“The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty for a few pence. They cravenly preached ‘social peace’ (i.e., peace with the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the ‘sympathising’ intelligentsia.”

Perceptions of material and social precarity in the middle classes (principally settlers, petit bourgeoisie, and the imperialist working class) tend to produce two outcomes, both a product of the heightening of the international class struggle. In the first case, middle class precarity can produce real class consciousness, that is, proletarian consciousness. In seeking answers to the problems faced by the middle classes, a small contingent of radicals emerges who seek education on matters of class conflict, imperialism, colonialism, settler occupation, racism, patriarchy, and the international Marxist-Leninist, Decolonial, Indigenous, and National Liberatory traditions. In the second case, a broader movement of false class consciousness, that is petit bourgeois consciousness, emerges. The latter is what we’re going to look at here. What is false consciousness? This broadly refers to all forms of middle class consciousness which purport to be liberatory. Because of the diversity of interests represented within the middle classes, these forms of consciousness are equally diverse in content, though in practice they all point in the same direction:  continued bourgeois supremacy over the whole world. 

Contemporary liberalism for instance can be analyzed as a form of middle class consciousness: extolling the supposed intrinsic virtues of order and procedure, universal equality before the law, freedom of expression, and “non-violence” as a central tenet of political activity. In false consciousness, the individual begins with the assumption of an ideal reality towards which to strive, and through political action attempts to shape material reality according to these ideals. In actual practice, this produces a dogmatic approach to political activity where these central tenets of Liberalism are more important than the material outcomes. Why is this? Attempts to label liberals as unintelligent, misguided, or otherwise unaware of the contradictions within their approach to political activity are unsatisfactory, as can be quickly seen when these contradictions are pointed out in discourse, and liberalism demonstrates its boundless capacity to deny, distort, and excuse. What then is the material outcome of liberal political activity? Social and institutional inertia, the preservation of the status quo, and ultimately support for and defense of oppressive white supremacist regimes of settler-colonial occupation, and imperialist exploitation of the global south. It’s important to note here that these patterns are not necessarily inherent to any particular ideology, but to the class itself.

The professed ideals are a smokescreen for the material outcome, which is the real intended function of the ideology. This smokescreen serves mainly for the benefit of the ideology’s adherents, who easily learn to live with its contradictions by rationalizing their ideas as being broadly “correct” on the basis of their own material concerns. If they are comfortable, they feel their worldview is approximately correct. It is only when they experience or expect discomfort that they begin to change their worldview, and usually only by demanding the restoration (or increase) of privileges. This additionally serves the interests of bourgeois rule by keeping the politically active sections of the masses debating and disputing one another’s ideological conceptions — conceptions rooted in the material interests of different strata of the middle classes. These debates, while sometimes incredibly lively, all operate within the bounds of the overarching middle class interest of the continued maintenance of the settler empire, and at their most intense represent conflicts for control over the levers of imperial power, but never stray into the realm of revolution. While the right wing of the settler empire is happy to experiment with new methods of control and dominance in the face of crisis, the imperial left wing can only debate and denounce, or at most occasionally roll back or delay particular reforms taken by the right. This leads to a circular process, a sort of political holding pattern that can only react to events and retroactively justify inaction and passivity in the face of crises, rather than actively struggling to change reality. 

Whether their words say so or not, the liberal does not want to solve homelessness, because to do so would require the overthrow of the regime of private property which is fundamental to imperial land speculation, the surest path to “financial security” (that is, upwards class mobility) available to the middle class individual (which most commonly takes the form of “homeownership”). The liberal does not want to free Palestine, because to do so would be to shatter the legitimacy of the institutions which actively maintain the occupation of Palestine, and which at the same time actively maintain the occupation of stolen Indigenous lands inside the borders of the U.S. empire, and which actively maintain the continuing flow of inexpensive commodities and superprofit-inflated worker wages into the empire. 

The liberal may go as far as to couch their demands in radical language, but the demands remain reactionary nonetheless. In the case of homelessness, liberals will advocate for jobs programs, or zoning reform, or expanded homeless shelters, and so on, measures which may or may not produce improvements in the conditions of the homeless population, but which are ultimately aimed at maintaining homelessness as an institution by providing a harmless outlet through which to redirect any resistance against the private property regime. At the same time, the victims of housing exploitation are corralled along lines amenable to the bourgeois/settler state, and violence is employed against them should they resist or fail to comply with the measures imposed. The language may say “end homelessness”, but the demands say “the homelessness regime is in need of maintenance”. In the case of Palestine, the most popular of such liberal measures is the two-state “solution”, which seeks to divert the struggle for national liberation into a formalized acceptance of the occupation by Palestinians, and a concretized formalization of apartheid by the occupation. The language may say “Free Palestine” but the demands say “the occupation has a right to exist”.

With this analysis in mind, let’s now turn to the issue of middle class “communism”. On the 22nd of May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two staff members of the Palestine occupation regime, shouting “Free Palestine!” during the act. In doing so he tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the U.S.-israeli empire. This was, first and foremost, an act of radical love for and solidarity with the Palestinian people, the victims of the occupation’s genocidal onslaught. At the same time, this was an act of political desperation, a refusal to accept the normalization of genocide, whatever the personal costs may be. In doing so, Rodriguez called direct attention to the failure of the “Free Palestine” movement within the imperial core to heighten the struggle and bring tangible consequences to the perpetrators of the Gaza Holocaust. In one stroke, Rodriguez demonstrated that resistance is absolutely possible, and that those of us who have so far failed to organize militant violent resistance to imperial genocide are failing in our duty to uphold and defend the oppressed.

Seemingly frightened to the core at the dreadful thought of militant struggle against the state, the so-called Party “for” Socialism and Liberation, and the so-called “Communist” Party USA both immediately leapt to denounce this heightening of the struggle. Professing a commitment to “peace” and “non-violent struggle” these organizations have eagerly demonstrated in action the real aim of their respective programs: maintenance of imperial rule and the bourgeois monopoly on violence. We already knew this was the case, but the discussions erupting around these revisionist statements point in the direction of the future of this movement, and where the red line of class allegiance is to be drawn. Remember to ask: what is the material outcome of their political practice? This will inform us as to their actual goal, and in turn the outcomes of their practice will inform us as to their class allegiance.

The goal of the settler Communist, as a member of the international middle classes, is to leverage their material and social privileges in the interests of the international proletariat, with the aim of the liquidation and abolition of the settler class. The goal of the settler “communist” is to claim to fight for liberation in word while obstructing liberation in practice. They will therefore wield whatever institutional power they possess to effect this desired outcome. The CPUSA claims to fight for liberation in word, but in practice they canvass for bourgeois parties, instruct their members to “call their senator” in response to genocide, platform and defend zionists, and denounce violent struggle. These proponents of watered-down and sanitized “communism” are not doing this because they are unintelligent or ignorant or otherwise unaware of the aims of Communism, but because these actions serve their real material interests. During the First Inter-Imperialist War (1914 to 1918) the leadership of the Second International famously betrayed the aims of the Communist movement in favor of backing their own respective national bourgeois formations, not because they misunderstood the aims of Communism but because their aims were the interests of their own class, which at the time was benefitting tremendously from the expansion of imperialism and the intense exploitation of the colonized world. Today this opportunistic betrayal of the proletarian struggle repeats itself, as it has for most of the past century, in the settler-run “communist” and “socialist” parties. 

Marxism-Leninism has been proven, time and again through the history of the last century of class struggle, to be the most potent ideological tool wielded by the revolutionary proletariat. In this sense it is a dire existential threat to the continued privileges of the imperial middle classes, whose comforts are predicated on the very system which Marxism sets out to defeat. Despite this, it does not require any greater degree of cognitive dissonance (compared to adherents of liberalism) on behalf of the middle class radical to claim adherence to Marxism while rejecting it in practice. It is equally as trivial to wield the phraseology and aesthetics of Communism in the interests of the settler middle class as it is to wield liberalism for the same. The difference is that while liberalism is at present a decaying order, increasingly seen as obsolete by the masses, Communism is, after decades of decay and decline, currently on the ascent in international power and influence. It is therefore more urgent than ever that committed revolutionaries study Marxism. It is the development of mass consciousness which is the antidote to the opportunistic poison of middle class radicalism. Don’t just accept what we tell you to be the truth! You have to study, learn for yourself, and develop yourself and your understanding. Settler radical “communists” prey on youth and ignorance, turning potential budding revolutionaries into the footsoldiers of the perpetual counter-revolutionary holding pattern. Marching in cop-approved circles waving signs and decrying “violence” in word while supporting it in action as colonized people are actively being exterminated with your tax dollars feels wrong because it is.

Equally as urgent is the need to recognize the direction that settler “communism” is developing. No ideology is static while it has living adherents, and the ideologies of the middle classes are no different. As mass consciousness has developed and grown, the settler “communist” parties have been forced to take up the increasingly radical and revolutionary language of the proletarian struggle and distort it in order to adapt it to their aims. In recent years these parties have started talking of issues like settler colonialism, decolonization, national liberation, gender liberation, and so on. When they think they can get away with it, they denounce these issues as “un-Marxist”, “revisionist”, “ultra left”, etc. If they feel they can no longer hold back the tide of consciousness this way, they may adapt by accepting these ideas in theory while continuing to struggle against them in practice. Beware of “communists” who claim settler colonialism is no longer an ongoing structure, but an event of the past, or “communists” who promote a workerist agenda to the exclusion of Indigenous, Black, Queer, and women’s issues.

The old adage that if you “scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds” holds truer than ever today. Faced with culpability in the extermination of the Palestinians, liberals have roundly demonstrated their commitment to upholding the imperial order no matter the human cost. This development does not create fascists out of liberals, but exposes the classes invested in liberal ideology as being committed to the same interests as fascism. This commitment is inherent to the class, not to the ideology. Though liberalism is fundamentally incoherent, this is owing to its idealistic character which it draws from its reactionary class representatives. Marxism is not fundamentally incoherent, but middle class “communism” only superficially resembles Marxism, and in practical character functions identically to liberalism.

Does this mean that the so-called “communist” parties of the middle classes have more in common with fascism than proletarian Marxism? In most cases this still remains to be seen: will the settler “communists” change their allegiance when a really revolutionary international proletarian party emerges? For many, particularly among the disillusioned youth of the movement, the answer is certainly yes! For many others however, their commitment to the imperial order will win out. With the undeniable necessity of Marxism-Leninism becoming clearer by the day, many middle class radicals are even now preparing to either stem this tide for as long as humanly possible, or to subvert it to their own ends. “Marxism” which openly upholds such reactionary and counter-revolutionary values as US nationalism, the patriarchal family, “anti-woke ideology”, queer/transphobia, zionism, etc, has been emerging. And while the left wing of the middle classes can only hand-wring over the (potential) loss of their privileges and otherwise maintain the counterrevolutionary holding pattern, the right wing is openly preparing to mount a renewed offensive against the proletariat by consolidating the middle classes under the banner of “Marxism”.

We’ve seen reactionary middle class revolutions before. It bears reiterating that the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) called itself a “socialist workers’ party” because it was drawing on popular radical ideas of the time, portraying itself as a “sensible” third way alternative to radical Bolshevik terror and failing capitalism. In our time the ideas have changed somewhat, but the processes of class conflict are very similar in many ways. When our own NSDAP emerges it will drape itself in both the red flag and the U.S. flag.

What are the hallmarks of an organization which upholds false consciousness?

• Attempts to control members, rather than empower them. Members are isolated from their community rather than supported as Communists within their community.
• Stifles development through repetitive tasks and overbearing bureaucracy, rather than making development and the carrying forward of the struggle the key priority.
• Education takes a lower priority to “action”, rather than practice and study being treated as equally important aspects of the dialectic of development. Members are taught what to think rather than how to think.
• Opaque and/or impenetrable internal organizational functioning, instead of clearly defined rules which everyone follows and which everyone has a voice in the drafting and implementing of.
• Communications with central leadership are limited to commands that are carried down the line, rather than a dialogue.
• Leadership is upheld on the “strength” of their ideas, rather than on their contributions of labor to the struggle.
• Decisions are justified by appeals to the authority of leadership, “The Party”, etc. rather than democratic accountability. 
• Leaders are treated as rulers to be obeyed, rather than servants of the membership and the people.
• Ossified leadership structures, leaders are not subject to recall, elections do not happen or are designed to reproduce leadership power rather than empowering the general membership.
• Historical revolutionaries (particularly Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao) are treated as infallible prophets whose word cannot be challenged, rather than regular human beings whose ideas should be studied and understood holistically and within their particular historical contexts.
• Contradictions in the ideology, outlook, organizational functioning, decision making, theoretical disagreements, etc, are resolved with appeals to “faith” in the organization’s mission or leadership, or the words of the aforementioned “prophets”, rather than constructive struggle.
• Attempts to engage in constructive struggle are shut down, treated as “wrecker” behavior, or ignored, rather than embraced as necessary to the development of the proletarian party.
• Finances are kept hidden from the membership, and/or spending decisions are made without the consent of the membership, rather than being open and democratically accountable.
• The voices and contributions of members from oppressed populations (women, Indigenous, Black, Queer, disabled, etc) are dismissed, excluded, minimized, or otherwise disempowered or decentered, rather than being held as central to the proletarian struggle, and empowered and uplifted by the organization.
• Discussions with or about other organizations are discouraged or silenced, rather than being considered essential to the task of building unity among the Marxist movement.

