Preliminary critique of the work has focused primarily on the erasure of transmisogyny, a particularly glaring omission given the author’s supposed inclusion of “marginalized genders”. This omission, coupled with an essentialist theoretical framework pulled from a radical feminist tradition, lead to the necessity of the piece’s retraction. The Red Clarion seeks to lead the communist movement towards the best path of sexual liberation, which necessitates a dialectical and scientific approach to understanding and combating sexual oppression. The conclusions reached in the article rely on a haphazard array of correlated data that are then assumed to be set phenomena across the breadth of patriarchal societies. The following criticism looks through these major flaws, and opposes the conclusions reached thereafter; as USU struggles towards unified clarity on these vital theoretical positions, we will move towards the publishing of a definitive piece regarding where the movement must take the issues of sexual liberation.

We will first begin with the author’s failure to conduct adequate research on the subject at hand, exemplified by the following passage:

Regardless of if you watch porn, you experience the effects of porn. You are punished by the existence of porn. A study of over four thousand young people in Melbourne found that 59% of men had reported strangling their partner during sex, with 61% of women reporting being strangled, and 78% of trans or gender-diverse individuals experiencing strangulation. Importantly, 61% reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.

This passage mistakes shadow for substance. Sex work is not the base economic relationship from which patriarchal violence emerges, but rather the result of patriarchal economic and social relations that reinforce and reproduce patriarchal relations. In other words, sex work does not create the social exploitation of women, nor lie at its foundation. Sex work is the result of divided labor regime. The scientific study cited by the author directs us to this very same conclusion: “Pornography was the most common avenue by which people reported first hearing about choking during sex (34.8%), followed by discussions with friends (11.5%).”¹ In other words, pornography does not create sexual violence, but rather reinforces it; it is not the cause of sexual violence, but rather its result. Failure to recognize this dialectical relationship that makes sex-divided labor the primary aspect puts us off immediately on the wrong track.

Here we must also make plain a glaring error in our comrade’s citation. The author warns that “61% [of young people in Melbourne participating in the study] reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.” This statement is false. A vast majority (65.2%) of the study’s subjects learned about choking during sex via means other than pornography. This suggests that even if pornography was banned, this ostensibly violent sexual practice would still exist and propagate through other means of social reproduction. With 61% of subjects exposed to but not learning about sexual strangulation via pornography, the study does demonstrate pornography’s role in reinforcing risky sexual practices amongst the general population through repeated exposure. However, with subjects also being exposed to the practice via “…movies (40.3%), friends (31.9%), social media (31.3%), and discussions with potential partners (29.2%),” we cannot give serious credence to the notion that pornography itself is the (or even one of many) progenitor of sexual violence.² At the very least, the failure of the article’s author to catch such a misrepresentation of the study at hand is demonstrative of a methodological sloppiness that cannot be considered Marxist for its lack of an adequately scientific approach to analyzing these social phenomena. The study actually shows that those who “first learned/heard” about strangulation through pornography constitute a mere 34.8% of respondents. The 61.3% number is representative of those who were “ever exposed to strangulation in pornography.” Failing to distinguish these incident rates is a critical error. Despite this sloppiness, our comrade further digs her heels in:

Studies vary on how much of pornography is degrading, verbally and physically, to women and marginalized genders, but as we see rates of strangulation rising, we can rest assured that it is a significant portion. Moreover, a meta-analysis of studies has found that porn consumption is linked with an increased likelihood to commit an act of sexual aggression, even if the pornography was considered non-aggressive.

This passage demonstrates another significant error in the author’s manner of conducting research. When analyzing any phenomenon, particularly social phenomenon where variables cannot be controlled and holistically observed, the correlation of data does not mean there is a relationship of causality. While the research in question does demonstrate that those who consume pornography more frequently “are more likely to hold attitudes conducive to sexual aggression and engage in actual acts of sexual aggression” than those who consume it less frequently, or not at all,³ it does not prove that pornography is the source of these behaviors. Given that not everyone who consumes pornography is sexually aggressive, we can just as easily assume that pornography lends itself to reinforcing pre-developed behaviors.⁴ Only one of these positions lends itself to a Marxist framework of socio-behavioral analysis.

Pornography, just as any tool of bourgeois social reproduction, functions by providing moral licensing for individuals’ self-interested and exploitative behaviors. To argue otherwise would be to deny personal autonomy, and thus, moral responsibility for one’s actions as an individual. People do not enact sexual violence as a result of consuming pornography, nor even because they are raised in a patriarchal society. Every action one takes in committing sexual violence is of their own volition, even if these social phenomenon may prime them to view such behaviors as permissible. Despite her previous claims in the piece, the author demonstrates a clear lack of satisfaction with treating pornography as a systematic tool that “…emboldens preexisting attitudes towards women, towards sexuality.” For our comrade is not interested in dissecting the material base of sex work.⁵ Even one unfamiliar with feminist analysis can pick up on this from the author’s incessant focus on sexual anatomy; she uses the word “cunt” 14 times throughout the work. The author does not define this term beyond its vernacular usage until its sixth appearance in the piece, and then the definition she provides is the following: “Anyone, not just the prostitute, can be penetrated, anyone can be turned into a cunt, anyone can be dehumanized and alienated from their sexuality and their body.”

Given such an apt definition, we can indeed state that nearly everyone within bourgeois society has been turned into a cunt. Proletarian and lumpenprole alike are alienated from their bodies as they expend their brain and muscles to labor for those with capital to spend. Settler-colonial and imperialist societies alienate the masses from their sexuality by using the violence of the state to coerce them into cis-heterosexual social-reproduction, as seen through the violent criminalization of access to birth control, abortions, hormone replacement therapy, mastectomies, gender reassignment surgery, etc.

Rather than developing a theoretical framework that naturally includes all those who are subjected to the violence and exploitation of patriarchal society, the author vulgarizes patriarchal power into a class struggle of the penetrated vs the penetrators. Everyone, no matter their class or social position, is flattened to the supposed power imbued within their sexual behaviors. Even gay men are not free to be men, for “The receiver, the gay man, is therefore reduced to a cunt as well, an object made for penetration and degradation.” In this absurd calculus, one is either an all powerful cis-heterosexual man (the phallus) or the weak and wretched cis-heterosexual woman (the cunt), a theoretical framework so fragile that even a pebble could shatter it into a million pieces.

If “power” is indeed based on one’s relationship to Penetration, then what are we to make of the men penetrated by women?⁶ When presented without reference to social reproduction theory, this argument simply cannot be reconciled with Marxism. Does this simple act truly turn the system of patriarchy on its head, turning men from exploiters to the exploited? This is no idle question. With the study on strangulation reporting approximately 50% of straight male subjects having been strangled during sex,⁷ and if we accept the notion that this supposed sexual “degradation” is an extension of real material power, we can indeed state that, “The war on women has expanded and mutated once more; it’s recruited our fellow women…” For now men must be on the defensive from this supposed wave of woman-led sexual violence! With 60% of lesbians ever being strangled and 54% ever strangling a partner, and bisexual women respectively reporting 80% and 51%,⁸ Cde. Reed’s struggle against sexual domination would have to extend its front to combat this degeneracy amongst sapphic women. In our comrade’s struggle against supposedly anti-social sexual behaviors we must not forget the worst offenders, transgender people, among whom we witness the highest rates of sexual strangulation, 78% and 74% respectively.

