Editor’s Note: Aside from a few minor copy-edits for consistency across the piece, the letter has been republished in its original state.

The following is a letter I wrote to my comrades on June 4th, 2026, in which I formally withdrew my membership from the PSL. I debated whether or not to post it here publicly, and initially decided to post it with the PSL’s name redacted. However, in light of the recent wave in resignations, particularly that of Walter Smolarek, a member of the Central Committee and a 17 year veteran of the PSL, I have decided to post my own letter in full in solidarity with the numerous other comrades who have arrived at the same conclusions and quietly or vocally resigned.

Before I continue, I want to clearly state that the problem is not the individual comrades in individual units, these units are often filled with the most genuine, kindhearted, and passionate people whose energy and time are currently being exploited by a corrupt party. These comrades believe the work they are doing is toward the stated goal of a proletarian revolution, which is why they are defensive of the party and their work. It should be noted that the PSL’s central leadership does not represent these comrades as a whole, and as Walter’s letter points out, there is absolutely no transparency regarding the PSL’s decisions, and this has intentionally cultivated a membership that cannot see the corruption and has no real system in place to challenge it.

The PSL’s internal response to Walter’s letter contains the same deflection I encountered anytime I lent constructive criticism or voiced concerns to leadership. There is only a superficial acknowledgement of “organizational issues,” while the purpose and intent of the criticisms are shifted to personal grievances and a “misunderstanding” of the party line. This shift away from the central thesis of Walter’s arguments, which are overwhelmingly and demonstrably not about a petty personal grievance or a misunderstanding of PSL’s “political line,” is manipulative and dishonest.

Rather, his thesis is a confirmation of a current of dissatisfaction running across Party chapters nationwide, the same conclusions that I, and evidently many others, arrived at independently. It is now apparent that the inferences I drew are, in fact, an accurate description of the PSL’s actual internal workings. And while I affirm the patterns he documents, I do not endorse or validate Walter’s past or present conduct and have found many inaccuracies in his letter that I will detail at a later date. He offers no real criticism of the PSL’s participation in bourgeois elections, and he does not reckon honestly with his own role, as a long-tenured member of the leadership, in many of the errors he describes.

The PSL is already mobilizing its members on social media to discredit the validity of these criticisms, dismissing them as the work of wreckers, that to circulate these criticisms while the organization is “under state scrutiny” is doing the work of COINTELPRO. This is deflection, a pattern of PSL’s central leadership to avoid accountability. A party genuinely worried about infiltration and wreckage would tighten its analysis and its accountability, not move to crush valid criticism. And importantly, naming a pattern of structural rot is not sabotage, the rot is the sabotage, and will ultimately be the party’s own downfall if it does not address it.

I actively pursued membership with the PSL around April of 2025 and became a candidate in June of the same year. To be clear, I did not finish the candidacy classes necessary to become a “full” member, and this was deliberate because the classes, as I note in my letter, were filled with numerous historical/theoretical errors that sought to guide the conclusions of comrades away from their historical intent. In my repeated attempts to address my concerns about the PSL’s political education, strategies, and structure with various levels of local leadership, those concerns were often repeated back at me as though I had simply “misunderstood” the PSL’s political orientation, as though, because I did not understand it, I had not engaged with it, had not finished the classes, and was therefore incapable of grasping its purpose.

Effectively, regardless of how analytical, precise, and specific my concerns were, I was told by local leadership, in so many words, that it was my own deficiency for not “getting” the purpose of our feckless strategies, rather than that I fundamentally disagreed with them. The PSL is deliberately obscuring the fact that these are not trivial differences or simple “disagreements,” their behavior is a named ideological-political tendency within the history of revolutionary movements and parties, and that this tendency is inherently antagonistic to the working class.

The focus of my letter is on the tendency of opportunism (namely, right-opportunism) and revisionism within the party which I ground in the theoretical works of Lenin, Mao, and other revolutionaries. Importantly, my critique of this tendency is not purely theoretical, but is also based on the astounding amount of negative feedback from members of my community that have made me realize how dangerous this tendency is to the proletarian movement. The party’s leadership is deeply disconnected from the needs of individual units and the units themselves are disconnected from the masses.

The overarching thesis of my arguments is that the PSL has wrongfully titled itself the vanguard of the working class while distorting the meaning and function of the vanguard in revolutionary history. “Vanguard” is a relational term, there is no such thing as a vanguard party without the overwhelming support of the working class behind it. That support is not won by presenting the masses with “correct” ideas, it is built by fighting alongside them, by embedding ourselves in the real conditions and struggles of their lives.

The PSL’s work is not organized at the center of the our class’s struggle, it happens at the margins of it, orbiting leaderships own political line, brands, calls to protest or “boycott”, rather than the lived struggles of those exploited by the capitalist system. Because the PSL’s leadership is itself severed from the masses, it can only relate to its own units through top-down command, issuing directives that do not arise from any real struggle of the working class. Nor is there any channel running the other way to surface the needs and conditions of different regions back up to leadership. This is why so many of these commands make no sense on the ground, why, for instance, the PSL can insist on agitating for a nation-wide “general strike” without any of the infrastructure necessary to support one.

As I diagnose in my letter, this is a form of opportunism, called commandism. However, this opportunism cuts in the opposite direction as well, in which the PSL constantly tails after the spontaneous consciousness of the masses, echoing their own sentiments, rather than raising them up. Both of these signal a party that, regardless of how many people show up to our actions or vote for our candidates, is deeply disconnected from the actual daily lives of the people.

That is, turnout measures how many people we can mobilize for an afternoon or election, not whether our work has sufficiently elevated their consciousness by being connected to their struggles. A party with no meaningful connection to the masses is an irreconcilable contradiction. Stalin makes this most explicit in Foundations of Leninism, where he states that the party is “the vanguard of the working class,” but only insofar as it merges with the class, absorbs its best elements, and is connected to it by “a thousand threads.”

Walter offers numerous examples of commandism in his letter that we can draw from, and I touch briefly on my own, but it’s important to understand (as I’ve already stated) that this is a historical ideological-political pattern. In the 1970s, thousands of leftists turned toward Marxism-Leninism and began building new revolutionary parties in a period that came to be known as the New Communist Movement. By the 1980s it had largely collapsed due to relentless sectarian splits, dogmatism, and international communist crises. As it fell apart, organizations tried to account for what had gone wrong, and one of them, the Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee, wrote a study that named these organizational failures. Their description of commandism reads quite similar to what we experience now:

The discouragement of independent thinking and discussion in the party leads to an overdependence on leadership. We have noted the crucial role of organizational leadership. Yet if only officially sanctioned ideas have a place in the party, it can quickly develop a bureaucratic spirit: leaders command, members become ‘employees’… Commandist parties quickly tend toward dogmatism because the cadres will not or cannot take responsibility to apply the organization’s line in an intelligent way to the specific circumstances they face. Even though the members of the organization may discuss how to apply the line, their discussions cannot get very far–because applying a political line in a concrete situation requires dynamic understanding rather than dogmatic memorization. In this atmosphere members avoid reporting problems or failures for fear of being thought disloyal or defeatist.

In our movement, commandism has often reflected the leadership’s mistrust of the members (not to mention their mistrust of the masses) because of the members’ low level of political development. Yet commandism is not a cure for uneven political development; it is a prescription for continuing it. Commandism can never result in members gaining that critical grasp of Marxism-Leninism necessary to develop communist leaders and cadre.

The PSL, as Walter points out, is about as far from being the “vanguard” of the masses as a supposed “revolutionary” party could possibly be. There is a culture of deflection and a refusal to engage in meaningful criticism, in which anyone, or any group, who criticizes, distances from, or rejects the PSL is treated as little more than a “hater” or even a fed. The PSL encourages comrades to dismiss those who distance themselves from us as simply not understanding democratic centralism or Leninist organization, when in reality this is a gross negation of the mass line which only harms our work and our connection to the proletariat.

The PSL manages and contains working-class energy rather than organizing it in the direction of independent proletarian power, becoming what Lenin called a “bourgeois labor party.” Lenin explained that the opportunists are “better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie itself,” because they perform a service for capital that capital cannot perform for itself, which is keeping the proletariat tied to safe, non-threatening, system-preserving activity.

Those who earnestly seek to see the dictatorship of the proletariat in our lifetime must abandon the opportunists, and must realize that their energy has been driven into non-threatening measures that drill their passion into the ground. In the past, when the PSL has had membership ruptures, many of those comrades never rejoined any organization or returned to political work at all, which is far more a victory for the ruling class than for the PSL or the proletariat.

So, comrades, I ask you not to lose sight of why we joined the PSL in the first place, and to understand that there is a great deal of work to be done, and that every day we spend with a party that has abandoned its revolutionary premise is another day without challenging the ruling class, another day it gets to inflict violence on the masses. The remedy for this diagnosis is to complete the task set before us by Engels and sweep away the “colossal pile of garbage inherited by tradition,” namely opportunism, by going to the workers and the oppressed to engage in revolutionary mass organizing at the heart of class struggle.

We cannot allow ourselves to be lost to the wind, nor can we abandon the tasks before us. If comrades read this and are inspired to persist in our historic task of revolution, please reach out so that we may coordinate and determine the path forward!!! Had Lenin remained within the undivided RSDLP, the Bolsheviks would never have formed, and the October Revolution would never have happened. Lenin explained in an issue of Iskra that “Before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation.” You do not stay in the ranks of an ineffective, corrupt party, even when the alternative is a significantly smaller group.

As Comrade Mao said, “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”

Assalamu alaikum Comrades,

I want to begin by explaining how incredible I think each of you are and how much you’ve all inspired me. After having to start over in a state where I knew so few people, watching ICE terrorize my new home and feeling completely powerless without a community to fight back with, I joined the PSL, and it gave me both a community and a sense of purpose. Because of you all, I have so much hope for the future, and I genuinely believe that a revolution in our lifetime is possible and inevitable.

However, I have decided to discontinue my membership with the PSL.

This is a decision I have been dwelling on for months, one that has tugged at my heart and led to immense guilt. My decision to leave has absolutely nothing to do with any of you, and I am so grateful to have struggled alongside each of you. Lenin was famous for announcing his departure from an organization and distributing it to the membership, so, in the tradition of Lenin, I will offer a clear explanation of why I’m leaving. Criticism is a longstanding tradition of revolutionary parties, and I genuinely hope my criticisms are understood in good faith, rather than as an attempt to sow disunity.

My decision rests on fundamental disagreements with national’s political orientation and strategies that, from my perspective, have led to a significant gap between the national leadership and the needs of local units. I have voiced many of these concerns in internal meetings and in private to leadership, and though I genuinely appreciate our incredible unit leads, leadership, and other comrades for patiently discussing them with me, I have not been able to reconcile them.

There is a tendency that continually emerges within revolutionary parties, one that every single revolutionary has had to reconcile with in the past, this tendency is what Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and others have identified as the biggest threat to revolutionary parties. This tendency is opportunism, and importantly, it isn’t a moral failing of individuals within the party, nor is it intentional! Its a structural drift that, according to Lenin and Mao, must continually be combated to prevent this tendency to cause the party to abandon the revolutionary cause altogether. A party that has drifted towards opportunism will still present as a Marxist-Leninist party.

And, indeed, the PSL identifies as Marxist-Leninist, its public political analysis is generally correct, and its propaganda and longer-form content retain the language and conclusions of Marxism, these are what drew me to the party in the first place! Diagnosing opportunism requires an analysis of the political character, content, and action of the party and continually holding it next to the ultimate objective, which is a proletarian revolution. This letter will break down my primary concerns with the party’s political character, content, and action by continually grounding it in the objective goal and pairing it with the wisdom of our revolutionary predecessors. My concerns break down into a few primary categories: political education, party propaganda, failure to convert spontaneity into action, lack of underground work, and electoralism.

(Addendum: I would like to note that the PSL carefully distances itself from identifying as a Marxist-Leninist party. In both their “About” and their “Party Program” sections on pslweb.org, the party never mentions Lenin at all. Instead, they frame themselves as simply ‘Marxists.’ They never specifically utilize Leninist or Marxist phrasing such as “vanguard,” or “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and instead soften these terms with less descriptive language. These specific terms are not “communist jargon” you can abandon for accessibility, they are literally the dividing lines that separate Marxism from reformism.

In The State and Revolution, Lenin writes that someone who extends the recognition of class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a Marxist, everyone who accepts class struggle but stops short of the DotP is a reformist or opportunist. This is an extension of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he is clear that the transition between capitalism and communism is the revolutionary DotP. Comrades, we must recall that the Gotha is a furious polemic against a socialist party watering down its program with vague, conciliatory language to make themselves palatable.)

Political Education

Beginning with political education. As Lenin states, “there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory.” Marxists have gotten a reputation for obnoxiously harping about the need to read theory, this has been exacerbated by those who treat Marxism as a dogma that must be strictly adhered to and applied. But Marxism isn’t a dogma, is it comrades? It is a science! And like any other science, it must be approached using skepticism, observation, hypothesis, and application, but we can build on the existing scientific research instead of starting from scratch. If enough evidence has disproven our hypothesis, we can begin to reanalyze and rehypothesize, rather than continue on without question (that would be dogma).

Theory represents the practice and research of revolutionaries who came before us, who diagnosed the problems in our society and how to address them, with each building off the work of the last, and all grounding their theories in the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. For a revolutionary party, theory is indispensable. Many challenges that Marxists face today are the same challenges that revolutionaries of the past confronted. Reading, understanding, and applying theory not only helps us become better agitators and propagandists, it equips us to make the right analysis and decision in a time of crisis.

Perceptual knowledge comes from our direct experiences with the world, and these perceptions are what help us to realize things like the unfairness in the justice system, wealth inequality, or that everything feels bad all the time. These data points reflect certain realities of the objective world, but they are one-sided and superficial, an impression that reflects things incompletely without revealing their essence. Rational knowledge is what you get when those scattered impressions are synthesized into an understanding of the why and the how. This synthesis helps to explain the laws and relations that produce these impressions. This is, as some of you may know, an overly condensed explanation of Mao’s theory of knowledge which isn’t limited to book clubs and study groups, it requires reflection and is incomplete without actual practice. Practice is what makes theory dialectical and material, rather than purely ideological.

The reason why many of us became leftists is because of this perceptual knowledge that helped us identify the impressions of capitalist exploitation in the world, rational knowledge is what leads us to become Marxists, and application is what transforms us into revolutionaries; this application is what produces new theory. Anyone can recognize and diagnose problems within society. But without taking these observations past their impressions, they will be captured by the ruling class, converted into an understanding that is compatible with ruling class ideology. Due to the nature of ruling class cultural hegemony, their conclusions are what seem most natural or inevitable to us. The theory is what produces the difference between a Marxist and a leftist.

This is why we need revolutionary theory. However, it is entirely unnecessary to start at step zero and to insist on rediscovering, by our own trial and error, things that were settled ages ago. The same way we wouldn’t need to come up with our own theory of gravity in order to understand that what comes up, must come down, as this has already been extensively tested and iterated upon. In the same way, revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin put Marx’s existing theories to the test and developed them further, which other revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro have done with Lenin’s ideas. The body of theory is the rational knowledge of the entire international proletarian movement!

However, theory without application is useless and produces dogmatists who are incapable of acting. As Marx said, the point of studying theory and discussing it is to change the world! Rational knowledge is only verified and developed when it is put to the test in our own material conditions, which is why every revolutionary party should pair practical application with a continual study and revisiting of theory. This doesn’t mean that “right” ideas come only from those who’ve read every volume of Das Kapital. The masses often have many right ideas, but those ideas are usually isolated to individual issues, and our role as revolutionaries is to systematize them into something coherent, a strategy. We cannot do this without theory.

In the PSL, theory is de-emphasized in practice. Our political education often vulgarizes theory and simplifies it to the degree of obscuring it altogether. The format is accessible, which is lovely, but this format cannot and does not supplement engagement with the revolutionary theory and pedagogical discourse that produces rational knowledge. The most important part of theory is NOT the conclusions drawn from it. The value of reaching the rational stage is understanding the analytical movement from impression to essence, so that we can perform that analysis ourselves on new conditions.

The PSL’s political education condenses almost two centuries of Marxist theory, supplemented with other PSL publications, all of which are secondary sources that place a barrier between us and the words of the theorists themselves. In the instances where actual theory is studied, it is often paired with study materials provided by the PSL. I’ve been informed that this is only to provide historical context, which is frequently what makes theory so difficult to absorb (so true). However, as I will demonstrate later in my letter, historical context is not neutral, and providing it pre-interpreted is where the PSL’s conclusions get inserted into the theory itself. (Note: It has been revealed that this is intentional, not incidental. In this letter I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I would revoke today.)

Leadership has framed the PSL’s resources as a pragmatic means of continuing education, one that alleviates the burden of study, which is time-consuming and often inaccessible. But theory isn’t just reading or learning, it is a cycle of analysis and application, and it is the PSL’s responsibility to treat political education as a continual project of sharpening our analysis and strategy. This isn’t to say we should hand comrades a stack of texts and wish them luck!

A presentation of historical context, in a classroom setting guided by analysis and dialogue, lets us develop our analytical skills against the texts themselves. A summary of that history paired with pre-determined discussion points intended to steer comrades toward a fixed conclusion does not. Education is the investment a party makes in its members to produce capable, confident revolutionaries, and the decision to de-emphasize it in favor of PSL-produced summaries is one I fundamentally disagree with.

Lenin himself already assessed the pragmatism in de-emphasizing theory in favor of practice, his conclusion is that there is no middle ground between ruling class ideology and Marxist ideology, without a full understanding of Marxism we will default into ruling class ideology. This default to conclusions that are acceptable to the ruling class, which is subconscious and unintentional, is what produces opportunism. This is what happened in Lenin’s time, in his polemics against the “Economists.”

These were Marxists who believed they should focus on the workers’ immediate economic struggles, wages, hours, conditions, because that is what workers “actually respond to,” and that they should meet workers where they are rather than ply them with abstract theoretical demands. They thought this was the practical, non-elitist, mass-connected approach, and they accused Lenin’s emphasis on theory and professional revolutionaries of being aloof and disconnected from the “real movement.”

Lenin argued that they fundamentally misunderstood the task, which was to elevate the consciousness of the masses, and that because they refused to study theory, they could not see that all they were doing was tailing after the masses. This brings my opening quote from Lenin fully into context:

“Those who have the slightest acquaintance with the actual state of our movement cannot but see that the wide spread of Marxism was accompanied by a certain lowering of the theoretical level. Quite a number of people with very little, and even a total lack of theoretical training joined the movement because of its practical significance and its practical successes… Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.“

Public Propaganda

This leads me into political propaganda. Now, when it comes to the masses, they do not need to be experts in political theory, but it is our job as revolutionaries to bring theory to them. This doesn’t mean we should show up to No Kings chanting that the “bourgeoisie’s appropriation of surplus value from the proletariat is the primary contradiction that will lead to capitalism’s downfall!” However, we are supposed to use our understanding of theory to take the working class’s ideas and connect them to revolutionary theory in a way that they can grasp, and to continually raise their consciousness rather than just reaffirm what they already understand.