If you feel like you or someone you know may be involved in an organization which upholds false consciousness, we have several articles which can provide further guidance:

• From USU: Cadre Development Literature, Organizing Theory
• On the Cult Form: The Cult Building Tendency
• On CPUSA: A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words, Against CPUSA’s Colonizer “Communism”
• On PSL: Revolution in Our Lifetime
• On FRSO: Colonizer “Communism” in the FRSO, The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO
• On DSA: Organize Within the DSA!, Uncommitted: A Lesson in Counterinsurgency

The struggle for the Party is at times a bitter one, and promises to only grow in contention as the proletarian movement builds momentum and begins to truly challenge the established “communist” institutions. Already many middle class “communists” resort to increasingly coordinated campaigns of harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence in order to assert the “legitimacy” of their particular organization. Committed revolutionaries must understand the backwardness of this approach: To assert authority without the backing of the proletariat, or to attempt to cudgel the proletariat into submission to “the party” can only ever at most postpone the emergence of the Party of the revolutionary proletariat. 

The Party will form the vanguard of the revolution only when the masses of the most oppressed internationally recognize it as their representative and their weapon in the class struggle, wielded by and in the interests of the international proletariat.

Last week, the popular consciousness once again exploded: Elias Rodriguez, unable to find an organization that was prepared to meaningfully confront the economic and political machinery of the U.S. state — unable to find some way to strike at the U.S. backbone for the zionists’ genocidal army — took desperate, direct, action. He killed two genocidaires in the heart of their rear base, the United States.

With this act, Elias has done more to expose the opportunists who wrap themselves in red flags than a century of angry condemnations. As the news and capitalist police rushed to connect Elias with the PSL that “party” for socialism and liberation issued a statement disowning him. “We have nothing to do with this shooting,” their media people wrote — but they didn’t stop there. “We have nothing to do with this shooting and we do not support it.”

OK, they’re under pressure to prevent the state from swinging its heavy hammer in their direction. It’s a cowardly but comprehensible move from an organization with no underground that has never laid out a clear theoretical path from the present moment to a future revolution. A Communist party cannot hide its plan for revolution!

The CPUSA then released a long-winded weepy statement condemning “MAGA” and Trump and openly denouncing violence. They never mention, of course, Joseph Robinette Biden or his genocidal advisors. Scores of Trotskyists began to wail and gnash their teeth, doing their best to deny Elias’ heroism.

These people have either forgotten or are intentionally distorting the goals and meaning of the Communist movement. Our aim is to carry the red flag forward, to rally all progressive forces to fight for liberation. Liberals, who make even their protests serve to uphold the capitalist-imperialist systems of oppression, despise liberatory violence. Pacifism is the credo not of the revolutionary, but of the priests of capitalism, of the adherents of order. Our work is to destroy the capitalist order.

One of the tasks of the Communists, especially now, while the revolutionary class in the West is scattered and incoherent, is to teach the masses to reach toward a revolutionary horizon; it’s to give the working class the power to imagine a future where they actually confront the enemy class and its footsoldiers, not metaphorically, but actually — with guns and bombs.

Anything that makes that job harder, like scandalizing the outbursts of liberatory violence that come with the sharpening of contradictions, is not only a poor tactic, it is actively reactionary.

Petty-bourgeois social democrats and “Communists” tend to be cowards. Unable to imagine revolution, unable to conceive of fighting or (imagine it!) dying for a better world, because they already have so much to risk, so much to lose. They have an instinctive fear of destabilization and violence. Psychologically, that occurs because the capitalist state and the status quo works for their class. They see, in the state and its politicians, their actual representatives, or at least their proxies. They see, in the state and the police, human beings; themselves.

Denouncing violence will not endear the working class to communism. It will not fool the agents of the capitalist state. It will not deflect scrutiny or prosecution. By denouncing explosions of liberatory violence, a Communist does not correct the “error” of the masses in their use of individual terror. Warping Lenin’s criticisms of the Social Revolutionaries can’t justify a Communist in rejecting liberatory acts of spontaneous terror. Adventurism is the act of an organization that disorganizes the masses, not the spontaneous expression of mass anger. There is no coherent class consciousness in the U.S. to disorganize, let alone a party that might disorganize it.

What is the source of this gross misdiagnosis? The Trotskyists and revisionists have identified Elias Rodriguez’s acts as the result of organized terrorism, directed by a theoretically insufficient party, like the violence of Narodnaya Volya or the Social Revolutionaries. What they fail to realize is that Russia had to pass through Narodism before it arrived at Marxism-Leninism; Narodism was the unconscious urge without scientific analysis that helped to organize the class. The second thing they fail to recognize is that there is no revolutionary party in the West. If there were, Elias Rodriguez would not have done what he did, because there would have been a viable organized alternative.

And yes.

That party might make use of terror against the state.

The time has come for all principled Marxists to engage directly with the student movement and aid it in its self-organization. The student movement  must now adapt and advance to address the new needs it has called forth. The state is using  a two-pronged assault on the movement: the first prong is the use of the legal repressive apparatus — the courts, the police, deportation — and the second prong is the use of the civil institutions acting  as state agents (in this case the universities) which are expelling, suspending, and revoking the degrees of student radicals.

As repression intensifies, it becomes clearer and clearer that we Marxists have not learned the correct lessons from the initial attacks on the movement (see our prior article, “Join the Student Movement!”). The movement must become organized to a high degree. Organization must develop in a particular direction and particular fashion to address the attacks the movement is now suffering.

That means the movement must develop to address:

• Organizational safety from the university system’s discipline;
• Physical safety from federal and state agents of repression (police, ICE, etc.) as well as paramilitary responses from private citizens;
• Anonymity of the leadership cadre and opacity of plans of action;
• Open lines of retreat after actions, and cessation of all action that results in identification or arrest.

To the purpose of addressing these issues, we have put together the following plans that Marxists involved in the movement should pursue. As always, we encourage to the strongest degree that any Marxists involved form separate, Marxist-Leninist organizations that are not directly integrated into the student movement and that can guide and coordinate the actions of the individual Marxists involved.

Organizational Defense Against the Universities

The universities are the second rank of defense for the state against the advent of student radicalism. In particular, elite universities like Columbia serve as the center of social reproduction for the ruling class, and thus are very concerned with the needs and demands of that class. These universities obviously have a class-character and a class-standpoint; their faculty are overwhelmingly high petit-bourgeois or bourgeois and their class standpoint is direct adherence to the haute bourgeois imperialists.

Despite the fact that they are “private” institutions, the university system is very malleable to the wishes of the government (and thus, the ruling class through its government agents). They have traditionally been the seat of reproduction for the reactionary vanguard, the CIA, and have always acted hand-in-glove with the state itself. Thus, we should not view the university system as separate from the state, but rather an extension of the state’s power into the social life of society. The university is the agent of the state. In this way, they act as machines of repression like the courts and prisons.

Columbia in particular has increased its repressive activities against student radicals: they have fired the leader of a student-worker union, issued expulsions, suspensions, demanded in-class attendance despite the threat of federal agents prowling the campus to deport radicals, private hearings with students, etc.

Defense against these tactics cannot arise spontaneously; it must be coordinated. The universities, as de facto agencies of the state, are too large and powerful to bend to pressure unless that pressure is exerted on a mass scale. Even the student population itself may be too small to draw the necessary concessions. Thus, the defense against the universities requires the utmost in organizational advancement and will also require the development of direct ties between the student-radicals and the masses of workers in their immediate area. Luckily, even the petit-bourgeoisie is likely to be outraged at the encroachment of the universities on the traditional “liberties” (as liberals understand them) of the students, particularly those who are members of the petit-bourgeois or bourgeois ranks of society. This represents a contradiction which must be exploited, a wedge which must be leveraged against the universities to the greatest degree possible.

1. Internal Solidification and Resilience

Resiliency is the order of the day. Withstanding legal or quasi-legal pressure requires resilience, specifically the organizational resources to ensure that everyone involved in the radical project stands in solidarity with one another. There are several components to a resilience of this type. The first is organization.

Organized groups are more resistant to repression. By organization, we mean a determined set of relationships and rules by which decisions are made and authority is delegated. The student-radical groups must be democratic, they must have defined membership, and they must have defined leadership and delegated channels of authority. This is the first step toward resisting the quasi-legal pressure being brought to bear by the universities.

This organization should then proceed to hold meetings with all involved and ensure that everyone understands the necessity of absolute solidarity. These meetings can boost morale, bring everyone on the same page as to strategy, and collect reports of issues being faced by the student-radicals.

The second component of this resilience is support. Once an organization is functioning, it must begin to garner material support for the radicals being targeted by the administration. This works in concert with component III of this proposal, the existence of Safehouses. In essence, those targeted by the administration should be assured of 1) housing, 2) income or essentials, and, where possible, 3) paid work. In order to achieve this, the organization should pool the resources of its individual members and solicit resources from outside in an effort to prepare for the necessity of material support. This should be done before it is necessary to draw on these resources, but that moment may be behind us.

2. Aggressive Legal Defense

The student-radical organizations must also prepare to strike back in the bourgeois courts with an aggressive legal strategy. The maneuvers currently being undertaken by the administrations are quasi-legal at best, and are subject to challenge. They can be slowed by entangling them in preliminary injunctions and litigation, particularly in federal courts where the local federal judiciary may be seeking to prove its independence from the central government.

This arm of the strategy should be carried out by trained movement lawyers who understand the necessity of militancy in the face of the current repression. We would recommend speaking with the National Lawyers Guild in detail about the potential for pro bono representation.

3. Prepare Plans for Tuition and Labor Strikes

The prior two stages should prepare student-radical organizations for the next stage of escalation: tuition and labor strikes. Unlike regular capitalist businesses, the universities have a flow of income that is independent from their labor-force. This often comes through the state apparatus itself (witness Washington’s attempts to interfere with Columbia’s internal operations by threatening to withdraw funding). However, there is a reliance upon both tuition and student labor in the allocation of university resources.

Tuition and labor strikes must be highly coordinated to be effective, and a large minority of student-workers and tuition-paying students must be prepared to expose themselves to the potential repercussions before they can be successfully carried out. However, given a high degree of organization, they can be extremely effective in bringing the administration to the bargaining table and forcing concessions. 

4. Connect with Unionized Workers on Campus

Other workers on the campus — faculty and staff — should be brought into the movement. Any student-radicals that are not yet in deep dialogues with the unionized workers on their grounds are cut off from the wider pool of labor solidarity and the above-listed labor strikes under C will be far less effective. The survival of the student movement relies on it connecting with the broader struggle of working people and uniting both of those struggles together.

At this stage, with many imperialist unions disclaiming Palestine solidarity, it is important that the student-radicals carefully assess whether the union leadership on their campus is friendly. If they are not, the radicals must bypass union leadership and instead establish connections directly with rank-and-file union members. They should be prepared to explain the manner in which the struggle of the student intifada is connected to the struggle of the unionized workers.

Student Self-Defense

In order to preserve their physical safety from state agents, the student-radicals must adopt modes of self-defense. We propose four steps or stages of heightening intensity to the student self-defense efforts:

1. Identifying the most vulnerable student-radicals;
2. Establishing a phone tree and lines of communication and warning;
3. Designating an on-call schedule for phone contacts; and finally,
4. Forming on-call defense brigades for physical confrontations.

1. Identifying the most vulnerable

The radical organizations, once fully formed, should reflect carefully on who is the most vulnerable to state action. Foreign nationals or anyone who could presumably be deported with a minimum of legal fiction should take precedence over others. Those who are being monitored by the state for any reason — plea bargains, court programs to get rid of cases, etc. — should also be considered. The organizations should privately draw up secret lists of those who must have the highest level of security.

2. Establishing the phone tree

An emergency phone tree must be established. Everyone in the organization should provide two phone numbers and at least one email address. The organization should then establish the call protocol in the case of any threat to an individual or group of student-radicals. Each person should have at minimum two other individuals to contact when an emergency begins. Once someone is contacted, they should immediately contact their listed “downstream” individuals. In this way, the entire organization can be alerted in very short order.

3. Designate an on-call schedule for the phone tree

Optimally, there will be one or two points of contact for the phone tree at any given time who make certain they are available. Anyone experiencing the threat of physical repression should call the on-call numbers; the on-call members may then communicate with the organization’s sitting body for self-defense to determine what actions are appropriate and then begin activating the phone tree. In most cases, physically assembling at the site of the emergency should be considered first.

4. Forming on-call defense brigades

Once the organization reaches a certain degree of development, the decentralized phone tree method should be transitioned to the formation and training of on-call defense brigades who can be called up to respond to emergencies. These defense brigades should be armed with some hand-held striking weapon (bats are a perennial favorite) and trained in defensive tactics. They will be called to rapidly assemble to sites where individuals find their safety threatened.

Safehouses/Underground

The student movement has called forth the need for a functioning underground. Those exposed leaders who now stand subject to vigilante threats or state action must have somewhere safe to retreat to until the crisis subsides. The construction of an underground now will provide the infrastructure for underground actions in the future and will heighten the degree of development of any student-radical organization.

