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.’” ︎

Normally, it wouldn’t be worthwhile engaging with discourse on Twitter, but because of the overwhelming positive response to the thread, including affirmations of its relevance to all organizations, not just DSA chapters, it is evident that this is a product of a widespread and troubling attitude among organizers in the U.S.

Now, there are some truths and some merits buried in this argument, if we can only excavate them from the worship of spontaneity that pervades it. What this person is attempting to describe is the concept of stagnation, which is very real. An organization is a machine; it is a vehicle. If it is not moving, if it is not progressing, it is failing to serve its purpose — not only that, it is beginning to degrade. That which is not growing and coming into being is already beginning to fade away. As Marxists, as Communists, as members and leaders of Communist organizations, we must always be engaged in the process of building revolution. We must take care to ensure our organizations are always moving toward this end and always furthering this goal.

Stagnation is a lack of qualitative movement or direction, and is characterized by wasted effort and wasted time. It is often the death knell of organizations, leading to burnout, despair, and nihilism. Stagnation is, in essence, the opposite of progress, a perpetual holding pattern whereby we are all just waiting for something to happen.

Stagnation does not necessarily mean failure. Failure, when it is part of the process of trial and error, is actually progressive. When we make mistakes, we learn. When we learn from our shortcomings and failures, we develop. Development is part of progress, and when we develop we are engaged in the process of building. As long as we are learning, we are growing. That is also not to say that we do not expect moments of calm when we are assiduously performing the plan we set out and agreed upon. Every moment is not necessarily a heightening of the struggle, and all organizations must make numerous strategic and tactical retreats, withdrawals, and breaks. None of these things are bad in and of themselves. (After all, we are Marxists — nothing has any positive or negative quality in itself, but derives those qualities from how it relates to the project).

Stagnation can also appear in the form of circular movement, where completed actions and programs leave you right where you started with no qualitative advancement. In cases like these, success does not always constitute progress. If an action is performed, regardless of how “successful” it was, if there is no real outcome, no lessons learned, no structures built, you have not really moved from where you were. In fact, a “successful” action can disorganize your organization and demobilize your cadre if the tactical or strategic direction is incorrect. Think, for instance, of making a push to elect a certain local politician in the hopes that they will open a breathing window for socialist discourse in your region. Once the election is over, many of the structures that were built to mobilize voters, because they were highly specialized (over-specialized), collapse. When this politician instantly turns coat and betrays the socialist values they claimed to espouse, you may lose morale and membership. This “success” was actually a failure.

When we make a mistake and learn from it, it was worth that time and effort. If we refuse to learn from it and continue to repeat the same mistakes, it is not and we have stagnated. We have failed to make progress towards our goal. This is the danger of stagnation, and it is a danger we must do our best to avoid.

This former staff member identifies one way to avoid stagnation, which is to find a direction and move in it. Programs and projects, with defined goals and practical milestones, are essential to construction and progress. An organization must have a direction around which to focus its efforts. If a vehicle has all of its wheels pulling in different directions, it does not move, but when all of its wheels are united and moving in the same direction, it makes forward progress, motion. So it is with organizations. Without a direction, there is no motion; there is no motivation, there is no unity.

Where our friend’s argument fails is that it lacks an understanding of progress, construction, and priority. Their “Danger Zone” doesn’t actually give an adequate definition of stagnation. We can restate this in a clear way as the answers to the following series of questions:

What exactly is the “Danger Zone” that this person describes?

DSA chapters fall into the “Danger Zone” when they focus on internal work instead of external work. It is in these moments, they say, that ideological differences among members become clear, issues between members erupt into conflict, and less active members are neglected and grow distant from the organization.

Is the “Danger Zone” actually stagnation?

No. In fact, if the “Danger Zone” makes existing contradictions between members clear and ideological struggle comes to the forefront, it is not actually dangerous at all! Debate, struggle, working through contradictions with your comrades; these are essential elements of development. This is how correct positions are adopted and direction and unity clarified.

This person effectively makes a distinction between internal and external work, arguing that external work is the only progress possible. However, internal development, building structure, clarifying ideology and political position is organizing. It is progress.

If this is the case, why is the “Danger Zone” so destructive to DSA chapters?