What I’ve noticed about the PSL’s agitation and propaganda geared toward the masses (think social media, campaign platforms, statements and speeches) is that it doesn’t seek to elevate the consciousness of the masses (though some of our longer-form content is better in this regard). When Lenin explained that the masses will always achieve a degree of political consciousness (”trade union consciousness”), he was trying to convey that the masses are fully capable of diagnosing the problems in their society based on their own experiences, as we’ve discussed. But this consciousness would not develop into revolutionary consciousness due to the hegemonic function of ruling-class ideology, which was always lurking in the shadows to redirect their political consciousness back into the system rather than away from it.

This is why populist phrases like “eat the rich!” and “people not billionaires” emerge organically from the working class! They’ve identified the economic element that leads to exploitation, but it is our responsibility to provide a class analysis that connects those phrases to the problem, capitalism. The masses are intelligent and will understand this. As Lenin put it, “the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.” When our propaganda only mirrors back what they already understand, we fail in our job to raise their political consciousness.

The Democrats and Democratic Socialists and other reformists center the entirety of their political agitation on socioeconomic “improvements” for the working class but they do not provide a class analysis. This is why Lenin explained that they “limit the tasks of the workers to a struggle for immediate, palpable results; they refuse to recognize that we Social-Democrats cannot reduce our tasks to those that are ‘attainable’ at the given moment… It is precisely the role of Social-Democracy as the vanguard in the actual struggle against autocracy to lift the spontaneous workers’ movement onto a higher plane, to raise it to its proper level of class struggle.” (Note: the Social-Democrats here are the Russian Marxists; Lenin would later break with this term.) Diluting our propaganda into left-populism that isn’t entirely dissimilar to that of the Democratic Socialists (like Bernie Sanders) is a grave error, as Lenin observes: “to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.”

What our propaganda should do is take that degree of spontaneous consciousness a step further by explaining that even if every billionaire disappeared, everyone’s material conditions would remain the same, because “billionaire” and “the rich” only describe a wealth category, and it isn’t the wealth in itself that produces systems of exploitation like wage labor and imperialism. In fact, not all billionaires are capitalists, plenty of capitalists are millionaires or small business owners. Whenever we simply reaffirm that billionaires are the problem, we allow the working class to conflate wealth with class, and we never help them understand that capitalism is the problem, and that IT needs to be abolished. We should have confidence in the working class’s ability to reason and to understand theory (insofar as it applies to their own conditions), and recognize that we may even have much to learn from them.

It is a common pitfall of leftists, not just Marxists, to underestimate the capability and smarts of the working class. Sometimes the argument is made that we still need to “dumb down” our agitprop because the average American reads at a sixth-grade level. This, too, is an excuse. Almost every historical revolutionary had to raise the political consciousness of an almost fully illiterate population. Lenin, Mao, Che, the Panthers, etc., all elevated the consciousness of a peasantry or working class that, in many cases, could not read at all! Lenin called out this tendency to belittle the masses’ capability as follows:

“Attention, therefore, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’ as the Economists wish to do, or to the level of the ‘average worker’… You, gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker’, as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation. Talk about serious things in a serious manner; leave pedagogics to the pedagogues, and not to politicians and organisers!”

Failure to Convert Spontaneity into Action

In the PSL, we have this idea that our primary tasks are to “popularize socialism” and “meet the moment.” Neither of these is inherently wrong. We should popularize socialism in the Marxian sense, and we should meet the moment. Wherever the masses are, as most Marxists argue, we should be there too, to listen to their needs, meet their needs, struggle with them, and elevate their consciousness. In the United States, the ruling class has successfully distorted the history and intention of protests, turning them into a pacifist performance, an outlet for working class rage. But even these entirely harmless, pacifist demonstrations are being pushed into less and less effective means (from protesting in streets to protesting on sidewalks, not being able to block traffic, police escorts, etc.).

As a result, protests are now viewed as a single solitary action lasting an hour or two at most, with everyone returning to business as usual afterward. Some on the left even refuse to attend due to the inefficacy of them. But protests contain immense potential, particularly for revolutionary parties, who should view them not only as a means to agitate and recruit, but as a way to turn the directionless rage of the masses into immediate, organized direct action. This shows the working class exactly what we are capable of while elevating their consciousness. If we show up to No Kings protests only to chant along with the masses, we once more fail to guide their consciousness a step further. As revolutionaries, we are the leaders of the proletarian movement, and it is our job to take the disorganized ideas of the masses and turn them into political action.

We should never push them to do something they aren’t ready for, but we should be able to gauge an individual situation and gently push them toward a more and more impactful flexing of collective power. This means turning pacifist parades into direct action by creating a list of demands, either in advance (with the entire objective of a protest oriented toward these demands) or being ready to create one and encourage a longer, sustained protest from the spontaneous one. This also applies to our current agitation for general strikes, which is one of significant error. When I’ve raised concerns about it, namely that it doesn’t make sense to agitate for one without the infrastructure to support one, I’ve been told that the PSL doesn’t intend to dedicate party resources toward building said infrastructure.

A revolutionary party that is only interested in vaguely gesturing toward the need for a general strike, rather than dedicating party resources and capacity to building the infrastructure, is unintentionally betraying its role as a leader within the proletarian movement. Strike funds, legal defense networks, food distribution, childcare, communication systems, and all the alternative systems are what sustain a successful strike. The historical strikes in the United States all had this infrastructure, built by communist or socialist organizers who prioritized these forms of organization. Such actions are prone to being co-opted by reformists, social democrats, and the ruling class, so it is paramount that communists build these networks rather than allow them to be diverted & squashed by counter-revolutionary forces.

The PSL’s stance on the current moment is what seemingly prevents national from directing resources and capacity toward this. However, Lenin firmly believed that the party should stay ready so it never had to get ready. In their own period of “counter-revolution,” the Bolsheviks did indeed prioritize propaganda and agitation. But importantly, they also used this time to build the skeleton that could support higher-stakes actions, like a general strike, but that often included uprisings many leftists would wrongfully categorize as adventurism. Take the 1905 general strike, which actually shifted the political climate to one of revolutionary potential. Lenin wrote in a letter that the endless deliberation over whether the working class was ready for xyz, or whether to escalate, irritated him. Let me provide the passage in full:

“I need hardly say that I do not undertake to judge of the practical side of the matter… However, judging by the documents, the whole thing threatens to degenerate into office routine. All these schemes, all these plans of organisation of the Combat Committee create the impression of red tape… disputes and discussions about the functions of the Combat Committee and its rights, are of the least value in a matter like this. What is needed is furious energy, and again energy. It horrifies me— I give you my word—it horrifies me to find that there has been talk about bombs for over six months, yet not one has been made! And it is the most learned of people who are doing the talking…. Go to the youth, gentlemen! That is the only remedy! Otherwise—I give you my word for it—you will be too late (everything tells me that), and will be left with “learned” memoranda, plans, charts, schemes, and magnificent recipes, but without an organisation, without a living cause. Go to the youth. Form fighting squads at once everywhere, among the students, and especially among the workers, etc., etc. Let groups be at once organised of three, ten, thirty, etc., persons. Let them arm themselves at once as best they can, be it with a revolver, a knife, a rag soaked in kerosene for starting fires, etc. Let these detachments at once select leaders, and as far as possible contact the Combat Committee of the St. Petersburg Committee. Do not demand any formalities, and, for heaven’s sake, forget all these schemes, and send all “functions, rights, and privileges” to the devil. Do not make membership in the R.S.D.L.P. an absolute condition—that would be an absurd demand for an armed uprising.”

This is why a firm grasp on the history of revolutions, revolutionaries, their mistakes, and their successes, all of which is contained within theory, is crucial to creating a revolutionary party capable of making the correct assessment and decision at a moments notice. Many Marxists would be shocked to find Lenin advocating for what many would classify as “adventurism.” But please understand that I’m not at all stating that every protest should turn into violent “Combat Committees” lol. As I’ve mentioned, a simple list of demands would suffice, and whenever the working class sees victories from these types of actions, it moves their understanding of working class power from the ideological realm into the material realm, making it tangible and achievable.

The PSL has an admirable degree of discipline and responsiveness. As I mentioned, I am continually inspired by you comrades and your ability to set aside your individual needs to respond to the cries of the people! However, our inability to convert spontaneous uprisings into direct action we can support is of concern. We often hold the attention of the masses in a time of crisis, but once the momentum dissipates, so does the attention we hold. Ebbs and flows are natural, but if we are not building infrastructure in the interim to actually prepare the working class for the next crisis, we will continue to lose them when momentum dies down.

Importantly, this cannot be the decision of one individual unit. Dedication to building infrastructure must be agreed upon by the entire party and prioritized by ensuring we dedicate appropriate organizational capacity and resources to it. This is a slow-burning, long term project that requires continual renewal of our dedication. There are days when the free breakfast programs of the Black Panthers didn’t have a single child in attendance, for example, but refusing to give up and maintaining these long term projects will ensure that we stay ready so we don’t have to get ready.

But unfortunately, we often must drop even short term projects to accommodate national’s orientation to prioritize, for example, door knocking. This frequently includes canceling existing actions, like book clubs or community defense meetings, in favor of these more “urgent” priorities. To be clear, I am not discussing when we need to urgently respond to a working class crisis such as ICE raids or emergency rallies! I also understand that we are limited in organizational capacity, and oftentimes we need all hands on deck to be effective in our other strategies.

However, the continual habit of dropping longer and shorter term projects for shorter term ones signals to the working class that we have no interest in seeing these projects through. This continual pivoting is a form of commandism, which is a structural problem when a party grows in size, but it is worrisome that we do not have (many) long term projects we’ve sustained for more than a year. Comrades, I ask you to look into the history of revolutionary movement building and find one movement that has not sustained long term projects! Worse, these pivots are rarely discussed among the units first. They’re decided on by central leadership, either at the national or district level, and comrades are expected to comply.

This is not democratic centralism; abandoning a project, whether at the local or national level, is something that requires discussion when it is not emergent. This is national’s orientation for how the party should be run, and many of you may be okay with this as a strategy, but my analysis is that we regularly sacrifice long term strategies for shorter-term ones that produce small “achievements” but never larger, meaningful “wins” for the working class as a proletarian movement toward the objective of revolution.

(Addendum: Upon reflecting on the PSL’s assessment of the “current moment,” I would like to further push back on this claim. If we look at the political analysis of the world, it is one of revolutionary potential, as evidenced by the political uprisings across the globe. This is not a time of low political action or consciousness; even in the United States, we have had more protests in the last five years than at any other point in history, and more people are turning up to explicitly political action by the millions. Yet we continually fail to raise this spontaneous consciousness further.

So, what is it, exactly, that the PSL means by “meeting the moment,” and what if the “moment” in question is rooted in the same poor political analysis of a leadership that is more concerned with optics and “building the party” than building the capacity to support THE moment for the working class? Because the leadership does not understand what a genuine revolutionary moment looks like, and because they are not cultivating comrades who are capable of utilizing such a moment, we risk squandering the opportunity to elevate the consciousness of the masses to usher them toward that moment.)

Participation in Bourgeois Elections

Seeing as this essay is already approaching 12 pages in its current form, I will keep this critique short but for anyone who is interested, I have written a longer form theoretical polemic and analysis critiquing participation in bourgeois elections for all Marxist parties. Effectively, we spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars within the four year election cycle on these campaigns. We are told that this is a Leninist strategy, but it isn’t really. Those who make this argument rely on Lenin’s polemic in Left-Wing Communism, where he criticized the German and Dutch left for declaring bourgeois parliaments “historically obsolete” on principle alone, he insisted that communists were obligated to participate so long as the masses were still engaged in them.

Once we contextualize Left-Wing Communism, we find that its argument does not map onto our current conditions. Lenin wrote within a climate of immense revolutionary potential, among a working class that was already heavliy organized and politically conscious, and within electoral systems (the tsarist Duma and the Weimar Reichstag) that have absolutely no resemblance to our red-tapped, anti-communist, anti-third party “democracy.”

The Third International, the authoritative codification of how Lenin’s tactics were meant to be applied, also clearly states that any participating party must identify openly as communist, draw a clear line of demarcation from the social democrats, treat elections as a tactic subordinate to other work, and that if conditions are ripe for (as an example) a strike, electoral participation should halt. Our candidates platforms in our recent Vote Socialist campaigns are indistinguishable from those of progressive liberals and social democrats. This is a form of opportunism where we flatten our message to “meet the masses where they are,” but only to keep them there, echoing their spontaneous consciousness rather than systematizing it and raising it a step further.

More importantly, people who turn out to vote are overwhelmingly the labor aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie proper. Roughly half of all adults earning under $50,000 and $100,000 did not vote in 2024. That is over 100 million eligible voters who did not vote. For comparison, only about 22% of adults earning $100,000 or more did not vote. Those who are the most impacted by the system (systemically the poorest, undereducated, marginalized) are those who have already given up on it.

And while statistics do not reveal the complete nuance or the entire picture of one’s class, and those who earn a higher income (such as myself) are capable of joining the proletarian movement, they’ve been repeatedly identified as those with the least revolutionary potential. Further, there are at least 27 millions more (the unhoused, the undocumented, the formerly incarcerated, those in US colonized “territories”) who are legally barred from voting, who our campaigns are also not reaching.

I am not saying we should refrain from participation altogether, but it should heed the contingencies laid out nearly a century ago that distinguish us from the bourgeois Democratic Socialists, and it should be deprioritized. Dedicating party resources to building the infrastructure for a general strike, which the working class has expressed interest in, would be far more valuable. This means establishing distribution networks with storage and pickup sites, neighborhood committees and coalitions, alternative systems to sustain the working class like community gardens (some PSL units in other states are doing this short term), training in first aid, self defense, and childcare.

(Addendum: I am saying that running in presidential and governor races is a woeful misallocation of resources, whereas running in smaller elections across more cities would be significantly easier to win and would have a higher probability of materially improving policy to aid our class, providing the support necessary to engage in class warfare.)

This is exactly what the Black Panther Party did! Their programs were dismissed by other leftists as pointless mutual aid, but they were tactical, a skeleton built to support the proletariat in a time of crisis rather than an end in themselves. As Huey P. Newton put it, they were “survival programs, survival pending revolution, not something to replace revolution or challenge the power relations demanding radical action, but an activity that strengthens us for the coming fight, a lifeboat leading us safely to shore.”

We know their method works here, that it has shaken the ruling class, and we have the Panthers’ own mistakes to learn from, which is again why theory matters. The PSL already knows how to do much of this work, but we don’t currently sustain it long term. We take these types of projects up for short periods and let them crumble in our absence, when sustaining them through the ebbs and flows is where the difficult work is. And much of it must be sustained independently of electoral or bourgeois arenas, so that when the state inevitably moves to crush it, we remain afloat.

In Conclusion

I sincerely appreciate those of you who’ve been able to read through this entire letter. Now, the reasons I’ve provided, for those of you still tuned in, may still seem trivial or unimportant, certainly not a reason to leave the party. But these reasons constitute Lenin’s definition of a party that has unintentionally abandoned the revolutionary premise of Marxism. Without theory, we cannot distinguish revolutionary work from work that only resembles it, and without propaganda that elevates consciousness, the masses will continue to be redirected toward ruling class ideology. This is a critique of the party structure, not of any individual comrades! As I mentioned, each of you is a dedicated, loyal comrade, and I do not question your intentions at all. But opportunism is defined by the use of revolutionary language to legitimize strategies that do not threaten the capitalist system, and that is effectively what our propaganda and political education have resorted to.

Lenin’s point in What Is To Be Done? was that there is no middle ground between revolutionary socialism and liberalism! Any de-emphasis of Marxist theory strengthens bourgeois ideology by default. What makes this dangerous is that the party, functionally, absorbs the energy of dedicated, loyal people who want to be revolutionaries and channels it into work that never actually threatens power, abandoning the necessary and patient work of developing leadership prepared to support the working class in times of crisis.

Every revolutionary leader you’ve ever heard of (Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro, Sankara, Minh, Luxemburg) identified opportunism as the greatest threat to revolutionary parties, more so than violent state repression, because repression leads to revolutionary clarity while opportunism eliminates or distorts it. The worst manifestation of opportunism is what Lenin identified as social chauvinism, when the party actually allies with the bourgeoisie and uses its organizational capacity to achieve their objectives. Lenin explains: “Opportunism is our principal enemy. Opportunism in the upper ranks of the working-class movement is bourgeois socialism, not proletarian socialism. It has been shown in practice that the working-class activists who follow the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeois themselves.”

(Addendum: the PSL has resorted to social chauvinism by mobilizing our organizational capacity to support legislation put forward by the Democratic party such as the recent redistricting in California.)

It may seem as though I’m purity testing the PSL and failing it simply because it doesn’t live up to my ideals of what a revolutionary party “should” look like, that all these theorists I’ve been quoting represent the standard I’m measuring the PSL against, and that we simply aren’t “radical” enough. HOWEVER, opportunism is a structural diagnosis with a long history within Marxist movements, and not a single revolutionary movement has avoided it. It is not representative of the individual moral failures of comrades and their work.

It is identified when a party sacrifices the long term interests of the proletarian movement for short-sighted gains. It is also identified when the question of revolution is continually put off into the distant future and intentionally delayed, treating the masses and the climate as not yet “ready”! Personally, I find this assessment by Parvus (written in 1901, though for transparency, Parvus was a promising revolutionary before the material success of the war persuaded him to abandon the cause, nevertheless, his revolutionary theory remains decent) to be the most astute:

As is well known, it is the dictatorship of the proletariat that opportunism criticises most. It does not directly deny the possibility of realising it, but it doubts it, it pushes it as far as possible into the distance, and above all wishes to eliminate it from present-day political considerations. The conditions, it claims, are still so unripe that they are not yet ready for it. The conditions, claims opportunism, are still so unripe that if the proletariat were to get hold of the machinery of the state, it… would end in a colossal defeat for the proletariat. So, for the time being, we leave the running of the state to those who already do so… And we must regard with trepidation every electoral victory as a step that brings us closer… to our defeat. But due to the inconsistency on which opportunism depends, it of course avoids drawing this conclusion from its premise. But what does it offer us instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it no can no longer countenance as a political guideline? How is the proletariat to abolish capitalist exploitation if not by conquering political power? What should be done, how should the working class act in order to achieve this goal…

It is only logical that opportunism, having abandoned the hope of the political rule of the proletariat, should seek to mediate between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Where socialism has hitherto uncovered the fiercest class antagonisms, opportunism seeks points of agreement. It pursues a policy of compromise. It wants to break off the peaks, to bridge over the antagonisms. This is how the theories of adaptation, of growing over into socialism, arose, with which opportunism seeks to conceal the hopelessness of its standpoint from itself and from the world.

Allowing opportunism to remain unchallenged is tantamount to allowing the party to forfeit the revolution. We will continue to invest our time and energy into strategies that never pose a threat to the ruling class, we will tail after the masses to “meet the moment,” we will substitute left-populist sloganeering for class analysis, we will never earn the trust of the working class, we will make short-sighted pivots that sacrifice the long term project of cultivating the masses, and we will distort the revolutionary character of our messaging.

