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.’” ︎

By 1965, the old slave power had managed to beat back Reconstruction and establish itself as a constellation of terror-states in the U.S. South. While the capitalist ruling class in the North was content to hide or mystify the national oppression the U.S. system relied on, for the defeated Southern planter class and their petty-bourgeois hangers-on, this sublimation wasn’t enough. They were either ideologically incapable or materially incapable of joining the northern capitalists in adopting grand-sounding language about equality while maintaining the national oppression of New Afrikans and Indigenous Peoples; their deep-seated ideological commitments required them to constantly express their white supremacy in overt and terroristic ways. Sitting atop a semi-colony of brutally oppressed people, the ruling class in the U.S. South had, as the slaver Jefferson said, “the wolf by the ear.” In order to feel safe in that great prison, the Southern ruling class had to maintain absolute, fascistic, political supremacy over the Black population.

Indeed, the southern whites had been more or less permitted to do just that in the long period between the overthrow of radical Republican Reconstruction in 1877 (the period known to the Southern whites as “Redemption,” that is, redemption of the white supremacist power and the defeat of New Afrikan self-governance) and the alliance that emerged between Black World War II veterans returning to the South and the growing Black petty bourgeoisie. This period lasted from roughly 1877 until 1950.

In 1941, the racist policies of the FDR administration were challenged by A. Philip Randolph and his Black March on Washington; in 1954, the Supreme Court ended the legal basis for segregation in public schools when it decided Brown v. Board. Northern capitalists were insistent on bringing the southern slaveocracy into the modern day, not for moral reasons, but for economic ones. In 1957, the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act, the first signed into law since 1875. These decrees from on high were motivated by the need to free up labor in the Black Belt from the regressive agrarian prisons that the colonial relations still kept them in; but none of these decrees changed the balance of power in the South. Black New Afrikans in the semi-colonial states were held in a vice of property and labor theft, rape, arson, lynchings, and undisguised murder. In the U.S. South, the state ruled by terror. Despite the promise of the amended U.S. constitution, Black people who registered to vote took their lives in their hands.

At the end of the 1950s, the militant streams of Black resistance gained more and more currency and began to unite. These were often spearheaded by Black veterans or radical Black students, many of whom were explicitly Communists — Marxist-Leninists or otherwise. This period saw the rise of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act was the result of a tightening labor market in the U.S. at the same time that militancy was increasing and the consciousness was widening for the support of a Black national movement.¹ Economic pressure joined with the Black drive for liberation. There was a real fear in the halls of power that the U.S. state could face a Black domestic insurrection and an increasing desire to see the fragments of the Southern planter class and their dependents defeated entirely, to consummate the triumph of free labor, as opposed to low-productivity sharecropping and semi-slave labor that still reigned in the South. Even the former planters themselves had begun to realize that they couldn’t continue to manage their sections of the country by relying purely on terror. They realized they needed to find a way to accommodate the form and appearance of equality while maintaining the white supremacist content of the slaveocracy.²

The VRA established a relation between the planters and the federal government that was similar to that of Reconstruction. Its general provisions under section 2 of the law prohibit state and local governments from enacting any law or rule that denies or abridges the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language group. Other general provisions outlaw literacy tests and poll taxes. The special provisions granted the federal U.S. Attorney General and the District Court for DC power over Southern elections, redistricting plans, and so forth, that essentially put the Southern states into a kind of federal receivership for the purposes of voting.

The War on the Voting Rights Act

Although the VRA was a necessary concession to save the capitalist state by creating a veneer of participatory democracy in the US South, it wasn’t fully implemented all at once. This gave the ruling class time to find ways to empty the vote of its power. There remained, however, a significant faction within the broader US capitalist class itself for whom the VRA remained ideologically intolerable. Existence of international pressure from the Soviet Union and the national liberation and Pan-African movements forced the US to maintain this veneer. With the fall of the USSR and the declining world-position of the US ruling class, this clique of ideologically devoted racists has gained more and more adherents from their bourgeois colleagues. 

The Federalist Society is one of the bastions of the movement to reverse the changes in the US legal landscape and return to the early 20th century when capital openly ruled the courts.³ In 2013, the US Supreme Court, that bastion of ruling-class power,⁴ nullified the powerful special provisions of the VRA in Shelby Counter v. Holder. In the 2021 decision Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court weakened the general provisions of section 2 of the VRA. Now, the court is poised to rule on the constitutionality of section 2 as a whole. The legal war waged by the growing right-fascist bloc for half a century is nearing its conclusion. We must ask: does it matter if section 2 is struck down? If it does, why and how? Is there any way we can agitate around this issue? Does it mean we Marxists must join hands with Democrats and other fragments of the ruling class?

To briefly answer each in turn: firstly, yes; secondly, it is a sign of how advanced the imperialist decay is; thirdly, yes again; and, finally, absolutely not!

What Will Be the Outcome?

Despite the fact that the VRA in and of itself cannot guarantee anything, and despite the fact that its passage was an accommodation that was fashioned as part of an overall effort to pacify Black militancy and disarm the Black national revolutionary consciousness of the 1950s and 60s, it is actually of great importance to us whether or not the fascist court strikes it down. Oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais have already signaled that the court does intend to roll back this final element of the VRA. This is part and parcel of the right-fascist drive to restore capitalists to open and undisguised power in all aspects of political and legal life. It dovetails with the same right-fascist attack on the administrative state presently being carried out under the guise of the shutdown, a political “conflict” in which the left-fascist Democrats are playing the role of useful idiot.⁵ Given the disposition of political forces and the economic situation (increasing inflation and unemployment) it is likely that the VRA’s section 2 will be struck down.

The fate of the VRA is a bellwether for the degree of decay of the old US imperialist system that prevailed from 1991 until today as well as the balance of power between the left- (Democratic/Progressive) and right- (GOP and MAGA) fascist cliques within the ruling class. If the VRA is struck down, Democratic Party operatives will ceaselessly and breathlessly fund raise and proclaim their old doctrines about emergency organization in the face of “Trumpist” fascism and the need to permit people from both sides of the color line to participate in and enjoy the capitalist system. In private, of course, they will signal more cynically that it’s just good strategy to give the nationally oppressed the illusion of democracy. After all, they will say to their donors in closed-door dinners, it’s not as if the masses of Black people — or for that matter, any working-class voters — actually have any way to influence the important policies of the US state.

If the VRA is struck down, it signals the right-fascists are extremely advanced on their path toward carrying out the genocide of the nationally oppressed that they have been preparing for Black and Indigenous people in the US.⁶ Striking down the VRA would remove entire layers and battlefields of intra-bourgeois political struggle — layers that are “wasteful” in the eyes of the ruling class, just like the “waste” of the administrative state that they are dismantling — but would also strip away the illusion that the US state can be altered by the oppressed voting in any meaningful way.

What Is Our Task?

If the VRA is defeated, the Democrats will attempt to lead the movement that organically emerges in reaction. Many will rightly be afraid of what the loss of the final provisions of the VRA mean for the nationally oppressed and other groups openly targeted by the right-fascist government. We cannot allow this to happen. Democrats will naturally frame the question as one of government participation. They will start new voter registration drives, demand mobilization to defeat the right-fascists at the ballot box, and exercise a full-court press for the election of Democrats to the Congress and in local government.

We must instead first agitate against the new terror-government directly, then propagandize to expand the consciousness of the masses to connect the striking down of the VRA with the entire rotten system. It will be clear to many that there are no self-correcting measures available. With the open and legal disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South and other right-fascist strongholds, the layer of mystification that promised government responsiveness to the people will be gone.

Now is the time to prepare for the VRA to be removed. Now is the time to lay plans. If it is not, and the right-fascists instead uphold the remaining section to buy more time before carrying out a direct assault on the ballot box, then our preparations won’t have been in vain; we can still carry out agitation and propaganda on the basis that the VRA could have been struck down, and likely will be struck down in the near future. We must broaden the call to include other landmark rulings and laws that were offered during the heyday of empire — Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board, and Obergefell v. Hodges — and warn that they too stand to be struck down by the right-fascists.

The moment is ours; the Democrats must not be allowed to stand at its head.

Footnotes

1. The tightening labor market put the pressure on to mobilize and “free” tied up labor; business interests wanted to draw from the pool of sharecroppers in the Black Belt.
   ︎
2. “By the 1950s the language of white supremacy was gradually softening in some quarters, becoming less shrill in an attempt to gain respectability for racism. Phrases like ‘states’ rights’ and concepts such as the need to protect ‘constitutional liberties’ from communist subversion and federal intervention were becoming stand-ins for raw racial rhetoric.” Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Duke University Press, 2015.
   ︎
3. See The Society Behind the Supreme Court’s Fascist Blitzkrieg in the Clarion.
   ︎
4. See Capital’s Supreme Defender in the Clarion.
   ︎
5. See This Land Ain’t Your Land: The US Government Shutdown in the Clarion.
   ︎
6. See DC Occupation: Coming to Your City Next in the Clarion.
   ︎

Federal government shutdowns are triggered when the federal legislature fails to pass a budget bill to fund government operations. Of course, the shutdown doesn’t actually incapacitate the government — the executive branch (the White House) marks certain agencies as “essential” and continues funding them despite the lack of the funding bill. This reveals what the ruling class actually sees as the “essential” functions of the US government.

The Department of the Interior has furloughed most of its employees, leaving federal parks understaffed but open (64% of staff). National parks also maintain their law enforcement, fire suppression, emergency response, and power maintenance staff. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will furlough all but 33,500 of its employees and those will be working without pay to ensure that air travel remains operational.

The Department of Education will continue to collect student loans and send out billing statements.

The Pentagon will be unable to pay over one million people serving in the US military, to award new contracts, or to start new programs. Elective surgeries and procedures in military medical and dental facilities are being postponed. If the shutdown is not resolved by October 15, troops will miss their first paycheck.

The IRS will keep all of its employees.

The Department of Health and Human Services is sending 40% of its workforce on furlough. The National Institutes of Health is putting three quarters of its staff on furlough and stopped basic research. Two-thirds of the CDC is being furloughed. The FDA will continue to function, but its staff will work without pay.

The VA (Veterans Affairs) has separate money available that was provided by Congress.