Using the framework presented, one could argue that women who strangle men or women who strangle women are adopting the mechanisms of patriarchy for their own benefit; however, the question then would become “why are men overwhelmingly the oppressors, if acting out sexual violence is in-itself sufficient enough to make one an oppressor?” The article’s theory fails to provide any answer to this question.

Had the author given any thought to the conclusions readers would draw from her prescriptive moral stance on such sexual behaviors, she would have read the publicly accessible scientific paper she cited and come to a vastly different conclusion. From this clear negligence we can conclude that our comrade’s goal was not to provide a proper investigation of these systems, but to find data useful in propping up her positions. The framework provided by this article can only function under the bold assumption that every sexual relationship is either patriarchal heterosexuality, or an imitation of it. The author appears to use the high rate of sexual strangulation amongst transgender people as a means to spark readers’ rage against an imagined wave of cis-men strangling poor defenseless transgender women. This assertion completely disregards transgender people’s actual dynamics and conditions as a population. This essentialist framework gets transgender people killed.

Amidst the ongoing war against transgender people, in which transgender people’s presumed sexual behaviors are used to justify mass waves of social violence and murder, a prescriptive framework adds fuel to the fire by proclaiming non-violent and non-coercive sexual acts as inherently oppressive. When transgender people engage in these sexual behaviors, who is being oppressed?⁹ Transgender people are most likely to be in relationships with other transgender people. With studies on sexual orientation demonstrating that only 19% of transgender women, 2% of non-binary people, and 23% of transgender men are reported to be heterosexual in the United States.¹⁰ If we made use of the framework presented, the movement would have no choice but to condemn a majority of transgender people as irredeemable oppressors. Are we to take such an absurd system, that would make an enemy of a hyperexploited population for acts we have no business meddling in, and take it to practice within our movement? Our comrade may take moral opposition to sexual strangulation, but that in-itself is not a basis upon which a Marxist theoretical framework can be built. Such a framework must be based on an analysis of the material conditions at play, not idealist and puritanical notions on proper sexual relations. 

Sexual behaviors are reflections of social and cultural phenomena, but in isolation they tell us very little about contemporary material conditions. We must constantly go deeper. For example, the social root of something such as a leather fetish is likely a result of the materials’ historical use in military and police uniforms, providing the objects a socially constructed aesthetic of power and authority. So what are we to make of its prevalence in gay and lesbian communities? Due to extreme levels of state repression and violence, the social authority imbued within leather provides an outlet for participants to be humanized through symbolic access to authority and/or resistance to it. The fetish provides an emotional outlet for the constant pressure of social restraint. As a reflection of material conditions, sexual behaviors can act as a tool to reinforce exploitative social relationships. With heterosexual relationships requiring a particularly high level of internal analysis of relationship dynamics, given men being socially conditioned to engage in more aggressive and high-risk sexual behaviors. However, power is not determined in the bedroom. Power is determined by one’s relation to property. 

Historically women have been denied the right to property, actively excluded from economic production so as to be coerced into the labor of social reproduction. With the development of class society, the role of women was largely relegated first as an economic and diplomatic asset in their youth, to later be sold into domestic servitude as a wife and mother. It is only recently that western women have gained the “right” to be workers and not the property of men, a concession made in part to constrain the spread of achievements that resulted from the dauntless and bloody struggles of communist women across the globe and in part as a result of capital’s drive to proletarianize everyone — to dissolve all social relations. Despite patriarchal systems losing ground in this age of collapse for the capitalist system,¹¹ women have not yet been liberated from traditional socially reproductive roles, particularly those of marriage and prostitution. These roles have changed in kind with the economic basis of society. The marriage and legalized prostitution of Ancient Greece are far different in their structure than marriage and prostitution within the capitalist age.  

The piece posits that, within bourgeois society, prostitutes make up “… a class that is designed to be difficult to get out of, as a ruined proletariat, and is slated to be accessible to all men. The state may punish different classes of men more commonly than others, but she is still available to all men.” Further, the author denies these workers their position as laborers, arguing that instead of being members of the proletarian or subproletarian classes they are instead ‘public property,’ — hyper-exploited subjects forced into ‘a form of slavery that is distinctly female.’ If these laborers are truly turned into property or commodities to be bought and consumed, then why haven’t sex dolls and sex toys replaced their existence entirely? It is the same reason humans can never fully be replaced by tools or machines in the production process. What is being valued here is not the mere production of a commodity or the provision of a service, but human labor power. This is why prostitutes sell their labor in the form of timeslots, and clarify the kinds of specialized sexual labor they are willing to perform within specified time-frames. When one buys this form of labor they engage in a form of petit-bourgosie labor exploitation, and like any member of this class the buyer seeks to take as much from the laborer as possible for as low as the wages can go. 

Within the article this claim of prostitute as public property is justified by the argument that sex work cannot be comparable to other forms of labor, as “The prostitute is alienated not just from her profits or her work, but from her body and the most intimate parts of her mind” and that “She is often forced to remain in the prostituted class via coercive forces…” Is the woman working 16 hours sewing with docked wages for every mistake not also alienated from “the most intimate parts of her mind”? What of the railway conductors coerced by contract and federal law to be on call 24/7 while working at minimum 12 hours a day? Is not the denial of sleep and a home life alienating one from their own mental wellbeing? When it comes to coercion, what worker cannot claim the same? Many women in the workplace are sexually assaulted but are forced to either stay quiet or risk homelessness and starvation of both themselves and their families. Other workers are coerced into their labor through the seizure of passports or the pointed guns of the police and hired mercenaries. The bourgeoisie will always seek the maximal level of exploitation. When they buy your labor-power, they buy the contractual right to ruin your body, break your mind, and kill you if it’ll make them even a penny more in profit. The only limit to the bourgeois drive to create profit at the expense of the worker is the level of class struggle. The relative conditions of the working classes are a symptom of class struggle.¹² Whether you are a sex worker, manual laborer, service worker, etc. the capitalist system runs on the rule that you are disposable to the bourgeoisie.

But with its blind drive, its bottomless werewolf-hunger for surplus-labor, capital doesn’t merely push past the moral limits of the working day. It does the same with the physical limits, too. Capital usurps the time that the body needs to grow and develop, and also the time for maintaining the body in a healthy condition. It steals the time it takes to get fresh air and sun. It chips away at mealtimes, incorporating them into the production process wherever it can; as a result, food is added to workers as though they were merely so many means of production, or the same way a boiler is fed coal, machines are fed grease and oil, and so on. Sound sleep destroys and refreshes a person’s vital powers, enabling him to build up his strength, but capital reduces it to only as many hours as it takes to revive a totally exhausted organism […] Only one thing interests capital: the maximum amount of labor-power that can be activated in the workday. It achieves this goal by shortening the lives of labor-power’s bearers, just like a greedy farmer gets the most out of the land by rendering it barren.¹³

[…]

So from society’s standpoint, the members of the working class—including when they aren’t participating in the immediate labor process—belong to capital just as much as the dead instruments of labor do. Even their individual consumption is simply an aspect of capital. It is hard for the worker, that instrument of production endowed with consciousness, to simply run away, since it constantly sends his product from his pole to the opposite pole—i.e., capital’s. Individual consumption is the means through which workers maintain and reproduce themselves, but as it occurs, it constantly destroys their means of subsistence, ensuring that they will keep reappearing in the labor markets. The Roman slave was fettered with chains. Invisible ties bind the wage laborer to his owner: he merely seems to be independent. The constant turnover among the worker’s individual wage masters and the fictio juris of his contract keep this semblance in place. 

