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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did we not abolish slavery?

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

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

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

Did we not give civil rights to everyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it isn’t the first of its kind.

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

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

The National Question — From Empire to Union State

Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facing the Settler — Finding an ‘American’ Proletariat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Terms of the Struggle — Shattering the Prison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pied Piper is arguably more dangerous than the hunter, and neither should be discounted.

Background

Mamdani’s campaign started with a surge of popularity riding on radical anti-zionist talking points. A long-time “pro-Palestine” activist, supporter of BDS, and critic of zionist settler violence in Palestine, Mamdani has been a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America since 2017, and the New York State Assembly since 2020. Using his elected position to amplify his particular brand of “radical” politics, Mamdani’s public visibility quickly ramped up following his condemnations of the genocidal zionist reprisals following the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood uprising. By repeatedly stirring controversy within settler power structures and zionist media, Mamdani has spent the last two years building a popular image of a radical “socialist” Muslim within a key hotbed of settler political struggle, carefully ramping up the controversy to keep himself in the media spotlight by spouting radical rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada” and “abolish the police.” In October 2024, he announced his candidacy for the 2025 Mayoral race, winning the Democratic Party primary in June 2025. 

Surprising no-one paying attention, Mamdani began walking back his phony radicalism as soon as his candidacy was assured, currying alliances with key members of the NYC police force, choosing open zionists for his staff,¹ announcing his support for the zionist occupation’s “right to exist,” and declaring his intent to greatly expand the police budget for prosecuting anti-zionist activities. 

Principles of Settler Opportunism

The “socialists” who run for office are little more than political adventurists and opportunists. A political adventurist here means an individual who sees themselves as a heroic figure setting out to save the masses from their oppression. They believe they can “make a difference” by struggling within the system, so long as they retain their “principles.” They set aside the necessity of first constructing a class that is conscious of itself and able to coordinate political action according to a definite plan, and try to instead champion what they individually perceive to be the interests of this class (which does not yet exist!). This necessarily produces an eclectic undisciplined political line, because one individual, or group of individuals (like the many so-called “communist” parties) is not capable of producing a correct political line. Only a vanguard party with the backing of the masses, acting in their interests according to their will, can do this. Adventurists either do not know this, or do not care. They believe that by “showing the way,” the masses can be inspired to spontaneous action in support of their own liberation. They believe that by spurring the masses to all go to the polls, they are at the same time building working class unity, solidarity, consciousness, or whatever. Inevitably, they are ultimately defeated: either they fail to gain any purchase within the system and wash out, or they realize the futility of pushing a “revolutionary” line all by their lonesome and turn to opportunism. To this end, political adventurism is materially indistinguishable from opportunism.

Opportunists are in it for whatever they can get. They may agree in principle with a revolutionary line, but in practice they are more than willing to discard inconvenient segments of the masses in the interest of political expediency. Often they can be found eagerly doing this in anticipation of what they believe will win the most “support” at the polls. Inevitably, their most radical edges are rounded out and dulled by constant contact with the inertia of bourgeois/settler governance. In the game of musical chairs that is settler colonial privileges, the most vulnerable people are the first pushed out of the way, and the opportunists are the ones who take up the task of doing the pushing. Because it may be “politically inconvenient” to militantly struggle against the settler colonial occupation and genocide against Palestine, they tell us that these issues must be set aside “for now,” to be pursued “later” when the movement has built more momentum and mass power. Of course what they fail to mention here is that in doing this they are dividing the masses, weakening the movement by directing mounting class struggle into dead-end reformist avenues down which only a small section of the masses can advance. Their actions lead to the sacrifice of all principles on the altar of “pragmatism.”

Besides Mamdani’s tepid criticism of some of the most depraved zionist acts of violence, the key reforms he promised (and those which have won him such widespread support among the imperial left) are as follows: 

• To freeze rents and build “affordable” housing
• To crack down on “bad” landlords 
• To establish city-owned grocery stores
• To establish free public transit
• To raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030. (This in particular appears to be why the “progressive” settlers are so thrilled.) 

A full explanation of the flaws in the rent freeze is well beyond this article, but suffice to say that whatever attempt he may or may not make at expanding and stabilizing the private property regime, it won’t put a dent in the empire-wide land speculation that is the real cause of the housing crisis. Cracking down on “bad” landlords is laughable, considering the socialist position is not to hound out malfeasors, but to liquidate entire classes. And rather than feeding people directly, Mamdani would prefer to compete on the market by creating his own NYC brand grocery store!

This minimum wage increase will mostly benefit the service workers in the empire’s finance capital, the people who keep the gears turning in the nerve center of global imperialism. The claim being made by the settler “socialists,” is that this push for higher wages for some of the city’s workers is building the mass base necessary to push through some “real” reforms—just later on, at an unspecified date and time. There’s no word on how that’s to be accomplished or what the demands will be, but never mind that, they say, we’re getting paid. How exactly is socialism advanced by the appointment of a bourgeois politician as the mayor of the bourgeois finance capital of the empire in the middle of a holocaust being waged against Palestinians? That this disgusting mockery of human decency is being held up as a beacon of hope for the socialist cause hinges on the idea that wage increases are a victory in themselves, that advancing the conditions of some workers is always an advance for the socialist cause. We contend that this is simply not true. Let’s ask the real question: wage increases for who?

Simply being employed, however wretched that employment may be, is itself a position of privilege and power in the imperial system. Yes, the bourgeoisie remain the top dogs, but people who “work for a living” in the colonial economy are still a privileged group: their class position depends on the continued exploitation of people who can’t work for a living. 

There has never been a challenge to the employment problem, and a major reason why is that following along to the plans of the Imperialists keeps wages high and development uneven, securing employment while simultaneously securing unemployment. 

Example scenario: Capitalist introduces labor saving machines that double productivity. Rather than overproducing, they cut the workforce in half and raise the wages of the leftovers by 50%. Overall, the capitalist just reduced aggregate wages by 25%. The business operates at the same level. They don’t overproduce and break their market position, the workers who didn’t get cut have a huge wage increase that puts a contradiction between them and their laid off siblings.²

– @probablykaffe

Many people are excluded from the “productive” sphere on the basis of nationality, gender, ability, etc. We know that a Black person is much less likely to have access to employment than a white person—in fact, the Black unemployment rate in New York City is more than double that of whites (8% vs 3.5%). Disabled people are often completely excluded from a livable income, with less than 25% of people with any disability being employed, and fewer than 1 in 5 autistic people. According to the 2022 US transgender survey report, trans people in the US face a whopping 18% unemployment rate, more than four times the empire-wide average, which frankly should be considered a demographic crisis. These are entire populations of people who are excluded from the privilege of accessing employment, and those who do gain access are often limited to part time or sporadic/seasonal work. And all of this is before we even get into the issue of the role of US imperialism in inflating worker wages inside the empire at the expense of billions of global south workers. 

It can’t be dismissed how difficult it is to be a low wage worker in New York City. There’s a very good reason people are clamoring for this reform. But as the grip of capital tightens around your throat, disabled people who have been suffering under brutal austerity conditions for years are dying at atrocious rates under state eugenicist campaigns. The fact that these plans don’t address the needs of the most oppressed, and in fact perpetuate their oppression in a mystified and more acute form, should be a warning that Mamdani doesn’t deal in social revolution but rather in reinforcing the capitalist state with a “kinder” face. How does the “socialism” of Mamdami do anything to build solidarity between oppressed groups? What is the plan for carrying this movement to a higher stage of struggle? What is being accomplished here, except grabbing more for a select few while the most vulnerable people continue to languish and die in ever-increasing poverty and homelessness? Is the wealth supposed to trickle down from people with jobs to those without? Everyone needs to eat before you reach out your hand for seconds! If any group is forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of “progress” then inequality is reproduced and oppression persists. What does “universal emancipation” mean to you, seriously? If your “socialist” candidate isn’t running on the democratic mandate of the masses of the exploited, and held to account by that democratic mandate, following a definite plan to continually heighten the struggle and broaden the involvement of the masses, then they aren’t a socialist. Unfortunately, the democratic institutions necessary for this, a vanguard party or socialist state, do not yet exist in this land. Our efforts, therefore, should not be to run candidates accountable to no one, but to build the party capable of holding leaders accountable, so that we can finally seize the state. 

Whose Side Are You On?

We must be very clear on this point: Palestinian sovereignty is non-negotiable, just as much as all anti-colonialism is. There is no middle ground or compromise with the settler colonial system. Either we destroy it or it destroys us. Any position which leaves room for the continued existence of “israel” in any form is a denial of the sovereignty and humanity of Palestinians. In tossing out this issue, by “compromising” with genocide, they draw a line between themselves and the Palestinian people. They separate international humanity into two groups pitted against one-another: “us,” and “them.” In the arena of class warfare this division is fatal. When one section of our forces advances while leaving another behind, reactionary forces are afforded room to encircle and defeat both groups, usually by absorbing the opportunists and killing off the rest. Either all the oppressed advance in unison, or we get picked off one-by-one. Genuine revolutionaries demand that every oppressed group be respected, uplifted, and empowered; this will be done in opposition to the dominant groups, who recognize every gain for the oppressed as a loss for their profit. On the other hand, opportunists are content to allow reactionaries to pick off “inconvenient” groups, so long as they personally benefit in the end.

This strategy of divide and conquer, directed from the rear by the bourgeoisie and spearheaded by opportunism, goes back to the earliest days of the anti-capitalist movement. In particular it has come to dominate and define imperial politics over the last century. When the interests of those privileged enough to have jobs are prioritized ahead of those who aren’t, the material division between the two widens. The privileges of the advantaged group are reinforced at the expense of the disadvantaged group, which produces an incentive to keep it that way in the privileged group. This is how reaction breeds. The issue with homelessness is not “the lack of supply” but the capacity for landlords to evict tenants. Ensuring everybody is housed and safe needs to come ahead of reducing market prices on apartments.³ The speculative value produced by rent extraction is what drives the constant inflation of property prices, not “undersupply.” When the health and safety of disabled people is considered a secondary concern to the “comfort” of abled people, and (for example) masking is not enforced, disabled people are excluded from the movement, further weakening it. When trans rights are considered a “token” issue and worth ceding ground on in exchange for concessions for “the majority,” the movement further fragments as trans people are left behind to struggle to survive and to die alone. When Indigenous sovereignty is treated as a secondary concern, or a threat to the property “rights” of “the majority,” the settler-Indigenous divide deepens, and one of the most revolutionary elements of all human society is ejected from the movement. It is this way that, in the name of “the majority,” the opportunists carefully and meticulously carve up the movement into bite-sized chunks that the reactionaries are only too eager to devour. The bourgeoisie and settler masses will always demand that we sit down and shut up and in exchange they will grant some privileges to those of us who acquiesce while they slaughter those who won’t or can’t. Every “temporary” retreat from solidarity turns into a strategic defeat for the movement.