We propose the following phases or schedule of establishing an underground:

1. Establish the network of safe locations available for long-term occupation;
2. Establish safe practices for moving between locations;
3. Prepare retreat plans for people who have been identified under II(1) above;
4. Transition to in-person meetings for all action planning.

1. Establish a network

This requires drawing up the names and addresses of everyone with space that can be used to hide people moving into the underground. A network of 5+ locations is required for this to be effective. These people must be trustworthy and developed, and must realize that they may be seriously inconvenienced for an extended period.

2. Establish safe practices for moving

The organization must establish a protocol for the safe transfer of radicals from safehouse to safehouse. This includes communication between safehouses (to be done in person at pre-arranged locations) as well as what physical routes will be taken and measures taken to obscure the identity of the people being ferried between safehouses.

3. Prepare retreat plans for those identified as most vulnerable

Everyone on the high vulnerability section of the organization’s vulnerability chart should have immediate emergency plans in place should they feel their safety is compromised, with predetermined signals and safehouses to arrive at.

4. Transition to in-person meetings for all action planning

No actions should be planned on any electronic media. All actions should be planned face to face and in person. Communication by digital media should be minimized as much as possible.

This is the Hour

We do not have much time. The student movement is under threat and must radicalize or it will be excised from the universities. Trained Marxists should endeavor to teach themselves the skills necessary to perform the tasks outlined above and should integrate themselves and offer their services to the student movement immediately. If you have resources or access to spaces that could be used as safehouses, you should make that known and contact student-radicals with that information immediately.

A luta continua!

Social revolution does not exist in the abstract; social revolution is always a concrete, embodied event or sequence of events. Those Marxists who make of revolution some nebulous virtue, rather than recognize it as a real process, are doomed to remain on the sidelines of the actual revolutionary movement. The social revolution comes clothed in actual struggles, and special tasks depending on where and when it occurs. This fundamental idealist error – the “pure class revolution” – has permitted the noxious rot of opportunism to destroy any chance for the Communist movement in the western imperialist powers. Because the leading “communist” organizations in those states refuse to grapple with the reality of the class structure in the imperial centers, they spend their time daydreaming, marching, and idling their time until a future where pure class revolution becomes possible – a future that will never arrive.

We Marxist-Leninists who truly understand historical materialism are left to pick up the pieces. For us to bring about the revolution in the imperial centers we must not only combat the powerful forces of the enemy state, but also their auxiliaries, the pure revolutionists, who insist on ignoring all existing conditions and carrying out their revolutionary daydreaming in a fantasy land based on their misreadings of past revolutionaries. Wherever these hollow revolutionaries spread their doctrine, they draw emerging class-conscious workers into their way of thinking; soon, these newly class-conscious workers are miseducated into becoming further ambassadors of the “pure revolution.”

While it is our task to build the revolutionary party in the United States-Canadian bloc, we must build it in such a way as to forever combat this source of opportunism and revisionism. Decolonial Marxism-Leninism is the only tool we possess that can inform the construction of such a party. Where the pure revolutionists decry that decolonial theory is the bane of Marxism, we know that it is only the bane of their fangless Marxism. They are terrified of it because it restores the fangs in the doctrine of social revolution.

Decolonial Marxism-Leninism embraces the two special tasks of the social revolutionary in the U.S.-Canadian bloc, namely the resolution of the national/imperial question and the woman question (which could more properly be phrased the domestic labor or reproductive labor question).

Decolonization is simply the national question applied to the conditions of the U.S.-Canadian bloc. The revisionists deny that there is a national question to address today. They often dress this denial in many colors; some say that there is no such thing as settler-colonialism, or that the period of settlement has ended and therefore settler-colonialism is wrapped up and done with. By this they mean that oppressed nations within the U.S. are not actually nations and therefore do not require self-determination. They subordinate the national question to the class question, and demand a pure social revolution in which the oppressed nations within the imperial centers must place their concerns for sovereignty aside. In fact, they deny a national struggle at all – these nations, which they have downgraded to ethnicities, must set aside their national demands. According to these revisionists, only the proletariat of each ethnicity need be approached and brought into the movement.

Do we need a special term to denote a kind of Marxism-Leninism that recognizes the need for the national struggle? Is that not the essence of Marxism-Leninism? Sadly, the term has been so perverted by the century of false struggle in the U.S.-Canadian bloc that we do need a special term. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxist-Leninists” (don’t laugh!).

Although we must draw from the entire corpus of works from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, we must also incorporate the critical analysis of the later 20th century from Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and George Jackson. The Russian and Qing empires did not engage substantially in the African slave trade or the Scramble for Africa – which is one of the reasons they lagged behind development of the European and colonial slaving powers – so the special task of national liberation did not take the form in the Tsarist or Qing empires that it must take here in the United States and its satellites.

To put it simply: the legacy of slavery and genocide at the hands of the settler population in the United States and Canada is not merely past, but continues on into the present. Combating this special form of national oppression is the task of Decolonial Marxism-Leninism. 

What Are the Central Tasks?

The formation of a guiding party is imperative for the revolutionary movement. It is impossible to form a militant revolutionary party while still being unclear about who our friends are and who our enemies are. Therefore, it is critical to the establishment of the revolutionary party-to-be for us to flush our enemies out into the open and draw a firm line against them. We want nothing to do with these pseudo-Marxist neocons, these Marxists-without-national-liberation; instead, we must actively seek to exclude them.

This can be done by openly embracing the two tasks of the social revolution in the U.S.-Canadian bloc: the liberation of the nationally oppressed through the establishment of national sovereignty (what our enemies contemptuously call “Landback ethnonationalism”) and the complete depatriarchalization of society. We must proclaim these tasks as the baseline for unity.

These tasks are the clothes that the revolution comes to us wearing, and they form a suit that would have been easily recognized by Marx or Stalin. They are the national question, as applied to the U.S.-Canadian bloc, and the question of reproductive/domestic labor, or the woman’s question, as applied to that same region. They manifest in the West as the tasks of decolonization and depatriarchalization, which are each composed of several necessary elements.

Departiarchalization must take the form of structural social changes, focused on true emancipation for women and LGBT people, the reorganization of productive and reproductive labor along gender-equal lines, the abolition of all outmoded institutions, industries, and medical, professional, and cultural practices that rely on gendered violence and maintain gendered oppression; the exact programmatic answers to these questions, however, are outside the scope of this present manifesto. The need is currently to break with the opportunist elements of the Marxist movement, and that requires a firm and explicit program of decolonization.

Decolonization

Decolonization is the task of establishing national self-determination for the oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canadian imperialist bloc. The desirability of the national self-determination of oppressed nations is beyond the scope of this article. We urge you to study Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and the other Marxist-Leninists for the answer to this question.

Here we are speaking of real nations, not, for instance, the reactionary projects of Cascadia or the secession of California or Texas. The really-existing oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canada are the Indigenous nations, the Black nation, and the Puerto Rican nation. There may be others, but such a determination would need to be made by careful examination of the national question in each individual instance.

As for the Black, Indigenous, Hawaiian, and Puerto Rican nations, decolonization means:

1. Economic sovereignty – that is, land reform;
2. Political sovereignty – that is, the freedom to establish politically independent states; and,
3. Cultural sovereignty – that is, the freedom to engage in culturally significant practices.

To achieve these three parts or elements of the task of decolonization, we must commit firmly to a program that guarantees them. The party-to-be must promise, in action, that Decolonial Marxism-Leninism means:

1. The establishment of Land Tribunals to be carried out by the existing Indigenous nations and the guarantee to abide by all their decisions; these Land Tribunals to distribute the geographical territories of the continental U.S. and Canada, excluding the Black Belt, to the apportionment of the Indigenous nations or, should the Tribunals so decide, to set aside geographical territory for the  construction of a plurinational socialist state where no Tribune claims that territory as national;
2. The redistribution of all land in the Black Belt to the benefit of Black workers and farmers;
3. The redistribution of all lands in Puerto Rico and Hawai’i to the benefit of Puerto Rican and Indigenous Hawaiian workers and farmers;
4. The support of all forces that are actually national-liberationary in character regardless of their class composition;
5. The complete  destruction of the U.S. state and its departments at all levels; and,
6. The incorporation of national proletarian elements into the party-to-be with the structural guarantee of authority over all programs and strategy concerning land and liberation.

This struggle cannot be downgraded to a mere aspect of the overall class struggle. It is a task separate and discrete from the final social revolution — and a task that, if not undertaken, precludes the possibility of a successful revolution. The proletariat of the oppressor (“Great”) nation (the imperial whites) must be made to join with the struggles of their nationally oppressed siblings to control their own national destinies. This is the meaning of proletarian internationalism at this stage of the revolution. To the greatest extent possible, the party-to-be must encourage and prepare the oppressed national proletariat to command the new states that emerge, but this is not a necessary outcome, so long as the nation is freed from the shackles of economic and cultural control. Should it prove impossible to establish socialism in one blow, we must commit to a longer struggle. It may be that we must win each national revolution as part of a nation-democratic front and the struggle must then move to the contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the national proletariat. This would not be a defeat, but a victory! However, should we correctly navigate the struggle for self-determination, there is no necessary barrier to the emergence of the social revolution at once from the many national revolutions; that is, each national revolution may pass over into the social revolution.

On that same line, we Communists are not in a position to insist on the establishment of socialist construction within any of the resultant territories after a decolonial revolution. Without the establishment of sovereign national territories, national oppression will continue to persist and mar the construction of socialism. Should the Land Tribunals and land redistribution set aside or grant territories for the establishment of plurinational socialism, that will form the basis for a post-revolutionary socialist state. Should they decide against this, it will then pass to the proletariat of the former nationally oppressed nations to struggle within the new context for the victory of the social revolution.

What Is the Demand?

Marxism-Leninism is already decolonial at its very core. It is the science of liberation and its core is anti-imperialism. Decolonization is nothing more than anti-imperialism applied to the conditions of the United States and Canada. It is self-evident for any Marxist-Leninist who cares to apply the lessons of the Russian and Chinese revolutions to our current time and place. Why, then, must we add Decolonization as a term? Because of the perversion of Marxism-Leninism in the West.

Revisionist organizations have threatened to prevent the emergence of a real militant people’s party by devouring all the oxygen in the room, by misrepresenting the meaning of Marxism-Leninism, and by burying the truth in mountains of lies. Marxist-Leninists must not allow ourselves, the heirs of Marx and Lenin, to be drowned out by opportunists and chauvinists. Just as the Russian movement was forced to adopt the term Communist as opposed to Social-Democrat to distinguish itself from the social chauvinism of the Second International, we must do the same. The lessons of the Second International were never really learned in the West. We are fighting that same battle today in a disguised form.

So we say, down with the traitors of the Second International who dress up their chauvinism in fine-sounding socialist phrases and reduce the movement to serve as the ineffectual lapdog of empire! Instead we must forward our demands for self-determination and openly require the task be set forth as the foundational one for the establishment of a militant, revolutionary, Marxist party.

We are faced with a world that, we are told, bears little resemblance to the crucible of the 19th and early 20th centuries from which came the most valiant fighters of the class struggle. We are told that the world of today is not one where where the proletariat has any power, where we are no longer the makers of the world. We see, at every turn, the breakdown of the workshop and factory floor — the growth of the “gig” economy, designed to circumvent worker solidarity and ensure continued precariousness, to prevent the growth of social and economic bonds between workers by shuttling them from one job to another.

We have been told these things, and we, for the most part, grow up believing them. But who told us? The bourgeois ideologists, textbook writers, journalists, and academics whose access depends on parroting the systemic “truth.” Why should we take their words for granted? Is the world more decentralized than ever before, or is this a bourgeois lie? Is the workplace atomized, or is that merely what we are shown? We must remember that the apparatus of cultural production has never been as powerful, and has never been as subject to the whims of its bourgeois owners. We cannot trust the mythmaking of bourgeois culture, we must investigate for ourselves! This means not only gathering data from bourgeois sources, which can be useful, but social investigation on the ground.

This document represents only the first step in a plan to ground our analysis, as a movement, firmly in reality, and to depart from the bourgeois mythmaking. As someone who does not live in New York City, I do not have continuous first-hand access to the conditions on the ground; however, as someone close enough to go there periodically, I hope that this document provokes a series of investigations through which we — Marxists — can collate sufficient data with which to forge a city-wide league of Marxists engaged in collective struggle against the imperialist state.

To begin, then, we must perform a class analysis of the enormous urban site of New York City, including not just Manhattan but all its boroughs. We must also take the measure of the advantages and disadvantages of the urban environment of New York City. While many of us across the U.S.-Canadian empire are organizing in second- and third-tier cities or what is effectively an imperial countryside, we must not lose sight of the special conditions present in built-up urban centers. These include a very large and densely situated population (among which it should be easier to locate radicals), a well-developed system of public transportation, etc. but also includes a large presence of the old, revisionist-opportunist-tailist parties (which Cde-Editor Myrrh has given the clever acronym ROT) as well as the most developed groups of social democrats, all of which work to demobilize and neutralize potential Marxists and redirect popular discontent.