It is necessary to resolve or reconcile contradictions between members, because their resolution is motion. However, there are some contradictions that are irreconcilable. A dogmatic anti-Communist liberal who refuses to engage with Marxism in good faith cannot be reached through struggle because you cannot establish unity with them. The nature of DSA being a big-tent organization, which allows anyone to obtain membership and makes no central structural attempts to develop them, means that people like this can become members of the organization. They can, and do, amass significant influence and take up positions of leadership. Therefore, when the organization attempts to take up internal work, which involves ideological and political struggle, it is destructive instead of constructive.

It is clear that this is the result of a massive structural failure endemic to the DSA as a whole. It is a product of petit bourgeois liberalism which can put forward no scientific analysis and instead defaults to liberal conceptions of democracy and individualism. They have no internal structure upon which to develop their various chapters. Some chapters develop their own education programs, but without standardization they are variable in scope and effect. As a result, members do not engage in adequate political development. Additionally, a lack of a central protocol for “grievances,” or criticism, causes struggle between members to quickly devolve into destructive pettiness and personal conflict.

Why is focusing solely on external work not actually a solution?

Imagine a merry-go-round. If you pick a point on the outside edge, it appears to be moving very fast. If you pick a point closer to the center, it is moving much slower. If you pick a point in the center, it is not moving at all.

External work only gives us the appearance of movement if it is not also paired with internal work. When we engage in canvassing, tabling, holding protests, even engaging in aid work, it makes us feel as if we are progressing. We are, after all, “getting out there.” We are putting boots on the ground, we are talking to our neighbors and community members. We say we are “organizing” them.

But mobilization is not the same as organizing. If you get a thousand people to come to a march, but then they go home afterwards and never come out again, what progress have you made? What have you built? If you pile a hundred people on a merry-go-round, where are they traveling to? Nowhere. In fact, they are not really moving at all.

As such, it is entirely possible to be thoroughly engaged in external work AND ALSO be stagnated in your development. In fact, focusing solely on external work obfuscates stagnation and lack of development, making one feel as if they are organizing when they are not.

The U.S. left, and DSA in particular, is obsessed with action, with what we call spontaneity. All of DSA’s major efforts have been organized around spontaneous events in American politics; falling in behind Bernie Sanders and M4A and the “Fight For 15,” all of these things are products of spontaneous populist demands. 

In many ways, organizing is the antithesis of spontaneity. Organizing is deliberate, it is planned, it is paced, it is controlled and directed. It is the work that happens behind the scenes when the streets clear of protestors and everyone else goes home. Organizing prepares us to take advantage of spontaneity, because moments of spontaneous passion and rebellion from the people are times of consciousness raising and opportunities for qualitative leaps in growth. It is the structures built between spontaneous moments that allows that momentum to be taken hold of.

For someone who lacks a holistic, scientific view, external work appears to be the preferable, or indeed, the only, form of motion. They see a person running on a treadmill and shout, “My, how fast they’re going!” But if the building is on fire, who is making more progress, the person sprinting on the treadmill or the person walking towards the door? 

Is this not the real “Danger Zone”?

We must reframe our understanding of what actually constitutes organizing. We must refocus our efforts from circular, wasted time and effort towards actual development and construction. We cannot use external work as an excuse to avoid the hard work of ideological struggle and commitment. We cannot use it to ignore contradictions and shortcomings in our structures and among our membership, pushed down like repressed emotions. Those contradictions must be dealt with or they will erupt.
At this time, our movement has no political formation capable of realizing class power and fighting for the interests of the working classes. Therefore, while external work is important, internal work, organization building, is primary. We cannot shy away from it as something dangerous or scary or incorrect, we must embrace it and engage with it wholeheartedly. Comrades, the “Danger Zone” is not actually dangerous at all. It is necessary work that must be done if we are to make forward progress towards our goals. If we avoid it, we fall into stagnation, regression, and irrelevancy. If we refuse to engage with it, if we refuse to engage in learning and development, then our failures truly are failures and our efforts are in vain.

So what does this have to do with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)?

It is exceedingly easy to apply a mechanical analysis to the DSA and dismiss the “party” without a second thought — which many Marxist-Leninists in the U.S. have done. After all, once one identifies the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), or the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) as the most principled organization in the Empire, why bother analyzing a “social-democratic party”? One can simply dismiss it as a pseudo SDP (the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, which was in power during the Weimar Republic and which betrayed the German Communists) and recapitulate the same history of Germany in the early 20th century. “Social democracy is objectively the left wing of fascism” — indeed!