All workers tasked with processing oil and natural gas drilling permits and coal mining operations will continue to work. Regulatory and enforcement work of the EPA will cease. The FTC, which is currently overseeing the prosecution of big cases against tech companies, will furlough all but its commissioners and a small pool of staff. Lawyers who are litigating must request suspension of dates in cases like the FTC’s antitrust case against Amazon. Wall Street regulators are suspended with only 9% of the Securities and Exchange Commission remaining in place and 6% of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission workers remaining on the job.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will continue to employ less than 900 of its 2,500 people.

HUD’s Section 8 housing budget will rapidly be depleted. All processing will be halted at HUD. SNAP and WIC will continue to run until the end of October, when the funding for those programs is in question. When they will cease is not yet public.

Why Did the Government Shut Down?

The Democrats have finally taken a concrete action “against” the MAGA government — or at least, so it would appear. The bourgeois news media has announced the loggerheads between the GOP and Democrats over the past few weeks, ostensibly over extending healthcare tax credits (which makes health insurance cheaper), reversal of cuts to Medicaid, and opposition to spending cuts in health agencies.

This disagreement, with the Democrats loudly proclaiming they will not fund the government unless the GOP makes concessions here, is the public reason for the budgetary fight. The Democrats claim they will not agree to any budget bill that doesn’t address these three concerns.

What, however, is the material result of the shutdown? The Trump White House has been slashing government spending and firing federal workers since the beginning of the term. The GOP brought in private capitalist and apartheid billionaire Elon Musk, along with a hit squad of finance and business children, to attack the bottom line of many executive agencies. The shutdown is an exercise in “belt tightening” of a kind that the right-fascist coalition has been craving since the beginning of this presidential term.

Why would the GOP cave on any budgetary issue when the president is attempting to dismantle the federal executive agencies anyway? This is the culmination of decades of “lawfare” and legal maneuvering by the Federalist Society, a clave of lawyers and judges that seeks to return more direct power to the ruling class capitalists by dismantling the safety rails constructed over the 20th century and bring the US back to its early 20th-century roots, before the triumph of the Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions made waves around the world, forcing the imperialist countries into a stage of imperialist bribery for portions of their populations.

Any and all “temporary” measures taken by the White House during this “crisis” stand a chance of becoming permanent. The Democratic Party will eventually capitulate in the face of the shutdown, funding the government without winning any significant reforms. They will then turn around and try to fundraise on their “bravery.”

Organize Mass Meetings

As a result of the shutdown, the government will at least temporarily cease issuing reports on market data, which will cause confusion among its central bankers and may lead to sharp declines on the stock market. If the shutdown goes on for long enough to cause furloughed government workers to miss pay day on October 15th, we should expect a sharp contraction in the economy. Many families and individuals will be unable to secure Section 8 housing or other federal benefits and the strain on local social services will increase, requiring extra help that Communists should stand ready to provide. Federal workers will be in a state of emotional and economic vulnerability and shock. Ideologically Democratic workers will be confused and angry. Petty-bourgeois and small-time government contractors will begin to fail as their sources of income dry up. This will free at least some of these petty-bourgeois workers and small owners from their present ideological shackles. They too easily slide into reaction, but this can be overcome if there is a Communist movement present to educate them.

This is the time to vigorously attack the legitimacy of the government in which this kind of disarray is a regular risk, but even more it is the time to expose the logic of class warfare that underlies government action. The main questions that present themselves are:

1. Why is this (the shutdown) the only option to get the kinds of change the Democrats are trying to get? That is, why is the US government structured in such a way that this can happen, and why are regular working people shut out from any means to influence its outcome?
2. What is the strategic reasoning behind this shutdown? It intensifies the contradiction between the capitalist and the workers.
3. What can we do about it? Why are the corporations and capitalists organized to achieve political ends in this fashion, but we are not organized enough to have our needs met?

Organizations should be agitating on these lines among their communities. This is the time to call mass meetings to help address the problems that will begin to arise as a result of the shutdown, as well as to answer the questions the shutdown presents. Literature should be distributed on street-corners and government offices. Meetings should be held about the failings of the federal government and both bourgeois parties that led us to this impasse.

The bottom line is that the country — the US and all its legal forms and structures — doesn’t exist to help the working class; it exists, at bottom, for the wealthy. It takes its shape from the needs of the wealthy, the capitalist class, and whatever is agreed upon is best among them. This land is not “our” land. In a very real sense, it’s theirs. It is the task of the decolonial Marxist-Leninist to ensure that “they” — the ruling class — no longer controls it and the land itself is rematriated to the Indigenous peoples through a comprehensive system of land and political reform: the social revolution. We can make ideological inroads on this process now.

When the ruling class is flush and internationally powerful, it sends its client politicians to dispense largesse. When, as now, it is embattled, its politicians push austerity and white nationalism, which is the semi-concealed principle upon which the US state is built.

As the capitalists attempt to reorganize their imperial system, they are uniquely vulnerable. The working people of the US are primed to accept arguments that will break them away from the labor-aristocratic or petty-bourgeois class standing that leads them time and time again to align with their own ruling class against the world in the hopes of receiving good jobs, artificially cheap televisions, computers, and cars, and all the other fruits of empire. If we build this subjective consciousness now, while the iron is hot, we can temper it to resist later reversals and blandishments.

Sample Literature

Understanding the Shutdown

The federal government has been shut down by an apparent disagreement between the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. After ten months of lying down in front of the MAGA agenda, the Democrats have chosen to take a stand to help Trump and his White House dismantle the federal government by shutting it down.

This government isn’t by the people or for the people. That’s a misunderstanding, one that the ruling class is only too happy to perpetuate. When the founders of this country said that, they meant it was a government by and for white settler land-owning men. Not much has changed!

When the ruling class is strong and successfully bleeding the world, it is “kind” to us — out of self-preservation! When it’s weak, like today, it takes that kindness away.

Come to a mass meeting! We will ask — and answer — the most important questions about the shutdown and all the schemes of the ruling class:

1. Why is this (the shutdown) the only option to get the kinds of change the Democrats are trying to get? That is, why is the US government structured in such a way that this can happen, and why are regular working people shut out from any means to influence its outcome?
2. What is the strategic reasoning behind this shutdown? It intensifies the contradiction between the capitalist and the workers.
3. Why are the corporations and capitalists organized to achieve political ends in this fashion, but we are not organized enough to have our needs met?
4. Most importantly: What can we do to fight back?

Although it is the Republican Party carrying the flag of extermination, the Democrats consistently enable it to continue by failing to act to prevent it. The fact is simple: the ruling class endorses the murder of trans people. This endorsement is manifest in both Republican and Democratic policies — in the one as the active engine of legislative extermination, the other as passive cover for this heinous program.

No, even the “Democratic” states are not safe.

The capitalists are attempting to reinforce their control over social reproduction, to drum up hatred and division in the working class, and, more importantly, to secure the heteronormative patriarchal regime through which capitalist society exerts its power. Whether they recognize this as their conscious objective is unimportant; whether they are driven by ideological commitments to half-baked religious theories or by fascistic concerns with “degeneracy,” whether they are acting out of self-conscious economic motives or whitewash their material concerns as being driven by some “nobler” form of debased ideology, we do not care.

We say, they will stop.

The attacks will stop.

To our unorganized trans comrades: now is the time to join together in armed self-defense organizations. To our trans comrades in organizations other than ours: the League and its members stand with you. We are prepared to fight fire with fire and to bodily defend you. Should you need aid of any type, we urge you to reach out through USU or other League organizations.

Only through armed power will we repel the enemy.

And indeed, only the complete triumph of the social revolution can bring about trans liberation. Now is the time to raise the flag of revolution, to stand against patriarchal capitalism, to build our fighting force so that we may tear down our enemies, overthrow their barricade, and storm their fortress!

A luta continua!

Signed,
All-Empire Worker’s League
Cincinnati Community Aid & Praxis 
Connecticut Radical Reading Group
Red Help ATX
Unity-Struggle-Unity Press

At a time when the fury of the popular classes has manifested such actions as the daring execution of Brian Thompson, it is curious that the many leaders of the two hospitals have not considered what is happening right now in homes across Connecticut. Parents are being told that their children are likely to suffer, perhaps even kill themselves in the coming years. There are names and faces associated with this suffering, and they aren’t some distant faceless bureaucrats in Washington, protected by the many miles and layers of red tape.

Oh, yes, the executive order that set this tragedy in motion came from Washington. It was drafted by some staffer in some back room. It was signed by the inhuman flesh-puppet Donald Trump. The blame for his election can be equally shared between GOP members and Democrats. So yes, there is plenty of blame to go around.

But gunmen and bombmakers aren’t likely to be interested in them. At least, not for now. The untold legions of parents that found out on July 24 that their children have been sentenced to suffer and perhaps to die aren’t likely to be hunting for figures in Washington to punish.

They will be looking for the people in their community that caused this tragedy. And they will find them.

Curious that these people haven’t built bunkers, hired private security, and gone off the grid.

Because they should.

1. CEO: Christopher O’Connor. ︎
2. CEO: James E. Shmerling. ︎
3. YNHH Board Members: Thomas Balcezak, William J. Aseltyne, Gail W. Kosoyla, Pamela Sutton-Wallace, Alan Friedman, Anne Diamond, Frank Ciminiello, LIsa Stump, Michael Angelini and Pam Scagliarini; CT Children’s Board Members: Bill Agostinucci, Jonathan M. Carroll, Bob Duncan, Paul Dworkin, Matthew Farr, Bridgett Feagin, Christine Finck, Paulanne Jushkevich, Sarah Matney, Lawrence Milan, James E. Moore, Deb Pappas, Lori R. Pelletier, Juan C. Salazar, and R. Moses Vargas. ︎

In Harlem, New York, on January 2nd, 2025, a man attacked a woman, with words and fists, and paid the price. 

Jaia Cruz, a 24 yr old woman, who is transgender and Latina, was standing in line at a deli. An argument started with Ray Hodges, a 36 yr old Black cis man, over who was next in line. This escalated rapidly. Hodges called Cruz slurs, and attacked  her. She told him to stop, and he continued to attack. She said she would kill him if he continued, and he pushed her against a refrigerator. She drew her knife, and he died en route to the hospital. 

