundamentally, I reject the premise that the success of revolutionary politics must mean the success of one particular organization. People leaving one communist organization to organize elsewhere should not automatically transform them into enemies, wreckers, or agents of the state. If our politics are actually about building a movement capable of transforming society, then there must be room for different organizations to exist, experiment, disagree, and still find ways to struggle together.

The Party’s vehement condemnation of any member who decides to leave and continue to organize in any capacity outside of the PSL is to me proof of how deeply sectarian and competitive their attitudes actually are.

My Essay Was Mine

There is another irony in their response. The women Central Committee members accuse me of portraying them as “pawns or pieces to be moved by some small cabal of men” and as “extensions of the desires of our male comrades.” I have never said that.

I find that characterization itself belittling to those women. I knew and worked alongside them for years. I considered them my friends. They are intelligent, experienced political leaders with agency of their own.

That is precisely why I hold them each accountable for putting their names on the Party’s response. The same way I hold myself accountable for signing other such Party responses when I was on the Central Committee and NDC.

What is striking is that while accusing me of denying these women’s agency, the Party constructs a narrative that denies mine. In their telling, I did not independently spend years reconsidering my experience or arrive at a different understanding after gaining distance from it. I did not decide for myself that I wanted to write publicly. Instead, I appear as someone drawn into a faction and incorporated into a coordinated campaign against the Party.

I reject both frameworks. Women in the PSL’s leadership are political actors responsible for their decisions. I am also a political actor responsible for mine.

My essay was mine. I wrote it, decided what belonged in it, decided when I was ready to publish it, and I take responsibility for every argument I made in it. The suggestion that someone else told me what to say or how to understand my own experience is an insult added to injury.

There is something circular about the Party’s argument. Former members describe harmful experiences and talk to one another about them. Their talking to one another is then offered as evidence that their accounts constitute a “coordinated attack”. If people leave separately and remain isolated, their experiences can be dismissed as individual grievances. If they compare experiences and discover commonalities, their agreement becomes evidence of “factional coordination”. When is anyone leaving the PSL ever going to be seen by PSL leadership as leaving with genuine grievances?

From Criticism to Conspiracy

The factional accusation does not exist in isolation. It’s the bridge to the most extraordinary part of the Party’s response.

Follow the progression of their argument: They begin by acknowledging that Eugene sexually assaulted me. They then dispute my understanding of how Party leadership handled that assault. From there, they question my motivations and connect me to a supposed faction of former members. Then come right-wing activists and Fox News. Finally, the response zooms out to discuss state repression, NSPM-7, infiltration, disruption, and the history of COINTELPRO.

By the end, a story about how the Party handled the sexual assault of one of its women leaders by one of its male leaders has been placed inside a narrative about threats to the revolutionary movement and the repressive apparatus of the state.

None of this answers the questions I raised. It instead creates an environment of mistrust and paranoia that serves to distract people from the reality of what happened, and in doing so is serving to make people complicit in harm that was done.

I am a communist. I do not need to be convinced that the capitalist state surveils, infiltrates, disrupts, and represses revolutionary movements. Nor do I need to be convinced that reactionaries will seize on real contradictions within left organizations and exploit them for their own purposes. They will.

But the exploitation of a contradiction does not make the contradiction false.

If former members of the PSL, or leftists long critical of the PSL; share my essay, that does not determine whether what I wrote is true. If Fox News finds my story politically useful, that does not determine whether what I wrote is true. Even if some agents of the state were delighted by internal conflict within a revolutionary organization, that would tell us nothing about whether the criticism at the center of that conflict is true.

And there is something painfully familiar about this framing.

In 2020, in the immediate aftermath of being sexually assaulted, I was asked to think about what accountability for Eugene might mean for the Party and the political projects he was responsible for. My trauma was placed beside the needs of the organization.

All these years later, after I finally decided to speak publicly, the Party is doing something remarkably similar. This time, people are being asked to consider what my disclosure might mean for the Party: who might exploit it, what political forces might benefit from it, and how it might intersect with broader attacks on the left.

What is “good” for the PSL is once again being placed beside and weight against the harm I experienced.

That should trouble anyone serious about building revolutionary organizations capable of self-criticism. If an allegation becomes politically suspect whenever an enemy can exploit it, what criticism of a revolutionary organization could ever be safe to make?

Our enemies will always exploit our failures. That is an argument for confronting those failures more rigorously, not for treating the people who expose them as possible instruments of those enemies. An organization protects itself from political attack not by refusing to examine its contradictions, but by developing the capacity to confront and transform them.

What Accountability Could Have Looked Like

I want to be clear about what I am arguing, because at several points the Party’s response frames the dispute around whether the consequences imposed on Eugene were sufficient.

That is not my argument.

I do not think that there could have been one perfect consequence that would have made what happened just. Accountability is not simply a question of how severely we punish someone. Accountability is not the same thing as consequence.

So what might a different process actually have looked like?

For starters, comrades who did not have a conflict of interest based on their relationships with Eugene and I could have been tasked with handling the process. I could have had someone independent of Eugene’s political relationships whose primary responsibility was supporting me. I could have been given time before being asked to weigh in on permanent consequences.

Most importantly, the Party could have had clear standards for what committing sexual assault meant for someone’s fitness to exercise leadership at the highest level.

Additionally, someone could have continued checking in with me after the immediate crisis had passed, when I had enough distance to understand what had happened more clearly.

Confidentiality could have been structured around protecting my privacy, rather than containing knowledge of what happened. This distinction matters. Especially, because in their response, the Party repeatedly points to concern for “my privacy” as a rationale for keeping knowledge of me being assaulted by Eugene so limited. Which is ironic considering that they then also proceed to share my private messages and make false assumptions about my personal life.

There is a difference between confidentiality that gives a survivor control over her own story and secrecy that gives a Party control over who is allowed to know about its failures. A trauma-informed process should have protected my right to privacy. It should not have made me responsible for keeping what Eugene did institutionally contained.

A principled trauma-informed response from the PSL would not have then violated my privacy further.

The Real Role of The PSL’s National Disciplinary Commission

The Party points repeatedly to the later creation of the NDC as evidence of its serious approach to sexual violence. I do not. As I described in my original essay, my experience serving on that body did not convince me that the Party had developed an independent, trauma-informed process.

Reading the NDC’s publicly leaked protocols as part of the Party’s response to my original essay only reinforced that criticism. Rather than demonstrating that the Commission is structured primarily around the needs of people who have experienced sexual harm, the protocols reinforce my concern that the NDC’s main function is to protect the Party from criticism and contain information that could damage it.

The protocols give three reasons for the Party’s highly confidential approach to cases involving sexual harm: protecting the privacy of the impacted person, protecting the privacy of the accused, and protecting the Party from “misinformation campaigns and machinations of the repressive state apparatus, and other anti-Party forces.” They further state that members who violate “the confidentiality of the proceedings” will face disciplinary action.

Protecting a survivor’s privacy and protecting an organization from its political enemies are not the same objective. When both are presented as reasons for confidentiality in a process dealing with sexual violence, we have to ask whose confidentiality is actually being protected, who controls it, and what happens when a survivor’s need to speak conflicts with the Party’s desire to contain information?

The protocols also leave unresolved how the NDC prevents someone who has experienced sexual harm from being made to carry the weight of the Party’s own responsibilities. They state that the “reporting party” should be offered the opportunity to participate in determining the “accountability process and consequence.” Survivor participation can be an essential part of a trauma-informed process. But the protocols never explain where giving a survivor meaningful agency ends and making her responsible for determining the consequences for the person who harmed her begins.

Nor do the protocols describe what care or support is offered to the harmed person throughout this process. They do not explain how the Commission accounts for the fact that someone experiencing an acute trauma response may not be prepared to make consequential decisions about accountability, or how asking her to do so too early could itself compound the harm she is experiencing.

More broadly, the protocols provide little indication of how the Commission understands the complicated ways trauma can shape a person’s behavior after sexual violence. These are not peripheral questions for a trauma-informed process. They should be at the center of one.

Instead, the publicly leaked NDC protocols tell us a great deal about the Commission’s disciplinary authority. They tell us which cases it investigates, who must submit to its decisions, what consequences it can impose, and that it consists of “long-time women cadres.” They tell us nothing about what qualifies those cadres to respond to trauma or how the process is designed around the needs of someone who has experienced sexual harm.

Being a woman does not by itself confer expertise in trauma. Being a survivor does not either. And placing women in charge of responding to sexual violence does not automatically make that response survivor-centered. Representation is not accountability. Women are also not the only people who experience sexual violence. And making women comrades disproportionately responsible for the difficult work of responding to sexual harm is itself a questionable and deeply gendered division of labor.

Creating a disciplinary body is not the same thing as creating a culture capable of accountability, nor is it the same thing as creating a trauma-informed process.

The existence of the NDC therefore does not resolve the questions I am asking. Institutionalizing a disciplinary procedure is not the same as institutionalizing an understanding of trauma, much less developing a serious political understanding of how sexual violence operates within our organizations and our class.

The questions I want our movement spaces to take up are these: What structures, practices, and political culture would actually allow an organization to respond to sexual violence without transferring its responsibilities onto the survivor or subordinating the survivor’s needs to those of the organization? What internal culture, training, and political development would be necessary so that women comrades are not disproportionately burdened with accountability work?

I do not see how the PSL’s National Disciplinary Commission, as described in its own protocols, answers either of these critically important questions.

Moving Forward

The Party is right about something. Something I tried to make clear in my own writing, which is that my understanding of what happened to me and how it was handled did change.

Time has given me distance and language I did not have then. Experiences outside the PSL have given me something against which to measure what happened inside it. Space has allowed me to reconsider relationships I once trusted and ask questions I did not know how to ask while I was living through their consequences.

I did not rewrite what happened. I did change what I understood my experiences to mean.

The Party says I am entitled to “change [my] feelings and opinions over time,” but then treats that change as something requiring explanation: Who influenced me? Which former members did I speak to? What faction did I supposedly join?

The simplest explanation is the one their narrative seems unable to accommodate: I changed because I learned, I reflected, I grew.

Revolutionary organizations must be capable of doing the same. We must be capable of giving survivors agency without making them responsible for deciding what justice requires; of protecting a survivor’s privacy without turning that privacy into institutional secrecy; of confronting harm without reducing people to monsters; of examining ourselves without treating criticism as attack; and of admitting that even when we believed we were acting correctly, we caused harm.

