This past January the All-Empire Worker’s League resolved that Unity–Struggle–Unity shall officially be the League Press, making it the central voice of the AEWL to combat the Four Opportunist organizations, and to help guide and unite our comrades.

Together, through struggle toward unity!

Presently, the primary aspect of the Communist movement in the US-Canadian bloc is disorganization and incoherence. This is not accidental. It is caused by the underlying primary contradiction in the settler-states: that between settler-relation and national liberation. In our movement, this manifests as a contradiction between settler socialism — in essence, nothing more than a virulent form of the “great nation” chauvinism that poisoned the Second International — and the national liberation struggle of the oppressed nations in the colonies and semicolonies, both internal and external, of the US empire and its junior partners Canada and Mexico.

At this time, there is no one organization embodying the class power of the organized US proletariat. The existing “Marxist” organizations are universally anti-democratic; they universally embody the class power of the US petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy. They are vehicles of chauvinism and tailism for this reason and can do little more than trail behind the Democrats, or march around in the street doing nothing meaningful, or join in the corrupt industrial business unionism of the settler unions.

Unity–Struggle–Unity Press was initially founded to address the general incoherence of the Communist movement. During its four-year history it has been forced to confront the underlying contradiction again and again in its work to unify the movement. To put it clearly: it is good that the movement is not presently unified, because this would be a false unity. It would be a stifling unity under the leadership of the chauvinist, opportunist, and tailist elements that presently dominate and control the CPUSA, DSA, PSL, and FRSO.

We do not arrive at this conclusion lightly, but through long struggle with each of these opportunist organizations. Although each may contain individuals or cliques of eager revolutionaries, the net effect of the four all-empire “Marxist” organizations is to isolate these revolutionary individuals and negate them by intermixing and countering them with innumerable reactionaries, tailists, and American and Canadian chauvinists. Even where whole cliques and groups of principled Marxists manage to gather within these organizations, they are eventually cut out to preserve the essentially counter-revolutionary character of the Four Opportunists. As proof, we point to the debacle of the 2022 CP Canada convention in which they violated their own rules to protect sexual abusers, to the expulsion and silencing of avowed Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries within the CPUSA in 2024 for the crime of advocating revolution and community self-defense, to the purge of members concerned with sex abuse and cover ups in the leadership of PSL and, most recently, the same within FRSO. The structure of these organizations does not permit constructive struggle. They cannot be saved. Their structure ossifies a self-selecting leadership caste that can never be ousted and whose chosen heirs are anointed to their seats. It reposes in this caste both money and resources, giving them added incentives to ensure they can never be removed.

This press and the All-Empire Worker’s League are thus implacably opposed to the continued existence, in their present forms, of the Four Opportunists. Our work requires us to continuously expose them for what they are: liquidators of the class struggle, engines of settler socialism, and, at the end of the day, social chauvinists and social imperialists incapable of mounting any real opposition to the bourgeois state even if they wanted to, which they manifestly do not.

The purpose of this Press is two-fold. First, it is our aim to expose those opportunist organizations that betray the social revolution in word and deed and, in exposing them, free those principled Communists who are held captive by them. We will strike them again and again. With each hammer-blow of truth, we will shake free some of those trapped by the mistaken hope that these revisionist organizations represent ready-made tools left by our forebears with which to attack our enemies.

The second purpose of the Press is to act as the central voice for the All-Empire Worker’s League. The League is a party-building secondary organization comprised of local, principled, decolonial Marxist-Leninist organizations. The Red Clarion is the League’s paper; it will carry news and announcements, analysis and guidelines, material suitable for both a mass audience and our more politically developed comrades alike.

The people need a press! The labor aristocrats must be broken away from their own bourgeoisie. The nationally oppressed peoples must strike at the state. The masses are moving, and we must move at their head or risk being left behind. Thus, ever forward, to heighten the struggle; we carry the fight to the foe!

Up to half of this “aid” has been in the form of shrouds for Palestinian dead, and the remainder has not been distributed. No food or supplies have reached the population since the 2nd of March. Almost everyone inside Gaza is suffering from severe malnutrition, with disease rampant and medical services overwhelmed and under constant bombardment. Over 3,000 people have died in the past two months. Ninety-eight people were killed on Tuesday this week.

They aren’t sending aid.

They’re sending tanks.

A comprehensive invasion is currently ethnically cleansing the strip from north to south. The zionists have established increasingly shrinking “humanitarian zones,” outside of which Palestinians are killed on sight, and have forced the nearly 2 million surviving Palestinians in Gaza into highly concentrated “refugee camps” in the south. The zionist state regularly bombs these refugee camps, resulting in horrific casualties. Since the 15th of May, the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, israel’s bombardment of the surviving population of Gaza has intensified to unprecedented levels. Around 100 people are being killed every day by the relentless bombings. 

Every leading scholar on genocide worldwide is calling this what it is, but the mainstream media refuses to report accurately on conditions in Gaza. They refuse to admit that this is an intentionally targeted genocide, being waged with our tax dollars, our “defense” industry, and our complicity. Instead they are under standing orders to continue to run PR for the genocidal zionist occupation of Palestine. The world’s governments continue to make symbolic gestures, denouncing the occupation’s actions in words while continuing to support it in practice..

The United States is the primary beneficiary and driver of this zionist atrocity; all pressure must be exerted on the United States government to cease. This genocide is U.S.-backed, U.S.-funded, and is being carried out with tactical direction from U.S. soldiers.

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY IN THE ZIONIST HOLOCAUST.

Immediate action is desperately needed on all fronts:

Arms shipments to the zionist occupation of Palestine must be stopped immediately. Visit workersinpalestine.org/who-arms-israel for a list of weapons companies involved in materially enabling the genocide.

Relief is desperately needed for the hundreds of thousands of people starving under intense bombardment. Visit gazafunds.org to contribute to relief funds, every donation helps the people of Palestine resist genocide, every donation is a potential life saved.

Visit chuffed.org/project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza to help provide e-sims to keep Palestinians in Gaza in contact with their families and the outside world.

Visit bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott for information on which companies are investing in, or directly involved in the occupation. 

Spread this message everywhere you can. This Holocaust is being systematically covered up through mainstream media silence and social media censorship. Visit clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2025-05-23-emergency-bulletin-zionists-begin-last-stage-of-genocide for the web version of this article, or unity-struggle-unity.org/palestine-emergency-bulletin-tri-fold for a printable PDF copy. Get this message into as many hands as possible! With every hour that passes more innocent men, women, children, and babies are being murdered. U.S. bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes, built with parts from Canada, the E.U., targeted by surveillance drones from the U.K. 

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY. 

INACTION IS COMPLICITY. 

THIS HOLOCAUST IS BEING CARRIED OUT IN OUR NAME.

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENDING IT.

We’ve written a lot about the masses; we’ve written a lot about the advanced, the middling, the tailing — that is, what portions of the great mass of U.S. workers and small professionals are discovering their existence as a collective group with shared interests and goals. What we haven’t written about is the way in which people who are becoming disillusioned with capitalism, people who can see and feel that the social system and the way we live is wrong, brutal, inhuman, can be brought together. That task, the awakening of the discontented to the possibility of another world, another way of living, a real existence where people no longer exploit each other for economic gain, is fundamental to our mission of bringing about the advent of such a society.

Before learning theory, before studying Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Gramsci, Rodney, Cabral, people must want to learn. They must feel deeply that society as it exists is unjust.

The society we live in has worked out a kind of self-defense mechanism to deal with people who realize this. They get called burn-outs, idealists, unrealistic. The child of a professional family who doesn’t want to go into business as a CPA or a doctor or a lawyer is “troubled.” Because they’re told by everyone they know that what they feel is abnormal, that most people know the world is an unjust meat grinder, that they know the lifestyle the great majority of the people in the U.S. is based on the misery of others and they just choose not to think about it — this causes a kind of socially-induced sickness. The people who feel the most deeply and most humanly are constantly told that, far from being the most ordinary, they are defective.

In a sense, this is true. They are defective from the point of view of the architects and engineers of society. They are gears with broken teeth in the eyes of the ruling class, the capitalist class, that group of bankers and industrialists who own everything yet do nothing. In ever-greater numbers, people are beginning to realize that their feelings of discomfort are valid — that they should feel moral outrage at the existence of sweatshops making fast fashion and child-slaves in the Congo mining minerals for their iPhones. Allowing yourself to feel that feeling is the first step on the road to awakening class consciousness. The second step is making the connection between that feeling and the way society is structured. The third step on that path is the realization that it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can do something about it.