Using this analysis, I suggest a number of measures that can be undertaken to help create local organizations within the city; these organizations can gather more information, study, prepare, and deepen connections with their communities to act. They can publish this information with Unity–Struggle–Unity to share experience with siblings in struggle across the continent and together we can refine our understanding. We must establish not only local organizations, but meetings between them. We must establish not just letters and correspondence, but standing conferences to discuss conditions.

We propose the foundation of a non-sectarian New York League of Struggle, in which many primary organizations act as the cells of membership. We also hope this document may help others outside of New York City perform their own analyses by serving as a model. Obviously, we are in no position to lead the formation of these primary organizations — where USU members exist, they are already doing what they can to do so. Should any of the analysis be mistaken or the recommendations be unrealistic, we urge readers to inform us and help correct the movement.

Class Analysis

Before we can attempt to determine a course of action, we must first analyze the locality in which we intend to act. Historically, the proletarian movement has not emerged in the rural districts, but in the urban centers where manufacturing gathered together thousands of workers, placed them in close confines, and forced them to cooperate by the design of the machinery and workshops.

As mentioned in the introduction, we are often told that the world today is basically different from the world of the 19th century factories. We certainly do not see the same explosions of spontaneous, militant worker’s power that were the hallmarks of the half-century between 1870 and 1930. But has the basic condition of the proletarian changed so much in that time? Essentially, we are tasked with answering the following questions:

1. Is there still an urban proletariat in New York City?
2. Has the system of imperialist spoils established by the U.S.-NATO alliance made class-consciousness of the urban proletariat impossible?
3. If the answer to the first two questions are yes and no respectively, then we must determine i) to what extent the imperialist system has “bourgeoisified” the New York City proletariat, ii) the current consciousness of that proletariat, iii) the allies of that proletariat, and iv) the size and location of that proletariat.

It is clear, from the experiences of Occupy and the 2024 student revolts that, at the very least, a stratum of radical students still exists and is capable of mobilization. Thus, we should also attempt to account for the student movement, and analyze the current position of the student stratum in regard to the U.S. imperial project.

This section relies almost entirely on data gathered by the federal government. It must be supplemented with interviews, examinations, and social investigation. This data is not differentiated for our purposes. While the listings for number of employees in each sector does not include the “managerial” layer (that is recorded separately), distinguishing between petit-bourgeois workers, labor aristocrats, and true proletarians is a task that must be undertaken by Marxists and gathered from more accurate data. The capitalist government simply does not care to record class-status.

New York City: the Epicenter of Haute Bourgeois Power

The largest financial firms in the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire are headquartered in New York City, and the largest among those is BlackRock, Inc., but the city also houses the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, the Goldman Sachs Group, and Morgan Stanley. JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley are the first, third, fifth, and sixth largest banks in the United States by market capitalization; between them, they account for roughly $870 billion — more than the other six banks combined. In assets, these four banks command $1 trillion (one thousand billion) in owned assets while the remaining six top U.S. banks own a mere $700 billion. It should come as no surprise that New York is also the seat of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, two of the largest financial institutions in the world. Every bourgeois economist agrees: New York City is the financial center of the U.S. Empire and the world.

The nerve center of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire — the corporations that run the chief bourgeois institutions throughout the world — is located in New York City alongside these banks. This makes it one of the chief seats of the imperialist haute (big) bourgeois of the U.S.-Canadian empire. It is the center not only of banking, finance, and communications, but has offices from many of the largest corporations in the world. As a result, New York City has the largest urban economy in the empire. This has an effect on the class structure of the city and its boroughs.

If we failed to take the time to examine this economy closely, we might easily be misled by the rhetoric of the bourgeois economists and politicians and believe that there is essentially no productive work done in New York City, that it is merely a parasitic entity living from the blood absorbed by the banks. However, despite the fact that the city employs around 498,000 people in finance, 300,000 people in the tech industry, etc., it also employs 200,000 people in manufacturing jobs. This will be discussed in more detail below. Most of those 200,000 people are nationally oppressed.

The fact remains that the imperialist haute bourgeoisie — the leaders of finance capital — cannot physically do away with the necessary workers to support their financial machinery. Thus, the presence of these enormous offices and management centers necessitates and calls into being the existence of custodians, paper manufacturers, logistics systems to truck in food and fuel, the staffing for grocery stores, restaurants, department stores, warehouses, docks, public transport, and all the other systems that represent the essential arteries of a city.

Decaying Finance Capital and the New York Economy

According to the New York State department of labor, 498,000 people are employed in the financial sector, whereas the total labor force in the city consists of 4,705,000 (four million, seven hundred five thousand) people. Direct support for finance capital accounts for roughly 10% of the overall labor performed in New York City. In 2000, there were 481,000 people employed in the financial sector against 3,640,000 (three million, six hundred forty thousand), or 13%. In 1990, that number was 525,000 against 3,562,000, or nearly 15%. In other words, finance capital in New York City is beginning to decay.

Despite the fact that financial services accounts for a mere 10% of the total employment, it provides 6% of total city tax revenues, 17% of the statewide tax revenue, and 20% of the city’s total wages. The average salary in the financial services sector was $398,000 a year in 2018. The average industrial salary in New York City is $41,000/year. Those employed by the financial bourgeoisie make 9.7 times that average.

Reportedly 113 billionaires — members of the country’s monopolists — live in New York City. One in 24 residents in the city, nearly 350,000, are millionaires. The next-wealthiest city in the U.S. domestically is San Francisco, with 52 billionaires. By far, New York City is the residence of the most concentrated elements of the ruling class.

The Monopolists

Michael Bloomberg, the world’s seventh wealthiest capitalist, not only calls New York City his home, he also owns one of its largest businesses and served as its mayor for a decade between 2002 and 2012. He was a law-and-order mayor, increasing sentences for gun crimes, and lending his name and support for the racist, fascist, “stop-and-frisk” policy, helping it expand and lending it credibility. He supported George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, Obama’s re-election in 2012, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. In March of 2019, despite his claim to support trans rights, he said that “If your conversation during a presidential campaign is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people.”

In this way, Bloomberg stands as the archetypical member of the monopolist class as represented in the capitalists of New York City. A political weathervane. He and the bourgeoisie as a whole are interested only in the protection of their class and expanding their profits. These monopoly capitalists have battled for control of the city for the past five years, since the mayoral races were opened to Super PAC money. Although U.S. social democrats and “Communists” (the Working Families Party, the CPUSA, the DSA, etc.) claim that there are “right wing” and “left wing” billionaires fighting for the soul of New York City, in fact the debates being held amongst the monopoly class are between the left and right wings of capital, between two different camps of billionaires debating the best way to crack down on crime and choosing between subsidizing labor aristocracy and breaking the city’s unions and public services. In other words, the debate occurs ultimately between the right and center right.

The monopolists are the primary enemy of the working and oppressed classes in New York City, but their influence is mediated through their lackeys in the labor aristocracy and their petit-bourgeois foot soldiers on the one hand and the city government on the other. That is, the big monopolists generally do not have their hands directly on the wheel of government or repression, and therefore may be somewhat obscure, their position mystified. Outside of billionaire mayor Bloomberg, the big bourgeoisie act through their economic and political agents. In the workplace, these are the labor-aristocrat or petit-bourgeois managers and professionals. In the political arena, these are the city employees: the tax assessors, permitting officials, police force, and judiciary.

The monopolist class also includes the city’s primary landlords whose incomes have catapulted them into the ranks of financial bourgeoisie. Many of what would, in a second- or third-tier city merely be regional or even full-scale non-monopolist bourgeoisie with industrial concerns, are able to become monopolist bourgeoisie in New York. The profits they obtain  in New York City selling their commodities to their haute bourgeois fellows can catapult these otherwise small-scale bourgeois onto the world stage and allow them to invest in multinational corporations through the stock market and investment banks.

New York, therefore, serves as the nerve center of the world-imperialist empire.  Although Washington runs the political machine, the financials that drive it are, to a great extent, concentrated in New York City. The imperialist haute bourgeoisie are vulnerable to attacks here — witness Occupy — and we can reckon that this accounts for the extremely violent responses of the NYPD to all students and workers movements in the city.

As a result of this confluence, and because the bourgeoisie of the zionist state are by and large also members of the U.S. ruling class, we have seen the similarly brutal police response to solidarity organizing in the defense of Palestine. The ruling class cannot afford to permit insurrection in the heart of their financial fortress, which is uniquely weak to such insurrection. Flow of goods and information to and from Manhattan, their world headquarters, must pass through a handful of narrow bridges, wires, and cell phone towers.

If our analysis proves it possible to organize a revolutionary league within New York City, it is most certainly desirable; as citizens in the heart of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire, close to its pulse, we would be a dagger clasped at the breast of U.S. world imperialism. It would be our moral duty and pride as true proletarian internationalists to chance it.

Real unrest here would threaten the entire fabric of the world-empire.

The Non-Monopolist Bourgeoisie

The transitory, smaller-scale bourgeoisie in New York City are a vanishingly minor class. There is simply no room between the petit-bourgeois strata and the monopolist stratum. The gap is too great. For instance, over the course of 2000-2022, “small” landlords were replaced primarily by corporations, and almost all landlords in Manhattan own at least 30 buildings. Data maintained by the New York City government indicates that some 98% of businesses in the city are “small” (employ fewer than 100 employees). These are the owner-operated small businesses of the petit-bourgeoisie.

A random sampling of medium-sized businesses bears this out: DO & CO, a 500-employee catering business, is actually a branch of a global restaurant group headquartered in Vienna. The small luxury soda company, Boylan Bottling, was purchased by Emigrant Bank in 2002 and is now part of their portfolio. Altronix Corporation, a small Brooklyn electronics manufacturer, is owned by Alan Forman, who has a net worth of $6.5 million dollars.

The 350,000 millionaires in New York City in fact compose what we might think of as the pre-monopoly bourgeoisie. They are the haute bourgeoisie that are not yet directly involved in monopoly finance. However, because they are entirely funded by monopoly finance in the form of the big banks, because they purchase raw-material inputs from the third world, and because they sell commodities directly to corporations owned by monopoly finance (like Altronix, which supplies other commodity-producers) they are inextricably linked to the monopoly bourgeoisie such that they cannot be separated in interest. The non-monopolist bourgeoisie therefore, can be said to barely exist; they are a passing phase of the growth of the bourgeoisie.

Every non-monopolist is on their way to being either entered into the monopolist category, or altogether expelled from the bourgeoisie. They are a transient class, almost totally adhering to their “big brothers” in the imperialist ranks.

The Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie — Parasitic Professional Class

As we have seen, there is a huge layer of petit-bourgeoisie in New York City. Small businesses and professional services, the remora of the empire, make up the absolute majority of businesses in the city. We can further divide this group into the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie, who service empire directly by providing the big bourgeoisie monopolists with necessary professional services, the non-imperialist petit-bourgeoisie who generally find their clientele among the petit-bourgeoisie and working classes, and the imperialist labor aristocracy, who are technically proletarians but who work directly for imperialist big bourgeoisie and receive enormously inflated compensation as a result of their position relative to the colonized periphery.

The imperialist petit-bourgeoisie is primarily composed of professionals working in large firms whose primary clients are the imperialist bourgeoisie. It’s worth noting that the corporations employing this strata are generally owned by the imperialist bourgeoisie themselves. For instance, the imperialist international law firm Shearman and Sterling, with offices at 599 Lexington, is run by senior partner Adam Hakki who, although he still practices law, makes a $20 million/year salary from his position, not as a practicing lawyer but rather from his “work” as a capitalist.

Top-flight doctors who make their living treating the wealthy and the trained accountants at firms like Deloitte also fall into this category, as do the many cold warrior academics still employed at the city’s universities. These last are ideological support pillars of the ruling class, endlessly churning out a nauseating anti-Communist bile.

The “professional and business services” sector of the New York City economy employs a huge number of people — 776,000. If we take the 498,000 people employed in finance who are not themselves bourgeois (a vanishingly small number) or labor aristocrats (for instance, certain banking positions), we can estimate that there are around 1 million of the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie in the city. We may also mark the 75,000 people employed as “management” as petit-bourgeoisie. Whether they are imperialist or not depends on what they manage.

These petit-bourgeois workers do have class interests that are in contradiction with the interests of their bourgeois employers. Like all petit-bourgeois professionals, they are subject to profit maximization (theft of surplus value), a certain amount of precarity or fungibility in their positions (although this is, by necessity, less than the fungibility of a proletarian worker — petit-bourgeois professionals are harder to replace, and their skills are more individualized and unique), and the generalized need for the bourgeoisie to realize their profits by the sale of commodities to their own workers, whose pay they minimize.

However, unlike proletarian workers, the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie are consciously cultivated by the haute bourgeois class. This means they intentionally suppress the contradictions that arise between their classes. The imperialist petit-bourgeoisie is excessively overpaid, they are granted political and economic participation in the imperialist project, and they are lauded with social rewards for their complicity. They are the managers of the empire, without whom the empire cannot function.

We should look at them as an inveterate enemy class. The risks of agitating among this class are very high, and there is very little chance that such agitation finds any success.