This is not separate from the work of defending our organizations and confronting our real enemies. It is a necessary part of it. We cannot build organizations strong enough to withstand repression, infiltration, and reaction if we are too afraid of our enemies to confront the contradictions within our own ranks.

Finally, I want to thank the many people who have reached out to me since I published my original essay. Some of you I have known for years; some I have never met. Some have shared with me their own experiences of harm within the PSL, and expressed how reading my story helped them better understand what happened to them. I am thankful for every kind message, every supportive comment, and to all who have told me that they hope I am surrounded by people who love and support me. I am. And I want you to know how much your care has meant to me.

I also want you to know that, despite how painful all of this has been, I am still hopeful. I am not an online person, I do not have social media accounts, and so watching the conversations and debates my essay has sparked online has been overwhelming at times. Getting to discuss the political meaning of these experiences with my own family, friends and comrades has honestly been healing.

I am proud to know that by telling this story more people are talking about trauma, sexual violence, accountability, organizational culture, and what we owe one another in the movements we build. My greatest hope when deciding to share my story was that by doing so I could help push exactly these kinds of conversations forward. If what happened to me can contribute in some small way to people learning, reflecting, asking harder questions, and building better practices for the future, then that matters deeply to me.

The Party may choose to respond to me again. They will likely continue to lie about my character. To invade my privacy. To call me ego driven, a wrecker, a state agent. I do not intend to enter into an endless back-and-forth in which every response demands another response, every private message another explanation, and every explanation another defense. I have said what I needed to say about their “true narrative”.

But I am not done writing about the questions it raises. I would like to write more about sexual violence, trauma, harm, accountability, and how we can build survivor-centered processes into our organizing spaces.

These conversations are larger than my experience, and they are larger than the PSL. They are conversations we need to have if we want to build organizations capable not only of surviving our enemies, but of becoming worthy of the world we say we are fighting for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobilization

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

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

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

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

Indigenous Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community Care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goal Construction and Considerations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflection and Feedback

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s Note: Below are two statements, both written and distributed internally within the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), as a form of damage control for the revealing testimony of former-PSL member, Marissa Sanchez, republished by USU here. What follows is an insidious effort to commit a character assassination of the very individual PSL’s procedures betrayed. Two things are admitted to, by both the National Disciplinary Committee and Central Committee: Eugene Puryear did assault Marissa and the procedure for remediation was determined by what Marissa supposedly wanted. These facts alone discredit PSL.

Their ‘victim-centered’ approach claims to be acting in the interest of the survivor, but in reality crushes them beneath social pressure. You can with one, formal, hand offer them the “choice” to expel someone, while with another, hidden, fist threaten them with the many “unfortunate consequences” that real accountability may cause. Which is exactly what Ben Becker did. The paper trail and consensus testimony for the “caring hand” can be brought out if ever needed to demonstrate leadership’s principles, while the existence of the fist can be doubted by smearing the victim as a manipulative liar. Which is exactly what these Committees have done here.

Internal National Disciplinary Committee Statement

The following statement was prepared by the National Disciplinary Committee to give our members an accurate account of the investigative and disciplinary process around an incident involving Eugene P. in 2020.

Marissa S., a former member of the PSL, posted a Substack article about this incident on September 7. The letter’s contents are understandably distressing. However, the letter seriously mischaracterizes the party’s actions and procedures. The article itself not only mischaracterizes the accountability process and events following the incident in 2020, but also attacks the central Party leadership and the NDC and undermines the PSL’s history in dealing with incidents of sexual misconduct, which are taken very seriously. It is important for members of the PSL to understand the context. The Party leadership is aware that Marissa has been communicating and working with the leaders of the recent faction, and former members are sharing the article online and sending it to current members across the country. The following document is not a comprehensive response to all the mischaracterizations in her article but rather an account of the investigative and disciplinary process related to the incident raised.

We also would like to make clear, for the sake of people having a full understanding of what happened, Marissa was an active participant in the entire process. She repeatedly expressed to multiple people, both in the immediate aftermath of the incident and in the years following it, that she felt supported by the Party and that she supported the process.

2020 Incident & Accountability

On March 29, 2026, the Standing Committee became aware that Marissa, a former Central Committee member considered a disciplinary incident involving Eugene in 2020 to have been mishandled, the accountability not severe enough, and the support for her to be inadequate.

The incident took place at a house party in November 2020. Marissa brought the incident to the attention of members of the Executive Committee at the time, which prompted an immediate investigation and disciplinary action. We do not share details of incidents widely, primarily out of respect for the comrades most affected by it. In the Party, the norms of our practices regarding disciplinary matters goes as follows: An investigation is conducted by the appropriate body, timeline is collected from all parties involved, disciplinary action is proposed. The proposed disciplinary action is typically brought to the victim before it is carried out. If any disagreements arise, we work through those disagreements with a path forward. Once a decision is made and the disciplinary action is carried out, it is not customarily re-litigated.

During the initial investigation, Eugene claimed he had been too intoxicated to recall the incident, but he did not contest it, and said he would comply with any accountability measure. He offered to resign from the Party. Marissa was involved in each decision made about Eugene’s punishment, and helped craft the decision that Eugene would be suspended from Party activity and leadership for six months. Eugene apologized to Marissa in a meeting she agreed to and facilitated by a leading Party member. Marissa made it clear she did not want Eugene to resign.

In the over five years, from the disciplinary action in 2020-21 to right before she resigned in 2026, Marissa never made the Party leadership aware that she had become dissatisfied about the disciplinary action taken. While she had been part of the accountability process at each step in 2020 and 2021, we only learned in March of 2026, six years after the incident, that Marissa now considered it insufficient and handled wrongly. Every victim, including Marissa, has the right to assert this and to look back on things differently with time. After Party leadership was made aware, the leadership reached out to discuss the matter. Marissa chose not to discuss this further and resigned from the Party. Following her resignation, the National Disciplinary Committee reached out again during the review period. She declined to participate.

As soon as Eugene heard that Marissa felt dissatisfied with the 2020 outcome, Eugene offered to resign from the Party. The Standing Committee accepted the resignation that same day.

Strengthening and Affirming the National Disciplinary Committee

At the time of the 2020 incident, the Party process in place to adjudicate misconduct was for a higher body to handle the charge. There had not previously been charges within the top leadership, and it was handled inside the top leadership as an uncontested charge.

In 2021, the Party initiated an independent National Disciplinary Committe, which was ratified by the Party Congress in 2022 with independent authority. Marissa was one of the founding members of this Committee and helped draft its protocols and processes based on the Party’s history in dealing with these matters. These norms have been used by other Party bodies to deal with new cases.

Following Marissa’s resignation, the NDC initiated a thorough review of the 2020 incident. The incident occurred before the NDC’s existence. The NDC reviewed notes and interviewed comrades involved to the extent possible. In its review, the committee found no evidence that the processes following the 2020 incident had been mishandled. It was particularly important that the accountability process had been swift. Marissa had been engaged at each step. Multiple people who were close to her at the time have independently confirmed that she expressed support for the disciplinary outcome, did not seek a different outcome and expressed she was being supported by the Party.

The NDC has, since its initial formation, been strengthened as a necessary step as the Party continues to grow. It is now institutionalized as a permanent standing and empowered body, composed of long-time women cadres. It has independent authority vested by the Party Congress. Any issues related to sexual assault go to it, bypassing all other leadership bodies, and all comrades must submit to its rulings. The NDC has the right to review all cases of sexual misconduct.

To emphasize, while we do share summaries and decisions of the NDC with the appropriate leadership bodies and occasionally members of the body most impacted, the NDC does not share details of its work or investigations with the wider membership. The primary reasons are to protect the privacy of the victims and to protect the Party from the machinations of the repressive state apparatus. Serious violations and egregious misconduct, which are not common in our party, are expediently investigated and lead to swift disciplinary action up to termination of membership. More often, the charges require time to conduct an investigation and understand the impact of any incident on those involved and on the work of the Party. Fundamental to our approach to these incidents is our understanding as Marxists that people can and do change. Comrades who violate Party norms, but remain in the organization, are punished appropriately and held accountable to ensure that they are meeting set expectations or terms of conduct. The victim(s) of those actions is(are) offered the ability to be involved in the determination of that punishment and the path forward.

Comprehensive Report from the Central Committee
in Response to Marissa Sanchez’s Post

This document was approved unanimously by the Central Committee on Sept. 10. It represents the most comprehensive report we can provide to members.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation has never taken the issues of sexual assault and misconduct lightly. The entirety of our politics is grounded in a well-developed understanding of the nature of oppression and exploitation in capitalist society. Sexual violence affects all people, but it does not affect all people equally. Women are, because of the system’s reliance on patriarchy, subjected to the most horrific forms of sexual violence to keep them dehumanized, isolated from society and the struggles of our class, and highly exploited within the political and economic system. Addressing the manifestations of oppression and the sexual violence that occurs is a requirement of the highest order. We have a proud 22-year history of confronting, rooting out and appropriately addressing these issues. 

On Sept. 7, a lengthy article was published on Substack by-lined by former PSL member Marissa which relates a 2020 incident involving Eugene Puryear, a long-time Party leader who resigned in March of this year. That a woman worker who experienced violence as a young person, and then experienced a violation from a trusted leading comrade, is disturbing, and hard to read for all of us — including those of us who were aware of the incident and did not speak of it widely out of respect for confidentiality of the victim. The Party leadership has maintained, from the moment it took place to now, that this was an absolute violation, which required a swift response, and that Marissa should be supported.

At the same time, the narrative that she now develops, six years later, about what took place after the incident, is false. The history is rewritten to erase the actual care that was provided, to erase the accountability that took place, and to erase what Marissa communicated then and her feelings expressed for years afterwards of feeling supported by the Party leadership. The agreed upon norms of confidentiality in this and other accountability processes — which she helped devise — she now falsely portrays as a cover up.

As written, it appears as an unrelated exposé independently confirming the allegations of the faction that the Party’s elected leaders are nefarious, undemocratic individuals who cannot be trusted. In fact, it was released in a coordinated plan with the same factional operation that goes back as far back as March — which we document at the end. 

We respect the right of all people to change their feelings and opinions over time about such traumatic incidents in their lives. But there are significant factual inaccuracies in what she has related about the accountability process that followed, the level of support she received and about the internal institutions of the Party. These must be corrected, and more information must be provided for accuracy. Due to the high-profile nature of this case, and the fact that we are currently under the highest form of state scrutiny and attack, letting a false narrative like this stand would only serve to sow greater confusion and provide a basis for the opportunistic larger attacks working to disrupt the Party and members’ work at this critical time. 