In an ideal world, one where we’d already built a powerful working-class party that had gathered up all the theoretically advanced Communists together, we would have not one but many newspapers. There would be a mass paper solely to address those people that are still waking or who are awake but not yet willing (or able) to take the last steps to being militant Communists and then a theory journal for those militant Communists to  debate the truth, the best way to overthrow capitalism, etc. Because our movement isn’t unified behind that kind of party (despite what the poseurs at CPUSA say), we have been mixing those types of articles here at the Clarion. Our core readership is mostly already-committed Communists.

But we can’t rely on people coming to Communism spontaneously. We have to reach the group of people who are being torn out of their social positions — people being sidelined. Revolutionaries going back to Lenin have been warning about the pitfalls of relying on spontaneous action; it was only through conscious development that the revolution of October was possible. Without intervention, lots of those children of professionals or the relatively well-to-do will do what comes naturally as the inevitable result of spontaneity: burn out, become despondent and chronically depressed, or turn into anarchists.

In all likelihood, that means you, the reader, are either the Communist militant who has the task of helping people you know move from realizing that capitalism is a theater of horrors to real class conscious Communism or you are someone who has seen that things are bad and getting worse. Maybe someone sent you this article so you could know that you are not alone.

The next steps won’t feel like doing much at all because the truth is that this realization alone is not enough. You have to study. You’ve got to develop your understanding of how the capitalist machine works so you can help us all build weapons to take it down. Studying isn’t fun and it isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel like accomplishing anything, much less setting out to make a revolution, but it is necessary. We can’t avoid our mistakes without reviewing them and we can’t bring down an enemy that we don’t understand.

We’ve got to get together, not just on our own, but in groups, and start to put together an organization that spans the entire U.S.-canadian empire, examine and report on its local conditions in each region, and create a plan to annihilate it root and branch. We have to plan to unite with all the oppressed peoples — each of the Indigenous nations, the Black nation — and get ready to strike.

The work has already begun: the All-Empire Workers’ League and other similar groups are preparing to create a Decolonial Communist Party.

You should join us.

You are not alone.

These lands are actively occupied. They were not acquired through fair and conventional warfare, but through the distinctly unfair practice of genocide, targeting mostly women and children. This genocide was and is waged by coerced treaties, active war, deprivation of resources, chemical and biological agents, ethnic cleansing, and more treaties. These practices have certified these regimes as apartheid states.

If you do not agree, you do not need to visit Palestine to see the dispossession of the people being pushed out of their generations old family homes, out of their land and being deprived of their resources and the many U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognitions of genocide. You have the option of seeing that in the country/occupation we already reside in; but even easier, we can read up on the Indian Act and see the starkly different conditions that we live in.

I don’t use the term settler, it’s too soft and it’s inaccurate because most people did not settle, they were born here. I use the terms colonist and occupier because these are active descriptions, their being here is active and our efforts must be active. 

Indigenous people and occupiers are not naturally antagonistic towards each other. But if we examine the differences under the colonial enfranchisement of cisheteropatriarchy, we see inequalities being instituted. We see the inequalities of class society being replicated. This makes it harder to deal with. We see it with the ruling class and working class, then masc folks and femme folks, then colonists and Natives, older generation canadians against refugees and new immigrants, with parents and children, abled and disabled, workers and sex workers. The instituted inequality makes it so we all have differences in the level of violence we face. This fabric of our colonial and capitalist society with its wide range of violence ensures that people experience our reality differently, and as such, assimilate at different rates. Our reality is a lot messier than a Marvel movie where there is our protagonist to root for and our antagonist to defeat. Our goal is not as simple as 1. Defeat the ruling class. 2. Live happily ever after. We cannot beat the bad guy, check our phones as the credits roll, and walk out of the theatre stimulated and satisfied. Our goal is to heal all the existing antagonisms so that we can have harmony. It’s a lot harder and bigger than defeating the antagonist/reactionary force. All reactionary elements at every level must be healed.

One example is the “patriotic socialists” (patsocs) calculating that the white guys at the top of the labour aristocracy have their labour expropriated the most because they make the most. Through this math, they concluded that they are the most oppressed. This is one small example of brushing off the importance of the analysis that we live in a settler colonial regime. Our existence of exploitation in our respective societies is more complex than a set of numbers, it’s about our relationships to society, to the state, to the class opposing us, etc.

Another example is the many East European fishermen on the west coast. Many with military experience and a truly rugged upbringing should make them incredibly powerful allies in revolution. Yet they spend decades repeating racist tropes about Indigenous people on the radio transmissions up and down the coast because canadian fishermen have long done that. Those Eastern European fishermen and the canadian fishermen should have unity with Indigenous People and Indigenous fishermen but that isn’t the case at all. 

The ruling class is able to manipulate them because they don’t face the same violence that we do. Their class interest is in contradiction to the ruling class yet they do not speak or fight against it. They assimilate because they operate in an extractive industry of our resources and they are brainwashed. This is a much bigger and more important problem with the oil industry because it affects more people. 

I was a fisherman for a long time and first hand I’ve seen it worse with oil workers. In both industries, the brutal alienation, physical duress and propaganda eviscerates people and strips them of who they used to be, converting people from humans to husks. When Samidoun brought me in to lead an educational on colonialism and Indigenous history, I tackled this science and assimilation. 6 minutes of it is linked here. 

In 25 minutes you will have better analysis than most of the people in this country on the topic, better than some scholars. If you have time later and gain from this writing, I’ve included 7 or 8 hours of other studies.

Speaking of some scholars, some members of United in Struggle had written a paper that laid out some critiques but it was not really their place to be making them. I had discussed the topic a few times but I never read a paper about it. It was good to read up on it and then discuss the paper with many others. However I went into the meeting angry. The paper had 4 authors: one is a Native friend and the other three are non-natives. I was told that only 1 line of my friend’s writing had made it into the paper. I viewed this as tokenizing him so that they had the freedom to critique Indigenous organizing. During this meeting, he was not there to uphold this work and they could not use him as a shield.

They have done good work before and they helped occupy the port of vancouver during the last escalation in Wet’suwet’en. Not the one where the police fired 70,000+ rounds, that was before this last one. I honour the efforts and contributions of ILPS in that port blockade. Personally, I had gone home a few hours before the 37 arrests because I am weak to the cold. The blockade lasted 3 and a half days.

I usually write a bit longer than this, so this doesn’t contain much prose. This is writing about as dry as 3 unbuttered buns with no drink. 

During the discussion, a lady said that she doesn’t see any meaning in analyzing differences between settler colonists and natives. Now this deeply bothered me because Strasserites push that; Trotskyists push that; wooks, hippies and anarchists say things like “We are all part of the human race, I don’t see colour” etc., etc. Now that line is probably not the line of their entire organization, more likely it is just her feelings being previously hurt causing her to say nonsense. I thought about joking “I want to smoke what you’re smoking because it must be fantastic stuff.” I wanted to say “I have over 40 near-death moments in the workplace, 50-60 sprains, I’ve lent over 120 grand to my family over 15 years beginning at age 13, and I’ve been to more than 40 funerals. Surely if there is no use in examining the different experiences between natives and occupiers, all 3 of you must have worse numbers than I do, because you are older than me.”

I could have mentioned residential schools and gone into detail about what my grandpa and many family members of mine went through. Here is a free educational I had on it, covering Residential Schools on both sides of the border: Indigenous history, Residential schools, Indigenous issues and canadian imperialism (The Four Cornered Room podcast, 137 minutes)

My headache as a colonized person in a revolutionary organizing space and state-driven intergenerational trauma aside, we can take a look at the science. A quote from The Native National Question and the Marxist-Leninist Movement to show the theory of our reality of existing in a settler colony:

“It is a Marxist-Leninist principle, put forward by Lenin and defended by Stalin and Mao, that colonized peoples have the absolute right to self-determination, up to and including secession from their oppressor nation. As Communists we recognize that struggles which weaken the hegemony of the world imperialist system are progressive. This means that the bourgeois democratic revolutions in territories which have not yet achieved bourgeois democracy, that political independence in countries which do not yet have political independence, is a progressive step from the standpoint of the world proletarian revolution; they are a part of the world proletarian revolution and they help to realize it. This is part of the Marxist-Leninist understanding that the Third World is the motive force propelling history forward today. Trotskyites malign these national liberation struggles in the Third World, saying that their nationalism is reactionary and that only a “pure” proletarian revolution is appropriate; revisionists insist that Third World struggles can only be revolutionary when under the hegemony of the “proletarian” struggles of the developed sections of the world. Marxist-Leninists distinguish themselves from these agents of the bourgeoisie by understanding the role which Third World struggles have in the course of world events, by defending their progressive nature and above all by upholding the right of Third World nations to self determination.”

