When it comes to ICE deportations, we must ask the question: Cui bono?

Who benefits?

Who benefits from ICE rounding up and deporting US citizens? Into whose pocket do those benefits flow?

Ask any liberal, and they’ll tell you there’s only one person: Donald J. Trump. “This is irrational, destructive ideology at work! It’s Trump setting himself up to become a dictator!” They want you to believe — they need you to believe — that there’s no world in which someone is making a profit off of the ICE deportations. Ask any chauvinist “Marxist” and they’ll tell you the same thing, but about some “faction” of the “industrial bourgeoisie.” They both need you to believe that ICE deportations don’t play a role in maintaining the social and economic order. The reason is that they need you to believe in the existence of some “good” civil society, in this myth of the “good” America counterposed to the “bad” one.

We cannot afford to be confused, we cannot afford to be misled. We must make a sober and scientific analysis that will tell us who our friends are and who our enemies are. Those “Marxists” espousing the liberal platitudes about the good America, the “good” civil society, have put themselves in the camp of the enemy. Unless and until they perform a real analysis, unless and until they examine the question from the point of view, not of what is comfortable for Western dilettante socialists, but what is necessary for the liberation of the entire world, they will remain our enemies.

We cannot espouse return to the status quo ante. That would be fighting on the side of the liberals, for a liberal victory. We fight, not for comfort, but for liberation.

Without the myth of good civil society, these chauvinists and liberals are rightly afraid of mass insurrection. They are selling you this line because they are trying, whether they know it consciously or not, to forestall a social revolution.

But we aren’t afraid of asking.

So, who benefits?

The white settler population benefits from mass deportation.

A Penn Wharton Budget Model study does in fact warn that overall GDP will fall – over 4-years, by 1 percent, and over 10 years by nearly five percent. But the impact on wages varies by skill class. Wages for high-skilled workers (which Penn Wharton says comprise 63% of the working population, placing a huge group in the petty bourgeois or technical specialist class) fall by 0.5% over four years and 2.8% over ten years. Wages for low-skilled US-born workers increase overall; by 1.1% under the 4-year deportation policy and by 5% under the 10-year deportation policy. ICE allows the white declassed labor aristocrat to work their way back into economic positions similar to those of their hated rivals in the liberal professions (who happen to be petty bourgeois).

The prison-industrial complex, which elevates its employees from proletarian to labor-aristocratic or petty-bourgeois status benefits. Private prisons owned by CoreCivic and the GEOGroup partner with ICE and have received huge investments from expanding ICE contracts ($2.1 billion for GeoGroup, $653.5 million for CoreCivic). CoreCivic employs over 13,000 people across 70 facilities and GEOGroup employs about 20,000 people across 98 facilities. (Because they aren’t obligated to report their total employment numbers, these are estimates). Every single person employed by these corporations benefit from deportations.

The tech companies benefit. Palantir, AT&T, and Deloitte have significant ICE contracts and provide the data systems that underlie the new deportation machine.

The banks benefit. Banks and investment firms such as Citizens Bank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo have all financed ICE contractors and see significant returns on their investment.

If the banks benefit, the imperialist bourgeoisie benefit. Wage theft in the US is highest among industries with high concentrations of undocumented immigrants (restaurants, landscaping and building maintenance, hotels, garment manufacturing, and gas stations). In the initial surges in ICE repression of undocumented immigrants, when sections of the bourgeoisie complained and petitioned that the raids had gone too far and risked hurting their bottom line, the regime relented. At the time, the consensus was towards “immigration policy” under the prior Democrat administrations: just enough repression to terrify the hyper-exploited workers into compliance, but not enough to damage productivity. The calculus has changed.

The imperial extraction machine is not running as it once did. Superprofits (and hence, superwages) are down. The empire’s managers, that section firmly in command of Washington, has made it clear. The empire is striking back. The time of neoliberalization has ended, and the managers are returning to the jodhpur and the pith helm. This year, Marco Rubio told the countries of Europe, “[W]e in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Mass deportations – White Terror – breaks unionization efforts, destroys solidarity among workers, and ensures that people paid under the table remain at the razor’s edge of desperation. This lowers their wages. It is the manner by which superwages, those wages paid by the imperialist bourgeoisie out of the suppressed wages of the third world, those wages garnered through the arbitrage in unequal exchange with the colonized periphery, are controlled and distributed in the center. For the white worker, yes. For the undocumented immigrant or for anyone who might look like they’re undocumented, no. Superwages are not for you.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics data for February of this year shows that Hispanic workers have higher unemployment (4.4% US-wide average vs. 5.2% for Hispanic workers), and Hispanic women are at the bottom of the US pay scale, earning some 53 cents to the white man’s dollar.¹ “Latinas remain lowest-paid group in U.S. workforce, despite historic gains in education.”² In California, home to the largest Hispanic population in the US, Hispanic women earn 49 cents on the white man’s dollar, according to data collected by UCLA in 2025.³

Will there be a bill to pay for the big imperialist bourgeoisie? Certainly, when the labor markets collapse in the sectors most heavily dominated by undocumented immigrants. But who will be hurt? Who benefits? This strategy will line the pockets of the big imperialist bourgeoisie. The ideology they peddle has enraptured the little bourgeois business owners, and will continue to strike sparks in the flinty hearts of the white US settler population… but only up to a point. Because the bill will come owing first to the petty bourgeoisie, who depend on exploiting undocumented immigrants to manage their bottom lines.

In the end, the big capitalists believe they can manage the terror. They believe they can weather the economic storm.

Amidst these sweeping shifts, these systematic injustices, lie endless individual cruelties. Yes, like Michael Parenti said, there were far more “Good Germans” who simply kept their heads down and followed the law, avoided the trouble that comes with justice; but there were the Patriots too. Those who met the jackboots with a smile and a wave, who industrially sought to use the circumstances to stuff their pockets, they’re everywhere in colonial history — they define it. From the blood-dripping “heroes” who fill the history books, to the businessman who reports his competitor, to the housewives who pick through dresses torn from the bodies of the dead, to the woman that gleefully watches her domestic house-cleaning slaves cower under her gaze. These cannibals, these flesh-eaters are the poster child of mass deportation. But the Good American who believes in a fairer settler-colony and the virtuous “work ethic” of their underclass and the Patriot who will send workers to the concentration camps and man the cells with equal glee, are two sides of the same coin.

Both sides are the face of the enemy.

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The Employment Situation — February 2026.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026. Latino Policy and Politics Institute, UCLA. ︎
2. UCLA, 6 Oct. 2025. ︎
3. Id. ︎

We sat down to talk with Em Cohen, whose meta-level critiques of general movement strategy and tactics we’ve deeply appreciated, and felt it would be valuable to delve into further. While Em frequently writes about Judaism and Zionism through the framework of “philosemitism,” in this conversation we chose to focus on a question that has been on many people’s minds: why hasn’t the so-called u.s. left, despite all of the efforts made over the last two years, been able to meaningfully intervene in a live-streamed genocide? And now that u.s.-led imperialism is descending into its death throes, unleashing some of the most naked expressions of violence we have perhaps ever seen, threatening to take out Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba even as it continues its whole-sale destruction of Gaza — where are we going wrong? We urge folks to check out more of Em’s writing and analysis at medium.com/@emcohen.

W4G: To start, could you talk a little bit about your critiques of some of the underlying frameworks that you think shape the strategies and tactics of the so-called “u.s. left?” You’ve written before about the way that there is a mismatch between the revolutionary-sounding rhetoric that we use, and the liberal or reformist nature of many of these tactics, which are designed to appeal to the moral conscience of the ruling class — or as you say, to simply register the fact of our dissent and nothing more. Can you give some examples of this?

EC: Whenever a situation provokes righteous anger, and society seems like it’s about to burst into flames, the popular protest organizations that have come to be known as the “u.s. left” jump into action. Like a well-oiled machine, they post the same graphic that they always post, with the same font and the same logos and the same endorsers, calling for another iteration of the same protest. If it’s not dubbed an ‘emergency action’ and announced that night, their faithful members spend the days leading up to the protest imploring everyone to show up and ‘bring all their rage.’

On the day of, they truck in loads of signs to pass out that make extensive use of radical slogans and imagery. They have a few organizers shout fiery speeches about people power, smashing imperialism, and freeing them all into sticker-covered megaphones. The crowd boos and cheers. Whenever the speakers mention some evil person or corporation or state, the crowd chants shame. Then the protest ends and everyone goes home. Over the next day or two, independent protest photographers comb through the footage they collected and make sure to post a bunch of really cool pictures and time-lapse videos showing just how many people came out.

The overwhelming majority of people who participate in this hamster wheel don’t think the protests they are calling for and attending will really bring about revolution. In fact, often, they’re not thinking of the protests in terms of the material at all. Think about how many times you’ve seen people chant “stand up, fight back” while marching peacefully down the street with cops next to them and when someone tries to actually act on the rage they are being told is legitimate and really stand up and fight back, the protest organizations’ safety marshals/peace police step in to stop them. It is not that they don’t understand what the words “stand up, fight back” mean, it is that they do not connect that slogan to the actual material reality of fighting in the physical world. It is simply a gesture, a representation of anger.

Protest in the so-called u.s. is a simulacrum of protest. While some of the components that make up a ‘protest’ are present, those that imbue the protest with its revolutionary character are absent. It is protest theater. This doesn’t just happen with protests, by the way. Rather, it happens with many different (formerly) radical methods of change-making. Over the past couple of years, many of the popular protest orgs have started calling for “strikes” that last one day, carry no strike fund, and basically only operate at the individual level—in the sense that the call is simply put out and individuals participate or don’t. These orgs put out graphics telling people to skip work and school, with ‘demands,’ and claim that this will grind the economy to a halt. The day comes and goes. No one really knows how many people actually heeded the call. No economic impact is ever really assessed. Did it work? Were the demands met? Does the organization even care? It’s a simulacrum of a strike.

Recently, some protest orgs did as they do and called for a protest outside of the jail where President Maduro is being held. Leading up to the protest, they talked about how Maduro must be freed by any means necessary. But at the jail, the protestors basically just stood around and chanted. None of the people who called for the protest or who showed up believed that that protest would have any impact on actually freeing Maduro. Of course, actually freeing Maduro would be quite difficult to pull off. But the difficulty of such an action is not the reason these organizations don’t earnestly try to achieve what they claim they want to. Rather, the call to free Maduro by any means necessary is totally compartmentalized from the material task of doing so. Again, the protest is separated from the material. Despite the chants and the demands and the slogans, the goal of the protest calling to free Maduro is not to actually free Maduro. The goal of the protest is to have the protest. To register dissent, to raise awareness, to speak out.

These ineffectual actions aren’t simply a product of bad organizing but rather of liberal, idealistic ways of understanding and formulating political struggle. You ask people how they are measuring if the protests they are calling for are working and they look at you like you are speaking another language. They aren’t thinking in terms of the protest ‘working.’ Rather, they protest because it is ‘good’ to protest and to show that we oppose what’s happening. There’s often this unspoken hope that the state will see how many people show up to the protests and will base its decisions on that. But then the protests happen and the state ignores them and the protest orgs keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Revolution is the process of totally upending society and this will only be accomplished with revolutionary methods. But the liberal idealist way of approaching struggle treats the methods as inconsequential; it is the ideas, the chants, the slogans, the images, not the methods, that matters. So to finish this long-winded way of responding to the question—if you want to assess whether a tactic is revolutionary or just revolutionary-sounding, look at the actual methods being used. The underground railroad wasn’t people marching peacefully in the streets and chanting that slaves should be freed, it was enslaved people freeing themselves. There were no gestures.

W4G: I can’t help but feel that so much of what you’re describing is rooted in the class character of much of what we call the “u.s. left” — people from a middle class or petite bourgeois background, or those aspiring to such a status — who are trying to show their solidarity with poor and oppressed people, either here or abroad. In other words, at the end of the day, the issues they’re protesting or organizing around remain largely abstract because they are not materially impacted by them, and so their outlook, which necessarily shapes their tactics and strategies, is rooted in idealism. In other words, they want certain conditions to change, but they don’t need them to.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with middle class people’s desire to show solidarity, and of course, it’s not to say that revolutionaries or revolutionary potential has never come from the petite bourgeois class—in fact, there are many examples to the contrary—but revolutions aren’t made from ideas alone. They have to take hold of poor and oppressed people, the people with actual revolutionary potential, by speaking directly to their material conditions.