Under our norms, the details of disciplinary matters and outcomes are kept confidential — especially out of respect to the privacy of someone subjected to sexual misconduct. But given that she has published an article, it is clear that at this time, six years later, we have no choice but to respond. 

The incident and immediate aftermath

There has never been any effort to deny or question what happened to Marissa in November 2020. Eugene sexually groped Marissa at a holiday party. She was believed and not disputed. The Party leaders were shocked and angered that this could take place. Eugene, having been heavily intoxicated, said he did not remember the assault, but did not contest what Marissa said. He accepted responsibility and offered to resign immediately. Marissa said she did not want his resignation, and so another accountability process would be devised in discussions with her. Marissa was at no point challenged or questioned about the incident, as so often otherwise happens in society when women bring serious allegations against men in leadership. There was no foot-dragging or bureaucratic process. We moved swiftly and decisively in support of her and for accountability. The quickness of moving towards a resolution was not a form of pressure, but rather ensured real and immediate accountability from Eugene, and support to her. It was not an option to delay. He was immediately suspended and removed from the situation. 

Before leaving the building, they had a brief meeting where he accepted responsibility, and said he would do whatever he could to remedy the harm; she told him why his actions were hurtful and disappointing, especially as a leader that she had looked up to previously, and with whom she worked so closely almost every day. She wanted to be able to work with him in the future, but it would take time and he would need to get professional help and work on himself. At the end, they tearfully embraced.

Screenshots of her messages to a confidant that day read, “The meeting went good. I said what I needed to say and feel that I got a very genuine apology. He is suspended. No clear time when he will be back.” 

When such acts of sexual misconduct take place, there is no perfect process to repair the harm. Engaging the victim in the accountability process is important to restorative justice. In this case, the resolution, worked out with Marissa in the days that followed, was not that Eugene would “not chair CC meetings for a while,” as she says now. Eugene was suspended from all Party activities for six months — public meetings, internal branch meetings, all bodies of the leadership he sat on, all protests, etc. He was mandated to go into therapy, to try to get to the root of how this happened, and told to give up alcohol for the duration of the suspension, and not go to social activities where Party members would be present. This was developed in discussions with Marissa as an appropriate punishment and response for an offense of this type. She was adamant that Eugene not be expelled, as she told both Ben and the people she confided in at the time. The idea that Ben proposed to just “move on” and never speak of it again is totally untrue. 

After taking some time off after the incident, Marissa insisted on returning to her work. Eugene returned to his office for his professional work, five weeks later, but remained under suspension from all Party work. 

Eugene complied with the terms of the suspension. During this period, he forwarded on all speaking invitations he received, refusing all but one, which Marissa authorized in advance. He signed up for therapy and showed documentation of his visits. He swore off alcohol for the duration. In a series of private conversations, including in the debrief at the end of his suspension, he demonstrated genuine remorse and understanding of the harm he had committed, volunteered to do whatever else was needed, and affirmed that such heavy drinking was unacceptable. The Party leadership had confidence such a violation would not recur and was not a threat to the safety of others — and there have been no charges against Eugene in the years since.

After six months out of Party leadership and all Party activity, Eugene was reintegrated into Party life and resumed the many responsibilities he had been elected to perform. Under the practices and principles of our Party, leadership is not an “elevated status” but an embrace of more responsibilities — chief among them the development of more leaders. In the years after he returned, Eugene played a key role in recruiting, mentoring and training many new cadres, and Black cadres in particular, bringing them into the spaces of the Black freedom movement where he was already the Party’s most well-known figure. From that position of leadership, as a popular communicator and first rate historian of Black history, American history and global politics in the Marxist tradition, he resumed to make a significant contribution to the movement for socialism. Long-term demotions take place in the Party only when the assessment is that the person has a pattern of bad judgment or untrustworthy behavior, or has not adequately learned from their mistakes. In general, after an accountability process is completed, the Party puts members back to work to serve wherever they can best advance the struggle. For people who remain in the organization, there are no forever punishments. 

At this time, there was no National Disciplinary Committee. The National Disciplinary Commission (NDC) was formed in 2021 and ratified by the 5th Party Congress in 2022 to institutionalize the accountability and disciplinary practices the PSL has engaged in since its founding to address any issues of sexual misconduct. If such an incident were to take place today, it would go directly to the all-women National Disciplinary Committee, which has independent authority vested by the Congress, and which all members, including Central Committee members, are subject to. Its decisions are final, and can only be overturned by the Party Congress itself.

Prior to the formation of the NDC, when any charges came up, the existing process over the preceding 15 years was for a higher body to handle the charge. There had never been a charge against someone in the top leadership itself. Marissa at this time was one of three observers to the five-person national leadership, which Eugene was a part of and which met remotely. The only other full-time national leaders in NYC were Ben and Marissa, which is why Marissa came to Ben and he responded to the situation the same day. To give a sense of the scale of the organization at that time, the two of them had been working out of Ben’s apartment in the years before COVID as the “national staff.”

At the time, two elected members of that leadership on the West Coast were told over the phone that Eugene had been suspended for six months due to misconduct at a party while heavily inebriated, without divulging the name of the victim, and he should not be contacted. The observer members of the leadership were told that he was being put into mandatory therapy including for alcohol abuse, and so would not be in the meetings for six months and was not to be contacted so he could focus on that. Marissa had input in what would be told to others, and what would not be shared. 

Marissa’s letter includes supposed quotes from a conversation with Gloria La Riva shortly after her resignation in 2026. Gloria has replied, “The quotes Marissa provided are totally untrue and the description of the conversation is an outrageous distortion. While I knew Eugene had been suspended in 2020, I had not known it involved Marissa in particular. I did not say Ben and Brian mishandled disciplinary cases – leaders who I have total confidence in. The call turned to something I now realize had a deeper purpose on her part. In my conversation she began to say, ‘Everyone knows you and Richard were pushed out from the leadership.’ I said, ‘who says that?’ I was incredulous. When she insisted that was the case, without naming anyone, I told her that he and I are in California, and are in the Central Committee, and the Executive Committee is based in New York, as it should be. Even if I didn’t have a leadership post, I told her I have plenty of work in the party, and I am very satisfied with what I do. It was clear to me she was trying to turn me against the party, by appealing to what she assumed would be unhappiness on my part. I realized what she was doing. But what I didn’t know was the extent she was in ongoing communication with a group intending to rip apart the party. That became clear in the following weeks and I deeply resent her trying to use me against the Party leadership.”

To go back to the events of 2020: under Party norms, confidentiality is a central part of accountability proceedings, especially in sensitive issues. There was nothing unusual about that, then or now, and this did not constitute a “cover up.” She did not object to this norm. As someone who directed many disciplinary processes herself in the years before and after this incident, she always insisted on the same for others in her situation. Marissa helped write those very disciplinary norms into the Party By-laws, and into the National Disciplinary Committee protocols. In some cases, but not all, depending on the wishes of the impacted person, an apology and resolution may be communicated to a wider group of members. We make exceptions to confidentiality where we believe someone poses an ongoing threat to others’ safety, in which case they are expelled and other members, and others in the movement, are notified. When that is not the assessment, as in this case with Eugene, our process is informed by restorative accountability. Unlike the traditional retributive justice system—which relies on public record, public shaming, and punishment—restorative accountability relies upon confidentiality: for the privacy of the wronged party, for repairing harm, for creating space for honest self-reflection, and for successfully reintegrating the individual into work after they have sufficiently complied with the accountability process. An additional dimension in radical political work is that any and all sensitive information can and will be utilized by anti-Party forces, and state agents, to inflame internal contradictions or defame an organization publicly.

With that said, when Marissa expressed that she would like to confide in some more people, she then did so without any reprisal whatsoever. First she told two of the comrades she most trusted about what had happened, and her boyfriend at the time already knew. To the three of them, she said she felt supported by the Party leadership, and supported by Ben in particular, saying she had been treated with great sensitivity. She told a third leading member the same thing about suffering an assault and being well-supported by the Party leadership, without naming Eugene. She apparently told a fourth leader, also a close friend in the Party leadership, shortly after the suspension was over, naming Eugene. None of these confidants of hers were coached in any respect. When she expressed that the Party had supported her, these appear to be her genuine feelings at the time, confirmed by multiple people, including her then-boyfriend and closest confidants. Three of the comrades she brought into her confidence about this incident remained close with her for years afterwards; while she continued to confide in them about any range of personal things troubling her, no one has any recollection of the 2020 incident as one of them. All this was independently verified by the NDC in a 2026 review of the case. The NDC did not exist in 2020.

The following months and years: care and support in NYC and Los Angeles 

In January and February 2021, Marissa went through a difficult and intense break-up in her relationship with her boyfriend. She confided in Ben repeatedly during this period, including coming to his house to talk about her relationship and personal struggles. During this emotionally challenging period, she received extensive care, attention and support – and expressed no dissatisfaction about the handling of the incident with Eugene. Her boyfriend, now ex, was also a co-worker in the same building. She had been doing intense Party work for a few years, which is a common cutoff time period for a staffperson. All this was impacting her work and happiness, and she expressed that it was time for a new chapter. Over time, she expressed the conclusion that perhaps leaving NYC would be preferable. The Party leadership thought of Los Angeles as a place she could make a big impact. 

Contrary to her narrative, she was supported throughout this process. A comrade was assigned to drive her around full-time to see if she would like the city. When she did, she was given the apartment of a comrade in Los Angeles, money for rent and to buy a car — since in L.A. she would need one, and it is difficult to save enough as a staff person to buy a car. This was a sign of care and appreciation – and we have similarly provided relocation expenses for other former staff people after years of service to the Party. It is outrageous to now twist this into “hush money.” In Los Angeles, she was immediately integrated into the branch leadership, and her presence was celebrated as a newly arrived national leader. 

Of course, with a new teaching job, and later grad school, while living thousands of miles away, the frequency of her communications with the party leadership in NYC changed. But it remained very warm, personal and caring. Below are just some of the exchanges. In 2022, while waiting to start back up at her job, she reached out for financial help from Ben, and he loaned her his own personal money. In 2023, after a tragedy in her family, she reached out to Ben for comfort: “I know we don’t talk as often as we used to, but you’ve always been in my corner so I wanted to reach out about this tough situation.” He immediately responded.