The Imperialist Labor Aristocracy — “White Collar” Financiers

Legal secretaries at Shearman and Sterling make, on average, $88,000 a year. At Deloitte, the salary for a secretary is $60,000 a year. The average salary in the city is $41,000 a year. The median secretary’s salary is reportedly $51,000 a year in the city. What is the difference between an “average” secretary and one who works at Deloitte or Shearman? Deloitte and Shearman benefit directly from their connection with the imperialist bourgeoisie, and purchase the loyalty of the proletarian workers in their employ. That is to say, these workers are compensated at far higher rates — and thus suffer far less exploitation than other workers in the same position at companies that do not directly service the imperialist bourgeoisie.

This class strata of essentially bribed workers includes functionaries who manage paperwork; “number crunchers” and “spreadsheet miners” as the joke goes. These white collar desk workers, when in proximity to the imperialist bourgeoisie and working to maintain their empires of finance, are, like the secretaries at Deloitte, exploited at a rate far less than their peers in other branches of industry.

We can estimate the numbers of this group roughly by looking at the employment data for administrative and support staff (244,000). The average income of administrative support staff in the metropolitan area is $80,000 a year. This places most administrative support at the very high end of the proletarian wage scale. But we can and must be more precise. A great deal of this money is made by brokerage clerks, office supervisors, executive secretaries, legal secretaries, and desktop publishers (who should fall under the petit-bourgeois heading). This accounts for twenty percent of the support staff workforce, or approximately 50,000 workers.

Like the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie, this strata of the proletariat is dangerous to the revolutionary movement. While the contradictions between the interests of the imperialist labor aristocracy and the entire bourgeoisie are much more acute than that between the petit-bourgeoisie and their haute bourgeois siblings, this doesn’t mean that they are currently aligned with the revolutionary movement. Individuals, or even small groups, in this layer of the proletariat may have revolutionary potential, but the effort required to reach or convert large segments is not, at this stage, worth expending. There are many groups that we can reach, many with high degrees of revolutionary potential or material resources; these labor aristocrats on the balance, have neither.

Non-Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie

The remainder of the petit-bourgeoisie are not the direct servants of imperial power. This includes fractions of the already-listed 700,000 petit-bourgeoisie professionals above, as well as a large percentage of the 1,209,000 private education and health services professionals (private educators at colleges and universities across the city number about 150,000 while an enormous 968,000 work in health care and social assistance).

This group should be divided into strata — upper, middle, and lower — based on income and precarity. The entire class, excluding those directly attached to the imperialist project mentioned above, are typified by having interests that sometimes are aligned with the big bourgeoisie and sometimes are in contradiction with them. This is why, as a class, they have a vacillating or uncertain consciousness that often demands socially progressive policies from the state while at the same time being generally unwilling to attack the root cause of reaction, namely capitalism. The anarchist and social democratic movements are the result of growing petit-bourgeois consciousness: highly individualized on the one hand (anarchists), and unable to confront capital on the other (social democrats).

The lowest strata of petit-bourgeoisie are barely distinct from the proletariat and are being proletarianized. Who are these downwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie? They are the lowest ranks of professionals who do not serve the imperialist bourgeoisie, as well as small-time bodega owner-operators and the owner-operators of restaurants and failing businesses. Obviously certain positions, such as owner-operators, will be more prone to reactionary politics. Since at least 2019, the real median household income in New York City has been falling. Severe rent burdens have increased among middle-income households. Half of all families in New York City cannot afford living expenses without government assistance. For instance, in 2000 the average annual cost of living in South Manhattan was calculated at $76,000 a year while the same cost of living was calculated at $152,000 in 2023. Across all boroughs, cost of living has increased by 131% on average, while the median earnings have increased only 71%. This is a 60% rise in the city-wide average cost of living between the years of 2000 and 2023. The percentage of families making over $250,000 a year increased by 1.2% between 2000 and 2021; the percentage of families making $60,000 – $100,000 a year decreased by 1.5%; a similar decrease occurred in the families making $40,000 – $60,000; however, families making the lowest wages increased by 2.6%. This represents a marked pressure on petit-bourgeois incomes. Calculated at today’s population, this would be approximately 210,000 families at the lower-end of the petit-bourgeoisie being shifted downward, potentially out of the class altogether.

This year, the New York Times reported a drop in overall city-wide population by 78,000 but the city government added the reservation that this does not account for increased “migrants.” We can see, then, that petit-bourgeois positions have been vacated and transformed into proletarian or sub-proletarian positions throughout the city’s economy.

The result of this economic pressure is that the lower ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie are essentially becoming working poor despite their access to professional training, a process that has a long historical precedent and is most visible in the deteriorating incomes of teachers and the creation of an underclass of adjunct professors at the university level. We can demonstrate this in the labor data quite easily: the decline in self-employed workers from 10% in 2003 to 8% in 2021 agrees with the sharp drop we have seen in the “middle income” group. The city government compiled data relating to jobs lost during the early phases of the COVID pandemic, and not regained; there are losses across all sectors, proletarian and petit-bourgeois, that were never regained except in health care and information services. The unemployment rate in New York City stands substantially above that of the rest of the state and the U.S. as a whole.

As a result of this pressure, the petit-bourgeoisie are faced with loss of station and even, in some cases, loss of self. They are increasingly shut out of the electoral processes held out by the ruling class as the bounty of imperialist participation — big money, in the form of Super PACs and dark campaign donations clearly and evidently plays the deciding factor in most important U.S. elections, and the petit-bourgeoisie (with its thirst for rules-based decisions, order, and boundaries that are clearly set out) have watched as the last several empire-wide election cycles for Congress and the U.S. presidency have been essentially stage-managed behind the scenes with a total disregard for any perception of process.

All of this is to say that the downwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie should be fast allies. They can be educated out of social democracy as they come to understand the true nature of the system that is destroying them. This, of course, has generally been true.

It is likely that even the middle strata of the petit-bourgeoisie in New York City can be mobilized for generally progressive issues (such as the support of public transportation and public assistance programs or ending the genocide in Palestine) and, given the pressures currently exerted by the bourgeoisie, won over to the side of Communism in large numbers, should a sufficiently organized formation exist to educate them and bring them into its ranks or its orbit little by little.

City Government — the Pig Class

The ranks of the city government are divided between the various classes. There are proletarian city workers, bourgeois politicians, etc. However, a specialized “guardian” class also works in the city government. We must take special effort to point out the danger of this pig class: cops, prosecutors, judges, magistrates, department of corrections guards, etc.

These are the ground soldiers of the enemy. They are the forefront of reaction. Not only can they not be organized, their organizations are our enemy. In every case, and in every way, we should be oppositional to the pig class. We must not cede an inch of rhetorical ground, but rather pick out the most egregious abusers of this class and hold them up to the community and demonstrate that these creatures belong to the forces oppressing us.

There are city politicians that we should be able to work with, but not under. However, all consideration of any such tactics is premature before there is a city-wide league, as will be discussed further. Therefore, all basic organizing at this time should avoid the government altogether. The risk is too great to organize government proletarians, the organization does not exist yet to meet bourgeois politicians on their own terms, and any interaction with the pig class would spell disaster for a nascent movement.

There are 36,000 police employed in the city, by far the highest police-to-civilian ratio in the entire United States. There is a reason for this — this is the seat of imperialist power.

National Bourgeoisie and Petit-Bourgeoisie

There is another lateral division among the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie between the dominant national groups and the oppressed nations. 3% of businesses are  Black-owned, 6% are “Hispanic”-owned, and 18% are “Asian”-owned. For our purposes, the categories of Hispanic and Asian are more or less useless, as they do not describe actual national origins, but rather agglomerations of many national origins. However, for the purposes of estimating the revolutionary potential of the national bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, we can see that there is a substantially larger Black and “Asian” bourgeois/petit-bourgeois population in New York City than in the country at large (+0.6% in the first instance and +5.3% in the second).

Whether or not these groups are truly “national” (that is, capable of being played against the big imperialists) or comprador bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie (that is, serving as the agents of the imperialists in controlling and managing the national markets) remains to be seen and is beyond the capacity of this investigation. Real data must be gathered about attitudes and information must be collated about community involvement before such a question can be answered.

Suffice to say that there is at least the theoretical potential for the nationally oppressed in these classes to be maneuvered into an antagonistic relationship with the dominant imperialist bourgeoisie, and thus, at least for a time, temporarily allied with the Communist movement. 

The Urban Proletariat

Is there an urban proletariat? Let us examine the data: there are approximately 200,000 manufacturing jobs in New York City, primarily employing the nationally oppressed. This is, in absolute numbers, equivalent to the amount of finance jobs in the city. Some of these manufacturing jobs are actually petit-bourgeois (for instance, technical workers at Bristol Myers Squibb), but this doesn’t change the fact that hundreds of thousands are employed as manufacturers. There are 131,000 employed in mining and other extractive industries. There are 84,000 specialty trade contractors, who may be petit-bourgeois or proletarian, depending on the degree of technical skill and the degree of restrictions on practicing the trade. 42,000 are employed in building construction. 580,000 are employed in trade, transportation, and utilities, almost all of which are proletarian labor. 417,000 people work in the leisure and hospitality industry.

The myth that proletarian labor has vanished is exploded by this data. From the above sectors, we can see 1.454 million proletarian positions in New York City, which is one third of the entire reported labor force in the city. The actual ratio of proletarians is undoubtedly higher and could be reckoned by a more careful calculation of the available labor data, but even in that instance it would be higher still to account for unreported nationally oppressed and migrant labor.

The bourgeois financial company SmartAsset calculated the average salary to live comfortably in New York City at $138,000 for a single adult and $318,000 for a family of four. The salary of an average machinist (of which there are 9,900 in New York City) is $27 an hour, which works out to $56,160 per year. By every measure, these are proletarians struggling in an economy that leaves them insufficient income to cover their basic necessities.

Comparing neighborhood incomes throughout New York City reveals the most firmly proletarian neighborhoods are, unsurprisingly, the Bronx, East Harlem, Flushing, Astoria, and the waterfront on the Lower East Side. It should perhaps also come as no surprise that NYU and Columbia University are the most well-positioned schools in Manhattan in terms of solidifying a link between the student movement and the proletarian communities.

The city itself has also designated areas for manufacturing, what it calls “industrial business zones” (IBZs). These are located in Brooklyn Navy Yard, East New York, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, North Brooklyn, Southwest Brooklyn, Bathgate, Eastchester, Hunts Point, Port Morris, Zerega, Jamaica, JFK, Long Island City, Maspeth, Ridgewood, Steinway, Woodside, North Shore, West Shore, and Rossville. The city provides a tax credit of $1,000 per employee and up to $100,000 to industrial and manufacturing firms that work in these IBZs. Because firms are economically incentivized to move into these areas, and because these firms are more likely to require the government support offered, it is likely that they have high concentrations of highly exploitative industrial production. This would seem to present the perfect opportunity for organizing.

The urban proletariat should form the basic material of any movement. It is among the ranks of this group that the advanced workers will emerge in numbers. Their interests are irreconcilably opposed to the big businesses and capitalists that live in the city. The price per square foot of real estate in Manhattan was $329 in 1997. By 2019, property was worth $1,657 per square foot on the island. A rising trend can be seen in the other boroughs. As of January 2024, the price of the consumer price index goods and services had risen to 1,000 times what it had been in 1967 in the city, about double what it was throughout the rest of the U.S.

It’s worth noting that union membership is down across the country, but New York state consistently has the highest union rates among all states. Of the 14.4 million union members in the U.S., 1.7 million reside in New York state. This indicates that contradictions are still sharp in New York and that basic trade union consciousness persists in millions of workers, even as it is decaying across the country.

There are millions of proletarians in New York City. Let us assume that agitation might be able to reach and draw in approximately one tenth of one percent of the proletarian population. That number, relatively miniscule as it is, is still 1,000 workers in absolute terms. There is no reason that 1% of all workers in the city shouldn’t be class conscious. There’s no reason why 10% of all workers in the city shouldn’t understand the proletariat not only as a class-in-itself, but as a class-for-itself. The fault doesn’t lie with the intermediate workers who are not yet conscious, but with the advanced workers who have achieved a degree of class consciousness but have failed to agitate and educate among their fellow workers. The working classes have not vanished in New York City, they are right in front of us. Advanced workers need merely begin the process of organizing them!

Students

Students are not themselves a class, but generally form a strata, like intellectuals, who can come from many class backgrounds. The majority of students in New York University, for instance, come from the upper 20% of income brackets. Students in the city are thus primarily drawn from the petit-bourgeois and bourgeois class, but their relations of production are suspended while they study. They are themselves more often lower petit-bourgeois, unable to access the wealth of their parents directly, despite being provided its benefits.

Students cannot form the basic material of revolutionary organization for many reasons, but they are extremely active and easily organized into militant formations. Students, while often eager, focused, and able to dedicate more time than other classes, generally are aware of the fact of the class they hope to eventually enter. This makes arrests, publicity, and other exposure more dangerous for students than for other proletarians in the same way that these things tend to be more dangerous for petit-bourgeois professionals. Students also “phase out” of the movement; their residences aren’t settled, and they tend to move without much notice. Lastly, students have a built-in deadline for their organizing, for relatively few will remain in the region or remain radicals/organizers after they graduate.