In the coming months, Mamdani supporters may pretend to be shocked at his complicity in settler violence and his leadership in maintaining the colonial occupation of Lenapehoking, just as they are now pretending to be critical of his zionism. The signs pointing towards his opportunism were always there for those willing to see. While he did condemn the zionist reprisals on October 8, 2023, he was quick to also condemn the Palestinian resistance within the weeks following, and since then has eagerly participated in spreading zionist propaganda lies about supposed “war crimes” committed by the resistance.⁴ Mamdani has carefully and consistently played both sides, spouting anti-zionist rhetoric out one side of his mouth while materially aligning himself with colonial hegemony with the other. This barefaced opportunism, and its inevitable tragic outcomes, should be wearily familiar by now to those of us with the slightest of principles. It’s plain as day now, just as it has been for years, that Mamdani is just another lying settler pig—perfectly content to take advantage of public outrage against the Palestinian Holocaust for his colonial ladder-climbing career. 

For as much ink that has been spilled and attention monopolized for this man, little mind has been paid to the social processes underlying his ascent to international fame and infamy. Mamdani’s popularity and controversy could well serve as a case-study in how the left wing of capital uses radical window-dressing to conceal maintenance of the status quo, but we’ve had enough such case studies to fill a library. What is happening to us on the ground? Whether you’re cheering and applauding or booing and hissing, you’re watching the show — so how has the so-called “revolutionary left” become so enraptured by what amounts to performance art on a stage inside a colonial garrison? The complete hegemony of the settler empire’s cultural influence continues to mislead and dull the senses of our aspiring revolutionaries, but not by lying to us to convince us that one settler politician or another is a radical. Even the most ineffectual liberal “socialist” will openly admit that they don’t believe Mamdani will deliver anything resembling a radical break. After all, they’ve “learned their lesson” from former DSA campaign outcomes, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vile opportunism. But if they’ve learned their lesson and “don’t expect much” from Zohran Mamdani, what exactly are they doing? The answer is a parallel to Mamdani’s career.

The Social Technology of Settler Socialism

The mass base of Democratic Socialism is the lower and middle strata of settler colonists.⁵ These people are genuinely discontented with the system, but pay attention to their grievances! “Housing is unaffordable, wages are too low, social safety nets are not robust enough, and  education is too expensive.” Wealth and capital have become too concentrated in the hands of a minority, “the 1%,” and they aren’t getting what they see as their due share. Are these the grievances of a revolutionary, or of petulant settler youth and failed settler aspirants? Are these demands aiming towards the complete destruction of the colonial system and the restitution of Indigenous land sovereignty, or are these demands aiming at a “fairer” redivision of the spoils of colonial conquest and imperialist exploitation? Are the grievances rooted in a desire to end class society or to simply make it more comfortable for those fortunate enough to live within the colonial jurisdiction at which their reforms are aimed?

The DSA professes to be a “socialist” organization, so on the surface it appears to be approaching an alignment with national liberatory, decolonial, and communist struggles. But is this really the case? Remember to always analyze the class position of a given organization by the actions it takes, not by the ideology it professes. Ideology is always a more or less accurate reflection of class alignment, but recall the scientific tenet that the appearance of a thing does not perfectly match its content—therefore we have to look deeper. The reflection can be, and often is, inverted. Zionism purports itself to be a liberatory movement, which is an inverted reflection of reality. Amerikan liberalism purports to be interested in universal democracy, which again is an inverted reflection of reality. So, is DSA really socialist? What are the outcomes of DSA’s political activity? As of this writing, no militant organizations or movements have emerged from the DSA, and decades of organizing has yielded little but a few “more radical” Democratic politicians in colonial office positions. The standard explanation given by “communists” within the DSA for its lack of revolutionary action is that the masses have yet to be radicalized, and therefore struggle within the DSA is necessary to bring them the consciousness they need to begin to take revolutionary action. In 43 years, however, the DSA has largely remained ideologically stationary.

This “failure” to radicalize the masses is a constant point of debate and analysis. Many individuals and organizations within the communist milieu but outside the DSA contend that the source of this failure is because the organization is ideologically democratic socialist (i.e. not revolutionary in ideological outlook), and therefore a different, “more communist” organization is required to impart the necessary revolutionary outlook in its adherents. But this is putting the cart before the horse! Ideology does not dictate material alignment, material alignment dictates ideology. The DSA is not a stagnant ineffectual organization because of its backwards ideology—instead it has a backwards ideology because this is necessary to fulfill its actual goals. What are its goals? The purpose of a system is what it does, especially a system which has remained more or less stable and self-reproducing for over four decades. So what does the DSA do? It reels in members of oppressed groups (trans, queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, etc) and disciplines their activities into serving the interests of its colonial middle-class leadership by mixing them into a single “organization” under middle-class leadership. The profession of “socialist” aims is a smokescreen to obscure the actual aims of the organization, which is ultimately little more than colonial, careerist ladder-climbing.

What of the internal criticisms levied at the organization? Many of the members are often very dissatisfied with the outcomes of their political activity, and among the common refrains is the need for more centralized leadership, for the ability to enforce a political line on the politicians they get into office, and for the organization to divest itself from cooperation with zionism. Yet despite a resolution passing in August⁶ enabling the expulsion of zionist membership (which was barely successful, succeeding with 56% percent of the vote), the openly zionist Mamdani continues to be backed by the DSA, and the overall strategy of the DSA continues to be to maintain its involvement in the zionist Democratic Party. The reality of the matter is, despite professing anti-zionism for the first time in its long history, the DSA remains a zionist organization, and its new “anti-zionist” mask is the same “anti-zionism” of the broader imperial left—an anti-zionism that affirms the necessity of the occupation to continue. Little more than a barefaced lie.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The settler empire has long since perfected the social technology of penetrating organizational and community structures built by, or being built by, the oppressed, with the aim of taking them over from within and submitting them to colonial interests. Where the oppressed see a dire need for unity and solidarity in the face of colonial genocide against our siblings in Palestine, the lower and middle strata of settlers see an upsurge in laboring subjects available to fill the ranks of their latest campaign for redivision of the imperialist spoils. That, in essence, is what the Democratic Socialists of America is: far from a dysfunctional organization which routinely fails to meet its goals, the DSA is a well-oiled machine of settler-colonial annexation. In which revolutionary currents among the oppressed are carefully cultivated within a narrowly bounded arena of struggle, both in order to prevent a dangerous rupture of the colonial system, and in order to ultimately benefit the settlers served by the DSA. That this process occasionally settlerizes individuals from oppressed demographics is part of the point—in order for the DSA to function as intended it’s necessary that the occasional individual from an oppressed demographic attains an internal leadership position or a colonial office position, but this is always predicated on the condition that they closely adhere to the interests of colonial maintenance; they must not engage in illegal activities, such as organizing and arming militant struggle. “Class peace” remains the priority ahead of anything else, even when the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children hinge on the taking up of armed struggle. To the settler socialists, their deaths are water under the bridge so long as wages are increased enough to broaden the number of people who can access the colonial land exchange.

For revolutionaries, what the success of the DSA and Mamdani’s campaign represents is a complete capitulation of the “Free Palestine” movement to settler annexationism and zionism. We’ve failed to differentiate between friends and enemies, failed to take the actions necessary to expel enemies from our organizations and communities, failed to build up the militant organizational capacity necessary to wage armed struggle against zionism, and in doing so failed to defend the lives of our Palestinian siblings in their hour of greatest need for two years ongoing. And yet, Mamdani’s electoral success is lauded as a victory for the left! Indeed, this is a triumph for the left wing of zionism. With hardly a word to the contrary, we’ve rolled over and allowed this travesty to unfold for two years, all the while repeating the inane mantra that “any day now” the masses of settler oppressors will “radicalize” and join forces with the oppressed to aid in the overthrow of their colonial system. In doing so, we’ve demonstrated our own willingness to be complicit in a holocaust so long as this complicity keeps us out of the prison cell and out of the line of fire.

Our Place in History

When freshly stolen land became scarce and prices rose in the late 1700s, the lower and middle masses of settlers eagerly aligned with the planter bourgeoisie to oppose British rule and expand the colonial system. Indigenous peoples bore the cost of their genocidal brutality.⁷ Since then this pattern has repeated itself over and over. At each moment of crisis in the colonial system, the dispossessed and poorer settlers will seek out temporary alliances wherever they can find them to bulk up their ranks for coming confrontation with the ruling strata, but always with the sole aim of securing their own slice of colonial land and their own share of imperial wages.⁸ As times change and ideologies shift and develop, the colonial redistributionists will find alliances in different places. During the period of protracted economic crisis in the 1930s, the redistributionists found alliance with rising Black nationalism, only to cast off their allies the moment a fresh flood of booty came pouring in following the empire’s successful conquests at the close of the Second World War, and by the 1950s the Communist Party USA had successfully liquidated all revolutionaries from its ranks and disavowed national liberation. In the 1960s, a new wave of national liberatory struggles rose, and by the 1970s, settler “radicals” had successfully played out their role in crushing all resistance. The defeated liberation movement became a victorious “Civil Rights Movement” in the settler history books.