In 2023, after Ben helped her resolve a series of issues she was having in the Los Angeles branch, she wrote to express her gratitude: “I know you’re super busy, but it means the world to me that we have leaders like you that always make time for people.” When she heard Ben and his family were coming to Los Angeles that year, she invited them over for the holidays, and to meet her new partner.

All of this was in the years after the 2020 incident, at Marissa’s own initiative. This is not the behavior and words of someone who was shunned or grievously wronged. Although less frequent than when she was in New York, she still called Ben about major life decisions, and questions she was struggling with personally and organizationally. She did not bring up the 2020 incident in any of these discussions. If she had, there is nothing to indicate she would not have received the same sensitivity and attention she received in every other area of her life where she asked for support. 

Marissa remained active in the National Disciplinary Committee throughout this period, and did not at any point ask to reopen or revise the remedies she sought from Eugene or the Party, nor did she advocate to revisit any of the Party’s disciplinary norms or procedures. It is not true that Ben and Brian directed the NDC’s work, nor did they overrule its findings and the targeted demonization of both in the letter is without factual foundation. It is also insulting to the members of the NDC who are strong and principled women comrades. The NDC, including Marissa, handled several complex cases during this period with great sensitivity and principle, providing a sense of justice and accountability to people seeking redress, while also upholding due process and Party norms. The NDC, founded in 2021, only was in session in the event of a serious case of misconduct, and none of the cases it has handled have brought disrepute to the Party.

So something changed to cause this presentation after 5-6 years about both the NDC and the support she received. Marissa had remained in the Central Committee, and was re-elected to it in 2022, having been motivated by other national leaders at the Congress. But afterwards in Los Angeles, other local leaders began to find her less responsive to the needs of leadership, and hard to work with when she did show up. With interpersonal tensions rising, which had nothing to do with anyone in New York, she left the Los Angeles Steering Committee and became much less active in the Party, focusing on her work and family life. After a while, in December 2024, she requested to be re-integrated into national work, and was immediately added back in. She reported to a confidant that her meeting with Brian “went good!” “I feel proud of doing what I had to do [in her personal life] and am deeply thankful I can integrate back in.”

At that point, she understood she was not going to be re-elected by her branch to the Party Congress, and would therefore not be eligible to be in the Central Committee anymore. She made an appeal to Ben to have the Central Committee directly elect her to the 2025 Congress. The National Organization Department discussed this and decided that this would not be appropriate because such positions are reserved for people who had been primarily active in national areas of work, which she hadn’t been over the preceding period. Ben communicated this to Marissa, but explained if she were now able to be more active in other areas of national work, there were many projects she could contribute to for the next few years. She said then that she accepted this, and was excited to rebuild her level of activity. In retrospect, she later told multiple people, she felt not being specially elected by the Central Committee to the Congress as a voting-delegate was a breaking point in her feelings towards the leadership. 

According to Marissa’s own narrative, in 2025 before the Congress, her feelings about the Party as a whole started to change, and now she looked back on the 2020 incident with Eugene totally differently.

But this feeling was still unknown to the leadership. In January 2026, Ben wrote to Marissa to wish her a happy new year, and that all the anti-war activity around Venezuela reminded him of her, and how we are still fighting the same battle all these years later. She wrote back “Man unfortunately yes. It makes me think of being in NYC with you all [and your daughter], but she was so little! Miss everyone. Hope you and the family are well .” 

How we learned of Marissa’s changed position, and our response

In March 2026, we received a call from one of Marissa’s closest friends that she had privately told him a factional operation was being prepared to break away multiple branches across the country. She had just met secretly with a Party leader who was covertly working with others to break away branches and members, who have since left to do precisely that. In this context of considering an effort to split the Party, she stated for the first time in over five years that she felt the 2020 accountability process was insufficient, and no longer believed it should have been kept so private. He alerted the party of the factional operation, but also mentioned her remarks about 2020. The Party leadership began to investigate the factional operation as this was the first time it learned there was a potential plot to break the Party apart. Marissa’s friend told her that he had reported back their conversation about the factional plot for the good of the organization, which upset her very much. Ben, still hoping that he and Marissa had a close bond and that the factional plot was untrue, sent her a message offering to come talk to her in person in Los Angeles if she did not want to talk on the phone. She did not respond. Then a few days later, she replied that she did not want to talk, had been harmed in 2020, and left all Party chats, resigning. 

Marissa’s recounting of how this happened, and her subsequent resignation, leaves out the factional plot entirely. 

As soon as this happened, the Party leadership informed Eugene that Marissa had told others she was no longer satisfied with the 2020 resolution, although had not indicated what other remedies would be. He again offered his resignation on the spot, and this time it was accepted. As in 2020, the Party leadership moved swiftly and decisively out of principle, again based on what we believed Marissa wanted. This too has been twisted into its opposite.

About a month before the leadership became aware of Marissa’s changed position, Eugene received an advanced, potentially life-threatening health diagnosis, which he is still dealing with, and which can be exacerbated by intense stress. He had already stopped coming into the office. We hoped that this ultimate political decision — leaving the organization he helped build his whole adult life — would demonstrate to Marissa his sincere contrition, and show that her concerns, even as they changed, were taken seriously. The NDC reached out to Marissa again to talk after the resignation, but she did not reply. 

What we did hear from other friends of hers is that she expressed that more leaders should know the story. Knowing that, the Central Committee was informed about the incident that had occurred in 2020. We recognized that all victims have a right to change their opinions and feelings about past wrongs, and she should not be judged  for that. We did not disclose to any comrades the reports of a factional operation, which we were still attempting to verify and unravel. We did not speak badly about Marissa at all, and continued to respect her confidentiality and request for space. All Central Committee members were under discipline, if asked, to not break the confidentiality of a situation that Marissa had not yet widely disclosed. Therefore, they were only authorized to disclose that Eugene has a severe health situation. We have had no contact with Marissa since.

Marissa continues to say she never wanted Eugene’s expulsion or punishment, nor does she want it to “define the rest of his life.” If that were the case, this is not how she would have gone about things. 

Women’s leadership

The letter appears designed to direct the shock about the awful incident in 2020 into distrust of two members of its current elected leadership, Ben and Brian, and to completely deny the reality of the PSL’s collective leadership. This can only be achieved by repeating the factional operation’s narrative that erases the role of women in building, maintaining and developing the practices and policies of our party. That is now a common theme in all the attacks. 

In addition to co-drafting this statement, the women members of the Central Committee want to speak separately in their own name on this point, “We are not pawns or pieces to be moved by some small cabal of men who supposedly predetermine our actions, but revolutionary socialists in our own right. Very few women in the party and in society do not have some experience of sexist violation. We are committed to building a world free from the exploitation and violence and abuse that we ourselves have suffered. Yet in a post that claims to seek a better world, those who are named are described as only extensions of the desires of our male comrades. Any serious leftist should think twice about this. We too lead the party. We make up the National Disciplinary Committee. We have spent hours on investigations and interviews and in discussions to ensure our party treats sexual misconduct with care, empathy and on principled views of what it means to transform our class and our society. We strategize the struggles in our workplaces and in our schools and in our communities. We play a visible and necessary role in the struggle and in the Party. It is unconscionable that we are repeatedly denied the right to visibility in attacks that claim to speak against the very violence that women are subjected to in society.”  

For 22 years, the PSL has built a foundation we can be proud of. We have had significant growth over the few years as the popularity of socialism rises among millions, and contributed massively to a range of movements for justice. We have built institutions and processes internally along the way to strengthen the Party, and we remain fully committed to always improving on what exists. We have proven this in practice. Through every stage and phase of the Party’s development, the Party has nurtured a culture inside our organization to not tolerate bourgeois-capitalist attitudes and behaviors of patriarchal violence, misogyny and sexism. The Party has a democratically developed Constitution and Bylaws that empower our members and give legitimacy to our institutions and elected leaders to defend these norms.

This is core to realizing our shared goal of building a genuine socialist party that can, standing with our class, build the movement for a socialist reconstruction in the United States.

Connection to the factional operation

Marissa has the right to change her feelings about a traumatic incident in her life. But why distort and misrepresent what did take place in the accountability process, the care provided and the reasons she either lost or stepped down from her leadership positions in the Party – which had no connection to the incident with Eugene? 

That the letter’s broadside attack on the PSL leadership and institutions coincides with the narratives that are already circulating online against the Party leadership is not just coincidence; it is by design and coordinated. 

In June, a faction of PSL members who had become dedicated to the destruction of the Party announced their resignations and characterized the PSL as a moribund organization arguing that they would commit themselves to “mass organizing” of the working class, and not Party-building or spreading socialist consciousness. Since resigning, the anti-PSL grouping has carried out a coordinated attempt to split members from the Party where they believe they find weaknesses. It seems instead of trying to organize and recruit among the 150 million unorganized workers, their only recruitment targets are existing PSL members. After leaving, they conspired to encourage a grouping in a new city to conceal their political differences and then resign; a battle over control of Party dues and offices ensued. In another city, a factional member used a false name to rejoin the Party in a new branch, and then helped organize the resignation of members. They claimed they would not stoop to personal intrigue and scandal to build their organization, but that is now demonstrably untrue. Factional leader Walter Smolarek was reported as “giddy” about Marissa’s letter, and started calling around to identify weak spots, and has been talking with current PSL members to uncover their most salacious stories, personal intrigue, old traumas and is seeking details in past internal disciplinary proceedings, presumably to prepare another round of attacks. It’s clear that the grouping has adopted a method to drive a wedge in the PSL, encourage resignations and to break trust with Party leaders using shocking “tell-all” innuendo. 

In the last few days we have confirmed more about the connections to the factional conspiracy:

• Summer 2025: Leaders of the future faction began quietly spreading gossip about the 2020 disciplinary incident involving Eugene and Marissa to grow their secret grouping. This was the same time that Marissa says her trust in the national leadership changed and is when she was not specially elected to the Congress.
• March 2026: When Marissa’s apparent dissatisfaction about 2020 first came out, via a trusted friend, it was after she had just met with a leader of the future faction, where they were discussing how to best break apart the PSL. Marissa resigned shortly after this was reported back.
• March-April 2026: Marissa told friends in the PSL, people she was trying to win over, that she had agreed to publish in “six months” to let the factional leaders in the CC “get their projects out of the Party first.” This roughly corresponds to the eventual publication date. 
• In the Brooklyn faction’s internal documents, they instructed their group not to “mention EP” while “consolidating” PSL members to the faction— and other faction leaders told people they did not want their larger organizational-political attack to be immediately overshadowed by a case of sexual misconduct. Proverbially speaking, they wanted to keep this bullet in the chamber for a few months later.
• In the week before Marissa’s letter, factional leaders suddenly restarted communications with current PSL organizers who they had once been close friends with, “just to catch up” — a coordinated probing operation.
• On Sept. 7, the date Marissa released her letter, these same ex-members from around the country had a national in-person gathering. Several of them immediately began firing off messages to current PSL members and leaders encouraging their resignation and to not trust the NDC or the CC to protect women. Another faction adherent immediately posted on X screenshots of the Party’s membership figures from the last Party Congress, emphasizing how many are new recruits, and thus potentially vulnerable to not trusting the Party leadership. 