With this, we can see why Trotskyists, Strasserites, “Patriotic Socialists” in the U.S., and other people who make light of and deprioritize Colonized people’s struggles are either ignorant or malicious, often both. In the U.S., the American Indian Movement was Marxist-Leninist and it made amazing progress. The Black Panthers were mostly M-L and the American state massacred and imprisoned them. I hope you are not familiar with the 3 bastard groups I mentioned (as a bastard, I mean no offense to my fellow bastards). The last group is the newest. Strasserites are a bit older — they were basically national socialists who wanted to control the means of production, but not work towards international liberation and the end of imperialism. This is a very easy position for white folks to develop into. Let’s take an uneasy look at SAG-AFTRA. 160,000 union members united. An amazing feat. And also a horrible colonial reminder of what happens when you do not have theory, history and love for marginalized peoples; SAG-AFTRA voted against supporting Palestine. 

Related, there is no wave of celebrities supporting Palestine. But there was a wave of celebrities supporting the U.S.-backed Ukrainian state with many western voice actors jumping for gigs to get paid to support Ukraine in the propaganda blitz, in hiding the U.S.’s 120 years of interference in that country and blaming everything on Russia. Why are there no gigs for getting paid to produce propaganda for Palestine? Why are there immense gigs and paid support for israel? The answer is Imperialism. In depth piece I did on the topic here: Historical and Contemporary context on Ukraine and NATO interference. 

I set to work. I pulled out a microscope for the room of people to examine the colonial chauvinism. 

I told them of nearly every job on reserve paying a dollar or two more than minimum wage. I swallowed my anger and did not tell them directly that everyone is poor except the business owners and those paid to administrate the colonial chief and council capitalist wing of the canadian regime’s “democracy”. I told them they can read Unsettling Canada if they want to get a grounded stance on colonization of this province, where we cannot judge harshly those who sellout because each treaty has been made under coercion and they have all been deemed illegitimate. 

An example from that book that Arthur Manuel uses is that the Wet’suwet’en nation has land so they are able to maintain their culture and reject offers from corporations and the canadian regime. The Nisga’a do not have land and the fishing industry in the west coast has been fully privatized and commodified, so that the Nisga’a and other coastal nations are not in the same position to uphold our culture and we are not in the same position to be able to raise a fist and a war cry to offers from corporations and the canadian regime. 

Can you imagine being elected to govern your people, or just being someone who your people look to for guidance, and watching your people suffer and starve for decades, and then be given a choice to continue to watch your people starve or to sign away your land and resources to get some food to the people dying in front of you? The canadian state figuratively has set my people on fire in order to sell water to their leadership. If they literally did this, it would be faster. On the plains, John A. Macdonald, our first prime minister, starved Natives so thoroughly that the population starved from 32,000 people to 20,000 people from 1880-1885. 

One famous incident was the Indian Agent Thomas Quinn gathering the Natives in the reserve he controlled and starved. He gathered them in front of the ration house and then announced, April Fools, no one was actually going to be fed.

These examples are good to examine. We have that history, and then we have colonists being given land to farm. 

If you are reading this, I know you have had struggles. We all do. It does not matter if your ancestors were barbarian racist murderers or unwashed mealy-mouthed wrist-wringers. Even if they were revolutionaries, they are then and we are now. You are your own person. You are the link between them and your future generations. What matters now is your analysis and your efforts. For better or worse, you may mirror them — you might uphold their legacy. We live in the age of information, there is no point in history where we can be as well informed and organized as we can be today.

Near the end of the meeting, I told them that a mutual friend of ours is stuck for 7 weeks on a seine boat because the ruling class bought most of the family licenses and our ruling class was permitted to convert 3 of them together into an industrial seine license. It was the Jimmy Pattison corporation but now it is the Weston family upholding this privatization. I am a 4th generation fisherman and after 15 seasons, I have left the industry. Our mutual friend is not native but he is still suffering from this privatization nonetheless. 

I told them across the 5,000 kilometre breadth of this colonial project there is unity against extractive industry and oil projects, that the only supporters are the people who work for them and they are outcasts among the rest of us and even their own people. I told them every Native house you pass by you will see unity of anti-oil placards in the windows, that we may not have Native socialist groups writing about imperialism but that our anti-oil line is in line with anti-imperialism because extractive colonialism is driving our conditions today. We can look internationally and that holds true; as of 2020, there are 194 canadian mining corporations in South America and around 75% of mining corporations in the world are based in the canadian regime. 

The U.S. puts more money into oil subsidies than it does running its entire government. I forget the exact number, somewhere around $740 billion per year. This lets us see the focus of these settler states…which is resource robbery, expropriation of Indigenous land and resources domestically and internationally while maintaining NATO as the consolidated imperial bloc.

Back to the meeting, when they said imperialism is the primary contradiction here, I told them inside this settler colony, settler-colonialism is our primary contradiction because it is the foundation that everything is built on, and that they would not tell a Palestinian that settler-colonialism is secondary. The only difference is more time has passed between that land and this land. But the same remains true, colonists and occupiers are eager to hide the truth of our conditions here because it requires that they fight this injustice. Any colonist on this land has the same relationship to it as an israeli: direct colonialism with a relationship of comfort granted as long as they look the other way. If you are reading this, it is vital that you look at the canadian flag with the same visceral fury that you look at a nazi flag and an israeli flag.

I told them I fucking hate to see colonized people’s becoming anarchists and about my 14,600 word piece on it: Why Anarchism can rub a sack (Dialectics of the Western Left). I told them that many natives become anarchists because the people we are around are deeply right wing, we are frequently bombarded with nazi bullshit. We are almost never in a place where we hear revolutionary discussion, history, theory and accomplishments; we just hear liberal noise and the most progressive thing we hear is fantasies of libertarian escapism of wanting to start a commune. We are functionally wading through a swamp of colonial opinions and reactionary violence.

Personally I had one coworker and one facebook friend tell me about their uncles fighting in the White army. These did not surprise me because I have met more than a dozen white nationalists. Settler states are international havens for white nationalists, enslavers, kulaks, and general traitors to humanity.

Another thing I vented was that the NGOs popping up to take native revolutionary potential and convert it to liberalism is distinct. It is a really effective way to defang our power. The exact same tactic is used to absorb Black power in the U.S. while Native power is power defanged this way there too. In episode 6 of season 2 of Reservation Dogs, they cover a similar method. The method of fake radicals who sell smoke and mirrors, who sell the vacuous essence of Decolonization and the words preaching it while not systematically changing anything or even identifying capitalism as the source of our oppression. I told them a question they need to be asking themselves is, can we work faster at building Indigenous Socialism than the canadian state can provide grants and fund NGOs to target this potential?

One thing they brought up was the worry of Natives adopting capitalism, they mentioned a worry of a Native ruling class. In canada there is no need to worry about this. In the U.S., casinos have been brought to many First Nations. But in the canadian regime, First Nations are too far from most cities for casinos to be effective. The injection of casinos is a strong tool of implanting destruction and capitalist influence into Native lands.

After the meeting, a white guy told me he didn’t feel what I was saying until I spoke of the government killing 1 million buffalo to wage genocide and privatizing fishing, these examples of capitalist and state level efforts to wage genocide and destroy our cultures and force us to assimilate. A parallel to this is in Palestine where israelis destroy olive trees and have made it illegal for Palestinians to harvest and sell Akoub. A related local example is the canadian government killing 20,000 sled dogs of the Inuit to force them to settle and lose their nomadic way of life. The focus of genocide is not merely to kill, it is to destroy culture, destroy their way of life, bury their legacy and erase every trace of a people. Hence the canadian government openly saying “We want to kill the Indian in the child” as their policy during residential schools. The focus is not just to kill, but to prevent the culture developing and to violently enforce assimilation. 

One of the last things I said was that a question they need to be asking is: What are we doing to build Indigenous Socialism?

I would like to stress, they did not argue with me. I have dealt with this argument in the Young Communist League as well. I have argued this online with many people over the years, which is why this gave me a headache thicker than a bun with only peanut butter. Things continue as they are until they are interrupted, these conversations are worth having. It is good to have them. The folks did not disrespect me at all. They said we may not see eye to eye on every issue, which is natural, we aren’t legally required to be in perfect harmony. They did not dismiss me. They were deflated and not smug, which is what leadership needs. The reason it was so frustrating for me was because I dealt with it so many times, not because they were in denial or reacting harshly. 

