“Commodities begin to be exchanged because of an act of will: their owners agree to dispose of them reciprocally. In the meantime, people gradually come to rely on use-objects produced by others. Constant repetition makes exchange into a normal social process.”

“Our commodity owners learn, then, that the same division of labor that makes them into independent private producers also makes the social production process — and their relations within it — independent of them, the producers themselves: they learn that their independence from one another emerges in and is complemented by a system of all-around dependence on things produced by other people.”

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

Recently, Cde. Potato published a work in Red Clarion entitled “No One is Coming to Feed Us.” While the piece brings to the forefront important issues regarding food supply chains in the United States, its surface level analysis coupled with individualistic calls to action reflect a deeply disruptive tendency within the contemporary communist movement. This paper serves as a substantive critique to the faulty theoretical lines of thought contained within Cde. Potato’s piece, while also providing a new framework for systematically addressing political issues that will aid us in our struggle to obtain political power and bring about a socialist state.

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

As communists, using scientific analysis of contemporary and historical social relations to determine the correct path of revolutionary struggle is the key aspect of our work. What differentiates Marxism from other pseudo-intellectual attempts at social analysis is that humans are not prescribed natures as independent actors or socially dependent subjects, but are understood in their contradictory truth as both. As an individual you can act in ways that benefit both yourself and those around you. You can go vegan, reduce food waste and compost the rest, and even plant native flowers to help local pollinators. The issue with individual action lies not in its moral nature as a good thing that you should do, but in its quantitative relation to broader society. One person going vegan in a country of over three hundred million is going to have a negligible effect on average consumption habits and their subsequent environmental impacts. However, local concentrations of thousands of vegans and a national population of over a million can begin to introduce qualitative changes in broader society. This is the dialectical nature of social development.

Historical progressions in social-economic relations keenly reflect this process. The bourgeoisie did not always exist, nor did they simply emerge from the mist to bring about a new age of gunpowder and roaring steel. Instead they emerged slowly out of the contradictions of feudal society. These small groups of proto-bourgeois eventually found one another and began to organize towards the interests of their class. Bit by bit the bourgeoisie concentrated and began to disrupt the feudalist biospheres. By the time feudalist society caught onto this process it was already too late to prevent the capitalist age. Feudalist classes had two options: they could either consign themselves to a slow death or face the guillotine. The bourgeois eventually won their class war through bitter struggle and brought about the contemporary age, in which capitalism has subsumed and guaranteed the death of all former social divisions of labor.

Anyone who calls themselves a communist must understand this process, as it is by the same means which we will bring about communism. There are no shortcuts or tricks that allow us to avoid direct confrontation and simply declare the world anew. We are as much subjects to history as we are its progenitors. Winning our war with the bourgeoisie will necessitate a strict dedication to proven revolutionary strategies and the scientific development of new tactics informed by historic failures and contemporary material conditions. The population of cadres politically developed enough to engage in such a struggle may still be small in number, but just as the bourgeoisie and feudal lords before them, we will achieve our social revolution through quantitative action.

Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for our movement. In the face of the end of unimpeded imperialist expansion, the liberal mask of the American empire has fallen. The bourgeoisie have turned their gaze to the core in the hopes that by ripping out the copper wire and using the floorboards as fuel they can hold out against a global turn towards anti-imperialism. We have seen this self-destructive tendency emerge in several ways. On the international scale, the American bourgeoisie have begun to forcibly open up the empire’s vassal states for rapid and brutal economic exploitation. This has primarily emerged through the use of economic crises induced via tariffs, the threat of annexing territories, and the move to end NATO to demonstrate the European bourgeoisie’s reliance on the United States as an occupational force. While these moves have shocked liberals within the imperial core, they are simply a continuation of the empire’s shift towards open imperialist brutality. The longstanding strategy of obscuring the violence necessary to maintain the settler and aristocratic laboring classes has been replaced with an ideological drive toward fervent celebration of complicity in the brutal murder of the globally hyper-exploited. With socialist and anti-imperialist resistance drastically reducing the ratio of surplus-value that can be extracted from the third world, the first world has been turned to as a fresh store of labor and resources prime for rapid primitive accumulation. 

On the national scale, we have seen the violent enforcement of the patriarchal social division of labor through the targeting of transgender people as a third sexed class. Making state backed and extralegal violence against transgender people an acceptable social reality makes all deviations from gendered norms, particularly those done by women (trans or otherwise), a viable marker for increased levels of exploitation. Regarding the nationally oppressed, the state has abandoned the policy of courting select segments of these populations to increase their tokenistic representation in the exploitative classes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and aristocratic labor to justify the continued brutal immiseration of the vast majority of their populations; replacing it with the open and fetishized brutality of their hyper-exploitation. This too is not unprecedented. Over the last two decades the state has forced migrant laborers into increasingly precarious conditions of survival through the slow erosion of legal protections, the expansion of surveillance, encouragement of settlers enacting extralegal violence, and the expansion of administrative violence through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Conditions of precarity that have forced this population into becoming a slave-like class of hyper-exploited laborers.

With capitalism’s barbarism now laid bare, millions have been galvanized to take action against these systems of exploitation. While the revolutionary energy of this moment is undoubtable, the ability of any of these movements to effectively harness them to bring about lasting social change is doubtable at best. Once again liberals squander this energy through haphazard and disorganized fits of reaction, such as the recent “economic blackout” that excluded small businesses from their supposed boycott of the American economy, or the national “hands off” protest which included an ideologically muddled list of complaints and no real demands. Those who have yet developed socialist consciousness mistake these protest movements as the means to develop and consolidate power. However, their lack of organization and long term planning leads to apathetic nihilism among the masses when the movements inevitably fail to achieve any of their idealistic goals. As long as there is no a communist party to lead the masses and uplift them from base trade union consciousness, these spontaneous actions will continue to act as a roadblock in the path of socialist struggle. To seriously address these crises requires us to direct our efforts away from spontaneous action, and towards the extensive construction of the communist movement’s organizational capacity. 