A 2003 estimate, by now woefully out of date, gives a total of roughly 600,000 college students in the city. If the ratio remains the same as 2003 (7.5% of the city population in that year), there should be around 620,000 students today. They are concentrated in a small geographical area with a broad public transportation system, enabling student activists to easily concentrate and disperse their numbers.

As we have seen throughout 2024 in the form of the student revolts, New York City is roiling with student discontent. This is the same discontent that fueled the 2008 Occupy protests in the city. The police and other pig classes (prosecutors, judges, etc.) are terrified of the potential for an organized student movement, and make every effort to crush any that seem to be arising. This partially accounts for the brutality of the arrests at Columbia over the past April. The students are a powerful force. The student movement must be joined to the worker’s movement. Historically, in most revolutionary situations, students are at the forefront of class consciousness.

The Sub-Proletariat

Over 350,000 people in New York City are homeless. Of these 350,000, approximately half are Black. This is an enormous number of nationally oppressed people without homes. They fall into the strata of the sub-proletariat, the lowest ranks of the proletarian class — those who are generally expelled from the labor force and act as the last ranks of the reserve army of the unemployed. It is important to note that a not-insignificant portion of this population may actually be the working unhoused, who can be reached through workplace organizing.

Like students, the sub-proletariat cannot be the basic material forming Marxist organizations, but they have suffered the most under capitalism and are prepared to despise and attack the bourgeois masters most of all. At this stage, it is too early to begin attempting to organize the sub-proletariat. A sufficiently advanced core of cadre must first be developed; local organizations must be formed on the ground, and a city-wide league must be proposed and carried out. Only then will survival programs yield anything more than the most basic agitation among the sub-proletariat.

The Urban Masses Need Marxist Organization

The question, then, is what do we do with this information? The urban masses are crying out for organization. The wellspring of proletarian action has never been the countryside. In the imperialized third world, the countryside has been a locus of action and agitation throughout the last century not because it is where the proletariat is located, but because it is where the third world peasantry is to be found. The U.S. does not possess a coherent peasantry. We must not apply lessons learned by the successful revolutions in the underdeveloped periphery indiscriminately to the imperial center. 

There are 2,500 police in Suffolk County, Long Island, to a total population of 1.5 million residents, or one cop for every 600 residents. New York City has 36,000 police officers, or one cop for every 230 residents. This is because the population density in Suffolk County is 1,600 residents per square mile, but the population density of New York City is 29,300 per square mile. The closely-packed nature of city life, particularly in the country’s biggest city and financial capital, means organization can proceed at an exponentially faster and easier rate. More people amenable to being organized can be reached, more quickly, with less effort, in New York City than anywhere else in the United States.

What the urban masses lack is not the will to resist the NYPD or anger at the system that continues to exploit and deprive them, but the organizational forms and dedicated cadre to run those organizational forms that will allow them to win confrontations with the enemy state. The bourgeoisie have used many cunning new means to divert and distract revolutionary consciousness among the working classes for fear of this exact type of urban uprising. The most advanced version of this misdirection comes in the form of the non-governmental agency or NGO. Political action NGOs purport to be interested in reforming the government and absorb many bright-eyed would-be radicals, redirecting their energy into phone banking, door knocking, and trying to pass progressive legislation.

This is not what the working people need. The working people need Marxist organizations. They need developed Marxist cadre who can help train new radicals and bring new organizations into existence. New York City needs hundreds of local organizations of radicals numbering 10-20 members, all studying to prepare for a city-wide League of Workers and Students. New York City can be, and should be, the epicenter of resistance to the imperialist order.

What do we mean by organization? We mean a group that has definite membership, standing rules, standing meetings, democratic decision-making, keeps minutes and records, and so forth. We mean a group with defined relationships, officers, and responsibilities. We mean professional revolutionaries who professionalize the task of overthrowing the bourgeois order.

The working people do not need the revisionist organizations like CPUSA. They do not need social democratic organizations like the DSA. Marxists can work within these organizations to build something else, but the organizations themselves are fatally compromised and held by the sympathizers of bourgeois power. We must build something new, something that can resist the great-nation chauvinism that has plagued all parties and formations in the West. We must confront that chauvinism and dismantle it before we can make any forward progress. Only by completely debunking the bankrupt vestiges of past (failed) attempts to establish revolutionary organizations can we embark on our own project.

We will start by building local organizations, cells, to become the constituent parts of an organization of organizations — a regional League. When this league is secure, a party may develop from many leagues.

Assembling Many Local Organizations

Those Marxists who are either in New York City or who can regularly access it should consider founding local organizations. The study group is the archetype of local Marxist organization, and serves to develop cadre and create Marxists capable of taking consistent revolutionary action. What we see more commonly is what has been referred to as “mutual aid,” but which is essentially a kind of charity. We reject the form of the “red charity,” but wholly embrace a revolutionary form: the logistics organization.

The study group is the optimal form in a locality without a sufficient number of developed Marxists to run a Marxist-Leninist logistics organization on a continuous basis. That is the case on the ground almost everywhere in the United States. Thus, we urge our readers to begin Marxist study groups and embark on cadre-development plans. A sample cadre-development plan has been included in this analysis. 

The Study Group

USU has published on the study group and on organization in the past. We recommend anyone reading this who is interested in pursuing this plan also read The Study Group and Constructive Struggle, both of which go into much more detail than is possible in this short paper.

Formation of a study group is the first step toward a functional Marxist organization. This is how cadre are developed, how advanced workers transform themselves into Communists. Although your study group can meander and pick books based on interest, this kind of broad, all-over study can take a long time to develop into a functional organization. Why do we urge the creation of study groups? It is not to sequester ourselves inside and remove us from the movement. However, we must counter the cult of action, that anarchistic urge that has pervaded all modern organizing in the West.

It is not possible to learn to tie your shoes while you are running a marathon. We should make no mistake, revolution is a grueling path that we have chosen. We cannot train ourselves, train others, and act all at once. We should begin with training and developing ourselves together, until we have a sufficient number of trained and dedicated Communists prepared to act in concert. This may, perhaps, strike readers as unnecessary caution. After all, anarchists and liberals run charities every day without training! We speak now from the bitter teacher of experience. When embarking upon a new revolutionary organizing project, a high number of the people who will join in that project will not be highly motivated to begin with. The basic requirement for every revolutionary movement is the capacity to create new revolutionaries. A revolutionary — a professional revolutionary — is not merely someone who knows Marxist theory. A professional revolutionary attends every action they pledge themselves to. They are consistent in their action, and they arrive early to ensure that actions are successful. They are able to engage in class analysis. They know how to write concise after-action reports and they are hardened against arrest and interrogation. This is what it means to be a revolutionary. Revolutionaries, in other words, do not fall out of the coconut tree.
It is through the basics of a study group that the historically successful parties (most notably the CPSU and the CPC) built up their membership prior to becoming parties. This is the course that we must take: one that simultaneously breaks up the ossified hulk of the old revisionist parties and builds the basis of the new party-to-be. In forming revolutionary circles that become organizations, organizations that become regional leagues, we build the basis for our work. Nowhere is that more important than in the financial heart of the U.S. empire.

The enemy, after all, is professional. The enemy is organized. We are facing the might of the capitalist state, embodied in the NYPD, FBI, and National Guard. The city government itself, despite being filled with workers, is our enemy. This corporate agency is highly organized and highly professional; revolutionaries must also be organized and professional. Only the reliable revolutionary will be embraced by the masses. No one wants to be agitated to by someone who doesn’t show up in the hour of need or can’t be trusted to offer consistent revolutionary aid.

If you are able to gather enough advanced workers who are interested in cadre development, we suggest the following plan:

Week one: How to Be a Good Communist, Liu Shaoqi

Week two: Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Week three: Class Struggle, Chapter 1, Domenico Losurdo

Week four: Critique of the Gotha Program, Karl Marx, Program of the Parti Ouvrier, Marx and Guesde, Critique of the Erfurt Program, Friedrich Engels, Programme of the Emancipation of Labour, Plekhanov, A Draft of Our Party Program, Lenin

Weeks five-ten: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, J.V. Stalin

After this, we have a number of “blocks” which accumulate texts on a specific subject, but which can be read in any order or combination.

Political Economy Block

• Blood in My Eye, George Jackson
• Capital, Karl Marx
• Class Struggle, Domenico Losurdo
• Dialectical and Historical Materialism, J.V. Stalin
• Foundations of Leninism, J.V. Stalin
• The Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, Otto Kuusinen
• Grundrisse, Karl Marx
• On the Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels
• Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels
• Wage Labour & Capital/Value, Price, and Profit, Karl Marx

Organization-Building Block

• The 18th Brumaire, Karl Marx
• On Authority, Friedrich Engels
• Combat Liberalism, Mao Zedong
• Constructive Criticism, Gracie Lyons
• Constructive Struggle, J. Katsfoter
• The Dreyfus Affair, Rosa Luxemburg
• Fanshen, William H. Hinton
• One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, V.I. Lenin
• Reform or Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg
• What is to be Done? V.I. Lenin

National Liberation Block

• The Apocalypse of Settler-Colonialism, Gerald Horne
• Assata, Assata Shakur
• Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois
• Blood of the Land, Rex Weyler
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Chicano Liberation and Proletarian Revolution, the August 29th Movement
• Decolonial Marxism, Walter Rodney
• For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question, Harry Haywood
• Hammer & Hoe, Robin D.G. Kelley
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
• Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, V.I. Lenin
• The Negro Nation, Harry Haywood
• The Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galleani
• The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

Sex Liberation Block

• Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici
• Lenin on the Women’s Question, Clara Zetkin
• Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, Anuradha Ghandy
• Revolution at Point Zero, Silvia Federici
• The Straight Mind and other Essays, Monique Wittig

The Logistics Organization

Logistics organizations can address a wide variety of survival issues: copwatch, food supply, community gardens, educational spaces, hot food for children, etc. These are what the Black Panthers called survival programs. However, many of those groups and circles seeking to emulate the Panthers’ survival programs do so without having anywhere near the infrastructure the BPP built up. In order to run a logistics program, you must have a dedicated cadre of Marxists. In order for a program to be logistics instead of simply charity, the program itself must also run political development classes — in essence, it must become a study group with a logistics element.

Despite our earlier warning against running and learning to tie shoes, it is possible to begin with a logistics organization if you have some requirements already met. If your organization or circle satisfies these requirements, you can feel confident in founding a logistics operation. If it does not, you should strongly consider putting together a study group first and attempting to meet the criteria.

1. Defined membership on a non-voluntary basis — formal membership requirements, including dues which will support the logistics operation.
2. At least 5 developed Marxist members who are at cadre-level in both political development and militancy.
3. At least 5 other members; development needn’t be as high as the core cadre group.
4. A method for arriving at binding collective decisions. This can be as simple as some rules of thumb on ending discussions and voting, or as complex as Robert’s Rules of Order. At any rate, it cannot be a procedure that allows endless talking.
5. Sufficient free time and effort to run the logistics program at a set time and place on a regular period. As close to a one-week repeating period as possible is best practices, since the people you serve will come to rely on you.
6. Sufficient free time and energy to run a political development program as part of your work, to develop those who begin attending the logistics operation.

Essentially, this is a way to satisfy the urge of action while also building political development; a study group plus a logistics operation, in other words. However, this is a draining, complex, and difficult task to undertake. If there is insufficient labor (that is, if there aren’t enough developed and militant members to continuously run the logistics program), it will be impossible to pursue continued political development. At this point, the political development of membership must be primary. We simply do not have enough trained and militant Communists. If your organization cannot perform both functions with time left to spare, it should focus on the study and development above the logistics aspect.

Worse, running a logistics operation and then stopping it damages the trust of the masses in Communist organizing. The result of running a short-lived logistics program is far worse than not running one at all. An assessment of capacity must be taken before the program is launched.

Finding Membership

This seems to be the part of organizing study groups and logistics programs that present the most difficult hurdle to overcome. In rural or lightly urbanized areas, membership can be very difficult to obtain. There are fewer central locations for flyers, posters, and handbills to be posted; distances between towns are greater, with less public transportation, requiring longer drive times, and so on. Large apartment buildings are fewer, and workers often live in more sequestered locations. There is a higher percentage of petit-bourgeois or labor-aristocratic workers living in the white suburbs.

In New York City, these problems vanish. To obtain membership and run a study or logistics organization, there are only a few simple requirements in a city as densely populated as New York.

1. Meeting place and time. You should have a meeting place and a regular time lined up before you begin seeking members for your study group or logistics organization. This can be a local radical bookstore, a church basement, a meeting hall or community center, a library branch, even your own apartment or a public park. If your group doesn’t require privacy, you should strive to hold the meetings in as public a place as possible to encourage walk-up attendance.
2. Contact information. You should have some contact information that people can reach. What type is a security question for your membership. Should you create a gmail account or a protonmail account? Can you afford to list a phone number? These questions should be answered prior to your first major recruitment efforts.
3. Flyers. Flyers containing the meeting place and time, your contact information, and a meeting call that will explain to workers the purpose of attendance without alienating them. A few sample flyers have been added to this piece. They’re designed to be easily customized.
4. Consistency. You should continue to meet, over and over again, even if only a few people show up consistently. You should strive not to postpone or cancel meetings. If you do this for a substantial period of time, eventually your attendance numbers will increase. Consistency proves that you aren’t a fed, proves that you won’t disappear tomorrow, and proves that you are serious about revolution. Advanced workers who are not yet Communists need convincing that revolution is possible. The best way to convince advanced workers that revolution is possible is to believe it yourself and act as though it were. That means acting in a consistently principled manner.