Colonial chauvinism shows up in different ways. A few ways:

• Pretending to be Indigenous and taking jobs and grants reserved for native folks to try alleviate economic depravity after centuries of intentional efforts to deprive us of economic prosperity 
• Going to a country and complaining about slaves becoming free and saying that that revolution “took everything from you” or “took your family’s business”
• Believing racist propaganda locally but also being willing to believe anything about other countries and centring the West as Just, civilized and a moral place to judge countries interfered with by NATO as if we aren’t in an occupying genocidal kingpin of a “country”
• Coming from a country resisting the U.S. at the state level and singing stories of how evil they are and directly using political energy to propagate that instead of learning about and fighting local injustice
• Selling out your homeland by selling anti-communist propaganda to pearl clutching liberals who call homeless people “junkies”
• Talking about how hard you work and saying Natives should stop asking for handouts
• Suggesting “we are all one”/denying our material conditions and history
• Caring only about your own personal struggle
• (Very closely related: western chauvinist anti-theism and Islamophobia)
• Burying our duties to wage revolution here by pointing to other countries to critique them when we do not know their material conditions, their history, their language or the external contradictions and hegemony that limits them
• Repeating “National Endowment for Democracy” CIA propaganda about Uyghurs from Adrian Zenz instead of talking about actual death camps like ICE camps and residential schools
• Patriotic Socialists who create a false dichotomy painting feminists and people who care about queer struggles as liberals and painting themselves as the “real” revolutionaries and anti-imperialists
• Sharing Lithuanian double genocide theory and Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s Holocaust denial that the Bolsheviks were worse than the Nazis
• Listening to Gusanos and white nationalists’ descendants excusing their crimes and speaking ill of revolution
• Suggesting all of humanity is evil/human nature is innately bad due to the actions of the colonial powers
• Hiding history by blaming all states as equally bad when this directly buries revolutionary history and defeats of nazis, enslavers, nationalists, U.S.-backed nationalists etc
• Blaming the Chief and Council government for being corrupt while not addressing that it is the canadian regime’s Apartheid bureaucracy, while also ignoring that the canadian government is vastly larger with worse corruption. C and C makes decisions that deal with millions of dollars while canadian bureaucrats make decisions with tens of billions of dollars. C and C is the tail being wagged by the dog, no Chief and Council determines the fate of colonists.

I don’t want you to have to read a part 4 so I will keep this short. The important focus for us as revolutionaries is that the material analysis here is that we cannot simply build Socialist canada. There cannot be Communist canada, just as there cannot be Communist israel. Revolution here means demarcating from colonialism and the point that has led us to where we are, which is a continental mass grave. If you are an anarchist the last few sentences may bring you joy, if you’ve read Lenin this may bring you joy. If you are strongly tied to canadian identity, this may bring you distress. 

Comrade, this settler state must be destroyed and sovereignty must be granted to the Indigenous nations. The privatization of our land, deprivation of our resources and political autonomy must end. We must be able to determine our path forwards from the last few centuries of genocide. We have more than enough resources for all. Kinship with the land is not complex and it has served us well for thousands of years.

We must build a Socialist Confederacy of Indigenous Nations. We can have societies that prioritize the People and every Pro-social pursuit. Bolivia is doing this already with its 14 point plan. Will you join the efforts to usurp Colonialism?

P.S. Please share this writing with anyone you think might benefit from it, I am very tired of having this argument.

Additional Resources

These are some really accessible and important resources for anyone to study to focus on Indigenous peoples.

• 1+1 Ep 105 Youri speaks to Alexander Reid & Damien Gagnon on Indigenous Affairs in Canada (114 minutes)
  • Wet’suwet’en struggles
  • Indigenous struggles across canada
  • the complexity of the Indian Act and why a right wing figure supports abolishing it
  • MMIW
  • how and why canadians are pitted against Indigenous peoples and colonial law
  • prison reform versus prison abolition
• Indigenous material analysis of settler colonialism (72 minutes)
• Legal history of the West coast, commodification of the fishing industries and contemporary fishing struggles on both coasts (97 minutes)
• Glen Coultehard on his book Red Skins White Masks (40 minutes + 20 minutes Q&A)
• Canadian mining corporations and extractive industry robbery of Latin America and Africa (15 minutes)
• Bolivia’s 14 point revolutionary constitution (10 minutes)

That’s all it would take, indeed.

For any debate-bro logicheads, this ludicrous argument has a very simple and identifiable error. It’s called begging the question. Certainly, all it would take to bring down the capitalist order is a coordinated assault, the execution of a few key government officials and particularly awful capitalist robber-barons, the expropriation of their land and wealth, the establishment of a socialist legality and decolonial government, etc., etc. A simple matter!

The question is hidden. What would it require for every worker to militantly agree to go on strike, resist police attack, and prevent scabs from working? Why, not much. Only a total revolutionization of the labor movement.

Only the creation of a centrally coordinating body. Only the joining together of the various labor struggles into a militant political party of labor.

The primary weapon of the working class is organization. Each individual capitalist commands an enormous number of resources. Each capitalist firm is itself an organization designed to marshal and control those resources. When we confront these massive accretions of capital, of political power, of physical repressive violence, we confront them alone and singly unless we are organized. A single strike requires local organization; a mass strike requires mass organization across the entire economy. For a strike against one of the capitalist behemoths that now stand behind the U.S.-Canadian governments, that strike must attack all the bases of the capitalist firm at once. That cannot be done without a high degree of organization. But we cannot organize against capital from within the labor unions until the labor unions themselves are won back from their current class-collaborationist leadership.

We can identify, then, the series of steps needed to break the stranglehold of the labor bureaucrats — those who speak revolution yet perform obeisance to capitalist leadership like Sean Fain, and those who don’t speak revolution at all — on the labor unions. These are the very first and necessary steps toward any question of a mass strike.

1. Active revolutionists — those people now calling for a general strike every so often on the internet, as well as those trained Marxists within the unions who are truly revolutionary — in short, the radical union members, must begin the task of propagandizing and agitating to the rank-and-file, bringing them to the understanding that they are being betrayed by their leadership;
2. Radical union members must form internal organizations capable of challenging the stifling rules and the environment of anti-democratic suppression that now surrounds the election of union leaders and determination of union policy;
3. These organizations must engage in the sharpest possible struggle against their internal union enemies — the labor bureaucrats — and force the addition of new rules to their constitutions, namely: i) thorough and democratic discussion on every issue, with the membership being permitted to pass dictates to its officers, ii) recall provisions for treacherous officers and other officials, iii) caps on officer salaries to be no more than three times the average rank-and-file salary, iv) completely clearing out all current elected officials and employees of the union and replacing them with radical members.

Only when this struggle is won in at least a number of major unions can we begin to discuss formation of a mass strike committee and the enactment of a general strike across all industries in the U.S.-Canadian empire.

This work can be begun in an uncoordinated fashion. Small cliques and groups of revolutionists within the labor movement can start the undertaking. However, for it to coalesce into a general strike, these cliques and groups must coalesce into the form of a dedicated, militant, revolutionary party of labor; a Communist party.

In the book, “What the “Friends of the People” Are,” Lenin outlined the main tasks of the Russian Marxists. In his opinion, the first duty of the Russian Marxists was to weld the disunited Marxist circles into a united Socialist workers’ party. …

The struggle waged by Lenin and his followers against Narodism led to the latter’s complete ideological defeat already in the [eighteen] nineties.

Of immense significance, too, was Lenin’s struggle against “legal Marxism.” It usually happens with big social movements in history that transient “fellow-travelers” fasten on to them. The “legal Marxists,” as they were called, were such fellow-travelers. Marxism began to spread widely throughout Russia; and so we found bourgeois intellectuals decking themselves out in a Marxist garb. They published their articles in newspapers and periodicals that were legal, that is, allowed by the tsarist government. That is why they came to be called “legal Marxists.”

After their own fashion, they too fought Narodism. But they tried to make use of this fight and of the banner of Marxism in order to subordinate and adapt the working-class movement to the interests of bourgeois society, to the interests of the bourgeoisie. They cut at the very core of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks), Short Course

Those of our comrades who are unfamiliar with the history of the development of revolutionary Marxism may shake their heads and wonder why, since we advocate unity, we are so divisive when it comes to “potential allies.” The first answer is in the words of Lenin in 1914: “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists and opponents and distorters of Marxism.”

But let us say that our comrades will not be convinced by context-free quotes. Very well! Then we shall explain why we cannot have unity with those who “cut at the very core of Marxism” and deny the doctrine of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The first weapon of the proletarian class, the revolutionary class, is organization. Our enemy, the bourgeois class, is organized to a frighteningly high degree. It has achieved this organization through the century of its dominance in the West where it has been triumphant on every front. We must not shy away from the truth: the weakness of the Communist movement here in the U.S.-Canadian Empire is both the reflection and the cause of the imperial bourgeoisie’s strength. These are intrinsically linked, the one conditioning the other. As a result of these triumphs, which are at the same time our losses, the bourgeoisie has established a fighting-organization that was unthinkable in Marx’s time… or Lenin’s… or Stalin’s. The national security state and its reactionary vanguard is capitalism’s answer to Communism. It is the entrenchment of settler-fascism, complete with its garrisons, extermination camps, and domesticated working class. Nevertheless, despite this daunting obstacle, the main strength of the enemy does not lie in its organization. The strength of our enemy is its control of property, of productive capital, and of political power.

