On Friday, ICE made widespread raids across Los Angeles, arresting 44 people with the express purpose of deporting them without offering even the fig leaf of liberal “due process.” By Saturday afternoon, the people of Paramount had had enough. When rumors started circulating that ICE was planning a raid on a local Home Depot, the people of Paramount gathered in force to protect their community.

The revolt began at the Home Depot at 6400 Alondra Boulevard — and was provoked by the police forces themselves. Federal agents threw flash-bangs at peaceful demonstrators to try to scare them off and complete their quota of kidnappings. The demonstrators fought back. Over the course of the day, righteous anger escalated to throwing rocks and bricks, burning cars, and establishing vehicle barricades to stop ICE deportation buses.

As has become typical, the consciousness of the masses is racing ahead of any pretension of an organized revolutionary movement. Our “Marxists” are too busy calling their senators and organizing police-approved parades to get involved, except perhaps to raise their hands in surrender and loudly proclaim a policy of treasonous social peace.

But the “Marxists” who are afraid of the spontaneous wrath of the people are exposing themselves more and more to be nothing more than toothless opportunists of the old regime. Let them show their true colors! The flags they fly look red at first glance, but look at them closely — you’ll see they’re the white flags of surrender; the white flags of reaction.

This spontaneous wrath must be organized, or it will dissolve into disillusionment and defeatism! We cannot let it.

Real revolutionists must not only embrace the spontaneous rage of the people, but give it aid and support. Marxists in the affected areas must form combat brigades at once. They must be strategic, arm themselves, and openly march with the people. “But we’ll be destroyed!” Maybe, and maybe not… but if we don’t stand up, then we deserve to be destroyed. The revolutionary who hides from the people, who insists on remaining underground at all costs, or worse, aboveground but only as spokesmen for cowardly social peace, is nothing more than an enemy partisan.

If your organization forbids you from forming combat units, leave it.

We must build combat brigades! A combat brigade is a Marxist organization, composed of militant cadre, organized along military lines for the purpose of providing support and projecting power on the ground. A combat brigade is not the same as community self-defense. Community self-defense is the construction of mass organizations, with trained Marxist membership, sometimes under the direction of Marxist organizations, that mobilizes the activated masses and forms a central spine for them to act.

Quickly, now, study Mao’s On Guerilla Warfare, the Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, and the U.S. marines doctrine manual Warfighting.

Popular consciousness admits the need for violent confrontation and struggle against the state. The escalation and ultimate military defeat of the student movement, the breaking of the 2020 June Insurrections, the actions of Aaron Bushnell, the Universal Healthcare executioner, and Elias Rodriguez have prepared whole strata of the masses to act. No less, the obscene public show of the Trump immigration police are galvanizing popular resolve.

If you are a Marxist in an insurrectionary region, form your brigade. Be prepared for community defense. Establish emergency phone trees. Hold mass meetings. Assure the community that you will respond. Distribute flyers and pamphlets.

Contact the All-Empire Worker’s League if you want to help coordinate actions. Contact USU Press for propaganda resources. Join us.

The time has come to fight.

When “Israelis” left Europe to settle Palestine in 1948, they brought European plants with them to remind them of “home” — the home they said did not accept them. Introducing non-native plant species was also a means to drive Palestinians out of their own homeland and towns and deny them access to water and land.

One tree the settlers favored was the eucalyptus tree, known in “Israel” as the “Jewish Tree” (despite being native to Australia) as it was so instrumental to the colonization of Palestine.

But first, what is settler-colonialism? Colonialism is the forceful arrival of settlers into a land that is already occupied to enable exploitation benefiting these settlers’ state back home. The settler part, however, presupposes that a native population, which becomes Indigenous when it exists in relation to settlers, is being displaced permanently so that settlers can occupy their homeland for themselves. Settler-colonialism creates new countries where none existed, and usually ends up carving out a state of their own instead of staying beholden to the state that sent them in the colonies — an example being pre-independence British Colonies and post-independence United States of America.