As to where and how to best gather recruits: we have identified in the analysis above several key areas in terms of the IBZs. Additionally, the largest and most well-trafficked subway and PATH stations should provide ample locale for flyering and postering with wheat paste or tape. The 1 train, for example, is the busiest train in the city and the Times Square-42 Street station is the busiest station. The Port Authority also provides a hub for bus travel and trains coming into the city from the surrounding regions and would be another suitable location.

We urge you to go forth and build!

A League Conference

It is possible that there are already a number of local organizations that meet the above criteria and that the authors simply do not know of them. Once five or more spring up or are located, the first steps toward the creation of a New York City League of Struggle can be taken. These organizations can participate in the foundation of a larger, umbrella regional organization. Rather than admitting individuals, a league would admit member organizations and serve as a central coordinating point for those organizations.

A conference to found a league would follow a simple progression:

1. Form a working committee of organizational delegates to determine the logistical questions of the first conference, namely: i) minimum organizational requirements for entry into the league, ii) method of determining votes and delegate ratios, iii) location of the conference, iv) time of the conference, v) rules of the conference, and vi) formation of a credentials committee to oversee vetting and attendance.
2. Advertising the conference to other potentially interested organizations.
3. Once the conference is held, the first order of business would be to verify credentials.
4. Then, the conference should elect a unity committee to propose basic points of unity which all members of the league would adhere to as their basic positions.
5. As the unity committee prepares the first draft of the points of unity, the general body of the conference should set up other committees to take care of other business, namely:
   1. An executive committee for carrying out decisions and for sitting in between future conferences;
   2. An agitprop or art committee for coordinating and pooling resources for the production of agitation;
   3. The establishment of sections for gender oppressed and nationally oppressed members;
   4. A rules committee for the creation or recommendation of the adoption of various rules and procedures, including grievances and harassment policies;
   5. And any other committee the general membership feels it is necessary to establish.

This is the road forward that we recommend. Form your organizations. Study. Develop. Unite.

Onward, to revolution!

Our movement, the Communist movement, is in dire need of reassessment in the West. We are faced with a proliferation of sects and cults, rather than a coherent movement. But what is this tendency that has sprung up in Western Communism?

The “cult-building tendency” is a term we use to describe a certain pattern that emerged in the U.S.-Canadian Communist movement after the disastrous 1957 conference of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). We can ultimately link this to the so-called “secret speech” delivered by Nikita Khrushchev to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on February 24-25, 1956. Of course, Marxist-Leninists have been complaining of the deleterious effects of the secret speech — the world-wide splits that emerged within parties, the destructive rupture between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the waves of revisionism — for nearly seventy years. We must be wary that overemphasis on the role of the secret speech may blot out other causes or give them a reduced appearance of importance. The simple fact that it has been used as the basis for many arguments in the past, however, is not enough to dismiss the effects of the secret speech as trite or rote.  With that properly in mind, we should be able to accurately assess its import in the development (and mal-development) of the Communist movement. For our purpose, the  causes — the underlying conditions within the CPSU which lead to the issuance of the secret speech and De-Stalinization policy — are less important than the effects of De-Stalinization as a whole upon the Communist movement in the United States and Canada.

At the time of the 1957 conference of the U.S. Communist Party, there was already, raging within it, a battle between great nation chauvinism and principled commitment to national self-determination. Lenin described this danger in 1922 in “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation,’”: “[W]e nationals of a big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without noticing it.”

“That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which it obtains in actual practice.”

This was primarily focused on the issue of the Black Nation imprisoned within the Black Belt of the U.S. Empire. This battle took the form of an opportunist turn and the entrenchment of revisionist-opportunist leadership. That is to say, it did not initially appear in the form of a war of principle between committed revolutionists and great nation chauvinists, but occurred underground with the surface appearance of a battle of opportunism and revisionism on the one hand, which was committed to the “peaceful coexistence” of the Communist movement with the capitalist West, and committed revolutionists on the other, who were dedicated to the violent overthrow of all existing social relations. The underlying cause was, of course, white settler attachment to great nation chauvinism, to the idea of “America” that they could not give up. 

In short, the leadership first took the increasingly liquidationist position espoused by Earl Browder and then, after he actually dissolved the party and it was reconstituted with the aid of the international Communist movement’s pressure and assistance, at the 1957 party conference, the right-most trends shut out the national liberation groups and instituted the party slate system and other extreme methods of anti-democratic control. (Further reading with more detail on the history of the CPUSA, its origins, its trends, etc., is available in the Clarion article “The CPUSA In Its Members Own Words”).

This same tendency to shut out dissent and insulate leadership from democratic control was repeated throughout many of the successor organizations. During the 1960s and 1970s, there sprang up many would-be parties that were infected with this anti-democratic trend. We do not yet know the full influence of the U.S. intelligence agencies on these groups, but we can see similar attributes shared across all of them. The Democratic Workers Party, the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the followers of Lyndon LaRouche, and even the Sendero Luminoso all share this cult-form. The Marxist cult is an evolution or graduation from the sect-form. Intense sectarianism and outside pressure — due to illegalism, fear of security services, security-paranoia — isolate left groups and lead down the mal-adaptive road of cult-building. Cosmonaut’s “Cults of Our Hegemony” presents a list of these organizations and explores the similarities between them. The recently-translated book The CIA’s Shining Path by Andreo Matías, hosted on the ProleWiki website, details the history and structure of Guzman’s Shining Path, which was also a kind of cult.

How Does the Cult-Form Function?

The cult-building tendency manifests in a similar fashion within most of the sects that fall prey to it, although obviously the details are particularized and unique in each case. We present here an individual case study of the International Marxist Tendency, recently named the Revolutionary Communist International, based on the written testimony of a former member.

Marxist parties or organizations, particularly those that emerged from the New Communist Movement in the U.S. during the ‘60s and ‘70s, often use a number of similar techniques upon making the transition from sect-form to cult-form, or they may inherit already-existing dangerous deviations that they possessed in the sect-form when they become totally closed to the rank-and-file and enter the cult-form. The necessity of maintaining control of the cult requires insulation from democratic accountability. You cannot have a cult organization that is accountable to its membership. This is the essence of the cult-form: in order to extract labor and money from its membership, commit abuses with impunity, and maintain absolute control over the money and labor lodged in the organization and its members, the leadership must maintain absolute control and block all avenues of accountability. This is sometimes done outright, but also more often done by establishing false avenues of accountability — blind alleys and dead-ends that lead nowhere but wear down the members and convince them to give up. Should any of the members become aware of their position as objectified non-entities, mere ciphers for the leadership to control, the cult must necessarily have a method of isolating them to prevent the spread of this consciousness among the others trapped in the cult.

Cults that spring from Marxist sects or otherwise profess a Marxist character tend to utilize some or all of the deviations that we have listed here. We must note that although some of these deviations share a name and, in some cases, even some elements of form with real Communist practices, these deviations are not in essence the same as actual practice, and we must be careful of falling into the cult-building trap of adopting any of the deviant aspects in our own organizing. So pervasive have they become, that they are easily confused for the healthy, Communist practice.

These deviations are:

The Slate System. Although there may be legitimate reasons for a party to adopt such a system, this is made necessary only in the face of extreme counter-revolutionary infiltration or other emergency conditions. There is absolutely no reason why a healthy party or organization not enduring some manner of siege should make use of the slate system. It may resemble the system used by the Communist Party of China (CPC), for instance, but careful attention to the functioning of a slate system as run by a cult or sect will demonstrate that, unlike real communist parties, the deviation adopted by the cults and sects permits self-selecting leadership to maintain their positions in perpetuity with no recall or accountability.

What is the slate system? As our interlocutor who provided us with the insights into RCI wrote, “a slate system is used during an election within an organization when the leadership body (or a fraction of the leadership body) proposes a slate. A slate is a list of leadership positions in the organization, with one candidate for each position which the leaders wish to fill. The leadership body votes on a single slate, which is then proposed to the rank-and-file members, who can either vote to approve or reject the slate. Rank-and-file members are not allowed to participate in the decision of the leadership body about who is put on the slate.” In many parties, this blatantly antidemocratic procedure is couched in the most hypocritical panegyrics. Oh, of course this is merely advanced democracy, true proletarian democracy, in which the membership is utterly neutralized and sidelined. Only in the most advanced proletarian democracy is the election of leadership a function performed by leadership itself!

Social isolation. Whether this is presented as a security measure to prevent individuals from learning the identity of the organizations roster, or as some bizarre and hitherto unheard-of aspect of democratic centralism, social isolation prevents individuals from having discussions “outside of the proper channels.” This is sometimes framed as a way to combat the formation of “factions,” which cults equate to any non-monitored social group. This social isolation functions in actuality to prevent individuals from comparing their experiences or sharing theoretical positions. It atomizes the membership and helps to disguise the true nature of the organization — revisionist, opportunist, abusive — and permits leadership to monitor all aspects of social life within the organization.

In the sect-form, the logic is usually that these kinds of social isolation are necessary to control and prevent the proliferation of revisionism, chauvinism, etc. Although this professed goal is certainly taken, at least in name, from the actual errors of the larger movement, it can never be achieved through the deployment of these tools. The rigid cabinning of cells is how a militant underground operates, not how a cohesive party operates. The two cannot be confused, or the resultant structure will list ever more steadily toward the cult-form.

Aggressive self-and-community criticism. Although when properly-exercised self-and-community criticism is a tool that can be used to engage in constructive struggle and can actually strengthen Communist unity, when it is abused by the sect-form and the cult-form it is a tool of social control. This is a broad subject, and was the initial topic that the Clarion writers began soliciting interviews with Marxists about. Self-and-community criticism is necessary because of the existence of the two-line struggle within Communist organizations. As the new Italian Communist Party wrote in La Voce n. 35 in July 2010, “two trends are always existing, one pushing onwards and the other restraining. They are the joint effect of the class contradiction (of the bourgeoisie’s influence and of the struggle against it), of the contradiction between the true and the false and of the contradiction between the new and the old. In some periods the two trends are complementary and both contribute to a party’s development. In other periods they become antagonistic and incompatible. The left trend has to transform the right one.”

This is particularly true in the imperial core where the two deviations — the ultra-left and right lines — arise organically from the economic and social relations of empire. Petty-bourgeois ultra-leftism must be purged; bourgeois rightism must be purged. These trends cannot be allowed to take hold! But how are they purged? Self-and-community criticism, when properly practiced, is a tool for this purification of the party organization. The deviation of self-and-community criticism can manifest in the sect-form as 1) an overemphasis on criticism (“addiction to struggle”) or 2) a refusal to permit any struggle (see below). In the cult-form, self-and-community criticism is only ever presented as flowing from the leadership to the rank-and-file. Leadership insulates themselves entirely from criticism in the cult-form.

Oppressive “democratic” centralism: 1) ban on factions; 2) ban on debate; 3) ban on expression of disagreement. Democratic centralism has been a byword for abuse in the Western Marxist movement since at least the middle of the last century. In order to understand the ways in which Western Marxists have distorted democratic centralism, we must work to recover the true meaning of the term.

Democratic centralism proposes a dialectic between the rank-and-file and leadership of a Communist organization. Democracy means the input of all levels, centralization means the consolidation of policies by leadership. The definition of democratic centralism, promulgated through the constitutions of the CPSU and the Community Party of China (CPC), means that 1) party organizations are established through elections; 2) party organizations at all levels are required to make reports to those party members or units by whom they were elected; and 3) all lower units must accept the decisions of higher units. Party rules should not restrict a party member’s “creative spirit” and democratic rights, for all members have equal duties and rights to oppose individual despotism within the party and to engage in criticism and self-criticism — especially criticism of those above and those below.

In the CPC this is expressed as 知无不言，言无不尽 zhī wú bù yán , yán wú bù jìn: say all that you know, and say it without reserve. In 2017, Li Junru, former Vice President of the Central Party School in the People’s Republic of China, articulated democratic centralism this way:

[I]ndividual Party members are subordinate to the Party organization, the minority is subordinate to the majority, the lower Party organizations are subordinate to the higher Party organizations, and all the constituent organizations and members of the Party are subordinate to the National Congress and the Central Committee of the Party, where both democracy and centralism are advocated.

The Party Charter also stipulates that if individuals hold different opinions, they can keep the differences, but most obey the Party’s decision in action. If they have advice for the local organizations, they can approach the Party Central Committee to exercise their right to express or right of petition.

This is commensurate with Lenin’s formulation: 

The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organizations implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.” He gives this example: “The Congress decided that the Party should take part in the Duma elections. Taking part in elections is a very definite action. During the elections… no member of the Party anywhere has any right whatsoever to call upon the people to abstain from voting; nor can ‘criticism’ of the decision to take part in the elections be tolerated during this period…. Before elections have been announced, however, Party members everywhere have a perfect right to criticise the decision to take part in elections.