You can engage in this work by joining or organizing a local Marxist Leninist book club. After building up a solid base of educated and militantly consistent cadres can you then direct your organizations capacity around a central project, whether that be communal gardening, mutual aid, becoming an anti-ice rapid response network, etc. This tiered process of development will provide you the means to effectively harness local revolutionary energy to not only enact social change, but to slowly institutionalize your organization as a node of political power. This essential work on the micro level will aid in the eventual consolidation of these nodes into a communist party that can harness our collective power towards dismantling the empire once and for all. While the struggle may seem daunting, revolutions have never been won in a single decisive blow. Rather they have succeeded against all odds by dismantling the enemy piece by piece.

The Conquest of Crumbs

As communists in the heart of the imperialist core, there is a vast array of issues we must address to build the foundations for socialism. A key issue that is rapidly exacerbating social contradictions is capitalism’s tendency towards ecological destruction through the metabolic rift. Current production processes and consumptive demands outstrip our environment’s ability to reproduce the raw resources these commodities rely upon. A process from which we have witnessed the total destruction of biomes through pollution, over extraction, and the mass eradication of hundreds of species. Faced with the existential threat that climate change poses, the global bourgeoisie was faced with a choice: either perpetuate the capitalist system by having the state intervene in the process of accumulation so as to restabilize the environment’s process of self-reproduction, or remove all fetters and pursue accumulation at any cost in the hopes some miracle cure for climate change will come along. Being nothing more than soulless husks that physically embody the spirit of capital, the bourgeoisie enthusiastically chose the latter. The ramifications of which have only just begun to hit the insulated imperial core. As Cde. Potato notes in their work No One is Coming to Feed Us, the rapid spread of pollution, disease, coupled with climate change are overlapping factors that will cause serious disruptions in food supply chains. Conditions that require us to face a serious question, who will feed the people?

Cde. Potato’s answer to this question is rather slapdash. Instead of outlining tactics and strategies by which local orgs could begin building the logistical means to feed the masses, we are given six individualist actions one can take to help bring about ecosocialism.

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

1. Grow your own food as much as possible to get a functional understanding of what your local ecosystem can produce
2. Support the food sovereignty of Indigenous communities by learning about what they are already doing
3. Support migrant farm workers by learning about what they are already doing
4. Organize to end child labor and prison labor through boycotts, advocacy, and direct action
5. Support local farms with an emphasis on perennials and orchards. Trees take YEARS to replace, these are the farms we can’t afford to lose
6. Recognize that “farmer” is not a specific term that automatically means petit bourgeois. Focus on the ownership class of agribusiness or Big Ag.

The author’s call for everyone to learn how to not just grow their own food, but to can and preserve this food on their own demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how systematic this issue truly is. This call for individual and small group preparation for a food crisis calls to mind the settler-colonial prepper mindset more than an effective socialist strategy. There will never be the spontaneous emergence of enough gardeners and small scale farmers to feed the people. These pressing conditions require a deeper centralization of agricultural production, not its decentralization.

Let’s say that you, as an individual, want to become more independent from national and international bourgeois agricultural production. So you decide to grow some potatoes in your backyard. Let’s assume you’ve got a natural green thumb and through hard work you’re able to produce 80 potatoes each containing about 100 calories. Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day, that would result in only a 1.09% decrease in your caloric dependency. If you were to compare the value of each potato given the labor time it took to till the soil, add fertilizer, consistently water them, cover them with leaves so they don’t freeze, harvest them, etc., the amount of labor stored within each potato would far outweigh the price of any you could buy at the store. Attempting to produce your own food at home, while a lovely hobby, is a complete waste of socially productive labor, as the socially necessary labor time to produce these products at scale will always be far outside your capacity as an individual laborer.

If you wanted to reduce your dependency by 10% you’d have to produce at least 73,000 calories, and spread that caloric intake across several nutritional sources such as onions, potatoes, rice, and beans. Of course this work would be made easier in a collective, but doing so comes with exponentially increasing costs. If each person is working towards the same goal you have to produce 73,000 calories for every member within the collective, divided across X number of crops, times an array of values for each crop’s individual requirements for land, water, and labor time necessary to produce a decent yield. Not to mention the financial costs of tools, seeds, etc. Taking on such a monumental task requires one to effectively answer several questions. For example, how are you acquiring enough land to grow that many crops? The majority of people do not own several acres to just start a farm. Even in suburban areas you’d require several front-and-back yards worth of land to feed more than a handful of people. Furthermore, which members of the working class have enough free time to dedicate themselves to farming on top of their jobs and domestic labor? Existing subsistence farmers still rely on the daily work of the whole family to produce enough food to eat or trade to maintain themselves. Finally, where will you obtain the money to maintain this project? Your comrades may be able to chip in through dues, and perhaps well-off members of your community may donate to such a noble cause. Yet, as soon as a financial crisis hits your pool of funds will dry up. There is simply no way to succeed on this path without the substantial support of an emergent socialist state.

When it comes to Indigenous food sovereignty Cde. Potato tells readers to research what their local Indigenous groups are, offer up support for their food sovereignty projects, and to “…shift your mindset to default the authority on agriculture and land management away from profit-driven science and towards Indigenous knowledge.” While it is good for comrades to know the conditions of their local tribes, the lack of direction given shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of these tribes. Indigenous organizations already have to deal with the incessant ignorance of well meaning liberal “allies” that come to the table with no means or tools to aid tribes in their liberatory struggle, yet demand to be educated and cultivated as activists so they can achieve moral salvation. As communists we must avoid adding to this feckless pool of good samaritans, and instead work to achieve the organizational capacity to work with these tribes in coalition. To have cadres who can be put to work using spades to put spuds in the ground or be an active presence to help in the protection of Indigenous farmers from settler violence. 