Final thoughts: NSPM-7

Right now, at a moment of intensifying repression, the PSL is playing a leading role in so many vital struggles. Some comrades have asked whether we believe any of this involves the state. It is not possible to know this with certainty at this stage. What we know for certain is that A) there is a multi-billion dollar law enforcement operation to “destroy and dismantle” the “far left” under NSPM-7 (COINTELPRO 2.0), a document operationalized by a Department of Justice memo to use the full range of tools and methods at their disposal. B) According to media reports, the PSL was specifically named by senior Department of Justice official Harmeet Dhillon as a target to be “dismantled,” a federal grand jury has been convened in the Southern District of New York, and we have faced an unprecedented range of state and Congressional attacks in the last 9 months. C) There is a multi-layered ongoing factional operation underway, that has been rolled out over many months and across many cities, focused on trying to dismantle the PSL from within — rather than focus on organizing towards their own vision. 

Predictably, a right-wing media activist, who funnels stories to FoxNews and the Department of Justice, was the first to post Marissa’s letter. We believe the hidden hand of where state forces are operating will be inevitably revealed in due time. We know from history that COINTELPRO’s favored methods are not overt repression but covert acts to “foster factionalism and cause confusion within the targeted organization,” specifically aiming to discredit its leaders. That requires identifying and manipulating any existing or potential contradictions or grievances, and then hitting relentlessly so that a sensation develops of “where there’s smoke, there must be fire.” The history of COINTELPRO shows that many activists were manipulated by bad actors without any knowledge this was happening – that was in fact the most common form of sabotage. Members and former members have informed Party leadership that the anti-PSL grouping has approached them sowing discontent, searching for potential inflammatory or negative information, and trying to recruit them to the project of taking down the Party. 

When a radical organization is facing a multi-layered operation to discredit it, there is nothing it can do or say to stop the attacks from coming. That is because the operation has a mission — not to improve the PSL or make it stronger, but to make it weaker and collapse the bonds of trust that hold it together. We know the state and far-right want nothing more than to tear apart the largest Marxist party that is playing a critical role in the fight-back against massive right-wing attacks. Building a mass movement against genocide in Gaza, against ICE terror directed at immigrant families, and in defense of democratic rights is the PSL’s real fight, and we aren’t going to back down from it, even in the face of a discrediting, disruption campaign. 

Across the country, comrades are collectively and individually grappling with the shocking news that Marissa publicized on Monday. It is distressing to read, as we are sure parts of this document have been too. But it is critical we not concede to a false narrative intended to decapitate the Party and undermine our ability to continue contributing to the struggle. The true narrative presented here will take time to process. We encourage comrades to read this multiple times and to engage in discussion with the leaders in your branch and city. 

In January of this year, 2026, after the League Convention, a new Executive Committee was seated with a convention mandate to strengthen the League’s centralization and help its member organizations increase their political and organizational development. At the first January sitting of the new Executive Committee, the Executive Deputy from Red Help Austin, TX, relayed serious concerns about his organization. The Executive Committee undertook a preliminary investigation and began to fashion a path of struggle for Red Help to address the serious liberalism identified by its elected deputy.

Over the course of the following eight months, with the full participation of Red Help’s elected League officers, the League began to carry out a program of directed internal struggle. This program’s details were reported in the Committee minutes and reflected in every Red Help report; these were published to Red Help and all Member Organizations. Red Help’s membership consistently demonstrated issues of serious liberalism, disorganization, and adherence to a depressing pattern of what can only be described as celebrity podcaster-worship in the form of Red Help’s main leader, Jen “Big Nasty,” who claimed to be acting in the all-powerful capacity as the organization’s “Chair” (a position which is not recognized in the Red Help bylaws, and therefore does not formally exist).

Had Red Help’s membership read any of the numerous monthly reports delivered to the League’s Executive Committee or the Committee’s own minutes (which League bylaws required them to read), they would have been aware of the repeated pleas for help and the dismal assessment of the state of their organization presented, over and over, to the League. Failure to adhere to their own bylaws, failure to pursue any political development of any kind; essentially, Red Help had become a not very effective liberal charity.

Open struggle broke out as the League’s Political Committee took steps to remedy this situation. The Executive Committee identified a minority group within Red Help that was committed to struggle and to transforming the organization from the miserable liberal-paternalistic charity project (piggybacking off of a local church to make non-agitational “aid drops” twice a month, and nothing else) into an actual Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organization. A member of the Unity-Struggle-Unity Editorial Board with no prior knowledge of the ground situation apart from what she’d heard from Red Help delegates firsthand at the annual conference, and occasional League-wide reports, was co-opted to serve as chief investigator, struggle captain, and primary author of any criticism. This comrade worked exceedingly long hours; she spoke to members of the minority faction, gathered evidence, formulated the plan for struggle, and produced the primary criticism, often working well into the night and morning.

When the criticism document was presented to the Political Committee for consideration, the Red Help Political Committee member (who had attended a total of two of the dozens of Political Committee meetings to that point) chose not to attend, nor to record or submit any position on the criticism. When the Committee voted and adopted the criticism, Red Help’s appointee resigned his position instantly, without waiting for a replacement, and deserted his duties as a Political Committee member.

To date, the majority of Red Help have voted on and accepted the criticisms, but refuse to struggle to remediate them. They have acknowledged that the League Political Committee is correct, but, based primarily on the “tone” of the criticism document (which will be published in the Political Committee’s final analysis of this debacle), decided they would not engage any further with any League work.

The Political Committee repeatedly asked for their recommendations toward remediation or to adopt the Committee’s recommendations. Red Help responded formally by announcing their intended remediation was to leave the League. The Political Committee rejected this remediation proposal, as it represents a suppression and avoidance of struggle rather than continued commitment to development.

To date, Red Help has permitted the deadline to appoint remediation officers or respond to the Political Committee, to pass without reply. Therefore, both Political and Executive Committees hereby recognize Red Help’s material split from the League and its Member Organizations. All Member Organizations, their individual membership, and orbiting organizations are advised to regard Red Help the same way it would any spontaneous group of radical liberals, one beholden to an unaccountable opportunist, and should take any and all precautions deemed necessary by them as a result.

This announcement marks the formal recognition of Red Help’s unprincipled split from the League.

If the members of RHATX should ever seek candidacy within the League in the future, we would require that:

I. Current leadership be demoted and expelled. If they express full remorse and self-criticize for their anti-democratic, unprofessional misconduct, then after a period of six (6) months after expulsion, they may be allowed back in on a Probational basis in accordance to the current Bylaws of RHATX. A self-criticism in writing from these member(s) would need to be submitted to the PC for approval, and an interview with the individual(s) would be conducted by the Executive Committee, before the League would consider full re-admittance of RHATX with the accompanying offenders.

II. RHATX submit a thorough self-criticism to the PC of the errors of the Majority tendencies within RHATX of liberalism, hobbyism, and Cult of Action-style tendencies, and that this be reviewed and approved of by all members of RHATX prior to submission. This would have to pass the approval of the PC, and may be subject to a struggle process to ensure the understanding of RHATX and the PC are in unity.

III. Proof, in the form of meeting minutes and regular reports, that a majority of RHATX members have participated in labor, meetings, and voting, for a period of no less than three (3) months.

Editor’s Note: This is a republication from a piece by Marissa Sanchez on Substack. The original can be found here. We agree with the author’s analysis, that PSL stifles dissent and operates as a parody of democratic centralism. To hide abuse is the symptom of a structure that must operate anti-democratically by design. The careerist, opportunist tendency displayed by PSL’s leadership, by their org’s guiding strategy, is one which must shield abusers and isolate survivors to sustain itself. To do otherwise is to invite self-reflection and accountability, which will implode their organization like a breach in the hull.

This is not a issue that is unique to PSL, it emerges from all of the top-down, franchise models of the fake “parties.” We called it out in FRSO, and the same structures of anti-democracy perpetuate themselves in virtually all structures of settler socialism. Though it is contained in all of the larger opportunist sects, it is not limited to the big groups, nor does it emerge spontaneously from all organizing at scale. The complicity is an outcome of the logic of the way these orgs are built, from the cell to the body. There are even some local organizations that are in the early stages of reproducing exactly this dynamic under a cult of leadership. This is the churn and burn model at play, that disregards reproductive labor and the safety of membership.

Content note: Please note that this essay discusses sexual assault, rape, suicidal ideation, and organizational misconduct.

Introductory note: In recent months, divisions in DSA and PSL have triggered debates over when it is justified or unjustified to leave an organization, to call for others to leave an organization, or to air problems in an organization. My vantage point has been of someone who quietly left the PSL many months ago based on a private experience with the organization’s systemic problems. In many people’s view, I dealt with my issues with PSL “the right way.”

The way I left did not create any damage to the left. It also denied the left the opportunity to grapple with some very real problems. I am seeing the issue with this as I watch the PSL color themselves as victims and readily labeling people who were formerly their trusted comrades as misogynists and racists and wreckers, without any real interrogation of their claims, and as the protest, fundraising and recruitment machine of PSL continues on uninterrupted.

I, like most serious leftists, do not believe in carelessly tearing apart our own organizations. I also don’t believe good organizations are built by evading accountability. My own experience with the PSL shows the stakes of long-term evasion, the damage it can cause to the movement, to organizations, and to the real people in them.

I also believe that no one can make an informed decision about joining or remaining in an organization if they are deliberately shielded from the actual character of its leadership and structures.

My assault within PSL and its mishandling

Reporting

I called Ben the morning after I was assaulted. I hadn’t slept. I’d spent the night crying, shaking, staring at the ceiling and feeling like the entire room was spinning. By the time I sat on the couch and made the call, I was numb. Through tears, I told Ben what had happened the night before at the holiday celebration we had both been at with comrades. He said he was so sorry. And then, almost in the same breath, Ben said, “Eugene might just want to resign.”