For us, for the revolutionary classes, it is the combination of our strength which is the source of our power. Why is this? It is a fundamental law of capital: the socialization of labor and the combination of labor-power into social forms — the factory floor, the office, any workplace — exists as the result of the form of the capitalist economy, the mode of production.

Only through the concentrated power of our class — and our  class-allies — can we stand against the enemy class and against the enemy state. Alone or unorganized, we are easy to overcome. Together and united, organized such that we cannot be divided and defeated in detail, the bourgeoisie are categorically unable to be victorious in this war between our classes; the bourgeoisie cannot live on its own power — without us, it must wither and die. There is no victory for our oppressors that does not end in their own destruction.

If our weapon is organization, the organization of our entire class, what does this mean for our unity with those who seek conciliation with our enemy, the bourgeoisie? To unite with the liquidators of revolution is to surrender our weapon of organization; it is to disorganize ourselves, to throw away our weapons and armor, to bear our breasts for the lance of the enemy. Only a militant, democratic, centralized party, utterly devoted to the revolution as its aim, can lead us to victory; only this can assure that we are not divided and destroyed.

Reform? Yes, but reform through class struggle. In 1916, Lenin wrote that revolutionaries cannot, without betraying their cause, vote for reforms. “Either revolutionary class struggle,” wrote Lenin, “of which reforms are always a by-product (when the revolution is not altogether successful) or no reforms at all.” Blunter, even than this, he delivered in December of that year a speech that noted “The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms (in such a manner) that—to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity—five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.”

The organization we must craft will be an organization of Marxists. Wavering, vacillating, and revisionism cannot be permitted. Our theoretical line will be anchored to the struggle for national liberation of the oppressed nations within the U.S.-Canadian Empire. This struggle alone is incompatible with reform, with revision, with opportunism inside the borders of the Empire.

We have already seen the spread of petit-bourgeois anarchist socialism — in the 1880s, as Narodism. “Legal” Marxism finds its apogee here in the U.S. as the CPUSA, the legalist strains within the DSA and academics that reject revolution. Economism is, similarly, the substitution of the revolutionary content of Marxism for simple economic gains — pure unionism, for instance, or other strains of CPUSA and DSA “thought.” These are all forms of the domestication of Marxism, the adaptation of Marxism to the bourgeois palate.

To achieve this unity, we must intensify the struggle. As Lenin and the early Russian Social Democratic Labor Party founders fought and destroyed the tendencies of petit-bourgeois Narodism, “legal” Marxism, and economism before they could unite the Marxists around a single banner, so too must we fight the modern incarnations of these very same tendencies. We must rhetorically destroy the “legal” Marxists and economists. They draw to their ranks the advanced workers who would otherwise become real Marxists. The real Marxists they dupe into their organizations become isolated, atomized, and neutralized by the parliamentary tricks they play to prevent their radical wings from having control or influence within them.

Only by rhetorically dismantling these enemies of the people can we free this locked-up labor, can we give our comrades back the chance to take up the weapon of organization. Once this is done, we will put the weapon into the hands of our class and they will guide it to the heart of the enemy. Then, when the revolutionary moment comes, our weapon will be sharp, our strategy prepared, and our ranks unbroken and unbreakable.

We must intensify the struggle!

It may seem like a curious question to raise. After all, don’t we have a profusion of parties, pre-parties, party-likes, and other non-party formations? But it is exactly this multiplicity of grouplets, cults, protest-mobilizers, and political organizations that require us to bring this question once more into debate. If there were a single, recognized vanguard party, the question would be meaningless. We wouldn’t need to ask it, because the answer would be self-evident. The fact is that there is no party recognized by the proletariat as serving its interests. This accounts for the decreased political participation in all U.S. elections over the last century.

Look around you at the profusion of viewpoints and revolutionary contentions. There are ten thousand paths and ten thousand roadmaps. Our class is not moving together toward revolution, but separately, along countless valleys and byways, where we are diverted, picked off, killed by the reactionary vanguard of the U.S. intelligence machine. Yet that hasn’t stemmed the flood. Class consciousness is still rising.

Unite All That Can Be United

An objective assessment of the Communist movement in the West can only lead us to one conclusion: it is scattered, broken, divided. The United States and Canada, forming one natural unit of economic strength and military might, sharing a single ruling class between them, and with a long unguarded border such that Canada serves merely as an adjunct to U.S. interests, have between them at least 15 major Communist or socialist “parties.” Add the various groups, grouplets, sects, and local organizations and you have a number reaching the hundreds.

There is hope in this, but there is also despair.

These various fragments of a single movement are the soil from which a real, united threat to capitalism and the ruling class can spring. We have merely to look at the history of past revolutions to recognize the fertile ground that is being created by these partial and furtive movements. In Tsarist Russia, it was the shards of the Narodnik and other idealist socialist movements that gave birth to the worker’s councils and struggle leagues that lead to the foundation of the RSDLP — which would become the Communist Party. In China, it was the petit-bourgeois study groups and struggle leagues that united to become the Communist Party.

There are differences, too. The U.S. Empire is not a semi-feudal semi-colony. In fact, we can consider North American capitalism to be the most developed form of capitalist economy. This is meaningful for several reasons. First, in the developed economies of the West, communist organization was achieved by the conscious growth of the workers movement: the unions and drives to unionization. That process took place in the U.S. and Canada, and has more or less been completely subordinated to ruling class interests (see, for instance, the UAW’s recent endorsement of the genocidaire Biden, despite his administration’s brutal attacks on unions and worker’s rights during his term).

Second, that advanced development has led to atrophy in the most productive labor, and export of most elements of the most exploitative labor-processes to the Third World. This was not the case during the 19th century when our movement was developing in Europe; this logic of imperialist capitalism only came about at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

Third, the advanced development of the North American economy has led to a concomitantly advanced development of the state apparatus. The U.S. Empire has the most advanced security state ever developed, capable of surveilling and breaking down attempts at worker organization. The managers of the world-capitalist economy, seated primarily in New York and London, have also developed numerous techniques of stalling, slowing down, and partially averting crises of capital. 

That means the field of play, as it were, is filled not only with the shoots of new and growing organizations and budding class consciousness, but it is joined by the huge, decaying shards of dead or dying organizations that have completely lost their dynamism. These are the after-images of the process of Communist consolidation that occurred in the 19th century — failed parties, splintering against the rocks into smaller and smaller subdivisions.

For us, this creates a situation of extreme peril.

The party-fragments and partial parties that grew up during the early 20th century — particularly the CPUSA and its many offshoots, refoundations, and successors (such as the Socialist Workers Party, which would give birth to the WWP, PSL, etc.) — don’t act as centers of gravity for the movement, but rather as black holes. Without exploring the history of these splinters in detail (the Clarion has already carried a piece specifically on the history of the main CPUSA), the net result of the Communist movement’s failure to cohere in the U.S., embodied most obviously in the repeated break-ups and splinters of the CPUSA, has created a dialectical shadow.

This shadow is a political ideology that manifests as the rigid sect-form.

The Incoherence of the Movement

In opposition to the failures of the mainstream Communist movement in North America, as a reaction to it, the New Communist Movement of the 1960s and 1970s attempted to combat the kind of lax opportunism and careerism that had so infected the Communist organizations in the U.S. This gave rise to the militant sect-philosophy. This philosophy not only rejects unity with open opportunists and careerists, it rejects unity with any group that does not profess essentially the same points of unity as the sect. It closes down discussion with outsiders in order to insulate the sect from political decay and infiltration by state agents.

This sterile strategy is merely the dialectical reflection of the flabby laxity of the infiltrated movement. No organization that follows these lines can grow much beyond its original membership. The single most important capacity of any revolutionary organization is the ability to reproduce an ideologically and politically militant membership. If the ranks remain closed, the organization will be denuded by burnout, wear-and-tear, and state action. It will die.

The inability of our movement — the Communist movement in North America — to cohere throughout the entire 20th century has created these two opposing organizational trends: ossification of leadership and sect-like rejection of unity.

At the same time, it has created the twin poisons of obsession with criticism (prevalent in the sect-form) and complete rejection of all criticism (prevalent in the ossified form). Both are deadly to real, Communist unity and both are symptoms of a desire to achieve a suffocating degree of unity. That is, they both serve the purpose of total ideological control of an organization from the leadership, flowing downward, to the ground-level of the rank-and-file. In both cases, this suffocation is encouraged in the name of “democratic centralism,” which it is not.

Unity — Between Marxists

What is necessary to “unite all that can be united”? Lenin famously said that “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists and opponents and distorters of Marxism.” He warned against “liberal-labour politicians,” “disruptors of the working-class movement,” and “those who defy the will of the majority.”

This merely begs the question: who are Marxists? Who are liquidators?