Today the same pattern plays out yet again in real time before our eyes: with the colonial system’s internal stratification at historic highs, and faced with the objective necessity of violent armed struggle in support of the Palestinian resistance and against the US empire, the settler “left” floods into our organizations and our discussion spaces, reads our literature and learns our language of resistance, claims to be our allies in struggle, and spends two years marching in circles to maintain the facade, while shoring up support for their preferred reformist. Time and energy and resources that could be spent serving the needs of the most oppressed, building dual power institutions, organizing guerilla strikes against weapons manufacturers and zionist finance institutions, etcetera, gets repeatedly diverted into the same century-old discussions about whether socialists should vote. Those of us aiming to build the revolutionary forces necessary for winning this war find ourselves surrounded by the most dishonest dregs of humanity, grabbing and pulling us back from struggle to keep our labor squarely aimed at shoring up the structures of oppression holding us down. Make no mistake, when $30/hr is firmly in hand, these so-called radicals will ride into the sunset towards their very own mortgages on stolen land and pensions funded by imperialism. 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for personal gain at the expense of the Palestinian resistance is not a betrayal of the “socialist” movement, but the blueprint to be followed by each of its adherents. We’ve already failed to lend Palestine the support it needs for two years ongoing. If the aspiring revolutionaries of our new rising wave of national liberation fail to recognize the myriad methods that settler opportunism uses to exploit our labors for individual gain, we too will take our place in the history books as the defeated “extreme fringe” of a successful movement to redistribute the spoils of genocide and oppression.

1.  Julian Gerson, political director for Mamdani’s electoral campaign, previously served as a campaign manager for US congressman Jerry Nadler. Nadler describes himself as a “committed Zionist” and “a strong supporter of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people.” Gerson is on record saying, “Jerry embodies the idea that one can absolutely be pro-Israel and progressive simultaneously.” ︎
2. From Kaffe in the same thread: “The ratio of the sub-employed population has been roughly the same for the last half century, even as the role of ‘housewife’ has eroded (good riddance), with the shift in joblessness going mostly to the Nationally Oppressed. The abolition of unemployment (a Soviet right), is so little entertained for two reasons:
   1. The Labor Aristocracy refuses to let go of wages and security, even if that value could be re-allocated for increased employment, and erase the security problem. 
   2. The work that desperately needs to be done (i.e. land healing), would reduce dependency on Imperial relations, making it more difficult to compel the working class to reproduce them.
   Instead: insecure-security, stratified wages, uneven development (the cause of high economic migration — the medium of insecurity and stratification), and the ‘public works’ cages a million people yearly, militarizes the population, and (re)builds Bourgeois terrorism.” ︎
3. Hence why housing was a right in the USSR, “Thus a worker cannot be put out of his room, even for non-payment of rent. His wages can be attached, but if he is unemployed his rent is free. He cannot be charged more than a certain low sum, fixed in proportion to his wages.” Anna Louise Strong, The First Time In History, (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1924),149. ︎
4.  “…of course I condemn Hamas. Of course I have called October 7th what it was, which was a horrific war crime,…” ︎
5. According to the 2021 DSA Member Survey Report, 85% of membership is white, compared with only 4% Black representation. 28% of members are full upper-PB with household incomes of $100k or more. 80% of respondents had bachelor’s degrees, and approximately 60% of respondents occupy petty bourgeois or labor aristocratic positions, split between scholars, academics, white-collar, tech workers, non-profit organizations, public sector employees, healthcare or social work, self employed, writer, performer, arts, and political org/union. ︎
6. See resolution R22. ︎
7. “This pretense toward ‘freedom’ continued in 1776 when settlers revolted when London seemed to be loath to continue funding their wars of dispossession against indigenes and the constant conflict with enslaved Africans that was an adjunct of that process” Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 154 in the PDF. ︎
8. See J. Sakai Settlers Ch. 4.4, describing the process of the settler economy importing Chinese labor to displace the Mexican population of the southwest, only to then violently expropriate Chinese industry and landholdings. Afterwards, the same participants in these genocidal purges urged “unity” with Afrikan labor, as the next phase of the developing industrial unionism movement: “Terrance Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor (who had personally called for wiping out all Chinese in North America within one year), suddenly became the apostle of brotherhood when it came to persuading Afrikans to support his organization: ‘The color of a candidate shall not debar him from admission; rather let the coloring of his mind and heart be the test.’” ︎

This most recent scandal again demonstrates the inseparability of the structures of organizing we have criticized in the past from the perpetuation of chauvinism and abuse. As we have written about in the USU Prospectus, it is the top-down structure of major organizations like the CPUSA, PSL, RCI, and FRSO that engender the sort of anti-democratization and stagnant leadership that permit abuses like this to evade accountability to membership. We will offer criticism of that particular structure, and our feedback for what principled communists within and outside FRSO can do to prevent it. 

Following the exposure of a large Marxist organization for systematic permittance, compliance, and covering up of abuses, there is always a sense of hopelessness among conscious members and supporters of the exposed org. Many equate loss of trust in a particular organization with loss of hope in the movement for communism itself. To understand this, we must understand the reasons people overwhelmingly seek out larger organizations to subordinate themselves to, rather than forming their own groups from the ground up. These reasons are:

1. Political Underdevelopment: An individual new to Marxism assumes that an insufficient understanding of core principles and history will make any attempts at group formation, primarily through their own direction, careless or ineffectual.
2. Social Isolation: An individual who feels too socially isolated to begin the formation of a group — they do not have, or are not aware of, proximate access to other unorganized Marxists, and/or do not know where to begin to draw in the revolutionary masses. 
3. Fear of Redundancy: An individual who feels that to start from scratch in organization-building is wasted effort when a suitable organization of principled Marxists already exists within accessible distance. 

Political Underdevelopment

It is precisely the organized pursuit of Marxist understanding that laid the foundation for the emergence of nearly every successful socialist revolution throughout the world (Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, to name only a few). Therefore, if the underdeveloped comrade finds themselves unsure of where to begin, we cannot stress the importance of the study group enough. To study while the world burns is not to waste time, it is the only way to ensure we successfully douse the flames. 

To quote the USU handbook The Study Group:

Therefore, it is no idle fancy that we suggest the study group — the reading circle — as the focus of local work. The study group has historically been the way in which socialists educate themselves and each other. This is the methodology of early socialist development. We must consider ourselves to be in such a phase. We do not suggest the study group because it is simple or because it is the topic which we chose from a hat, but because it is a foundational type of primary Communist organization.

In fact, it is the overemphasis on “action,” before and above theory that will ensure precious time and energy be wasted, yet again. We often see the argument that, “Well, since the dialectic is practice-theory-practice, a group and its members must engage in practice first every single time, then study the results and modify next actions.” But this confuses our place within history; we wander the cramped halls of a library of failures, shelves stocked to burst with recorded practice.¹ What is the history of the Marxist movement in North America, if not the history of wheels spinning in place? This is not to suggest that there has never been progress, but those that did advance the struggle did so as far as they were able and willing to scientifically understand the conditions their actions existed within. 

Social Isolation

For the Marxist that is hesitant to undertake the building of a new Marxist organization due to isolation from other like-minded people in their community, we recommend the following (summarized from the relevant portions of the aforementioned Study Group handbook). First, investigate local conditions to determine demographics and needs. This will inform what the study group will initially set out to study and who in the local area will be most likely to be interested in revolutionary work. After this initial investigation, identify if there are any trustworthy individual Marxists nearby to assist in the formation of an Organizing Committee to adopt basic rules for the emerging organization and plan the first steps in putting it into motion. Whether an Organizing Committee is successfully assembled or the individual Marxist still finds themself operating on their own, they can proceed to the next step which is spreading the word of the study group through fliering or other outreach. We have seen the most success when the fliering advertises a specific text that will be read at a specific time and place, and that there is no expectation of having been familiar with it before the scheduled date.

If, however, the individual Marxist is not able to identify trustworthy individual Marxists nearby, nor engage in much of the on-the-ground investigation and spreading the word that the recommended tactics advise, we recommend getting involved in whatever local organizing is available for the purpose of identifying potential comrades to organize with separately in the creation of the study group. The individual should be wary of the ideological underpinnings of most local organizing, and keep in mind that the most vital work any individual Marxist can engage in is identifying others suitable for the creation of Marxist organizations. It is not the subordination of Marxists to local activism.

Fear of Redundancy

Fear of redundancy when considering building a new organization is, on its own, a valid concern. However, in understanding that it is valid, we must then ask, is the concern well-founded, is it sound? Let us assume, first, that it is. It is true that if you have a principled group of organized Marxists down the street, around the block, within a short bus trip or a bike ride away, then to attempt to build from scratch a new organization of Marxists to address the same community’s needs, to study the revolutionary science, or to otherwise advance the struggle, may be entirely redundant. Even in the cases of an existing organization formed to address a particular purpose (e.g. Red Aid, group study, community defense, etc.) that do not address a particular need an individual would like to organize around, it is in most cases best for that individual or group of individuals to make contact with the local organization and discuss the possibility of joining and forming a branch or committee to the organization that addresses the issue. This has the benefit of additional funding through dues, a preexisting and tested bylaws structure, and the input and labor of more people.

The alternative, more common case, is that through social media or word of mouth, the individual locates an organization of self-proclaimed Marxists, who identify with the same general tendency of the individual, Marxism-Leninism. The individual decides to contact the organization, which seems more than ready to receive and induct them into membership. The individual takes to the work with a sincere drive and passion. Likely, they become regarded by their fellow members as reliable and trustworthy. Principled. 

Then, weeks, months, years later, it happens. Maybe it happens all at once: the individual witnesses, or discovers, or experiences intra-org abuse. Maybe, at first, it’s a subtler, gnawing doubt: a confusing newsletter from leadership that vaguely gestures at some sort of conflict the membership must not allow themselves to be swayed by; the removal of a district organizer with no explanation due to “concerns of privacy”; a series of dead links to organizing cells that no longer exist, discussion of its members heavily discouraged. The more openly the individual confronts these moments of disconnect, these organizational hauntings, the more the individual realizes the organization has begun to shift and squirm around them. The individual’s reputation as trustworthy spoils, now other members seem nervous talking to them; their reputation as principled is outright questioned — “You’re behaving like a wrecker.” The secondary realization will not come easy, that the abuse is not some isolated tumor, but every muscle fiber and bone of the organization. It’s a nightmare, to push for a new life for everyone, only to find you’ve become embedded in a corpse. 