In the past, capital enacted compulsory laws whenever it felt that it had to assert its proprietary rights over free workers. Until 1815, for example, it was illegal for England’s machine workers to emigrate, and people committed this crime at their peril, since the penalties it carried were severe.¹⁴

If sex work does not constitute a special super-class, then how do we as communists position ourselves against this particular form of exploitation? To answer this we must first understand the socio-economic nature of prostitution. Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent feminist within the CPSU, provided a clear analysis on the subject: “Prostitution arose with the first states as the inevitable shadow of the official institution of marriage, which was designed to preserve the rights of private property and to guarantee property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs.” Further outlining its emergence within the capitalist age:

The sale of women’s labor, which is closely and inseparably connected with the sale of the female body, steadily increases, leading to a situation where the respected wife of a worker, and not just the abandoned and ‘dishonoured’ girl, joins the ranks of the prostitutes: a mother for the sake of her children, or a young girl like Sonya Marmeladova for the sake of her family. This is the horror and hopelessness that results from the exploitation of labor by capital. When a woman’s wages are insufficient to keep her alive, the sale of favors seems a possible subsidiary occupation. The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path.

Prostitution is a form of socially reproductive labor. Just as maids are hired to clean houses, nannies to raise children, and nurses to care for the old, prostitutes are hired to satisfy personal needs without the buyer being obligated to provide for the care of the worker until the grave. Prostitutes are domestic laborers. If they are in a waged relation which is exploited for profit, they are proletarian. If they are not, they are nevertheless subproletarian, as those excluded from social production.¹⁵ The nature of their work, that of socially reproductive labor, does not alter their basic relation of production.

It is here that class divisions make themselves the most evident. A white cis woman is far more likely to gain access to legal, or at least institutionally protected forms, of sexual labor than a Black and/or trans woman. With white supremacy and cis normativity further providing enough class mobility to allow her escape into the membership of the labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois classes. This was the purpose of western nations’ struggle against so-called “white slavery” in the early 20th century. White slavery was a nationalistic tool used to secure white womanhood from the exploitation of lumpen and proletarian sexual labor. It was never about protecting women from sexual labor, it was rather a “common fixation on protecting the purity of white womanhood, constituting an image of white women’s precarity that was only tangentially connected to the realities of women’s lives.”¹⁶ Reed’s reintroduction of the term is yet another example of her gender reductionist framework, which excludes all other forms of class, national, and disabled oppression. By systematically denying nationally oppressed, transgender, and disabled people from the benefits and wages of the upper classes, the necessity of survival coerces them to flood the market of sexual labor. The resulting reduction of wages and working conditions, alongside a crackdown on legal sexual labor, pushed members of privileged social classes from the streets and into domestic servitude as wives and mothers.

The consumption of sexual labor, particularly in the form of pornography, is so widespread in society that even moral condemnation will do nothing but harm the most marginal of sexual laborers. Laws seeking to limit public access to “sexually explicit materials” have been used to actively suppress access to resources for sexual education, birth control, and transition related medical care.¹⁷

While we could dive further in this historical and materialist analysis of sex work, the breadth of the theory’s deviation from Marxist analysis should now be abundantly clear. Despite her condemnation of liberal feminists for flattening the experiences of sex workers, the author actively chose to disregard the autonomy and humanity of sex workers so that their idealized forms could serve as a prop for her radical feminist analysis. By using the theoretical framework of Andrea Dworkin, a zionist and arguably transmisogynistic theorist,¹⁸ to position men as a cabal seeking the sexual slavery of all women (i.e., people of penetration), the author — in one masterful stroke — both eschews class analysis and creates a false solidarity with sex workers by flattening their varied conditions into one of a universal metaphysical precarity.  Instead of seriously studying the scientific nature of these classes and the material conditions that bring them about so we might properly dedicate ourselves to uprooting these systems of oppression, we are instead given a world that has been wholly abstracted into a totalizing struggle between “men” and women. 

In its conclusion, the piece proclaims that “Our war is not against sex workers but against johns, sex buyers, and consumers of pornography.” This statement serves no theoretical purpose. We can make whatever proclamations we like, but what matters is the rhetoric behind them. The rhetoric of the piece gives ample justifications to the reader for hunting down these progenitors of patriarchal violence while at the same time excusing class collaboration between women (penetrated, the subjects of violence) of all classes:

These commodified individuals are surviving under patriarchy, under capitalism, and under oppressive forces. Until they engage in traitorous behaviors such as, but not limited to; promoting an OnlyFans referral code to 18 year olds to make money off of their content, dressing in children’s clothing, dressing in ways that contribute to the sexual violence minority women and those in the global south face, and/or glamorizing the industry, they are our comrades in the struggle.

This supposed “marxist feminism” tails the utopian organizational strategy of anarchists and radical feminists, wherein the supposed abolition of the state, or relationships with men, will instantly bring about heaven on earth where power and patriarchy are no more. We have only to unite all sex-workers (except those that promote OnlyFans referral codes to 18 year olds, dress in children’s clothing, dress in ways that contribute to sexual violence, and/or glamorize the industry of course) with all women! This super-class of sex-workers-and-women will then… well, what? Rather than building a serious strategy to bring about socialism, these adventurous radicals seek moral salvation by cleansing the world in a purifying flood. As Anuradha Ghandy writes: 

To assert that gender based division of labor is the basis of women’s oppression rather than class still begs the question. If we do not find some social, material reasons for the inequality we are forced into accepting the argument that men have an innate drive for power and domination. Such an argument is self-defeating because it means there is no point in struggling for equality. It can never be realized.

The liberation of prostitutes – and of all those from whom domestic labor is forcibly extracted – comes from the organization of their numbers into a body capable of battling their oppression and all work toward that organization, not from the repeated imprecations to divide the world into sexual abusers and the sexually abused. As Marxists it is our duty to organize, to bring together those who have an interest in fighting for total liberation. The patriarchal state is surely our enemy, as is the concept of masculinity itself insofar as it stands for the theft of labor, but we must be ever wary of the liberalizing drive to universalize victimhood and create a universal victimizer. No matter how strenuously the piece demands the reader to understand that “cunt” is shorthand for being raped, that does not make it so, nor does it make the central division along which society is divided into the raped and the rapists.