Ali Kadri recently said something along the lines of: revolutionary potential belongs to the people who have no choice but to fight against the conditions of capitalism and imperialism. But today, at least in the u.s., this isn’t so simple, because substantial sectors of the poor and oppressed classes have been bought off, pacified, or straight up conscripted into directly upholding some of the most violent arms of u.s. empire—which is evident if you just consider the racial and class makeup of the NYPD, ICE, border patrol, the military, or even prison guards or wardens at this point.

At the same time, we can also say that much of what is driving the endless repetition of ineffective strategies and tactics on the u.s. left is rooted in subjective factors, too, which include defeatism—the fundamental belief that revolution in the core isn’t actually possible (“it’s never the right time for revolution”). And no, revolution is not just “abolishing” this or that thing, or scoring an occasional win by getting some company to divest, it is the total upheaval of the entire system and society. Defeatism may be latent or unconscious, or even obscured by revolutionary-sounding rhetoric, but as you say, in the case of the Maduro protest for example, there was never any intent to actually free him, only to publicly register the fact of dissent: “The goal of the protest is to have the protest.”

What this ends up doing is vastly narrowing the scope of possible strategies or tactics that are even on the table. At a fundamental level, the options seem to be either mass protests or autonomous direct action, which are often framed as opposites (symbolic vs. material) but end up producing similar results. While the mass protest appeals to the ruling class through a show of numbers that is not actually backed up by the material threat of violence that would actually make those numbers consequential, the autonomous direct action appeals to the ruling class through a show of force that is not actually backed up by the numbers that would make that force consequential.

And of course, both of these tactics also suffer from a lack of long-term vision, a roadmap, or the kind of organizational infrastructure that would allow them to happen not just sporadically, but regularly, and in ways that gradually up the ante in attacking the real levers of the capitalist machine. And so, to the ruling class, the autonomous direct action becomes just as much of an empty or symbolic threat as the mass protest, because both are saying, “do this or else,” but the problem is there is no “else.”

People often respond to this kind of critique by arguing that we can’t go immediately from A to Z, and that all of these tactics and strategies are actually “building power” in a gradual way that will eventually lead to some kind of victory. But if these strategies or tactics are in fact working, and will eventually lead to some sort of revolutionary rupture, how would we know that? Is there any concrete evidence we can point to that would show us whether we are on a path that is actually leading somewhere, as opposed to running in place on a hamster wheel?

Occasionally, of course, we have seen impressive numbers of people coming out into the streets and engaging in militant rebellions — in Los Angeles or Minneapolis during the recent ice raids, during the George Floyd Uprisings, and before that, the Ferguson Uprising, the Oscar Grant rebellion, etc. One could go back through the decades and point to many such moments, when people get sick of the old tactics, and hope glimmers for a brief moment. But the issue is that rebellions are sporadic and largely unplanned, and therefore die out, get crushed, co-opted, etc, perhaps for lack of the kind of organization and infrastructure that could seriously defend people from state violence, allow them to strategize against the enemy in longer-term ways, and most importantly, to allow them to grow and develop the rebellion into an actual revolutionary force. But perhaps for other factors as well.

With all that said, what are some ways you think we can get people to reflect on and seriously engage in the question of revolutionary strategy and methods? What do you think are some of the main barriers to this?

EC: People are so resistant to any questioning of either mass-based organizing or autonomous direct action. When you’re in an org that’s focused on mass-based organizing and say “hey, it feels like this isn’t working,” you’re immediately met with almost reflexive responses of “well what’s your idea?,” or “oh yeah? Then why don’t you go do direct action!“ as if direct action is the real answer to what is to be done and mass-based organizing is the thing we do simply because we aren’t brave enough to do direct action. This sets people up to view their options as either shutting up and doing something they don’t think is working, self-sacrifice in the form of individual autonomous direct action, or quitting entirely. This makes lots of people burn out and believe revolution isn’t possible in the first place.

This dynamic where people reflexively respond to criticism or even vague frustrations about things not working with attacking the criticizer, is a vicious cycle that leads to orgs increasingly being filled with dogmatic sycophants. Folks show up because they agree with an org’s rhetoric or a friend invited them. Over time, if they really are there to make change, they start to question whether what they’re doing is actually making a difference. If they bring those frustrations up, they’re immediately shut down. They either stop raising their frustrations or leave. This happens enough times and the thinking in the org becomes so rigid that active ideological struggle is impossible.

To a certain extent, I think the “well what’s your idea?” kind of responses are fair, or at least understandable. It sucks when someone complains and criticizes what you’re doing but doesn’t have any recommendation for what you should do instead. But the requirement that people have the answer before bringing up a criticism basically makes it impossible to ever criticize the larger issues in the first place. Sometimes a vague sensation of “this isn’t working” is really all someone can give. To put it a different way, it’s only the smaller problems or issues that anyone could reasonably have a concrete solution to before bringing up. For the bigger issues, though, the answer is almost always unclear—it can only be figured out over time by actively struggling to find the answer, working through different possibilities, and testing and analyzing the results.

People don’t want to feel totally powerless, and I understand why they would think it’s better to “at least do something” rather than nothing. But I also think we have to simply confront the fact that we don’t have the answers. I certainly don’t know what the answer is. But I think if you don’t know the answer to something, it’s better to spend your time trying to figure it out than to do something you know isn’t working.

There are also larger material barriers, such as the fact that lots of people who are members and leaders of the orgs that make up the so-called u.s. left ultimately benefit from the anti-Black Islamophobic colonial imperialist patriarchal world system. It’s really easy to not care about whether the methods are working or not when your survival doesn’t depend on them. If you don’t need the method to work, moral grandstanding is enough. I do think this plays a really big role here, and speaks to the compartmentalization between methods and rhetoric that I touched on earlier. Because people don’t need the methods to work, it’s a lot easier to not even think about the methods as actual tools for doing something. This is also one reason why so many on the so-called u.s. left are resistant to studying. Instead of viewing revolutionary theory as a resource that we can use to hone our ways of thinking, gifted to us by those who carried out successful revolutions in the past, studying theory is viewed as either a fun social activity or a chore.

Another barrier to seriously engaging with the question of how to develop new revolutionary strategy and tactics is the vulgar invocation of “the urgency of the situation we’re facing.” I have seen so many people downplay analysis and reflection and study as activities that should only take place when we “have the time.” This is the total backwards approach. It is not that the situation is so urgent that we can’t afford to spend time studying and thinking, it is that the situation is so urgent that we can’t afford to NOT spend time studying and thinking. The situation is too urgent for us to waste our time making the same mistakes that revolutionaries before us made and we can avoid making if we learn from them.

I do think most of these barriers can be corrected through serious study of political theory, especially studying as part of a good group. At least, I want to believe that. So, I’d recommend that people try to find others they can study revolutionary theory with. Books are great, but you can use podcasts, youtube videos, whatever. Just try to meet with people regularly and talk about what is and isn’t working, why things are the way they are, etc. Maybe set up regular phone calls with a couple of friends and talk about your political work, ask them hard questions and encourage them to do the same to you and seriously try to think through the answer without being defensive. Be curious and be critical.

I also think, in a very grim way, as climate collapse gets worse, as social conditions get worse in general, more and more people will find themselves in positions where their survival depends on the methods working and so they will have to struggle to figure out better strategies and methods.

W4G: It’s interesting that you highlight a lack of capacity for criticism and self-criticism on the u.s. left as directly connected to the prevalence of liberal / reformist strategies, even when the lack of tangible results is staring us right in the face. I do think it’s connected to the fact that again, much of the organizations on the “u.s. left” are made up of people from a petite bourgeois background. It’s not just that either. Too often, the people who make the decisions for a lot of these organizations receive their funding from donors that are directly connected to the capitalist class, etc.

Obviously the ruling class is not going to throw money at an organization or project that directly threatens its material interests, quite the opposite, and so many of these organizations will have to promote strategies and tactics that are intentionally designed to be ineffective or non-threatening. It’s not an accident or case of miscalculation. It’s designed that way, as controlled opposition. If someone joins an organization naively thinking it is actually invested in creating the kind of radical change that is advertised on its website at the level of rhetoric, and then challenges the leadership a bit too much, crosses the line a bit too far, asks one too many challenging questions, they will simply be expelled.

At this point I have to be kind of blunt and say that what I think is really needed is for more people on the so-called u.s. left to quite literally commit class suicide. Generally speaking, as people living in the imperial core, many of us are taught to aspire to bourgeois ideals and lifestyles in one way or another, even if we don’t necessarily come from that background. You could call it class aspiration vs. class status. So we have to commit class suicide, and the other thing is that we have to seriously de-identify with being Amerikan. We have to completely reject everything we have been handed by the u.s. empire, because they give us these things precisely to buy us off, to prevent us from doing what really needs to be done, and from uniting with the very people who are best positioned to do it.

I mean, if you are really serious about creating the kind of world you envision, again that is not going to happen just based on vibes. Are you truly ready to give up your subsidized apartment? Your salaried NGO or academic job? Your rock-climbing membership or weekend getaway trips and Air B and B’s? Your Netflix subscription? This isn’t about romanticizing revolution — I think it’s quite literally the necessary first step that has to be taken in order to deprogram ourselves from the horrifying matrix of propaganda, co-optation, and counterinsurgency that so many of us are completely bought off by without even realizing it. I really think we have to completely reject any careerist aspirations or neoliberal self-making projects laundered through entrepreneurism, social media influencerships, or the like in order to even begin to actually interface with reality—because so much of the lifestyle that is peddled to us is so skillfully designed to hide from us the very reality that the majority of the rest of the world actually lives in.

I really love the Mao quote that says, “In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” I actually feel like we need to take this much more seriously — that every idea we have is ultimately shaped by material conditions, that no one is immune from this. The idea that we can just think or imagine our way out of our class conditioning, that if we just become critical or intellectual enough, we can be immune from propaganda, is so sinister, and is really rooted in liberal idealism and individualism.

I’m not saying this to be defeatist or deterministic, actually the opposite. This was the whole reason they placed such emphasis on practicing “criticism and self-criticism” during the cultural revolution, because they understood how deeply capitalism and colonialism conditions people’s attitude and outlook and psychology, and that this is something we have to take extremely seriously. Again, not in a vibes-based way of “the personal is political” or “i need to work on myself” or “accountability processes,” but actually taking seriously the need to completely transform people into new human beings, that that is as much a part of the material process of revolution as redistributing land or wealth, and really understanding how long and difficult of a process that is. And maybe most importantly, that we can’t transform our consciousness alone.

We’re not used to relating to ourselves or each other in a way that isn’t thoroughly saturated with liberal and idealistic thinking. Which is why when someone says, hey, I don’t think this tactic is working, rather than examine that criticism for what it is (is it true that it’s not working? what is the evidence that it isn’t working? how are we interpreting that evidence? what other possible tactics could we use?) we instead become immediately defensive, and dogmatically insist that it is working, even if objective reality clearly shows otherwise. The only way we can explain this kind of reaction is that the person is motivated less by the desire to reach a tangible, objective outcome that really betters our collective conditions, and more by the desire to be seen in a certain light. So it’s individualism, idealism, and liberalism. If your goal was really to achieve change, and someone offered a criticism of your strategy to help you find a more effective one, logically speaking, wouldn’t you welcome that?

What you say about the need to see revolutionary theory as a resource, and that we are largely not seeing in that way, is so true. Like, we actually don’t have to start from scratch or just guess. We can build off of what people did before. Of course, conditions here are entirely different than they were in 1950s Cuba, but it is not that we live in a separate reality altogether, or that the laws of dialectical and historical materialism somehow don’t apply here. That’s just Amerikan exceptionalism. We can study what worked and what didn’t in other circumstances. We can consider whether past strategies make sense for our current context, or what about them needs to be adapted or changed. But again, we don’t just have to flail and guess and give up, or pretend like we have to invent something out of thin air, which is what it feels like we are doing a lot of the time.