Beyond this lack of political activation, Cde. Potato refuses to explain what the struggle for food sovereignty looks like in the United States. In the place of such an explanation readers are given a collage of random news articles about Indigenous organizations, federal programs, and small businesses, with no context given for what each meaningfully does in the long term struggle for tribes sovereign management of their own food production, consumption, and distribution. No thought is given to the ways in which ecological colonization, the capitalist enclosure of land, and the genocidal destruction of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and traditions has made many tribes’ traditional food systems nearly impossible to reproduce. Nor is there consideration given to the fact that not all tribes have a strong traditional relationship to agricultural production. Take the Northern Arapaho tribe. Situated in the plains, the tribe’s primary form of caloric intake came from hunting local wildlife and gathering wild grown food. This in turn led to periods of extreme precarity before the introduction of the horse and gunpowder rifle guaranteed a more consistent means to sustain the tribe on wild game (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 74-75). The same level of nutritional variety and food security did not rematerialize until the 1940’s with the emergence of family gardens and increased levels of small game hunting. Gains that were again swept away within a few decades due to capitalist and colonial encroachment (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 78-80). While contemporary efforts such as the Growing Resilience project on the Wind River Reservation was able to achieve some gains in food sovereignty through the development of home food gardens, further efforts are still drastically constrained by extremely limited access to resources and capital.

To understand what role we as communists can play in the work to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty it’s important to first contextualize the project within contemporary material conditions. Food sovereignty represents several political goals in one project: tribes securing access to plentiful and healthy food, the ecologically sustainable production of this food, and the means to develop agricultural production in relation to their own needs and ambitions. While each is key to achieving the political project as a whole, most Indigenous people in the United States struggle with either hunger or being able to regularly obtain nutritious and healthy food, so of central importance to the current struggle is securing access to food. When food sovereignty is brought up by non-Indigenous people the focus is rarely on ending the systematic colonial violence that is the infliction of hunger on Indigenous populations, rather the ecological benefits of Indigenous food systems are made to be the main focus. This is because liberal interests lie not in aiding Indigenous people in their struggle, but using their knowledge to save the Bourgeois and the settler-colonial classes that served as their foot soldiers from the environmental catastrophe they themselves brought about. 

Despite these ideals placed on the back of Indigenous tribes they currently do not have the means to fix over two centuries of genocidal environmental destruction. The level of development required for tribes to achieve food sovereignty may at first look nothing like the ideals of ecological stability or growing crops native to a geographic area. It may very well require industrial levels of agricultural development owned, operated, and managed by the tribes themselves. Instead of family and community gardens that feed a handful of people, it may look like the efficient use of socially productive labor through the implementation of heavy machinery, greenhouses, and a variety of other large scale forms of agricultural production. The burden of fixing climate change alongside feeding not just their people, but everyone who will remain on Turtle Island, is a burden that should not be placed solely on the back of these nationally oppressed peoples who are pushed to the absolute extremes of precarity. To expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fix the ongoing environmental catastrophe forced upon them with nothing but a small amount of individual financial, moral, or volunteer support, is not merely an absurdity, but outright cruelty.

If communists are genuinely interested in helping to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty, then we have to develop the means to materially support them. The collective efforts of a communist club can do far more to aid these tribes than any individual deciding on a whim to look into what’s going on. A club could work with food sovereignty projects by helping to organize a donation drive, volunteering club members labor to help build and maintain gardens or farms, or find other ways to provide material and logistical support like offering car rides or free mechanical maintenance. Instead of this ceaseless chatter about what Indigenous sovereignty could do for us, we should be figuring out what we can do at scale to aid in their struggles and fight to restore their land.

When addressing the conditions of migrant farm workers, Cde. Potato again refrains from fully addressing what these conditions are and how readers can engage in migrant workers struggles. The only direction readers are given is to follow United Farm Workers (UFW) “for updates and attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training if you can.” Information that is only useful if you live in California, as the UFW has little to no organizational presence outside of the state. Further, this call to action yet again shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of self-organized migrant workers. Workers who are expected to trust absolute strangers with not just their personal safety, but the safety of their family. An astounding amount of trust has to be given for these workers to tell a stranger they’re a migrant, particularly when ICE agents are rounding folks up while in plain clothes and many white people are more than happy to report migrants so they can take part in the spectacle of state enacted colonial violence.

Migrant workers can be found in every state of the country, doing not only local agricultural work, but much of the hard physical labor of proletarian jobs that the broad swath of Americans are totally uninterested in doing. Just as these workers can be found in every state so too can you find organizations fighting to improve their material conditions. Some states may have orgs dedicated to this specific struggle or chapters of national organizations such as the ACLU may have rapid response networks of trained legal observers who can show up to ICE raids to inform people of their rights and do everything within their legal ability to prevent an abduction. As an individual it is far more useful for you to get in contact with one of these orgs so they can train you and put you to use in the local struggle rather than simply keeping up on the news. What migrant workers need is not self-educated sympathy, what they need is organized groups of people who will fight to protect them from the violence of their employers and the settler-colonial police force that is ICE. Politically centralized orgs, even in some of the most rural and conservative states, have been able to use long term strategic planning to prevent both deportations and the construction of ICE detention centers. The only way migrants can regain any sense of stability is through the support of highly organized groups that provide safety through rapid-response networks, legal support, volunteer translators, or even the provision of daily necessities such as food and water.