The outrage machine has spun up shockingly fast, even for this time of escalating terror against trans women. She was described as “towering” and “giant” by Yahoo! in a classic monsterization of trans women (her height is the fourth search result on google). The New York Post published an article whose title called her “Pure evil” and “A disgusting excuse for a human being.” While he attacked her, Hodges called her a “faggot” and a “tranny”.  During her sentencing, Hodges’ family chanted and jeered “It’s a boy!” and “Fucking boy!” at her. She has been deadnamed, misgendered, verbally and socially abused in the reaction-economy, accused of being on drugs, a slut, aggressive; and people gleefully fantasize over what hideous violences await her in, as anonymous people are giddy to point out, “men’s prison.” Ms. Cruz is sadly no stranger to either violence nor public spectacle. Her image and dignity having been thrown to the rabid dogs of social media earlier last summer when videos circulated of her being viciously beaten in public by two men. 

Make no mistake, people know what they are calling for when celebrating her incarceration, when lying about her gender, and gleefully hoping she is sent to men’s prison. Trans women are subjected to a regime of sexual violence and torture in men’s prison. We are placed into disgusting circumstances by people who fucking hate us, who desire nothing more than our violent debasement. One aspect of this debasement is known as “V-Coding”, a system in which we are “given” to inmates to be violated, raped, and abused. 

Would this have gone differently if Jaia did back down? Certainly! Another woman’s life may well have been extinguished, gone unremarked upon, another abject, another victim, and Hodges may well have gone free in the city whose police brutally murdered Marsha P. Johnson and threw her body in the Hudson River. Trans women are a precious resource in patriarchy and racism and our lives are extinguished frequently in the pursuit of its violent maintenance. Cruz did only what was necessary, backed up against a literal wall, unable to trust anyone except herself. She does not deserve to be the new face of this hyperviolence, nor the recipient of targeting by the unleashed dogs of a reactionary, blood-thirsted public. She deserves a long life, surrounded by loved ones, outside of public mockery, out of prison, and free from the clutches of the fascist rape-reich. 

Transmisogynoir, the hyperviolent intersection of anti-Blackness, misogyny, transphobia, misogynoir, and transmisogyny, sits as a fulcrum, a break-glass-in-emergencies tactic, to be wielded even by other oppressed groups. It allows the violence being suffered at the hands of the state to be redirected against abjected minorities. Trans women’s lives are fertile soil for the flowering of love, care, community, beauty and liberation, yet we are made dirt to the vast majority of the wider populace, ground for growing and training violence, prejudice, and resentment. 

The resistance against this tightening is already sprouting as well! Rodney Hinton Jr.’s heroic retaliation against police that brutally murdered his son was treated with the same spectacle and the same theater.

“Your favorite song… Nicola, Bart – immigrants, wrongly executed… But their deaths served as a message to others: that ours is a society that murders the innocent. Do you, too, believe that your sacrifice will change the world?”

Skull Face

Make no mistake. This occurred during the allegedly “most pro-worker”, “pro-trans” Biden Regime. The Democrats have been no friends to trans people. When prompted, Kamala Harris refused to even say that trans women deserved rights and healthcare. Gavin Newsom has pushed transphobic rhetoric, actively exhorting the fascist ranks of their evil party to abandon trans people altogether.  There has been nothing but escalating violence, genocidal rhetoric, and an unceasing hitlerian regime of legislation being introduced, un-fucking-challenged in both red and blue states, designed to cut trans people out of all walks of life, especially trans women.

Two trans women were attacked in broad daylight in a train station in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a self-declared trans sanctuary state! Sam Nordquist, a Black trans man, was tortured to death over the course of a whole month earlier this year in New York! In May of 2025, the suicide of a trans girl was turned into a spectacle to jeering hordes on twitter who mocked her relentlessly and turned her despair into celebration. 

The amount of violence has hardly escalated. We have always been hideously subjected to violence, including rape, murder, beatings, homelessness, and exploitation. What has changed has been the rhetoric and spectacle surrounding our deaths. From Norm Macdonald on Saturday Night Live saying of Brandon Teena’s rape and murder, “Now, this might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should die,” in 1993, to now where we can look forward to outright celebration, heroizing of our killers, beaters, rapists and attackers.

Transmisogyny flourishes in the client states of the U.S. Empire as well. On April 4th, 2025, Sara Millerey González, a trans woman from Colombia, was raped, beaten, and mutilated by having all her limbs broken, before being thrown into a stream in a ravine to drown to death. She later died in the hospital. Again, people prioritized filming the spectacle instead of stepping in to stop it. 

What will we do then? So much structured, dedicated, motivated violence is arrayed at the innocents, who the Empire has decided to grind into a pulp as it thrashes.This will not resolve with simple reforms. Just like Pavlov and his dogs, the reactionary elements have been primed, conditioned, and rewarded for their worst impulses, encouraged and trained to salivate when they smell fresh meat. 

Jaia Cruz’s actions in her own defense will serve as a warning to those who would terrorize us. We will not be passive or pacific. We will no longer ask timidly for respect of our pronouns. We will instead demand our safety, knowing that it will only blossom from the barrel of a gun. Let her serve as a rallying call to all transfeminine people to organize for our self defense. Let us be unafraid, disciplined, and swift. 

We cannot trust so-called “allies” any longer. You are with us, or you are against us. You will fight and bleed and die alongside us, or you sentence us to abject horror in prisons, allowing and committing our murders alongside the cops and fascists and bigots. It has been too long that queerness and transness have primarily been a vehicle for otherwise neutral parties to feel good about their own pathetic, capitulationist lives. That ends now. End your own complicity. Buy us weapons, food, housing, hormones, and stay the fuck out of our way.

Some queer people may react to this essay with timidity, and to that I say, I am not sorry. We are not at a point where you can opt out of the violence because it will find you. There is not an off ramp, there is not a reformist track anymore. Brianna Wu and Buck Angel are not going to fucking save you, and begging the Democrats will give you nothing. Get with the program.

Unrelenting, unmitigated, unapologetic terror against the enemies of trans women’s dignity and safety is the only answer. Trans women will never be respected until every aspiring woman-beater, self-indulgent rapist, and whinging, sniveling, coward who hides behind a screen to mock our deaths, is afraid for their miserable, worthless lives, afraid to look us in the eye for fear of being the last thing they ever see, afraid to be cut down in righteous self- and community- defense. 

“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Cruz said to investigators:

“I told him, ‘You come to me and I’ll kill you.’”

“No motherfuckers are going to put their hands on me no more.”

“He tried to mess with me because I’m trans, and I poked him up.”

“I hope he’s maggot food.”

Good for her! Well that she is still here. This is only what is deserved by people who would hurt vulnerable women. 

“I killed him laughing. Oh, well. I’ll piss on his grave.”

“Times are changing. Our armies are rising and we are getting stronger. And when we come a knocking (that includes from here to Albany to Washington) they’re going to know that you don’t fuck with the transgender community.”

Introduction

Over the last five years, an open war has been waged by reactionary forces against the transgender population within the United States. There are two fronts on which this war has been waged. The first front is a de jure assault by the state through the direction of its mechanisms of settler-colonial violence to enact systematic social murder and constrainment. This multi-pronged attack includes restricting or banning access to transition related medical care, legalizing discrimination (making the population more viable for hyper-exploitation), deputizing cisgender people into enforcers of the patriarchal social division of labor by criminalizing transgender people’s existence in public spaces, and using the police to round up transgender people so they can be disposed of in the colonial garrisons otherwise known as jails and prisons. The second front is a de facto assault coordinated by fascist paramilitary groups shored up by the far right media apparatus, which actively recruits members of the petit-bourgeois and labor aristocratic classes into sporadic anti-trans vigilante violence.

This war on two fronts has been pursued as a means to destabilize the transgender population and demobilize their allies. By inducing a panic among transgender people, reactionaries hope to force broad swaths of the population to further jeopardize their already precarious conditions of survival. Transgender people fleeing the fronts of this war attempt to immigrate to expensive “safe haven” states they can’t afford, spend all their savings on obtaining a hormone surplus, or find any means possible to find refuge in another country. Through the Blitzkrieg of anti-trans laws (910 introduced this year across 49 states) and murder with 43 violent deaths (67 when you include social murder in the form of suicides) recorded in 2024, reactionaries aim to stretch the transgender population’s limited resources and political support to its absolute limits. Like the endless waves of a bombing campaign, their goal is to induce such an intense pressure that our supply lines finally snap, leaving us helpless for the inevitable slaughter. While there has already been substantial work done to build supply networks and organizations to help transgender people flee the most dangerous states (such as Florida and Tennessee), they often rely on the support of donations and the dedicated work of a few trans women. Without the substantial backing of an organization with the resources and capacity to aid in this key logistical struggle, these limited efforts will likely be snuffed out by the overwhelming task laid before them. 

As Communists, it is of utmost necessity that we open up our own front in this war waged on the transgender population. It is our responsibility to use everything within our means to build the organizational capacity necessary for providing material support in this struggle; the work can start with simple volunteer labor and financial aid. While there still exist pockets in this country where transgender people can find a semblance of safety, the Federal Government’s attacks on trans existence coupled with an increasing regularity of everyday harassment and violence suggest that these levees may soon collapse. Without a centralized authority to guide our people through this tumultuous era, we’ve begun to see the most privileged amongst our ranks choose to scatter rather than engage in collective struggle. This is not a new phenomenon: in Marxism and the National Question, Joseph Stalin describes how nations and their internal classes tend to scramble for personal gain in times of crisis when lacking an internationalist socialist project.¹ Central to the Communist struggle is building a political line that centers the revolutionary nationally oppressed and transgender populations. Regarding the latter, we luckily do not have to start from scratch. Leslie Feinburg dedicated zir life to documenting the history and tactics of trans liberation both in the United States and in Actually Existing Socialist (AES) states.² It is from this materialist analysis that we can construct the theoretical and organizational means to achieve trans liberation. A Communist party can put this theory into action by building supply lines to secure transgender people’s access to HRT,³ constructing an underground railroad to transport transgender people to safer states, and work with the parties of Actually Existing Socialist countries to obtain aid supplies or achieve the asylum of the most vulnerable internal trans refugees.