The problem is that most of the people who are actually reading and studying past revolutionary movements with some level of seriousness and depth—the kind of study that could actually give us the roadmaps we need—are just sitting in their offices and publishing their articles on Jstor. So these ideas never reach the masses, which is where they actually belong. We need to find ways of translating these ideas to ordinary people, and largely that isn’t happening, because if a significant part of the poor and oppressed classes, the ones with actual revolutionary potential, have been conscripted into the military or ICE or the police, and the working classes have been bought off by the labor aristocracy and the spoils extracted from the global south, then the intellectuals, especially the ones who have radical ideas, have been bought off by academia or nonprofits and the like. And so while you actually need people from all of these sections of society to be working together in order to wage an actual revolution, in practice they have all been bought off in different ways by the different facets of u.s. imperialism. Because that is what it is designed to do.

But that brings me to my next question: in addition to strategies and tactics, you’ve also critiqued the kinds of default organizational forms that the u.s. left tends to fall into. Could you speak a little more on how we are limiting ourselves through a failure of imagination in terms of organizational forms?

EC: While there are hundreds of different ostensibly radical political organizations with different names and slogans and logos, the overwhelming majority of them fall into one of two categories: There are organizations that try to recreate what once was, and there are organizations that pretend they are not organizations.

The former groups are filled with people who pick some historical revolutionary group to dogmatically idolize and imagine they’re the vanguard of. The latter groups are made up of people who rhetorically claim to reject hierarchy and be above organization itself. Neither of these organizational forms are able to effectively confront the problems we face today, in part because they both, albeit in different ways, discourage active ideological struggle. Each of these types of organizations, again, in different ways, produces a rigid way of thinking that refuses to update to changing conditions.

When people start to become radicalized and search for an organization to join, they are almost always joining one of those two types of organizations, and because of the errors inherent to them, almost always end up burnt out by unfair divisions of labor (that typically fall along harmful race and gender lines), targeted by predatory creeps, or frustrated by chauvinistic behavior. After their experience, they either leave and try to find a different org, or they quit organizing entirely. But because nearly every organization falls into one of these two categories, the people who are persistent, who keep searching for better organizations, are repeatedly harmed until they either become so disillusioned with organizing entirely or they assimilate into the power structures of the harmful organizations.

In this way, the dominance of these two organizational forms perpetuates its own power and rigidity and endlessly chips away at any semblance of developing revolutionary potential. (So many radical organizations have absurdly high turnover rates that are only masked by the seemingly endless supply of new people who realize that the world needs to change.)

When you look at major cities, it appears that there are hundreds of organizations working on different political goals. But the reality is that it’s basically just a dozen iterations of the same org, which utilizes the same methods and tactics and which is made up of a rotating cast of the same small group of people. The different orgs are much more a product of interpersonal animosity than they are of genuine ideological, strategic, or tactical differences.

Over time, this failure has produced a “left” that is almost completely separated from the most oppressed masses, who (rightly) view popular “leftist organizations” as either nothing but a waste of time or as the enemy. The solution to all this is not yet another ideologically rigid organization trying to rehash the 1960’s protest movement or pretending like hierarchies are evaporated by claiming to reject them, but rather a rethinking of form—or, more accurately, a rethinking of everything altogether. Whatever it is that needs to exist for us to confront the moment we’re in doesn’t. We have to accept that.

W4G: So much of what capitalism does is give us the illusion of endless choice while really giving us no choices at all. When you were describing the seemingly endless choice of leftist organizations that one could ostensibly join, that quote about freedom under capitalism being the ability to choose between 20 different brands of toothpaste came to mind, which is something you’ve also written about in regards to the way social media has so deeply invaded the way we relate to each other, and thus also shaped the way we organize. You write:

In the same way that social media provides an endless selection of people to peruse, it provides an endless selection of political organizations to choose from. While it might seem good that there are endless organizations to choose from, allowing you to search for the organization that most perfectly matches your politics, in reality this leads to organizations held together exclusively by superficial bonds, filled with people who don’t know each other, don’t need each other, and don’t trust each other. And this is having disastrous effects on how people engage with political organizing.

It is somewhat incredible that even with the hundreds or possibly thousands of Palestine solidarity organizations that exist just in the u.s—and there have been so many that have sprung up after 10/7—none of them have been able to offer any real meaningful resistance to the ongoing genocide. I should be clear that I’m not dismissing any of the organizational efforts that have managed to offer very real, material and life-saving support to vulnerable people despite all of the odds stacked against them. What I’m attempting to do instead is zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

Part of me wonders how much of this is rooted in a refusal to take ourselves as seriously as revolutionaries in the 60s and 70s did. These were people who committed their entire lives to struggling against capitalism and imperialism. But in 2026, the idea of a “revolutionary,” especially in the imperial core, sounds laughably naive, deluded, romantic, maybe even arrogant (?) or some combination of the above. Revolutionaries are people who existed in the past, but not today. And to attempt to aspire to anything like that today would likely be met with extreme skepticism or ridicule. How dare we think so highly of ourselves. We should be more humble and realistic—better to be an “activist,” or “organizer,” some sort of regional or local specialist in a particular issue, like environmental issues, or prison abolition, which you can then confidently command expertise in by citing the number of years you have been a member of x or y organization, or been involved in x or y issue or struggle.

But that’s the problem. So much of u.s. left “organizing” has this quality of a side hobby, of “volunteering.” Something you fit into your schedule between work, dating, vacations, and hobbies in order to convince yourself that you’re “doing something” (as you said) or “giving back to the community.” Of course, much of this can be attributed to the realities of life under capitalism, and the fact that so much of our time is eaten up by the obviously very real need to sell our labor to capitalists in order to survive. But I don’t think it can be completely explained by this, either.

How would this kind of commitment to dedicating our entire lives to revolutionary struggle transform what kinds of organizations we could create? By “entire” I don’t so much mean in the literal sense as in the ideological sense—as in, your identity is not tied up in any kind of career, your life is not divided between your work and your hobbies and your “organizing,” but revolutionary activity takes priority and precedence over everything else even while of course you must work to survive.

What might be possible if we we had an organization that was based not on this or that particular issue, but on truly developing people’s revolutionary potential, in the fullest sense of the term, not just in rhetoric or branding or slogans, but in an absolute and sincere commitment to transforming ourselves into completely new people in order to build a completely new society? And that we were also extremely strict and principled about where we took our money from to prevent our politics from being compromised? What if we had infrastructure and mechanisms to ensure that people could dedicate themselves to this work entirely, without distraction? What if we began with very basic questions, such as: Who are the classes with the most revolutionary potential in the imperial core? In a settler colony like the United States (as opposed to a country in the global south) what would constitute the most revolutionary outcome on a global scale?

After all, this isn’t just any country we’re talking about, but a country with the most powerful military, economy, and propaganda machine that has ever existed in the history of the world. Even if it were possible, is overthrowing the state an optimal outcome? Or is the best we can hope for to weaken the u.s. from within to increase the possibility of revolution or at least sovereignty for countries in the periphery? If the latter, what are the most effective ways of weakening the u.s. from within? Given the nature of the surveillance state that we all live under now, what are the most effective organizational forms for achieving those goals? What are the most effective methods and means for communicating and spreading revolutionary ideas to people?

It seems to me that, like you said, rather than creating more and more leftist organizations, groups, podcasts and collectives that inevitably employ the same tactics due to their class makeup, perhaps we should begin to look at the common organizational structures—many of which will not announce themselves as “leftist” or “activist” —that already exist in oppressed communities, and by which they already organize themselves, even if not yet toward an explicitly revolutionary goal. Churches, mosques, networks of prisoners’ families, parents associations, things like this. These are all organizations, networks of people that are meeting a common, tangible need, that play a real social function for oppressed communities, unlike most “leftist” organizations, which are only based on a shared abstract ideal.

This isn’t to say that we should just parachute into these kinds of spaces. But my point is that maybe the organizational structures with real revolutionary potential are not the ones that outwardly announce themselves as such, and maybe more people on the u.s. left need to carefully consider and familiarize ourselves with the organizational structures that already exist among poor and oppressed communities, that aren’t led by or cater to the petite bourgeois activist networks.

For example, it was impressive to me to learn that the infrastructure for a state-wide work stoppage organized by prisoners in Alabama in the last decade was largely built out through pre-existing gang networks within the prisons. There are whole communities of mothers and wives in rural North Carolina who organize themselves on Facebook groups to inform each other about what is going on in a particular prison where their sons or husbands are caged. There are networks of semi-illegal buses that take people across the George Washington Bridge from upper Manhattan into New Jersey that charge a fraction of the price of the official NY bus system.

Let’s be honest: most of the people who exist in the worlds I described above are not going to join a self-described leftist organization. They are going to spend most of their time with other poor and oppressed people in their communities, and the networks and organizations, formal and informal, that they are going to spend the majority of their time in are ones that meet a common material need—again, something they need to survive, not just an idea they believe in. The problem with most self-described leftist organizations in the u.s. is that there is still this inherent class divide between the organizers and the communities they ostensibly serve, that can’t be overcome by just offering occasional mutual aid services. Even if these services do meet a tangible need and help to at least ameliorate some of the intolerable conditions produced by racial capitalism, they are not for the most part using the kinds of methods or tactics that would actually enable or empower whole communities to actually self-organize, to seize power for themselves, on a scale that is significant enough to really shift the balance of social and economic forces in a serious way.

Of course, we have many labor unions which are made up of and organize among poor and oppressed and working class communities—but these unions do not have anti-imperialist politics. They are simply fighting for a bigger share of the imperial spoils. Which is why none of them were mobilized to stop weapons shipments at any point during the last several years of the accelerated genocide in Gaza. So it is not just a matter of methods or tactics, but of politics. We can have effective methods or tactics, we can read Secrets of a Successful Organizer back to back, but if we are not guided by the right principles or politics, we are still going to be ineffective. Like yes, congratulations, we raised the pay of New York City bus drivers by $2/hour. Unfortunately the U.S. is still beheading babies in Gaza and cutting off the fuel supply of entire populations in the global south.

There are many organizations that say that they are doing things like “mutual aid” or “social investigation” — that they are actually engaging with and organizing among and empowering poor and oppressed communities. But usually this amounts to a handful of, again, middle-class activists handing out food on the weekends, or going around with a clipboard and talking to some homeless people and asking them what their concerns are, because Mao told them that was what they were supposed to do in order to be serious revolutionaries. Unfortunately, though, I don’t think this is a winning strategy, because at the end of the social investigation, or mutual aid shift, most of these people are going to go back to their gentrified neighborhood, or maybe their non-gentrified neighborhood, but they are not living among the people whose needs they are ostensibly serving. They will publish their results or photos on Instagram—again, the intention being to prove to other middle-class activists that they are doing real revolutionary TM stuff. Or they do it for a few years in their twenties, only to burn out and eventually apply to that master’s program because the class forces pushing them in that direction eventually get too strong to resist through sheer willpower alone.

At the end of the day, no matter how much “mutual aid” or “social investigation” they do, a lot — perhaps not all, but a lot — of these activists are not committed to actually transforming themselves on a fundamental level. They are more so acting like anthropologists of the poor. It takes a long time and a lot of dedicated effort to really get to know a community, to earn their trust, to develop a real understanding of what they are materially struggling around and then to be able to meaningfully offer the kind of tangible support that might begin to allow them to create material change — again, for themselves. You can’t just walk around a homeless encampment with a clipboard or a bag of groceries a few times, or even a few years, and then call it a day.

If we really and truly want to put an end to the horrors of capitalism and u.s. imperialism, we have to be honest with ourselves about a) what that will really take, and b) who is most likely to make that happen. I don’t mean in any kind of moral or idealistic sense, but from an analysis that is rooted in actual historical materialism. It is not going to be the middle class activists in DSA. It is not going to be the labor unions. It is not going to be a few mutual aid groups or autonomous direct action groups, as inspiring as they are.

As you say, we have have to stop projecting idealism and start taking a really hard and serious look at oppressed people’s concrete, existing material circumstances, with all the contradictions that that will inevitably entail, and then not just offering them services but actually and truly committing ourselves to being with them, living among them, studying with them, speaking with them not just a few times but continuously, again and again over a long period of time, thinking and acting with them, struggling alongside them, committing ourselves to understanding and serving them and developing some sort of honest trust that is not just based in offering a service.