This is the reality of organizations like FRSO, RCI, and PSL. The members satisfied with working in a faux-radical reformist group stay, follow the rules (regardless of how these change based on leadership’s whims), and, understanding that their satisfaction with gradual change and improved conditions for the labor aristocracy is mirrored in the organization, remain unquestioningly loyal to it. Why wouldn’t they? As patriotic settlers and flag-worshipping elites show us, people become fiercely defensive of the structure serving their interests. For this loyalty, they are rewarded with advancement, leadership, maybe even the highest honor of all: full-time employment as a revisionist, maybe even with a corner office. The FRSO whistleblowers say this plainly (emphasis ours):

Each time leadership protects an alleged abuser, those who see the problem clearly either leave or leadership pushes them out, while those who can rationalize the decision remain. Over successive incidents, the organization becomes composed of people who have demonstrated willingness to defend leadership’s protection of alleged abusers. Leadership advances from this filtered pool.

Chrisley Carpio² and Michela Martinazzi³ were present for the Tampa and Gainesville incidents, and defended Dustin⁴ both times. Jared Hamil⁵ was the Tampa District Organizer in 2014. Fern⁶ was the DO of Gainesville in 2013 and Jacksonville in 2016. Sol Marquez⁷ defended Dustin in Tampa. They’ve all since been promoted to national leadership positions in FRSO.

Meanwhile, the members who are most desperate for real sweeping change, no matter how bitter the struggle, the most ready to be revolutionary, are resigned to the rank-and-file. These dedicated comrades are usually the most committed, initially, to the communicated “cause” of the organization. Usually nationally oppressed, disabled, queer, and/or trans, these members give their blood to the organization. It is useful to emphasize the ways in which the “multi-national working class” line that organizations like FRSO hold, and that we have criticized, helps to facilitate an opportunist position not just externally, but internally as well, as we now see clearly. It is by this line that opportunists can lecture members about how it is the advocacy against chauvinism and abuse which disrupts the “solidarity” and “stability” of this supposed multi-national working class. Real determining factors such as settler-colonialism and imperial superwages are flattened for the sake of a model that prizes false unity and not shaking the boat. Sometimes, in spite of being surrounded by this rhetoric, members try to struggle within the organization, like they were told to again and again, only to be stonewalled, silenced, disciplined, and gaslit. The system serves its purpose and crushes all attempts at real revolutionary struggle. Afterwards, these comrades are isolated entirely, betrayed, and often left too burnt out to pick the banner up again. Both leadership and the capitalist state are satisfied by this outcome. Leadership gets to continue its maintenance of a structure purged of genuine communists who may threaten business as usual, and the state eagerly pats them on the back for demobilizing these radicals. Is it any wonder these organizations have persisted in their current form for so many decades?

These organizations always set themselves up as the true inheritors of the future, in contradistinction to the tiny microsect or local study group.  This is how they market themselves — it is the only way they can justify their own drawn out existence. They say, “Well, what else are you going to do? Start a tiny group of three people that claims it represents the masses?” the same way  the Democratic Party defends its position saying “What are you going to do? Run as an independent?”. It is the same logic painted red and yellow. The rhetoric of the reformist clouds the horizon. This is repeated ad nauseum within these organizations and then repeated by members to people outside the group. Even when the principled communists flee these sinking ships in disgust still ready and willing to organize, too often does this toxic idea stick to them, signaling the sequel: the communist goes looking for another “big” org. 

It is crucial we do everything in our power to ensure this doesn’t happen. The choice is not between languishing in bloated reformist NGOs or isolated in some puny microsect for all time. This is a false binary. The true path forward is what has worked for most socialist revolutions around the world. The party of the people is not born from some downtown office that directs the formation of new cells like a chain restaurant establishing franchises. Rather, it is precisely the tiny, local group of principled communists that shifts history, step by step, until a leap and bound, to the party of the people. To summarize the portion on this in the USU Prospectus⁸: the correct path begins with the formation of the local organization, uniquely adapted to local conditions and able to establish roots among the local masses in a way these franchise organizations are incapable of. The local organization then reaches out to other primary groups of principled communists regionally and then around the country in order to collaborate, coordinate, and struggle in a process that eventually enables the establishment of real organizational unity. 

These local organizations are not subordinated to a tiny sect filtered through several vetting processes to remove any trace of real revolutionary consciousness. They democratically determine their own representatives to the second-order organizations they form to coordinate and reproduce their unity. It is through this initially, vitally horizontal process that a greater set of bylaws are written and ratified, a set of practices and standards. Through a series of conferences these local organizations eventually form the party-to-be. 

This is how the vanguard party emerges, not in the backwards manner that the CPUSA, PSL, and FRSO have undertaken. This top-down schematic followed by the chauvinist organizations is the correct blueprint only if your design is a weapon wielded against the people. We, however, wish to help the revolutionary masses build a great cannon to obliterate chauvinistic violence forever. The All-Empire Worker’s League has begun this process. 

Looking Forward

We commend the efforts of our comrades to lay out a plan for agitation and exodus of members from FRSO. As challenging as it may be, it is often far more important that the most principled communists, with the capacity to do so without risking burnout, remain within the exposed organization. Not for anything so foolhardy as to “change the system from within” (you cannot negotiate with the snake from the pit of its stomach), but to agitate and heighten the struggle to a fever pitch from within. As they do this, these communists must seek out sympathetic comrades within who take these abuses seriously but remain unsure for the reasons above. Each rallying cry for justice will peel back the rotting mask of democracy from the revisionist’s face; the skull of reaction will be grinning, sharp, and naked. 

The strategy of agitating around an attempt to seize the structure and body of the organization from its center may be useful in winning over the sympathetic comrades mentioned above, still in the grip of the apparent hopelessness of organizing outside the vast structure FRSO operates. But just as the authors of the exposé recognize, this goal will never be achieved. It is like a radical program that “demands” the United States government liquidate its military. This is a goal of the radical movement, but it is not something that will ever be given, only seized. However, just as part of that recognition is seeing that the settler-bourgeois state machinery will be smashed and replaced with a new structure to defend the revolution of the oppressed, the agitators in FRSO must see the structure of FRSO not as something to be taken and used, but something to be left in the dustbin of history. It is not an organizational system useful to those of us who demand revolution, it is a multi-level-marketing scheme with a beret. 

It is the people you will find while raising hell that will be invaluable to you. You must link arms with the most solid, passionate comrades you can find and only jump ship when you have enough hands to commandeer the lifeboats. Treat the chaos of this scandal as a proving ground for the most trustworthy and audacious communists. When you find your people, we have some resources to help you get started. Just as we were honored to offer our feedback and labor to the reporters of this abuse, we eagerly await your input, curiosity, and fire; not just as members of Unity–Struggle–Unity, but as part of the All-Empire Worker’s League. Meet us, organized and principled, and be treated as you are, as you’ve proven yourself to be: comrades.

Contact the USU Editorial Board here.

Contact the All-Empire Worker’s League here.

Footnotes

1. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Marx. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852. ︎
2.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO, leader of the FRSO Student Commission, and president of National Students for a Democratic Society.” (Copied from source.) ︎
3.  “Member of the Central Committee, current District Organizer of FRSO New York.” Ibid. ︎
4.  “FRSO member who was accused of sexual assault in Gainesville, Tampa, and Jacksonville and protected by FRSO leadership. Left FRSO in 2018.” Ibid. ︎
5.  “Leader of Labor Commission” Ibid. ︎
6.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO. DO of Gainesville when FRSO protected Dustin Ponder in 2013. DO of Jacksonville in 2016.” Ibid. ︎
7.  “Leadership of Legalization 4 All and FRSO Chicano/Latino Commission.” Ibid. ︎
8.  Worth highlighting is the subsection of our Prospectus on FRSO specifically. Written years ago, before our criticisms of them for settler chauvinism and these most recent revelations, and thus offering them more good faith than it turns out they deserved, the section still holds up in diagnosing the issue of structure that produces FRSO’s moribund theory and practice: “FRSO recognizes in theory that primary organizations must be built. However, despite claiming that they are a pre-party formation and not a party, they operate like a party-in-miniature, with congresses, a Central Committee, and central decision-making. The efforts of local FRSO organizers are directed at creating primary organizations — the local is being directed by the center. This reverses the necessary stages of growth of the Party.” ︎

What is the psychological impact on the children for whom their agency over their own bodies is violently ripped away from them, whose bodies are disfigured against their will, and their identities and very humanity denied them by friends, family, and society? These mechanisms of social abuse lead many trans people to attempt suicide. Rather than treat us as victims of social violence, reactionaries proudly tout “41%”, referencing the trans suicide attempt rate. It is of course nonsense to assert that being trans makes us suicidal, rather than the issue of the above denial of our fundamental humanity, and denial of our access to life-saving medical care, and denial to community, love, support, and respect, that produces suicidal individuals. It’s social murder. But that is naturally the aim of these policies. The cruelty is the point. They want us dead. This is a deliberate policy of genocide, which we have written about before (Transition or Death, Total War and Trans Liberation, Death Before Detransition: In Solidarity with Jaia Cruz). This assertion is in no sense hyperbole or exaggeration. Trans people are under genocidal assault by the settler state.

The proponents of this policy are well aware of this, and consider this forcible imposition of their own values onto the bodies of children to be “protecting” them. Protecting them from what? From the freedom to choose, which naturally builds on the innate drive to resist infringements on that choice. If children are permitted agency over their own lives, then what guarantee is there that girls will grow up into submissive subservient women, obediently serving the interests of abusive patriarchal fathers, husbands, and the state? What guarantee is there that boys will grow up to take their place in the home, workplace, and state as the violent enforcers of the patriarchal order? If given a choice, children can choose anything, and as far as the settler-colonial system is concerned, that is unacceptably dangerous. These children will be ruthlessly punished for choosing “wrong”, and so in a twisted sense stripping away their freedom to choose certainly does “protect” them.

It should be stressed that this danger perceived by the transphobic reactionaries is in fact real. We are a threat. By simply existing out in the open, trans people, particularly trans women, threaten the continued enforcement of transmisogynistic violence which undergirds the very fabric of the cispatriarchal regime and consequently the material reproductive base of the settler colonial occupation of Turtle Island. We lay bare the crying contradictions of this societal death cult. We exemplify in action as well as in words that you really do have a choice, you don’t have to submit, you can live the life that you want for yourself, you can be the person that YOU want to be. By demanding respect for our humanity and our agency, we demand in the same breath respect for everyone’s humanity and everyone’s agency.