As transgender people, there is a tendency to cast shame on those who flee the struggle; but, how can we expect our siblings to act otherwise when we still lack the means to respond in kind to this war waged upon our people? For a soldier to advance forward, they must know their struggle is not in vain, they must clearly see the bright future for which they forge ahead. Yet cast in shadow, the vast majority of trans people today instead see themselves as wretched objects of history. Faced with the overwhelming pressure of oppression, revolutionary political consciousness is replaced by a gnawing drive towards survival. Needs of the future are replaced by the needs of the present, analysis of the systematic replaced by analysis of the direct, and all politics is reduced to whatever keeps you housed, fed, and maintaining access to HRT this day and the next. In this state of desperation, even an offering of crumbs can be received as salvation, a promise of seeing tomorrow. It is under these dire conditions that the parasitic worm of Liberalism takes its root.

Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism manifested, a worship of private property and so-called individual freedom. The more you own, the more you are; the more you exploit, the more you tower over society embodying an enlightened and superhuman soul no longer bound by the moral chains of social responsibility. Capitalist society inoculates even the oppressed into this self-obsessive ideology. You are taught that in times of desperation the only solution is to work harder, to pinch and save, and inevitably you’ll find yourself among the class of exploiters rather than living in the abominable drudgery of the exploited. This parasitic infection of Liberalism has a wide range of affect and severity. It primarily makes itself known through a severe dulling of revolutionary consciousness, inducing a zombie-like effect where the material conditions of the world pass by unnoticed. Amongst the sliver of our population who find themselves temporarily within the upper classes, we witness the most devout faith in the Democratic Party, with some going so far as to hold fast to the outlandish claim that the current calamity would have been prevented had Kamala won. Yet, when she was directly confronted with the question of whether our people should have access to gender affirming care, Harris quickly replied that she would “follow the law.” When 27 states have anti-trans laws on the books, “following the law” is not a neutral stance; it is active complicity in this mobilization towards our people’s genocide. When the law makes our people’s murder legal by painting us as deceivers,⁴ when even our acts of self-defense are routinely charged as premeditated murder,⁵ when the prisons systematically enforce sexual assault against their transgender populations,⁶ the law is revealed to be nothing more than a crude layer of legitimacy used to obscure a system pursuing our systematic social murder.

Even if members of the Democratic party genuinely care for transgender people, as members of an imperialist bourgeois party, they are incentivized to refrain from taking actions that would prevent or bring any form of exploitation to an end. These so-called representatives of the people are in actuality a managerial class whose goal is to maintain the system by smoothing over the contradictions produced within bourgeois society. When an oppressed group gains rights within the imperial core, it is not a reflection of liberals’ proactive political struggle for human liberation. Rather, liberals can only offer concessions. Concessions which they use as a release valve, easing exploitation just enough that the oppressed maintain a bare minimum investment in the status quo and become disinterested in taking on the risks of revolutionary action. Any demand for more is crushed with extreme prejudice and without mercy. We have seen this direct and unyielding response in the silencing of Rashida Tlaib for speaking out on the struggle of Palestinian people and the expulsion of Montana’s first openly transgender state Representative Zooey Zephyr for encouraging public struggle against anti-trans legislation. This internal party pressure is why even the Democratic Party’s token representative of our people, Sarah McBride, has chosen time and again to actively aid in our people’s genocide rather than do anything that could be perceived as harming the party’s standing amongst the ruling class.⁷

In the imperial core, liberals tout, “Here we allow our third-sexed sexual objects to sing and dance within the bounds of this golden cage, are we not the most progressive societies in the world?” A narrative constructed to obscure that our ancestors fought tooth and nail for even this pittance of survival. To liberals, our existence is a luxury of empire, a vice to be enjoyed and disposed of the moment it hinders the maintenance and expansion of the empire. Even so-called “Safe Haven” states are already beginning to crack under the pressure of the empire’s expansion of hyper-exploitation at home to offset imperialist losses abroad. This is demonstrated by Gavin Newsom’s openly spreading anti-trans propaganda, despite being the governor of California, the country’s largest and most economically independent “Safe Haven” state. The Democrats cannot save us, they won’t even try. Belief in this bourgeois party is not merely naive: the perpetuation of this false consciousness is actively suffocating the struggle for trans liberation. 

In the face of the Trump administration’s open displays of brutality against transgender people, a majority within this undeveloped portion of the trans community cried, “This is the end!” While this despair and frustration is a genuine reaction to the trauma of systematic violence being inflicted on our population, waving the white flag at the mere declaration of an exterminationist war will get us nowhere, and neither will naive worship of the Democrats or the pursuit of spontaneous action. Liberalism’s fetishization of “civil disobedience” has even led some courageous trans women to engage in individual protests of anti-trans laws, such as bathroom bans, only to be locked up in men’s jails with limited political effect. Although conditions are dire, what we need now is not action, but organization. 

On “Safe Haven” States

“We raised a lot of hell back when STAR first started, even if it was just a few of us. We ate and slept demonstrations, planning demonstrations. We’d go from one demo to another, the same day. We were doing what we believed in. And what we’re doing now, the few of us who are willing to unsettle people and ruffe up feathers, is what we believe in doing. We have to do it because we can no longer stay invisible. We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are. We have to show the world that we are numerous. There are many of us out there.”

Sylvia Rivera, Queens in Exile, the Forgotten Ones, 2002

Amidst this total war, the crumb of safety that Democrats have offered transgender people is the so-called “Safe Haven” state. States have earned this title by passing legislation that prevents the extradition of transgender people, their parents, or medical providers of transition related care, to states that criminalize trans existence and social reproduction. These states vary in what additional protections they may have for transgender people. Some have a full suite of laws covering insurance to discrimination, while others provide no additional protections. Of the 16 “Safe Haven” states currently in existence, a majority overlap with the 11 most expensive states to live in within the United States. Despite the fact that the transgender population is made up primarily of the precariat and lumpen classes, liberals proudly tout these silver palaces as oases for our people.

This is by no means a new narrative. We have heard this mythology before about the liberation that queer people would find in San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles in the 60’s and 70’s. While queer inhabitants of these areas could find a sense of freedom in finally being with their own people, they knew the truth: they were not free, but merely tolerated as long as they remained within the stark confines of their ghetto. As Carl Wittman describes in Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto:

San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals. We have fled here from every part of the nation, and like refugees elsewhere, we came not because it is so great here, but because it was so bad there. By the tens of thousands, we fled small towns where to be ourselves would endanger our jobs and any hope of a decent life; we have fled from blackmailing cops, from families who disowned or ‘tolerated’ us; we have been drummed out of the armed services, thrown out of schools, fired from jobs, beaten by punks and policemen.

And we have formed a ghetto, out of self-protection. It is a ghetto rather than a free territory because it is still theirs. Straight cops patrol us, straight legislators govern us, straight employers keep us in line, straight money exploits us. We have pretended everything is OK, because we haven’t been able to see how to change it – we’ve been afraid.

Although “Safe Haven” states position themselves as sanctuaries, the legal safety they provide lacks any real stability due to its reliance on the sustained political interest of the settler, labor aristocratic, and petit-bourgeois classes in our struggle. Central to these classes’ material interest is property value, which serves as an abstracted system used for the dual purpose of determining the existing value of the amount of labor and capital that has been invested in the land and predicting future investment. This existing value emerges out of the colonial exploitation of the land and subjugation of hyper-exploited populations, which is the constant capital of settler-colonial social relations. The predicted future value of investment assumes ever increasing levels of exploitation of both natural resources and human labor. This is why discussions of homelessness coincide with discussions of property value. The presence of homelessness subverts colonial ideals of the country’s purity (causing potential class treason amongst their ranks of the elite), actively drains the resources of local settlements, and the potential of their organization is posed a legitimate threat to the landed classes that keep them in this constant position of desperation. The migration of transgender people to these states is a very real material threat to property value. Our precarity as a population forces us into proletarian labor, prostitution,⁸ and homelessness due to our broad lack of social safety networks. The constant stress of survival leads in turn to higher rates of addiction as alcohol, weed, etc. are used as a means to alleviate the mental and physical pain we endure. While our concentration provides an opportunity for landlords, the bourgeoisie, and petit-bourgeoisie to profit from our hyper-exploitation, it also provides us the means to organize and harness our population’s revolutionary potential.

To counteract this, states will use coercive means, such as the police and social services, to gradually confine their transgender populations into easily observable and manageable areas. Just as with our ancestors and the colonized peoples of so-called Amerika, the class contradictions of our society at play will produce the political conditions for our peoples’ ghettoization. With history guiding us, we must proactively subvert this trend. We must use the concentrations of our people to harness our collective wealth (what little we may have) and labor power to develop logistical networks through trans-led Communist organizations that will form the backbone of our struggle for liberation. Like Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries (STAR), we can develop the means to provide our people housing, healthcare, food, and security locally, with the goal of inevitably connecting regionally and nationally to shore up these supply lines in the long term. It is essential that we not fall into the snare trap that is mutual aid when engaging in this work. The key to preventing this organizational blunder is understanding that the oppressive systems at play will continually produce ever more transgender people in need of support. Rather than hope that our supply lines will hold against this ever increasing pressure, we must develop a fighting force capable of striking fast and true against the roots of this oppression. Each successful strike will ease the pressure and provide us with more maneuverability in our resources and organizational capacity. Our people did not ask for this war, but we will be the ones to end it. To do so, we must prepare ourselves for an all out guerrilla war.

The Trans Guerrilla

“There are those who say: ‘I am a farmer’, or, ‘I am a student’; ‘I can discuss literature but not military arts.’ This is incorrect. There is no profound difference between the farmer and the soldier. You must have courage. You simply leave your farms and become soldiers. That you are farmers is of no difference, and if you have education, that is so much the better. When you take your arms in hand, you become soldiers; when you are organized, you become military units.”

Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla War, Chapter 5, 1937

“What is the relationship of guerrilla warfare to the people? Without a political goal, guerrilla warfare must fail, as it must, if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and their sympathy, co-operation, and assistance cannot be gained. The essence of guerrilla warfare is thus revolutionary in character.”

Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla War, Chapter 1, 1937

What primarily plagues our struggle today is not the methods of war waged against our people, but the festering disease of self-doubt. Any leftist or socialist organization that has achieved even a grain of political progress in the last 20 years is undoubtedly indebted to the labor of trans women. As a hyper-exploited population, transgender people are already primed for spontaneous revolutionary consciousness. The luxury of liberal idealism cannot last long when met with the clear headed material analysis necessary for survival. Although this lived experience makes clear the necessity of political struggle, trans youth doubt their own capacity to lead. When they join the Communist struggle, they most often offer their labor to one of the dozen different democratic-socialist organizations (DSA, CPUSA, PSL, FRSO, etc.) in the hopes that they will be educated in the ways and means of revolution. Instead of turning this revolutionary youth into cadres, these organizations work to actively suppress the revolutionary potential of our people by burning them out and exploiting their labor as secretaries, facilitators, propaganda officers, or recruiters. What our young comrades do not realize is that this labor makes them the true leadership of the revolutionary masses, not their feckless comrades whose 10-20 years of mass action tailing liberals has only served to prevent socialist revolution.

This is by no means a new phenomenon, as Sylvia Riveria notes:

“But in these struggles, in the Civil Rights movement, in the war movement, in the women’s movement, we were still outcasts. The only reason they tolerated the transgender community in some of these movements was because we were gung-ho, we were front liners. We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose. You all had rights. We had nothing to lose. I’ll be the first one to step on any organization, any politician’s toes if I have to, to get the rights for my community.”

Throughout her whole life as a revolutionary, Sylvia saw organizations time and again exploit the revolutionary energy of transgender people and then spit them out like used gum. Even the Gay and Lesbian liberation movements—who owe everything to their transgender forbearers—time and again chose personal gain over joint revolutionary struggle. This bourgeois nationalism still rears its ugly head in the form of queer anti-trans organizations. Its source being the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie, and labor aristocratic queers who believe they can use this war to curry favor with or replace members of the imperialist cisgender and heterosexual bourgeoisie. It is an active class struggle against socialist internationalism—and thus the cause of human liberation.

Our grandmothers Sylvia Riveria and Marsha P. Johnson may not have fought with weapons honed by Marxist theory, but they entered the struggle with a clear understanding that steadfast political leadership was needed within the trans, gay, and lesbian populations. The goal of STAR was not to achieve the crumbs of rights and respect, but to achieve revolution. While STAR did not start off as a Marxist-Leninist formation, it quickly became one, as Sylvia engaged in political dialogue with the leadership of the Young Lords and Black Panther Party. The Young Lords took STAR under their wings as a project their organization could put their resources into, putting to practice their theory that only through the joint struggle of all oppressed peoples can we bring about our collective liberation. Sadly, STAR did not last, but Leslie Feinburg and Sylvia Rivera carried on its banner and lessons of struggle until their untimely deaths. 

With reactionary forces bearing down upon us, we, the children of these struggles, must take on this banner and win the war once and for all. To do so, we must develop the means to secure our survival outside of the support from the state or any liberal institution. We must develop cadres that can bring the masses into our joint struggle for liberation, underground communication networks through digital encryption and physical dropbox networks, resource depots (which will form the backbone of a logistical network) to secure the supply of necessities to the people and our revolutionary fighters, basic physical and medical educational programs so cadre are fit to engage struggle they are met with, and we must develop cells within every pore of this country from which we can mount our organized counter-attack. When discussing revolution, people often get lost in the aesthetics of struggle; they imagine revolutionary fighters engaging in battle after battle with no break or set-up. They imagine that all one needs is a band of revolutionaries and rifles to force the new world out of the shell of the old. These fantasies are the birth of well intentioned, but naive hearts. Most of the work of a revolutionary army is logistics, followed by aiding in the work of the people by acting as a pool of concentrated labor, then engaging in direct confrontation with the enemies of the people. The People’s Liberation Army undoubtedly harvested more pounds of rice and millet than can be counted in spent bullet casings. A Communist party is nothing more than the rationalized organization of the people’s collective will, for every gain of the people is a gain for the party, for every loss of the people is a loss for the party. Only through unwavering dedication and service to the people can we have any hope for success in our revolutionary struggle.

For most so-called Communist formations in the imperial core, the goal is not to become servants of the people, but rather to achieve moral salvation by engaging in liberal bourgeois politics with a red coat of paint. They claim they are serving the revolution by tailing the mass actions of settler, labor aristocratic, and petit-bourgeois classes. When confronted with the needs and strategies for genuine socialist struggle they balk; while they play pretend at being revolutionaries, our people are actively being murdered by individuals and a system that seeks our total eradication. The time for patience is long over, now is the time to call their bluff. If you as a transgender person find yourself in a position of leadership in a self declared revolutionary organization, press them to take on this war against our people with the utmost seriousness; when they refuse, destroy them by taking every disciplined cadre they have to form a local Communist organization. If you as a transgender person are not yet in the struggle, then form a Marxist reading group of your friends and follow this guide; with time and dedication, this too will become a Communist organization. The more of these organizations we form, the stronger the eventual party that emerges from them will be. Like a spider’s web, each node will be able to support the other, and soon enough we’ll have the foundations for genuinely revolutionary mass action. 

The time this will take may not sit easy. With the war raging on, the desire for action in our people is like an overwhelming and nausea inducing pain, but as a soldier you must endure. Although we were caught off-guard by this war, that does not mean we have lost. As long as there are transgender people still breathing, as long as revolutionary cells are still fighting, we shall remain on the path towards victory. Guerrilla war is not total war, it is a war of annihilation. Our numbers are far too small to attempt to destroy our enemy in one decisive blow, rather we must destroy their forces piece by piece. As Mao says, “Injuring all of a man’s ten fingers is not as effective as chopping off one, and routing ten enemy divisions is not as effective as annihilating one of them.”⁹ Quantitative changes eventually form qualitative differences. Just as a few droplets of water will eat through a stone, so too will our every success eat through the forces of our enemies, diminishing their capacity and will to fight until they inevitably collapse under their own weight. Through dedicated struggle we will win; it is simply a matter of having the courage to seize the time!

Footnotes

1. Stalin, J. V., 1913. Marxism and the National Question, Chapter 2. ︎
2. Zir works such as Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left, are essential readings regarding the history of Trans and queer liberation and the struggles relation to the Communist movement. ︎
3. Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) is one of the most common forms of transition related medical care for trangender people. The treatment produces a wide range of changes to one’s secondary sexual characteristics, bringing them broadly in alignment with their cisgender counterparts. ︎
4. This phenomenon is most well known in the trans panic defense, where men blame transgender women for their own assault and murder on the basis that discovering their transness is a justifiable basis for violent reaction. Oftentimes this defense works due to rampant trans-misogyny upheld in the judicial system, reinforced by police who treat our victimhood as an impossibility. To the courts transgender people are self-made victims whose very existence is an act of deceit, and this violence is justified in its use against us, but violence is not justified in our defense.
   Fields, Shawn E. 2021. “The Elusiveness of Self-Defense for the Black Transgender Community,” Nevada Law Journal 21 (3): 982;992-993. https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/nlj/vol21/iss3/4 ︎
5. Transgender people are frequent victims of violence, with higher rates among transgender women, and the highest among black transgender women. Faced with the dual violence of patriarchal and national oppression, which is enforced by both these systems’ benefactors and the state, black transgender women are given no choice but to act in their own self-defense. This defense, although rational and necessary, is treated as an intentional act of violence by the judicial system that then often charges them with assault and premeditated murder. ibid., 975-978. ︎
6. This systematic sexual violence is known as V-Coding where “transgender women [are placed] in cells with aggressive cisgender male inmates as a form of social control.” The sexual violence is further perpetuated by male staff within these prisons, who regularly use their position of power to dehumanize and violate transgender women. It is by far the most common experience of the prison system for transgender women (Kulak, 2018, pgs. 314-316). When not being made the subject of sexual violence, transgender people are forced into solitary confinement as punishment or for so-called “protection” (ibid., pgs. 316-318). These daily tortures are made even more extreme by the routine physical and psychological violence of the regular denial (or sporadic provision) of transition related medical care (ibid., pgs. 318-320). Kulak, Ash Olli. 2018. “Locked Away in SEG “For Their Own Protection”: How Congress Gave Federal Corrections the Discretion to House Transgender (Trans) Inmates in Gender-Inappropriate Facilities and Solitary Confinement,” Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality, Vol. 6, Iss. 2, Article 6: 314-320. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ijlse/vol6/iss2/6 ︎
7. When faced with horrific dehumanization and attacks by Republicans after being elected to office, including a bathroom ban and congressional policies to enforce the misgendering of both herself and the various transgender staff who work for Congress, Sarah McBride argued that anti-trans attacks are a distraction by Republicans and that the Democratic party would have to be more open to an anti-trans political project as fighting on behalf of transgender people “impedes the very needed path toward winning electorally…” (González, 2025). A true statement that inadvertently reveals the Democrats true political base: self-conscious exploiters and reactionaries. González, Oriana. 2025. “Inside Democrats’ Reshuffling on Trans Issues.” Them. https://www.them.us/story/notus-inside-democrats-reshuffling-on-trans-issues ︎
8. Why prostitution and not “sex work”? Sex work and prostitution come from two different class positions; the former being a proletarian position of socially reproductive labor that one can leave due to having access to some form of class mobility, and the latter being a form of systematic sexual assault forced upon a hyper-exploited population (primarily women facing dual oppressions). Sylvia Rivera considered it key to understand that “We don’t want to be out there sucking dick and getting fucked up the ass. But that’s the only alternative that we have to survive because the laws do not give us the right to go and get a job the way we feel comfortable. I do not want to go to work looking like a man when I know I am not a man.”(Rivera, 2001) and “Unfortunately, many of us have to live by night, because of the lack of laws or protections. A lot of transwomen are standing out on street corners or working clubs. And many of them are highly educated, with college degrees. Many of us have to survive by selling our bodies. If you can’t get a job, you have to do whatever it takes to live.” (Rivera, 2002). The trauma of being forced to sell your body to survive, coupled with the constant threat of assault and murder, drove many trans women in the 70s and 80s to addiction and premature deaths. Something only partially elevated with material gains in the 90s and 2000s. Rivera, Sylvia, 2001.” Bitch on Wheels.” Color Collective Press; Rivera, Sylvia, 2002. “Queens in Exile: The Forgotten Ones.” GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary. ︎
9. Mao, Zedong, 1936. “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War,” Chapter 5, Section 9, ¶1. ︎

Mahmoud has not been charged with any listed offense; his crime is his support for the Palestinian national liberation movement. Mahmoud stood against the slaughter of his people and the ongoing theft of their homeland. The fascist Empire is committed to worldwide terror and the enslavement of humanity. The state would rather us remain silent, going about our cleaved lives apathetic to genocide — this is vile and unacceptable. 