1. Sharman, Leah S., Robin Fitzgerald, and Heather Douglas. 2025. “Prevalence of Sexual Strangulation/Choking Among Australian 18–35 Year-Olds.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 54 (2): 465–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y.  Pg. 470. ︎
2. Ibidem. ︎
3. Wright, Paul J., Robert S. Tokunaga, and Ashley Kraus. 2016. “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies: Pornography and Sexual Aggression.” Journal of Communication 66 (1): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12201.
   Pg. 201. ︎
4. The correlation between the consumption of pornography and sexual violence lies in the dehumanizing of the sexual laborers. Even if the viewer were to construct subjectivity for the participants, one that they must construct themselves, as pornography commodifies the alienated images of these workers as they perform sexual labor. The consumer of pornography is a beneficiary of the patriarchal violence that produces this commodity as it only exists for consumption as a byproduct of systematic patriarchal violence. ︎
5. “For the cultural feminists, heterosexuality is about male domination and female subordination and so it sets the stage for pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, and woman-battering…. In their understanding of material conditions, they have taken the physical fact of reproduction and women’s biological role as the central point for their analysis and concluded that this is the main reason for women’s oppression…. Reproduction means both the reproduction of the person on a day to day basis and the reproduction of the human species. But in fact, reproduction of the species is something humans share with the animal kingdom. That could not be the basis for women’s oppression. For in all the thousands of years that people lived in the first stages of human existence, women were not subordinated to men.” Ghandy, Anarhuda, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, 54-5. ︎
6. Obviously, the Marxist analysis is that all real power is founded somewhere in property relations, and that other forms of power are all ultimately mediated property relations. ︎
7. Sharman, et al. Pg. 472 ︎
8. Ibid., Pgs. 472-473. ︎
9. On a case by case basis, it is, of course, possible for transgender people to reproduce patriarchal oppression. Domestic abuse is one form this takes. However, this is far from as simple a proposition as the mechanical oppressor/oppressed relation presented by the article at hand. Indeed, is it not possible that the penetrator in a relationship can be abused? Is it not possible that the penetrating partner can change from one to the other? ︎
10. James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. 2016. “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.” National Center for Transgender Equality. https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf. Pg. 59 ︎
11. Marx makes note of this phenomenon in Capital, that the family loses its material foundation in the capitalist age as children become the collective property of bourgeois society and women are a constant reserve army of labor ever ready to replace men in the workplace. It is through latter socialist social revolutions that women’s liberation has since unfolded. ︎
12. This struggle can itself be enervating to class consciousness, as is the case in the imperialist centers where class struggle has produced not revolution, but an entrenched labor aristocracy. ︎
13. Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press, pgs. 235-236. ︎
14. Id. at 528. ︎
15. In a waged relation, a prostitute is paid a wage by an employer, who keeps the amount that is paid for the sex work. In a slave or semi-slave relation, the prostitute is essentially kept in bondage to a pimp or madam, and receives instead whatever goods they need directly from their keeper, rather than a wage. Those thrust into illegal positions are excluded from legal production. We here incorporate slave and semi-slave relations as subproletarian, for in the age of “free” labor, these are all classes that must sell their labor-power. ︎
16. Harris, Leslie J. “Conclusion.” In The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity, 149–60. Michigan State University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.14321/jj.2990357.11. ︎
17. These and related “internet safety” politics have a long history of particularly targeting transgender and queer people, making both digital and physical spaces more dangerous for these communities. This is a result of queerness and transness being ideologically labeled as sexually explicit, or otherwise as a harmful social disease (Brooke and Turner, 2025; Kayyali & Mithani, 2025). Lawmakers in the UK have sought to expand such existing laws to further require websites to keep track of users sex assigned at birth, a tool that will be used to heavily monitor and further suppress the transgender population in the country if it comes to pass (Santi, 2025). 
    Kayyali, Dia, and Jasmine Mithani. 2025. “Age Verification Is Locking Trans People out of the Internet.” Tech Policy Press. December 8, 2025. https://www.techpolicy.press/age-verification-is-locking-trans-people-out-of-the-internet/.
    Santi, Mariano. 2025. “Data Bill: First They Came for Trans People.” Open Rights Group. 2025. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/.
    Tanner, Brooke, and Nicol Turner Lee. 2025. “Children’s Online Safety Laws Are Failing LGBTQ+ Youth.” Brookings. July 9, 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/childrens-online-safety-laws-are-failing-lgbtq-youth/.
    https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/  ︎
18. Dworkin actively proclaimed women’s struggle for liberation as resembling the struggle of the Zionists for a state in which they could finally find safety from the hoards seeking their death and sexual violation. (Lewis, 2025). Her early theoretical positions on the subjects of transsexuality and criticism of bioessentialism — despite holding a contradictory stance that “One might argue for a liberalization of sex-based roles, but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.” (Dworkin, 1974, pg. 175) — has left a wide range of room for an ongoing ideological struggle on whether Dworkin would be supportive of trans liberation today. In Woman Hating Dworkin stated “it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by faulty socialization. More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society.” and “…transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency (see p. 185) as a transsexual.” (Ibid., 186). With her short term solution to this so-called emergency being that “…every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.” (Ibid., 187), with the end goal being the construction of an androgynous human community that would bring transsexuality to an end by subsuming it into “…new modes of sexual identity and behavior.” (Ibid., 188). Dworkin later gave considerable praise to and actively promoted Transsexual Empire, a violently transphobic work which targeted transition related medical care, and specific transgender women who were subsequently harassed by Janice Raymond’s followers out of public life. While later expressing her distaste of the work’s treatment of transgender people in a personal letter to Raymond (Duberman, 2020, Pg. 161), her lack of public retraction has allowed figures such as Raymond to continually lay claim to Dworkin as an essential figure in the theoretical framework of modern Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (Janice, 2021, pp. 41-47). 
    Duberman, Martin B. 2020. Andrea Dworkin : The Feminist as Revolutionary. New York: The New Press.
    Lewis, Sophia. “Are Women Weak Jews? On Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism.” Spectre Journal.  May 27th 2025. https://spectrejournal.com/are-women-weak-jews/
    Raymond, Janice. 2021. Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. ︎

On June 16, 2025, days after the Paramount Insurrection and the popular attacks on the ICE facility at Delaney Hall, Unity–Struggle–Unity Press received a double criticism from our comrades at the Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness identifying two recent articles in the Red Clarion as “left-opportunist,” “adventurist,” “defeatist,” and “bowing to spontaneity.” These comrades ask for a self-criticism to be published by the Press containing the self-criticisms of the two authors and the Editorial Board (“any persons involved in the publishing” of the two articles). The comrades take issue with “Forward the Red Flag,” and “Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics.”

We disagree with the propositions put forward by these comrades and decline to offer such self-criticism. This article contains our response.

To begin with, we must clearly state the comrades’ argument: that the acts of Elias Rodriguez, and all support for those acts, constitute “left opportunism,” “defeatism,” “tailism,” and “adventurism.” The comrades counterpose the strategy of “raise[ing] consciousness for the ultimate purpose of raising the progressive movement’s consciousness.” What this raising of consciousness involves or how it is to be achieved, our comrades are not at all clear! Certainly, given their criticisms, they believe it does not include the denunciation of moribund parties when they distance themselves from political violence, nor can it encompass the defense of spontaneous political terror. Our comrades also warn us that Communists must not prepare the masses to confront the enemy state with guns and bombs. This, they caution, is “the line of an Anarchist!” They urge instead that we engage in a two-line struggle, although with whom is not clear. The masses? The would-be terrorists? The narrow field of other Marxists?