The importation of these foreign plant species into Palestine firstly played a part in concealing the Nakba. After 1948, zionist organizations planted more than 250 million trees in Palestine, most of which were invasive pines and eucalyptus. These trees were planted around the ruins of Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed and emptied during the Nakba. Under the guise of “turning the desert green”, land around ancestral Palestinian communities was seeded with these foreign plant species and then expropriated to be turned into a ‘natural reserve’ that is neither natural nor a reserve of anything. Legally, it means the land cannot be built on. It cannot be excavated. The Nakba is concealed.

When objections are raised about this practice, settlers —  who think of everything in terms of their potential for exploitation — is “well, at least we’re doing something with the land!” but Palestinians were doing something with the land too. Just because the settlers didn’t understand this relationship doesn’t mean that the land was not being used in some way.

It’s difficult in the West to understand ties to the land. We are removed from the processes of production, and see commodities only as the object in front of us on the grocery store shelf. We don’t see the labor that went into bringing us vegetables on a stall or candy in the aisles. Someone has to till the land, someone has to plant the seeds, someone has to water the sprouts, and someone has to harvest, package, and drive the grown crops to the store so we can eat them.

Thus, we think of land in the abstract. We think that the shelves will always bear food, because from our perspective it just appears there, conjured out of thin air. But for most of human history (and for a vast portion of the world still today) this has not been the case. It was instantly clear to any farmer of the past, including in Europe, that land had to be taken care of lest it stopped providing for good.

Before the Nakba, Palestinians distributed land communally under the Masha’a system. Plots were distributed among families for a certain period, and land outside villages was held in common for grazing and collecting firewood.

Many ways in which Palestinians made use of the desert and marshes and why they chose to leave them as they did may have very well been lost in the Nakba. Most of the information about the Masha’a practice in Western studies comes from British sources and is thus seen through their worldview. After which, the absence of evidence about how people used to survive on their native land is used by the settler to justify more of their destructive practices.

A system that works for its population cannot be said to be a failed system. That settlers “made the desert green” is a childish myth for a childish people who mythologize their history where none has been. Throughout history, Palestine had long been a provider of commodities around the Mediterranean. Even today, the only use “Israelis” have for the Naqab desert is to abandon asylum seekers there to die. No settler wants to live in the desert — they prefer the lush, neatly-colonized landscapes west of the Jordan, or the seaside accommodations that Gaza keeps away from them. What one finds in the Naqab today are 36 unrecognized Palestinian villages that do not appear on any map (including Google Maps), and several kibbutz suspiciously close to the border with Jordan; this makes sense within “Israeli” settler-colonial policy, as the kibbutz were established to serve as the first line of human shields against incursions (and that is indeed the purpose they served on October 7, 2023).

The introduction of destructive species in Palestine has disrupted local ecosystems and the availability of water. Eucalyptus trees drink up as much water as is made available to them, which can be used to justify not providing water to Palestinian communities – and eventually forces Palestinians to abandon their homes. Eucalyptus trees have also been the cause of many wildfires in Palestine — the oil in the bark is highly flammable and makes the trees explode under heat, spreading the fire. Wildfires in Palestine are now more common than they used to be, and this can be directly attributed to the presence of foreign plants that have been imported to Palestine.

Since 1967, settlers in Palestine have uprooted over 800,000 olive trees — trees which are suited to the local climate and provide food and livelihood to millions of Palestinians. Settlers are not interested in cultivating olives for themselves; they prefer to destroy these generational trees and import olive oil from Turkey or Spain; Because of this, the “Israeli” settler state has become the 35th largest importer of olive oil in the world. The settler state turns itself into a caricature because no concessions can be given — not one step back can be made.

The ramifications of this form of colonialism are plenty. Under humanitarian concerns, the settler reinforces their power and ensures the native population will never be a problem for them. They kill the Indigenous; they force them into reservations; they sever their ties to the land that feeds us all, and then wonder why climate catastrophes happen. And when these catastrophes happen, the settler retort is to say “well, there’s just nothing we could have done to prevent this!” To say otherwise would mean recognizing that the land is occupied and that people did know what to do for hundreds of years, but they were uprooted and severed from the land — only then will the settler know peace, however briefly. To recognize and integrate Indigenous practices would mean to recognize their claim to ownership of the land – at least partly – and this is antithetical to the survival of any settler state.