I remember pausing, the words landing somewhere far away from me. It felt strange to be thinking about what would happen to him while I was still trying to understand what had just been done to me.

At that moment, the morning after being violated by someone I thought I could trust completely, someone I considered a comrade and a friend, I said, “I’m not sure that’s what I want to happen.”

I knew instantly that was the right answer. I was commended for being so measured.

After that, the days blurred together. Conversations with Ben about responsibility. About protecting the Party, the projects, the work. About ensuring that nothing would “roll downhill” onto others.

In a meeting led by Ben, I sat down across from Eugene. It had only been a few days since he had put his hand on the most private part of my body without my consent. Eugene said he had been too drunk at the celebration to remember sending me texts asking about how I was getting home before putting his hands on me. He read from a letter he had written, saying he wished he hadn’t hurt me.

The three of us had that conversation in a room at The People’s Forum. The same space we had all been working in together for months. I was sobbing. Self consciously, I reminded Ben and Eugene I wasn’t unraveling just because of what Eugene had done. I reminded them that I have a history of experiences with sexual violence from before Eugene, that in the past I had been violently raped. That I had lived the experience of begging someone to stop. I tried to explain that, while I knew this wasn’t the same as before, to my body the violations felt connected, and that I could feel myself spinning out.

Ben helped suggest a plan. Eugene would apologize. He would spend a month in Baltimore “for health reasons.” He would not chair Central Committee meetings for a while. We would all move on. I agreed.

Over the next few weeks, I spent more time outside my body than in it. I felt panic, my body’s primal response to being harmed in a place I had believed was safe, and an overwhelming sadness. But woven through both was something else; an excruciating sense of responsibility.

It was that feeling of responsibility, more than anything, that felt familiar to me. That I realize now is why I was so quick to agree to Ben’s plan.

It is a feeling I have returned to after every experience of sexual violence. The instinct to search for the point where you went wrong. To locate the cause for harm within ourselves. As if assigning ourselves blame might restore some sense of control or safety.

To be honest about it, people seeking to take on the responsibility of our own harm is not just internal. It is reinforced from the outside. We all know the type of questions that are asked of women who have been sexually violated. “What was she wearing?”, “Was she drinking?”, “Was she flirting?”

In left spaces and organizations, locating responsibility becomes entangled with a different kind of pressure. The pressure of responsibility to the collective. The question shifts almost immediately from what was done to you to what should be done about it? And if there aren’t trauma-informed practices already in place to be followed, that question is then handed back to the violated person to answer. What do you want us to do? As if the burden of response belongs to them, the person who was harmed.

I did not cause harm. Yet I was expected not only to manage my own pain, but its implications for the PSL.

And of course, I did want to move on. To forget. To go back to feeling safe. To think that the PSL was still what I had believed it was when I joined.

Joining

My go-to line was always, “I didn’t join the Party for Socialism and Liberation to be part of a cool-kid clique. I joined because I hate capitalism, and I want to destroy it.” That was my personal maxim. The line I lived by. Because long before I joined the PSL, I had already lived a life that made something unmistakably clear to me. Capitalism is killing our families, and socialism is the only real alternative.

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a working-class family with a single mom, two brothers, and a grandmother helping raise us. My mom worked constantly. She did everything she was supposed to do. She worked hard, showed up, and took care of her kids. Like millions of other parents, it still wasn’t enough to build anything beyond survival.

We had food. We had places to stay. Most importantly, we had each other. But there was no safety net, no savings account, no sense that the future was something we could plan for. And despite my mom’s best efforts when we were small, there were generational traumas that haunted us. Mental illness, religious abuse, domestic violence, sexual trauma. These weren’t abstractions. They shaped our lives in immediate ways.

By the time I was 15, I made a decision that felt like the most stable option available to me. I left home. I decided to take full responsibility for myself because staying felt more chaotic than leaving. My mom was experiencing a mental health spiral, and I believed I could create more stability on my own than I could within that environment.

So I did. I got a job. I dropped out of traditional school and found an alternative high school program that would accept my pay stubs as class credits. From then on, I worked full-time. In fast food, retail, hotels. I depended on every dollar I earned and I spent too damn much of what little I made just to keep a roof over our heads. Mine. My brother’s. My various girlfriends and boyfriends, and just plain friends.

For years, I was hyper-focused on our survival.

I hustled hard all through my teenage years. But the truth is, hard work never scared me, and I don’t often mourn how quickly I grew up because that work did create a lot of stability. I’m proud of the home I built from very little.

But living that life, watching my mom work herself to exhaustion, then doing the same myself, left me with questions that never went away. Why is it that no matter how hard people work, some of us are always just barely scraping by?

When I found Marxism at age 16, it didn’t feel abstract. It felt like recognition. Like someone had finally put language to what I had already lived and understood. Marxism gave me a framework for something I had known all along. We weren’t struggling because we didn’t work hard enough or didn’t know how to “get ahead.” We weren’t traumatized because our family was simply made up of broken people.

So when I joined the PSL in 2015, at 22 years old, I wasn’t new to political thinking. I had already been working for nearly a decade. I had been a Marxist for years. I already identified as a communist. I had gone deep into studying Marxist theory long before it became trendy or visible online.

I joined the PSL because I believed I was joining something historically necessary, because at my core, I believed the highest calling of a working-class girl was to organize for the overthrow of capitalism. That belief shaped everything I gave to the PSL over the next decade.

Organizing

From the moment I joined, I jumped in deep. I organized my whole life around the Party. By 2017, I was asked to come on Party staff and help to build up branches amidst the post-Bernie surge in interest in socialism. I was paid a small stipend each month to organize full time. I drove around the country in my car, surfing on comrades’ couches going city to city, helping branches get their start. I organized protests, mentored new comrades, taught candidacy classes, joined countless meetings, spoke at demonstrations, represented the Party in coalition spaces, and recruited dozens upon dozens of other people to join.

I was soon an invited observer to the Central Committee, then elected to the Central Committee for two terms. I served at points as an observing member of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee, at the time that that body was a real thing.

Eventually, I was asked to move to New York City to help plan the 2019 Congress. Once there, I spent every day with Ben and his family. We organized out of his apartment. We cooked and I helped care for his young child. In those years, I was one of only two party staffers. I did everything from liaising pre-branches around the country, to organizing Congress logistics, to mediating interpersonal issues. My life was building the PSL. There was no one more loyal than me.

All of those years worth of experiences is why being assaulted by a trusted Party leader and friend at a holiday celebration in a comrade’s apartment in November 2020 was so wildly disorienting. And why the way it was handled by Ben and Brian Becker was so hard to reconcile.

After the assault, I was told repeatedly by Ben not to tell anyone. Ben warned me that if I told anyone we might lose connections and projects. He told me that the only people he had told were Brian, Ben’s father, and Karina, Ben’s wife. But neither of them once spoke directly to me about it.

This also meant that out of the five-person Executive Committee, one person, Eugene, had assaulted me. And that two other members, Ben in consultation with Brian, were handling the response. The other elected members were left in the dark, including the one female member, Gloria La Riva. (An aside, I spoke to Gloria after resigning from the PSL in March of this year, and she confirmed that she had never known about the assault until I told her, six years later. Terrifyingly, Gloria also told me on that call that she knew Ben and Brian had mishandled other cases of sexual assault in the past, and that in her opinion they could “destroy the Party” due to their neglect and that she planned to confront them. However, I have since been made aware that Gloria was dispatched to speak with and reassure the few comrades who became aware of my experience after I left.)

The remainder of the Central Committee was also not informed.

Ben explicitly told me that this level of silence was necessary, because if not maintained we could lose the growing relationship with The People’s Forum. We could lose the budding project that was BreakThrough News. That my friends, the comrades I was in a small COVID pod with could lose their jobs. And so, out of an intense sense of loyalty to the projects I had already spent years building, that I had organized my life in service of, I didn’t say anything to anyone.

Except, one person. I had immediately told another member of the Party, my recruiter and mentor, my then best friend, Chris Banks.

When I told Ben that I’d already told Chris, he responded with disappointment. “I wish you hadn’t.” Ben told me he worried that Chris would now be upset because Chris himself had once been suspended for over a year over much less severe allegations, whereas Eugene was getting a much lighter response for a full-on assault.

I explained to Ben that I told Chris because I needed someone to know what had happened. I needed support. I wasn’t okay. Ben recommended that, if I needed someone to talk to, I speak with Nathalie, another woman on the Central Committee. He called her first to explain the situation, then I was allowed to call her.

I remember crying over the phone, telling her how badly I was spiraling, and asking whether she thought all of this was okay. She told me to trust Ben. In every conversation we had afterward, I was encouraged to accept Ben’s plan for how my assault should be handled. I had hoped she would help me make sense of what had happened and advocate for my wellbeing. Instead, our conversations consistently led back to why I should trust Ben’s judgment and move forward with the plan he had already laid out. Looking back, I don’t think I was being connected with a source of support. I was being directed to someone who reinforced Ben’s approach.

A few short weeks later, Eugene was back at work. Comrades working with us, having no reason to suspect that his absence was for any reason sinister, celebrated his return. I told Ben again that I wasn’t alright. That I felt terrible.

The day Eugene came back to work, I threw up in one of the office bathrooms.

And at the lowest part of what I now know was a months-long mental health spiral, caused by being sexually assaulted and receiving no trauma informed support in the aftermath, in February of 2021, I called Chris, the friend Ben said he’d rather I hadn’t told, because I was prepared to take my own life.

I wept and told Chris that my life felt valueless and too painful

Fight, flight, or freeze – I rolled flight

After Eugene came back to work, I asked to be moved. To be re-assigned away from New York City. I was willing to go anywhere. I couldn’t keep seeing Eugene every day. I couldn’t keep pretending I was alright. That was when Brian asked me if I’d like to go to Los Angeles. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But I was willing to try anything.

Three months after being assaulted, on March 8th, International Women’s Day, 2021, I landed in LA.

Shortly after moving to LA, Brian had $8,000 dollars sent to me to buy a car. I felt an unspoken message with that check: that I was lucky, that I had nothing to complain about, and that I should stick to the plan, keep quiet and move on.

In LA, I tried to keep up. To get back to normal. To keep being a “good comrade”. Of course, I was also internally just trying to hold myself together, which no one else knew.

Once in LA, I asked to be taken off Party staff. At the time, I couldn’t fully explain why. Looking back, I’m grateful my brain was protecting me. My subconscious knew I needed distance from the people who had manipulated me into silence, even if I couldn’t yet name what had happened. It took another year, but by 2022 I was finally off the Party payroll.