Before we respond to these criticisms, let us define our terms as Marxists understand them. Opportunism is the adoption of politically-expedient but incorrect positions primarily with the aim of capturing a popular sentiment. Adventurism is the action of “tiny groups” or whole parties without roots in the masses. Defeatism is the position that a revolution is impossible or that socialism cannot be achieved. Tailism is the adoption of positions that have already been made irrelevant by mass consciousness.

The comrades begin their criticism of what they identify as our “left” errors with a quote by Bukharin: “All the aims which a party representing the interests of its class vigorously pursues constitutes the party program.” To this we must ask: What is the purpose of this quotation? What party are our comrades referring to? What class? What program? These are things that do not yet exist. What bearing does the conception of a party program have on our activities? I do not understand the comrades to be arguing that there exists a positive party or program to adhere to. It is my hope that they do not refer to an existing class-in-itself, much less a class-for-itself, within the U.S. that constitutes a revolutionary base. No such class presently exists! It is our job to call that class into existence — indeed, it seems our comrades know (or perhaps instinctually felt) this, for they later quote False Nationalism, False Internationalism, “No revolutionaries find conveniently ready-made, pre-packaged, social bases, but must develop and build the masses and themselves in the same process.”

Indeed, we intend to provide an analysis of the immediately revolutionary strata in a forthcoming article, relying on a formula that compares an individual or household’s present wages to:

Wages
– Superwages
– State benefits
– Real property
+ Value of socialized benefits under communism

(which, not coincidentally, provides insight into the formation of a program, where we identify housing, healthcare, child care, education, transportation, food, and utilities as socialized benefits).

Our comrades clearly see the necessity of building the party, but in their eagerness, their analysis considers that party already built. They criticize anarchic tactics that the masses themselves are adopting. Very well! But they go on to criticize this Press for drawing from those tactics object propaganda lessons to rouse the lowest and deepest members of the working classes to act in their own defense. They mechanically repeat the adages of parties of the past, but the historical development of our present situation must be accounted for. The chief error of the CPUSA, etc., is a warmed-over Lovestoneism. This is the real defeatism! The class that should serve as the motor of the revolution has been completely disorganized over the past century. Its members have trouble even dreaming of a tomorrow free from the capitalist state and have entirely swallowed the Lovestoneite deviation. This cannot be combatted by struggling with other Marxists alone; only propagandizing on the actions and trials faced by the masses themselves can bring them to that understanding.

Indeed, we fear that our comrades have misidentified the masses entirely. “The collective,” they warn us, “is not ready for armed struggle.” It is the advanced masses themselves who are the very people engaging in violence in Paramount and New Jersey! Perhaps our comrades consider the sedate, middle-of-the-road centrist as the “masses.” Perhaps they envision Democratic voters as the masses. The masses, however, the revolutionary strata of the masses, are those who routinely do not vote. Their advanced elements are the Communists. Those coming into consciousness must be guided into our ranks in order to form the revolutionary party.

There is no division between us and the masses.

We are already embarked on the journey to form that party. It is the purpose of this Press and the All-Empire Worker’s League to make it a reality. We ask our comrades to consider advancing the project of forming the party, of adding their voice to the others that now flock to the red banner.

We cannot ignore the spontaneous movement of the masses — this is hardly “bowing” to spontaneity. To disclaim Elias Rodriguez or the Paramount Insurrection as adventurism is to split ourselves from the masses, to declare that the active portions of the masses are in fact not the masses at all. Under this rubric, the masses in motion will never be recognized. We cannot intend to go into direct conflict with the state while wringing our hands about violence against it. On the contrary, we are required to harness this spontaneous energy, not restrain it. The masses must be made ready to do violence. Our comrades accuse us, by refusing to condemn spontaneous terror, of “tailing” the masses. It is the attempt to restrain popular feelings that “tail” the masses — indeed, it is not possible both to bow to mass spontaneity and to tail the masses, for tailism is the adoption of positions that are already outdated, that the masses have already discarded as useless, that have outlived their usefulness.

The comrades also take us to be claiming that any and all anti-state violence heightens the struggle. We say no such thing! But, to deny the evidence of our eyes — the actual heightening of the struggle from October 7, to the Student Intifada, to Aaron Bushnell, to Elias Rodriguez, to the Paramount Insurrection, to Delaney Hall, is to risk a state of permanent tailism and obsolescence. Our comrades are wrong where they suggest that the spontaneous acts of any portion of the masses cannot drive struggle forward. They would, I think, struggle in vain to find any Communist who has held this view uncontested. Spontaneous acts can heighten the struggle, but when they are not guided by the organized party of the revolutionary proletariat, they risk defeat, disorganization, and co-option by the liberal reformist currents.

Although our comrades denounce CPUSA and PSL in words, their criticism in effect embraces the CPUSA position: to allow the “revolutionary” revisionists to teach the masses that Communism is passivity and cowardice.

Briefly, as to our comrades’ last section on safeguarding the movement, here, our comrades fully embrace the CPUSA position with only the slightest hedging. They hold that the security apparatus of the U.S. state requires us to “keep[] our people out of the enemy’s hands and… shield[] them from the political police’s awareness.” No revolution can remain underground. This is a call not to organize an aboveground, unrelated to any of the other issues our comrades address. There is risk. We must be prepared to accept that risk. Anyone who is not prepared to accept that risk is not prepared to be a revolutionary.

These statements also demonstrate a mechanical thinking; there is a dialectic between security and visibility. There is a contradiction between organizing the class and staying hidden. Right now, the disorganization of the class is its defining feature. This means we must overcome that disorganization by above-ground work.

We hope these thoughts are taken in the spirit in which they are meant. We invite our comrades to further conversations on this subject, and further struggle. More, we hope our comrades will take seriously our efforts to unite all that can be united, and, true to their own words, that the thing of greatest importance is the coherence of the movement, act to cohere it and organize it. Let us take concrete steps toward unification.

Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness (SCRC) Letter to the Editor

“All the aims which a party representing the interests of its class vigorously pursues constitue the party program.”

Nikolai Bukharin, The ABC of Communism

This article is a response to and criticism of the recent Red Clarion articles “Forward the Red Flag” and “Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics”. The article discusses specifically the left-opportunism present within both articles regarding the prevalence of adventurism, anarchism, and the general tendency towards the so-called “propaganda of the deed”. We see the defense or affirmation of these tendencies by Communists as opportunistic and defeatist. This is also an example of the present ideological weakness of the Communist movement in the imperial core. Ultimately, it is our understanding that moving beyond this current stage of development regarding the Communist movement, as well as the broader progressive movement, requires that all those who have embraced the Communist ideology further dedicate themselves to the development of a Communist program for revolution as well as the establishment of a legitimate Communist party to struggle out the way forward. This task necessarily demands that Communists refuse the opportunistic instinct to bow to spontaneous action, and instead strive to provide the Communist movement, and the progressive movement, that which it has historically lacked and still desperately needs, revolutionary class consciousness and organization.