To go back to the idea of being a revolutionary, it isn’t something to be taken lightly, or something that can just be done part-time. It’s a total life commitment. You can be a part-time activist but you cannot be a part-time revolutionary. And yet, the problem is that we lack the infrastructure and the revolutionary commitment to actually make continuous, long-term struggle a viable possibility for enough people.

There is a reason why so many organizations on the u.s. left are filled with people who are either extremely young, in their late teens or 20’s, or elderly, perhaps retired, in their 50’s or 60’s. You notice that there’s this huge gap in the middle, because most of these 20 year olds, when they inch closer to 30, are going to start giving into the social forces that mold their class position. They’re going to go to graduate school, and start their careers. They’re going to get married and have kids and buy houses and cars. It’s a straight escalator from one thing to another, and people think they’re making these choices independently but there are these very real and powerful social forces that exist to take them out of the struggle. Perhaps after their kids are born, they’ll occasionally show up to a weekend protest with their toddler in a stroller and tell themselves that they are doing radical parenthood. I’m not saying people can’t have kids. But all of these ideas are tied up in class and property in a particular way, and it is that way for a reason. Idealism can only last for so long.

On the flip side, when people finally reach retirement age and their labor is no longer productive to capitalism, they will start to feel a bit lost, lacking in purpose, maybe lonely, so they will join an activist group as a way to “get involved” or “meet people.” But again, there’s this hobbyist quality to the whole thing. None of it is really serious. The basis of analysis is always the individual, their life, their preferences, their career, their goals, their aspirations and interests. It is not the collective, or collective need. This is how capitalism teaches us to think, and this is the governing logic of much of the u.s. left.

How do we get rid of this kind of conditioning? I think it is very difficult to reject these social forces. They are extremely real and extremely powerful. But again I think it has to begin with a real commitment to transforming ourselves, to totally rethinking our orientation toward struggle. To engaging in criticism and self-criticism. We need to learn to enjoy serious argumentation, to welcome being wrong or being convinced out of a previously held belief, not because we love debate for its own sake, but because we are sincerely committed to getting to the bottom of something, to really finding out the truth about it and not just copping out at “we can agree to disagree” or “you have this ideology and I have that ideology.”

Gravity is real! That is not up for debate or a matter of opinion! It has been discovered and proven! But somehow, we don’t treat social reality with the same level of seriousness, and just fall back into this easy idealism of, oh, well, you’re an anarchist and I’m a communist so we just think differently about this. This isn’t about dogma, it’s about being committed to figuring out what is actually real and recognizing that some ideas or strategies are going to lead to better or worse outcomes for real people leading real lives, depending on whether or not we got the math right.

This leads me to my final question, which is something we spoke briefly about before. What, to you, does true militancy mean? What does it look like? There is this tendency to reduce the idea of militancy to either rhetoric or actions, but it seems like there is more to it than that. Can you get into this a little?

EC: Militancy isn’t just chanting that you support the resistance or waving certain flags. It’s not something you say. I feel like there has been this really weird dynamic, especially over the past couple of years, where ‘militancy’ takes form in people trying to chant the “most radical” things at protests, and sort of laughing at or making fun of other organizations who they think chant “less radical” chants, as if the content of the chant is what matters. But it’s all still happening in the realm of ideas; It’s all still treating “the war” as something that is happening elsewhere.

So, I think militancy starts with acknowledging that we are at war, right here, right now. The state is waging war. It is waging war on the countries it is targeting with imperialist violence, it is waging war against the people of oppressed nations living in internal colonies within the imperial core, it is waging war against potentially insurgent elements. The most oppressed masses already know this, of course. But even though some popular leftist organizations might occasionally superficially acknowledge this in political rhetoric, it doesn’t seem to impact how they actually function as organizations.

Once you acknowledge that we are actually at war, then I think militancy can take shape. The specific chants don’t really matter all that much. What matters is skills, training, capacity, logistics—you know, the things that actually produce capable fighting forces.

Every so often, some video of Patriot Front or the Proud Boys training goes viral. I see leftist after leftist retweeting the videos of them practicing hand to hand combat or moving as a group. But the leftist response isn’t calling for the left to train, rather it’s usually simply making fun of the fascists for looking silly. The leftists laugh and shake their head about how silly the fascists look and then move on. I feel like this is another manifestation of people not really getting that we’re at war. How do you see the fascist enemy training and your response is to laugh, rather than think about what that means for you, for the most marginalized among us?

I also think of militancy in terms of forming objectives and assessing results. If a military general kept calling for their troops to fight the same battle plan over and over, and every time it was tried, the results were a bunch of casualties with no real gain, that general would be fired (or worse). But it’s normal to see the same leftist orgs call for the same protests over and over, with the same results: zero tangible gains but lots of folks getting sick, arrested, beat up, burnt out. We should be rigorously assessing the costs of these tactics and consciously deciding if they are worth it, not just using certain tactics because those are the tactics we are used to using.

Radical political organizations that want to embrace militancy should be studying, training, and directly trying to analyze and confront their internal contradictions. They should be trying to develop the infrastructure and skills that are necessary for struggling. They should be doing what they can to protect their members (and communities) from COVID and other dangerous health-threats—recognizing that viruses are also part of the war the state is waging. They should be thinking about loss of morale, about divisions of labor, about trying to constantly study what the state is doing and figure out why it’s doing it. In other words, they should focus on the material.

Editor Note: This piece was drafted before the empire and its vassal state escalated into all-out war with Iran. We have kept the language the same. For more info on our analysis and position on that subject, see our article, “TURN THE WORLD WAR INTO A CIVIL WAR”.

On February 24, 2026, the goblin-king of the high petty bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the settler labor aristocracy took the podium in the heart of the Burgerreich to deliver his paean to US military and economic power. Amidst what has become an all–too–typical celebration of US empire, the chief executive officer of the imperialist plunder machine delivered a few remarks that we should pay attention to. Yes, his rambling, often unfocused speech was full of little misrepresentations and outright lies,¹ but more importantly, it was filled with signals about class policy.

We have to remember the intended audience for big events like this. It’s televised and scrutinized by the politically active members of the US labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie and sometimes analyzed by the ruling class of other countries for signs about presidential plans.² This isn’t the imperialist bourgeoisie talking to itself; this is the executive branch of government setting out its bait for the masses of labor aristocrats. We have to keep that in mind when assessing the truth of the regime’s claims. This isn’t a board meeting, but rather an advertising campaign.

So what did the Burgher King say?

He was less combative in defense of ICE and CBP than he has been in the past – in fact, he didn’t mention any DHS agency by name. This reflects the government’s awareness that the federal occupation of Minnesota is deeply unpopular. Trump’s regime has been widely unpopular with the middle and lower petty bourgeoisie, but it can only continue its course with support from the labor aristocracy and upper petty bourgeois elements.³ Trump himself must be seen to bridge the gap between the ruling class and the reactionary labor aristocracy in order for the right-fascist coalition to maintain its integrity. 

The speech was peppered with shout outs to members of the US imperialist armed forces,⁴ and “victims” of immigrants as well as a handful of labor aristocrats who, thanks to the Burgher King, have finally managed to become landed property owners and fulfill the American Dream of owning a plot of land. Kissing the dirty boots of this sovereign, every parasite can be a franchisee – to every roach, a toy with their meal. 

Yes, Trump also thanked some members of the ruling capitalist class by name (Michael and Susan Dell and Brad Gerstner) while at the same time sounding the false populist drum of the Stop Insider Trading Act.⁵ The goal of this rhetorical move, of course, is to contrast the “good” ruling class (capitalists) with the “bad” ruling class (politicians) while obscuring the real relation between them, that members of Congress are the servants of the capitalist class.

By far the bulk of the speech was devoted to nativist fear mongering about immigrants. It also included naked threats issued to Iran, demanding the Iranian state surrender its nuclear weapons program or suffer an invasion.⁶ There was a token reference to the policy of trans genocide (inverted, of course, as “saving” children). In its entirety, the speech was clearly aimed at stoking the traditional US middle-class militarism and strengthening the regime’s basis among the labor aristocrats they have been alienating with their Minneapolis operation. The Burgher King attempted to negotiate this while downplaying the fault-line he has opened with the US vassals in NATO.⁷

The regime’s rhetorical commitment to the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie remains loud and steadfast. Trump referred to: a state college savings program for children designed to increase class mobility, a federal pension program for private employees to maintain government savings accounts and putting them on the federal dole,⁸ his success in keeping mortgage rates down to make housing affordable, and keeping property rates high for the value of housing and land to remain a viable path for investment and class ascension to the labor aristocrats.

In the wings, the imperialist bourgeoisie are slavering for war in Iran, occupation of Venezuela, and increased pressure on the US working class.⁹ The main media outlets, which deliver news to the vast majority of the US population, have neither attacked nor defended the speech except to note where it was factually inaccurate. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Democratic “opposition,” stood and applauded when the Burgher King called for war in the Middle East.

As long as the labor aristocracy stands by the side of the big imperialists, the revolutionary situation will never mature fully. There is an opportunity, here and now, to break this connection. As the Trump regime moves into territory ever-more-fervently desired by the big bourgeoisie, our window for the wedge grows wider. We must break the complacency of the labor aristocrats away from the imperial bourgeoisie; the only way to do that is to build up the revolutionary consciousness and organizational level of the real proletariat and force the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie into a reckoning with its material complicity with the terror-regime of Washington.

1. The rate of inflation has been 3% and 2.8% for the first two months of this year, not “the lowest level in more than five years,” even if you take just the CPI. ︎
2. Nielsen estimates that 36.6 million people viewed the SOTU address and 70.7% of those viewers were 55 or older. https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2026/32-6-million-watch-2026-state-of-the-union-address/ ︎
3. The MAGA approach has been to try to fuse the labor aristocracy (the middle and upper ranks of the imperialist proletariat) with the high petty bourgeoisie. ︎
4. Buddy Taggart, a WWII soldier; Sarah Beckstrom, the West Virginia National Guardsman who was killed in DC; Andrew Wolfe, another Guardsman; Eric Slover, one of the Special Forces animals who kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela; 10 other unnamed special forces dogs; and navy murderer Royce Williams, who fought against the self-determination of the Koreans in Korea and the Vietnamese in Viet Nam. ︎
5. He named Nancy Pelosi by name as a corrupt politician. ︎
6. “[T]hey were warned… yet they continue starting [the program] over…. We are in negotiations with them…. But we haven’t heard those secret words, ‘we will never have a nuclear weapon.’” ︎
7. See, for instance, “Too late, Trump envoys try to reassure Europe,” in The Economist. ︎
8. Direct payments to the labor aristocrats for their loyalty! ︎
9. The Wall Street Journal recently published the articles “Violent Militias Stand Between the US and Venezuela’s Vast Mineral Riches,” “Trump Hails an Economic Turnaround Many Voters Don’t See,” and “America’s Bills Will Come Due.” ︎

The labor union, prior to the entry of the US-bloc into the capitalist-imperialist competition at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, served as the “school” of collective worker action in Europe. It was never so in the US, because the US capitalists simply sent restive workers westward to conduct the continental equivalent of European imperialism but amongst Indigenous peoples. The early 19th century unions were illegal, confrontational, and engaged in direct battle with the bourgeoisie and their capitalist states. Although the western countries reeled from this conflict, they were able to manage the contradiction by doling out the rewards of imperialist exploitation. In Europe this manifested as social democracy; in the US, it took the form of Indigenous genocide and the internal Black colony. By the beginning of the 20th century, it was increasingly in the form of the creation of a “white” (Euro-Amerikan, as opposed to the earlier Anglo-Protestant) national project.

By this time, labor unions had become instruments, not of working class power, but of labor discipline. Unions were legalized and given a stake and a share in the US imperialist project. In this way, the unions were “housebroken” and the mass of the labor aristocracy was broadened just as the frontiers were closed and entry into the petty bourgeois homesteader class was restricted. Failure to recognize this fact (which is obvious to anyone who bothers to investigate for even a moment; see, for instance, the rates of equity held by US workers in real property — the average home equity held in the US is $300,000 — has driven many would-be Communists directly into the arms of reaction.