Even though I needed a break, I never stopped organizing. In LA I was elected to the Steering Committee, and was re-elected to the Central Committee at the 2022 Congress.

However, when it came to my relationship with Ben and Brian, I stopped feeling like a respected comrade and started feeling like a problem to be managed. When I would talk with them, I felt them caught between two impulses: keep me happy, and keep me at arm’s length. The warmth I had felt in the past had disappeared, or it seemed to come in artificial, strategic spurts. When I sought their advice they were quick to dismiss any of my concerns, place blame onto me in conflicts, and called me “competitive”. Which was stunning to me, because I knew competition with comrades was never a motive of mine. They stopped seeking me out for assignments.

At one point, I called Nathalie to seek her advice about how I was feeling. I described to her my struggle to get along with leaders who had a different approach than me in Los Angeles, and how I was now struggling to gain access to consistent areas of work nationally. I told her I couldn’t help but wonder if things had shifted so dramatically because of what had happened with Eugene. She told me she didn’t think that was the case, but offered no other explanation.

At the same time that I was fighting, seemingly now by myself, to move forward inside the organization, I was also starting to build a relationship with myself that I had never had before.

Growing up as fast as I did, my identity had been shaped by survival, caring for others, and then by the Party. For years, who I was, what I valued, how I made decisions, it was all filtered through what the PSL needed, what was disciplined, what served the work.

But as I moved closer to being in my thirties, that began to change.

I started to pay attention to myself in a different way. To my limits, my emotions, the quiet signals in my body that I had spent years overriding. That the experience of rape will suppress in anyone, because in order to protect yourself, you shut off feeling your own body and emotions, and then that survival mechanism can echo for years.

Underneath the California sun, I started, for the first time, to develop a sense that I deserved care. Not just as a comrade, not just as a worker, but as a woman, as a person.

And that shift made something else happen. It made my experience harder and harder to explain away. To keep taking responsibility for. The more I respected myself, the harder it became to reconcile what had happened with the story I kept telling myself about Ben and Brian. I wanted to believe they cared about me. That they were mentors who had made mistakes but ultimately wanted what was best for me and for the Party.

But believing that required me to distort my own experience.

It required me to ignore the fact that when I was at my most vulnerable: crying, disoriented, asking for help, I had been managed and silenced, not supported. That what was actually obvious, be it painful to admit, was that their decisions had not been made based on care for me or our shared project. That what happened was totally lacking in transparency, accountability, or even the basic recognition that what had happened was truly wrong and not something that could simply be explained away by “too much alcohol.”

Looking back now, I don’t think what I actually needed then was particularly mysterious. I needed time with people who loved me. Time away from organizing without worrying that I was letting anyone down. I needed the comrades I worked beside every day to know enough to understand why I was struggling, so that I was surrounded by support instead of silence.

I think this kind of paradigm shift is something nearly all women experience as they move from their twenties into their thirties. There is a process of reflection, of looking back at the relationships, the institutions, the organizations, the choices that shaped us and asking, sometimes for the first time: Was that okay? Was I treated with care? Did I deserve better? Was I just numb the first time around?

As my identity became more defined, more grounded in my own sense of self rather than in what was expected of me, I couldn’t bring the developing version of myself into alignment with what I had lived through.

Something had to give. And eventually, it wasn’t my growing sense of self respect.

I started to look in a new way at the organization I had committed my whole adult life to building, and allowed myself for the first time to actually question it.

Disillusionment

My disillusionment with the PSL didn’t come all at once, but a big piece clicked for me in 2025 with the 6th Party Congress.

Before the Congress, knowing I would again spend days in the same room as Eugene, Ben, and Brian, I realized I needed to talk to someone. Not Ben, not Nathalie, but someone I could trust cared about me. Even if it meant I was breaking discipline. I called a comrade in Albuquerque who is like a sister to me. I told her what had happened, what I was feeling. This time, I wasn’t assured it was okay. She didn’t say, “trust the comrades”. She was outraged. She cried. She was disgusted.

That conversation helped confirm for me that I wasn’t crazy, or weak, or responsible for what had happened to me. I had been wronged.

At the Congress, watching Eugene and Ben and Brian speak in session after session, I felt sick and trapped. On the third night of the Congress, I broke discipline again. I asked another woman on the Central Committee, someone who I had helped to recruit years before and who had been in very similar positions in the organization as me, if we could talk. We sat down on a curb in the dark and I told her everything. Again, it wasn’t assured away. She recognized in what I told her the patterns of the organization. She understood intimately how this could have happened. We reeled together at the reality of the organization we served. I asked her not to tell anyone and she didn’t.

While at the Congress, another situation unfolded that left me reeling. I watched leadership attack another woman comrade who I had known for years; who had also dedicated her life to building the Party.

During a session on artificial intelligence, this woman leader, an engineer with deep expertise, raised political concerns about the highly positive orientation on AI that was being presented. She had already submitted thoughtful written criticisms through the official pre-Congress process. It didn’t matter. Later that day, Brian pulled her aside and loudly berated her in view of people walking by.

Immediately afterward, leadership introduced an AI resolution and manufactured a “debate”. Comrades were pulled aside and instructed to speak in support of the AI resolution without being given access to read it before the session. Consensus was manufactured in real time. Kei Pritsker spoke out against this maneuvering and manipulation from the Congress floor. (Kei and the woman engineer have since resigned from the PSL)

Watching this unfold confirmed a fear I had resisted for years. Inside the PSL, genuine, thoughtful, political disagreement is treated as a threat rather than part of collective development. Even when it’s coming from trusted comrades who have proven their loyalty to the project from years of dedication.

Ultimately, it was at the Congress that I finally saw the organization from a perspective I could no longer deny. I was no longer looking at it as someone eager to prove herself or willing to explain away its contradictions. I was looking at it as someone who had given it everything, been harmed by a trusted leader, been left to navigate that harm alone, and yet still desperately wanted to believe the organization was capable of political honesty and growth.

What I saw instead was a leadership clique around Eugene, Ben and Brian that had consolidated its authority and would not tolerate meaningful criticism, even in the very spaces where criticism was supposedly being invited. And given my experiences with these specific men, I could no longer believe that the immense authority they commanded was justified by respect they had earned within the Party. I knew too much about how they exercised that authority behind closed doors.

After the Congress I talked a couple of times in the year since with the woman comrade I had confided in there, and I told her I was debating leaving the organization. I told the woman comrade from Albuquerque who I first confided in the same. Out of a sense of loyalty to our friendship, I also decided to tell Chris, who at that point had been quietly moved to a different state after becoming involved in another sexual misconduct scandal himself.

Chris went to Ben behind my back and told him about our conversations.

Ben began messaging me, expressing concern that I was unhappy with how my assault had been handled. He told me he would fly out to see me.

I couldn’t imagine having to sit in a room with Ben to discuss my assault again. I couldn’t imagine being asked what I wanted to make this all go away. I didn’t want to participate in figuring out damage control again, six years later. I knew the Party still had no processes in place to give me the care I needed then, let alone now. So I decided it was time for me to leave. I texted Ben back that his offers to fly out and see me didn’t address the harm that was done. Then I left the dozens of PSL chats I was in, and that was it. I was out.

I was soon called and texted by another leader, this time a woman. She informed me that Eugene had offered his resignation and the Party had accepted, as they found my feelings that my assault had been mishandled as “legitimate”. I was told the Party was taking this very seriously and was “reconstituting” and “systematizing” the Party’s processes through the National Disciplinary Committee (NDC), so this would never happen again. I had to laugh, because the comrade texting me and I both knew the truth about the NDC.

The lesson PSL refuses to learn

The PSL learned in 2020, both from my case and another sexual assault allegation, that it needed better protections, not real protections against assault, but PR defenses for the organization. That was when the PSL established the National Disciplinary Committee (NDC). I was asked to be part of its creation, just two months after my assault, when I was actively spiraling.

From the beginning, the NDC was a performance. It was guided by Ben, with three women of color there to legitimize it with our identities and our experiences with sexual violence.

The NDC was sufficient as long as it existed conceptually enough to be pointed to. No process was ever concretely developed or implemented. Certainly there was no clear process ever distributed to the membership or local leaders, no process that members know to follow. I truly challenge any member to cite evidence otherwise. In reality, allegations of misconduct continued to be dealt with through loose processes, typically handled by women who would call themselves members of the nonexistent “NDC,” operating as intermediaries for Ben or Brian.

I looked back and found the draft document we developed, in January 2021, which never became a real thing. What it outlines is far from a set of trauma-informed practices. It’s a set of protocols for damage control. It’s irrelevant anyway. Real processes for the NDC were never actually researched or developed beyond the one draft document. The point was that there was a document that carried the names of three women, including mine, which allowed the Party to say, “Women built our process, women who themselves experienced sexual violence, women of color. Question that and you question them.”

When in March of this year, Dolores Huerta and so many brave women came forward about César Chávez, PSL members in many of the branches that I liaised asked questions about our processes. In response to such questions from members, an internal orientation pointed to the NDC as proof of the safety and accountability for women in the PSL. It was just a few weeks later that I finally quit, and was told that the NDC would be “reconstituted” and “systematized:” an open admission that it had not actually been active, even though it had literally just been pointed to in response to concerns about Chávez that the PSL takes SA seriously.

To this day, nothing about how this was handled reflected care for me or concern for accountability. I didn’t ask for Eugene’s resignation. If what happened truly was a terrible drunken mistake, I do not believe it has to define the rest of his life. I never wanted punishment. I always wanted care.

When I was assaulted, I needed to be allowed to simply be the person who had been harmed. Instead, I immediately was handed the full burden of protecting both Eugene and the Party’s reputation. There needed to be a process that allowed me space and protection, allowed both of us to confront what happened honestly, and define a way to move forward collectively.

At the same time, their lack of process, and transparency means we still do not know whether I am the only person he has harmed. I carry the fear that there are other women who could say, “Me too.” And that for years, while I tried to be a “good comrade,” my silence may have betrayed not only myself, but them as well.

And that is what makes watching this unfold so painful. Once again, Eugene quietly leaves Party chats under the explanation of “health reasons,” while unsuspecting comrades send him heart emojis and well wishes. The pattern has not changed. The leadership remains committed to protecting its own reputation rather than confronting harm with accountability, and it still does not reckon seriously with what sexual violence does to the people who endure it.