The existence of trans people then is an irreconcilable contradiction, a revolution in process against the hegemony of patriarchy. This as-yet-incomplete revolution forces compromises by the regime. It begins to accept our existence, but only in part, in incomplete form, and it demands at the same time compromise from us. The forms of these compromises are varied, ranging from “stealth” where our existence as trans people is accepted only so long as we remain invisible and indistinguishable from cis people, to “respect” for our “identities” wherein our humanity is treated as a relatively harmless aberration, a “delusion” to be tolerated and humored, or a “mental illness” to be pitied rather than a revolution to be feared. But the fear is there nonetheless. We’re depicted in the news media and mythologized in horror movies as grotesque brutish caricatures of women, bent on the predation and murder of “real” (cisgender) women. A cold gripping terror of trans women is woven into the very fabric of this society. We are the worst thing you can possibly be, repulsive to all decent upstanding people. At least, that’s how the bourgeois media likes to present us, as a cultural boogeyman to be reviled. And as the empire’s grip on power declines, as its legitimacy in the hearts of the people falters, the fear turns to panic, and it begins clawing back what little it gave us. The empire itself is terrified of us and killing our trans children because of it.

Trans people, particularly trans women, have always been at the forefront of the Queer liberation struggle. From the Stonewall riots to STAR’s collaboration with the Black Panthers, trans women have consistently been on the bleeding edge of militant struggle, cutting into the heart of the empire. Today the Communist movement finds itself disproportionately represented by trans women. Nearly every org has us, and some of our orgs are majority trans. And the reason is simple: we’re marked for death by a society which has never had a place for us and never truly will. When our very lives are forfeit, we have absolutely nothing left to lose but our chains. We’re drawn to Communism because the settler colony leaves us no choice: revolt or die. Make no mistake, this assault will continue and it will escalate. The support by Communists for the Palestinian liberation struggle will be pointed to as evidence of “transgender terrorism”, necessitating additional crackdowns, surveillance, imprisonment, and disappearing. Cutting off trans children from lifesaving healthcare is accompanied by banning the discussion of trans issues among all children. We face punishment, arrest, and even death for simply talking to kids about this. They will begin to consider us unfit parents and those of us who have kids will face the reality of the state’s willingness to kidnap them in order to break the generational continuity of our revolutionary resistance. Don’t believe us? Disabled people already routinely face this, and are being pushed ever further into the margins of society where they can be left to die with nobody watching. 

This is nothing new. The AIDS epidemic was left to run rampant, deliberately exacerbated, research was blocked, and trans and queer people began to waste away and disappear, because they were afraid of us, because they wanted us dead, and those deaths set the revolutionary movement back by a whole generation. The genocide against us destroyed and continues to destroy countless lives and their accumulated experiences, knowledge, culture, and traditions of resistance. But this tendency towards genocide, and the tendency to target children, goes back even further—it is baked into the structure of settler colonial society. The empire’s genocidal hunger for control over this land faced militant resistance by the Indigenous nations for centuries, until finally the policy to “kill the Indian to save the man” was implemented. The state kidnapped children from their Native parents, forcing them into brutal reeducation camps disguised as “residential schools.”

Native children were abused and tortured into adopting the colonizer’s language, religion, and culture. Their spiritual and philosophical understanding of the world was beaten out of them. Their hair was cut short, their clothes were destroyed and replaced with what the colonizer deemed acceptable. Any “confusion” about gender roles (which the Indigenous nations had very different views on), was violently stamped out. Their very names were stolen from them, replaced with names suitable for “Christian” society, and unspeakable sexual violence was inflicted on them as a disciplinary measure. In breaking the Indigenous cultural continuity, the traditions and experiences of resistance were shattered. Traditional communal practices and modes of organization were erased, and the very language of resistance was lost (a process referred today as epistemicide).

This is why they are targeting trans kids first. Not because there’s any “reasonable scientifically-grounded” argument for blocking lifesaving healthcare for children, not because children are “threatened” by trans education, or by sex education, but because the empire itself is threatened by our tradition of resistance. It is terrified that we are forming part of the leadership of the revolutionary struggle that will overthrow it, and it is seeking to erase our history, culture, and knowledge through both exterminatory and “cultural” genocide. Similarly, the targeting and extermination of Palestinian children by the zionist occupation is far from an accident, but a deliberate measure to break the continuity of resistance, to stave off the revolution for generations to come. 

The Black, Indigenous, trans, and queer revolutionaries of yesterday were crushed by coordinated campaigns of genocidal propaganda, state terrorism, assassination, and biological warfare. Palestine faces the brunt of the current wave of the genocidal onslaught, (as of this writing the occupation is killing 150 Palestinians a day) but the violence won’t stop with them. The fate of colonized peoples everywhere, from Palestine to Turtle Island, is bound together by the violence of settler colonialism; and as a group fundamentally incompatible with the settler regime, the fate of trans people too is bound up with theirs, as is the fate of disabled people. We aren’t in this struggle alone! It is the solemn duty of the Communist movement to center and uplift the struggles of the most oppressed, to center the Black liberation struggle, the Indigenous/Palestinian liberation struggle, the Queer liberation struggle, the trans liberation struggle, the disability liberation struggle, the women’s liberation struggle. These forces can and will be united, they must be for all of us to survive. These are the forces of the revolutionary proletariat, whom Communists must weld together into a united class capable of leading the Revolution. Together, we will take the future into our own hands, by force, and carry forward the banner of humanity, marching hand-in-hand over the flaming wreckage of this most ruthless and destructive of empires, towards a shining future of peace and equality for all.

It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Let’s get to work.

Almost nowhere in the United States is the class struggle sharper, or more one-sided, than in Atlanta, Georgia. And almost nowhere can the dynamics of race in that class struggle be more clearly seen. This has been true for years. In 2018, the Guardian devoted a week of coverage to the city, laying out in great detail a situation which was, even then, remarkably bad. The passage of five years, with the pandemic and the political unrest those years brought, have only made things worse.

Atlanta’s population in 2019 was 51% Black. By the following year, that number had fallen to 47%.  This was the first time in its modern history the city did not have a Black majority. In January of 2019, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the city was $1,868. By January of 2023, that had gone up to $2,212. The national average rent over the same period increased from $1,465 in 2019 to $1,900 in early 2023, placing Atlanta well ahead of the national curve for the period. These numbers clearly show a city that is rapidly becoming both whiter and more expensive.

This process is known as gentrification, of course, and it has arguably been the primary contradiction faced by the U.S. working class over the last several decades. In Atlanta, several factors have come together to create a situation that surpasses the scale and scope of the problem elsewhere. The most obvious of these, as a driver of the increasing whiteness and costliness of the city, has been the relocation of much of the U.S. film and television industry to Atlanta. Hollywood has come to town, and both the city and the state have rolled out a red carpet worthy of the gaudiest, most decadent film premier.

In the period 2019-2020, Georgia was home to an estimated total of 641 film and television productions, which brought over $5 billion into the state.  The vast majority of these productions were and are based in Atlanta. And what led them all here was simple: money. Georgia, from 2008 onward, has offered the industry heavy incentives in the form of tax rebates and other enticements. And the local government has allowed the influx of film industry people to essentially colonize the city. No effort has been made to protect longtime residents from the economic impact of a tidal wave of rich Californians and New Yorkers crashing into the place. Quite the opposite, in fact. The city has declared class war on its poorest people and their neighborhoods. And the army that fights that war is the Atlanta Police Department.

An excellent case in point comes from a neighborhood known as the Old Fourth Ward, which sits east of downtown. This was Dr. King’s neighborhood, and he and his wife are buried there. It is also rapidly being transformed into precisely the kind of petty bourgeois Potemkin village that has sprung up all over the city, to house and amuse the white gentry. Gated communities of condos or townhouses that come with game rooms and gyms, dog parks and pools, surrounded by upscale restaurants and shops to soak up the residents’ spending money. Many of these also feature a “market,” essentially a high-end mall food court minus the mall, of which there are many throughout the city. The one in the Old Fourth Ward is called the Krog Street Market. To go there on a weekend evening is to stumble into a stereotypical yuppie’s wildest dreams. Throngs of white people peppered with a few darker faces, all of them frolicking in their artificial paradise, dropping fistfuls of cash. What one does not see is any poor people, and very few Black people, who are not at work. This is one of Atlanta’s most historic working class Black neighborhoods.

The question is how the Old Fourth Ward got this way. We are fortunate to have a firsthand account from a former Atlanta police officer who, disgusted by what he was ordered to do and why, not only quit over it but went to the media. This was Tom Gissler, which may not be his real name. According to Gissler, in 2020, after three years on the force, he was given very specific instructions by his superiors: target the people living in an Old Fourth Ward complex called Bedford Pines Apartments, which is privately owned public housing. Gissler’s orders were explicit: get the people living there on anything you can, parking violations, old warrants, petty drug charges, whatever. Let nothing slide. According to Gissler these orders were unusual:

It made me very curious. So on my own time…I drove over there and…was like: “Hey, this is what I’m being asked to do. Why do you think that is? What’s going on?”

A homeowner in the area was very frank with me. He said the guys who own Bedford Pines got their tax bill last year, and their taxes were assessed based on all the gentrification that’s happening in the area. And so they wanted to move everybody out of these apartments and knock ’em down and rebuild these nice expensive apartments and the government said no. And so then they said, “Well, that’s ok, we’ll just increase the rent.” They tried to increase the rent and the Section 8 guys came back out and said, “No, you can’t do that either.”

The only way you can evict or do anything like that is if the person who [lives in] the apartment is convicted of a felony. So the Bedford Pines guys just went to the police department and said: “We want you to police in here, and we’re going to give you a section of Bedford Pines to actually have office space. And I want you to lock up as many people as possible so we can make these apartments vacant and we can knock ’em down.”

I go to my supervisors: Is this what the case is? And they looked at me like, what are you, stupid? Of course, why else would we be doing this?