Of course, we need recourse to some theory in order to answer it. Thankfully, past revolutionary experience has given us examples and explanations that we can use to analyze our present situation.

The Marxists, then, must adhere to the following principles, which must form the basis for unifying all advanced elements of the working class struggle in the United States and Canada:

1. Proletarian Revolution. No one is a Marxist who is not a revolutionary. A firm commitment to the revolutionary overthrow of the existing capitalist order is the first and foremost necessity for any Marxist.
2. National Liberation for the Indigenous Nations, New Afrika, Puerto Rico, and All Enslaved Nations. The mangy yellow dog of national chauvinism lies at the bottom of almost every opportunist deviation and almost all revisionism and reformism. A firm commitment to genuine truth and reconciliation, to land reform, and to the actual, political and economic self-determination of all enslaved nations in North America is a requisite point.
3. Sex Liberation and Depatriarchalization. Second only to the national liberation struggle, gender chauvinism and reactionary commitment to the patriarchal order have also been the root cause of many revisionist turns. Only by a full and real unity along the sex (and sexuality) liberation lines and a real unity in agreement with the depatriarchalization of society can a functional party be born.
4. Disability Liberation. The fascist drive to liquidate the so-called disabled individuals — those whose laboring capacities don’t conform to the dominant technologies of production and efficiency — must be countered by a strong commitment to the abolishment of the capitalist category of disability and the true integration of all comrades into the struggle for liberation.

These positions should not be contested. As a matter of strategy, this is the broadest possible liberatory coalition; to omit any of these four points — the primacy of the class struggle or the special fronts within it — is to cut the size of the revolutionary coalition unnecessarily. There is no significant group that would be excluded from the foundation of the party with the inclusion of any of these points. Theoretically, it is important to recognize the “special manifestations” that the class struggle will take here in North America. Failure to grant them their proper place — not as subordinate struggles, but as incarnations of one and the same struggle — is to risk repeating the movement’s slide into revisionism, opportunism, and careerism.

A Concrete Plan: Unity by ‘25

Nor is it enough for us to “call” for unity, or to postulate its necessity. Such sloganeering is nothing more than hot air. There must be a plan, even if it is preliminary.

We are forwarding such a plan now, for debate among the advanced elements of all organizations. Smaller organizations, not afflicted by the debilitating rot of opportunism, may choose to attend the proposed conference in their entirety by sending delegates.

A vanguard party is an organization of organizations. We propose therefore to call a Unity Convention by 2025, in a location physically central to those organizations that, in part or in whole, intend to send delegates. Battles over strategy and tactics, timelines, and organizational forms must be subordinated to the need for Marxist unity — to unite all that can be united. This means sectional debates between, for instance, Maoists and Trotskyists, are beyond the scope of such a convention. The people need a party. The time to unite is now.

Some Canadians might remember the 2016 fire season. The 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire displaced close to 90,000 people from their homes and caused the most damage to business, property, and oil sands operations of any natural disaster in Canadian history (so far). Nevermind that, in terms of area burned, 2016 was less than even 2022. Although Indigenous nations were affected by the Fort McMurray fires, and Indigenous nations are disproportionately affected by wildfires generally, cynical observation suggests the fire became memorable only once it scorched the predominantly white suburbs of Waterways, Beacon Hill, and Abasand.

When the news consistently reports that something is in some way unprecedented, once in a blue moon, once in a generation, once in a lifetime, etc. the effect is that people fail to notice the gradual deterioration in the normal condition of that thing. Suddenly, the wildfire season starts in March when just five years ago it started in April, and five years prior to that, in May. Events that affect settler populations are magnified, while the same events are minimized when they affect Indigenous populations. This effect is called Shifting Baseline Syndrome, but one might be more familiar with the term “boiling the frog,” which is the propaganda technique that induces it. The technique isn’t restricted to news about wildfires, or even weather and climate — most subjects, from health to economics, are reported upon in this way. Eventually, everyone feels like the dog in the iconic 2013 meme and K.C. Greene comic, “This Is Fine.”

Things aren’t fine. In its insatiable hunger for profit, the Canadian forestry industry clearcuts swathes of ancient, biodiverse forests. When they replant trees, as part of so-called green capitalist initiatives, they plant only a few species. The result is that the new tree plantations are essentially kindling. They can’t rightfully be called “forests” because a forest is not just “many trees,” but a dynamic ecosystem of soil microbes, mosses, fungi, insects, and animals — the destruction of which is actually what renders environments susceptible to flames. Likewise, it was the clearing of the Canadian prairies’ complex meadowscapes to graze cattle, and monocrop canola and other cash crops, that increased the environment’s flammability. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, global warming has altered weather patterns and melted polar ice, resulting in widespread ecological change and, again, environs that are increasingly vulnerable to fire. These effects are cumulative and cyclical. Wildfires emit greenhouse gasses that warm the Earth, which causes larger fires to emit more gasses, drastically altering global weather systems and the seasons. Although these changes manifest first as fire and drought, they’re also to blame for the vicious tropical storms and monsoons that devastated Pakistan in 2022, and Libya in 2023, resulting in thousands of deaths. Eventually, this will all culminate in an oven planet that bakes all its living organisms to death. No, things aren’t fine, but it’s an existential imperative of the owning class, the bourgeoisie, to ensure the masses continue believing they are — to continue believing that these events are disparate and unconnected from the capitalists’ activities, and from capitalism altogether, when the opposite is true.

The ruling class likes things the way they are. As they exploit the environment (and us), they’re acutely aware of a great danger: that we won’t take it any more. They study their history books — well, to be honest, they don’t; they’re dissolute wastrels who don’t do much other than lounge on their billion-dollar-yachts. They pay people to study history for them. And what history teaches them is that they have to beware of violent revolutions, especially those with decolonial or communist character. 

One of the ways they work to stay in power is to delay the recognition of these impossible conditions for as long as possible, and one of their tactics is propagandizing people into believing that circumstances are relatively okay here, they must be worse elsewhere, and there’s no connection between here and there. In several works (i.e., “The Collapse of the Second International” and “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder), Lenin observed that a revolutionary situation can only occur when three conditions are met:  

1. when the oppressed classes no longer want to live in the current way
2. when the ruling classes are no longer able to rule and govern in the current way
3. when a crisis affects both the oppressed and ruling classes, spurring the former to action, and destabilizing the latter.

In May Day Action by the Revolutionary Proletariat, Lenin adds that “the bourgeoisie [does] everything in its power to back counter-revolution and ensure ‘peaceful development’ on this counter-revolutionary basis.” 

But a byproduct of technological progress under capitalism is that it has sufficiently improved the lives of westerners such that these conditions occur with increasing rarity. For instance, since the 1970s, the Canadian province of Alberta has been afflicted by drought with increasing frequency, yet this hasn’t manifested into widespread starvation due to improved technology that rescues food crops in otherwise blighted years. Furthermore, capitalist overproduction ensures that millions of kilograms of imported produce from the imperial periphery go to waste each year. Our so-called peaceful development and counter-revolutionary stability depends upon this waste and exploitation. We are a far cry from the mass poverty that galvanized the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Revolution. The real danger and the real misery remain hidden from us (so far).

From the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, the riots in France over the murder of Nahel Merzouk in 2023, the murder of Tortuguita at Cop City, and to the refusal of the Canadian government to search Winnipeg landfills for the bodies of murdered indigenous women, events that could have been the straw that breaks the camel’s back come and go. This is just as the ruling class wants it — just as they have designed it to be. We can’t manage to grasp the moment and fight against them before the moment slips away.

But what does this have to do with wildfires? In a sane world, climate events such as this year’s wildfires and floods would represent a political crisis too unconscionable to ignore. The system that utilizes its police to terroristically execute thousands of people, and the corporate system whose practices condemn thousands to death each year are one and the same. But instead of a political crisis, we have political theater.  

Past wildfire seasons involved an expected amount of backbiting between bourgeois politicians, phonily accusing each other of not caring. For instance, Justin Trudeau was accused of apathy about 2016’s Fort McMurray fires. This year’s wildfires are especially noteworthy for the conspiracy theories about them. Conspiracies, such as the idea that “green terrorists” or “antifa” started the fires with the goal of justifying “climate lockdowns,” abound. It’s no longer that Trudeau is apathetic; now his agents are maliciously setting the fires to convince you that climate change is real so the World Economic Forum can control you (and he can justify his carbon tax). 