But what were the features of the labor union that made it a school of communism?

1. Workers were organized and developed experience organizing and running meetings, coming to collective decisions, and exerting power.
2. Collective grievances were compared and conclusions could be collectively drawn as to their source — the contradiction between workers and owners.
3. It was a venue through which the advanced elements and conscious Communist could draw intermediate elements and develop their class consciousness by propagandizing, not only the abstract, but around specific conditions affecting those particular workers.
4. It was directly antagonistic to the continued existence of the bourgeoisie and their state, at least until it was captured.

Present-day labor unions do not possess any of these features. Meetings are pro forma affairs, ill attended, and run by bureaucrats. The unions themselves are managed by professional union hustlers whose job security depends on their capacity to (1) deliver beneficial contracts, (2) come to an agreement with management, and (3) not break any laws, like the ones making it illegal to advocate for revolutionary consciousness or suggest a strike unless the union contract is up.

There is, however, an organ of working class power that possesses these features: the Communist-led mass meeting.

What is a Mass Meeting?

A mass meeting is a gathering of people in one place where they are led by the meeting’s organizers to debate and decide on issues that affect them. The character of the meeting will be determined by, in the first instance, the class character of those in attendance and, in the second instance, by the class standing of the meeting’s leaders. We can think of this as, (1) the potential character of the meeting and, (2) as the direction of change or realization of that character.

A single mass meeting occurs over a period between forty minutes to several hours and is a one-time event. There’s no guarantee that it will develop into a standing organ of working class power, but this question depends on whether the organizers have taken care to answer several underlying issues which will be explained below.

There must be advanced preparation. First, it is important to identify the locality from which the meeting’s attendants are to be drawn. This is ideally an urban working class neighborhood with a high number of nationally oppressed workers and a low rate of real property ownership. This is the mass base of our organizing efforts, and focusing on these areas will ensure a good attendance as well as both a receptive class composition at the meeting and increase the likelihood that anyone drawn into the organization as a result of the meeting will have a revolutionary class standing.

Next, efforts must be made to identify the most pressing concerns affecting the community in question. This is traditionally done by conducting a social investigation. During a social investigation, the organizers go into the community and have detailed conversations with residents and workers. The organizers must keep good notes and direct the topics of conversation into the following areas: (1) the biggest problems the interviewees face on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis; (2) the interviewees’ views on local political figures and bastions of state and civil authority (police, relief workers, religious institutions, local politicians, big politicians, etc.); (3) avenues of relief that are available for community members like local shelters, food pantries, etc.; (4) other local conditions that are particular to that area.

Then, the organizers must analyze the data they’ve gathered. It’s not enough to understand what people say on a surface level. To stop there would be to engage in workerist tailism. The data must be subjected to Marxist analysis, and problems must be understood not only in their surface manifestations, but also in the fundamental contradictions that are causing the problems identified in the reports and investigations. The sharpest contradictions responsible must be sought. The organizers must make explicit the links between these problems, the contradictions that underlie them, and the general tasks of the social revolution in the US bloc: national liberation, sex liberation, and proletarian internationalism. The organizers must have a firm grasp on decolonial, antipatriarchal, Marxist theory in order to avoid the reactionary-opportunist pitfalls that will present themselves.

This analysis is the same kind that’s done when an organization performs other general propaganda work. It is the linking of a particular grievance to the general capitalist system, as embodied concretely in the state and civil society, in such a way as to orient toward proletarian internationalism and a revolutionary outlook.

Once this analysis has been performed and an organizational “line” has been developed which connects the most acute problems of the area with the necessity for organized, antagonistic class action, the necessity to overthrow the bourgeoisie through revolution, the necessity for supporting or attaining national self-determination for the oppressed nations, of national-suicide for the oppressor nation, anti-patriarchal action, etc. — once this has been done, the organization must begin a campaign of mass agitation. A date, time, and place must be set for the mass meeting. Flyers and handbills must be drawn up and copied. Members of the organization must go into the community, armed with this material, and hang posters, have conversations, and hand out literature. The call should be clear: This is the problem; here are its causes; come to a mass meeting to decide (or learn) how to combat it.

If the investigative and analytical stages are carried out correctly, the agitational stage is sufficient, and the date and time are selected with careful attention to the general availability of the masses in the area, then the meeting should be successful. That is not to say that the first few calls for a meeting may not be unattended or sparsely attended. This is not only because of the errors an inexperienced organization is likely to make on their first or early attempts, but also because the organization will not be known and will not yet have currency among the masses.
It is worth noting that the Soviets and councils of the successful Communist revolutions were essentially mass meetings that took on standing form. Indeed, Indigenous nations have been holding mass meetings as the primary method of political engagement for centuries. (See, for instance, Kathleen Duval’s Native Nations: A Millenium in North America, for a survey of Indigenous practices. Random House, 2024). 

What Do You Need?

First and foremost, in order to run a mass meeting you must be organized, that is, you must be a member of a Marxist-Leninist cell that has a defined membership in which labor duties are required of members, has regular and consistent meetings and keeps records, and has written internal rules that govern its structure and actions. Without an organization, it’s impossible to direct a mass meeting effectively or to elevate a mass meeting from a one-time event into a mass organization capable of embodying the will of the working class, which is the ultimate goal.

Your organization must have a sufficient number of real, actually-working members to carry out not only the preparatory tasks, but also to run the actual meeting. We have found that five dedicated cadre-level members is an appropriate benchmark. Each of these five members should be capable of mass work, trained in historical materialist analysis, able to conduct searching social investigations and keep detailed notes, perform analysis on the fly, and have training managing a crowd.

You will also need at least rudimentary graphic design and printing capabilities to prepare the flyers and literature. Your organization will require the use of a large space, whether indoors or out-, to hold the meeting and should secure at least a simple PA system — a megaphone with a detachable mic will suffice. Preferably, all organizers should be able to dress in a manner that marks them out as members of your organization, whether it is a single article of clothing or a shared color. This will allow them to stand out at the meeting and help manage it.

Running the Meeting

It is wise to formally open the meeting by announcing that it’s beginning and asking the attendees to gather around the speaker. Ideally, the speaker will be elevated above the rest of the crowd for visibility and there will be room for at least one other person to stand up there with them.

A short speech is a good way to open the meeting. This should lay out the main topic, any critical ancillary topics, and connect the issue to the imperialist state and the oppressor bourgeoisie. This is a good time to begin getting the crowd involved. Simple questions that can be easily answered (even with just a “yes!” or “no!”) will prime the listeners for engagement and signal that this meeting won’t be a passive affair.

Once the stage is set, the meeting leader should ask the crowd if anyone present has experienced the issue which is the subject of the meeting. If the organizers recognize anyone in attendance who has a particularly good and demonstrative experience, it  can help to call that person to speak first. From this point, tactics will diverge depending on what the organizers intend to do with the meeting. If the goal is just to use the meeting to propagandize, generally elevate class consciousness, test the organizer’s own organization, and make connections with the masses, then the meeting can be comprised almost entirely of calling individuals up to the PA system to speak about their experiences while the meeting leader interposes questions, clarifications, and reframes the issues in a Marxist lens. Once the crowd has been sufficiently propagandized and exhibits a high degree of energy, the meeting leader can deliver a short closing speech to summarize what was said, to draw a broad connection to the capitalist state, to identify the ruling class as the collective enemy, and to stress the need for organization. The meeting leader should propose further meetings and discussions and clearly articulate what organization entails. These somewhat restrained aims are a good target for an organization’s first mass meeting, and may help it develop internal rigor.

That being said, the organizers should never attempt to restrain or repress the organically-occurring maturation of the masses. If the attendees want to engage in debate, discussion, adopt an organizational form, or even settle on concrete steps that can be taken to begin addressing the problem presented, they must not be delayed or put off. The organizers must be ready to capture the energy and foster any kernel of consciousness with real suggestions and real action. This should not turn into a run-away meeting in which the attendees decide to go to war with the state immediately, but neither should the organizers offer platitudes. Real steps may be required.

To that end, it would be wise for the organizers to become familiar with rules of procedure for running mass meetings as an organizational form. These may be home-made, but the latest edition of Robert’s Rules of Order contains good rules for a mass-meeting form that can help an organization run a meeting, maintain a good flow of conversation, and ensure that decisions are made collectively.

The Meeting is Not the End

The most important thing to impart is that the first meeting is only the beginning of organizing. If the organizers wish to push further with their meeting and the mood of the attendees permits it, they should call for a debate on action, set further meeting dates and times, and even consider calling for volunteer officers to serve as an interim executive committee to carry out decisions adopted by the meeting. This body of officers should hopefully contain a mix of the organizers and attendees, and should be subject to elections at the soonest possible opportunity (generally the next scheduled mass meeting).

The organizers should also urge attendees to join any public-facing political education classes they offer. Indeed, this is an excellent opportunity to urge attendees to assist in or join any of the organizers’ other initiatives: Red Aid, community self-defense, etc.

The critical thing is to continue holding meetings, to develop the attendees, and to drive struggle to an ever higher degree. The more meetings are held, the more the class consciousness in the area will be fostered. It is important to ensure that this consciousness does not develop in a reactionary direction, which is why the organizers must be well trained in the most advanced decolonial theory. Armed with the advanced theory and the energy of the masses, the mass meeting is the chief organ of class power available to us at this time.

This most recent scandal again demonstrates the inseparability of the structures of organizing we have criticized in the past from the perpetuation of chauvinism and abuse. As we have written about in the USU Prospectus, it is the top-down structure of major organizations like the CPUSA, PSL, RCI, and FRSO that engender the sort of anti-democratization and stagnant leadership that permit abuses like this to evade accountability to membership. We will offer criticism of that particular structure, and our feedback for what principled communists within and outside FRSO can do to prevent it. 

Following the exposure of a large Marxist organization for systematic permittance, compliance, and covering up of abuses, there is always a sense of hopelessness among conscious members and supporters of the exposed org. Many equate loss of trust in a particular organization with loss of hope in the movement for communism itself. To understand this, we must understand the reasons people overwhelmingly seek out larger organizations to subordinate themselves to, rather than forming their own groups from the ground up. These reasons are:

1. Political Underdevelopment: An individual new to Marxism assumes that an insufficient understanding of core principles and history will make any attempts at group formation, primarily through their own direction, careless or ineffectual.
2. Social Isolation: An individual who feels too socially isolated to begin the formation of a group — they do not have, or are not aware of, proximate access to other unorganized Marxists, and/or do not know where to begin to draw in the revolutionary masses. 
3. Fear of Redundancy: An individual who feels that to start from scratch in organization-building is wasted effort when a suitable organization of principled Marxists already exists within accessible distance. 

Political Underdevelopment

It is precisely the organized pursuit of Marxist understanding that laid the foundation for the emergence of nearly every successful socialist revolution throughout the world (Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, to name only a few). Therefore, if the underdeveloped comrade finds themselves unsure of where to begin, we cannot stress the importance of the study group enough. To study while the world burns is not to waste time, it is the only way to ensure we successfully douse the flames. 

To quote the USU handbook The Study Group:

Therefore, it is no idle fancy that we suggest the study group — the reading circle — as the focus of local work. The study group has historically been the way in which socialists educate themselves and each other. This is the methodology of early socialist development. We must consider ourselves to be in such a phase. We do not suggest the study group because it is simple or because it is the topic which we chose from a hat, but because it is a foundational type of primary Communist organization.

In fact, it is the overemphasis on “action,” before and above theory that will ensure precious time and energy be wasted, yet again. We often see the argument that, “Well, since the dialectic is practice-theory-practice, a group and its members must engage in practice first every single time, then study the results and modify next actions.” But this confuses our place within history; we wander the cramped halls of a library of failures, shelves stocked to burst with recorded practice.¹ What is the history of the Marxist movement in North America, if not the history of wheels spinning in place? This is not to suggest that there has never been progress, but those that did advance the struggle did so as far as they were able and willing to scientifically understand the conditions their actions existed within. 