Despite being removed from its process of production, land is land: it feeds us. We extract its resources for our devices. This is true whether one is Palestinian, European, American, or anyone else.

In 1626, when Puritans arrived in what is now Salem, located off the Bay of Massachusetts, they came across empty buildings and, thinking they were abandoned, appropriated them. By winter, when the Naumkeag band of the Massachusett came back to their winter fishing grounds for the season, they found white people occupying their homes, redecorating them to suit their European tastes. Instead of driving them out, the Naumkeag welcomed these newcomers as people needing help in a new land they did not know. They taught the English how to cultivate the land, how to plant in the hills productively, and how to survive there.

In Salem the settlers drained swamps and built upon them houses and industry, despite the fact that the Naumkeag had been living perfectly well with these swamps next to their fishing grounds for thousands of years. They understood the importance of these biomes because they had lived with them for millennia. In Salem too the rocky hills in Salem were also a problem to the settlers — just another obstacle to be flattened, destroyed and paved over.

When Europeans came to Turtle Island, they thought they were seeing wilderness; huge forests and marshes greeted them. But what they were actually seeing were carefully-tended autonomous systems that served as breadbaskets for the Indigenous population. Controlled burns were used seasonally to renew the soil, promote the growth of fire-adapted plants and prevent wild forest fires. Over generations, these burns could be massive and span over hundreds of miles — but they were not random. They were the result of careful planning over decades.

As fires destroy entire towns in California right now, we may want to remember that Native American burns across Arizona and New Mexico showed that it is possible to break the typical climate-fire pattern across large areas. This pattern consists of a few years of rainfall promoting plant growth followed by a year of drought that starts wildfires. It becomes even more mind-boggling to witness these fires and wonder how much must have gone wrong that things have come to this when Indigenous people would be able to enact these practices today in California, but are kept away from doing so at the administrative level.

Native tribes actively managed and enriched forests by introducing beneficial species and useful plants for human life that could thrive in a given system. Plants were sustainably harvested and encouraged to become resilient by sometimes purposely — but always strategically — disturbing the ecosystem.

This was not wilderness and neither was it unique to the Americas. This was not undeveloped land. It looked undeveloped to the European eye because they did not see cobble roads or brick houses, but it sustained life for millions of people for millennia. The European considered the Natives’ tie to the land magical, as if they had some secret sixth sense and knew just where to find berries and game, because they could not see the approach taken to building a multi-generational system with reason and labor.

Dams along the Klamath river were removed just three months ago to restore salmon populations, and now enlightened descendants of Europeans are blaming the Indigenous populations that led this initiative for dispersing water that could have been used against the fires. But salmon indirectly help forests become resilient against wildfires, and this is what the settler mind refuses to see.

The Naumkeag band used the Salem grounds as their seasonal fishing spot. How did all the fish happen to congregate there specifically?

And European settlers could have enjoyed this way of life too — the Naumkeag and many other tribes did not pick up weapons against them, even as the settlers killed them off with diseases they brought over from Europe, but instead welcomed them into their homes and communities, teaching them what they knew of the land. Instead, settlers chose to create reservations outside of the nations’ ancestral homelands through 535 treaties that the U. S. government broke with the Indigenous at every turn.

In California, forest fires are a natural risk. The climate is naturally prone to wildfires, and certainly climate change is worsening the situation. But the European response to these constant risks is always to consume more. Build more dams to dump more water on more fires. Then build more walls to retain more water when the dams flood. Build more dykes to help the walls we built…

Indigenous practices are not magical or mystical. They are the result of understanding the local conditions (something we all do as humans) through practice over millennia. What seems more magical is expecting that we would be able to transpose foreign practices to entirely different conditions with no friction.

I can tell you one thing: if the land in California had been under Native stewardship, the fires would not be destroying thousands of acres, countless homes, and causing the suffering we are all witnessing at this moment.