Free speech is dead. Did it ever exist in the first place?

Our free speech rights go about as deep as a puddle on the side of the road. The American Fourth Reich, aided by the skeletal Democratic party, has gutted what little was left of so-called “civil liberties” in this country. The U.S.’s liberal democracy was founded on the “rights” of only the white, slave-owning, and propertied classes, leaving everyone else, especially enslaved peoples, grasping for the shards of a deadened life.

Regardless of what the slave owners who founded this country may have intended when they wrote the Constitution in 1791, the settler-imperial government has never meaningfully valued free speech. Just seven years and one president later, the John Adams administration would pass the Alien and Sedition Acts: the Sedition laws criminalized any negative speech against the government, while the Alien Acts let the president deport any foreign nationals. Adams, who was a federalist, used the Sedition Acts to arrest journalists supporting his political opponents, the Democratic Republicans. The minute differences between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans are not terribly significant — (both supported the slavery of New Afrikans and the genocide of Indigenous Turtle Islanders) — suffice to say they were the two dominant tendencies of early USian politics. Adams lost the political battle; the Democratic Republicans won the next election and repealed the Sedition Acts. And the Alien Acts? They remain in effect to this day. The president may therefore deport any foreign national they consider to be dangerous, based on this 225 year old law.  In essence, dystopian state repression is one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy.

The Alien and Sedition Acts would be the first major crackdown on free speech, but they are not the last, nor the most recent. The Democratic-Republicans had their own opportunity to silence mass dissent a few decades later when the abolition of slavery became a contentious issue. In 1836, an Andrew Jackson-controlled Congress ratified a gag order banning any mention of abolition in the halls of Congress. 

In light of the modern national security state, first amendment rights are shallow.  With state surveillance and a history of interference in liberation movements, an American citizen’s speech may be free, but only so long as their words remain barren and removed from action. The Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement: when nationally oppressed groups peaceably assemble, we can see time and time again that the First Amendment often has a selective application. Perpetual surveillance, state assassinations; sharpened knives which they are ready to use against any defiant organization. 

Before the regime will criminalize your collective expression, two circumstances must generally be met. 

1. The expression must be dissent, i.e., it must go against the regime’s foreign or domestic policy.
2. The expression must be popular. The degree of popularity can vary, but generally, the dissenting speech or collective expression must be popular enough for the regime to consider it a threat to its rule or the implementation of its policy. 

Popular dissent is forbidden.  

If this clownish blockheaded President is trying to weaken free speech rights on campus, he is late to the party. Colleges and universities across the Empire beat him to the punch by launching a full scale offensive against the right to protest before the Fall 2024 semester. Protests now have formal time limits. They are banned in popular gathering spots. Fascism on the Amerikkkan campus is objectively bipartisan. Trump’s threat is a promise to build upon the groundwork that was laid last year. Do not be scared. For fear is your greatest enemy. Now, we’re all able to see clearly without the blinding, twisted distortions of Democrats who use identity essentialism as bait in order to duplicitously rally support for their graveyard of a party, and therefore gut the very undercarriage of revolutionary understanding and action of the mass of vexed workers.

Saturday’s attack on student resistance was orchestrated by the regime’s use of the word “terrorist;” it is, by all means, a propagandistic term in the modern U.S., the same way “communist” was in the past, and is in the present. The state of course uses the veneer of a mythical “antisemitism” to justify its draconian measures. Claims of a phantasmal antisemitism from the very same administration that goes around giving Nazi salutes. Remember, the Trumpian gendarmes are the very same ilk that said “Jews will not replace us.” The very same people whose base committed a massacre in a synagogue,  now want to wage a “holy war,” which they pretend is for the very Jewish people they tried to mass murder. 

However, we must recognize that we’re in the depths of a revolutionary moment. The inflection points of class war are nearing a breaking crescendo, and it is up to us in the anti-imperialist movement to understand this dialectic of intense struggle and form a clear and firm guide to action. Now is the time to unite with left and progressive forces (While not compromising the proven Marxists analysis) to defeat the fascist juggernaut. In the age of techno-imperialism and the mass slaughter of our people, we must do away with the muddled Trotskyist tendency of splintering into groups of 50 (that has historically gutted the left in this country) and form a temporary alliance to defeat the strangling repression of the Trump regime. We, the mass reserved army of labor must pick up the red banner and fight for the liberation of all those colonized, imprisoned, and hyper-exploited. 

At her nominee’s acceptance speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris declared her intent to chart a path “forward to a future with a strong and growing middle class, because we know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success and building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” This intent shows both an honest understanding of the nature of the U.S., and the crux of why voting for Harris is utterly opposed to any principled, long-term progressive strategy to erect a more democratic state in the bounds of what is now considered the U.S.

For most in the U.S., the middle class means little more than the average level of affluence: the “normal” unit of family defined by a lack of excess opulence or any ever-present risk of destitution. Harris herself evoked this aesthetic through her personal history: “The middle class is where I come from. My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means, yet we wanted for little. And she expected us to make the most of the opportunities that were available to us and to be grateful for them.” Her professed aim to expand her history to the rest of the U.S. populace via an “opportunity economy” means emphasizing the implications of this view of the middle class: that those in poverty are failing despite the economic system, rather than because of it, and that those in the upper class are exceptional individuals who made exceptional use of the opportunities presented to them, rather than nepo-children who generate wealth through the poverty of others.

Every facet of the U.S.’s existence mirrors this logic of the middle class. We are called “Americans,” absorbing both continents into one spiritual center and making each non-White ethnic group a hyphenated variant of this title. Our corporate and military presence across the world is referred to as “global leadership” rather than empire, and the exceptional privileges derived from our imperial power are naturalized in the same manner that the popular view of the middle class naturalizes the merits of the bourgeoisie. “American exceptionalism” comes to rely on a worldview that makes U.S. dominance a natural consequence of reality, rather than an exception in any real sense of the word.

With the growth of poverty eroding the middle class and the slow destruction of U.S. global dominance heralded by defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the untenable gap between Americanism and reality is rearing its head, therefore prompting promises of state intervention to prop up the middle class from both Trump and Harris. These candidates’ policies have been forced to highlight the truth of the U.S. middle class: that its existence is a result of conscious political policy rather than the natural state of capitalist society. Contrary to the assertions of many leftwing intellectuals, the U.S. middle class is not a fabrication meant to obscure the divide between the U.S. bourgeoisie and proletariat, but a real economic phenomenon stemming back to the origins of the U.S. as a colony of White settlers escaping poverty in Europe via the theft of Indigenous land.

Economic classes are defined by their members’ relations with the means of production, and the arena of Manifest Destiny provided the conditions for a uniquely large petit bourgeoisie based in small land ownership, allowing for the mode of life evoked by Harris’s speech:

“When we speak of the small, land-owning farmer as the largest single element in settler society, it is important to see what this means. An example is Rebecca Royston of Calvert County, Maryland, who died in 1740 with an estate worth £81 (which places her well in the middle of the small-medium farmers). That sum represented the value of 200 acres of farmland, 31 head of cattle, 15 of sheep, 29 pigs, 1,463 lbs. of tobacco stored for market, 5 feather beds, 2 old guns, assorted furniture, tools, and kitchen utensils, and the contract of an 8-year-old indentured child servant. No wealth, no luxury, but a life with some property, food, shelter, and a cash crop for market.”

J. Sakai, Settlers

This condition of comfort without opulence offers an escape from the violence of traditional class conflict between a propertyless proletariat and a tight-knit bourgeoisie with a monopoly on state violence. Thinly-veiled in the picture of this colonist’s wealth is the trifecta of slavery, indentured servitude, and Indigenous genocide which permitted a wide petit bourgeoisie to develop and give the U.S. its unity and popular support for expansion. That we still have a large middle class in the U.S. is not a result of capitalist trends ceasing to apply to a U.S. which has nearly exhausted the loot of Manifest Destiny over more than two centuries, but a result of these forms of exploitation shifting and expanding to encompass the world and operate via modern, financial capitalism.

The threat of the Great Depression prompted state intervention in the capitalist economy, and with it, the U.S. turned towards a strategy of propping up its middle class via their entanglement in its financial institutions:

“Hoover’s administration instead implemented the Home Loan Bank System, which provided liquidity for banks affected by homeowners defaulting on their mortgages. A similar logic — of facilitating homeownership through government support of banks — was continued in the Roosevelt administration, in the form of the New Deal program Home Owners’ Loan Corporation … Promotion of homeownership was a strategic move, anticipating that workers who owned their homes would be more invested in the capitalist system, and less likely to overthrow it. By a similar logic, workers’ retirement plans have been entwined with the success of capitalist ventures. Pension plans, which guaranteed income for workers who put in enough hours, have vanished. In their place, we are left with 401(k)s and RRSPs, which shackle our hopes for a comfortable old age to the moods of the stock market and to the profits of the capitalists.”

Alice Malone, Concessions

This combination of state intervention and financial concessions to workers both kept the U.S. middle class afloat and brought their interests further into alignment with the success of U.S. imperialism, as the retirement plans of U.S. citizens become dependent on Western companies’ ability to remain profitable by keeping the wages of Global South workers low. The small ownership that defines the petit bourgeoisie is replaced by financial mimicry, as U.S. workers achieve middling affluence without actually owning anything:

“For both the example of homeownership policies and education policies, these initial relatively limited governmental forays into social concerns paved the way for bigger interventions. These bills and their successors resulted in real improvements in the lives of workers, but it’s crucial to note that these investments in areas such as education occurred through policy mechanisms like loans and were never cemented as permanent rights, as in socialist constitutions.”