Worst of all, we will be unprepared to assist the masses in times of crisis. One of the most dangerous aspects of opportunism is that it is rarely intentional (though it certainly can be)! As Lenin states, the opportunist “does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless. Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.”

In conclusion, I hope my criticisms do not read as an attack on the decent, genuinely good work we have done for the working class. I am aware of how strong my critiques are, and how, like myself, many of you have found a political home and community in the PSL, and it is not my intent to diminish that. The point of this letter is NOT that the PSL’s work is totally pointless or unimportant, nor that everyone should abandon it. The PSL does meaningful and important work, and for many, that work is valuable enough to continue.

But I do not believe this work, in its current form, is building the infrastructure or capacity to support a proletarian revolution.

Though it may not be apparent to everyone reading this, I have tried to address these concerns with varying levels of leadership and to emphasize the need for improved tactics, strategy, and political education. Over the last year I have suggested internal book studies, strategic mutual aid, infrastructure building, self defense training, targeted strikes, and more. Many of these suggestions were supported by our (amazing) local leads, but they require the material support of the PSL’s central leadership, and cannot be carried out by one unit of 6 to 10 people. (Addendum: They have absolutely no interest in doing this type of work.)

I have insisted on different formats for our public-facing “meetings” and “forums,” which often become a lecture with preset discussion points. I’ve heard from at least a dozen people that this format alienates them from attending, people who came expecting their own observations to be heard and taken seriously as a contribution to the struggle, are instead lectured at and forced to engage in timed, predetermined discussions. This overly corporate formula for community organizing is what happens when leadership tries to formalize the cultivation of political consciousness in a way that is totally removed from the actual proletarian movement.

There is nothing wrong with having an agenda or discussion points to keep a conversation productive. The problem is that they reverse the pedagogy of the oppressed, resorting to a style of dialogue that treats the community as empty vessels to be filled with the “correct” knowledge and guided to the “correct” conclusion, rather than letting us be led by them and learn as much from them as they might from us. To assume that only we possess all the knowledge, and must therefore guide their conclusions accordingly, underestimates and, as Paulo Freire argued, dehumanizes the working class and their capabilities.

What has troubled me most in my time with the PSL is that every time I have offered productive criticism, a change of tactics, an improvement to our political education, I have not been truly heard. The responses from upper leadership are often so defensive that you would forget I am a member of this party who deserves to contribute to it meaningfully! My criticisms have, rather, been taken as an attack on you comrades and your hard work.

In my final conversation with [Redacted], I was told that the only way for me to “understand” the work is to “do it.” As if I have not attended dozens of protests and rallies, given speeches at them, driven 20-plus miles in the middle of a workday to defend my comrades from police, ICE, or counter-protesters, as if I haven’t been teargassed and shot at trying to aid my community and my comrades, as if I haven’t harassed my friends and family to vote for our candidates, as if I haven’t tried to bring the PSL to my Muslim community, as if I haven’t spent my own money, time, and energy struggling along the party line with everyone else.

As if it were not from these experiences that I made my observations and earnestly sought to contribute by analyzing where we could improve! For God’s sake, I have been in the PSL almost as long as I have lived in this state lol! It has been the center of my life here. How utterly demoralizing to have my critiques received as though they come from an overly dogmatic, unrealistic armchair revolutionary.

I ground this letter in theory to show that these concerns have a history, a solution, and a name. The PSL claims to be Marxist-Leninist and uses theory to justify many of its stances, and it is for that reason that I have brought theory into this discussion, to substantiate my perspectives with historical precedent, in the hope that they will be taken more seriously after my departure. (Addendum: I implore comrades to genuinely reflect on their work in the party and determine if that work is valuable enough to continue at all.) But I know leadership has meant no ill will and did not intend to push me away or diminish my perspectives. I know they are defending work they believe in, and I still believe in them as individual comrades.

Despite these efforts, despite my attempts to raise these concerns with higher levels of leadership, I have not been able to reconcile these differences. And because I cannot reconcile the party’s strategies, I cannot defend them. It is for these reasons that I have decided to leave the PSL.

I want to end with a special thank you to [redacted comrades] who have taught me so much through their own actions, who have offered me friendship and comradeship, who have had more faith in me than I have at times had in myself, and who I know will continue to do meaningful, hard work both in and out of the PSL, work that all future comrades can depend on to lead them toward the good fight. That love extends to each of you, and I look forward to seeing everything that you all will accomplish and cheer you on from the periphery. <3

Love you all! Salaam!

Recommended Reading:

• The Labor Aristocracy: The Material Basis for Opportunism in The Labor Movement
• Lenin’s polemics against the Economists
• On the Tactics of Opportunism
• The Foundations of Leninism – Theory
• The Foundations of Leninism – The Party
• BE CONCERNED WITH THE WELL-BEING OF THE MASSES, PAY ATTENTION TO METHODS OF WORK
• Mao’s Little Red Book
• How To Be A Good Communist

“Our analysis has found that this Americanism manifests in the U.S. Communist movement as two opposite and complementary, major organizational problems: aversion to criticism and obsession with criticism. Both are manifestations of extreme liberal individualism and both trend towards the movement’s greater fracturing, atomization, and dissolution…. The former, aversion to criticism, is…the liberal-individualist’s defense mechanism, an avoidance tactic that serves to protect one’s fragile ego from shattering under pressure….

“We must become as the storm that sets the trees and the grain to trembling, that causes the ripest of the fruit to fall; from all formations and half-built organizations and from the petrified corpses of formations that still bear green shoots, we aim to sort and sift, to winnow and combine, the most advanced, the most prepared, the most militant into a single ferment of revolutionary dialogue.”

—USU Editorial Board, The Prospectus, August 2022

We have frequently remarked on the prevalence of an anti-democratic tendency among the supposedly Marxist-Leninist organizations that claim all-empire status in the US – the CPUSA, PSL, and FRSO.¹ We have published pieces about the cult-form taken by the opportunist organizations.² In particular, we warned that the Party for Socialism and Liberation has no long-term revolutionary strategy and is, instead, merely a brand-building exercise.³

Over the past week or so, two letters have emerged from internal PSL channels. The first purports to be written by one Walter Smolarek, a Central Committee member. It is addressed internally, to other PSL members, and lays out the justifications for his resignation. Although there are several questionable points contained in it, the main critiques of the letter are sound and align with criticisms that we have repeatedly made.⁴ The PSL Central Committee is alleged to have responded with a now-leaked internal letter that might as well be titled “My ‘Not Involved in Human Trafficking’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.”

First, the areas in which we disagree with the Smolarek letter: 1) Walter Smolarek was implicated in the Central Committee’s suppression of a sexual abuse investigation. This represents the most extreme example of the very anti-democratic chauvinism the author highlights, and should have been appropriately addressed.⁵ 2) The Smolarek letter also makes the mistake of separating the “movement” from the masses, and improperly positions the class conscious (whether newly or not) as being somehow part of a separate “stream.” The letter mistakenly divides attempts to win hegemony over the movement and attempts to win leadership of the masses. These are dialectically related and, in any period, before the masses can manifest their organized will in the form of a vanguard party, the incorrect theories and false-starts within the movement must be soundly and thoroughly discredited and defeated.⁶ To that end, it is impermissible for us to separate out the class conscious as a special group; they are the leading elements of the masses. While we are building up bases, we must be fighting the war of ideology against the distorters and liquidators of Marxism – like the PSL.

The Central Committee’s response is laughable, and should need no commentary from USU to expose it for the fraud that it is. It openly embraces the petty bourgeois notion of “branding” as the battle to win. For the PSL, socialism is a brand and its chief efforts are to act as the marketing manager of socialism among the labor aristocracy. The Central Committee does not even bother to refute some of the most damning accusations (for instance, that Brian and Ben Becker wrote most of the speeches or dominate the entire theory-production process in an undemocratic fashion). Indeed, it merely confirms that they are chasers-of-spontaneity, worshipers at the altar of the popular movement, and devoted first and foremost to expanding the PSL “brand,” above, beyond, and to the exclusion of actually building the required organizations among the people, and above, beyond, and to the exclusion of combating the settler labor aristocracy and the petty bourgeois socialism that dominates the field.

Indeed, how could they combat it? After all, PSL embodies one of the main tendencies of petty bourgeois socialism today. Despite their high-flung rhetoric accusing Smolarek of dismissing the possibility of revolution in the US, it is the PSL Central Committee that, through their theory of organizing, dismisses this possibility except as a branding exercise. Read carefully and compare the claims, and it will be apparent that the PSL is thoroughly bankrupt as an organization and serves only to mislead the masses and trap their newly-conscious strata.

This is why the League reiterates the position of our updated Outlook: down with the Four Opportunist Organizations of the PSL, CPUSA, FRSO, and DSA, and let us move forward toward the construction of a real militant vanguard with a proletarian internationalist outlook and an anti-settler standpoint!⁷

1. See, for instance, “The Social Reproduction of the Revisionist Party” (April 16, 2026) and “CPUSA Resignation” (October 30, 2025).
2. Although the piece was about the IMT (International Marxist Tendency), it could equally have been about CPUSA, FRSO, or PSL. “The Cult-Building Tendency” (April 2, 2024).
3. “Revolution in our Lifetime” (March 6, 2024).
4. See particularly, “Against Settler Socialism: Lessons from Minneapolis” (March 24, 2026).
5. Fashbusters, “PSL Whistleblowers Refute Central Committee’s Defense of Steven Powers”.
6. See, e.g., V.I. Lenin, What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats (1894).
7. See, “The 2026 Outlook of the Central Press of the All-Empire Worker’s League” (2026).

Editor’s Note: The letters have been reproduced exactly as they were received save for the fact that the Smolarek letter was followed by 19 blank pages in the document that was sent to us, and that numerous formatting issues (paragraphs breaking mid sentence) in the CC letter have been fixed.

Resignation from the PSL – The Smolarek Letter

Comrades, I am writing to submit to you my resignation from the Central Committee of the PSL and my resignation from membership.

I have been a member of this organization for 17 years, more than half of my life. When I first joined, I used to sneak out of my parents’ house to attend Party meetings and had to open a P.O. box to receive Party literature. I spent years building Party branches in various cities — Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Asheville, Baltimore, Louisville, Lexington and elsewhere. I was elected to the Central Committee three times, and before that was an observer present at every CC meeting for seven years. I worked for over four years on the Loud & Clear podcast alongside Brian Becker, then later on The Socialist Program. When the National Communications Department was established in 2022, I was made its director, and I have written the bulk of both external and internal Party materials for several years now, including ghost-writing materials for individual Party leaders. This is all to say that I have truly dedicated myself to the Party — this has been the singular purpose of my life. I do not make this decision lightly.

In recent years, I have been working in the “Center” of the Party, the New York office, which was established about three years ago, and I have become deeply disturbed by the crystallization of trends which I previously hoped were marks of the organization’s newness. These trends are the deep political dishonesty of the organization’s top leadership circle; the lack of serious strategic assessment; sectarianism and hostility towards mass organizing; the recklessness of the organization’s top leadership; and the marginalization of leaders who raise disagreements on a sincere political basis. I hoped and believed that the maturation of the Party would create the conditions for these problems to be overcome, namely that the emergence of more leaders from the branches could bring a greater health and honesty to the organization. But the reverse has become true. As the top leadership has gained access to more resources and more dutiful personnel, these tendencies have only hardened.

Rather than producing a more thoughtful, more rooted national leadership, I have seen person after person I respected come into the Center only to assimilate into total deference to Brian and Ben Becker, or otherwise quietly leave.

Seeing this, I have many times wanted to leave the organization. These last two years have been the most difficult in my Party tenure. I have wrestled over the responsibility to fight for “the party” and my recognition that it is not and will not become a true revolutionary party, a vehicle for the working class to win power. These last two years, I have made the calculation to conceal my full political views in order not to be displaced from central leadership, not out of a desire to retain any title but out of serious concern for the irresponsibility of the impulses of the Party’s top leaders and a commitment to mitigating them. This is a pitiful position. But I firmly believe that if I had done anything other than this, I would have been rapidly marginalized from meaningful positions of leadership and would not have been able to prevent top Party leadership from making decisions that would endanger the entire membership in gravely serious ways. I have decided now that this is no longer a meaningful contribution to the struggle for socialism.

Why now

The breaking point for me has been witnessing the profound dishonesty of the Branch Organizing Conference and the hardening of the leadership’s antagonism towards organizing the working class.

Comrades do not generally know that the Branch Organizing Conference only came to life because Ben Becker was concerned about bringing the Bylaws changes that he sought to make to the floor of the Party Congress. He worried that the changes, most notably significantly lowering the requirements of membership, would be controversial. His solution was to propose bringing together a body of hand-picked branch leaders to act as an acceptable enough substitution for the Congress to sign off on the changes. But in the process of putting together this group, he got carried away and the idea grew and grew into a de facto second round of the Congress — but without the constitutionally mandated processes, elections, and rights. In the end, the same hesitations over bringing the Bylaws to a vote led to them once again being put off, this time to the Central Committee.

In the end, the Conference became more of a defensive pep rally meant to reinforce, or “unify”, the Party around a celebration of its supposed “vanguard” status in defense against growing internal problems. After the Party Congress, there was a series of quiet resignations from Congress delegates based on concerns with the Party’s core political analysis and the suffocation of internal debate. There has also been a growing panic amongst the top Party leadership that several areas are succeeding in developing base building projects and conducting their own internal education.

The Conference became a key venue to check this trend, but with great efforts made to disguise the Party leadership’s true aims. Members were not told that their leaders are against base building and mass organizing work, that they view it as being in direct competition with growing the PSL. Members were not told that the leadership is suspicious of branches exploring education beyond that provided nationally from the PSL or TPF.

Instead of making direct interventions that could be debated on their political merits, members were presented with a wildly inflated picture of the PSL’s strength and an orientation on the current political landscape that anticipates nearing ruptures of a revolutionary proportion. The practical implication of such an outlook is that members must make their singular focus “building the Party” in preparation for these impending critical openings. They were given cherrypicked history lessons on the Bolsheviks and the U.S. Communist Party suggesting the PSL is on the brink of a massive expansion in scale and influence. Members were also presented with promises of a new, expansive and immersive, long-term educational period, a “National Cadre Development Program” that the national leadership will be driving — thus, no need to be driving education at the local level. In reality, this was a last-minute appropriation of an existing multi-part educational series that runs through the PSL’s line on the full history of the core debates of the Communist Movement from the 1860s through the fall of the Soviet Union. It was developed by founding members many years ago, and a couple of branches continue to utilize it as introductory education.

Another instructive example of what has been going on behind the scenes is the semi-controversy that arose around a seemingly new labor orientation given at the conference. In the panel on organization entitled “Building the Organization to Scale,” there was a speech given by a young union member who is not part of the national leadership. It may have seemed curious to attendees that this speech was not given by a member of the Labor Department leadership or Central Committee. That was because Ben and Husayn recognized that the content of this speech was a departure from the previous orientation that had not been run through other Labor Department leaders, and thus sought to distance themselves from direct responsibility for it. The comrade’s speech made the argument that we should reconsider the value and viability of organizing and moving unions. They’re too few, too weak, and too slow. Instead, our orientation to workplace organizing should focus on promoting Party literature, forming discussion groups, and recruiting coworkers to the Party and to the Action Network.

This orientation was shocking to many people in the audience, and, immediately, there were texts being exchanged asking about this apparent reorientation. By the time audience comment was through and the speakers were returned to for final comments, the speaker gave a comment that walked back much of what he had said.

In the Central Committee meeting following the conference, Husayn, Ben and Brian Becker made it a point to remark on the speech, distancing themselves. They characterized the speaker as “flippant” and spoke of the problems with “speaking in shorthand.” The reality is that Husayn wrote the talk that the speaker gave. He also wrote the comment the speaker delivered walking it back. Further, this is the orientation that all of them have quietly been giving for some time. This is at least the third time that I have heard this orientation presented. Yet if other leaders were to try to contest the position, they would deny any disagreement.

This maneuvering by the top party leadership is not in and of itself new. I have seen a hundred times over how the top leadership will go to great lengths to defeat a political trend they disagree with not through direct and open political struggle, but through some sort of disorienting maneuver that never makes an admission of conflict. What is new is the potential that has emerged within the organization for real, impactful work that I am watching be stifled. Witnessing this is revealing to me the stakes of allowing this farce to continue. It is capturing and suffocating the possibilities of the embryonic socialist movement. I believe that this is a greater threat than anything.

I have been extremely disturbed by the secret machinations within the New York office to extinguish or wrest control of the base building projects gaining ground in Denver and Brooklyn. Both areas, through separate processes of development, have found their way to building community center projects that operate as genuine mass organizations. There was an initial attempt to dissuade each area from this direction, but when the dissuasion didn’t work, the approach was taken to give leaders of both areas the impression that the top leadership was nonetheless supportive of their projects and interested in further debate and discussion. Behind closed doors, the national leadership has been working with insiders in both areas to inform on and undermine the projects. I know this both from being in proximity to these conversations and because I have been asked to play a role in this subterfuge.

In recent months, I have been aware of growing outrage in the office about the Brooklyn leadership’s focus on cultivating community partnerships and relationships, and most vehemently the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center. I have been approached multiple times, in secret conspiratorial huddles and one-on-one meetings, trying to ensure that I don’t sympathize with the efforts. It is well known that I believe in the centrality of base building for the communist movement today — I helped lead base building projects in the
Philadelphia branch and have written extensively on the subject. I have tried to generally avoid involvement in these discussions because I know the only goal is to pin me to a position against the members in Brooklyn. I have, however, heard other members receiving orientation on counter-organizing within the district.

Avoiding involvement became impossible when I was asked repeatedly to put my name to a document opposing base building in Brooklyn, a position I clearly do not support. I was asked first by Layan and Wyatt at the Branch Organizing Conference, then again in the New York office in a one-on-one with Ben Becker. I declined directly, saying that I agreed with the Brooklyn strategy of base building and explained why. This triggered yet another meeting with Ben Becker, David, Gabi, and Wyatt, where I was told that Brooklyn’s approach, which included raising comradely but critical analysis of the efficacy of previous work, would make the branch ”feel bad” and “feel confused”. I explained why I thought having honest assessment and differences of views expressed internally was healthy. I tried to steer the conversation in the direction of the political and strategic principles in dispute and explained why I agreed with the base building strategy. This was met with tears and anger, then it was made explicitly clear by the four of them that they viewed base building as incompatible with the approach of the PSL. I informed them that the previous night I had been reached out to by the Brooklyn leadership to speak at their district retreat based on my experience and writings on base building, and I had planned to go. They said they did not object to me speaking at the retreat, but reiterated how “confusing” they thought it would be.