There is a common refrain that those who critique in any way the spontaneous actions of individuals, such as the action undertaken recently by Elias Rodriguez, are counterrevolutionary, right-opportunists, or simply cowards. In some instances this line is proven correct, as in the instance of the capitulationist and defeatist anti-violence positions taken by the so-called Party for Socialism and Liberation(PSL)and the Communist Party of the United States(CPUSA) regarding the action. These positions, which totally denounced the action, the CPUSA calling for “militant non-violent protest”, are examples of the ideological weakness and counterrevolutionary limitations of these organizations. Both of these so-called parties refused to embrace a revolutionary line on revolutionary violence against the imperial/colonial violence that is regularly practiced by the enemies of the oppressed and working masses globally. In doing so both PSL and the CPUSA have revealed their inability to guide the conscious development of the Communist movement nor the broader progressive movement that seeks to overcome the present state of things.

“Now the struggle will be unfolding primarily within the revolutionary trend around the program, strategy and tactics of socialist revolution which is first of all a question of how is revolution unfolding objectively, the ideological line, and second of all what shall communists do about it, the political line.”

Committee for Scientific Socialism, History of Two-Line Struggle on Party Building

That fact acknowledged, the line that regards Elias Rodriguez’s actions not as adventurist but instead as “liberatory acts of spontaneous terror”(Gracchus) is plainly opportunistic. Spontaneous actions by individuals or by organizations that outstrip the current stage of development of both the objective conditions as well as the capabilities/consciousness of the subjective forces of progress is the essence of adventurism. Communists can and should understand the manifold reasons and forces behind all things in reality, however, there is a line between understanding and affirmation. It remains painfully true that the present organization of the Communist movement and progressive movement at large is currently incapable of stopping or even noticeably slowing down the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the Zionist entity and its master the USA. This reality is beyond regrettable and deeply shameful to admit, but more than this it remains necessary that this fact be acknowledged. The collective is not yet ready for armed struggle in part because they are not yet conscious of the necessity of armed struggle. Discounting the present state of the progressive movement and running ahead of it in practice without its unyielding support can only and has only resulted in activists, organizers, would-be revolutionaries, and their organizations being overwhelmingly targeted and destroyed by the enemy’s political police. The apparent lack of desire to combat and end this veritable hemorrhaging of our people from the movement at large is due principally to the worship of spontaneity embraced and proselytized primarily by anarchists.

There are certain ideological and political principles that all those who have chosen to embrace Communism and the struggle for its realization must also comprehend. These principles are borne out of the historical and current experiences of Communists struggling for revolution and the end to the rule of the exploiting classes. Opposing anarchism/adventurism and refusing to align oneself with the belittling of the conscious element is one such principle. Comprehending what we as Communists should know through both study and practice, that spontaneous actions cannot be depended on for the development and sustenance of class consciousness, is another aspect of this commitment. The Communists of this era should feel free to be inspired by the ongoing spontaneous actions and rebellions, these are clear signs that the forces of progress and resistance are alive within the masses of oppressed and working peoples. However, we should remember that our duty is to raise our consciousness for the ultimate purpose of raising the progressive movement’s consciousness. The forces of progress and resistance must be cultivated and developed into revolution; dependency on spontaneity has proven insufficient for this monumental task.

“Just as it is important to remember that theory is not just book learning, it is important to remember that practice is more than engaging in spontaneous struggle.”

I Wor Kuen (IWK), Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building

The claim within Forward the Red Flag that “one of the tasks of the Communists, especially now, while the revolutionary class in the West is scattered and incoherent, is to teach the masses to reach toward a revolutionary horizon; it’s to give the working class the power to imagine a future where they actually confront the enemy class and its footsoldiers not metaphorically, but actually—with guns and bombs” is not the line of a Communist but that of an Anarchist. Where they should argue for coherence of the Communist and progressive movements into revolutionary organizations, they instead argue only for confrontation with guns and bombs. Confrontation with guns and bombs is nothing new to the struggle against the settler-bourgeois state. Confrontation with guns and bombs, and the call for such confrontation, is not enough to develop class consciousness or foment revolution. Communists who know at all the history of the struggle here know this fact, because in the history of the struggle here it has not been enough. The weather in the Communist movement has unfortunately not changed very much since the seventies.

In addition to this ideological and political failure, the author’s further claim that Russia “had to pass through Narodism before it arrived at Marxism Leninism”(Gracchus) unqualified by the fact that this passing only came as the result of bitter ideological struggle between the Marxists and Narodnaya Volya is questionable at best and undeniably problematic. This line lends itself to the legitimizing of the current anarchist trend in the progressive movement. The very trend that has done more to disorganize movements than to organize them, like with the STOPCOPCITY movement in Atlanta. Omitting this fact regarding the history of Communist struggle cannot go without direct criticism, therefore a written self-criticism is called for as a consequence of this lack of ideological and political consistency and quality. In addition to this call for self-criticism, a reading list will be provided for assistance with overcoming this lack of historical and ideological consciousness.

“Opportunism is the sacrifice of the long range interest of the working class for the immediate interests of a minority of the working class. It is bourgeois thinking developed as a trend in the working class movement. Common forms of opportunism in the working class today include such outlooks as reformism, trade unionism, national chauvinism, narrow nationalism and anarchism.”

I Wor Kuen (IWK), Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building

The author of Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics makes similarly opportunistic considerations of Elias Rodriguez’s actions. The claim that Rodriguez “tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the US-israeli empire”(Winter), seems to argue that the struggle til May 22nd had not been tangible, and is tangible only now that Rodriguez is in enemy hands and beyond our still limited/non-existent organizational capabilities of freeing him. Furthermore the claim that Rodriguez’s actions represent a “heightening of the struggle”(Winter) is also opportunistic. Is the struggle heightened every time an individual undertakes violent action against the enemy state? If so then this form of heightening is undoubtedly insufficient for heightening the struggle to the level of revolution, seeing that individual actions against the enemy state occur and have occurred regularly for the entire history of the struggle in the US and in the Zionist entity. The conclusion instead should have been, recognizing the insufficiency of individual spontaneous actions, adventurism, that Communists should further commit themselves to the consolidation of the movement for conscious collective armed struggle against the enemies of the colonized and exploited masses.

In their attempts to rightly critique the capitulationist and counter-revolutionary positions taken by PSL and the CPUSA, both authors go too far and lend their conclusions to anarchistic operations. They, like many in the progressive movement, are in awe of spontaneity and it leads them to uncritically support spontaneous actions committed by those who have insufficient faith in and understanding of the masses of this land. The current lack of a Communist program for revolution and the absence of a party are not license for today’s Communists to forfeit ideological principle for the sake of combating capitulationism, revisionism, and right-opportunism. What our movements lack it is incumbent upon the conscious element to develop and provide. That development still underway, failure to resist bowing to spontaneity is a harm to both the Communist movement and the progressive movements generally.

“The unity between ‘left’ and right opportunism is that both belittle the subjective factor in its ability to correctly assess the social conditions and in its role of consciously bringing politics to the masses and transforming the spontaneous movement into a class conscious one.”