Alice Malone, Concessions

This lack of true ownership allows us to more accurately refer to the U.S. middle class as a class of small shareholders, or petit actionnaires, rather than a petit bourgeoisie. This distinction makes the U.S. middle class more vulnerable to the crises of the capitalist economy, hence the remaining trauma of the 2008 financial crisis. However, it also allows the petit actionnaires to assert a greater obfuscation of class conflict in the U.S. Whereas land or business ownership easily signifies a member of the petit bourgeoisie, the financially-enabled breadth of the petit actionnaire class means that we now have Trump’s strategy for upholding the middle class including protecting the privileges of coal miners. An industry steeped in “blue collar” aesthetics and proletarian property relations became a real part of the U.S. middle class thanks to the breadth of the petit actionnaire class, despite the particularly tangible impacts of capitalist extraction on their communities:

“As everyone knows, the rampant stripmining is rapidly destroying the area’s simple road system, choking the streams with corrosive coal refuse, fouling the underground water supply, and generally causing more physical and ecological destruction than repeated bombings. Harry Caudill, author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, says: ‘They’ve treated the region as if it were a colony. When they finish taking what they want from it, they’ll just let it go to hell.’
Why don’t the workers in this ripped-off ‘colony’ organize, seeing in a revolutionary change a way to keep the wealth for the community of their children’s generation? … The answer is that the majority of them welcome such exploitation, whatever the future price. Their community may have nothing, may be sliding back into an eventual future of undeveloped desolation, but right now those who have jobs are making ‘good bucks.’ The 5,000 coal miners have been earning around $30,000 per year, while the county’s per capita annual income is up to $7,000. (Written in 1983)”

J. Sakai, Settlers

That coal miners would continue to strive for the protection of their privileges despite the destructive impacts of their industry cannot be solely tied to greed. The inability to work for a holistic solution for their community’s impoverishment is a result of the petit actionnaire class itself. The category’s flexibility provides a boon for capitalists and a poison for its members, as the political combination that proletarian jobs usually encourage is offset by these workers’ dependence on the U.S. state and stock market’s ability to provide a middle class lifestyle. With the proletariat fractured by the dual forces of imperial, financial privilege and the long journey of manufacturing jobs to greater exploitation overseas, the only politically coherent class left — the bourgeoisie — takes the reigns of the petit actionnaires and leads them into marginal involvement in U.S. politics and petty negotiations for economic benefit, a pattern shared with the wider West:

“European workers have paid a great price for the few material benefits which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table … In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counter-balanced by increased costs of living.”

Walter Rodney, Fascism at Home and Colonialism Abroad

When Harris describes the strengthening of the U.S. middle class, she is actually describing the mechanism by which both the Republicans and Democrats keep mass politics in the U.S. tethered to their respective factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie. It is not a strengthening of democracy in North America, but the protracted removal of U.S. citizens from any sustained involvement in the political course of their society. For the majority of the U.S., political involvement has been reduced to bi-annual — if that — elections, where the populace selects leadership, but hardly ever asserts its mandate more than a selection between increasingly unpopular choices. The class conflict which gives proletarians a cohesive identity as an independent political force presents itself as an undesirable state of social failure to petit actionnaires who understand their affluence to rest in the security of U.S. empire. Therefore, Harris and Trump’s shared promise to restore unity appeals especially to the petit actionnaires disempowered by their reliance on bourgeois representation.

Yet the ability of the U.S. to maintain its petit actionnaires continually declines as the Global South’s economic sovereignty rises and wages within the U.S. subsequently stagnate or erode to maintain profitability. With the shrinking U.S. middle class comes increasingly “radical” political ventures, both in new parties like the Democratic Socialists of America and through new styles of politics within the main two bourgeois parties, i.e. Trump and his brand of populism. Neither of these routes offers a real break with the destruction of democratic and social rights in North America, because both are committed to the preservation of the middle class and the state apparatus which doggedly spurn class conflict. The common focus on a strong middle class and a unified, powerful U.S. on the global stage betrays the barren hand of cards available to Harris and Trump, who both struggle to convince the petit actionnaires of the “weirdness” or “radical agenda” of their opponent.

In other words, the logic of the petit actionnaire class means these would-be presidents must compete to present themselves as the inoffensive unifier that U.S. empire needs, but U.S. citizens at risk of poverty understand more and more that their position cannot be improved without drastic change. Hence, the bourgeois leadership embodied now by Trump and Harris moves towards agreement on those areas of policy which leave the capitalist system untouched while consolidating the empire’s White supremacist foundations, competing for a “tougher” image on border policy. With the feigned horror that the Democrats exhibited for Trump’s border rhetoric in 2016 fading into the mist, it’s no radical prediction that they will soon also echo the Republican calls for an invasion of Mexico.

For many leftwing North Americans, even what I’ve just predicted would not be enough to dissuade a vote for Harris. After all, we can already see many rationalizing the tacit support that a vote for Harris offers to her and Biden’s genocidal support for the Israeli war on Gaza. The logic goes that both Harris and Trump support Israel, so why not vote for the candidate who at least supports abortion and LGBTQIA+ rights as well? This logic is superficially valid. I adopted it myself as a vaguely-left liberal in the 2020 election, but the fact of the matter is that Biden’s election in 2020 has given us four years of journey back to the exact same conundrum. This result is not counter to the Democrats’ intentions, but a result of their strategies and the arena created by the dominance of the petit actionnaires in the U.S.

The Democrats know that a necessary slice of their electorate only votes for them due to the fact that they are not Trump on these democratic issues, and they would therefore be fools to actually address the threats to women’s rights and queer rights which give them this slice of support. The plethora of executive actions available to Biden for the protection of abortion largely went unused, and even in her DNC acceptance speech, Harris was careful to voice her support for abortion through the most passive means: “We trust women, and when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.” Given the impossibility of this outcome in a Congress defined by gridlock and with Republicans expected to gain seats, Harris is setting herself up to preside over another four years of democratic backslide, with the Democrats throwing up their hands and claiming to be bound by the Constitution. The reality is that despite the Constitution’s fundamental opposition to democratic freedoms, it avails the president with executive options that Harris will avoid not out of respect for the sacred law of slavers, but because packing the Supreme Court or establishing abortion clinics on federal land might attenuate fears of Republicans candidates while frightening centrist petit actionnaires into believing that the Democrats are threatening the U.S.’s precious unity.

The emptiness of Democratic support for abortion grew even greater with queer issues at the DNC, with trans people entirely absent from the prime-time speeches of the convention. This is a regression from trans Congress member Sarah McBride’s introduction at the 2016 DNC, a step backwards at a time where the Republican movement for a genocide of trans people is growing more explicit and bold. The same duplicitous rhetoric used by Democrats to excuse their inability to defend abortion will be applied to transgender rights, with the most notable accomplishments of Biden’s presidency on this front merely reaffirming existing legislation rather than pushing for new, desperately needed protections. While utterly unable to expand the fabric of democratic rights in the U.S., Democrats have shown themselves willing to fund the MAGA candidates furthest to the right, using fear to bolster their electoral chances at the long-term cost of legitimizing these candidates and growing their strength in the Republican Party.

At every step since 2020, the Democrats repeatedly show that voting for them for the sake of democratic rights simply does not work, regardless of their constant embroilment in the same genocidal imperialism as Republicans. The petit actionnaire class needs a renewed U.S. imperialism to survive without destroying the unity that gives the empire its lasting strength. The Democrats and Republicans collaborate to meet this goal, with Trump adopting Biden’s rhetoric on unity and Harris following the Republican’s rightward shift on the border and social issues. The DSA and other leftwing forces, in turn, tail the Democrats because the structure of the petit actionnaire class has left them without the independent political will to form a separate party, because the petit actionnaire class is existentially opposed to class conflict.

This is why the correct response to the 2024 election is neither candidate. Not because both are morally irretrievable, and not because refusing to vote will itself deliver the people’s democracy which we need. What we desperately need due to the class structure of the Global North is a proletarian political party which accepts the destruction of U.S. empire as a positive outcome and sees the defense of democratic rights as something which cannot be accomplished by a petit actionnaire class fundamentally dependent on bourgeois rule. When U.S. empire declines, the passivity which U.S. imperialism engenders in its citizens declines with it, and this trend must be the greatest motivator for North Americans to align with an anti-imperial party despite the material security offered by empire. The decline of queer rights and women’s rights is a natural consequence of imperial decay as the empire turns towards militarist escapades and internal regimentation to survive, and each vote for the Democrats saps energy which we must redirect towards building a political party capable of enforcing what they are unwilling to enact. If the Democrats passively accrue left wing support in 2024, the election’s farcical nature will be entirely the U.S. Left’s responsibility for our failure to capitalize on the lessons wrought in the past four years.

Traditionally, a good place to start would be to examine the candidate’s platform and consider its merits, point by point. The Harris campaign, unfortunately, does not appear to have a platform, at least not one posted to the public, and so we will have to rely mostly upon an analysis of her record as a politician, instead.

Political operatives of the Republican and Democratic parties have written much about Harris’ six-year stint as California’s Attorney General, and her own campaign frequently refers to that period when trying to build the case of her competence for office. Harris herself isn’t shy about discussing her work as California’s top cop, but her characterization of her work during that period the years before, when she worked as the head prosecutor in San Francisco, shifts with the political winds. One year, she describes herself as a progressive and a reformer who bravely took on the worst excesses of the Californian carceral state. When it suits her, however, the story changes, and we find instead that she had always been a hard nosed cop who worked tirelessly to protect California’s pristine suburbs. It is therefore difficult to get the measure of her without investigating this record directly.

Kamala Harris was California’s Attorney General from 2011 until her election to the United States Senate in 2017, and before that was the head prosecutor for San Francisco from 2004 until 2011. Her record during these years reflects the “tough-on-crime” era of the 1990’s and 2000’s — a period which might, arguably, be said to have opened with Joe Biden’s 1994 crime bill, now famous as the racist “superpredators” legislation which saw incarceration rates across the country soar to barbaric new heights. This was a time which, like today, saw Republican and Democratic politicians, from the Clintons to the Presidents Bush, in open competition to determine who could be the toughest on crime, lay down the longest and most draconian sentences for the most minimal offenses, and take the most racist political positions. During Kamala Harris’ tenure as the top prosecutor in California, Black people were incarcerated at a rate 9.5 times higher than their white counterparts. They were far less likely to have positive outcomes at parole hearings, and far more likely to be subject to police violence.