Shortly later, the same night, Ben called me four times to urge me not to speak. The final time he called me, around 11:00pm that night, he told me that the Standing Committee of the Central Committee had just held an emergency meeting and voted that I could not speak at the retreat. While explaining why I disagreed with that decision, that I am a Central Committee member — one of the longest tenured members of the organization and the national leadership — expressing sincere political views that are not outside of stated Party line, I accepted and informed the Brooklyn leadership I would not be attending.

I later learned that at this retreat, a group of five members intervened forcefully, disruptively, and in a clearly orchestrated manner. Each of these members is current or former staff. The entire retreat, these five members read from a document on their phones, in a way that was completely unsubtle and visible to all attendees. One of the members emotionally stormed out. Having the experience of 17 years in the organization, and a decade in national leadership, I am certain that this was coordinated by Ben.

Later in the week, I was sat down by Brian Becker for more than three hours, questioned about my loyalty, and plied with what was clearly meant to be intimidating information. I was informed directly of the national leadership’s plans to kill the political trends coming out of Denver and Brooklyn. I was informed that he and others have been working secretly with select members of the Denver Steering Committee to incapacitate the other Denver leaders who have developed strong critiques around the issue of mass organizing and the PSL’s political orientation. He characterized the section of the leadership driving the Colorado People’s Center disrespectfully, and claimed that Lillian House specifically is driving a a strategy for mass organizing based on personal grievances. This is astonishing, as Lillian has been an open advocate for local mass organizing and base building for the entire time that she was in New York. In fact, this was a major source of frustration for the leadership, particularly for Ben, who found Lillian’s participation in leadership discussions annoying and would often say so to others. It is absolutely well known that the Colorado People’s Center is a project with the explicit aim of base building and mass
organizing. She reported multiple times within top leadership meetings on the project, and just two weeks ago, Brian applauded the center in front of the Central Committee. The national leadership has repeatedly given the impression that they embrace the project and Lillian as a dynamic leader, while behind closed doors they have denigrated both her and Denver and followed them with suspicion. Now, without an acknowledgement of the political difference, they are planning to empower their chosen representatives in Denver to temper the current direction of the People’s Center and bring the Denver to temper the current direction of the People’s Center and bring the branch back in line. After spelling out what they intend for Denver, I was asked pointedly if I wanted to remain a national leader, and if so if I had to exercise the expected discipline.

Finally, last night, trying one last time to address this issue in what should be the democratic bodies of the Party, the Brooklyn leadership asked that their strategy be discussed at the meeting of the New York Branch Committee. This is the body above the Steering Committee in New York that six of them are part of. When the point came up in the agenda, the junior members of the branch leadership came right out with it and expressed that base building was in contradiction to the strategy of the branch and the Party. But the members of the national leadership present, with the exception of myself — Ben, Karla, Layan, Manolo — shifted to the tactic of denying that there was a fundamental difference being expressed. Once again, with gross feigned magnanimity, they opted to conceal their views on a controversial issue so as not to risk a debate that could weaken their grip on the organization, just like with the Branch Organizing Conference and so many other instances. I expect that in the coming days, they will adopt the same posture internally, arguing that mass organizing is something they support.

I know this is false and I am not just inferring this. I have heard them talk behind closed doors for months about their opposition to the base building and mass organizing work that comrades are doing across the country, and have read draft documents they’ve written to combat the trend. This position was alluded to in a document written by Brian Becker that characterized mass organizing work as “too pedestrian,” but Ben Becker wrote more explicitly against base building and mass organizing in a document titled “Turning to the working class: What it should mean and what it shouldn’t.” This document was circulated amongst the inner circle in the New York office, but was ultimately not shared
out of concern that it would cause debate. In preparatory documents for the conference, key objectives included establishing that “pivoting is the essence of revolution,” and “deep organizing..isn’t part of [our] theory of revolution.”

It would be naive and irresponsible to take part in any further “processes” within the organization to deal with these questions. How can I continue to play dumb, knowing how such commissions and working groups are formed solely to drag out and delay resolution on an issue until a disfavored view loses its momentum. Congress attendees, consider where the promised “AI commission” and “Trans liberation commission” went? Even if any type of process actually were to come into being, it would be characterized by the same concealment of views and false “unity” to secure agreement while the actual decision making and implementation would remain completely under the control of Brian, Ben and the circle they keep around them.

Comrades, remaining in this organization has become the inverse of my political principles and I find no room within it to fight. I can no longer ignore the conclusion that I have been in the process of reaching over the years, and have now arrived at. Despite the presence of many people whom I respect and admire in the organization, the PSL is a fundamentally dead-end project driven by shallow and opportunistic leaders. These leaders squander the vibrancy of their most dynamic organizers and under-develop those who place their trust in them. I do not believe that the PSL’s narrow agitational focus and exaggerated political analysis is adequate for the tasks of our time. I do not believe there is the possibility of meaningfully moving the organization. I do not believe it is permissible for a communist to continue onwards in this organization in light of these conclusions.

I firmly believe that membership in the PSL must be based on a voluntary commitment to the organization’s clearly and openly stated political line and structure. I believe most members have essentially no idea what the PSL’s top leaders really think, how this impacts the directives members are tasked with carrying out, and how the organization really operates. I feel a responsibility in choosing to make my own exit to share insight into the dynamics beyond this final experience that have led me to a certainty this organization is a dead end-dynamics that are only plainly visible to the small handful of people that are allowed into the inner circle. I am not going to give an exhaustive account of my experiences, but I hope to shed enough light that others can believe their own eyes about the organization and its limitations and make an informed decision about how to exercise their political commitment to the movement for socialism, as I have made mine.

There are so many sincere, dedicated people in the PSL, and the intention of this letter is not to harm them, though I recognize it will be disruptive. I am departing not to abandon the fight for socialism, but because I am determined to commit my life to a real path towards winning it.

The fantasy of the Socialist Consciousness thesis

The core political line of the PSL is an opportunistic distortion of Leninism that conveniently aligns with the PSL’s marginal position in relation to the working class. Most members are likely not totally clear on what their organization imagines is the path to a successful socialist transformation of society in the U.S. While they are instructed intensively in the minutiae of the Party’s line on historical and geopolitical issues, members are largely left to themselves to deduce what the PSL’s theory of revolution might be.

Most members develop a sense that it is something like this: As capitalism inevitably produces injustices, the revolutionary party calls or joins protests. It recruits participants in these protest movements by expressing views that participants come to see as correct. When there are not protests, the party does agitational outreach to show itself and change the minds of more people. Capitalism’s own dynamics ensure that this cycle can be relied on to continue. Eventually, the capitalist system produces a crisis acute enough to throw the system into question, and if the Party is big enough, the protests can become a revolution.

This is essentially it. The PSL dresses up this simplistic concept with the socialist consciousness thesis — the idea that unique historical conditions preclude any path to revolution but to widely popularize our particular definition of socialism, positioning the party for the abrupt seizure of power at the time of a revolutionary crisis.

It is my firm belief that the PSL deliberately uses imprecise language, delivered with supreme confidence, to obscure the superficiality of its strategic and tactical approach. If the PSL can be said to have any strategy, it is to announce its ideas as often, loudly, and on as many issues as possible.

The socialist consciousness line is textbook idealism — that there is a magic set of words that can prepare the working class for revolution. This flies in the face of what communists historically have held: that the working class comes to class and revolutionary consciousness through the process of profound experiences gained through struggle, and, yes, repeated agitational exposures from the trusted organizers they fight with side-by-side.

The socialist consciousness theory relies on such a simplistic and flattened view of politics that it ignores almost every major question facing the working class and socialist movement — the atomization of the working class, the strength of right wing influence amongst the working class, the unprecedented powers of the capitalist state.

It is reasonable that members will be defensive of the PSL’s documents. It is unfortunately necessary to disabuse the membership of the idea that the core political documents of the PSL are carefully considered products of collective study, debate, and discussion. There is no meaningful collective leadership shaping the core political perspectives of the PSL beyond Brian Becker, Ben Becker, and formerly Eugene Puryear. In fact, core political documents often stem from a sudden thought that occurs to an individual. They are typically hastily assembled and often have basic historical and logical errors. It is not at
all uncommon in recent years for the Central Committee to receive documents without notice, cobbled together just in time for meetings, that are full of typos and are essentially recycled content from previous documents. (This has improved now with the prolific use of AI chatbots.) This gets by because of the strong cultural norm within the national leadership, shaped since the founding of the organization, to unanimously and enthusiastically praise whatever documents or directives are received from top Party leaders.

The basic historical analysis that forms the premise of the PSL’s Socialist Consciousness thesis is wrong. Is it really true that socialist transformation could not come to the United States through the struggle for democracy or the struggle for national liberation? What about the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the country came perhaps the closest it has ever been to socialist revolution? This was based on the internal national liberation struggles of the oppressed nationalities of the United States, principally the Black nation, waged in concert with the anti-colonial struggle of the people of Southeast Asia that delivered the U.S. empire its most humiliating military defeat. Brian himself directly contradicted the Socialist Consciousness thesis at the 5th Party Congress with a shift in its central theme. Shortly ahead of this Congress, Brian learned about an obscure Supreme Court case, Moore v Harper, and a related fringe legal concept called the “independent state legislature theory”. Brian extrapolated from this that a faction of the bourgeoisie was intent on using this case to end the democratic form of government in the United States and install a right-wing dictatorship. Thus, the central task of revolutionaries, as articulated in the 5th Party Congress, must be to urgently turn towards the struggle to defend democracy, a struggle which could only be defeated by a
people’s movement led by the PSL, which then could lead to a socialist revolution.

The fundamental contradiction between the central proclamation of the 5th Party Congress and the PSL’s official Socialist Consciousness line was never acknowledged or explained. They existed simultaneously in direct contradiction. That no one even on the Central Committee ever challenged this speaks to the culture of blind deference expected of all PSL members, even elected national leaders, to Brian Becker.

Not a party but a tendency

It is only possible to understand how the organization could have such a one-dimensional
approach by appreciating its lineage. PSL calls itself a party but, by concrete measures, it is an ideological tendency: an organization defined by its comprehensive political line, or as the PSL calls it, its “highly refined worldview”. A party is an organization that can credibly claim to represent a class or a section of a class. A party is solidified through a historical process in which the relationship between organization and base is formed; prior to that it is a preparty formation. A tendency is an organization that gains ground not by organizing the working class but by gaining influence amongst radicals. This is
not a criticism over semantics — the PSL calling itself a party as a reflection of its aspirations is reasonable enough — but a matter of clarifying the nature of the PSL as an organization.

The PSL’s basic approach was imported from the organization PSL emerged from — Workers World Party — and remains fundamentally unchanged. The PSL did not split from WWP over politics, but over the degradation of WWP as a functional organization.

The main difference between PSL and WWP is that today there is a much smaller “movement” within which to compete than in the 1960s and 70s, when WWP was at its prime. Ironically, the empty left landscape has benefited the PSL, which has become at least one of the biggest fish in a small pond. The leaders of PSL feel validated in the correctness of their approach — by doggedly raising its own flag in protests and on social media, the PSL has grown in reputation and numbers. Since breaking out on their own in 2004, they have surpassed WWP and anything WWP ever was, becoming one of the dominant forces in the small U.S. left. The PSL is hypnotized by this relative success. The
way PSL speaks of itself, many people internally and externally are shocked when they learn the PSL only has about 4000 members, and after more than twenty years of existence, its activity still does not go far beyond the protests and street outreach you can see from social media.

There is at least a logic to building a tendency in a period where a powerful working class movement exists, for revolutionaries to make their primary task working to influence the course of this movement. But today, in the aftermath of decades of global revolutionary defeat, the systematic destruction of left and working class organization in the U.S., and the advance of the organized far right — to organize an ideological tendency is to embrace historical irrelevancy. We are often told that “the biggest campaign is to build the Party.” Actually, the biggest campaign must be to address the diminished position and power of the working class. Through this process, a real communist party can be born. The PSL could achieve unquestionable hegemony within the existing left and still have no prospect of affecting real social change. We cannot lose sight of the most elementary of our political convictions, proven time and time and time again, that the masses make history. The prospect of a victorious socialist revolutionary struggle is contingent upon the participation of the working class, organized as a class.

The PSL’s internal culture and structures guard this extremely insular political perspective. If PSL members are trained, it is to learn and regurgitate the Party’s line — “to speak as leaders of the nation” — not to internalize the Marxist method and how it can be applied in deep and rigorous political study, discussion, strategizing, and experimentation considering the problems of our day. PSL members are in fact guided away from asking tough questions. Why do our events and protests seem to mainly mobilize activists from a middle class background and rarely people from the more oppressed strata of the working class directly affected by the issues in question? Is this a problem a protest-oriented organization can solve? One can see why such questions are
guarded against.

It is extremely abnormal for a communist organization to have such a low level of internal political engagement as the PSL. Critical debriefs are not a practice of the top Party leadership, not a part of the Party Congress process, not conducted by the Central Committee, and they are even banned within the New York City branch at the direction of top Party leaders. Where there are exceptions in the branches, it is to the credit of branch leadership and membership.

The paranoia that prevents self-reflection is rooted in political insecurity. There is an unspoken ban on members engaging with other contemporary left currents. Many members are likely unaware that there are sophisticated socialist debates within the U.S. left right now over strategy and tactics. There are significant socialist-led base building efforts making headway in New York City, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles, in many parts of the country. Any form of rigorous engagement with the questions, proposals, experiments, and debates of our day that are occurring outside of the PSL are treated as a danger.

In fact, in the New York office there has been panic in recent months after learning that some members have read interviews from non-PSL leaders of the Minneapolis general strike published in Jacobin, and another group of members have been taking the Jane McAlevey Organizing for Power class.

The organization’s structural deficiencies after more than twenty years of existence demonstrate plainly the PSL’s defective internal character. There is no functioning national education department and there never has been for more than a few months. The National Organization Department was only recently made into a real department, but since the organizer who led this work was pushed out of the Center, the department has rapidly degraded into little more than a surveillance and mobilization structure wielded by the top national leadership. Currently the NOD is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars employing highly skilled software developers to create an AI-powered app to compile comprehensive reports from all areas of the Party for the top leadership circle without having to deal with time-consuming personal engagement with branch leaders. This app will be used to ensure compliance with national directives and surface openings like Minneapolis for the national leadership to opportunistically claim credit for. The National Liaisons system — initially developed to be a network of support that surfaced the needs of the branches and facilitated the development of schools, trainings, resources, and consultation, is today overseen by the leaders of the National Organization Department with an almost singular purpose of ensuring compliance with national directives. There have been no schools, trainings, educational materials, or organizer-to-organizer exchanges developed by the NOD in now over a year. Forums for the engagement of leaders beyond the top leadership circle like the Party Organizer and the National Council have rapidly degraded into just more echo chambers for Brian and Ben Becker and sites to enforce the into just more echo chambers for Brian and Ben Becker and sites to enforce the latest agitational initiative.

Concealed hostility towards mass organizations

Many members think that their organization is invested in building mass organizations. The PSL’s top leaders, behind closed doors, believe members must be kept from this work. Mass organizations, they say, don’t yield recruits, tie members up in responsibilities that keep them from “pivoting” to protest calls, and make the membership “conservative”. For a tendency that is concerned exclusively with advancing its own position, the logic holds. Mass organizing, as compared to purely agitational activities, brings the organization into contact primarily with people who don’t already share it’s ideological perspective. It does embed organizers in a position of responsibility to specific groups of workers. It does result in organizers who are deeply in touch with the gulf between the PSL’s political line and where the masses of working people currently are. All of these things are extremely necessary.

Brian and Ben in particular recognize that their members believe in mass organizing work, and they thus carefully obscure their full political views with vague language and opt to kill mass organizing the long way. Rather than argue politically for the correctness of their position, they simply deny this work oxygen.

Branches are every day making attempts to develop local organizing campaigns, partnerships and coalitions, and mass organizations that build deep relationships with working class communities. Many branches have started to write branch strategy documents specifically to make progress on these objectives. This is a practice that came out of the Philadelphia and Denver branches and is viewed with suspicion by the top Party leadership, especially as it has inspired other cities to think critically about expanding the type of work a branch does.

With some exceptions, without training or guidance from the national organization, with constant orientations to force clumsy agitational campaigns into this work, and with repeated disruptions from competing national directives, long-term organizing efforts generally don’t make it past an elementary level.

When branches do get far in prioritizing such efforts, the national organization treats it as a major threat.

This was something I experienced even before the current manchinations within the Party Center in New York, as a branch leader in Philadelphia when we were building the PSL’s first Liberation Center. Originally, the concept of a Liberation Center was to build a lasting institution in a working class neighborhood that becomes known for addressing the issues directly relevant to the day-to-day lives of the people living there and build struggles around them. Liberation Center volunteers would go out into the community, get to know people, develop a deep understanding of the neighborhood, get involved in the lives and efforts already existing there, and offer labor and their center as resources to strengthen these efforts and propose new initiatives of our own. Through this, the relationships would be built that would tie the Party deeply to these communities and open up the space to build deep political consciousness over time in the neighborhood.

Brian, Ben, and Eugene sought to halt this proposal. It was ultimately settled with an unofficial deal that Philly would be allowed to continue but would have to represent the project within the Party using language obfuscating the real political proposal. I regret complying. I have seen over the years the consequence of blurring important political debates. Many cities have tried to emulate the Liberation Center concept, but without understanding it. In most places, it has more or less become diluted into just another name for a PSL office — a space primarily for PSL promotion.

The PSL uses the language of mass organizations, but it does not actually build them. A mass organization is a durable organizational form that involves a base of people outside of the party who are brought together to fight not just on the basis of agreement with a given position (like housing is a human right) but on the circumstances of their lives (like living in the same building or neighborhood). The PSL creates not mass organizations, but brands to put out protest calls, front organizations that consist of the same membership, and a supporter network. They all narrowly revolve around the PSL.

It makes sense that the PSL, as a tendency, finds mass organizations slow and frustrating. Again, a tendency is defined by its political line. That is what distinguishes it and attracts other radicals and greater influence within the left movement. If the PSL is engaged in low visibility, long-term work with people who are not going to immediately join and generate greater visibility, then newly radicalized people may end up in other left groups, losing potential numbers for PSL. If the PSL premises its success on growth and recruitment amongst radicals, then it is logical to favor activity that puts it at the front of every protest, in every flashy battleground, speaking on every hot issue, because that’s where the radicals will be able to see our position and find us.

This dependence on flash and visibility creates a particular tension with labor organizing, which cannot appeal only to the already ideologically sympathetic workers, but must do the long and hard organizing of moving all workers in the union regardless of pre-existing political views.

While the PSL espouses a desire to build the union movement, and there are PSL members who play important roles in trade unions and have led significant labor struggles, the PSL’s top leadership views this at just another site for the PSL to raise its flag high. Behind closed doors, the comrades engaged in the labor movement are routinely treated with exasperation, as “always the most conservative element of a communist party.” Comrades are directly instructed by the Party’s labor department to minimize their involvement in union organizing drives so that they can more fully focus on “talking politics” to their co-workers and recruiting them to the PSL or PAN. Comrades who are labor leaders are expected to readily deliver endorsements for protest initiatives and provide legitimacy to hastily decided calls like the general strike orientation. But the responsibilities of true mass leaders are in direct tension with quick-return agitational interventions.