But we are not in the third period of the Soviet Union, the DSA is not the SDP, and there is no equivalent to the KDP (the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, the Communists who split from the SDP). We must analyze the particularities of our historical moment, not do battle with the ghosts of history. Let us consider, then, some objective facts.

1. In 2020, the DSA estimated that it had approximately 66,000 members. This by far outstrips the PSL’s internal “estimate” of 2,000 members and the CPUSA’s claimed 5,000. By any stretch of the imagination, the DSA has more contact with the masses through its base membership than either of those parties through all of their programs.
2. The DSA lacks even the fundamentals of political discipline. Any and every trend and tendency is permitted to openly organize into political factions without expulsion and, for the time being, to struggle for supremacy within the organization. Obviously, this state of affairs will not continue.
3. The DSA is undoubtedly heavily compromised by the intelligence agencies as well as by the extremely reactionary elements’ organization within it. As an organization, it is in the thrall of an anarchistic non-ideology — what its members call the “big tent,” permitting anyone who proclaims even a vague appreciation of socialism and pays their dues to become a member.
4. The DSA has elected a spate of vile imperialist pawns and assets to high office to participate in the management of the U.S-Canadian capitalist empire. These politicians have proven that the organization has no discipline; even against strenuous objections by the DSA, the politicians continue to act in the interests of the empire and they are subject to no repercussions.

What does this information tell us? In the first place, the DSA is drawing orders of magnitude more advanced workers than any other even nominally socialist organization in the U.S.-Canadian empire. In the second place, these advanced workers, who are newly-waking to class consciousness, are being miseducated by the reactionaries their organization combines them with. This intermixing of radicalizing workers and reactionary old-guard social-democrats enables the elders to poison the newly awakened workers before they get their feet under them. These rightist elements are a major stream within the DSA and are intermixed with all the others.

Normally, as Marxist-Leninists, we would deride this organizational mish-mash, this utter incoherency, and it is true that this incoherence means the DSA cannot take up the role of a worker’s party. It cannot legitimately represent the outlook or needs of the workers. Thus, we should put aside starry-eyed optimism about what the organization is and can be.

In order to make sense of the phenomenon we are now observing, we must keep in mind the political development of the revolutionary classes as outlined in our prior article, Battle Lines, but with a further and more detailed analysis of the most advanced section of the workers.

These advanced workers can be separated as follows:

Tailing advanced section. Workers just reaching class-consciousness tend to develop eclectically, to display extreme unevenness in their comprehension of even basic political economy and strategy, and to be easy prey for reactionaries. Indeed, this fraction can be leveraged by reactionaries to form a bulwark of tailism within the revolutionary classes themselves — they can be transformed into their own inverse.

This group of tailing advanced workers are by and large the group entering into the DSA.

Intermediate advanced section. Class-conscious and relatively well-developed, the intermediate advanced workers are essentially that group which have already become fairly well-versed Marxists. They compose many of the Marxist caucuses within the DSA, as well as the bulk of true revolutionaries in the U.S.-Canadian empire.

Leading advanced section. The truly well-educated Marxist-Leninist is a rarity. There are unlikely to be more than several hundred in the U.S. Empire’s geographic territory.

Obviously, it is imperative for the more advanced elements to link up with the tailing-advanced elements before they can be mobilized by reaction. Perhaps paradoxically, the tailing-advanced section is more vulnerable to being misled in this fashion even than the less advanced sections of the working class. This section possesses some preliminary theory, but not a sufficient amount to differentiate between the devious sleight-of-hand performed by imperialist “Marxists,” who have trained their whole lives to deceive the working classes.

Secondly, most of those people claiming to represent some ideological tendency in the U.S.-Canadian empire are  not true adherents of that form of thought, but merely aesthetically attracted to this or that aspect of a tendency. They are generally among the tailing advanced section, not the intermediate advanced section, and will not be able to enter that section until such time as the contradictions sharpen and the lines of battle become more clear to them.

Thirdly, the extremely unstructured internal organization of the DSA means that it is not a conventional social-democratic party, but rather a forum for the organization of cliques and factions. Depending on the geographical prevalence of any trend, a given location may be more or less “party-like,” more or less advanced, etc.