The pattern of aggressive policing to drive out working class Black residents that Gissler witnessed in the Old Fourth Ward has been carried out in neighborhoods around the city. Summerhill, Peoplestown, Pittsburgh, the Bluff; the list is long and growing. Once the original residents are mostly gone, the city and their preferred developers move in and buy up whole blocks. These are then leased out to white hipster capitalists, who renovate the buildings and open their foodie restaurants, their breweries and cafés, their boutiques and yoga studios. Fast forward two years and the high-end yuppies start to move in. They displace the hipsters, and the whole grim circus rolls on to the next neighborhood. And if, somewhere along the way local residents become frustrated enough to protest or otherwise object, the police come back, make more arrests and bust whatever heads catch their eye. Many of the city’s numerous gang prosecutions are rooted in this process.

This has gone on in Atlanta for years, at least as far back as the preparations for the 1996 Olympics. It might appear, from the outside, to be strange. Atlanta is a Black-controlled city, after all. The offices of mayor, police chief and city council have been mostly occupied by Black people since the 1970s. The city has long been held up as the most successful, practical, capitalist answer to the demands of ’60s radicals for Black power. And yet the policies that slowly eroded that Black majority have been relentlessly pursued. One might be tempted to conclude, on this basis, that the primary contradiction in Atlanta is class rather than race. As we shall see later on, this is not really the case, though class does play such an outsized role in the political economy of race in the city that the two are difficult to separate.

The best guides through this terrain are E. Franklin Frazier’s 1955 book The Black Bourgeoisie, Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture’s 1967 work Black Power, and the work of the late Glen Ford on the concept of the “Black misleadership class.” The short version is that the Black political leadership in Atlanta employs a rhetoric crafted to appeal to their working class constituents, while their policies advance other interests. Viewed through this lens, the situation becomes more clear.

Things in Atlanta would likely have continued this way until the remaking of the city was complete, if not for 2020. That year, the covid pandemic collided with outrage at the police murder of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and many others. There was a serious uprising in Atlanta. It was in the aftermath of that uprising that a proposal was put forward which had, as its stated goal and purpose, rewarding the police after a long hot summer. The centerpiece of that proposal was a massive, new, state-of-the-art police training facility.

This announcement was years in the making. Research on “what a training center would look like and what it would cost” began as early as 2015. By January 2021, after months of reactionary media coverage about crime waves and low police morale, conditions were ripe. The mayor at that time, Keisha Lance Bottoms, rolled out “One Atlanta: One APD,” a multi-pronged plan to “bolster police presence, training, and morale.” The plan called for the expansion of the city’s already vast surveillance network, the targeting of “nuisance properties” such as bars and nightclubs with increased force, and the forming of partnerships with the FBI and local sheriffs to “put more officers on the street.” 

Lance Bottoms’ plan further promised to “explore a public safety training academy that expands recruitment classes and ensures that police officers and firefighters have high-quality facilities and training.” On April 1, 2021 plans for the training academy were finally revealed. The $90 million project, to be constructed on a parcel of forested land in neighboring Dekalb County, was to include housing for police academy trainees, many shooting ranges, an explosives testing and training site, and large a mock city for urban warfare and counterinsurgency training. It was this last feature that led opponents of the project to give it the name which stuck: Cop City.

Opportunism from the White “Left”

Right Opportunism 

The proposal to construct Cop City was met with harsh criticism and resistance from around Atlanta. An eclectic coalition of neighborhood associations, police/prison abolition groups, environmentalists, liberals, democratic-socialists, and anarchists began to come together. Soon they had a slogan: Stop Cop City.

Activists focused their efforts on mobilizing community pressure on the City Council to vote the proposal down. They canvassed neighborhoods, circulated petitions, held rallies, marches, and town hall meetings. As opposition to the plan grew, the city made a few calculated concessions. The 150-acre project was scaled back to 85 acres, and provisions were added to plant 100 hardwoods for every tree removed during construction. Meanwhile, the official city council vote on the project was twice delayed by allegations that the “listening sessions” being held to gather community feedback were a sham. Eventually, the Council set up a phone line that people could call to make a short recording of whatever they had to say. This resulted in 17 hours worth of audio, about 70% of which was firmly against the project. Nevertheless, on the evening of September 8, 2021, the City Council voted to greenlight Cop City by a margin of 10-4, swatting away four months of mobilization like a gnat.

This was of course predictable, and indeed it was predicted. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s local Steering Committee, told a reporter at an August protest outside City Hall, that DSA thought the measure would pass. “We just believe that Councilwoman Shephard isn’t actually listening to her own constituents, and she is doing what she wants to do to support the Atlanta Police Foundation’s funders.” For some organizers, the obstinance of local officials was more than just likely, it was necessary. A former member of a local organization called Defund Atlanta Police Department, Refund Communities (DARC), Jesse Pratt López, stated in a recent interview that the defeat came as no surprise. It was, in fact, the very reaction the coalition had built their strategy around. According to Pratt López, the goal was to radicalize the masses by leading them through a futile civic exercise, thereby catalyzing a more militant movement against the project. Following the vote, however, rather than picking up steam the first iteration of the movement to Stop Cop City began to fissure.

Within days of the city council vote, DARC itself would dissolve. Its last act was the publication of an open letter, endorsed by a majority of active members, explaining the reasons for this dissolution. The letter describes a pattern of chauvinism and anti-Blackness in a movement riddled with internal contradictions. It begins: “In early September, our abolitionist group…informally dissolved after multiple white and non-Black organizers in DARC and Atlanta DSA completely eroded the trust and confidence of Black comrades in DARC. These same organizers harmed DARC’s relationship with other coalition groups that collaborated on the #StopCopCity campaign.” The letter goes on to allege that DSA’s leadership used the movement and the moment to advance their own goals: “While the campaign began as a horizontal movement-building project, it became clear that Atlanta DSA sought oversight and control (financially and structurally).” The DSA, according to DARC, saw the campaign against Cop City primarily as a way to recruit people into their own formation, and attempted to take over the coalition’s messaging and strategy. A text message from a member of the local DSA Steering Committee, sent the week of the council vote and published with the open letter, reveals them advising others to use this period of “peak attention” to “try to absorb as many people into DSA as possible, win or lose.”  

DARC’s letter helps explain the tactic of lobbying the City Council to vote the project down while knowing damn well they would not. The notion that working class Atlantans, people who live their entire lives in the trenches of the city’s class war, require a civics lesson to be radicalized is self-evidently chauvinistic. Such a plan coming from a broad, predominantly Black, coalition of locals makes no sense; but coming from a clique of mostly white, petty bourgeois electoralists, it does. DSA appears to have been more interested in growing their organization than winning a fight they always expected to lose. In pursuit of that goal, it strong-armed its way to the front of a movement of working class Black people, maligning and alienating fellow organizers as it went.

It is no surprise to see DSA, in this particular case and as a broader organization, move this way. It is an instrument, not of the working class, but rather of, by, and for petty bourgeois opportunists. Born out of the work of Michael Harrington, himself a petty bourgeois opportunist, amid the pervasive anticommunism of the Cold War, the DSA was formed in the early 1980s by a merger of two smaller social-democrat formations. Then as now, DSA’s entire reason for existence is to be a place for liberals who want to go further than the Democratic Party, but not “too far,” i.e.: not toward outright, mature communism. Its theoretical framework is derived largely from the work of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, two bourgeois collaborators who were soundly refuted by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg over a century ago.

Even the group’s name gives this away, speaking as it does, as Kautsky did, of “democracy” without going the necessary further step to ask: democracy for which class? The group has never, at any point, revealed an accurate understanding that everything in class society has a definite class character, and that which is not explicitly proletarian is bourgeois, because it derives from the culture and ideology of the bourgeoisie. As such, the DSA’s attempt to collage together a form of socialism that the bourgeois state will tolerate is doomed from the start, because this can only be accomplished by leaving the essence of Marxism, its scientific revolutionary character, behind. The end result can only be a reformist, radical liberalism at best, though more frequently such formations function, objectively, as agents of the bourgeoisie. The only real question being whether they are themselves aware of this or not.

Opportunism of this type arises in tandem with imperialism, as a fraction of imperialist superprofits are tossed to a section of the working class like so many crumbs. It emerged in the context of the First World War, which the opportunists supported in collaboration with their national bourgeois, in defiance of a revolutionary understanding of that war as an essentially imperialist project. In the heat of this controversy, Lenin defined opportunism simply as “an alliance between sections of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat.” DSA’s actions in Atlanta clearly demonstrate the accuracy of this definition. They attempted nothing but the advance of their own short-term interests over those of the majority Black proletariat of Atlanta. And they accomplished nothing but furthering the bourgeoisie’s goal of building Cop City, in that they seriously damaged the working class resistance to the project in the city.

Left Opportunism 

It is within this context of a working class movement undermined by opportunism that anarchists entered the scene in a significant way. Early in 2022, a nebulous group of individuals calling themselves “forest defenders” moved into the South River Forest, site of the proposed facility. They began setting up camps and erecting “tree-sits.” Their intention was to physically occupy the forest, thereby preventing work on Cop City from beginning. It is unclear how the decision to pursue this particular tactic, which has been employed many times with very little success, was made. In many reports, the forest defenders describe themselves as a “decentralized, autonomous movement [where] nobody is in charge, and nobody is responsible for anybody else’s actions,” so it’s unlikely we will ever get an answer to that question.  

The camp was in a state of perpetual flux, with people constantly coming and going, but reports indicate that somewhere between 40-100 activists were ensconced in the trees throughout 2022. They practiced yoga, planted gardens, held religious ceremonies, and of course engaged in minor vandalism of construction equipment. Their strategy was to make themselves “an immovable obstacle to any construction” while allies outside of the forest went to court and pressured construction companies in an effort to end the project before it began. And when, as they sometimes did, work crews tried to start clearing the forest despite all this, those in the camp “put their bodies on the line, climbing into trees to prevent them from being felled.”

The risks involved with such tactics hardly need to be explained. The police were called in very quickly and there were frequent altercations, which became increasingly violent as the year went on. During a May confrontation, police claimed a forest defender threw a Molotov cocktail at an officer. In a December raid on the encampment, police used tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets on activists in the trees. Yet for all of this, the approach to operational security in the camp was incoherent at best. When speaking to the media, as they often did, forest defenders concealed their identities, distorted their voices and used aliases like Twig and Rutabaga. This gives the impression that, on some level, they understood how vulnerable they were. But rather than regimenting security given the clear threat of police violence, they left fundamental things such as scouting and keeping watch to be taken up by anyone on a spontaneous, voluntary basis, for reasons which were purely ideological.