Concealed sectarianism

For an organization that has been around for more than 20 years, the PSL is remarkably isolated. PSL members are told over and over that they are not in a sectarian organization, but their organization has a very limited view of who is worth cultivating relationships and collaboration with.

It is true that the PSL will work with most anyone, no matter how silly or discrediting, as long as they advance a PSL initiative (take General Strike US, for instance). But short-term utility is the primary basis of assessing external organizations and partners: will they or won’t they advance a PSL initiative. Given that the PSL’s work is oriented towards its own advancement and not that of working class organization, many serious working class formations are not very relevant to the PSL.

In the partnerships it does pursue, the narrowness of the PSL’s goals lead to an extreme expectation of control. Members are trained in the importance of the Party being the “anchor” of any coalition it is part of. The “anchor” is a euphemism for the force that makes all core political decisions and has executive authority to handle on-the-spot decision making without challenge. Members learn that having other groups around the PSL that follow our lead is worth the trouble because it provides a shield against red-baiting from the right wing and identity-based attacks from the left. These expectations put a short expiration date on the partnerships the PSL pursues, especially those that have any responsibility to a social base, and indeed members are repeatedly instructed that “breakups are inevitable” and cadre should avoid forming too close a bond with anyone outside the PSL.

In reality, no organization that represents real social forces will forever be content to accept direction from an external “anchor” that expects the level of subservience that the PSL does.

This sectarianism is not just petty; it results in the squandering of historically important opportunities. In the 2024 election, for example, the Stein campaign came to the PSL leadership to propose that the Green Party and PSL unite their presidential campaigns. Because of paperwork deadlines and restrictive ballot access laws, it would only be possible for Stein to be the formal presidential candidate and Claudia De La Cruz would have to be vice-president. But Stein was willing to organize the campaign in a way that she and Claudia would be presented as co-equal candidates running in an alliance, both equally empowered to speak on behalf of the campaign. This proposal was met with emotional meltdowns by multiple top Party leaders. The offer was rejected. This was the basis on which the PSL killed the possibility of a powerful third-party unity ticket, in an election in which the two major parties put up a repeat of the most quintessentially detestable capitalist candidates — Joe Biden and Donald Trump — for the second time to the American people.

Why reforming the organization is impossible

As a communist, I would not issue this resignation had it not become unmistakably clear that there are no democratic structures in the PSL that could effectuate a change in orientation. While the Party’s Constitution outlines a genuine democratic centralist structure, this is not what the Party’s national leadership practices. I have already described to some degree the real internal functionings of the party, but comrades need a fuller picture to really understand.

The top Party leadership carefully constructs a cosmetic democratic structure The top Party leadership carefully constructs a cosmetic democratic structure that brings only innocuous details up for discussion and conceals its real decision-making process. While the Party Congress is under the impression that it elects the Party’s national leadership, the real leadership is simply Brian and Ben Becker, formerly and to a limited degree Eugene, now to a limited degree Manolo, and whoever is permitted into their informal leadership clique. I speak having spent the last decade or so within this clique.

Unless you are brought into this clique, becoming a Central Committee member is essentially inconsequential. It does not on its own involve greater practical or political responsibility. The Central Committee gathers a few times a year, brought together at the convenience of the leadership clique. Central Committee meeting agendas are given less attention than most branches give to organizing SC retreats. Similar to the National Council, the bulk of the meeting is consumed by long lectures from Brian, Ben, and formerly Eugene.

In the 14 years that I have been attending CC meetings, I have come to understand that even when a decision is made by the Central Committee, that decision is only implemented if the leadership clique chooses to make it a priority. Countless hours have been spent at CC meetings discussing “big ideas” from the core leadership that never materialize. At the same time, ideas that Brian, Ben, or Eugene change their mind on or disapprove of personally will be quietly abandoned without consequence.

Attendees of the December 2024 Central Committee meeting will remember a proposal to build on the momentum of the 2024 presidential campaign by pursuing a united front in the electoral arena during the 2026 midterm with other left-wing forces opposed to the two-party system. This would then form the basis for initiatives to form a new third party that could present a unified, credible left-wing slate in the 2028 election. Every CC member who participated in the discussion spoke in favor of the proposal and it was adopted. But at a secret gathering two months later of the informal leadership body operating out of the Center, the initiative was discarded after five minutes of discussion.

The Party Congress is a carefully controlled performance allowing only superficial discussions. At the last Party Congress, both Ben and Brian Becker asserted openly that the purpose of the Congress is not to make major political decisions but to “build Party unity”. This was honest. The entire Congress process is tightly orchestrated to strengthen devotion to the Party, not to take up political questions. Great care is taken to avoid the surfacing of debates. At the last Party Congress, a participant openly disagreed with the PSL’s proposed line on AI and was met with a coordinated string of comments lined up by top PSL leaders to decisively shut down the disagreement. Many attendees were confused and concerned by the display. Another delegate openly criticized it from the floor. Both of those members have quietly resigned since.

In reality, the functional leadership of the Party lies with Brian and Ben, to be executed without debate by their immediate staff of devotees, organized in both small private meetings and a “Political Coordinating Committee” — the current unelected leadership clique that acts as a substitute for the elected Executive Committee. This team was assembled outside of any sanctioned process from hand-picked staff. Many times ideas that impact the focus of the entire organization are swiftly decided based on minutes of deliberation in this group.

Take the “general strike” line. Considering this has become the main intervention of the PSL in the anti-Trump movement, comrades may reasonably assume it was the product of extensive and measured discussion by the Central Committee or another elected leadership body. That is not the case. On October 14, the Political Coordination Committee met to discuss the No Kings Day protests that were coming that weekend. Democratic Party-aligned forces were showing greater interest in the big street protests. So was the PSL. Brian Becker asked the group if people expected the protests to be large. Most people said yes. This surprised Brian, who became worked up with jealousy over the large protests. He decided that the PSL needed to intervene in the No Kings protests to wrest influence from the liberals. Suddenly this became a moment of historic importance. The way to force the Democrats out was to put forward a demand that would give the initiative to the Party. The PSL would take up tactics to trick the No Kings Day leaders into adopting the language of “General Strike” by making the demand look like a groundswell, like enlisting several branches to make giant hand-painted banners at the last minute with the hopes that it would be captured on aerial footage and go viral.

That is the true story of how this line was adopted — a line that has cost the PSL relationships and legitimacy, infected the PSL with grandiosity, demanded from its members execution of the most absurd underhanded tactics, and has forced PSL members to embrace and defend a farcical political proposition.

This kind of leadership is only possible because a great deal of thought and energy has been put into assembling around Brian and Ben a team of people who will not only accept decisions made in such a ridiculous way, but work who will not only accept decisions made in such a ridiculous way, but work tirelessly to bring them to fruition. This dynamic has become more pronounced than ever with the tightening of the relationship between the PSL and the People’s Forum and the availability of more funds to hire staff from the NFD and now PAN. The leadership clique has now assembled a team of some dozen staffers who are highly administratively efficient and have round-the clock availability, but are mostly politically inexperienced and highly competitive with one another. The resulting dynamic is an organizational culture where every gathering is a race to see who can raise their hand first to express their enthusiastic agreement with the latest big idea and drop everything to execute the “new initiative”.

Predictable from a sociological standpoint, the in-group is maintained by enforcing a strict delineation of the out-group. Brian, Ben, Eugene, and Manolo all cultivate an intense culture of gossip, surveillance, and competition amongst their staff. Many times this has resulted in outsiders being removed from roles on the basis of some spun-up criticism resulting from rounds of speculation, never to be told directly the real reason for their removal. Disagreement is treated as disloyalty and is attributed to personal defect, especially when expressed by women. Behind leading women’s backs, they are described as negative, insecure, abrasive, and jealous. Explanation of their political engagement is tied to their physical appearances and imagined associated insecurities.

If someone who has been brought into the leadership clique starts to fall into disfavor, they are put out to pasture in some way or another. This is typically accompanied by a quiet but far-reaching campaign of meetings and phone calls to characterize the ex-clique member as described above.

The brittleness this internal culture creates represents one more serious obstacle to the internal correction of the defects of the PSL.

Why this can’t wait

For years I was convinced that the only principled thing to do was to stay and build “the Party”. But realizing that the PSL is not and will not become a true revolutionary party of the working class, I believe it is irresponsible to continue investing time in this organization.

Inevitably, this decision to leave and to share my resignation will be portrayed as treason at a moment of heightened political intensity. This is the excuse of every self-serving bureaucracy in history that is unable to defend its actions every self-serving bureaucracy in history that is unable to defend its actions based on their merits. The extreme nature of the political moment we are in is in fact what makes accepting the PSL’s leadership failure intolerable.

Examine the PSL’s record in the second Trump administration, with the foreseeable attacks on immigrants, the expansion of the repressive state apparatus, the slashing of essential public services, the dismantling of key restraints on executive power. The PSL, supposedly the revolutionary party of the U.S. working class, made no meaningful preparation. The PSL’s top leadership merely churned out fruitless big idea after big idea.

In the immediate weeks following Trump’s second victory, the PSL declared the need to focus on agitating around the “bread and butter” economic issues that swung the election for Trump. A series of pamphlets were designed on everything from the postal service to Social Security — 11 in total — and sent out to the branches.

A few weeks later, the leadership was convinced of the false idea that Trump would quickly lose interest in deportations, but still convened an “immigrant rights working group” that did not produce any coherent campaigns. The “don’t open for ICE” outreach campaign was put together by the Communications Department as a face-saving measure.

In February, the PSL decided there was not enough resistance and it must launch a new round of days of action to protest Trump’s domestic policies, under a new brand with viral potential. The name of this brand was the subject of several long meetings where nothing was decided. It was ultimately determined that an “off-site” meeting was needed. A room was rented for two days in a building a few blocks from the PSL office and meals were catered so that these top leaders could be “free from distractions”. The total price tag for this brainstorming session was about $4,000. It produced a name, “World Without Billionaires” and big plans for a new website and social media pages. World Without Billionaires ended up being dropped before it was ever launched.

In April, Trump issued an executive order as part of his “tough on crime” crackdown, giving the Department of Defense 90 days to come up with a plan to make Pentagon assets available for use by domestic law enforcement bodies. This gave rise to a renewed “martial law” fantasy akin to the Moore v. Harper fixation. While Brian, Ben and Eugene became convinced that a fullscale fascist coup was coming in just 90 days, the response was not to build a united front to defend democracy, but instead to recirculate the Moore v Harper united front to defend democracy, but instead to recirculate the Moore v Harper pamphlet. They also became consumed with ridiculous and extremely costly contingency planning. When the 90 days came and went, the leadership clique quietly moved on without acknowledging the false premonition.

In May, the intense protests against ICE in Los Angeles brought the Center’s attention back to immigration and the Party was again “turned on a dime” — not to serious organizing projects among immigrant workers, but to the “Sick of ICE” initiative. This campaign banked on branches that had built their own immigration work to make it take off. But it was completely out of touch with the conditions and limitations of these projects. Branches were blamed for the initiative’s flop, and throughout June, the Party was forced to keep trying to make it go viral.

Come July, the national organization had to race to catch up on preparations for the Party Congress that had been completely neglected. A little under two weeks before delegates were scheduled to arrive in New York, the “Interim” Coordinating Committee (the unofficial substitute for the Executive Committee and Standing Committee that preceded the Political Coordinating Committee) began taking up the agenda of the Congress on an emergency basis. The entire event was sloppily thrown together at the last minute. Because there was hardly any time to prepare, the sessions of the Congress were heavily filled by extensive talks from Brian, Ben, Eugene, and the immediate circle of men around them. Despite dominating the agenda, they repeatedly spoke over time. Discussion periods were so rushed that comments were cut at times to 90 seconds, making some delegates talk too fast to be understood, and most sessions did not get to the full line of delegates on stack. Besides the heavily choreographed “discussion” around AI, the Congress mostly ran like an extended National Council call, where members of the leadership clique elaborated on general political observations and projects that were already in progress.

After the Party Congress, the big initiative became the general strike. After Brian pushed the PSL to call for a general strike at No Kings Day, the PSL became the subject of ridicule online and amongst other organizers. This made Brian become obsessive, and any external mention of a coordinated work stoppage, whether in Chicago or Minneapolis, became the site of an intense campaign to get the PSL’s chosen language taken up. The work of the Communications Department became almost exclusively content creation promoting the idea of a general strike.

Ultimately, in the exceptional conditions of ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis and the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a coalition in Minneapolis called for a statewide work stoppage. The PSL viewed this as their shot to bring their proclamations to life and sent in dozens of organizers to do outreach, particularly focused on getting the language of “general strike” adopted wherever possible.

The historic success of the January 23 general strike was underpinned by years of deep organizing led by a united front of mass organizations that the PSL had zero involvement in, widely referred to on the left as the “Minnesota Model.” Surely the PSL’s outreach efforts helped to make the day a success. But the PSL had the arrogance to claim primary credit for the success in Minneapolis, when it had done no long-term organizing there, was not part of the coalition that initiated the call, and merely sent in outsiders to popularize what was already in motion.

The organizers who embraced these PSL outsiders without sectarianism were denigrated to the PSL’s National Council repeatedly after they failed to adopt the PSL’s demands to extend and expand the general strike. Refusing to take no for an answer, the PSL used a Somali student organization as a front to push forward with the call, suggesting it was coming organically from the Minneapolis forces behind the 23rd. Members were frantically directed to seek endorsements from other organizations, and the Communications Department was deployed to create graphics that would trick influencers and celebrities, outraged by the murders, to recirculate what they thought was the Minnesota demand. This ultimately succeeded in popularizing a mass action on January 30. Husayn, who led the PSL deployment to Minneapolis, later bragged to me that “the students had no idea what they were getting into.”

Whether you agree or disagree with the historical correctness of forcing the January 30 call through by any means necessary, the PSL’s swaggering arrogance in the aftermath should be alarming. Instead of having any interest in examining the long term organizing that allowed Minnesota to achieve such a show of force, or a desire to clarify and repair relationships, the PSL has contented itself to publish externally on its own role, and internally extoll its own leadership, even declaring itself now the proven vanguard.

The responsibility of socialists today

Socialists today have the responsibility to rebuild a left that can contend for leadership of the working class. We must rebuild from a period of distortion and defeat. We must forge a left that can survive a repressive state that has demonstrated that it respects no legal nor moral constraint.

To take up these challenges, we must engage honestly and soberly with the challenges of our day and reject false shortcuts. We must build organization that cultivates cadre with both discipline and a deep responsibility for study, debate, experimentation, and assessment. We must task up the long-term work of raising the level of organization of the entire working class, not just already-politicized activists. We must build the organizational forms, campaigns, and united fronts necessary to concretize the power of the working class. We must engage in robust and sincere dialogue with other socialists pursuing various projects, rather than proclaim ourselves the vanguard and wait for everyone else to get in line behind us.

I am leaving not because I don’t believe this is possible, but because I do.

I have made peace with the years I have spent in the PSL because I have realized that in order for a viable communist left to be rebuilt, one with genuine cadre who grapple with the lessons of the last century and the novel challenges we face today, there needed to be an intermediate generation of communists who experienced the inadequate remnants of the last wave of left organizing and developed the critiques necessary to go beyond what we inherited. If even a handful of individuals emerge from this generation with clear vision, having accepted their agency in charting the next stage of communist organizing in the U.S., then I believe that we have made a step forward, not backward.

I know that this handful has been formed, and maybe more. I am leaving alongside the leadership of the Brooklyn District to take the next step in the formation of a viable socialist movement in this country. While we will leave smaller in number than if we remained in the PSL, we are confident that in the long run, cultivating a healthy seed is a better choice than continuing to tend to a dying tree. We will engage respectfully with the members of the PSL who remain, understanding that it is hard to grasp the true nature of this organization without the proximity we have had.

With determination for what comes next,

Walter Smolarek

Response from the Central Committee

Response to Walter Smolarek’s Resignation 

PSL Central Committee internal statement 

[Not to be re-shared, distributed or posted anywhere] 

Summary 

Two members of the PSL Central Committee (Walter and Lillian), working with a small group in Brooklyn, formed a secret faction and have broken off to launch a new organization that is premised on conclusions that are far different from the PSL’s political line. The faction is attacking the PSL and its elected leadership with a personalized and sensationalized narrative, hoping to persuade members to resign, but the political essence of the faction is the fundamental issue. They reject the need to build a communist, Marxist-Leninist party in the near future. They reject the optimistic assessment put forward by the PSL that a mass socialist revival is underway, and the objective basis exists to develop a large-scale communist party by actively intervening in all the emerging struggles and movements with a clear and popular presentation of the socialist horizon. Rather than revolutionary optimism, their factionalism is rooted in a deep pessimism, that the right-wing of the capitalist class is ascendant in every way, that the far-right will gain from the explosive contradictions of capitalism, and that the left is worthless. According to their presentation, all the mass movements in recent years in the United States, including the mass movement against racism in 2020 and for Palestine since 2023, have been worthless because they have not led to lasting reforms to improve the lives of the working class. The only thing that would give such movements value is if they translated into “enduring” “intermediate” mass organizations of the working class — the model for which they have never explained. It does not matter that these movements have shaped the consciousness of tens of millions of people, exposed the imperialist state, spurred the formation of hundreds of new radical organizations and collectives, affected the political correlation of forces, and drawn tens of thousands towards parties like the PSL. Walter Smolarek, one of the two leaders of this tendency, recently told us that even if the PSL grows to 50,000 members, it will be meaningless. 