Then, as today, California state law mandated that prisoners do labor for the state and for private companies who contract with the state for that purpose. Refusing to work can result in write-ups, housing changes, stripping of the inmate’s rights to phone access, visitation, and ordering food or supplies. It can also affect parole considerations.   

Involuntary servitude (the term ‘slavery’ apparently having been too on the nose) is legal in California under Article I Section 6 of the state constitution, and under the 13^th Amendment to the federal one. It has been so since 1865, when the 13^th Amendment was written to provide a direct means to reinstate the slave relation that the Civil War had recently abolished. It served the triple purposes of producing a fungible, renewable, and cheap source of labor for the country’s growing economy, codifying a legal avenue for the appropriation of what meager properties Black people were then permitted to own, as well as to shore up a white supremacist hierarchy that had been teetering on the verge of collapse.

Under Attorney General Harris’ oversight, tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Californians were shuttled into the carceral system and subject to this “involuntary servitude.” Inmates were paid on average between 8 cents and 32 cents per hour, or between 12 dollars and 56 dollars per month, for their work for the state and the private corporations who contract with it. The jobs they were assigned then as now are menial, physically demanding, and often extremely dangerous. Prisoners are regularly deployed as firefighters during California’s increasingly severe wildfire season, cannon fodder in the capitalist state’s halfhearted fight against climate change.

Not only did Harris fail even to pay lip service to abolishing this abominable practice, she actively defended it from those who worked to curtail its worst excesses. She fought bitterly against a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in California’s prisons, filing obstructionist, frivolous motions to delay or derail the order entirely, and flirted with the idea of denying that the Supreme Court even had the authority to order such a thing.

That the Supreme Court, dominated by Republicans in 2011 (and hardly a bastion of progressive or liberatory thought at any time), even ordered such a thing is telling. In the majority opinion written by conservative Justice Kennedy, it was observed that Californian prisons were over 200 percent capacity, that they saw inmate deaths due to inadequate medical facilities and staff on a weekly basis, and that they had an inmate suicide rate nearly 80% higher than the national average for prison populations. Kennedy wrote that “…in one prison, up to 50 sick inmates may be held together in a 12-by-20-foot cage for up to five hours awaiting treatment… A prisoner with severe abdominal pain died after a 5-week delay in referral to a specialist; a prisoner with ‘constant and extreme’ chest pain died after an 8-hour delay in evaluation by a doctor; and a prisoner died of testicular cancer after a ‘failure of MDs to work up for cancer in a young man with 17 months of testicular pain.’”

Harris’ office acted with such intransigence in defying the order that the Court considered finding the State of California in contempt. Observers noted that her behavior may have fallen afoul of Californian legal and ethical standards against filing motions “for an improper purpose, such as to harass or cause unnecessary delay’” The State Government was eventually defeated and forced to reduce the prison population, but not before her office argued in court that extending the proposed inmate release programs “…to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought”.

Simply put, the State and its Attorney General were reluctant to release any of their cheap, disposable “involuntary servants.” The regime of slavery was simply too profitable to allow it to be undermined without a fight. It is worth noting that the institution of involuntary servitude persists in California to this day. When, in 2024, she stands on stage and portrays herself as a “tough on crime top cop”, this is the record that she is looking back upon so fondly.

Shifting the focus away from Harris’ violent, racist record inside the United States, we now examine her record and position on the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

Kamala Harris has sat now for three years as the second-in-command to President Biden, during which time the administration has dispatched at least 25 billion dollars to Israel in military aid, and recently authorized at least 20 billion more. Israel has long been, since its inception in 1948, the primary recipient of U.S. military aid, but the pace of this aid has accelerated dramatically in the wake of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. Between October of 2023 and May of 2024 alone, aid to Israel totaled 12.5 billion dollars, though this data is provisional, and the actual amount is almost certainly higher. This tranche of aid accounts for about half of the total amount sent over the course of Biden’s presidency.

As evidence of Israeli atrocities mounted, as the world watched the undeniable ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip in real time via live-stream and reacted with indignation and rage at the inhumanity of it, Harris never broke with her President or changed course.

Rhetorically, Harris has tried to play both sides. She’s commented more than once on the need for a ceasefire. When mounting pressure from student protests across the U.S. threatened to destabilize the country and, horror of horrors, her own political prospects, Harris paid lip service to the notion of establishing a ceasefire, or, more often and more tellingly, a “pause” in the Israeli extermination campaign.

Liberals and optimists alike might have been tempted to find some small shred of hope at that, and perhaps by Israel’s apparent willingness to discuss the possibility, but those fantasies were blown away when, on July 31, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of Hamas and the negotiator on their behalf, in his private room in Tehran.

Harris was now caught in a difficult position. Her halfhearted calls for a ceasefire suddenly seemed less convincing when her side had just murdered the very man that ceasefire negotiations might be made with, and therefore foreclosed on the possibility of any negotiations in the most spectacular possible way. Indeed, her refusal to denounce Israel in the aftermath of Haniyeh’s assassination, or for that matter the assassination of senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr the day before, reveals the naked cynicism of her words.

She has hardly had a sharp word for Israel since. Not since the clearly terroristic assassination of its negotiating partner, not since the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu and members of his government on war crime charges, not since the release of reports estimating that over 186,000 Palestinians, fully 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, have been shot, starved, beaten, and bombed to death. She didn’t even have anything to say on July 29 when, in a fit of sociopathic rage, mobs of Israeli fascists stormed a prison facility to release a soldier who was being held there on charges of brutally gang raping a Palestinian prisoner.

Since then, the most notable thing the Harris campaign has had to say on the matter of the ongoing genocide is that she is categorically opposed to an arms embargo on Israel. Publicly, she shouted down a group of pro-Palestine protesters at one of her rallies in Michigan on August 7, admonishing them for mentioning the genocide of the Palestinians and telling them that “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” before security ejected them from the event.

Kamala Harris is guilty of lying about many things, but when she says that her support for the genocidal Zionist project will never waver, she does appear to be speaking the truth. This steadfast and unbreakable support for the blood soaked colonialists occupying Palestine is hardly unique among American politicians, and a particularly generous (or naive) reader might be tempted to point this out. But then, vocal and energetic opposition to racial genocide has rarely been common among politicians who are actively engaged in it. One wonders who among the active politicians in 1940’s Germany might have represented the “lesser of two evils.”

Harris has walked in lockstep with Joe Biden and the right wing of the Democratic party every step of the way. She issued vocal support for Biden when he crushed the nascent rail workers strike in 2022. She’s been actively heading up the administration’s approach to immigration along the U.S. southern border, where ever more draconian tactics dominate. Deportations are on track to be higher under Biden’s administration than they ever were under Trump and, having apparently forgotten that she once pretended to have a problem with “children in cages,” Harris now weaponizes this brutal and racist record to outflank her Republican opponent on the right.

Recently, the Vice President was subject to a substantial amount of pressure from the U.S. working class over her choice of running mate. For a time, there was every indication that Josh Shapiro was her favored candidate, being as how he is the governor of Pennsylvania, a critically important swing state. Shapiro hit immediate opposition from the left, who cried out that he is a fanatical zionist who volunteered for and served six months in the Israeli occupation military earlier in life, and who penned racist tirades against the “battle-minded” and “belligerent” Arab people.

This didn’t seem to change Harris’s calculus on the issue though, and for weeks it seemed she would name him as her running mate at any moment. Shortly before a decision had to be made, however, a story broke about how in 2022, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office concluded that Ellen Greenberg, a victim who had been found in 2011 dead with 20 stab wounds on her body, had died by “suicide” rather than been murdered by her fiancé. Shapiro later had to refer the case to a different office after it became public that he had connections to Greenberg’s fiancé’s family, and thus had a conflict of interest.

This, apparently, was too much for the Harris campaign, and shortly thereafter they announced that Tim Walz would be her running mate instead. Walz cuts a public persona as an affable, easy-going, white suburban dad. He is the sitting governor of Minnesota, a position that he’s held since 2019. While he hasn’t, as far as this author is aware, covered up any murder cases for family friends, he isn’t free of the zionist charge that marred Shapiro either. On August 6 of this year, Yinam Cohen, a Consul General of Israel to the U.S., publicly thanked Walz for “deepening the Israel-Minnesota partnership” and “…for standing with Israel during our darkest hour.” The Twitter post was accompanied by a photo of the two, shaking hands in front of the United States and Israeli occupation flags.

Tim Walz is likely more recognizable, though, as the governor who called in the U.S. National Guard without hesitation to put down the George Floyd Uprising in 2020 and to occupy the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding areas. Thousands of National Guardsmen stormed the streets and fired indiscriminately into protesters and uninvolved onlookers alike. They demonstrated spectacular brutality, beating and arresting hundreds and abandoning even the pretense of acting within legal or proportional bounds.

A recently viral audio recording of then-President Trump from that period is enlightening. In it, Trump recounts how he had been in regular contact with Walz during the protests, how he’d asked the Governor to send in the National Guard, and how deeply impressed he’d been with the way that Walz had handled the events. He said that Walz is an “excellent guy” and that “what they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately.” He goes on to explain that Walz is on the phone and, addressing the Governor, says “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Odd Trumpian language notwithstanding, it is very clear that in that acute moment of crisis for American capitalism and class society, Donald Trump and Tim Walz are much more similar than they are different. At that juncture, when the structure of capital itself was at risk — when the colonial capitalist state’s inherent antagonism towards the working and racialized masses was exposed — the party lines disappeared and Walz, and the rest of the Democrats, joined hand in hand with Trump to put down the threat from below. The Harris-Walz campaign intentionally shared that audio clip to make a hypocrite of Trump on the campaign trail, but all it does is show the complete moral bankruptcy of both campaigns, both parties.

Harris claims to be a progressive, but she has the record of a brutal reactionary. She pretends that her campaign is about smashing glass ceilings and empowering women and people of color, but she has made a career of oppressing women and Black people, and is directly involved in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. She begs the workers to believe her when she says that she is the sane alternative to another four years of a fascist Donald Trump, but then she positions to the right of his campaign and criticizes him for being weak.

Like a chameleon who never really got the hang of its trade, Harris shifts her colors but never very convincingly, and hopes her audience has forgotten how she appeared a moment before. Unfortunately for her and her ilk, the working class and the oppressed of the world aren’t that gullible.