Child and prison labor are similarly under-discussed by Cde. Potato. Child labor is nothing new to capitalist development. Whether it be in the cotton mills, coal mines, or modern day meat processing plants, the blood of child laborers has long served as a fountain of youth for the dead labor known as capital. Liberalism’s main function in the United States has been to obscure the violent exploitation contained within nearly every commodity so that aristocratic laborers can consume them without guilt, so they can eat their $10 cheeseburger without once thinking about the child who lost their hand carving up the flesh they now so greedily consume. The reappearance of such overt exploitation in the imperial core is merely a sign that the imperialist super-profits that once protected America’s aristocratic laboring class from such conditions have drastically eroded. All this change means is that to maintain current rates of surplus-labor extraction within the imperial core now requires adult laborers’ direct competition with child labor. This will continually get worse until we bring about socialism. Cde. Potato also engages in the longstanding myth that prison labor is a profitable enterprise, and thus believes a boycott could do anything to affect it. Prisons in America do not exist to produce a profit, but primarily serve to suppress and concentrate the nationally oppressed and precariat so as to sequester their classes revolutionary potential. The carceral state is a central foundation for maintaining the imperial settler-colonial state. These conditions cannot be ended without engaging in long term socialist struggle.

If feeding people is a genuine concern and if, as Cde. Potato argues, supporting local farmers is imperative to achieving this goal, then we must undertake a serious analysis of their needs and character as a class.  Despite Cde. Potato’s claims to the contrary, farmers are a petit-bourgeois class. Renting land, tools, and having to buy fertilizer do not disqualify farmers from membership in this class. If renting one’s constant capital is all it takes to not be a member of the petit-bourgeois class, then the local cafe or bakery owner is also a member of the working class because they have to rent the building in which their business operates. Whether they own or lease the land, becoming a farmer still requires having access to the capital and labor necessary to not just start their farm, but maintain ownership of it through the exploitation of surplus labor. This labor may come from their unpaid family members, migrant workers, or seasonal agricultural workers. Whatever the case may be, they actively engage in exploitation and thus cannot be labeled as peasants, proletarians, or even aristocratic laborers. Further, Their reliance on government subsidies and the willingness of locals to buy their produce at higher prices places them in a reactionary position against both the bourgeoisie and those that seek to overturn the state. Without state intervention their class would be fully subsumed by what Cde. Potato describes as “Big Ag.” Not only are they petit-bourgeois, but they serve as an active force of colonization.

It is a simple fact that anyone who owns land in the United States is an active participant in settler colonialism. On the east coast this participation is rarely seen and felt as there the tribes’ physical, social, and historical relationship to the land have been the most thoroughly eradicated. It is in the West, wherein lies the largest concentration of reservations, that we witness continuous acts of heinous violence inflicted on Indigenous populations. Police, white workers, ranchers, and farmers regularly engage in the trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of Indigenous peoples. White settlements built on reservation land expand themselves to further exploit native people and resources, while the means of social reproduction is restrained to conditions of utter desperation within the tribes. These conditions of precarity provide an opportunity for settlers to engage in further exploitation by getting Indigenous people addicted to drugs and alcohol. The war against Indigenous people never ended in the United States, the same tactics and tendencies have been in continuous use by colonizers for well over 500 years. Liberal society simply chooses to wash away the blood on its hands by silencing Indigenous voices and sequestering their violent subjugation to the least populated areas of the country. 

Local farmers are just, if not more, guilty of perpetuating this systematic violence. They have no legitimate claim to the land they till and grow food on beyond that which is enforced by the settler-colonial state. The right of eminent domain makes this relationship clear, as any land can be claimed by the state for the expansion of infrastructure to benefit the military and the national means of production. This makes their class one of highly concentrated, yet split reaction against all those who may attempt to expropriate their land and capital, i.e., the industrial bourgeois, the state, and Indigenous tribes.  This is why as communists we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the anarchist tendency to reduce every class and struggle to that of David and Goliath. Just because a class of people views the bourgeoisie as a threat does not mean that they are our ally in the socialist struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie’s reliance on the capitalist system of exchange to maintain their means of production and access to a wide pool of exploitable labor puts them in a natural opposition to the socialist cause. Even if that were not the case, Lenin’s critique of the cooperative movement remains a salient reminder of why we must struggle against these anarchist tendencies contained within Cde. Potato’s work:

“Do you really think that the capitalist world will pave the way for the cooperative movement? Capitalism will try to take power over the cooperatives by any means necessary. This ‘anti-authoritarian’ cooperative group of English workers will be crushed in the most ruthless way possible and will be made into servants of capital. They will depend on capital via a thousand threads so that the newly created trend, which you sympathize so much with, will be caught as in a spider’s web. Pardon me, but all of that is unimportant! Those are all details! What is needed is direct action of the masses, and as long as that is not happening, nothing can be said about federalism, communism or social revolutions. Those are all children’s toys, prattling without any firm ground under our feet, without power, without means, and it does not bring us any step closer to our social aims.”

Vladimir Lenin, A meeting between V.I. Lenin and P.A. Kropotkin

Capitalism will not allow you to leave its social relations! You can free yourself as much from their overwhelming pressure using collective farming, housing, cooking, etc. as a submarine can free itself from the pressure in the Mariana Trench by opening up its hatch. The capitalist class will smash you into mush just as it has done with every attempt at individualist revolution for well over two centuries. The choice is simple. Engage in vanguardist organization, or die being remembered for nothing but hindering the revolutionary movement. In order to win, these petit-bourgeois anarchist fantasies must be smothered in their bed, before we lose another decade to their cult worship of spontaneous and individual action.