Leaders of the factional attempt to divide the party have stated that the top priority should not be to build a revolutionary Party, but to build “mass organizations and institutions of the working class,” to rebuild the “social fabric” and “subjective forces” destroyed by neoliberalism, after which a genuine Party can eventually be built. At a recent CC meeting, one of the leaders explicitly rejected the concept of the “actuality of revolution” — dismissing the idea that revolutionary possibilities will open up in our lifetime and working towards this should be the Party’s chief objective. Walter Smolarek insisted in the last week that the Party’s notion about the prospects of revolution in the United States are ‘ridiculous.’ From this non-revolutionary outlook several conclusions follow: the Vote Socialist 2024 campaign was a mistake because it could have folded into the Jill Stein campaign; agitating for a general strike as the tactical horizon of the anti-Trump movement was wrong; and the January 30th National Shutdown was a mistake because it damaged our relations with social-democratic leaders of certain unions and non-profits. No matter that the Vote Socialist 2024 campaign helped popularize socialism in a way that no independent socialist campaign has in decades. No matter that a general strike did actually take place. No matter that the Jan 30 shutdown actually advanced the living struggle of the masses and pushed back the Trump administration’s invasion. These conclusions are rooted in significant political differences from the PSL, and constitute a political basis to leave it. The underlying theory represents a form of reformism and “economism,” which Lenin fought against his entire political life, and if adopted, creates a road straight towards social-democracy and NGO-ism. A huge section of today’s progressive labor unions and NGOs are led or mentored by ex-revolutionaries who made the same calculations in the 1970s and 1980s: to wind down their Party formations, to focus on non-revolutionary mass organizations, to supposedly prioritize blocking the right-wing, to gradually drop explicit anti-imperialism and socialism so as to not alienate the liberal bourgeoisie, all while telling themselves they remained loyal to Marxism and reading Marxist books together in private. They are still dedicated to a better world — but they lost faith in revolution, adopted a different read of the objective situation and logically adopted a different strategic framework. The political dispute is not about the merits of mass organizing, or whether or not to go among the working class, especially the lower and deeper strata to fight alongside them for their immediate grievances. The Party engages across the country in this kind of work in neighborhoods, workplaces, disaster zones, and elsewhere, and we seek to do even more of it, deepen it and systematize it. Walter’s document conveniently denies this work is happening. The orientation of the Party is to jump at every opportunity to join or stimulate a site of struggle, to advance struggles wherever they are in motion, and to try and bring existing mass organizations of the working class into motion. With the Party participating and fighting alongside them in the struggle, carrying with it agitation and education, we know that any struggle, no matter how big or small, can lead people to the socialist conclusion — that the working class must seize political power. All this activity is why thousands of young workers have been won over, recruited and trained by the Party, as well as an increasing number of existing leaders of the class — all of whom are erased in this portrayal of “already politicized activists” from the middle class. The vanguard party is forged through all manner of economic and political struggles, and serves as the true durable institution of the working class because it carries with it all the lessons of previous political and economic struggles, and weaves them back into the living struggle. These are the basic elements of Leninism, which the faction is attempting to liquidate by borrowing a mishmash of social-democratic theories (most heavily from Jane McAlevey’s writings and trainings). 

Unfortunately, this faction never made their views known for debate. Instead, they plotted in secret, possibly for over a year, and launched an unprincipled campaign behind the back of the leadership and most members to create a secret faction within the Party. This is all now confirmed from the notes of the Brooklyn District leadership, going back months, which reveal a sophisticated and coordinated operation to intentionally build a faction. Members of the District were individually tracked and assessed based on their “level of awareness” of the faction and their “level of consolidation” to its line. The long-term goal was to take over the branch step by step by getting their adherents in positions of influence, while masking their different political line. To succeed, faction members were oriented to have evasive communication with the New York Steering Committee about Brooklyn organizing, so as to not draw out larger political conversations. New Brooklyn members who volunteered for other citywide activities (such as petitioning for the “Andre for the Bronx” campaign) were carefully approached and “inoculated” with phone calls that appeared to just be check-ins, but were intended to ensure people weren’t lost to “the center.” They prepared their questions in branchwide internal settings not to stimulate genuine discussion, but to draw out potential new recruits for their faction. The goal was to identify real or perceived contradictions in the branch, which always exist, and raise them just enough to recruit without being discovered as a hostile force. 

At the same time, their notes reveal a strategy to conceal their differences from the Branch Committee — the highest body of the branch which they were a part of — because it might have triggered a larger political discussion and resolution (when they wouldn’t have the forces yet to win power). They collectively decided not to run for the Steering Committee so the political issues would not be drawn out there. Once they successfully captured the District Committee, their plans escalated to carve out space inside the organization, to remove unit leads deemed unreliable to the faction and to bureaucratically isolate comrades who were “with the center.” But it appears they moved too fast, making the Steering Committee aware that something deeper was going on. We have receipts for all of this. 

A huge amount of energy they could have actually spent on base-building in the working class they instead spent on secretly base-building inside the Party. 

Without ever raising their differences within the existing structures of the Party, they suddenly resigned, circulating documents filled with falsehoods and distortions, yet still revealing their defeatist, pessimistic view of the prospects for socialism in the United States. They never raised their arguments internally or used the existing Party structures, which are fully available for resolving differences, or for having votes on fundamental issues of strategy, tactics and program. That is because their goal was never to resolve differences. They worked to conceal their views over a long period of time so they could build up their forces secretly, and quietly reorient people to their liquidationist approach by pretending there were no political differences. Their faction had nothing to do with the absence of debate, despite their presentation. Their departure was triggered because there was about to be a debate. They would have to submit to the majority position under the norms of democratic centralism and then would lose their momentum. Resigning in this fashion gave them a kind of fake moral high ground, a way to gain sympathy with comrades who legitimately want to improve the Party. 

What finally provoked the faction’s departure was that the debate was now going to come out into the open, to be discussed and debated in the Central Committee and other leadership bodies, including in New York. Resigning after losing a debate would have left them too weak to launch an organization. They clearly decided it would be better to allege, falsely, that no space for debate was available inside the Party, and then cobble together a wide range of distortions and grievances, unrelated to the core political issues, which could shock people into resigning and joining their new group. 

Most jarring was Walter’s vague and false allegations about the treatment of women leaders and staffers in the party center. Half of the staff in the center are women, as are over half of the Central Committee. He does not speak for them, and has no right to. Knowing they would reject his characterization, he conveniently dismisses this as a feature of “blind deference” among a “staff of devotees,” while dismissing the Central Committee as “inconsequential.” The central role of women leaders, achieved in the PSL through their track record in the struggle (not quotas), does not mean our work in this area is complete. This has been and will continue to be an area of focus for our Party. Because patriarchy is so integral to capitalism, bourgeois society ascribes a gendered division to labor, with men playing more political roles and women confined to logistics and administration. This tendency plays out in all organizations, including within left organizations, and therefore has to be constantly and consciously combated. Nathalie, a long-time CC member in San Francisco and a mass worker-leader, wrote an individual response to Walter’s letter, which will soon be circulated to the National Council. In it she says: 

“I serve now on the Central Committee with Gloria, Sheila, Karla, Satya, Claudia, Rachel, Karina, Sarah, Claire, Layan and Hannah who I feel I must name because we as women leaders were wholly erased in the preposterous descriptions of the internal culture of our leadership. I am proud to sit with other leading comrades on the CC all of whom, if you are to believe this letter, are relegated to a position of ‘total deference to Brian and Ben Becker.’ I speak for myself when I say that Brian and Ben have earned my respect and I have learned a great deal from both of them. However, the idea that we women comrades and leaders only move politically and organizationally in deference to Brian and Ben should not be entertained.” Walter doesn’t even consider the possibility that the high level of unity among the Party’s leadership and staff in the center might be forged through years of working together, struggling through issues, developing a common perspective and high trust. When he says “people I once respected come into the Center only to assimilate into total deference,” this is a way of saying: a series of independent leaders, capable of forming their own opinions, came in to the center and ended up working well with the Party’s top leadership. It is preposterous to turn this into a bad thing. 

Walter and the leaders of this faction are not whistleblowers. They are not trying to improve the organization or resolve any deficiencies. They are weaponizing the fact they were inside the leadership and privy to certain information and internal contradictions to selectively present a distorted narrative that, they hope, will lead comrades to sign up for a new organization that they will now lead. This grouping is actively reaching out to PSL members around the country, trying, and failing, to break them away from organization. 

Rather than present the political differences honestly, they are preying on comrades’ physical distance from the national leadership and the difficulty of separating fact from fiction. They are also preying on deeply ingrained anti-communist and anti-Party tropes — of power-hungry and unelected leaders, living large, with secret agendas different from what they espouse publicly. Never did we think that by including Walter into leadership discussions of real issues in the organization, he would then exaggerate and distort them to launch a new group. As this factional campaign erupted, the PSL is under the highest level of state scrutiny in its 22-year history, with leading Trump administration officials vowing to “dismantle” the organization, and the right-wing media sniffing around us at every turn. To conduct a political struggle in this way — first through concealment and factionalism, then through the mass circulation of angry, vindictive letters — is a gift to our real enemies, the capitalist state, which seeks to infiltrate all leading progressive organizations, identify contradictions and exploit them. After this statement, we have no intention to spend any more time dealing with this faction, either in writing or otherwise. We will of course defend our Party and our membership. But we already have an enormous set of tasks in front of us: to advance the class struggle, to build the socialist movement, and to continue improving our Party. We are resolute in our path. We are confident that the liquidationist character of their new organization will soon be made evident in practice. 

Below are some of Walter’s arguments, responded to point by point, as well as a series of lessons and takeaways. 

— Central Committee of the PSL. 

This statement was reviewed, amended, and adopted unanimously, 23-0. 

Point-by-point rebuttal 

On his strategy of concealment 

Quote: 

I have made the calculation to conceal my full political views in order not to be displaced from central leadership, not out of a desire to retain any title but out of serious concern for the irresponsibility of the impulses of the Party’s top leaders and a commitment to mitigating them. This is a pitiful position. But I firmly believe that if I had done anything other than this, I would have been rapidly marginalized from meaningful positions of leadership and would not have been able to prevent top Party leadership from making decisions that would endanger the entire membership in gravely serious ways. 

This explicit admission of political concealment so as “not to be displaced from central leadership” is indeed “pitiful.” But he does not provide one example of ever doing anything to restrain the so-called irresponsible “impulses” of the top leadership which were “endangering the entire membership in gravely serious ways.” By power of suggestion, it insinuates illegal adventurism — where there has been none — and merely stokes panic and alarm. It is pure recklessness to write in such a manner. The Party leadership has been open with cadres across the country about the new McCarthyite operations targeting the Party, and we have made it a top responsibility to defend our members arrested falsely in the struggle. We have a demonstrated track record of navigating a range of security threats, while still growing the Party and maintaining our militancy. This excuse for staying silent rings hollow. The real reason Walter stayed silent is that he wanted to stay in leadership. To have his true ideas put up for debate in the Congress or Central Committee — the ones he expressed in his resignation — he would have been defeated. Maybe the majority of the Congress would not have elected him to the Central Committee if he presented such non-revolutionary conceptions. Maybe the Central Committee would not have re-elected him as Communications Director if it knew he had a totally different view of agitation, communications and the explicit promotion of socialism. That wouldn’t be undemocratic suppression; it would be totally democratic. That Walter tries to give his concealment a heroic purpose is absurd; it’s a violation of the elementary principles of democracy and a betrayal to everyone who voted for him.

On the Conference on Organization and revision of By-Laws Quote 

Comrades do not generally know that the Branch Organizing Conference only came to life because Ben Becker was concerned about bringing the Bylaws changes that he sought to make to the floor of the Party Congress. He worried that the changes, most notably significantly lowering the requirements of membership, would be controversial. His solution was to propose bringing together a body of hand-picked branch leaders to act as an acceptable enough substitution for the Congress to sign off on the changes. But in the process of putting together this group, he got carried away and the idea grew and grew into a de facto second round of the Congress — but without the constitutionally mandated processes, elections, and rights. In the end, the same hesitations over bringing the Bylaws to a vote led to them once again being put off, this time to the Central Committee. 

The distortion here is indisputable. The Fifth and Sixth Party Congress both voted to authorize the incoming Central Committee to revise the By-Laws. No new idea about membership was being smuggled into our By-Laws by a small group. The Congress passed the following resolution, the last section of which speaks directly to the membership issue: WHEREAS, the Bylaws of the Party for Socialism and Liberation were last amended in 2023; and 

WHEREAS, the Central Committee has the authority to amend the Bylaws following an appeal to the membership for amendments provided the amendments are taken up at an in-person meeting (see Appendix Resolution to Amend Bylaws in the Bylaws); 

WHEREAS, the membership has submitted amendments following an appeal for such submissions; and 

WHEREAS, the Party has more than doubled in size since the time of that amendment; and WHEREAS, the Party’s increased visibility has and will continue to create more opportunities to recruit from broader sectors of the working class; and 

WHEREAS, the Party must adapt its structures and membership norms in order to effectively utilize the opportunities created by this quantitative and qualitative growth; THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED the Sixth Party Congress tasks the incoming Central Committee with considering the amendments provided by the membership AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED the Sixth Party Congress tasks the incoming Central Committee with amending Sections 3 (“Local Organization”) and 4 (“Party Membership”) of the Bylaws. The amendments shall account for new branch structures necessitated by growth (i.e. units, districts, branch committees, branch congresses), evaluate which provisions have already become outmoded based on existing practice or are practically unfeasible, and establish a simplified presentation of membership requirements that facilitate the Party to recruit and retain members from broad sections of the working class while still retaining the fundamental distinction of the Leninist Party form (based on consistent activity, not mere agreement on paper.) [emphasis added] 

Walter is being dishonest in the extreme. No small “hand-picked branch leaders” would be deciding on the By-Laws after the Congress, but the newly elected Central Committee itself. It’s worth reminding comrades why we did this. As Walter knows well, we spent huge parts of the Second, Third, and Fourth Party Congresses on the Constitution revision process. In each of these, nearly whole days were taken up with long debates and votes on particular phrases on non-political procedural issues, which could not be revisited again for years. As the Congress grew in the number of delegates, these textual revisions became more challenging, and so the 2019 Fourth Party Congress adopted a resolution to separate the By-Laws and Constitution into separate documents explicitly so that future Congresses could focus more on political and organizational issues. Unlike the Constitution, which represents the foundational organizational principles, By-Laws procedures would need to be adjusted more frequently than every three years since we were growing out of our existing organizational norms. So the CC has been reauthorized at each of the subsequent Congresses to revise By-Laws, and it has done so. Walter knows that the current by-laws revision process is the same as it has been for years, but conceals it. 

If one looks deeper, he has actually turned the reality of this conference upside down. Even though the CC had the full mandate to make such By-Laws changes on its own, we wanted more debate and feedback about such important issues. Rather than trying to secretly “lower the membership requirement,” Ben and Husayn openly motivated for a simplified presentation of membership requirements at the Sixth Party Congress, which then adopted this task explicitly in the above resolution, in pre-Conference documents, and at the Conference itself. This was not done in secret. 

What he describes conspiratorially as “lowering the requirements of membership” ultimately was proposed as changing meeting attendance from “required” to “expected,” putting meeting attendance under “Party work” rather than a standalone condition of membership, and an expanded definition of Party work to facilitate members doing organizing at their jobs and in their neighborhoods, while still reporting and coordinating with their local units. At the October 2025 CC meeting, rather than vote on the revisions, the CC decided to convene the first ever Conference on Organization to hear from branches at all levels on how changes to the branch and membership terms would impact their local organizing — to not rush into things. Rather than passing the changes at the CC, we continued to work on them and then sent them to all Steering Committee members in the whole country, along with a lengthy explanatory document. All SC members were given an opportunity to submit changes, and 170 of whom were then invited to the conference to provide feedback in person. Dozens of comrades submitted questions, thoughts or amendments to the range of by-law revisions under discussion. Then there were 90 minutes of open discussion in front of the Conference in which the membership definition change was discussed. 

The Conference in May 2026 could not vote on the revisions because it is not a duly elected body to do so. The Congress had authorized the CC only to make changes, not the Conference. Who explained this to the Conference attendees? Walter. He wrote the pre-Conference memo explaining the By-Laws revision process — and he did so correctly and precisely. So he hasn’t forgotten anything; he is deliberately sowing confusion. 

This discussion of membership requirements and By-Laws in fact speaks to the democracy of the organization. 

Local internal education

There has also been a growing panic amongst the top Party leadership that several areas are succeeding in … conducting their own internal education. The Conference became a key venue to check this trend, but with great efforts made to disguise the Party leadership’s true aims. … Members were not told that the leadership is suspicious of branches exploring education beyond that provided nationally from the PSL or TPF. 

Response 

There has never been a national effort to stop branches from developing their own educational materials. The main criticism from the branches has been the opposite: the inadequacy and irregularity of the production of national educational materials — not that they’ve been shoved down their throats. Improving this has been identified as a priority at the last two Congresses and repeated Central Committee meetings. Comrades have demanded more standardized internal education materials to be used locally, and updated candidacy classes. It led to the formation of the Education Department in 2022 — which was then disrupted by the fact that the two co-Coordinators became our presidential ticket — and which is now being rebuilt. That is why the National Cadre Education program and materials, another project Walter was brought into a couple months ago and never criticized, was greeted with wide enthusiasm by branch leaders across the country. 

Has any branch ever been reprimanded or treated badly for developing materials “beyond that provided nationally from the PSL or TPF?” There was indeed one recent example of “suspicion” of a branch’s internal education priorities, and that was with Denver in May of this year. What was the basis of this “suspicion”? A Steering Committee member circulated a document to her branch alleging that a new substitute candidacy program had been developed independently by another SC member and the National Liaison (Lillian). In these classes, all five of which were taught by these same two people who have since resigned, there was not a single mention of the Party at all, no reference to its strategic framework, and no Party branding. A third SC member then wrote to the national organization that he believed the whole branch was being made to take these classes to reorient them away from the Party. These two Denver SC members worried that, given other comments they had overheard, it was part of a political consolidation process to lead towards a factional break. When the charge of factionalism was made, members of the Central Committee flew out to Denver and met everyone in question and asked directly about the accusation of factionalism, which they vehemently denied as a lie, and which we then took at face value. As for their local class series, we came to the following group agreement with all members of the SC that we then presented to the branch: “The 5-part class series is not a replacement for the existing PSL candidacy material, which will still be used by sponsors for new candidates. Once new PSL candidacy classes are instituted nationwide, these will be adopted in Denver, with local sessions added if so desired by the SC.” A month later, those who denied they were organizing as a faction have indeed left as a faction. The 5-part series is apparently being prepared as the educational program for those who have also left in Brooklyn. So the one time in 22 years we’ve been “suspicious” of a branch’s internal education, it was because of the vigilance of two out of three of the branch’s SC members, and it was weeks later confirmed as indeed part of a factional operation.

Ability to debate the Party’s strategic framework 

Instead of making direct interventions that could be debated on their political merits, members were presented with a wildly inflated picture of the PSL’s strength and an orientation on the current political landscape that anticipates nearing ruptures of a revolutionary proportion. The practical implication of such an outlook is that members must make their singular focus “building the Party” in preparation for these impending critical openings. They were given cherry-picked history lessons on the Bolsheviks and the U.S. Communist Party suggesting the PSL is on the brink of a massive expansion in scale and influence. 

Response 

To be precise, the formulation we are using is that building the Party is the “top priority,” not the “singular focus.” This has been the Party’s top priority since its founding in 2004, even when we have been involved in all kinds of movement-building and mass organizing. What we are identifying now in the objective political situation, especially compared to our founding years, is the opportunity for the Party to grow into a much stronger force. It is the largest revolutionary Marxist organization in the country; it has a solid foundation of cadres and branches around the country; it is entering a period of increasing social, economic and political ruptures and crises of legitimacy that will intensify mass interest in socialism and create new mass struggles that will intensify interest in getting organized. 

As for a “strategy of revolution,” elements of this have been sketched out many times in classes and documents over many years, keeping in mind that a certain level of abstraction is necessary since the future cannot be scripted. The following language was sent to Walter just last week, and was up to be discussed and debated again at the upcoming Central Committee, containing the following Draft Theses 

The Party’s overall strategic priorities are stimulating mass struggles, developing depth of cadres, growing its influence within the working class, and building mass socialist consciousness. 