Social Isolation

For the Marxist that is hesitant to undertake the building of a new Marxist organization due to isolation from other like-minded people in their community, we recommend the following (summarized from the relevant portions of the aforementioned Study Group handbook). First, investigate local conditions to determine demographics and needs. This will inform what the study group will initially set out to study and who in the local area will be most likely to be interested in revolutionary work. After this initial investigation, identify if there are any trustworthy individual Marxists nearby to assist in the formation of an Organizing Committee to adopt basic rules for the emerging organization and plan the first steps in putting it into motion. Whether an Organizing Committee is successfully assembled or the individual Marxist still finds themself operating on their own, they can proceed to the next step which is spreading the word of the study group through fliering or other outreach. We have seen the most success when the fliering advertises a specific text that will be read at a specific time and place, and that there is no expectation of having been familiar with it before the scheduled date.

If, however, the individual Marxist is not able to identify trustworthy individual Marxists nearby, nor engage in much of the on-the-ground investigation and spreading the word that the recommended tactics advise, we recommend getting involved in whatever local organizing is available for the purpose of identifying potential comrades to organize with separately in the creation of the study group. The individual should be wary of the ideological underpinnings of most local organizing, and keep in mind that the most vital work any individual Marxist can engage in is identifying others suitable for the creation of Marxist organizations. It is not the subordination of Marxists to local activism.

Fear of Redundancy

Fear of redundancy when considering building a new organization is, on its own, a valid concern. However, in understanding that it is valid, we must then ask, is the concern well-founded, is it sound? Let us assume, first, that it is. It is true that if you have a principled group of organized Marxists down the street, around the block, within a short bus trip or a bike ride away, then to attempt to build from scratch a new organization of Marxists to address the same community’s needs, to study the revolutionary science, or to otherwise advance the struggle, may be entirely redundant. Even in the cases of an existing organization formed to address a particular purpose (e.g. Red Aid, group study, community defense, etc.) that do not address a particular need an individual would like to organize around, it is in most cases best for that individual or group of individuals to make contact with the local organization and discuss the possibility of joining and forming a branch or committee to the organization that addresses the issue. This has the benefit of additional funding through dues, a preexisting and tested bylaws structure, and the input and labor of more people.

The alternative, more common case, is that through social media or word of mouth, the individual locates an organization of self-proclaimed Marxists, who identify with the same general tendency of the individual, Marxism-Leninism. The individual decides to contact the organization, which seems more than ready to receive and induct them into membership. The individual takes to the work with a sincere drive and passion. Likely, they become regarded by their fellow members as reliable and trustworthy. Principled. 

Then, weeks, months, years later, it happens. Maybe it happens all at once: the individual witnesses, or discovers, or experiences intra-org abuse. Maybe, at first, it’s a subtler, gnawing doubt: a confusing newsletter from leadership that vaguely gestures at some sort of conflict the membership must not allow themselves to be swayed by; the removal of a district organizer with no explanation due to “concerns of privacy”; a series of dead links to organizing cells that no longer exist, discussion of its members heavily discouraged. The more openly the individual confronts these moments of disconnect, these organizational hauntings, the more the individual realizes the organization has begun to shift and squirm around them. The individual’s reputation as trustworthy spoils, now other members seem nervous talking to them; their reputation as principled is outright questioned — “You’re behaving like a wrecker.” The secondary realization will not come easy, that the abuse is not some isolated tumor, but every muscle fiber and bone of the organization. It’s a nightmare, to push for a new life for everyone, only to find you’ve become embedded in a corpse. 

This is the reality of organizations like FRSO, RCI, and PSL. The members satisfied with working in a faux-radical reformist group stay, follow the rules (regardless of how these change based on leadership’s whims), and, understanding that their satisfaction with gradual change and improved conditions for the labor aristocracy is mirrored in the organization, remain unquestioningly loyal to it. Why wouldn’t they? As patriotic settlers and flag-worshipping elites show us, people become fiercely defensive of the structure serving their interests. For this loyalty, they are rewarded with advancement, leadership, maybe even the highest honor of all: full-time employment as a revisionist, maybe even with a corner office. The FRSO whistleblowers say this plainly (emphasis ours):

Each time leadership protects an alleged abuser, those who see the problem clearly either leave or leadership pushes them out, while those who can rationalize the decision remain. Over successive incidents, the organization becomes composed of people who have demonstrated willingness to defend leadership’s protection of alleged abusers. Leadership advances from this filtered pool.

Chrisley Carpio² and Michela Martinazzi³ were present for the Tampa and Gainesville incidents, and defended Dustin⁴ both times. Jared Hamil⁵ was the Tampa District Organizer in 2014. Fern⁶ was the DO of Gainesville in 2013 and Jacksonville in 2016. Sol Marquez⁷ defended Dustin in Tampa. They’ve all since been promoted to national leadership positions in FRSO.

Meanwhile, the members who are most desperate for real sweeping change, no matter how bitter the struggle, the most ready to be revolutionary, are resigned to the rank-and-file. These dedicated comrades are usually the most committed, initially, to the communicated “cause” of the organization. Usually nationally oppressed, disabled, queer, and/or trans, these members give their blood to the organization. It is useful to emphasize the ways in which the “multi-national working class” line that organizations like FRSO hold, and that we have criticized, helps to facilitate an opportunist position not just externally, but internally as well, as we now see clearly. It is by this line that opportunists can lecture members about how it is the advocacy against chauvinism and abuse which disrupts the “solidarity” and “stability” of this supposed multi-national working class. Real determining factors such as settler-colonialism and imperial superwages are flattened for the sake of a model that prizes false unity and not shaking the boat. Sometimes, in spite of being surrounded by this rhetoric, members try to struggle within the organization, like they were told to again and again, only to be stonewalled, silenced, disciplined, and gaslit. The system serves its purpose and crushes all attempts at real revolutionary struggle. Afterwards, these comrades are isolated entirely, betrayed, and often left too burnt out to pick the banner up again. Both leadership and the capitalist state are satisfied by this outcome. Leadership gets to continue its maintenance of a structure purged of genuine communists who may threaten business as usual, and the state eagerly pats them on the back for demobilizing these radicals. Is it any wonder these organizations have persisted in their current form for so many decades?

These organizations always set themselves up as the true inheritors of the future, in contradistinction to the tiny microsect or local study group.  This is how they market themselves — it is the only way they can justify their own drawn out existence. They say, “Well, what else are you going to do? Start a tiny group of three people that claims it represents the masses?” the same way  the Democratic Party defends its position saying “What are you going to do? Run as an independent?”. It is the same logic painted red and yellow. The rhetoric of the reformist clouds the horizon. This is repeated ad nauseum within these organizations and then repeated by members to people outside the group. Even when the principled communists flee these sinking ships in disgust still ready and willing to organize, too often does this toxic idea stick to them, signaling the sequel: the communist goes looking for another “big” org. 

It is crucial we do everything in our power to ensure this doesn’t happen. The choice is not between languishing in bloated reformist NGOs or isolated in some puny microsect for all time. This is a false binary. The true path forward is what has worked for most socialist revolutions around the world. The party of the people is not born from some downtown office that directs the formation of new cells like a chain restaurant establishing franchises. Rather, it is precisely the tiny, local group of principled communists that shifts history, step by step, until a leap and bound, to the party of the people. To summarize the portion on this in the USU Prospectus⁸: the correct path begins with the formation of the local organization, uniquely adapted to local conditions and able to establish roots among the local masses in a way these franchise organizations are incapable of. The local organization then reaches out to other primary groups of principled communists regionally and then around the country in order to collaborate, coordinate, and struggle in a process that eventually enables the establishment of real organizational unity. 

These local organizations are not subordinated to a tiny sect filtered through several vetting processes to remove any trace of real revolutionary consciousness. They democratically determine their own representatives to the second-order organizations they form to coordinate and reproduce their unity. It is through this initially, vitally horizontal process that a greater set of bylaws are written and ratified, a set of practices and standards. Through a series of conferences these local organizations eventually form the party-to-be. 

This is how the vanguard party emerges, not in the backwards manner that the CPUSA, PSL, and FRSO have undertaken. This top-down schematic followed by the chauvinist organizations is the correct blueprint only if your design is a weapon wielded against the people. We, however, wish to help the revolutionary masses build a great cannon to obliterate chauvinistic violence forever. The All-Empire Worker’s League has begun this process. 

Looking Forward

We commend the efforts of our comrades to lay out a plan for agitation and exodus of members from FRSO. As challenging as it may be, it is often far more important that the most principled communists, with the capacity to do so without risking burnout, remain within the exposed organization. Not for anything so foolhardy as to “change the system from within” (you cannot negotiate with the snake from the pit of its stomach), but to agitate and heighten the struggle to a fever pitch from within. As they do this, these communists must seek out sympathetic comrades within who take these abuses seriously but remain unsure for the reasons above. Each rallying cry for justice will peel back the rotting mask of democracy from the revisionist’s face; the skull of reaction will be grinning, sharp, and naked. 

The strategy of agitating around an attempt to seize the structure and body of the organization from its center may be useful in winning over the sympathetic comrades mentioned above, still in the grip of the apparent hopelessness of organizing outside the vast structure FRSO operates. But just as the authors of the exposé recognize, this goal will never be achieved. It is like a radical program that “demands” the United States government liquidate its military. This is a goal of the radical movement, but it is not something that will ever be given, only seized. However, just as part of that recognition is seeing that the settler-bourgeois state machinery will be smashed and replaced with a new structure to defend the revolution of the oppressed, the agitators in FRSO must see the structure of FRSO not as something to be taken and used, but something to be left in the dustbin of history. It is not an organizational system useful to those of us who demand revolution, it is a multi-level-marketing scheme with a beret. 

It is the people you will find while raising hell that will be invaluable to you. You must link arms with the most solid, passionate comrades you can find and only jump ship when you have enough hands to commandeer the lifeboats. Treat the chaos of this scandal as a proving ground for the most trustworthy and audacious communists. When you find your people, we have some resources to help you get started. Just as we were honored to offer our feedback and labor to the reporters of this abuse, we eagerly await your input, curiosity, and fire; not just as members of Unity–Struggle–Unity, but as part of the All-Empire Worker’s League. Meet us, organized and principled, and be treated as you are, as you’ve proven yourself to be: comrades.

Contact the USU Editorial Board here.

Contact the All-Empire Worker’s League here.

Footnotes

1. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Marx. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852. ︎
2.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO, leader of the FRSO Student Commission, and president of National Students for a Democratic Society.” (Copied from source.) ︎
3.  “Member of the Central Committee, current District Organizer of FRSO New York.” Ibid. ︎
4.  “FRSO member who was accused of sexual assault in Gainesville, Tampa, and Jacksonville and protected by FRSO leadership. Left FRSO in 2018.” Ibid. ︎
5.  “Leader of Labor Commission” Ibid. ︎
6.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO. DO of Gainesville when FRSO protected Dustin Ponder in 2013. DO of Jacksonville in 2016.” Ibid. ︎
7.  “Leadership of Legalization 4 All and FRSO Chicano/Latino Commission.” Ibid. ︎
8.  Worth highlighting is the subsection of our Prospectus on FRSO specifically. Written years ago, before our criticisms of them for settler chauvinism and these most recent revelations, and thus offering them more good faith than it turns out they deserved, the section still holds up in diagnosing the issue of structure that produces FRSO’s moribund theory and practice: “FRSO recognizes in theory that primary organizations must be built. However, despite claiming that they are a pre-party formation and not a party, they operate like a party-in-miniature, with congresses, a Central Committee, and central decision-making. The efforts of local FRSO organizers are directed at creating primary organizations — the local is being directed by the center. This reverses the necessary stages of growth of the Party.” ︎

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

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

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

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

The IRS will keep all of its employees.

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

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

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

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

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

Why Did the Government Shut Down?

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

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

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

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

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

Organize Mass Meetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sample Literature

Understanding the Shutdown

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

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

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

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

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

$24.99

In 1978, Hodee Edwards’ Labor Aristocracy first saw print with Aurora Press of Stockholm. In that landmark work, Cde. Edwards cut through the fat of reformist “Social Democracy” in Europe and the settler-relation underlying racial capitalism in the U.S. She revealed, through economic analysis of the presence and source of imperial superprofits, that Lenin’s thesis about the labor aristocracy of the imperialist countries holds more true than ever before — and has been completely obscured by the so-called Marxist-Leninists since the mid 30’s of the last century.