What does all of this mean? Based on these three underlying propositions that:

1. The tailing-advanced workers are entering the DSA in relatively large numbers
2. Most people claiming an ideological tendency among advanced workers are not ideologically committed to that tendency, and
3. The fact that the DSA is not a centralized party but merely a loose group of “fellow-travelers” — a “big tent,”

Then our treatment of the DSA should not be as a social-democratic monolith with the internal organization of a hostile party, but as a broad field where newly-radicalizing workers stand to be exposed to a variety of ideas and streams of radicalism. Thus explicated, it becomes our duty not to stand aside and apart, criticizing the DSA as a stern elder sibling who knows better, but rather to organize its membership into the seeds of Marxist local, primary organizations; to provide political education and democratically guide the masses of tailing-advanced workers through proper political development and militancy.

Some will ask if this is merely entryism, to which we must make a simple but all-important clarification: entryism is an incorrect strategy of attempting to secretly take control of a bourgeois party. The above is distinguishable in several respects, namely:

1. The DSA is not a “party” in the traditional sense, and
2. The analysis does not require attempting to wrest control of the DSA.

This is not entryism. This is the organization of constituent members of the DSA into Marxist organizations that can, at any time, help form the basis for an all-empire party of Marixsts.

The Need for Organization and Discipline

However, this strategy cannot be pursued by lone, disconnected unconnected individuals. When surrounded by potential counter-revolutionary and reactionary currents, one must have a real connection to other principled advanced workers of at least the intermediate-advanced section. The risk is that one is atomized within the party and isolated from revolutionary currents, thus becoming transformed into an appendage of the reactionary streams. Thus, prior to attempting to carry out a local plan of this type, we urge our readers to either form a Marxist organization apart and outside of the DSA that can serve as a guide to these efforts, discusses successes and failures, determine strategy, etc., or else to connect with the Press so other principled members of the Press can help serve this role.

The capacity for the Press to act in this fashion is the result of technical changes in the methods of communication and organization since the beginning of the last century. It is now possible to rely on geographically disparate comrades to act as a central repository of knowledge and aid, pooling their capacities through the internet, and to serve as a blood bank of struggle to answer questions, and so on.

Thus, we urge those unaffiliated advanced workers to organize within the DSA and those already pursuing this strategy to connect with the Press.

Organize the membership of the DSA!

At present, partly due to the “big tent” the DSA harbors, there are many streams of “support” for the Uncommitted Movement — some revolutionary, and others less so. USU encourages the Marxist tendencies to come together and exert their collective power within the organization to support the most radical version of the Uncommitted Movement; that is, the direct confrontation against the Democratic Party machine. We urge you, also, to purify the DSA’s position and make it clear: the position is not to vote uncommitted in order to change the Democratic Party — it is to vote uncommitted to prove that the Democratic Party is not subject to proletarian pressure, that it cannot change.

We point here to our recent sister-piece, Defy the Democratic Party Coronation, for our analysis of the difference.

The difference may seem slight, but we believe that the distinction is critical. Even if the ultimate material consequence of the Uncommitted Movement is to expose the lies of the bourgeois politicians, if the guidance of the DSA is confused or muddled — if there are messages of reform intermixed with the revolutionary message — the ultimate outcome will result in a petit-bourgeois deviation from the true proletarian line: that we must abandon the electoral machine en masse, in an organized form, and prepare for direct confrontation with the genocidal enemy state.

Our Press Organization stands prepared to aid you in any way we can.

As this paper has recently covered, the Democratic Party — one of two fascist settler-parties that govern the U.S. empire — is dismissive of inner-party democracy. They have rejected the concept that anyone other than the Genocidaire-in-Chief Biden could claim the Democratic nomination. Plans are already in place for a coronation of either the current president of the U.S. Empire or his second-in-command, Kamala Harris.

The people say no.

This sham of democracy is always a problem for the parties in a bourgeois republic where voting has been extended to working people. Of course, the desires of the working class are discounted by the governing class — when was the last time you can remember voting for a plumber, a construction worker, or a coffee-house barista in the general election? — but the political form of the U.S. republic requires a pretense of democracy. It’s one of the ways the U.S. government has been able to suppress capitalism’s inherent class contradictions and prevent class struggle from sharpening domestically over the last century. If you believe you have a say, you’re less likely to reject the whole sordid affair.