These priorities flow from our theory of revolution, which requires 1) the objective existence of a revolutionary crisis — the most dynamic and complex political situation conceivable, when there is not only an intolerable situation for the working class but paralysis among the ruling class; 2) the existence of a vanguard Party with sufficient strength, influence, and capacity for centralism to act as needed; and 3) the majority of the working class being won over to socialism. Winning political hegemony over the radicalizing layer of the class requires a sustained, creative, multi-front campaign of agitation and propaganda: mass communication on every burning issue, cultural interventions, electoral campaigns, and a consistent public presence that presents the PSL not as one organization among many but as the communist party of the United States. That will happen because the organization proves itself to be correct in its analysis, capable of building effective movements and united fronts in the living struggle of the working class, and can show the credibility of its program by recruiting workers from all sectors. The strategic framework of the PSL, codified across the last three Party Congresses, begins with a political assessment of the objective situation: we are living in a period of rupture, produced by new contradictions that are not resolvable under capitalist property relations and US imperial control of the global order. … Diagnosing this conjuncture is not the same as saying revolution is imminent, or that the left is automatically the main beneficiary of these shifts. It means that the political terrain is very unstable, more so than in decades, that the potential for widespread struggles and the conditions for dramatic shifts in mass consciousness exist, and that our strategy must be calibrated accordingly. Our revolutionary optimism is based on the analytical recognition that capitalism will not be able to solve these existential structural contradictions, and they are thus prone to explode in unmanageable ways. The timing of these ruptures can not be predicted but their arrival is inevitable. Before revolution, societies tend to proceed through stages of mounting disequilibrium, political crises of legitimacy, events that serve as shocks to the system, and then finally unforeseeable triggers. Common features include unwinnable wars, ecological disasters, intra-ruling class struggles, and financial crises. We cannot know where in the historical process we are. The question is whether we are agile enough, strong enough, and politically prepared enough to act as the world shifts. The idea that all this, and the overall thesis of building mass socialist consciousness, has not been directly put forward before the membership and the leadership for real discussion on its merits is absurd. It goes back years and years. Even in the last month related to the Conference, Walter has had every imaginable opportunity to debate the question of scaling up the Party and the political assessment on which it is based. Here is the exact timeline: 

● April 20: The core political framework of the Conference is circulated by Brian to a group of 12 Central Committee members and other leaders in New York City, where it is discussed at great length in a two-day retreat. Each comrade speaks about their views on the document and its central theses. Walter participates in the discussion but offers no disagreement. The document is open for additional edits before going to the Central Committee. Walter proposes none.

● April 27: the document is circulated to the whole Central Committee and a virtual meeting is scheduled for May 2 for discussion. Walter is present, it is discussed for over 90 minutes. Walter expresses no disagreement.

● April and May: The Conference planning committee, which Walter was a part of, meets weekly, works out the agenda, core points and organizational documents of the conference — the conference he now trashes. Walter speaks up on a range of issues, like everyone else in the committee. He expresses no disagreement on any of the core political analysis or themes in the meetings or in the office.

● May 8: The political document is circulated to the National Council and an open discussion was held there in front of all steering committees nationwide. No disagreement from Walter there, or outside the meeting, or after. A submission form is sent to all attendees to submit documents in response to the political framework document. Around 10 comrades and multiple branches write in with their reflections. Walter sends in nothing.

● May 22: The Central Committee has an in-person all-day meeting prior to the Conference to discuss its political themes and objectives. At the meeting, Brian makes the point that we should not go through an immediate period of rapid growth, and should focus on internal consolidation for a period. This is debated, but Walter sits silent.

● May 23-24: Walter gives a presentation at the conference about anti-billionaires sentiment, and how this has been built through repeated mass movements and political turning points over the last 20 years. He literally had the stage and the mic and the opportunity to speak to the whole leadership but expressed no alternate view. The Conference proceeds for two days. Walter expresses no disagreement, either in front of the body or in the presiding committee.

● May 25: The CC has a debrief the day after — in which many areas of improvement and critiques were raised by many members of that body. Walter stays silent. 

● May 26: A feedback form is circulated to all conference attendees about the By-Laws, or any other reflections from the Conference. Several important submissions come in. Walter submits nothing.

● May 28: The conference planning committee organizes its own debrief, in which Walter finally spoke and only for the first time said the conference lacked a clear “action plan for the branches,” but again expressed no political disagreement. He agrees (clearly disingenuously) to a series of post-Conference tasks, including volunteering to help with planning new training schools for unit leads and Steering Committee members, write new organizational manuals, and help convene working groups on different fronts of struggle precisely to develop more action plans.

● June 2: Ben circulates to the Conference Presiding Committee a Draft Report, with each paragraph presented as a separate political thesis so that each can be debated by the Central Committee. The preface to the document reads: “The [theses below] are intended for discussion, amendment and ratification at the Central Committee, to ensure we have formally adopted a strategic framework for the Party before we move forward. Each thesis can stand on its own for discussion, but together they constitute the political and organizational framework for the period ahead. We can of course add to it as well, if there are elements of our perspective that are not captured here but need to be worked out.” Walter offers no thoughts.

● June 5: The Central Committee receives the draft report, with a virtual meeting scheduled for June 14 to discuss, amend, and adopt it.

● June 5: Walter resigns eight hours later in the name of “democracy,” trashing the conference.

How could such a deliberately evasive person now present himself as the champion of open political debate and transparency? 

Communist organizing at the workplace 

Another instructive example of what has been going on behind the scenes is the semi-controversy that arose around a seemingly new labor orientation given at the conference. In the panel on organization entitled “Building the Organization to Scale,” there was a speech given by a young union member who is not part of the national leadership. It may have seemed curious to attendees that this speech was not given by a member of the Labor Department leadership or Central Committee. That was because Ben and Husayn recognized that the content of this speech was a departure from the previous orientation that had not been run through other Labor Department leaders, and thus sought to distance themselves from direct responsibility for it. The comrade’s speech made the argument that we should reconsider the value and viability of organizing and moving unions. They’re too few, too weak, and too slow.

Instead, our orientation to workplace organizing should focus on promoting Party literature, forming discussion groups, and recruiting coworkers to the Party and to the Action Network. 

Response 

The comrade in question did not say “we should reconsider the value and viability of organizing and moving unions” — this is utter distortion. He is a worker-leader of one of the key union drives in the country! That is a campaign the Party has sent several key cadres into. What he presented in this case was what we can do in workplaces where traditional union activity is impossible or practically dead. To correct Walter’s distortion, we need only quote from the Draft Report on the Conference, which he received days before his resignation, and, like all the other Draft Theses, was going to be up for discussion and amendment among the CC. The thesis on workplace organizing reads: 

“We are deploying more members into audacious labor union work than ever before. This involves strategic implantations and concentrations in certain industries and developing new agitational tools to build an expanded base in the working class. Our approach to all union fights is to make them fights for the whole class, as well as schools of socialism, with the [recent teachers] strike as a great example of how long-term work in strategic areas can lead to outsized impact. Our goal in new organizing is — in the best tradition of Communism — to make them social crusades and battles, especially seeking out opportunities where the intervention of devoted comrades can move larger numbers and lead to breakthroughs that ideally sparks a new contagious wave of labor revival. 

“Still we must recognize that ninety percent of workers in this country are not in a union, and that number is increasing. Based on the current organization of work, especially the large number of workers now working contractualized, remotely or in small teams, there are significant obstacles to winning unions and contracts in big parts of the working class — especially via the current NLRB process. If the only way we know how to bring socialism into the workplace is by first building a union, we start from a position of having no access to the vast majority of the working class. Union organizing is important where conditions for it exist, and the party should pursue it there but it cannot be the only instrument to reach the working class on the job (where people spend a majority of their waking hours). The examples of the PSL Shipbuilders in Virginia — ten workers, one candidate member, a shop paper, built entirely without institutional resources — demonstrate that it is possible to build socialist organization, raise class consciousness, and recruit to the party in workplaces without active union life. We should seek out any and all creative ways to bring socialism to the masses in the workplace and draw the most advanced workers into the party.” 

One may agree or not with this perspective, but it was not hidden. We were about to discuss it in the Central Committee and among the Labor Department leadership before it would be circulated as an orientation to the membership. 

Party support for community centers 

I have been extremely disturbed by the secret machinations within the New York office to extinguish or wrest control of the base building projects gaining ground in Denver and Brooklyn. Both areas, through separate processes of development, have found their way to building community center projects that operate as genuine mass organizations. There was an initial attempt to dissuade each area from this direction, but when the dissuasion didn’t work, the approach was taken to give leaders of both areas the impression that the top leadership was nonetheless supportive of their projects and interested in further debate and discussion. 

Response 

There was neither extinguishing or wresting control of anything. The desire to support creative projects and interest in further debate was genuine. Denver was not dissuaded from the work of building a community center. There was in fact an immediate and enthusiastic offer to fund it and support it, with comrades’ dues. In addition to continuing to pay one national staff person who had moved to Denver and became its Co-Director, the other Co-Director was also funded nationally! We did this because we assumed we were all aligned politically. In fact, when the funding was agreed to, it was said that we hoped we could reproduce such centers in all regions of the country. Many of the Party’s top leaders — those described falsely as enemies of base-building — have personally co-founded similar community centers in other cities, and have many positive lessons to share from these experiences. There was no articulation of any ideological disunity at this time from Denver or any notion that their conception of “base-building” would require the liquidation of Party-building, or a rejection of the Party’s strategic framework. These two comrades on staff had the least amount of national oversight of any staff people, based on assumed trust that they were working hard on local projects and had little time for anything else. One of them was asked repeatedly to help organize the Conference on Organization, but she declined. What other branch has two full-time local staffers paid by the national organization? 

There was no “subterfuge” against Denver either. When one SC member in Denver on her own accord circulated a document criticizing those two Denver staff members for preparing the Colorado People’s Center in a manner that wasn’t transparent with the branch and the SC, and erased the Party, this was brought to our attention. The Party center had zero role in that document being written or distributed, and up to this point had no idea there was any division in the Denver SC. Then, a third Denver SC member wrote a document to the center alleging a faction was being secretly organized. Only at that point did we become aware that underneath Denver’s limited communication with the center was a significant dispute, and we informed the rest of the Party’s leadership that something was up (including Walter). Walter was then in the center and persuasively told us “there’s no way” these Denver leaders intended to leave the organization, concealing that he was already setting the stage for a new organization himself. Ben and Claudia traveled to Denver and came back optimistic, reporting that the charges of factionalism had been denied, the SC had been apparently stabilized. While the comrades had shared some long-held disagreements with the national perspective, we hoped a new stage of political candor would open with Denver. Lillian declined to present her views to the Conference, when offered. Instead we planned to return to Denver after the Conference to have a more rigorous discussion about the relationship between base-building, movement organizing, and Party-building. We affirmed that different strategies can be used in different local contexts, and affirmed that we have never adopted a one-size-fits-all approach to branch-building. That discussion never happened due to the faction’s departure. In fact, the faction left to preclude the discussion. 

Immediately upon returning to Denver from the Conference, Lillian — who had said nothing inside the CC meeting debrief — launched into an open attack on the conference at their branch internal before all the membership, violating the prior agreement of the Steering Committee and violating the group agreements from a few weeks prior, which was to first bring disputes to higher bodies. There was never any real intention to debate. 

Brooklyn District leaders organized a faction and debate was not suppressed 

In recent months, I have been aware of growing outrage in the office about the Brooklyn leadership’s focus on cultivating community partnerships and relationships, and most vehemently the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center. I have been approached multiple times, in secret conspiratorial huddles and one-on-one meetings, trying to ensure that I don’t sympathize with the efforts. … I have tried to generally avoid involvement in these discussions because I know the only goal is to pin me to a position against the members in Brooklyn. ,,, Avoiding involvement became impossible when I was asked repeatedly to put my name to a document opposing base building in Brooklyn, a position I clearly do not support. I was asked first by Layan and Wyatt at the Branch Organizing Conference, then again in the New York office in a one-on-one with Ben Becker. 

I informed [the SC] that the previous night I had been reached out to by the Brooklyn leadership to speak at their district retreat based on my experience and writings on base building, and I had planned to go. … The Standing Committee of the Central Committee had just held an emergency meeting and voted that I could not speak at the retreat. … I later learned that at this retreat, a group of five members intervened forcefully, disruptively, and in a clearly orchestrated manner. Each of these members is current or former staff. The entire retreat, these five members read from a document on their phones, in a way that was completely unsubtle and visible to all attendees. One of the members emotionally stormed out. Having the experience of 17 years in the organization, and a decade in national leadership, I am certain that this was coordinated by Ben. 

This is quite an astonishing narrative. After admitting to concealing his views for years, and pretending to be in agreement with the Party’s strategic framework, Walter feigns surprise that people fell for his trick and approached him to intervene politically to help build a higher level of organizational and ideological unity between a local steering committee and its district leadership (which was then claiming, disingenuously, that they had no political differences with the Party). Yes, comrades went to him because they considered him as someone with a balanced and nuanced view, who was well regarded by the Brooklyn District leaders and the NYC Steering Committee, had written about base-building before, believed in popularizing socialism (they thought), and could now write an updated synthesis that shows how the building of mass organizations at the neighborhood level would fit into the Party’s overall strategic framework based on its years of experience. Members affirmed to Walter “this will be good because it can bring the issues out,” and Walter seemed to initially agree. Walter was asked to “huddle” by the NYC Steering Committee so he could help strategize how to have an organized discussion and productive synthesis after the District retreat, a retreat the Steering Committee expected would be volatile based on the disagreements already expressed by members in their unit meetings. Those members were not coached or organized by Ben, a totally false allegation. The Steering Committee had decided not to try and fight it out with the District leadership in front of their own members. The city’s elected leadership hadn’t been invited to speak, hadn’t been consulted about the strategic document before it was circulated, and had no chance to have a meeting beforehand to discuss it. The process was backwards for a Leninist party, but they decided not to intervene anyway. Further, in the context of an emerging political dispute between a Branch and District leadership, it wasn’t appropriate for a member of a Central Committee to go into a meeting of the membership and take a side against the city leadership. That is why we have higher bodies. 

How is it that Walter was so ready to violate the basics of democratic centralism that he has taught to so many others? Was it just a noble commitment to debate? No, the truth is that the Brooklyn District leadership had already decided to use this retreat as the next big step in consolidating a faction. 

The groundwork for Brooklyn’s faction had been laid for months. The retreat and discussion over base-building merely provided the trigger for them to move. Their campaign involved removing unit leads who they considered disloyal, discouraging members in the District from attending other events in the city, and deliberately limiting communication with the Steering Committee to the least possible so they couldn’t be accused of totally breaking Party norms. This went on for months. Walter, sitting in the same office as the Steering Committee, apparently reported back to the District leadership their growing frustration about all this. Meanwhile, the faction oriented their core leaders to say as little as possible if asked anything about what organizing was happening in Brooklyn, to be evasive, to minimize, to not agree to individual phone calls and meetings, and not provide answers that could lead to follow-up questions or discussions. Their notes show the scale of the operation. The goal was to buy time and consolidate forces. Meanwhile, the faction pursued selective outreach to individual members in other Districts who they thought might have organizational frustrations and grievances. 

In his final week in the office, Walter agreed to write a manual on branch building that would be used as a training document for the whole membership, which would go over base-building and Party-building at the neighborhood level. He agreed to spend the summer planning major Party events and schools, alongside other CC members who would plan this out together. The whole thing has been proven to be a deception. Or, rather, he was going to continue to do this work on false pretenses for a while longer until the Brooklyn faction revealed itself. Some of Brooklyn’s faction canceled their dues prior to the Branch Committee meeting. Their notes show months of factional planning. Yet now they claim that it was at this meeting, where the debate finally started to come out, that their democracy was suppressed. That debate was meant to continue two days later, but instead they considered it the most opportune time to leave. If they had stayed, and if a consensus position was adopted, or a majority vote taken, they would have been defeated and not been able to claim “no space for debate” in their resignation letters. 

False presentation of base-building 

Quote 

I have heard them talk behind closed doors for months about their opposition to the base building and mass organizing work that comrades are doing across the country, and have read

draft documents they’ve written to combat the trend. This position was alluded to in a document written by Brian Becker that characterized mass organizing work as “too pedestrian,” but Ben Becker wrote more explicitly against base building and mass organizing in a document titled “Turning to the working class: What it should mean and what it shouldn’t.” This document was circulated amongst the inner circle in the New York office, but was ultimately not shared out of concern that it would cause debate. In preparatory documents for the conference, key objectives included establishing that “pivoting is the essence of revolution,” and “deep organizing..isn’t part of [our] theory of revolution.” 

Response 

Beware the strategy of selective omission. Here is the full quote of what Brian Becker called “too pedestrian” — and it is not a rejection of “mass organizing” at all: 

“There is a mistaken notion that our goal is to simply assimilate into working class communities, become familiar with the issues in those communities, be accepted by those communities, and then, over time, we will develop individualized relationships with a select number of people who will then join the unit and join the Party. This is way too pedestrian. Our focus should be reaching those parts of the population that are already becoming political, becoming radicalized, or are in motion in response to a form of injustice or exploitation. (Emphasis added). It is when people are engaged in struggle that their ideas change, and it is when they are in those struggles that they realize that they want to join an organization to become effective.” What Brian is clearly describing is a passive, slow and uninspired (“pedestrian”) approach to Party-building, which sequences it behind individual relationship-building and leaves out the struggle of the masses. Instead of this pedestrian approach, the document emphasizes getting engaged in any site of struggle, against any form of injustice, and that is where we will build our movement, our Party, and where people will be open to new ideas. This is the basics of Leninism — building socialist consciousness through engagement in the struggle, and drawing those with socialist consciousness actively into the Party — but the fact that Walter so strenuously objects to it, going so far as to misquote it, shows he has gone far down the road of economism that Brian’s document warns against. 

In Ben’s unpublished and unfinished document “Turning to the Class: What It Should Mean and What It Shouldn’t,” we can find none of the quotes mentioned here. These quotes seem to just be invented to pin a position on Ben that he doesn’t hold. Ben sent his draft document to Walter for comradely feedback — and because he never got any from him or the rest of the presiding committee, he therefore didn’t circulate it right before the Conference. But the questions of mass organizing, the meaning of base-building, best practices and methods in neighborhood and workplace organizing, all of these are constantly being discussed by the Party at all levels, and the stated goal of the Party in recent national meetings is to develop a more comprehensive theory of branch-building. The Party has no history whatsoever of concealing our views on any of these issues. Each issue of The Party Organizer always seeks case studies for such ground-level mass organizing work, as examples that all members can learn from. 

Preliminary Lessons for the Party

Is every element of the document an invention? No. There are, of course, always real deficiencies in the organization, which we readily accept and many of which we have already been working to resolve. 