This was work that had begun by Communist luminaries like Samir Amin (Accumulation on a World Scale, 1971; Unequal Development, 1973). Edwards’ book is a thoroughgoing analysis of the imperialist system as it existed in the 1960s and 1970s. It unsparingly excoriates the Marxists who have refused to heed Lenin’s words that “Capitalism has now singled out A HANDFUL (less than one-fifths at the ‘most generous’ and liberal calculation) of exceptionally rich and powerful states which plunder the whole world simply by ‘clipping coupons.’” (V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism)

Cde. Edwards divides the imperial metropoles into two types: those with semi-colonies physically present within them (like the United States) and those who have no internal semi-colonies. She convincingly, correctly, maintains that Social Democratic (reformist, anti-Communist, and revisionist) parties flourish in the second type of country. In the first, open, reactionary, racist terror flourishes instead. The basis for both is the material benefit, the super-wages, the suppressed prices of luxury goods, that come as a bounty of imperialist exploitation and which are shared with the imperialist’s “own” workers.

This book is a critical text. Without understanding the problem of why revolution has not yet been successful in a developed imperialist country (or even attractive), we cannot begin to assault the bastions of capitalism. Cde. Edwards’ work comports with the practical information gathered over ten years by social investigations and organizing among the staff of Unity–Struggle–Unity Press and all of its affiliates. We can confirm that Cde. Edwards’ analysis explains the reality of organizing in the imperialist centers almost precisely.

This new, second edition printed by Estuary Press, is vital to study. Unfortunately, it introduces a number of irritating formatting errors (mis-numbered end-notes, mysterious extra blank pages, bs where there should be hs, indicating the use of an OCR method) which detracts somewhat from the overall reading experience — but nevertheless, all those who would claim Marxism-Leninism in the imperial centers must read this book and other works that address this problem.

Though we object to numerous aspects of the article, we would like to focus on three key failures: (1) Sykes collapses class struggle down to a binary, (2) Sykes uses an inadequate definition of settler colonialism, (3) Sykes argues against strawmen, showing little evidence of having read theoretical works by those they are attempting to refute.

It is the duty of the Communist movement to study the actual reality around them, to adapt their theory to fit those conditions, and to use this theory to lead the working classes to victory over the old society. It is a serious perversion to study theory and demand conditions alter themselves to match what is written on the page. Sykes insists that the working classes of the U.S. empire’s oppressor nation have the same immediate material interests as the working classes of its oppressed nations and as the oppressed nations of the world. Only someone with fundamental misunderstanding of material reality or a mind completely rotted away by chauvinism could entertain this notion for more than a moment before discarding it.

It is, rather, our duty to identify the internal contradictions which prevent the working classes in the U.S. empire from uniting to destroy the capitalist-imperialist state and resolve them non-antagonistically. It is our duty to overcome those internal contradictions. It is impossible to overcome something that, like Sykes, you pretend isn’t there. A man with his eyes closed cannot bridge a gap: he must fall into it.

As a preliminary question, we must then ask: why has revolution failed to manifest in the U.S. and other imperialist centers for over one hundred years? Should we make the same mistakes? If not, what can we do to avoid them? Certainly not repeat the same tired chauvinist platitudes that destroyed our hopes at revolution in the 20th century.

Point 1: Sykes sees class struggle as a simplistic binary

Sykes describes the position of their ideological opponents in this way:

“[T]he basic argument from the proponents of this theory goes something like this: The United States remains today a settler-colonial state. People of European descent, regardless of their actual class position, are settlers, and are seen as continuing to benefit from and perpetuate a colonial system. In other words, the people of the United States are divided into two camps, with the colonized in one camp, and the settlers in the other. Some even go so far as to say that this makes up the principal contradiction in the U.S. This is furthermore viewed as a fundamentally antagonistic contradiction.”

In brief, Sykes accuses their opponents of collapsing class struggle into a binary, with settlers on one side and the colonized on the other. This accusation comes with some irony, as Sykes declares their own position to be one of collapsing the class struggle into a different binary:

“[W]e see a division of U.S. society into two camps. On the one hand there is the camp of the capitalists, and on the other the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and oppressed nationalities. The principal contradiction is therefore between the capitalist class on the one hand, and the multinational working class and its allies on the other, particularly the oppressed nations.”

Sykes goes on to propose that the “multinational working class and the oppressed nations” must form a “united front” against capitalism. We agree that the working classes must come together in solidarity to struggle against capitalism. However, we understand the working classes of the imperial core as a multitude of classes, often in contradiction with each other — gender, settler-colonial, and imperialist contradictions. The class struggles of U.S. society cannot be collapsed into two camps, except at the broadest level. These are the ultimately antagonistic camps of worker and owner — but that is not the only class antagonism that exists, that is not the only contradiction that exists.

Communists do not traditionally champion the proletariat merely because it is among the most oppressed classes or because it is a uniquely communistic class. Communists champion the classes most receptive to their message and who are best prepared to build a revolutionary movement.² In our conditions it is the colonized working classes who play this role. A Communist movement in North America must be led by centering decolonization and opposing settler interests. This is because the interests of the colonized are directly opposed to the immediate interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and so they are most in line with the interests of the international working masses. These decolonial priorities must inform organization structure, programming priorities and political education strategies at every level, and must certainly not be relegated to the realm of mere “special consideration.”

For example, resource extraction projects often find popular support among the white working classes that see them as opportunities for jobs that will keep bread on the table or keep gas prices low, which puts their immediate material interests at odds with the indigenous communities whose land sovereignty these projects violate, and instead aligns their interests with those of the bourgeoisie. As Communists, we know that it is also in the long-term interests of the white working class to respect land sovereignty, to seek sustainable energy sources, and for workers to own these productive means and not private companies.³ To resolve these contradicting interests and to unite these forces, it is essential that political education center decolonization and that institutional structures insist upon decolonial priorities over these immediate interests of the white working classes. 

Sykes does not recognize that the white working classes have real material interests in settler-colonial relations, insisting that it is only “the monopoly capitalist class who reap the super-profits from national oppression,” and denying that an entire ideological superstructure has formed to support these material interests of settlers (“those ideas [racist and white chauvinist ideas] are the ideology of the class enemy.”) Because these material interests are not acknowledged but are instead papered over, FRSO’s political program is unprepared to deal with contradictions between the colonized and the settler working classes. 

Point 2: Sykes presents a woefully inadequate definition of settler colonialism

Sykes defines settler colonialism as follows:

“U.S. settler-colonialism is a particular social formation with a particular set of contradictions at the heart of it. Historically it is a transitionary period in the early development of the capitalist mode of production. It is characterized by the dominant role played by the contradiction between settlers on the one hand and colonized people on the other. This contradiction is the main thing shaping the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production in the period of ‘primitive accumulation’⁴ during its nascent development. In this way, settler-colonialism fueled the rapid growth of the capitalist mode of production in the early United States.”

This definition requires settler colonialism to be transitionary, conveniently making it by-definition incompatible with capitalism. It is also a tautology: settler colonialism is a contradiction with settlers on one side and colonized people on the other. Furthermore, this definition fails to distinguish between colonialism and settler colonialism. These are modes of extraction and oppression with different characteristics, and this difference is crucial for understanding our present context. 

Let us contrast Sykes’s near-meaningless definition with definitions used by those who do argue that the U.S. is a settler-colonial nation. Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks, is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, an Indigenous studies scholar, and associate professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. He defines settler colonialism in this way:

“A settler-colonial relationship is one characterized by a particular form of domination; that is, it is a relationship where power…has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority.”⁵

For example, the Dakota Access Pipeline was proposed to run within 10 miles of Bismarck, ND, but because it would require additional new infrastructure construction, because it would threaten the water supply of the settler city, and because it would violate settler laws about residential zoning, it was decided that it would cross the Standing Rock Reservation instead. Indigenous land defenders waged years of struggle in the form of protests, legal challenges, sabotage, and eventually open violence. Though many settlers joined the movement, the majority of local settlers did not and were content to allow the project to continue. The state’s subsequent violent clamp-down on protests enabled the project to continue to completion. Ultimately, the settler state almost always sides with settler interests, which occupy a position of entrenched institutional privilege backed by the monopoly of violence wielded by the bourgeoisie. 

Patrick Wolfe, historian and scholar of Aboriginal history, described as a “cherished friend of the Wurundjeri” at his memorial service, said the following about settler colonialism:

“The primary motive for [settler colonialism] is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler-colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”⁶

That Sykes’s definition does not even mention territoriality is a critical error in analysis. In skating past the material basis of the settler-colonized contraction, Sykes appears to see the contradiction not as a material class relationship facilitating the violent acquisition of land and accumulation of power through control over land, but as a mere contradiction of identity. The colonized and the settlers may as well be two opposing football teams for all it matters to Sykes.

Wolfe also notes:

“Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory … The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In common with genocide as Raphaël Lemkin characterized it, settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.

…

In its positive aspect, the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler-colonial society. It is both as complex social formation and as continuity through time that I term settler colonization a structure rather than an event.”

Sykes merely views settler colonialism as an event. To them it is an ephemeral phase of the development of the contemporary state, a phase which has long since passed and only bears consideration as an academic matter. Sykes fundamentally does not understand what settler colonialism is or what it does, and was evidently not challenged by others in his organization. As a self-professed “revolutionary” organization operating within a settler-colonial system, FRSO can and must do better than this!

Point 3: Sykes argues against strawmen

Sykes sets out to refute “the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory” but does not name these opponents, nor quote them in their own words. Indeed, Sykes shows little evidence of having read many theorists of this persuasion at all. The crux of Sykes’s assertion that the U.S. does not remain a settler-colonial state is that this phenomenon happened a long time ago and the U.S. is no longer an English colony:

“[S]ome people believe it’s as simple as ‘once a settler-colony, always a settler-colony.’ This is metaphysical thinking. While it is true that the legacy of settler-colonialism in the United States certainly persists, the systems of oppression have not remained static. … As the capitalist mode of production developed, this transitional settler-colonial period had to give way to mature competitive capitalism, bringing forth new contradictions.

…

As the book An Economic History of the Major Capitalist Countries by Kang Fan puts it, ‘American victory in the war [of Independence] and the subsequent establishment of the United States overthrew England’s colonial rule in North America. Domestically, it swept aside many feudal remnants, and it opened the road for the development of capitalism.’ Lenin called the War of Independence ‘one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few,’⁷ and after that war the U.S. was no longer a colony.”

It is true that settler colonialism is not a static arrangement, this of course would be metaphysical thinking, if anyone were actually asserting this to be the case. Theorists that refer to the United States and Canada as settler-colonial states have also noted that socioeconomic relationships have changed over the last centuries. The argument, however, is that settler-colonial relationships that dispossess Indigenous people of their lands and self-determining authority continue to play a role in our society.⁸

For example, Glen Coulthard notes “the escalating onslaught of violent, state-orchestrated enclosures following neoliberalism’s ascent to hegemony has unmistakably demonstrated the persistent role that unconcealed, violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts.”⁹ Nick Estes, describing specific examples of violent dispossession of indigenous communities in the 21st century, states “settler states like Canada and the United States continue to settle the land, raping and killing Native women and Two-Spirit people in order to do so.”¹⁰ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues settler-colonial ideology continues to shape the behaviors and beliefs of both settlers and new immigrants:

“A ‘race to innocence’ is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression. This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country’s past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.”¹¹

Racing towards innocence themself, Sykes does not engage with these Indigenous scholars, nor, as previously pointed out, with any theorist that believes that “the United States remains today a settler-colonial state.” The result is that this “scientific” analysis falls apart when consulting the works written by theorists that term the U.S. a settler colonial state.