If you want power you have to think as if you already have it. You have to think about how resources will be transported, you have to think about how people will be supported, think about where funds will come from, think about how to maintain people’s morale, and you have to take your enemies seriously. If we take for granted the fact that local farmers’ agricultural production will be of key logistical importance in the revolutionary struggle, then to prevent local farmers’ total capture by reactionary forces our short term strategy must be to direct the energy of their class struggle against our mutual enemies. Such work has already been done in getting farmers to join the ecological struggle against the construction of pipelines by arguing against the use of eminent domain and demonstrating to them how their farm could be destroyed if a leakage were to occur. Further work can be done to organize the struggle against factory farms due to their mass production of and spread of livestock diseases. Gaining the full trust of these farmers in the socialist cause will necessitate the construction of a sophisticated party that has the logistical means to ensure their goods are transported and traded at a fair price, can secure the maintenance of their means of production, and possibly reduce the economic pressures they face by providing free technical, mechanical, or physical labor through party cadres. To manage this contradiction of aiding this settler class and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, the emergent socialist state’s mass agricultural production must be placed under the management of Indigenous experts. Through this process the land and capital of industrial agriculture can be expropriated into the hands of Indigenous tribes, providing the foundation for the eventual expropriation of all settler-controlled land for the benefit of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples.

This paper is not a condemnation or a call to shy away from the necessary work to provide food security for the masses. It is however a call for comrades to recognize the path to do so is not an easy one with simple solutions. Taking on the task to feed the people is a vital struggle for our movement to take on, and doing so will significantly aid the development of our logistical capacity and political power. If your club or organization is interested in taking on this work then you should follow these steps: first, ensure you have developed the institutional means to take on and cultivate new cadres. If local needs outstrip your organization’s capacity and it collapses, that will harm the movement far more than developing the essential skill of patience within your cadres. Second, secure a regular supply of food through donations, organizational funds, or whatever means are at your disposal. Third, find and build connections with those in your area who lack the means to secure food on a regular basis. Learn their stories, struggles, and work to find out what they want and need. Fourth, connect with other organizations doing this work. Ask how they’ve come to their current strategy, what has worked and what’s failed, see if there’s any way you can support one another.

The struggle for a socialist world is not a game and there is no salve by which we can fix all the harm capitalism has brought upon humanity. The only path for liberation is to engage in massive struggle propelled through the people. As communists our responsibility is to become a collective leadership the masses can trust, to not just courageously overturn the present, but to safely guide them through this tempest with vision unclouded by idealism. When the people ask the question of who will come to feed them, our goal must be that it comes with the quick reply, “The party is here to feed you.”

Citations

Arthur, Melvin, and Christine Porter. 2019. “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 9 (2): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.012.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1902) 1961. What Is to Be Done? Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press.

“The struggle… is in essence a struggle for political domination… The primary issue is control over people… our adversaries have generally employed armed force… primarily as a political abrasive intended to cow the population into submission, collapse all political structures… and erode the appetite for struggle… but the ultimate measure of success or failure will not be relative casualties… but — instead — whose political writ runs… over the population of South Vietnam.”

In July of 1967, the CIA began what it would later call the Phoenix Program. A 2005 U.S. Army proposal paper drafted by Lieutenant Colonel Ken Tovo said Phoenix “directed the participation of key representatives from civil government, police, security services, and military organizations” in Việt Nam with the explicit purpose of destroying support for the Communists in the South. In 1971, after rumors exploded into the public consciousness, the U.S. Congress held a series of hearings on Phoenix where it was described as a “murder program.” In 2015, CIA analyst Samuel Adams described Phoenix as a combined assassination and torture program. The Phoenix Program was shut down on paper in December of 1972, but in reality, as our own Lt. Colonel Tovo noted in his very forthcoming paper, the program continued under CIA direction until the “fall of Saigon” in 1975.

Douglas Valentine, an independent journalist, has spent the last forty years warning the American public about the Phoenix Program and how it has been operationalized within U.S. borders. Today, we are going to talk about what the Phoenix Program still means for the broad group of Communists and anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist activists working to topple the U.S. foreign policy regime of terror, death, and profit. In reality, the Phoenix Program never went away: it was merely transplanted, first to Chile, then to El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, and folded into the “Global War on Terror.” Now it is mushrooming up again as the Department of Homeland Security, militarized police, targeted murder of Black Lives Matter activists, and the not one but many Cop Cities springing up all over the United States.

Before we begin, it is important that we extend our thanks to Twitter user @sxlongshadow for his continued commitment to exposing the Phoenix Program’s involvement in modern domestic affairs and the CIA’s meddling in all aspects of U.S. policy. This article will not be able to replace the primary research conducted by people like Douglas Valentine, but it will lay out the basic operational outline of how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) follows the Phoenix outline and, we hope, provide cautionary information for those who are on the front lines of the struggle today.

Part One: What is the CIA?

To understand the methodology and function of the modern incarnation of Operation Phoenix, we have to understand the formation of the CIA and the national security state.  When we say that fascism is already here, it is the creation of the national security state and the inauguration of a century of surveillance and murder primarily directed against the nationally oppressed and left groups — Communists, Black liberation fighters, and anyone else designated by the decision-makers of white “square” America as outside the social fold. In Marxist terms, the class-conscious advanced workers in all spheres, the nationally oppressed members of internal colonies like the Indigenous peoples and Puerto Rico, and the nationally oppressed members of the internal semi-colonies like the Black Belt, were all targeted as non-people, individuals outside the protection of the legal arrangements of the liberal U.S. state.

The 19th and early 20th century U.S. state was anemic when compared with the vast machinery we now associate with Washington. There were few federal agencies and departments: the State, War, and Treasury Departments (1789), Department of the Interior (1849), of Agriculture (1862), Justice (1870), Commerce (1903), and Labor (1913) were the entire executive apparatus. In 1901, President William McKinley was shot to death by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exhibition. This set off an imagined scare of anarchists and revolution, which was used by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte (yes, of those Bonapartes), to justify the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908. More state machinery was needed to “enforce” Prohibition, which led to the creation of new jobs and departments. By the end of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, pursuing his “program of preparation for fascism and war” (according to the CPUSA before its revisionist turn), created an American version of the German Reich’s controlled labor union, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, by shepherding into existence the Works Progress Administration and the National Labor Relations Board. For those thinking this is a stretch, we refer you to the comments of President Biden this past week that the unions in the U.S. represent a “domestic NATO.”