Eugene’s resignation six years after the fact is nothing but a sacrificial offering to protect Ben, Brian, and the organization’s reputation. It’s a strategy. I anticipated from the moment I decided to leave that the Party would panic and want to put on record actions that can be referred to if they ever had to own up publicly to their mismanagement.

What their response has proven to me is that, despite every opportunity to learn their lesson, nothing fundamental has changed. Still the only thing that determines the process is the insulation of the organization. Not me, not what I want, not what will allow for reconciliation and healing, not what best protects women in the organization, not what corrects problems in the organization, but what protects Ben and Brian and the PSL from facing scrutiny.

What now?

I know what the response to this account will be: that Marissa never expressed any dissatisfaction with the “process”, that we did the best we could, and we’re learning now.

As a longtime organizer in a young and evolving organization, I have ample sympathy for the growing pains and inevitable shortcomings of an organization striving to do a lot with a little. But is this a good excuse?

It’s true, at the time of my assault, the PSL had no formal standards for handling such matters. The organization had also existed for 16 years. Numerous situations requiring navigating allegations of sexual misconduct had already come up. Ample resources on best practices existed to support the development of clear, trauma-informed processes in any organization. The PSL just did not use them. It instead opted for whatever informal secret resolution best served minimization in each case. And the truth is, if I sat down with Ben earlier this year when he offered to fly out and see me, I would have only experienced more of the same.

Unfortunately, my expectation is also that I will be more vehemently condemned by PSL leadership for my choice to share my experience than Eugene will be for assaulting me, or Ben and Brian will be for how they handled the situation.

This reality gets at the heart of something fundamental. What does it mean when someone who has been harmed is held to a higher expectation of perfection and discipline than the men who harmed her? Why are her choices considered more harmful to the movement than theirs?

An organization that cannot meaningfully hold its own leadership accountable, that must protect one or a handful of central figures at all costs, is not going to last.

If its members can substantially change it, great. For me, I no longer believe staying in the PSL is the principled choice. Nor do I believe the PSL can lead the kind of change our class needs. I don’t say that out of bitterness, but after eleven years of trying to build the PSL and watching it fail to correct itself at every opportunity.

Our class doesn’t need perfection. But it does need better leadership than this. It needs honesty. It needs accountability. It needs structures that can face harm without collapsing into denial or control. It needs organizations whose principles apply to their own leadership as much as anyone else.

It’s not good enough to keep telling us that we have a responsibility to a bad organization just because organizations must exist.

I still believe in fighting for a socialist future, but I believe we must do this with eyes wide open. I hope my story will help others to open their eyes and see.

Statement from the Editors: This piece has been republished from Paul Cockshott’s Blog which was published on May 24, 2026. The original article can be found here.

9/16/2026 Update from the Editorial Board: A reader brought it to the press’s attention that this republished author is a noted transantagonistic gender chauvinist. The press was further encouraged to investigate and potentially remove this article from publication.

A short investigation was conducted determining the validity of these claims, which did not take long to prove true as herr Cockshott is not a shy reactionary. We have re-reviewed this article to ensure that the piece itself does not contain “leaks” of its author’s errors. It does not. The article retains its use as a strike against the obfuscatory choices made when theory becomes more about prestige than liberation.

The Editorial Board has determined that the piece in question shall not be removed. We are grateful for our readerships’ keen eyes, and encourage the submission of works engaging in struggle against the chauvinistic tendencies evident among so-called Marxist intellectuals.

A couple of months ago I was scheduled to debate Frank Engster in Berlin. As preparation, I did the obvious thing: I tried to read him. I had not encountered his work before, so I hunted down what was available in English. What I found was not profound, nor even particularly difficult — it was simply unreadable. Entire passages were so opaque that they defeated any attempt at interpretation. At first I wondered whether Engster’s argument was simply confused. But the more I read, the more I realised the problem was not Engster’s thought but the English itself. The translation was so mangled that it rendered the text unintelligible.

This is not an isolated case. Over the years I have repeatedly run into English translations of continental Marxist theory that seem designed to mystify. They take concepts that were clear in the original language and bury them under layers of pseudo‑technical jargon. The same pattern appears in Engster’s case. His argument leans heavily on the term valorisation, and he repeatedly uses the phrase “the valorisation of value.” In standard economic English this is not a concept — it is a tautology masquerading as theory. It is the linguistic equivalent of fog.

Why does this keep happening? Why do English translations of Marxist theory so often obscure what was originally clear? And what does this tell us about the intellectual culture that produced them?

To answer that, we need to look at the two very different traditions of translating Marxism into English.

Two Traditions: One Clear, One Obscure

The first tradition is the one associated with Engels and the early translators of Capital, such as Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Their translations were aimed at self‑educated workers — people who needed clarity, not mystique. Engels supervised these translations closely, and the result was a body of English Marxism that was readable, concrete, and faithful to the original.

The second tradition emerged in the mid‑20th century, particularly among translators associated with New Left Review and the early British Althusserians — Nicolaus, Fowkes, Fernbach, Brewster, and others. These translators were writing for a very different audience: graduate seminars, university reading groups, and the burgeoning academic industry of “theory.” Their translations often imported foreign terms directly into English, creating a specialised vocabulary that signalled sophistication but frequently obscured the underlying ideas.

This shift in audience produced a shift in style. Students, especially those immersed in theory, often take pride in mastering obscure terminology. A text filled with unfamiliar words can appear “deep,” even when the reader has no idea what the words actually mean. Obscurity becomes a badge of intellectual seriousness. And translators, consciously or not, catered to this expectation.

The result is a body of English Marxist writing in which mystification is not a bug but a feature.

Let us look at four of the worst offenders.

1. Valorisation — A Word That Was Never English

Valorisation is now a familiar term in academic Marxism, but historically it was never an English word. Between 1925 and 1975 it barely appears in English at all. Its earlier uses, from 1900 to 1925, refer exclusively to coffee price‑support schemes in Brazil. It was a loan word from Portuguese, where valorização described government efforts to maintain coffee prices.

A 1907 lecture on the São Paulo scheme makes this clear:

“The object of the valorisation scheme… was to ensure a minimum price for the planters…”
— Ramos, The Valorisation of Coffee in Brazil (1907)

This is what valorisation meant in English: price support.

Google Ngram confirms the rarity of the term. Between 1955 and 1965 it appears only once in English — in a book on agricultural price problems in India. Its sudden reappearance in the 1970s is almost entirely due to the 1975 English translation of Marx’s Collected Works, which introduced the term into academic Marxism.

But this was a disastrous choice. If we take the prior English meaning seriously, “valorisation of capital” would mean “price support for capital,” which is obviously not what Marx meant by Kapitalverwertung. The first English translation of Capital, supervised by Engels, rendered Verwertung with phrases like “creation of surplus‑value” or “self‑expanding value.” These are clear, intelligible, and faithful.

Valorisation is none of these things. It is a foreign‑sounding abstraction that obscures a simple economic process. It is mystification by translation.

2. Overdetermination — A Term That Misleads More Than It Explains

The term overdetermination entered English left theory through the translation of Althusser. But in English, the word already had two meanings:

1. The overwhelmingly dominant meaning was mathematical: an overdetermined system has more constraints than variables and therefore no solution.
2. A much rarer meaning appeared in clinical psychiatry.

Neither meaning corresponds to what Althusser meant by surdétermination. For him, political phenomena have multiple, complex causes — economic, institutional, ideological. A translator concerned with clarity might have chosen “complex‑determined” or “multi‑causal.” But Brewster opted for a term that allowed him to hint at Freudian psychoanalysis, even though most English readers in the 1970s had no familiarity with Freud.

The result was a cipher: a word that conveyed nothing and erected an immediate barrier to understanding. Students dutifully repeated it, often without any clear sense of what it meant. The obscurity became part of the term’s appeal. It was a perfect example of translation as intellectual gatekeeping.

3. Interpellation — A French Verb Smuggled Into English

Interpellate was never an English word. Brewster simply inserted the French verb into his translation of Lenin and Philosophy. English readers, having never encountered the term, were forced to guess its meaning from context. This guesswork produced a haze of pseudo‑understanding.

A clearer translation exists. “Ideology arrests the individual” captures both senses present in the French: the act of being stopped by an authority and the act of being seized or captivated. It is powerful, direct, and conceptually rich.

Instead, English readers were left with the impression that ideology somehow injects the philosophical subject into the human brain — a mystification produced entirely by translation.

4. Aleatory Materialism — Obscurity for Its Own Sake

The French word aléatoire simply means “random,” “chance‑based,” or “contingent.” In English, aleatory had only a narrow usage in music theory, referring to compositions determined by dice throws. Any translator with even a basic knowledge of 20th‑century science — quantum mechanics, information theory, statistical mechanics — would have rendered matérialisme aléatoire as “stochastic materialism.” Stochastic is the standard scientific term for processes governed by randomness.

The choice of aleatory instead of stochastic has three consequences:

• Obscurity: Most readers have no idea what “aleatory” means.
• Missed connections: It fails to link Althusser’s concept to the scientific discourse on stochastic processes.
• Unnecessary jargon: It invents a new term where a perfectly good English one already exists.

This is mystification, not translation.

Why This Matters

The mystification we see in these translations is not inherent in Marx or Althusser. It arises from the translators’ decisions — decisions shaped by academic culture, by the desire to signal theoretical sophistication, and by a readership inclined to equate obscurity with depth.

In the Engels‑supervised translations, clarity was a political necessity. The audience was composed of workers who needed to understand the mechanisms of capitalism in order to change them. Obscurity would have been a betrayal.

In the New Left Review milieu, by contrast, obscurity became a kind of intellectual currency. Foreign terms, pseudo‑technical vocabulary, and untranslated French phrases signalled membership in a theoretical elite. The result was a body of English Marxist writing that is harder to understand than it needs to be.

This is not a trivial matter. Translation is not a neutral act. It shapes the reception of ideas. When translators choose obscurity over clarity, they do not merely distort the original text; they reshape the intellectual landscape in which that text is received.

A Personal Coda

When I finally went to Berlin, I decided not to bother responding to Engster’s arguments. The English translations were so muddled that it was impossible to reconstruct a coherent position worth debating. Instead, I presented my own mathematical analysis of the value‑form — an approach grounded in clarity, precision, and the avoidance of unnecessary mystification.

If Marxist theory is to remain a living intellectual tradition, it must resist the temptation to cloak itself in obscurity. The task of translation is not to create mystery but to dispel it. Concepts that were clear in German or French should remain clear in English. Anything else is not translation but obfuscation.

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. ︎