Decisions without execution: For instance, Walter throws a jab about the absence of the “AI commission” and “Trans liberation commission” decided upon at the Congress. True. But he was a Central Committee member just like the rest, and on staff, and showed no initiative himself to bring either of these into existence. Perhaps he was too busy, but to lay this shortcoming at the feet of one or two leaders is dishonest. There are many projects we have decided upon that are not yet brought to fruition. We are sure every branch leadership in the country could review its notes and find projects and tasks it agreed to do, and did not yet carry out. We aren’t proud of this phenomenon, but it’s the reality. This isn’t about anything but capacity, time, and the many shifting pressures and new things the organization is responding to, which need to always be prioritized. In this particular case, we have never built a commission on ideological questions — although we know they are part of the communist tradition — but we want to. So now have to figure out the methods to bring it into existence as a new organizational process. 

Expanding and formalizing leadership: Walter repeatedly complains about “actual decision making and implementation would remain completely under the control of Brian, Ben and the circle they keep around them.” This is a mischaracterization. What we do have is the elected executive leadership of the Party (the Standing Committee of the Central Committee), in which Walter for a few years participated as an observer. Elected executive leaders do in fact decide on what to prioritize amid a huge variety of contending pressures and opportunities. That staff are then used to implement such decisions of the elected executive is also not nefarious. What is a real problem, which we have sought to resolve, is the smallness of the group, and the informal method with which some decisions get made. Even elected leaders to the Standing Committee, if they’re not present at all times, can be out of the loop, creating new problems. Unlike a corporation, we have to assume any of our top leaders could be taken off the playing field by the state at any moment. This makes it a prime priority to train more leaders and to share information among leaders, and between branches and the center, so that information does not become centralized just in individuals, but institutionalized. We have begun to introduce new reporting routines for this purpose, and are discussing how the CC can be reorganized for more in-person and virtual meetings. 

In this spirit, we created the Political Coordination Committee, which Walter derides as an “unelected leadership clique.” This was done to expand the circle of leaders beyond the elected Standing Committee, and to expand high-level political discussions to a larger number of cadres and leaders. It was created first as an interim body at the height of the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing in all elected CC members in New York, as well as the full-time staff leading major national departments and areas of work. Far from anything covert, a presentation on how this body functions, and how the organization of the center needs to be improved even further, was given to the whole CC in the October 2025 meeting. This development has widened leadership discussions and debates, not narrowed them, and drawn in many rising women leaders, including elected Central Committee members — who Walter dismisses as undeveloped “blind” followers and functionaries. One recent resolution of this body is to carry out more intensive political education to further develop this next generation of ideological and political leaders. 

While the Political Coordination Committee has been an advance, we still need to resolve the overstretched nature of certain leaders, which creates frustrating bottlenecks, as well as the unevenness of reporting, note-taking and accountability for prior decisions. We’ve discussed the challenges we’ve run into in sharing information across the leadership, working across teams, and methods for keeping the whole Central Committee informed and engaged, while they are themselves dealing with demanding work schedules across many time zones. This is complicated work, and we have no blueprint to work with. We are constantly seeking new methods to improve. 

Party culture and functioning of the center: In multiple leadership bodies, and in the CC itself, we’ve also discussed in recent meetings the need for deliberate training in communist values and “Party culture” to foster more collaboration, avoid cliquishness, deal with conflicts head on, and more. This has to be prioritized. CC members openly presented at the Congress how a center was both a necessary development and could give rise to bureaucratic inter-office politics and cliquishness — as well as the danger of factionalism! At multiple Central Committee meetings, and in our most recent days-long leadership retreat, we identified how problems of informality and adhoc-ness of certain decision-making and leadership structures can exacerbate such tendencies, as well as the informality around scheduling, on-boarding, and work expectations. 

By-Laws for the national organization: None of the above problems are secrets. In fact, we restated at the Conference on Organization how the next stage of By-Laws and procedural revision would be to improve and systematize our national functioning, where we still are quite underdeveloped given the size of the Party. As the Party grows, each stage creates an enormity of new tasks, projects, problems and threats, which strain the existing organizational norms. This dialectic will never end — we expect the pressure on the center will only increase as the Party scales up further. 

Scaling responsibly: At our recent leadership retreat, we resolved to study the best practices of other types organizations that have scaled up, the literature on leadership, cross-team collaboration, and to carefully consider the formation of new national departments with their own kind of executive leadership. This requires study of both communist and non-communist organizations. 

Leadership identification: Finally, these resignation documents also present us with an opportunity for reflection about how people get into positions of central leadership to begin with and long-standing staff. The criteria for that has always been based on personal trust, hard work, initiative, but the party must more deliberately train all of its staff and leaders and cadres in non-stop ideological formation and in communist values — including to practice radical honesty with one’s political views and concerns. Once on staff, revolutionary optimism and belief in the Party can never be taken for granted, but must be consistently reinforced through study, discussion and a living connection to the class struggle. 

In summary, we will keep pushing forward with all these areas of improvement, and many others, not because of the resignation documents or the claims of the faction. These were all issues that were being openly discussed already, which is why Walter knew how to twist them.

In our view, no organizational changes would have prevented this factionalism because at the root it is not fundamentally about people or processes — it’s a totally different political outlook. For them, now is not the time for a revolutionary perspective, a cadre-based vanguard party, or a time to anticipate and prepare for ruptures. Where we see opportunity, they see a wasteland. 

Where we see ruling class instability, they see stability. Where we see a generation of young working people coming towards socialism, and towards the Party, they wave this off as meaningless. Those theoretical differences, and totally different readings of the political conjuncture, will become more and more apparent in the field of practice, and it is where their theory will be tested and the debate will be settled. We are confident in our path.

We say that we must come to know the difference between mobilization and organization because the enemy will use mobilization to demobilize us. Mobilization is very easy. Very, very easy. Since we are a people who are instinctively ready to respond against acts of injustice, any time there’s one little act of injustice, we can blow it up and we will find people who will come and make some mass demonstration around it. […] And this is what mobilization does, it mobilizes people around issues. Those of us who are revolutionary are not concerned with issues, we are concerned with the system. The difference must be properly understood. […] Mobilization usually leads to reform action, not to revolutionary action. […] We must transform mobilization to organization. We say the enemy will try to use mobilization to demobilize us. Many brothers and sisters who’ve been to the million and more march will say to you, ‘I was there.’ Well, what are you doing today my sister?

— Kwame Ture

Organizing, Not Merely Mobilizing

We have all heard and seen the mass demonstrations, marches, and walkouts that erupted in the Twin Cities, signaling the start of this year of struggle. We’ve heard the tramp of ten thousand people marching against the occupation, the sounds of mobilization; but beneath it, and lasting beyond, for those who know to listen, is a steadier sound — like whispers, like chants. That of the organizers standing sentry on street corners in the aching cold, coordinating grocery runs, rapid response to raids, and transporting students and workers safely. These bands are built by grassroots organization, and it’s precisely the last lesson our enemies want us to learn.

Five years ago, Minneapolis erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd. For that summer, it seemed every city in the world became an uprising, as Democrats scrambled to take a knee and corporations writhed to retire racist brand mascots and grant better media representation. USU spoke with a Communist on the ground in Minneapolis who has witnessed the sweep of 2020 to the present moment. “During this period, it felt like people were taking power in a way that’d be much bigger,” they told us. “Living in south Minneapolis, a police precinct being lit and set on fire, grocery stores looted and turned into mutual aid sites, 200 buildings going up in flames – that was a lot happening. In that short period of time, it felt more than a moment, but it quickly went away.”

All the energy to abolish the police, or even defund them, was funneled by liberal counterinsurgents into tactics that either wasted the time of great masses of the oppressed, or narrowly appealed to the upper classes of the nationally oppressed through job prospects and investment opportunity.¹ The “moment” that was 2020 evaporated into an utter defeat for the oppressed, and a complete victory for the settler-colonial ruling class that ensures daily the death of a countless unnamed Floyds. The only price paid: a handful of temporary concessions this current regime has already pried back with vengeance, and a single sacrificial pig.

As our comrade in Minneapolis said, “As Communists, we were not organized enough to win the masses over when they were ripe to be captured.”

It is the general consensus of principled Communists that this was a watershed moment wasted. Every failure is a lesson, data in the experiment of social revolution; but if no one is keeping track, if no one is recording the results and learning from past efforts, the movement might as well be hurling human lives at the wall to see what sticks and looking away at each impact. But, as it turns out, something has stuck. Something has lodged itself firmly in the communities of Minneapolis, that all resulting efforts to resist occupation have been able to grow from: organizations, persisting from the embers of 2020 to now. It’s our responsibility to learn from them.

In Minneapolis, there was a massive wave of homelessness at the beginning of COVID. Networks of mutual aid popped up because of that. Then the uprising happened, and people started figuring out how to take care of each other. Figuring out food, how to handle work, those networks were built by organizers, and after the mobilized masses disappeared in 2020, these networks remained.

The remarkable pace at which these networks expanded, from the handful of organizations to the intersecting community webs connecting every single city section, neighborhood, and block proves the lessons that Kwame Ture described so perfectly more than half a century ago. It also shows all of us, empire-wide, a roadmap for how to prepare as these “occupations” escalate. Every city on this land is a garrison fort, palisades replaced by cameras, automatic alarms, and barbed wire, so to call any concentration by the federal government an “occupation” is essentially a misnomer. It is merely a reinforcement. It is a concentration of already-existing state repressive powers. But we must not ignore the difference in form. The organizers in Minneapolis have adjusted to the reality of their new opponents.

All law enforcement in this country can and will kill you, we know that. They’re parts of the same arm in this imperialist state. However, what has become clear with these federal agents is that they do not function on the same playing field as a local PD. They do not operate on the same playing field as the National Guard. […] I don’t know if it’s a martyr complex or just talking shit, but I see this tendency from people who don’t live here when they say, “Stop filming and go de-arrest.” Or, “I wouldn’t let this happen.”

I’ll tell you: you would let it happen, or you’ll get killed.

De-arrest is more common in anarchist circles; anarchists here are not calling for de-arrest anymore that I’ve seen, because it’s understood in the city that we don’t stand any chance. You can de-arrest with the local PD. Not with ICE, because there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll kill you and the person they’re trying to kidnap. In the end, you still won’t stop who they’re trying to kidnap.

The organizers in Minneapolis understand fundamentally the dialectic between theory and practice. They have gathered experimental data from their lives, developed practices, tried and applied this theory, analyzed the results, and developed new theory and new practices. They are at the forefront of the fight against the bourgeois government.

The Four Opportunists and the Spontaneous Movement

As the press organ of the All-Empire Worker’s League, we have already taken a stand against the Four Opportunists, those “organizations” that capture revolutionary and radical energy, sweep up developing Communists and the newly class-conscious, and then negate them by combining them with liberals, by denying them access to the levers of power in their own organizations, by teaching them bad theory, and by burning up their energy through endless mobilization with no strategic goals. The Four Opportunists are the CPUSA, the PSL, the FRSO, and the DSA. (See “The 2026 Outlook of the Central Press” and “Liberalism and Fascism With Communist Characteristics” in the Red Clarion).

In Minneapolis, the growth of the spontaneous movement has continued in the face of the Four Opportunists, specifically the FRSO and DSA. USU has had contact with other Communists in Minnesota who tell us that…

De-legitimizing action and organizing is being done by individuals acting on the behalf of FRSO (DSA was also involved on this front). The hegemony held by FRSO makes this possible, as their cadre members are involved in other orgs. There’s another Somali group in Cedar Riverside who call themselves the Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance, but are democrat adjacent and pro assimilation. They were attempting to de-escalate by gathering all the African folks into their homes for that day, telling them to stand down and not confront [Jack] Lang.² Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance was doing flyering, circulating statements via signal group chats or boosting messages that were calling [an] org ³ outside antagonists with no right to organize in Cedar. They cut off supply lines and disrupted organizing work doing this.

When the fascists came to town, Jack Lang and co., the Coalition Against the Trump Agenda (A group made up of a lot of FRSO front orgs) enacted the strategy of “shadowing” the fascists.

Basically, this amounted to them just following them around and yelling stuff at them. However, things did not play out as FRSO planned. Roughly 1000 folks showed up (the divide between the masses and org affiliated was obvious) to counter around 10 fascists with a banner. The FRSO marshals protected the nazis’ banner from the masses, until they eventually lost control and the banner was destroyed in spite of their efforts. Extreme peace policing.

An additional note to further illustrate the resource strangulation and white chauvinism of FRSO: [a] Somali organization that led the defense action against Jake Lang in Cedar Riverside reached out to the SRA [Socialist Rifle Association] of Minneapolis for a firearms training. They later learned that there is a strong FRSO contingency in SRA. Once SRA realized this Somali organization was the one that held the defense action, SRA informed the organization that they would not move forward since they “created confusion and gave other (FRSO) organizations a hard time.”

From the comrade in Minneapolis:

One thing I can speak to is, right now, not just in Minneapolis, but nation-wide — we’re seeing opportunism. There’s this tailist need to use this term “general strike“ to try and illicit buy-in from people. For these days of action. We saw this last Friday. The labor unions involved, the orgs involved, it was never called a general strike. It was clear we weren’t calling for one. There were outside groups that decided to call it a general strike. […]

When we mislead people into thinking a day of vacation is the same as a general strike, we do an insurmountable amount of damage to education and getting working people to understand the actual risk-reward of going on strike. And dealing blows to capital which is the point of a strike. That is the big criticism I Have right now. The organizations that should and do know better, continue to use words like general strike.

PSL has pursued a similar strategy in Minneapolis: more than any other group, they have misrepresented the effort to organize petty-bourgeois businesses to voluntarily close as a “general strike.” They encouraged people to use paid time off to participate in marches. This is the PSL’s strategy of class struggle — not as the struggle of the lowest elements of the proletariat against the imperialist system, but as the struggle of the petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic layers to achieve limited political aims. This is not revolution. This is counterinsurgency.

The spontaneous development of the people is breaking free of the chains long cast over the struggle for liberation by the Four Opportunists. In every corner of the US Empire, the grip of the opportunists and the tailists is weakening. We must unite the most advanced theory with the most class-conscious elements of the people and we must fight against the settler-socialism of the opportunist groups. What is this settler-socialism? It is the Marxism of capitulation, a form of revisionism that sees reform as the only path forward and puts the question of revolution forever over the horizon. (See “Revolution in Our Lifetime” in the Red Clarion). In FRSO and PSL, this is partially accomplished through the deceptive organizational structure in which access to internal documents and planning is entirely isolated and inaccessible; day to day members of these organizations are encouraged to pay into them and attend marches, but the strategic and tactical level operates at one remove from the general membership. All decisions are made by a secret group of select few — Blanquism, in other words. (See, for instance, “The Cult Building Tendency” in the Red Clarion). Have you seen calls for marches spring up with less than 24 or 48 hours notice? That’s the work of the Four Opportunists. Whether it is their intention or not, the material result is the bleeding off of revolutionary energy into channels that are acceptable to the ruling class. In truth, it is an attempt to find accommodation with the ruling class and demand a different distribution of power within the imperialist system. It is the plea of the imperialist labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie (who overwhelmingly command the Four Opportunists) for more spoils to be allocated to them and for a greater degree of input into the empire’s political system.

For more on the Four Opportunists and our criticisms, see generally “Stagnant Parties Don’t Deserve Your Time” in the Clarion, and…

CPUSA – “A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words,” “Why I Left the CPUSA”

PSL – “Revolution in Our Lifetime”

FRSO – “The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO,” “Forward Out of FRSO”

DSA – “Triumph For the Zionist Left”

We, and the organizers in Minnesota, reject this settler bargain.

The League Principle

We require a country-wide organization to fight both the Four Opportunists and their labor-aristocratic/petty-bourgeois base and the bourgeois state itself. The lessons of Minneapolis are clear: it is possible to bring elements of the imperialist working class into direct and antagonistic contradiction with the state when we move our strategic goals out of the narrow realm of wage increases and into the realm of the national liberation struggle. White anarchists and Communists, petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic elements, have joined the national liberation struggle against ICE. Breaking the law for the first time, acting directly against the state for the first time, opens a new world of revolutionary potential among the labor aristocracy. Show them that it is possible to oppose the state, rather than seek accommodation with it, and we develop the subjective awareness of revolution. Revolutionary potential is created within otherwise reactionary elements of the population.

However, this is only possible with uncompromising proletarian leadership. Without the anchor of a revolutionary, proletarian organization, opportunism is the unavoidable result. Those members of the imperial labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie who will not voluntarily surrender their class-outlook and who will not voluntarily subject themselves to proletarian class-leadership are our objective enemy.

The principle of the League is the intermediary principle between our present stage of development (scattered, ideologically incoherent, with the presence of small pockets of developed Communist organization at the local level) and the militant party-form. Yes, we need a party of the new (new) type, as the All-Empire Worker’s League has put it,

It’s not enough, though, to just state the obvious: that the US in 2025 is not Russia in 1917, it is not China, it is not Viet Nam, it is not a semi-feudal country or a country in the global periphery. The US is the center of world-capitalist reaction, an imperial hegemon that acts as the backstop and system of last defense for capitalism across the entire world. No metropolitan country has ever seen a successful proletarian revolution….

We must create a vanguard organization of the working class that can purge all opportunism and revisionism from its ranks, educate and elevate the working masses, defeat internal and external chauvinism, unite the liberation struggles of the colonies and semi-colonies, and prepare the reserves of the revolutionary proletariat for direct confrontation — for direct class war — with the enemy state, with bourgeois civil society, and with the world-bourgeoisie themselves, who largely reside within the US-Canadian bloc. In order to satisfy these requirements, we must creatively apply the lessons of 1905, of October, of the course of struggle in China, Viet Nam, Ghana, and the whole periphery.

While we work to create this party, we must organize our various local organizations together and take advantage of the benefits this centralization can provide. While a League is not yet a party, it is an organization of organizations. We have discussed the formation of regional leagues in the Clarion in the past (see “Towards a New York City League of Workers and Students” and “Towards a Boston League of Workers and Students”). It is through this process of regional organization that we can build our capacity to resist the state as well as the class forces that tend to drag Communist-oriented projects in the US empire toward opportunism.

Since 2025, the All-Empire Worker’s League has worked to integrate local organizations and propagate, develop, and advance the theory necessary to combat the opportunists and the bourgeois imperialists. In areas with a high concentration of developed local organizations that are actually engaged in class struggle against the state, we urge them to band together to resist opportunism and form centralized organs of class power.

In regions where the struggle has not yet been heightened to the same degree as in Minneapolis, we urge local organizations to prepare for the same degree of struggle. Our sources on the ground warn that unless we prepare in advance, we will be caught off guard. Washington is willing to kill to suppress class-consciousness and solidarity between the imperialist labor aristocracy and the US proletariat. We have to be ready to counter that violence with the main weapon we have: organization!

Footnotes:

1. Black, Too and Rasul A. Mowatt. Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. Routledge, New York, NY, 2024. Introduction, xi-xxiii and 138-145. ︎
2. Jack Lang is a pardoned January 6th rioter and fascist agitator. ︎
3. “[…] a group of communists who have been organizing in Minneapolis and Saint Paul who are critical of the established Left in the region and are actively attempting to build a viable decolonial Marxist alternative[…]” — From the Communists in Minneapolis. ︎

The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.