I Wor Kuen (IWK), Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building

Elias Rodriguez should have been surrounded by comrades and acted with the unyielding support of the Communist and progressive movements as he undertook armed action against the Zionist entity and its factotums. That he went without these things is not his fault, but the fault of the current political and organizational insufficiency of the Communist movement. Until we have united our movement around a Communist line on revolution, a program, and until we have consolidated this unity through the establishment of a Communist party, people with the will to struggle like Elias will be left without in their struggle against the forces of reaction. If Elias Rodriguez “would not have done what he did, because there would have been a viable alternative”(Gracchus) then the conclusion reached by every Communist should be that Communists must provide the progressive movement, which is continually conveying a desire to struggle, its viable alternative to spontaneous rebellion. Such a viable alternative can again only be realized through the process of developing a truly revolutionary program and the establishment of a Communist party.

The principal responsibility for Communists in the imperial core is to lead and guide the development of the progressive movement, not tail the spontaneous rebellions that are the inevitable consequence of the constant exploitation and oppression wrought by the settler-colonial bourgeois state.  If the consciousness of the exploited and oppressed masses is limited, and it is, then the practice will also be limited whatever it appears to be at the moment. The principal task of Communists at this current stage of development is to cultivate revolutionary class consciousness among the exploited masses. Revolutionary class consciousness, more than just the acknowledgement of bourgeois exploitation and colonial/imperial violence, means being conscious of the need for and inevitability of the total dictatorship of the oppressed and working masses over and above the current ruling classes of oppressors. This kind of consciousness is not ready-made nor can it be the result of spontaneous or haphazard practice. For its development it requires dedicated ideological and political training in the theory, history, and practice of scientific socialism.

“No revolutionaries find conveniently ready-made, pre-packaged social bases but must develop and build the masses and themselves in the same process.“

False Nationalism, False Internationalism

Call for Self-Criticism from Red Clarion authors

To remain consistent with the goals listed in the Red Clarion mission statement; to develop revolutionary consciousness in the masses and a revolutionary vanguard party, and because you have declared yourselves Communists, we representatives of the Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness, who have united  to the same goals, are calling for a collective public self criticism from any persons involved in the publishing of “Forward the Red Flag” and “Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics” on the basis of these articles’ left-opportunism and affirmation of adventurism. We also request a public reassessment of spontaneity and left-opportunism, clarifying for readers that criticism of right-opportunism should not lead to the unprincipled affirmation of anarchism and adventurism generally.

If Communists allow the development of the revolutionary movement to remain at the level of spontaneous action, then we have chosen to sacrifice the future vanguard for moments of temporary excitement and acts of adventurism. Acts that more often than not lead to little more than arrests and movement stagnation must be struggled against. We suggest a thorough reading of the works listed in the provided reading list. We also call for a public reassessment of Elias Rodriguez’s action that emphasizes the importance of a legitimate Communist party to the consolidation of movement practice. Finally, it should be acknowledged that his action, and other such adventurist undertakings, are not required for the development of a legitimate Communist party.  In being critical of these mistakes, and struggling for a more-correct way forward, we not only allow ourselves to evolve, but also affirm the scientific character of our ideology. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge, correcting flawed practices, alongside comprehending the lessons from our revolutionary predecessors, is how the future we have united to building becomes inevitable.

“The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side.”

Mao Zedong, Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work

“We have the Marxist-Leninist weapon of criticism and self-criticism. We can get rid of a bad style and keep the good.”

Mao Zedong, Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Note on Movement Security and Care

Anyone who does not feel any concern at the thought/possibility/likelihood of themselves or others being arrested or targeted by the political police or the other organized servants of reaction either does not know the history of the struggle both here and abroad or has simply decided not to care. Whatever the reason, such a perspective on matters of movement security and longevity is objectively detrimental to the struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperial/colonial domination. This brand of amateurishness has resulted in scores of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries being brutalized, imprisoned, and murdered by the enemy state and their forces. Countless more have chosen to abandon movement organizing entirely on the basis of their negative experiences of engaging with the enemy. At present we have neither the organizational infrastructure nor the resources to protect those who have embraced the struggle. What is worse is that the progressive movement in general seemingly lacks the conscious belief that our activists, organizers, and developing revolutionaries should be protected, that their lives should be valued above and beyond mere spectacles for the masses that have long gone unmoved by mere spectacles.

The “goal of security,” as laid out by J. Sakai in Basic Politics of Movement Security, “is to protect the movement itself, to let the larger struggle against capitalism move forward.” Adopting a lackadaisical perspective on what individuals should be prepared to risk in the struggle, or how they should undertake risks, does not at all protect the movement, but instead views the very people needed to forward the movement as merely cannon fodder for the political police and the enemy state. No one should be expected to “throw their lives away” for the realization of the revolution. Lives must be given and dedicated to revolution, aimed at serving the revolution. The revolution is not served through getting arrested or brutalized by the police. It is not served when people imagine that the only or best way to confront or resist the violence of the settler-colonial bourgeois state is by bowing to spontaneity and forgoing conscious development. It is on the conscious element to ensure that every sacrifice, every gift of a life to revolution, has the impact on the struggle that such a sacrifice should always have. There have already been so many sacrifices, and there will necessarily be countless more to come.

The revolution is inevitable, but the process lags every time Communists concede to carelessness and defeatism regarding our movement, our responsibilities, the broader struggle, and decide to bow to spontaneous action. It is more meaningful to struggle for keeping our people out of the enemy’s hands and increasingly shielding them from the political police’s awareness. It’s more meaningful to work now on developing the networks, strategies, and organizations that will ensure, whatever ways the enemy state and the political police seek to attack the movement, the movement will continue moving forward. 

Reading List

• False Nationalism, False Internationalism, E. Tani and Kae Sera
• What Is To Be Done, Lenin
• On Practice, Mao
• Materialism and the Dialectical Method, Cornforth
• History of Two-Line Struggle on Party-Building, Committee for Scientific Socialism
• Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building, I Wor Kuen (IWK)

Although our Press has put out an updated version of Gracie Lyons’ Constructive Criticism, entitled Constructive Struggle, this work did not touch on the liberal-individualist trend directly. A little over a year later, we believe it is time to update some of Constructive Struggle, or rather to make this addendum to it: that we must purge our organizations of the twin liberal-individualist desires for absolution and for justice. Enough of absolution, then, and enough of justice!

We are Communist revolutionaries. Our task is to nurture the revolutionary energy of the masses, to construct the party-militant that can channel revolutionary fervor, and to lead in the assault on the rotten, tottering bastions of the old society so we can begin to build the new. One of the tools that we have inherited from social-revolutionary movements of the past century, one of the tools that can help us build the party and prevent the structural decay that has afflicted all other party-building efforts in the imperial West, is that of self-and-community criticism. However, self-and-community criticism may easily be distorted. We are prone to distortions of true proletarian tools and to their misuse, because we lack a highly educated and developed backbone of political cadre that form the institutional basis of correct action and the model to which political rectification should conform.

Let us begin, then, with what self-and-community criticism is. Then we may lay out the ways that Western deviations corrupt and distort it, so that all our comrades may be equally on guard against these distortions.

What is Self-and-Community Criticism?

Self-and-community criticism is a tool deployed by the Marxist-Leninist parties of the past. It serves several purposes at one and the same time. It mediates political disputes within a Marxist-Leninist organization and provides a method whereby those who stray out of the correct theoretical space can be brought back into the fold, but conversely it also provides a form of redress for the individual to air their political grievances with their organization.