Instead of putting forth any effort to understand and critique the arguments made by those who call the U.S. settler-colonial, Sykes dismisses this position because his unnamed opponents are alleged to be petty bourgeois: 

“The petty bourgeoisie, the class of small business owners or petty capitalists, is under immense pressure  … from the working class on the one hand, whom they exploit generally, and the monopoly capitalists on the other hand, with whom they cannot compete. Because they are driven to ruin by the monopoly capitalists, and ultimately have no future as a class, they sometimes take up radical, even revolutionary, ideas, however inconsistently. … They are not members of the working class and do not grasp the centrality of the working class in the socialist revolution. They take up all sorts of petty bourgeois ideas about the backwardness or ignorance of the working class and take a pessimistic and defeatist attitude regarding the revolutionary potential of the working class. So, they seek revolutionary potential elsewhere.”

Those committing the “error” of asserting that the U.S. remains a settler-colonial state that are not merely petty bourgeois ideologues are instead naively trying to copy-paste their analysis of Palestine onto American soil:

“Second, many see the heroic struggle of Palestinian resistance against Zionism and wish to copy and paste an analysis of the Palestinian struggle onto U.S. conditions. Largely this comes from a desire to use what is happening in Palestine to draw attention to the need for revolution in the U.S. As admirable as this is, the United States is not Palestine, and so this obscures as much as it illuminates.”

True, the U.S. is not Palestine. But in what ways are they different?

“The U.S. isn’t an apartheid system, like ‘Israel’ or ‘Rhodesia’ for example. The horrific system of Jim Crow segregation that followed the betrayal of Reconstruction was itself uprooted by the Black liberation movement. While national oppression remains, de jure segregation no longer exists. The working class, as a result of its historical development, is therefore multinational in character.”

In what ways does national oppression remain? What are the forms it takes? Sykes doesn’t tell us. Certainly “du jure” segregation has long since been abolished, but that naturally leads us to ask, what about de facto segregation? What are redlining, gerrymandering, ghettoization, if not the contemporary form that racial segregation takes? Does the “reservation” system not qualify as an apartheid system? A “reservation” is a particular zone, whose borders are generally designated by the settler state, in which the Indigenous may exercise limited sovereignty and may enjoy the few special rights still afforded them by the settler state. Outside this zone these remaining privileges largely do not exist, and what few there are can only be accessed by registration of “native status” with the state. How is this functionally different from other apartheid systems? How does a native community – isolated and deprived of amenities like consistent access to electricity, sanitation, and clean drinking water – have identical class interests with a settler community? The suburban sprawl of settler communities, with their huge homes, lawns, commercial plazas, and roads and parking lots their cars, have paved over the land and natural resources which the indigenous used to rely on for life. To claim these two groups are, in the present moment, a single class is simply ridiculous.

If one wishes to truly refute settler colonialism as a discrete theory of class relations and historical development in the contemporary U.S. empire, one would have to actually engage with prominent theorists, in their own words, and present a real counterargument. Instead Sykes sets up a pair of easily dismantled strawman positions, tears them down, and calls it a day. 

Why Was This Article Written?

Sykes emphasizes the need to “understand the contradictions at work in society,” recognizing the stakes for this debate are high: 

“[I]f the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country. Indeed, such a view sees the ‘settler working class’ as instruments of colonialism, hostile to the interests of the colonized people, rather than viewing all working and oppressed people as natural allies in the struggle against imperialism, our mutual oppressor.”

In other words, the author asserts that if the theory of settler colonialism is correct, their own revolutionary program is incorrect and will not work. Therefore the settler-colonial theory must be incorrect. Rather than engage with the actual arguments put forth by theorists, Sykes sets out to collapse class struggle down to only that of workers versus capitalists, and builds their argument backwards to support this conclusion.

Of particular note is the author’s implied assertion that socialist revolution is impossible within the context of settler colonialism. This is not the conclusion reached by proponents of settler-colonial theory, but appears to be what the author believes is the necessary conclusion reached by settler colonial theory. 

Nick Estes documented the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline that brought together Black Lives Matter activists, revolutionary socialists, and poor whites:

“Political elites and corporate media have frequently depicted poor whites and poor Natives as irreconcilable enemies, without common ground competing for scarce resources in economically depressed rural areas. Yet, the defense of Native land, water, and treaties brought us together.”¹²

Aligning with the interests of the colonized is the clear path to unity and intensification of the struggle. We have to ask, then, if the proponents of settler-colonial theory are not incorrect, why does the author believe this obviates the possibility of building a multinational communist party? We certainly do not believe this. 

We can glean greater insight into FRSO’s position by breaking down its key points:

1. Settler-colonial theory asserts that the interests of the settler working class are hostile to the interests of the colonized masses.
2. Revolution can only be carried out by broad unity of the working masses across national lines.
3. If (1) is correct, then (2) is impossible to achieve. 

By process of elimination, we are led to conclude that:

4. The position of the FRSO is that revolution is only possible through the participation of settlers as a class. The settler-colonized contradiction must not be abolished as a primary revolutionary task, but relegated as a secondary consideration. 

Why not come out and say that then? Why cloak it in this obfuscating argumentation about how settler-colonial theory is petty bourgeois? Some insight may be gleaned from this earlier passage: 

“They [the ‘petty bourgeois’ proponents of settler colonial theory] are not members of the working class and do not grasp the centrality of the working class in the socialist revolution. They take up all sorts of petty bourgeois ideas about the backwardness or ignorance of the working class and take a pessimistic and defeatist attitude regarding the revolutionary potential of the working class. So, they seek revolutionary potential elsewhere.”

We can derive the following further conclusions from this: 

5. FRSO believes proponents of settler-colonial theory are searching for a revolutionary subject outside the “working class”.
6. Following the above conclusion (4), FRSO sees the “working class” as being chiefly comprised of the settler masses, and the colonized masses as being peripheral contingents of workers incapable of independent revolutionary action, or as groups outside the working class entirely.

This conclusion (6) is further supported by the final passage in the article: “Only the multinational working class, allied with the liberation movements of oppressed nationalities, can overthrow the rule of the capitalists, smash the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, build socialism, and end exploitation and oppression once and for all.” (Emphasis ours.) The liberation movements are here considered separate from the proletarian struggle, one which the “multinational working class” must ally with. 

Sykes attempts to establish that the “multinational working class” is a single revolutionary body above lesser considerations like nationality: 

“While national oppression remains, de jure segregation no longer exists. The working class, as a result of its historical development, is therefore multinational in character. This is because workers of all nationalities, both oppressed nationality workers and white workers, toil shoulder to shoulder on assembly lines and shop floors, in kitchens, warehouses and offices, from coast to coast. Even as national oppression puts greater pressure on oppressed nationality workers, they are still forged into one multinational working class together with their white siblings as they suffer exploitation together under the same bosses.”

However it is difficult to square this with the above conclusions. If Sykes’s position is incorrect and the interests of the colonized must be centered in order to defeat the settler state, then it follows that revolutionary organization must be built within the colonized masses first, and in the process their leadership will provide the basis for international unity within the U.S. empire. If proponents of settler-colonial theory are wrong, then certainly the above quoted passage is more-or-less correct, but how then are we to understand the general tendency of settlers to align themselves with the capitalist class? Importantly, neither position rules out revolution, only defining the overall strategy by which it is to be achieved.

This then explains Sykes’s assertion that proponents of settler-colonial theory are “pessimistic and defeatist.” Only if we accept the premise that the settler masses are the only class capable of leading the revolutionary struggle would insisting that they are incapable of revolutionary action on the basis of their settler identity lead us to the conclusion that revolution in settler-colonial states is simply impossible. This conclusion then leads us down the path of reformism or nihilism, a truly counterrevolutionary and reactionary mode of thought. 

But this is not scientific socialism. Many assumptions are being made without supporting evidence: 

1. The settler masses are the chief revolutionary subject.
2. Unity between settler and colonized is necessary for revolution.
3. The capitalist-worker contradiction supersedes national contradictions.
4. Unity between settler and colonized is possible on the basis of (3).

Far from clarifying the strategy for revolution, FRSO’s position muddies the waters of national oppression and settler-colonial theory. Far from presenting a unifying message, it attempts to build the case that issues of national oppression are secondary to the class struggle. By attempting to place national oppression in the backseat and “multinational unity” in the driver’s seat, FRSO once more sets down the worn and tired dead-end path laid by the CPUSA in the 1940s and 50s.

A Scientific Case for Revolution

Our position is this: the settler masses of the U.S. empire are materially invested in the perpetuation of settler-colonial property relations. Petty bourgeois ideological currents are predominant among the material beneficiaries of settler-colonial land theft and imperialist resource and labor exploitation.¹³ No class unity can develop among the settlers except through outright rejection of settler privileges. However, their privileged class position is fading as imperialism continues its historical decline. The “middle classes” are historically doomed, just as Marx observed in the Communist Manifesto. Furthermore, the question of national liberation in the U.S. empire is not separate or peripheral to the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, but is the most advanced form that this struggle takes.¹⁴

Our movement’s abysmal historical record is reflected in this – by failing to recognize the petty bourgeois tendency of the settler masses and the proletarian character of the movements for national liberation, and by nature of the settler masses being the majority of the population of the U.S. empire, our movement has historically centered petty bourgeois leadership and strategy, firmly positioning the interests of the proletariat in a perpetually secondary and subservient role. In order to carry out revolution this relationship must be reversed. We must center the struggle for national liberation and decolonization as the particular forms taken by the proletarian struggle in the U.S. empire. In doing so we can establish a clear revolutionary path forward, one which invites the beneficiaries of fading U.S. imperialism to reject their doomed privileges and join the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. It is not the colonized masses which must ally with the leadership of the “multinational working class,” but the settler masses who must discard their petty privileges in order to ally with the proletarian leadership of the colonized masses, and only by doing so can we at long last forge the basis for a truly multinational working class movement.

1. J. Sykes, “Marxism-Leninism and the theory of settler-colonialism in the United States”, Fightback! News, December 4th, 2024. <link> All quotes derive from this article unless otherwise indicated. ︎
2. See, for example: Mao on the semi-proletariat versus the land-owning classes (<link>) and on all the classes of a nation united versus imperialism (<link>); Lars Lih on the Bolsheviks and the proletariat versus Tsarism (in Lenin Rediscovered (2008), particularly pages 6-7); Marx on the revolutionary potential of the Russian agricultural commune, contrasted to the Western European proletariat (<link>). ︎
3. In fact, Marx and Engels highlight the dehumanizing effect capitalism has on capitalists too, a dehumanization that would be abolished through the dissolution of capitalism. “The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence.” (<link>) ︎
4. Sykes also misunderstands what is meant by “primitive accumulation.” This is a basic or initial step in the process of capital accumulation, where resources, labor, land, etc. are violently appropriated and transformed into capital. This process necessarily occurs prior to the ability of wealth to function as capital, but it is nevertheless ongoing. See W.C. Roberts, What Was Primitive Accumulation? Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept (2017) <link> ︎
5. G.S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, “Introduction: Subjects of Empire” (2014). Emphasis in original. ︎
6. P. Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”, Journal of Genocide Research (2006). <link> ︎
7. The revolutionary nature of the American War of Independence has been challenged since Lenin’s time, see G. Horne, The Counterrevolution of 1776 (2014). ︎
8. For example, in 2017, the Canadian state upheld that corporations may continue to profit through the use of Indigenous territory against the wishes of the Indigenous communities affected. <link> ︎
9. G.S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, “Introduction: Subjects of Empire” (2014). Emphasis in original. ︎
10. N. Estes, Our History Is the Future, “1. Siege” (2019). ︎
11. R. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, “Conclusion: The Future of the United States.” (2014). ︎
12. N. Estes, Our History Is the Future, “Prologue: Prophets” (2019). ︎
13. D. Phos “Then as Farce” (2024) <link>, “The Middle Class Is Not a Myth” (2022) <link> ︎
14. In Accumulation on a World Scale (1970) Samir Amin identifies the emergence of the bourgeois-proletarian contradiction on an international scale, where the “center” nations of the capitalist world system occupy a bourgeois oppressor formation, and the “periphery” occupies an oppressed proletarian formation. This differentiation also occurs within the borders of center nations: “The mechanisms of centralization for the benefit of the dominant capital also apply as between the different regions of the center: the development of capitalism is everywhere a development of regional inequalities. Thus, each developed country has created its own underdeveloped country within its own borders.” ︎