Belief and propagation of these conspiracies convolutes any serious conversation and delays any mitigation of climate change. Whether cooked up by the ruling class or simply amplified by them, conspiracy theories like this prevent us from seizing the critical moment; they prevent us, the working class, from even realizing the nature of our enemy, let alone drawing the sword.  Ultimately, it’s not the case that Trudeau is either apathetic or enacting a secret scheme — his purpose is to maintain the normal extraction of profit. Both obfuscations are part of the same strategy that gave us the term “climate change” to begin with. Recall that it was the notorious Republican political strategist, Frank Luntz, who advocated replacing “global warming” with “climate change” in the vernacular, since it’s a much less frightening phrase, and more malleable to the political agenda of the ruling class. This agenda is actually quite simple. In fact, it’s so simple it barely qualifies as an agenda at all; it’s to maintain the exploitation of people and nature for profit, aka the status quo, for as long as possible. This is the class interest of the bourgeoisie.  

They would have us believe it’s not the case that capitalism is omnicidal, that human exploitation of the planet and each other is gradually heating the planet past the point it can sustain life. The planet’s not warming, it’s changing. Are these changes natural, or caused by humans? Who can say?

They would have us believe that, even if the changes are caused by human activity, the activity is part of a plot. It’s certainly not an indictment of their mode of production, or system of governance. The world isn’t burning because of something they have participated in, or let happen — it’s obviously some other (((them))).

Historically, accusations involving a them are antisemitic. From the 1389 Holy Saturday Pogrom in Prague, to the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648 – 1657) in present day Ukraine, in which tens of thousands of Jewish people were massacred, Jews have been the frequent scapegoats for the ruling class, to use as a bulwark against the frustrations of peasants and oppressed classes. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, incitements against Jews were given anti-communist flair by the Okhrana, the Tsar’s Secret Police, so that violence could be directed against would-be revolutionaries. Germany’s Nazis developed this strategy to its apotheosis, and the result was the Holocaust.

Just as it happened in Germany 90 years ago, people who believe these narratives are rapidly coalescing into an alt-right fascist movement in Canada. Although the victim group may change nominally, the tactics used to turn the working and oppressed classes against each other remain unchanged.

Scapegoating, deferral, and denial are more comfortable than admitting one’s entire way of life is murdering all life on the planet — but this is exactly what’s taking place. My comrades at USU have already written about the profitability of ecocide as it related to Maui’s fires and about how the bourgeoisie’s narratives about climate change are ruses. Their analyses are also true of Canada’s fires. 

Still, among many Canadians, none of this information causes the general alarm it should. The powder keg of mass resentment has not ignited, even while the country burns. Sure, every summer is a bit smokier than the last, but in the average Canadian metropole, everything seems normal. This is the ultimate boon of colonial exploitation — the privilege to live in normalcy while your internal colonies, and indeed the world, burns around you.   

The settler state and its police refuse to search for the bodies of these women. The cracker government gives various excuses — all inadequate — for its inaction, such as the three years it would take to search the landfills, the expense of up to $184 million, the possibility of exposure to toxic chemicals, and the sheer gruesome nature of what may be discovered. One excuse not invoked by the state: the potential to uncover many more corpses than those of the four aforementioned women, which would be a scandal for the police and government.  Meanwhile, Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson bloviates about building a memorial, and about “feasibility studies.”

All of the above is reminiscent of a previous prominent Canadian serial killer, Robert Pickton. Pickton claimed to have murdered 49 women, of whom 26 were confirmed, but he was only found guilty and sentenced for killing six. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police originally only searched Pickton’s pig farm in order to score easy money by ticketing unregistered firearms. They dragged themselves to investigate further when they found two missing womens’ blood and property. It took five years and cost $70 million to unearth the remains of the 26 women on Pickton’s farm. After his conviction, the Canadian Supreme Court found no further reason to continue trying Pickton, as there was no higher punishment possible for him. It will be much the same for Skibicki, who is already charged with first degree murder. He will be quietly put away and the government will claim justice has been served. But the conditions that allowed him and Pickton to commit their crimes, to murder Indigenous women under the settler state’s radar, will remain for as long as the Canadian state persists. For example, Robert Pickton’s brother David Pickton, who was previously convicted for groping and threatening to rape and cut a woman into pieces, walks free today. His freedom only required his claim ignorance of his brother’s crimes, despite having worked on the farm where they took place.

None of this is accidental. Whenever Canada looks into its past, it always unearths more Indigenous bodies than it bargained for. In 2021, a search uncovered a mass grave of 215 Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. More schools across Canada and the U.S. were searched. This resulted in the discovery of the bodies of more than 10,000 Indigenous children. The liberal Canadian media describes these events as “tragedies” and publishes reports of unheeded recommendations. For example, the government found many instances of what it called “police mishandling” in Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, a 2012 British Columbia provincial government inquiry into the Pickton murders. This report had dozens of recommendations for the police and provincial government, but none were taken seriously. Indigenous leaders accuse Canada of disregarding the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and children. This is true, but misses the full picture.

In actuality, the settler terror incarnate in the murder of untold thousands of Indigenous women and children is vital to the Canadian state. The settler government “cares” only insofar as the violence must continue. To accuse the police of “mishandling” these cases is an understatement bordering on injustice, for the police are not mere bumbling fools. True to their role in the history of Canada, they are active collaborators with settler terrorists! Some Canadian police admitted in the 90s that they would rather solve one murder of a white, bourgeois victim, than investigate the deaths of a dozen prostitutes — who are disproportionately drawn from Indigenous and racialized women. Police comments of this nature were documented in case studies into the Pickton murders, such as Stevie Cameron’s On The Farm. As for the perpetrators, liberals consider them monstrous, and rightly so, but fail to recognize that becoming a serial rapist-murderer is the logical apotheosis of settlerism. There are no acts more viscerally colonial than direct, individual sexual violence and murder against the colonized. To understand the causes of this violence, and its ubiquity in Canadian society, one must recognize the mountain of colonialist cruelty in Canada’s dark and genocidal history — the mountain these acts stand atop. 

The inability to recognize such grotesqueness condemns liberalism as a failed ideology. Even when some well-intentioned liberals document the atrocities in historic works such as Clearing The Plains, by James Daschuk, or true crime texts like Cameron’s On The Farm, the most they can accomplish is a grim witness-bearing. There is no prescription in liberalism to end the spilling of Indigenous blood by settlers and the settler state. The best liberalism can offer is some befuddled discourse and solemn “remembrance.” As Daschuk said in an interview with Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix news in 2016, referring to the deliberate mass starvation of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian government, “the stories were so profound and the truths, in some cases, were so ugly that we can’t turn our backs on them.” But what does it mean to not turn one’s back? In Canada’s case, not a lot — typically some mumbled apology and dead-end state “inquiries.” In that same interview from nearly a decade ago, Daschuk stated, “I think we’re at a moment. I think there’s enough momentum, and goodwill in the general population” to “examine how our society might right its inherent inequalities.” But in the years since, this hasn’t transpired, nor can it. The graveyard of failed bureaucratic endeavors surrounding Canada’s genocidal past and present, which includes the now-dissolved Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Forsaken inquiry in British Columbia, and whatever crib-strangled half-effort will soon emerge in Winnipeg, is only expanding, while the “inherent inequalities” remain and genocidal injustices continue.

Anti-colonial resistance must be found beyond liberal frameworks. On July 7th, the pig government of Manitoba told the families of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, to their faces, that they would not search the Brady landfill, despite the feasibility study demonstrating that a search was possible. In a hollow and tired deflection, Premier Stefanson cited safety concerns to workers conducting the search, and suggested that the search should be the federal government’s responsibility. In response, Indigenous activists, including Morgan Harris’s daughter, Cambria Harris, rightfully and immediately blocked access to the landfill, returning to a protest tactic first applied last year, when these murders first came to light. This people’s blockade against the settler government is continuing, even though the City of Winnipeg filed an injunction on Tuesday, July 11th to have it forcibly dispersed. Naturally, the demonstrators are unlikely to acquiesce to the city’s demand, and have every right to hold their ground.

The reoccupation and blockade of their own stolen land is an essential tactic for Indigenous resistance to colonization across Turtle Island. From present struggles in Wet’suwet’en and Landback Lane, weaving back through the “IdleNoMore” movement and “NoDAPL” protests at Standing Rock, Indigenous actions have been most successful when they impede the movement of the settler state, settler capitalist firms, and settler “private citizens,” and settler access to land. Looking only slightly further back into history, the settler government’s fear becomes palpable when it is confronted with armed land reoccupations, as occurred during the Kanesatake Resistance (Oka Crisis) in 1990, and Wounded Knee in 1973. These brave acts of popular anti-colonial resistance stand at the head of five centuries of Indigenous resistance, and will continue until settler colonialism is finally dismantled. The nascent actions to blockade Brady landfill are only a thread in this storied history.