The zionist aggression unleashed by the heroic resistance attacks of October 7, 2023, threatens to undermine the already-feeble appearance of democracy in the U.S. Voter participation in U.S. elections has historically waxed at a mere 66% of eligible voters and more regularly tops out at 50% of the electorate. Around 15% of the electorate votes in local elections for mayors and community leaders. Compare that with the 83.6% voter participation in Cuba, a worker-lead socialist country; the working class of the U.S. empire is already skeptical of the political machine that runs things.

Enter the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Uncommitted Movement.

The DSA is a “big-tent” organization which contains both truly revolutionary and counter-revolutionary streams. DSA Marxists tend to gravitate toward one of the Marxist caucuses within the party: the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), Red Star, and the former Trotskyites of Reform & Revolution. MUG alone, to our knowledge, has forwarded a plan that would see the transformation of the DSA into a vanguard party. While the Pressworker’s Organization at USU does not agree with the potential of the DSA to emerge as the vanguard, we believe organizing within it can be useful to the working class movement and, at this stage, is necessary to reach the masses and increase class-consciousness.

The Uncommitted Movement is a required step in that process. The reformist wings of the DSA, which cause it to tail Democrats and engage in wasteful electoral politics that produce controlled-opposition office holders (Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush in the U.S. House of Representatives, alongside a welter of state officials), has made noise in opposition to the Uncommitted Movement. There are also those Marxists who express their disagreement with the movement and desire to focus DSA resources on bread-and-butter worker organizing.

What Is the Uncommitted Movement?

The movement represents the expenditure of organizing power, time, and money to cause Democratic voters to vote “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries. The mainstream reasoning behind the movement (and the reason some Democrats have signed on) is to “send a signal” to the Democratic National Committee and party leadership that Biden cannot win a general election and that his administration’s continued support and logistical management of the zionist genocide of Palestine must end.

This is futile. That’s not why the Uncommitted Movement is important.

This is the moment to disillusion the working classes with Democratic party politics. The Democratic Party has captured working-class movements and throttled class struggle by using paid labor aristocrats and bought-off union leadership for a century. As we recently published in The Democrats Have Nothing Left to Offer,

In the face of this [early 20th century] labor agitation came the Great Depression. The threat of the final and total overthrow of the capitalist order loomed large as the world capitalist economy melted down and threw twelve million people out of work. The capitalists scrambled to craft a policy reply to the crisis. It finally came in the form of European style social democracy. Thus was born the New Deal. In the words of conservative think-tank the Hoover Institute, the revolution never came because the “man in the White House co-opted the left.”

But there is no more flex in the old unholy alliance of high-level labor leaders, opportunists within the Communist Party of the USA, the working class, the petit-bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois Democratic party politicians. The Democrats literally have nothing left to offer as a bribe for the working class. The only thing either party has left is the stick.

The Uncommitted Movement is important because it will expose the Democratic party in the eyes of the working people. The DNC won’t respond — it is constitutionally incapable of taking the feedback of angry voters, as we saw with the internal coup against the very mild left-wing social imperialist Bernie Sanders in 2016. The most the DNC will do is gear up its talking heads to chastise voters, call them stupid, or childish, or short-sighted, or self-destructive. That will drive people away from bourgeois politics.

There Is a Movement, but No Party

This is a necessary precursor for breaking up the ice that has paralyzed the working class movement for so long. We have a situation currently prevailing where there is a working class movement but there is not a working class party.

While the Marxists struggle for unity to give the working class a party through which it can voice its grievances and with which it can wield the weapons of revolution, the DSA is preparing the ground for the movement itself to swell and grow ever-riper. We must disillusion the people from electoral politics. We must break the reliance of the working class movement on their captured labor-aristocrat leaders. We must think, and cause our class-siblings to think with us, about non-electoral alternatives.

Therefore, although USU and the Red Clarion are primarily engaged in the project of uniting the advanced elements of the working class and the lower ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie, we endorse the Uncommitted Movement. We urge it to spread. At this time, full commitment to the movement, full commitment to mass-disillusionment with bourgeois politics, is the most revolutionary act that the DSA is capable of taking. Show the Democrats for what they are, and spit in the eye of their heir-apparent, the murderous Biden and his “top-cop” crony. Defy the coronation, for the good of the working classes.