World War II marks the major transition into a qualitatively different kind of state. In 1942, by Roosevelt’s executive order, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was created to serve as the intelligence agency of the U.S. during the war. One of the key tasks given to the OSS as the war progressed was to ensure the defeat of Communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. To achieve this, the OSS partnered with the Kuomintang in China, and became involved in protecting the drug-running operations that financed the Kuomintang warlord Chiang Kai Shek. To Washington and the bourgeois businesses of the U.S., the OSS was a way to strike against rivals for imperial power — Germany and Japan — as well as to prepare the ground against the Soviet Union for whatever would come after the war.

In 1947 Harry Truman, who was a pure class puppet of the high bourgeoisie and was a compromise vice president to replace the left-leaning Henry Wallace in case Roosevelt should die, signed the National Security Act, creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This new agency was formed out of members of the armed forces intelligence services as well as the OSS, and was immediately directed to continue the former activities of the OSS in combating Communism. The National Security Act forbade the CIA from taking action within the U.S. The newly created agency almost immediately violated its authorizing act and began the process of fighting Communism everywhere: at home and abroad. Among its most well-known domestic spying operations were CHAOS, which served as a counterpoint to the FBI COINTELPRO during the 1960s and 1970s, and the infamous MKULTRA, which began in ignominy as a series of mind-control experiments on U.S. citizens and ended with CIA agents filming U.S. politicians having sex with trafficked minors.

“The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology. It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals,” wrote Marcus Raskin, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in 1976. At home, the national security state gave the office of the president nearly untrammeled power, placing him at the helm of the various national security gangs: the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc. It was Truman himself, in Executive Order 9835, who instituted loyalty oaths for government officials. By 1949, dissenting voices — Communists, socialists, progressives — were being driven out of the unions, which became the vehicle for capitalist control of the labor movement.

Let us consider the words of D. Guerin in his 1939 book, Fascism and Big Business:

[a]n important fact [in the case of Mussolini’s Italy] is that the fascist squadron had at their disposal… not only the subsidies of their financial backers but the material and moral support of the repressive forces of the state: police, carabinieri, and army. The police recruited for the squadrons, urging outlaws to enroll in them and promising them all sorts of benefits and immunity. The police loaned their cars to squadron members and rejected applications for arms permits by workers and peasants while extending the permits granted to fascists. The guardians of “law and order” had their orders to remain idle when the fascists attacked the “reds” and to intervene only if the latter resisted. Often the police collaborated with the fascists in preparing attacks on labor organizations.

The line between criminal gang and police is crossed without compunction in the national security state. Compare this to Noam Chomsky’s introduction to COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom:

One FBI provocateur resigned when he was asked to arrange the bombing of a bridge in such a way that the person who placed the booby-trapped bomb would be killed. This was in Seattle where it was revealed that FBI infiltrators had been engaged in a campaign of arson, terrorism, and bombing of university and civil buildings, and where the FBI arranged a robbery, entrapping a young Black man who was paid $75 for the job and killed in a police ambush.

The CIA was once part of this network of national security gangs, but now stands above it as the premier agency of the national security state. They achieved this position through their control of criminal networks in Eastern Europe and Asia. This led them to infiltrate and essentially take over the Drug Enforcement Agency in order to protect their sources in drug running operations across the world. At the same time, they pioneered the Phoenix Program, which has become the counterinsurgency technique par excellence.

The CIA’s initial role, the destabilization of Communist governments, was undermined by their victory over the Soviet Union in 1991. In order to continue driving its militarism and the national security obsession, the U.S. needed a new enemy, and it turned out that the CIA had already financed them to be an enemy of the Soviets: political Islam. It’s here that we catch up with the 2005 proposal paper by Lieutenant Colonel Tovo and his desire to bring the Phoenix Program in its entirety to the “War on Terror.”

The contradiction for a secret police agency like the CIA is simple. The acts which the CIA targets are essentially non-criminal. Yes, it is against the law to commit treason or to teach of the necessity for the overthrow of the U.S. But there are ten thousand other acts that lead up to this treason that the CIA wants to stop. Subversion, progressivism, unrest, dissent. These are the hidden, non-criminal activities the CIA targets. These acts are usually carried out between willing participants. Talking about revolution isn’t something you do with every person you meet on the street. In order, therefore, to draw out their targets, the CIA needs to manufacture crimes by enticing potential Communists into criminal conspiracies with CIA plants.

To review: on the eve of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, the CIA was one of several terror gangs of secret police operating on U.S. soil. It pioneered a unique cocktail of drug running and hunter-killer squads abroad and domestic spying at home. It was poised at the tip of the U.S. foreign policy spear, to enter into a target country and subvert its government, undermine its authority, assassinate its leadership, and so on. It had already done so in Chile, in Nicaragua, etc. One of the CIA’s previous benefactors, political Islam, came into conflict with the U.S. empire at around the same time. The CIA recommended that they themselves be put in charge of all counterinsurgency operations, and for the U.S. to adopt the same plan the agency had deployed in Việt Nam. Lt. Col. Tovo’s proposal in 2005 is part of that scheme; the paper embodies that recommendation.

The CIA encouraged the federal government to create a Project Phoenix for the U.S. homeland. It engineered the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Part Two: What Is Phoenix?