Self-and-community criticism is a type of constructive struggle. It is the thorough discussion of an error or errors in the political-organizational realm. It generally takes the form of a discussion or meeting in which the errors to be criticized are brought up and put into the open, either amongst comrades or between Communist and the masses. In this meeting, the criticized person or people has a chance to defend themselves, dispute the criticisms, and make counter-criticisms. In this way, the organization rectifies itself, individual members rectify their political understandings, and the organization becomes rectified to the community. It is of the greatest importance that strict rules be observed during such a meeting to prevent it from becoming an exchange of personal attacks.

We can reduce this description to a list of elements or factors that make up a self-and-community criticism session. Self-and-community criticism is:

1. Community-based, and undertaken with the membership of an organization or a meaningful sub-unit of that organization;
2. Political and neither moral nor personal in scope;
3. Designed to correct, not to destroy;
4. Open to defenses and counter-criticisms.

What does it mean to be a political process? Self-and-community criticism is not designed nor should it be used for the redressing of personal grievances. Dislike over the way someone carries themselves, behaves, etc., is not appropriate. Criticism of these aspects should only come by way of the manner in which they affect the work. Disagreement with personal habits is not appropriate. Only the political should be addressed. All direct insults should be avoided if possible.

This is one of the hardest things to internalize or analyze. As subjects in a bourgeois political system, we have a naturalized tendency of thinking in terms of morals or property. If a serious harm is done that requires redress, the venue for that redress is not self-and-community criticism. This cannot repair damaged relationships and is not designed to. Should, for instance, a member of a Communist organization steal something from a comrade or strike a comrade, it is not the harm done to the comrade struck or stolen from that is being corrected by a self-and-community criticism. Many harms, however, have a political level or valence to them. In the above examples, stealing from a comrade evinces a lack of respect for the organization and a breach of organizational rules; striking a comrade may exhibit a level of chauvinism, depending on the relationship.

If there are serious breaches of behavior, serious threats to the security and well-being of other members of the organization, then there must be some other, much sharper process than self-and-community criticism. For instance, no organization can countenance serious inter-member violence or sexual abuse, and it should not require a criticism meeting to criticise that behavior; nor should any organization suffer moles or informants, and that is not behavior that needs to be criticised before the organization acts to protect itself.

What does it mean to correct instead of destroy? The purpose of the process is to correct the organization and the person or people criticized. On rare occasions this isn’t possible. However, this is not a punitive process. It is not meant to bring closure for personal grievances or wrongs done. It is designed to bring one or more people to an understanding of an error or errors and, in fact, it may be the initially criticizing party who is wrong and must undergo rectification.

What does it mean to be open to defenses and counter-criticisms? Someone who simply passively accepts criticism is not engaging in the struggle. They must grapple with the criticisms; should they feel they are incorrect or unjust, they must articulate their reasoning. Should they have criticisms of their own which are relevant to the criticized matter, they must air them.

Some censures that might be issued as the result of a criticism meeting include, in increasing order of severity: warnings, serious warnings, removal from positions in the organization, probationary periods, and expulsion. Even in the case of expulsion, it is incumbent on the organization to produce a potential road to recovery and re-admission. The submission of searching, thorough, well-reasoned, and pertinent self-criticisms in response to a criticism may help to mitigate the degree of the sanction issued by the organization.

The Left Deviation: Kill the Patient

One of the most prevalent deviations when it comes to self-criticism is an overemphasis on penitence and purging. This is an ultra-left position whereby the politically suspect are identified and then “burned out” of the organization, leaving only scorched earth behind where a former member once stood.

This is not the purpose of criticism. Self-and-community criticism is not a weapon, nor is it inquisitorial. It is not designed to hunt out and root out the non-believers or those who believe incorrectly. It is a tool of community-building, and an aspect of scientific socialist organization. When transformed into a weapon, it loses all its effectiveness in political rectification and becomes deadly dangerous, allowing whoever controls the criticism process to secure their position in command of the organization. The “kill the patient” model is most commonly manifest as the proverbial witch hunt, in which membership is scoured for the ideological deviants, who are roundly criticized and expelled, leaving the organization ideologically “pure.”

This is, of course, an illusion that only those in command of the witch hunt can possibly believe. Self-and-community criticism is not an investigative technique, and it can become the channel of serious abuse if it is distorted in this fashion.

Self-and-community criticism is also not line struggle, and should not be used to replace line struggle. We must be attentive that ultra-left tendencies are not permitted to use the tool of self-and-community criticism to adjust the line of the organization or otherwise set new, more restrictive, points of unity. It is also important for organizations to maintain a method of line struggle. If this avenue is blocked, it may burst forth in the self-and-community criticism process, wreaking untold havoc.

The Right Deviations: Cult-Building, Individualism, Moralism

The first right deviation is similar to the left deviation, but put to a different end. Cult-building, as we covered in our article, The Cult-Building Tendency, often makes use of criticism as a means of control. When deployed in this fashion, “criticism” becomes  the subjection of a member of an organization to a round-robin attack in front of their peers. Their very defenses are often thrown back in their faces as further proof of their guilt. Should they dare to show any interaction with the abusive form of criticism aside from meek acceptance and humble pleas of apology, they are subjected to further angry tirades and sermons about their deviation from the organizational norms. This is a form of emotional abuse, and is not to be tolerated.

The other two major deviations are individualism and moralism. These are intertwined, and arise from the view that criticism is about something other than the political rectification of the criticized person, people, or organ. The example which comes to mind for many seasoned Communists of a moralistic attack on another member of an organization is that of Nikolai Bauman, a member of the RSDLP. In 1899, Bauman had an affair with the wife of a fellow revolutionary, who became pregnant with Bauman’s child. He openly mocked her, and she later hanged herself. In 1902, several of the Iskra editors wanted Bauman expelled from the paper. In 1903, the Iskra board adjudicated the matter, but none other than Vladimir Lenin blocked the investigation, arguing that the party’s task “was to make revolution against the Romanov monarchy and to vet the morality of comrades only when and in so far as their actions affected the implementation of the task.”

Of course, we can now realize that there was a political aspect to this “crime,” which should have been criticized! But the manner in which the criticism was leveled, the attempt to expel Bauman for a moral crime rather than for his political deviation — that is, chauvinism and degrading the fighting-force of the revolutionary organization — was what drew the response.

Criticism is not a bourgeois trial, and is not used to establish the “guilt” of a person in harming a “victim.” Although there may be victims of the criticized as a result of their errors, criticism is a tool for determining if the criticized committed a political error and correcting the errors of the criticized if one has been committed.

Concluding Remarks

I hope that this has been a useful meditation on the processes that are currently used (or not) in our Communist organizations. The Press urges anyone with experience in criticism and self-criticism to submit their own critiques of this piece, submit stories, or update it.

While criticism is certainly important, it must be practiced correctly.

Its use will allow us to purify the ideological atmosphere of our organizations, to bring proletarian consciousness among all strata of our activists, and to rectify the unavoidable deviations of our revolutionists.

Onward, then, together toward revolution!