Arguably more important security concerns, such as the fact that police would surely attempt to infiltrate the camp, do not appear to have been considered at all. On their numerous social media accounts and websites, forest defenders repeatedly sent out open calls to the public: all were welcome, no questions asked. A June 2, 2022 communique posted to the website Scenes from the Atlanta Forest reads:

We are welcoming ALL the tactics. Kate Bush flash mob when kkkops arrive? Fuck yeah. Frontline Action to stop machines of destruction? Fuck yeah. Please just get your sweet fucking feral ass down here.

Your house sitting gig & coffee shop job can wait– come occupy the forest, & if you got privilege, use it to throw down, as trees, community members & non-human animals are better than a clear cut lot with a militarized police training center.

The stakes are high & the forest is calling!

Come for the blackberries & community, & stay for the chaos!

Setting aside the condescension toward workers who, with bills and babies, must have jobs that absolutely cannot and will not wait, there are serious problems here. The “act first, ask questions later” ideology permeates the forest defenders’ entire internet footprint. One of their Instagram pages features a buffet of organizing tactics: phone zaps, rallies, marches, mutual aid, and teach-ins. These are peppered with more urgent calls to direct action. One such post, from January 25, 2022, reads in bold red and black font: “We need folks on the ground to stop bulldozing happening by the ponds by the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. Most of the entrances have cops. Risk of police encounter is medium-high, be smart. Be alert.” Another post, from May 4, 2022 reads “Police are entering the Weelaunee Forest in large numbers to remove forest defenders. Please come help now!”

One needn’t be a seasoned organizer to understand how reckless this is. To put out a mass call to action, on the internet, insisting that anyone who reads it charge immediately into the woods, flinging their bodies in front of a brigade of heavily armed cops and bulldozers is astonishing. The best it can do is halt construction at that particular moment, a victory so temporary as to be essentially Pyrrhic. At worst, it leaves everyone who turns up totally vulnerable to police violence, with no means of self defense and without the requisite knowledge of the terrain to even flee. It boggles the mind that activists, so diligent in concealing their identities from the readers of Rolling Stone or Vice, could have such a cavalier attitude about the various dangers posed by police. Eventually, this would have literally fatal consequences.

On the morning of Wednesday, January 18, 2023, gunfire rang out in the forest. Police encircled the camp and ambushed, opening fire on Manuel Terán, known in the camp as Tortuguita a.k.a. Tort. They were shot at least 13 times, killing them as they emerged from a tent. A sheriff’s deputy was shot as well, and while police claim that Terán shot first, everyone on the scene except the cops have disputed this from the start. For weeks, police denied that there was any body camera footage from the incident; but such cameras were clearly visible on APD officers in news reports and the recordings were eventually released. They reveal a cluster of suppressed, high caliber military weapons opening up almost in unison, with no preceding, small caliber fire such as might have come from the legal, registered pistol which Terán owned. Later in the video an APD officer is seen asking someone off-camera, “You fucked up your own officer?” and receiving a grunted, affirmative reply.

What happened that day is as clear as it will likely ever be, though important questions remain. Did the police know beforehand that Terán had a gun and target them on that basis? If so, how did the cops come by that information? How were police able to encircle the camp that morning without being detected? Why were there no lookouts when everyone knew this was coming eventually and even one minute’s warning would likely have kept everyone in the camp alive? Because the only real feature of the “autonomous, nonhierarchical” form of mobilization that prevailed in the forest is that “no one is in charge and no one is responsible for anyone else,” there is no one to even ask such questions, leaving only silence regarding the entirely needless death of a brave, committed person.

Rather than pausing to reevaluate their strategy after this catastrophic turn of events, anarchists immediately resorted to reckless mobilization once again. The Saturday after Terán’s murder, a vigil in their honor was used as cover for a small-scale riot. A police car was burned, a Wells Fargo vandalized, and 6 more protestors were arrested. #AvengeTort became a trending topic on social media and across the country there were other random acts, ranging from graffiti to attacking office buildings with “stench agents.” What the people involved clearly fail to understand is that mobilization alone, no matter how immediately satisfying to the emotions, will never be enough to halt Cop City or anything else. As Kwame Ture was constantly at pains to point out, mobilization is easy because people instinctively respond to injustice, but “if we’re not careful, we allow mobilization to become an event. The struggle is never an event, it’s a process: a continual, eternal process.” Mobilizations that aren’t tied to a disciplined, organized, working-class base will always fall apart once the heat of feeling fades.

Liberal reformists, petty bourgeois opportunists and custeristic anarchists have spent two years at the center of this struggle. For all of their efforts, they have not made any measurable progress at all, having failed at every turn to convert mobilization into organization. In fact, many of their tactics have proven downright alienating to Atlanta’s working class. This is certainly true of all the tilting at City Council windmills. And it is equally true of the forest camp, where one local resident noticed that “those treehouses are nicer than my fucking apartment.” The erstwhile movement against Cop City seems to be about everything except winning, and therefore it is losing. One activist is dead. Eighteen are facing Domestic Terrorism charges that carry thirty-five year sentences. At time of writing, construction crews are clearing the forest while heavily armed police stand guard at every entrance. And the best the project’s opponents can come up with is a plan to re-occupy the forest the first week of March, to which end they have called, once again, for anyone and everyone to come to Atlanta and go camping with them.

These events are as troubling as they are familiar. Recent history is littered with the wreckage of such mobilizations. From Occupy Wall Street to Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter, all were undone by their insistence on mobilization at the expense of disciplined, militant organization. And for all this, still such methods are widely praised and held up as the future of leftwing politics, which is flatly absurd. The reality is that a truly horizontal organization does not and cannot exist. Friedrich Engels explored this in his 1872 essay, On Authority, concluding that, under bourgeois rule, it is impossible to create an organization in which one’s will is never subordinated to another’s. Even in the most utopian, anti-authoritarian formations, someone’s ideas end up prevailing. And when the idea that prevails is nothing but a refusal to have coherent ideas, it virtually always ends in defeat, with people dead or in prison.

The Atlanta Police Foundation and Ignored Answers 

The movement against Cop City, such as it is, has focused its outrage on various actors at various times. The mayor, the city council, the police, the contractors, and the corporations who have provided funding for the project have all been targeted for everything from protest to graffiti to sabotage. Often overlooked entirely, and rarely correctly analyzed, has been the private, 501(c)3 nonprofit called the Atlanta Police Foundation.

This is a serious error, because the APF is in fact the primary force behind Cop City. It was their idea, they brought it to the mayor, they pushed it through the city council, they have controlled the conversation around the issue, they control the land in question, they are slated to provide the overwhelming majority of the funding for the project and they will apparently operate it if it is eventually built. The question, then, becomes who and what is the APF? Answering that question is of paramount importance, because it reveals not only the interests that want Cop City built, but also maps the real terrain of power in the city of Atlanta.

In seeking an answer to this question, what we do not find is as eloquent as what we do. The APF, as a 501(c)3 organization, is required to file fairly transparent tax documents which subsequently become publicly available. But such records are only available up to and including fiscal 2020, the year before the activity around Cop City begins. So few details pertaining to the project are on the formal record. There are receipts for some of the money, though the source is APF itself and the information must, therefore, be viewed somewhat skeptically. This is relevant, because the records for 2020 show $24.1 million in assets against $16.7 million in liabilities, leaving a balance around $8 million. This is well short of the $60 million the APF has committed to the project. None of the tax records currently available, which go back to the organization’s founding in 2003, show them having anything close to a spare $60 million dollars lying around. So it is clear that a massive amount of money was raised very quickly for the Cop City project.

The information APF has chosen to make available, in a “campaign update” from the third quarter of 2022, lists 24 large donors. Nine of these are foundations, including the project’s two largest single donors. The Woodruff Foundation, endowed from the estate of an early president of Coca-Cola, has contributed $13 million. The James M. Cox Foundation, endowed by the owner of Atlanta’s only major newspaper, gave $10 million. Also on the list are the companies that control gas and electric service in Georgia, two large railroad companies, and then a laundry list of large corporations based or doing substantial business in Atlanta and Georgia more broadly.

For some reason, efforts to problematize the project’s funding have ignored the foundations almost entirely. Some attempts have been made to pressure one or another corporation into withdrawing their support, though at this point only Coca-Cola has been responsive to this pressure. And even then, the victory consisted only in extracting a promise that they would provide no further funding, rather than somehow clawing their prior $1 million “donation” back. Every other corporation involved has simply ignored the pressure.

But the corporations as such are beside the point. They are not the major donors to Cop City. And they are not people, despite the legal sophistry that classifies them as such in the U.S. They are not subject to shame or embarrassment. The investors to whom they ultimately answer might be, at least in theory, but probably not. The corporations and the foundations, along with all the other donors, are advancing the self-identified interests of human beings. If they judge that one way to do that is to give millions of tax-deductible dollars to the APF, then they will. The only language they understand is money, so arguably only a strategy that would escalate the cost of their involvement beyond what they were prepared to spend would have a chance of success. And it seems no such strategy was ever even considered.

The fact of the matter is that money to fund Cop City is simply not a problem the APF has. If one corporation were to drop out, as Coca-Cola appears to have done, it changes nothing. If they all pull out, the APF already has their money, and could simply switch to soliciting money from more foundations and private individuals. More to the point is who the APF is and what it does with the money that comes in. And here the available tax documents are actually useful.