Philip Agee and the other former spies that ran the magazine CounterSpy between 1973 and 1984 called the Phoenix Program “the most indiscriminate and massive programme of political murder since the Nazi death camps of World War 2.” In 1963, the CIA began operation Chiêu Hôi, “open arms,” which sought to subvert National Liberation Front (a.k.a. Viet Cong) members to defect through amnesty and resettlement. When this failed to produce results, the CIA reoriented and began to train, direct, and equip what were called Counter-Terror Teams (CTTs), later given the rebranded name of Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). This was the beginning of Operation Phoenix.

Phoenix had the following attributes:

1. Action at a distance;
2. Data-driven;
3. Civilian targets;
4. Recruitment of motivated anti-Communists;
5. Combined arms of counterinsurgency;
6. Torture;
7. Recruit, defect, capture, kill;

Action at a distance. Phoenix operated through “local” agencies to increase deniability. CIA advisors sat with Vietnamese National Police and gave them instructions about what they wanted not by doing it themselves, but primarily instructing their GVN subordinates. They created their own branch of the National Police to act on their behalf. If agents instructed information to be extracted by means of breaking ribs, withholding medicine, or attaching electrodes to a detainee, if they ordered their hunter-killer teams to kidnap or execute someone, they could tell Congress that the CIA never actually did anything illegal. A child’s distinction of morality, but such are the men (and now, women) that make up the premier intelligence agency of the U.S. empire.

Data driven. It began with a general census taken through the GVN to help identify the names of the secret Communist Party cell leaders in each village, as well as identifying their family members for later extortion, kidnap, and torture.

Civilian targets. The CIA developed its program not to demoralize the army, the National Liberation Front, but to kidnap, subvert, or kill the civilian members of the Communist Party that ran the administrative roles within Communist organizations. The CIA pursues what Douglas Valentine calls a “political order of battle” as opposed to the armed forces’ military order of battle.

Motivated anti-Communists. The CTTs or PRUs recruited the most highly motivated anti-Communsits and paramilitary forces available; this included deserters, desperados, and criminals facing lengthy prison terms or execution; even American soldiers who were otherwise going to be disciplined would volunteer for the CIA’s special operations roles.

Combined arms of counterinsurgency. The crown jewel of Phoenix from the CIA’s point of view was the Province Interrogation Center, or PIC. PICs were combined-arms centers that coordinated strategic civilian, police, and military intelligence in one place. The PICs were built all over the country, in each province, and that is where the Special Police interrogated “suspects.” Results of these interrogations, usually the identities of civilian Communists, were shared with a CIA paramilitary officer in the province, and the paramilitary officer could then dispatch a CTT to kidnap or kill the target.

Torture. There was widespread use of torture. As Douglas Valentine recounted in the words of a Phoenix officer, torture that was conducted out of sight of the CIA but with their instructions included “rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder, the ‘Bell Telephone Hour’ rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body; waterboarding; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling suspending the prisoner in mid-air while he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.

Recruit, defect, capture, kill. Phoenix established a hierarchy of outcomes. The creator of Phoenix, Nelson Brickham in 1967 explained it: “My motto was to recruit them; if you can’t recruit them, defect them (that’s Chieu Hoi); if you can’t defect them, capture them; if you can’t capture them, kill them.” The COINTELPRO and CHAOS programs were designed to sow distrust among Communist and left organizations by planting false evidence of federal agents in their midst; their crowning achievements were the actual subversion of Communists. The same with the Phoenix program. 

Operation Phoenix went so far as to dress the Special Operations Division police in the clothes and gear of National Liberation units and have them commit atrocious crimes against the people to spread fear of the Communists among the rural population. Subversion can come from the inside, or the outside. These seven elements made up the basis of the Phoenix Program and still serve today as the underlying logic of the Department of Homeland Security.

The War on Terror and the drive for homeland security are merely two sides of the coin of class warfare. The effects of imperialist policies have long been known to us. In 1950, Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, wrote “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken in him buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism…. no one colonizes innocently, [] no one colonizes with impunity either; [] a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization — and therefore force — is already a sick civilization.”

Veterans of the U.S. armed forces make up 20% of police officers. These men and women are sent overseas to engage in targeted murder and terror in Phoenix-like operations in Afghanistan or Iraq, to operate little Phoenix Programs across the world, and then brought back to work in the domestic police force. They are desensitized to killing, torture, and corruption because those tools are taught to them as the legitimate methods of control of foreign territories. They train in Abu Ghraibs abroad only to come home and build little Abu Ghraibs in the U.S. Officers who served in the military are more likely to have fired their weapons while doing police work (32% vs. 26%). The use of SWAT teams and military tactics has ballooned. 

The Chicago Police Department operated a secret black site where suspects were held without booking, shackled, and beaten. Beginning in 2005, the Maryland State Police began keeping a list of death penalty opponents and anti-war protestors as part of their effort to track terror. After Hurricane Katrina, the private security firm Blackwater patrolled the city of New Orleans and operated under DHS authority. Starting with the Reagan-era War on Drugs, police began to receive surplus military equipment from the Pentagon. After 9/11, DHS created anti-terror grants to provide new military equipment — armored trucks, ballistics gear, armored personnel carriers — to police departments. As Valentine says, “[F]our months after 9/11, D[irector of Central Intelligence] George Tenet personally arranged with New York City’s Muslim-hating Mayor Michael Bloomberg to slip senior CIA officer David Cohen inside the NYPD as its deputy commissioner for intelligence.”

The Homeland Security Act of November 25, 2002, created the same centralized structure out of the domestic U.S. law enforcement agencies, including local police departments, as the Phoenix Program did in Việt Nam. This is point 5 of the Phoenix Program as described above. DHS established “fusion centers,” which they call “focal points in states and major urban areas for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between State, Local, Tribal and Territorial, federal and private sector partners.” DHS says the role of these fusion centers is to receive classified information from federal partners, analyze and assess the implication of those reports, gather information to feed back to federal partners, and then disseminate the threats assessed with local law enforcement.