Unfortunately, until they are united in a broad people’s anti-colonial movement, these actions can only delay and prolong the ongoing displacement and genocide regime of the U.S.–Canada settler empire. It is a death by a thousand cuts. The 1980–94 Clayoquot protests (The War in the Woods) did not prevent greedy settlers from harvesting old growth lumber in British Columbia for long — similar events unfolded only three decades later in the 2020–22 occupation at Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek). The capitalists, motivated by their unceasing, existential drive for endless profits, will never willingly stop; they will raze the whole Earth, if they are allowed to do so, and they will be aided at every step by the capitalist class-dictatorship state. Clayoquot and Ada’itsx demonstrated that the state has endless patience and capacity to jail peaceful protesters. The plaudits heaped by the state on acts of peaceful resistance, thereby condoning and denuding these actions of revolutionary impetus, are another obstacle. Still, it’s clear that while Canada, its police, and its corporations exist, there can be neither lasting peace nor permanent victories in the Indigenous liberation struggle. There can be no justice for the tens of thousands of children buried beneath residential schools or for the uncounted hundreds, if not thousands, of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Unfathomable cruelty characterizes the Indigenous experience in Canada and across Turtle Island. The settler state offers only this choice: they may live on the rez (reserve/reservation) and contend with an ongoing cultural and literal genocide, or they may leave. If they leave, however, they’re extremely likely to be criminalized, rendered homeless, victimized by physical, emotional, and sexual violence (including disappearance and murder), or any combination of these traumatic experiences and horrible fates. If they are murdered, their bodies can be buried in landfills or fed to pigs. Their spirits and families can find no peace. Yet liberal settlers dimly wonder why the phrase “Reconciliation is Dead” is popular.

The sum of this experience is sometimes called the “Fourth World” — in which primarily Indigenous and Black people, but also gender nonconforming and disabled people, live Third-World conditions in allegedly First-World countries like Canada or the United States. In this framework, Fourth World communities are understood to occupy a unique underclass, beneath the settler working class proper. Fourth-World workers are locked in a web of contradictions with the capitalists, the First-World workers, and the “Fourth-World” propertied classes all at once.

Fourth Worldism dovetails with Engels’ theory of labor aristocracy and Sakai’s theory that settler proletarianism is a myth. In letters to Marx in the 1850s, Engels worried that England, then the “most bourgeois of nations,” feeding itself on the spoils of hundreds of millions of people in its colonies, would soon have not only a bourgeoisie — its capitalists — but also a “bourgeois working class.” Marx and Engels feared that England’s colonial plunder would be sufficient bribery for its working class to betray their own class interests at the expense of racialized workers and workers abroad. Marx, for instance, wrote that the English working class would never free itself from “its own” capitalists until it stood in solidarity with liberation movements in Ireland, India, and other British colonies. The situation Engels described is sadly true in Canada and the U.S., where the settler proletariat has, time and time again, betrayed its class interest as workers to align with the settler capitalists, at the expense of  Turtle Island’’s colonized and other “Fourth World” peoples. Sakai takes Engels concept to its furthest extreme and claims, “Amerika [or canada] is so decadent that it has no proletariat of its own, but must exist parasitically on the colonial proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities.” For Sakai, settlers only exist to brutalize the Indigenous proletariat, whose slaughter and dispossession built the luxuries they enjoy.

Regardless of whether we find these theories plausible and rigorous, or nonsense, the wretched lived experience of Canada’s Indigenous populations cannot be denied, nor can the solution to their predicament be avoided. The Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island understand that the settler state will not change its colonialist character out of good will; it will only capitulate to any demands made from a position of power. As Mao said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The present mobilized resistance, while heroic, must spark the revitalization of Indigenous revolutionary anti-colonial organization, complete with the capability for armed struggle. When Indigenous nations make the settler pay in capital, real estate, political standing, comfort, and blood for his broken treaties and residential schools, his sprawling suburbs and golf courses, his oil pipelines and cleared forests — then and only then will the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty become realizable. The 1974 successful re-establishment of Ganienkeh as Kanienkehaka (a sovereign nation governed by its own laws and traditions) by the Mohawk, against the U.S. government, shows only an elementary hint of what could be. Let a thousand Ganienkehs overgrow the entirety of Turtle Island!

Among the settlers there is a desperate need for mass cultural upheaval. We must expunge the cultural and economic conditions that culminate in the violation and murder of Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois, Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, and the thousands of other Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). This begins, at the community level, by terrorizing the terrorists — by keeping a vigilant watch on settlers who show any political inclinations toward fascism and any personal inclinations toward domestic, sexual, and other interpersonal violence. Pickton and Skibicki could never have gotten away with their crimes for so long, had they not been shielded by whole communities, who (at best) looked the other way and (at worst) aided and abetted them. But this is only the elemental level. The solution cannot be merely personal and communal; it must be political. Communists must heed the call of Indigenous liberation. Full decolonization, which can only mean the abolition of the existing settler state and the utter destruction of the U.S.–Canada Empire and its settler society, the total restoration of Indigenous sovereignty, and the prolonged reeducation of the settler population must be included in our minimum programme. This is the only way towards any semblance of genuine “Truth and Reconciliation.” Only the anti-colonial revolution can achieve anti-colonial justice. If projects cannot uphold this bare minimum, they will be eradicated in the forthcoming revolution. If we settler would-be Communists fail to reeducate ourselves, then we will rightfully reap the 531 years of rape and murder we continue to visit upon this land and its people.

Author’s Endnote: In this piece I have used standard capitalization for illegitimate place names, such as canada. Rest assured, this was only done for legibility, and I don’t consider canada to be a legitimate nation.

We can smell the smoke from a world on fire. 

We are being told to stay indoors to avoid the toxic air.

People are scared. Rightfully so.

These severe and “unprecedented” Canadian wildfires are just the latest expression of the runaway train that is climate change. 

With every new season, the immediacy of the changing climate becomes more and more real for people. Every crop failure and natural disaster makes the reality of our situation harder to ignore. Climate change isn’t just a looming specter, it is a monster that lives in our backyard. 

So, what is the capitalist ruling class doing about it? 

The reactionary right does nothing. It buries its head in the sand, “rejects the politicization of weather” (Desantis, 2023), and “encourages innovation in the private sector” while denying the necessity of government intervention. Then they try to change the conversation to be about whatever hateful and chauvinistic fire they are trying to stoke this week.

The Democrats use this fear to beg for votes, promising that they are the only ones that can save us from the climate denying Republicans. Biden made climate change a central tenet in his first round with Trump, and he will 100% be playing this same sad song as the bell rings for round two. The Biden White House is trying to push the narrative that they have made some sort of meaningful progress in the fight on climate change; this is all political posturing and downright dishonesty. His signature Inflation Reduction Act, hailed as “historic climate action,” requires the federal government to lease 62 million acres to fossil fuel companies every year before it is allowed to allocate a single acre for solar or wind. Third party groups such as Earthjustice give Biden abysmal scores on the few minimal programs he has nominally begun work on. 

In the meantime, the owning class tries to push an agenda of personal responsibility in the face of climate change. The owning class is giving us a way to perform agency in the face of a terror they have unleashed upon us. Instead of passing the minimum intensive regulatory measures necessary to even slow climate change, the capitalist class tells us that the way to save the environment is to “vote with your dollar.” Buy local. Buy a Tesla. Buy from “eco-conscious” brands. They have taken our fear and commodified it. Selling us mousetraps to set in the path of a charging T-Rex.

One of their most cynical ploys is the motto of “corporate responsibility,” particularly through carbon offsets. Through this scheme, companies can continue to pollute and degrade our environment, continue to tear down forests and pump out as much carbon as they wish, as long as they also use some of their ill-gotten profits on paying for other forests to not be destroyed. Some of these carbon offsets are located in the very same forests that are smoldering as we speak — where is the accountability for those companies that claimed these trees as their greenwashed indulgences?

There is no amount of personal or corporate responsibility that can put an end to climate change. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t recycle and visit our local farmer’s market. This doesn’t mean that every individual is impotent in the face of climate change. But, we need to understand that neither these individual acts of consumption nor the voting booth are where this fight needs to take place.

Every person can make a difference: as a part of an organized mass movement. We must come together, organize and make our voices heard. We must reject the tepid promises of a “Democratic” party that has continuously failed to do anything meaningful in the face of the literal end of the world. We can’t be hoodwinked into casting a vote for the “lesser evil.” 

Instead of making cynical comments to our family, friends and coworkers about how fucked we are, we need to start having real conversations about why the people in power are not doing what clearly needs to be done. We need to reckon with the unbreakable link between capitalism and environmental destruction.

Even while we watch the world burn around us, the ruling class begs us to maintain civility in the face of the devastation they bring down on us every day. They shed crocodile tears and assure us that reasoned debate, civil procedure, and compromise will eventually start working. Well, we can clearly see how far that has gotten us. The smoke in our eyes cannot blind us from their sleight-of-hand. They cannot absolve themselves with words and false promises. The only path forward for this planet is to divest the capitalists of their power and get to work undoing the damage they have done.