First, the who. APF’s fiscal 2020 documents list some 50 members of the board of directors, 41 of whom hold the mere title of “director.” The other 9 are the foundation’s officers at the time, and even a brief glance at them is very revealing. The president and CEO is one W. David Wilkinson, who has served in that post through the administrations of three successive Atlanta mayors. Wilkinson’s prior work experience consists primarily of 22 years in the U.S. Secret Service. Marshall B. Freeman, the APF’s chief operating officer, is ex-APD, where he was the deputy chief administrative officer. The chief financial officer in 2020 was one Courtney Collins, who came to the APF from the local nonprofit sector, specializing in homelessness, toward which the city is infamously brutal. She has since left the APF, and gone on to work for something called the Atlanta Building Wealth Initiative, which is exactly what it sounds like. APF chairman Robin Loudermilk is a member of one of the oldest, wealthiest families in the entire South, and has a background in high octane real estate speculation. Vice chairman John F. O’neill was formally president of “US Multifamily Capital Markets” at Cushman & Wakefield, a Chicago-based commercial real estate firm with over $9 billion dollars in annual revenue. Calvin Darden, also a vice chairman, was an executive at UPS, and was heavily involved in the building of the city’s yuppie hiking park known as the Beltline. Treasurer Tye Darden has been general counsel for both Georgia-Pacific Railroad and Koch Industries. And finally, secretary Bob Peterson also has a background as a commercial real estate executive. Of these nine officers at the APF, only two are Black.

As for the what, the tax records don’t cover the Cop City project, but the APF’s other programs are nightmarish enough. Taken together, these activities are clearly seen as intended to bring about a kind of new golden age for U.S. police on behalf of those the police serve and protect. For the rest of us, the future the APF is working to bring about can only be described as a chilling, dystopian police state.

Perhaps the most obviously problematic program is what the APF calls OPERATION SHIELD. This is a surveillance network. It consists, not only of the 11,000 cameras that APF has provided to the city, but of virtually every other public and private camera in the entire city. Closed circuit security cameras, Amazon’s Ring cameras, traffic enforcement cameras and others are all linked into a single network that the APD can monitor in real time from their APF-provided Video Integration Center. As an adjunct to SHIELD, the APF has built what they call ComNet, a communications hub linking the APD to private security outfits. These networks are available to any group that cares to pay the subscription fee for access. This means communications between APD and any manner of private security, from the unarmed watchmen of a company like Securitas to the more overtly militarized personnel of a mercenary firm like Blackwater, are perfectly seamless because they are all on the same network.

More subtly troubling is an initiative called SECURE NEIGHBORHOODS. Under this umbrella, the APF purchases real estate in neighborhoods targeted for gentrification. They then bring in contractors to build new housing or renovate existing structures on those lots, and these homes are then sold to APD officers at sub-market prices. The end result, obviously, is that various working class neighborhoods come under full-time surveillance and threat of police intervention, courtesy of their new neighbors. This program has also provided discounted housing for APD recruits at a development called Unity Place, which has room for up to 30 such recruits at a time.

Another, more overtly carceral APF initiative is something they call the Atlanta Repeat Offender Commission. According to the APF’s tax records, in 2014 “the AROC was given authority” to track and issue reports on repeat offenders who, if their cases originated in different jurisdictions, might have received something less than the harshest legal punishment.

And finally we come to the Atlanta Crime Research Center, which APF describes as its “research and analysis arm.” Launched in 2019, the ACRC’s first task was a study of APF’s own Repeat Offender program, which included compiling reports on local judges’ sentencing patterns, no doubt intended to help pressure or remove those who decline to throw the entire book at every such defendant. The language in the tax documents is intentionally vague, stating that the ACRC “is managed by APF but works in concert with local universities and law enforcement partners to develop and analyze content” and conduct various “short- and long-range studies” with the goal of reducing “crime.” It seems reasonable to assume that this entity will be and is being used to identify law enforcement targets, probably using the pseudo-science known as “predictive policing.”

While this is not quite a complete list of the APF’s programs and activities, it is sufficient to outline the nature of the organization’s efforts. These, clearly, are all about expanding the power of the police. The Cop City project is about consolidating that expanded power, giving the police a physical, military-style base from which to operate while moving towards more sophisticated techniques of crowd control and counterinsurgency. Furthermore, it is quite clear that there is very little chance of effective political oversight being exercised by the city government. The city council has fallen over itself in its zeal for the project. And two mayors have now been caught in the project’s undertow. One has seen her political ambition go up in flames, in part, because of the controversy around Cop City, and the other has compromised himself so publicly that it is highly unlikely that he will even seek, let alone win, re-election.

In point of fact, one has to question who actually runs the city of Atlanta, where the real power resides. Mayors come and go and are tossed aside once they can no longer advance the APF’s agenda. City Council members, too. All of these elected officials, most of them Black, put in office by the city’s still large population of mostly Black Democratic Party voters, have a clear record of laboring, not on behalf of their constituents, but rather on behalf of the APF. And as we have seen, the APF’s officers and funding come from a sewer of private and corporate interests that all emerge from a single source: the bourgeoisie.

The Atlanta Police Foundation, then, is best understood not as a slush fund or a shady organization behind the scenes, but rather as a de facto shadow government that actually runs the city on behalf of a mostly white bourgeoisie. And it follows that the local political and civic leadership is not a Black bourgeoisie at all, but a petty bourgeois faction at best, a gang of compradors at worst, always at the service of those with real power. This understanding clarifies the situation around Cop City substantially, and such clarity is something that the movement to stop the facility’s construction has far too often lacked. But not always.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in this whole sordid tale is that, while mostly white “leftists” of whatever persuasion were offering no analysis of the problem, inventing strategies based on that missing analysis and deriving faulty tactics from that bad strategy, there was an organization in the city that not only could have but was doing all of this better: Community Movement Builders, one of the best grassroots organizations in the city.

CMB is based in a neighborhood known as Pittsburgh, where the APF is currently building three homes under the auspices of its “Secure Neighborhoods” program. The group is loosely modeled on the Black Panther Party’s community outreach programs. They teach adult literacy and political education classes, organize community gardens, host lectures on various topics and otherwise defend the community’s interests. As the struggle against Cop City has progressed, CMB’s involvement has increasingly become showing up to do media damage control for the latest mess their white “comrades” have made. They have done an admirable job of this, somehow managing to not directly criticize their “allies” in public. This says a lot, both about their organizational discipline and the quality of the help they’ve had in the fight.

CMB’s most public face is a movement lawyer and organizer named Kamau Franklin, who has lately been interviewed by a wide variety of liberal/progressive outlets like Democracy Now. He is also a key member of a grassroots platform called Black Power Media, frequently appearing on their morning news program, The Remix Morning Show. Featuring a group of contributors such as Jacqueline Luqman, Dr. Jared Ball, Kalonji Chonga, and Kim Brown, with music by The Ear Doctor, The Remix airs four days a week. It, and Black Power Media more broadly, are the best on-the-ground source for news about Cop City and the class war in Atlanta in general.

Much of this essay has its ultimate roots in regularly watching Black Power Media over the last year and a half. Had any of the variously problematic caucasians discussed above done the same, things might have gone differently. Almost every day since the Cop City project was first announced, someone on BPM has been talking sense about it. This analysis can have no better conclusion than simply quoting them and their analysis of the situation and what must happen from here if the fight against Cop City, or any similar struggle, is to have any chance of success.

Kamau Franklin, speaking to Robert Scheer:

It’s extremely important that people realize that these police foundations are taking off across the country, they’re not accountable to public officials because they are private nonprofits… [Cop City] is basically their facility that they’re renting from the city of Atlanta for $10 a year…for the next 20 or 30 years. So this is completely not going to be scrutinized by the public or answerable through CC hearings. They will train as they see fit, as an agency set up to promote policing…I’m not sure who elected or decided that the APF should play a prominent role in “crime fighting” and or “training” of the police. They’re not elected to do so.

Jacqueline Luqman, Remix Morning Show, the day after the murder in the forest:

I want people to understand that the right wing, the system, the corporatists, the capitalists in this country, they are very patient. They play the long game and they recognize the difference between mobilization and organization. They understood, I think, that the uprisings in 2020 was great mobilization, it was a wonderful, global mobilization. But most of those people did not connect to actual radical anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, socialist organizations to organize for actually changing this system. And they knew that a lot of people, yeah people were responding to the horrible thing, the public lynching of George Floyd, and they were angry in the moment, but most of those people did not want to commit to actually changing their own world view. Most of those people, like I said, great mobilization, but a lot of those people thought well we’re going to change…the police without addressing the need to change this whole system. And that is, I think, the very foundational difference…between mobilization and organization. What should have happened, during that uprising, is that radical organizations should have seen a crazy influx of people saying OK I get it, this capitalist system is the problem, or help me understand how this is a bigger problem than just the police, it’s about an entire system, teach me, let me learn all these things. But can we be real? People in this country don’t want to, largely, change a system that has benefitted them, most of them materially, if they’re not working class and poor, really. And working class and poor people are kept so tired and worn out just trying to survive that the idea of organizing and committing yourself to this other thing is overwhelming for a lot of people. So the system was like: We’ll wait. And we’ll give this nice, a lot of white folks, a little taste of what we’ve been giving the Negroes and the Indigenous for all this time and then they’ll go home. The politicians will make some promises. And then they will think they have done something, when in fact the system just kind of hibernated for a little while during those uprisings, to a certain degree, and they waited til those well-meaning, mostly white folks went back to their regular lives where they don’t have to deal with this every day. Where they’re not interested in overturning capitalism. Where they see no problem with U.S. imperialism and they don’t want to know the connections between domestic racist police terrorism and U.S. militarism abroad, particularly focused and targeted at Africans and the global south. I really want people to understand how absolutely critical and important it is to be in organizations. This is not like a part time gig. It’s really not. Because 24/7 365 days a year our enemy is organizing. They are.

Ajamu Baraka, of Black Alliance for Peace, on the Remix Morning Show: 

This fantasy that Europeans think that they’re gonna be the leaders of some kind of process, of some kind of radical, revolutionary process in the U.S., is absurd. And basically, if it ain’t us leading this thing, it ain’t going nowhere…The white left has got to understand: you aren’t going to be at the center of this. Not anymore.

Author’s note: In the time between the writing and publication of this piece, Stop Cop City activists revealed plans for a music festival in the South River Forest, which is still under construction and heavy police surveillance. Additionally, activists on social media are promoting a public calendar for a “week of action” to stop Cop City that anyone can access and edit. Meanwhile, the Black Power Media youtube page was temporarily suspended this week after reactionary elements of the white left brigaded and harassed one of the contributors quoted above, Jacqueline Luqman, following her criticism of an anti-war rally organized by members of a far-right Libertarian Party caucus.