That is point number 1 of the Phoenix Program: act through local agencies. There is at least one fusion center in every state, which permits the CIA to coordinate its so-called counterterrorism efforts through local law enforcement. As of 2018, there are 79 operating fusion centers. These are no different from the Province Interrogation Centers: coordinating hubs between the federal security gangs and local police and paramilitary operations.

It was recently confirmed by the Intercept that the FBI paid a felon to infiltrate Denver’s 2020 racial justice protests. He spent his time trying to convince George Floyd protestors to pick up a rifle so the right-wing paramilitary agents could shoot back. Even though the protestors were too smart to be fooled by this agent provocateur, that didn’t stop the media from creating the circumstances for Kyle Rittenhouse to murder Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. He was recently set free by a Kenosha jury. So much for law and order!

At the top of DHS is the executive management team. Below them are the deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, who manages the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, containing about 1,000 analysts, many from the contributing agencies. There is also an Office of Operations Coordination and Planning, which oversees the DHS National Operations Center (NOC). The NOC acts as a central clearing-house for the fusion centers. DHS employs over 250,000 people. It communicates with tens of thousands of private Terrorism Liaison Officers, or privately-paid secret police. TLOs monitored Occupy and BLM from inside the protests and encampments.

Citing Valentine again, “[a]t the strategic political level it consists of bankers and corporate lobbyists paying elected officials to create tax loopholes for the rich, blanket domestic surveillance that compels working people to live in terror of being fired if they make suspicious utterances, and corrupt officials rewarding their arms industry contributors by laundering taxpayer dollars into the war machine.”

Non-governmental agencies (NGOs) play a huge role in this machine by trammeling revolutionary energy and redirecting it. Grants are doled out by CIA cut-outs and in response, groups report their entire membership and submit expenditure reports directly to Washington.

Part Three: Why Don’t We Recognize the Enemy?

We are trained not to understand the class forces at play in society. There are several tactics used by the law enforcement gangs to shape public perception through the media we consume. For federal agencies, the most prominent is the scheme of “it happened long ago,” a kind of limited hangout. For police and the military, there is what we’ve come to call copaganda. A generation or two ago, these would have all been overshadowed by the sentimentalist portrayal of all these agencies as uncomplicated heroes, but the modern period is one of increasing cynicism as the machinery of capital becomes more and more exposed.

“It happened long ago,” is a rhetorical trick that the CIA and FBI use to downplay their history of misdeeds. They allow certain records of very bad behavior from 30+ years ago to become public, owning up to the things their agencies did in the past. COINTELPRO, CHAOS, MKULTRA, Phoenix? Yes, these agencies did those things. But they happened long ago. We’re a new agency now. Meanwhile, they continue to pursue the exact same strategies that they honed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Copaganda is a topic too broad to cover here, and there are numerous other good sources on it as a media tactic. The news media doesn’t cover the most egregious and flagrant abuses of federal law enforcement agencies because the reporters would lose their access to exclusive stories and contacts within those very same federal gangs. The letter agencies carefully control what information is published.

Together, these strategies feed what CIA agent Cord Meyer dubbed the “compatible left,” liberals and pseudo-intellectuals who claim to challenge power but in fact are easily duped by its narratives and influenced by the ruling class and its nodes of control. Compatible leftists will regurgitate pre-cooked CIA talking points about how everything happened a long time ago, or worse, will actively engage in disinformation, claiming there was never any proof for Iran-Contra or the flooding of Black communities with drugs by the intelligence agencies. During the Trump years, the compatible left was responsible for the Mueller Report amplification, and now works tirelessly to exonerate Biden and Washington from the provable charge of having engaged in genocide in Palestine.

Conclusion

We must hold ourselves apart from NGOs, which are tools of governmental control. We must make a firm break with the compatible left, and reject all attempts to escalate to “direct action” that we do not have a firm strategic plan for. Above all, when analyzing the behavior of police and local authorities, we must never forget that behind every tin badge in the U.S. empire there stands the full might of the letter agencies, coiled and ready to strike.

It is necessary for us to maintain independence of action from the compatible left and to strictly delineate our organizations to be independent of all NGOs and government grants. We cannot take money from the enemy state, for every grant comes with intelligence agents of one stripe or another quick behind it. The maintenance of strict organizational control over our local groups (and, eventually, our all-empire party) is necessary to prevent the kind of backbiting that was fostered by the letter agencies in the last century.

The effect that the federal law enforcement gangs hope to achieve is one of terror and paralysis. We cannot afford to become terrorized or paralyzed. It is not the death of one, or even one hundred, that destroys the movement, but the fear that ripples through it thereafter. For the same reason, we must engineer the production of new Communists as the first and most critical task of any organization we build.

Further, we must insist not only on organizational integrity but on political development as a necessary component of organizing. We cannot fall prey to the trend of hyper-security that plagued the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and 1980s and still haunts us today. This is an outcome actively desired by the CIA and the other federal law enforcement gangs because it cuts Communists off from the wellspring of the movement: the people. We must study the techniques used to build both above- and under-ground movements in China during the struggle against the Kuomintang and the Japanese; we must insist on politically developing our membership; we must above all be principled and reproduce principled members.

As Fred Hampton said — you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can murder a freedom fighter, but you can’t murder liberation. While we cannot underestimate the U.S. Empire’s capacity for violence against us, we must also remember that, by the very nature of this program, the anti-imperialists who came before us have already proven victory is possible. The Communists have beaten the Phoenix Program before, because it undermines the support of the capitalist invaders. We will beat the Phoenix Program again, in the same way.