Democratic centralism does not mean that criticism of political positions is outlawed in an organization. Democratic centralism does not mean that at all times, factions are outlawed in an organization — this confusion was the result of the 1929 Ban on Factions, which is not inherently part of democratic centralism. Democratic centralism does not mean a ban on debate, or a sequestering of debate to once-every-four-years.

These deviations came about to permit leadership in compromised Western parties to exert social control over their opponents. The effects of these blanket bans on debate is to crush all democracy and subject an organization to stifling central control. As to the Ban on Factions, that could be the subject of an entire article of its own. Suffice to say here that democratic centralism requires a sliding balance of democracy vs. centralism depending on the conditions — and no organization in the West is fighting a civil war with reactionaries or is subject to intense state repression, meaning none of those organizations has a good reason to suppress factionalism entirely.

Unaccountable abuse-handling systems. This is an adjunct to the false democratic centralism, and is sometimes couched as being part of the party security apparatus. In a functional party or organization, systems of handling allegations of abuse and misconduct are exposed to daylight and are transparent. That is, part of the methodology of weeding out abuse is to expose the abusers and to demonstrate publicly the systems in place for handling that abuse.

In certain very devolved sects and as a necessity of adopting the cult-form, abuse handling systems are hidden. They are made opaque. Reports of abuse enter a black hole or, worse, trigger private and secret investigations in which the person who reported the abuse is investigated and told, behind closed doors, to be quiet. Sects will often give their reasons: avoiding wreckers who make false allegations, avoiding public scrutiny by non-Communist elements who use allegations to raise a cloud of dust and smear the name of the organization, etc. The reason for this should be clear once it’s considered for a moment: keeping accountability meetings quiet means that the abusers and, more importantly, the cult can be protected from any blowback.

In reality, the reason that sects are afraid of wreckers, false allegations, etc., is because their abuse-handling systems are, in part, insufficiently rigorous and, in part, because of the very secrecy which they demand.

RCI: In Its Members Own Words

The material we have assembled here was submitted by a comrade going by the pseudonym Violet. She sent us this material in the hope that we could publicize what had happened in the RCI and help the movement advance and learn to combat the cult-form. One of the reasons that she credited and trusted USU to undertake this task was our statement indicating our commitment to openness and transparency: that we publish all of our board and Press Organization minutes as well as our financial statements.

Sadly, in the time since we made that commitment, several of our editors, affiliates, and distributors have been targeted by the state repressive apparatus and our doings much exposed to the news in certain local regions. For that reason, although we remain committed to openness, these minutes and financial statements are no longer simply available for browsing online. Those who are interested are welcome to contact us to request the minutes and financials at USUEditorial@protonmail.com.

We hope that the above framework will provide a way to navigate and digest Violet’s account.

Violet writes,

I was a member of one of these cults for five years. The group was called the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) when I was a member, but they recently renamed themselves to the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI). The US section was called Socialist Revolution, recently renamed to the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA). You might have seen their stickers that say, “Are you a communist? Then get organized!” This is a recent campaign of theirs, and even though their membership is small, they have been putting up those stickers like crazy, and reaching a further layer of the population than they have before, at least in the US.

MY HAPPY YEARS IN A CULT

The RCI recruited me when I was a freshman in college, near the end of 2016. I had radicalized during high school, primarily due to the internet, and there were no open socialists at my school that I could share ideas with. By the time I started college, I was so desperate to join a revolutionary group that I joined the first one that I saw in person.

Over the next five years, I devoted more and more of my time to the RCI, and more and more of my money once I began to work full-time. I was excited to finally be a part of a group which doesn’t hide the fact that it aims to overthrow capitalism. I genuinely believed that I was building the workers’ movement, and felt like I was achieving the most meaningful purpose that my little life had to offer.

THE 2022 CANADIAN ABUSE SCANDAL

In June 2022, an ex-member in Canada published an open letter, which reported three incidents of sexual assault against them and others, by members of RCI. The author had previously reported the abuse to the Canadian leadership bodies discreetly, but felt that their responses were inadequate (to say the least), and then decided to leave the RCI altogether and share their experiences with the public. The top leadership bodies in the national sections of Canada, the United States, and even the international leadership body, published a series of responses, calling the author of the open letter a political enemy of the organization, and defending the actions that the Canadian leadership took in response to the allegations.

Later, in 2023, the highest-ranking leader of the Canadian RCI section, who was heavily involved in the responding to the abuse allegations, was himself quietly expelled from the organization for committing sexual abuse, despite being a member for over 20 years, and practically founding the Canadian section. His name is Alex Grant. Many other ex-members have published resignation letters, detailing the RCI leaders’ response to the open letter in greater detail; here is the most recent one, which also addresses Alex Grant’s quiet expulsion from the RCI.

Although we did not yet know the truth about Alex Grant, many members at the time found these responses from the leadership to the open letter to be repulsive. The statements from the leadership gave the impression that they were more concerned about protecting each other, than about getting rid of the abusers. Most people who had a problem with that decided to leave. They were the smart ones. Some of them published big resignation letters, and others left quietly. The biggest sillies were in Chicago, and I was the peak silly girl.

For further reading about the scandal: Here is a resignation letter co-authored by 21 Canadian members during 2022 when the scandal was still unfolding. Here is a resignation letter from the British section. Finally, here are two other solid articles written while the scandal was unfolding, both of which address the events of the scandal itself and the RCI leadership’s response to it. I can also dig up some old internal emails from the RCI during this period upon request.

HOW CHICAGO RESPONDED TO THE SCANDAL

At the time, I was the member in Chicago who had been in the RCI for the longest. However, I had just moved to the city, and two other members already held the leadership positions in our branch. This would later come back to bite us when the scandal hit, because the two members in branch leader positions (i.e. the Branch Committee, initialed as BC) sided with the Canadian leadership, and shut down all discussion of the scandal, and any talk of improving the abuse policies, as best as they could. However, unlike those two, I could see that six out of ten members were very concerned about the abuse, and only those two approved of the leadership’s behavior, with the other two staying out of the conflict. I saw more and more people in other cities resigning. I did not want that to happen in Chicago. I felt disappointed by those members for resigning, instead of staying and pushing for change through the “democratic structures” of the RCI, which the leadership assured over and over existed.

I succeeded in temporarily convincing the other five concerned members of the Chicago branch of the RCI to stay. We tried for the next three or so weekly meetings to put a discussion about the scandal over the agenda, but it was futile, because the two members in the Branch Committee had total control over planning the meetings, and refused to let us have any say. I was still concerned with appearing good in the eyes of the national leadership, so we did not attempt to take control of the meetings by force, instead patiently waiting for the Branch Committee members to decide to open up a discussion.

This plan of ours changed when we learned about one member of the Executive Committee who resigned, after being threatened by the other EC members with expulsion. All this, just because he had two phone calls with a Canadian member where he was trying to get more information about the scandal. I have more to say about this further down, in the discussion about the slate system.

Given that we were clearly being prohibited from discussing the scandal openly at branch meetings, I reached out to the other five members privately, asking if they wanted to hop on a video call together to decide our next steps. They all agreed. By the end, we had not yet decided on a clear course of action, but we agreed to make a group chat with the six of us, so we could more easily share news and coordinate together.

A week and a half later, one of the other five got nervous, and shared the entire contents of the group chat with the US section’s Executive Committee (EC), which is the highest body of the US section. Only after this did the two pro-leadership members in Chicago agree to begin a series of discussions. This only resulted in one group discussion, regarding democratic centralism, and how to raise disagreements. Never once were the members of our branch offered an open, honest discussion about the abuse which occurred. I realized later that the leadership never once intended to have such a discussion, and that these assurances of a future discussion were only a stalling method to keep us in place while the Executive Committee prepared their attack on us.

THE LEADERS PUBLICLY SHAME AND EJECT THE “CHICAGO CLIQUE”

On August 24, 2022, the Executive Committee sent all members of the US section a big email about the “Chicago Clique” as they named us, publicly shaming us, and demanding us to repent for discussing the scandal when we had been told not to. There are a lot of acronyms used, so here is a quick guide, if you decide to read the emails:

• A = the initials representing me
• XX = the initials representing other “Chicago Clique” members
• TT = his real initials, because he was Chicago’s point of contact with the Executive Committee, and he is a terrible person who continues to do a lot of harm. In addition to being one of the most ardent defenders of abusers which I have ever met (and I have met a lot), he introduced me to his partner while I was still a member, who looked like he was at least 30 years younger than TT. TT’s full name is on plenty of Socialist Revolution publications if anyone wants to figure it out for themselves.
• BC = Branch Committee
• EC = Executive Committee
• CC = Central Committee (EC members are just the CC members with the most authority)

Here is the first email from the EC:

Comrades of the Chicago Branch,

The EC is addressing you before the membership of the entire US organization to express our support and solidarity with those branch comrades who were unknowingly excluded when a secret clique was formed in your branch. The actions of these comrades constitute a serious breach of our internal democratic structures, and have damaged the trust and confidence of the rest of the branch, and of the organization as a whole.

In the late hours of July 25, a group of six members of the Chicago branch held a secret meeting in which they voted to form a Signal chat group, and agreed to conceal it from the rest of the branch. In the weeks that followed, the group acted as a secret bloc within the branch, voting on various decisions and actions behind the backs of the other comrades, coaching each other on how to handle meetings and discussions, and sharing screenshots of texts, emails, and Slack message conversations with other branch members and the CC contact from the National Center. The group also shared Discord links to internal documents from the Canadian section, as well as various “updates” and rumors from other back channels, including report backs from conversations with individuals outside the organization.

Of the six members who initially formed the group, one comrade made the decision to break with the clique and put everything on the table, sharing a full transcript of the secret group chat. In their words, they came to the conclusion that “honesty is the one thing I haven’t tried.” Upon leaving the group chat, this comrade expressed their realization that the bloc had in fact constituted a clique, and advised the other comrades to disband the group and be honest with the rest of the branch. 

We commend this comrade for acting responsibly and attempting to restore and repair the damaged trust within the Chicago branch. We do not know if the other members of the clique plan to heed the advice of this comrade. The EC is writing this letter in order to bring the facts to light, to invite the other members of the clique to answer for their actions, and to use this experience for the benefit of educating the entire section in order to become stronger Bolsheviks.

Once again on the lessons of cliquism and factionalism

The actions of the Chicago clique are an unfortunate byproduct of the recent political attack and its impact on our ranks. The balance sheet of this experience was discussed at the last meeting of the Central Committee and outlined in the most recent circular on this topic. Prior to that, the document on “Democratic Centralism and Bolshevism” also took up the questions of cliquism and factionalism in some detail. 

We can appreciate that this has been an entirely new experience for most comrades, one that has already proven extremely instructive for the organization. In these circumstances, it is understandable that some newer comrades were disoriented and responded to events, perhaps unintentionally, in a way that undermined the democratic structures of the organization. The point is that comrades must learn from this experience, and this includes recognizing mistakes and taking steps to restore trust when it is compromised. It is one thing for comrades to fall unintentionally or unconsciously into undemocratic actions. It is another thing to go behind the backs of your comrades and engage in a prolonged and deliberate deception, and to double down on this route when the mistake is clearly pointed out to you. 

The history of the revolutionary movement shows that the refusal to break from dishonest methods can only lead to one outcome: a departure from the struggle for socialism. These lessons, which may appear new and unfamiliar to comrades today, have roots going back to earlier periods of the movement, which we can learn from. 

For example, one of Trotsky’s most famous works, In Defense of Marxism, is a collection of his contributions to an internal polemic against an unprincipled petty-bourgeois grouping within the Socialist Workers Party in 1939–40. These writings not only cover the organizational aspects of the factional dispute, but delve into the philosophical roots of Marxism as a method of analysis. This masterpiece of Marxist theory—whose title provides the inspiration for the name of our international website and theoretical journal—deserves to be read by all comrades. 

At its recent meeting on August 7, the CC discussed the lessons of the 1939–40 experience. The factionalism that had taken hold within the SWP was rooted in years of elaborate back-channeling and secret correspondence, fostered by leading figures within the party, including Martin Abern. The early years of the Communist Party in the US were rife with factionalism and various internal rivalries. When the American Trotskyist movement was born, many of these unhealthy organizational methods were carried over by individuals like Abern,who had broken politically with Stalinism, but had not broken with its methods of bureaucratic maneuvering.

Another contribution to the polemic within the SWP was made by Joseph Hansen, who was one of Trotsky’s secretaries living with him at his residence in Mexico from 1937 until Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Hansen had a unique perspective on the nature of the Abern clique, because he had formerly been a part of it, and had gone through the experience of breaking with it. In 1939, he wrote the text “Organizational Methods and Political Principles” explaining the nature and methods of cliquism, and appealing to comrades to defend the basic principles of Democratic Centralism. As Hansen describes in the introduction, Trotsky reviewed the article approvingly, and did not feel the need to make a single suggestion or edit. 

To be sure, the degree of factionalism and intrigue within the SWP was on a level far beyond anything remotely comparable to recent instances of cliquism in the US or Canadian sections. Yet, precisely because the last couple of months have been new terrain for the organization, there are important lessons to be learned from historical experiences like these, that can help shed light on the dangers of small-circle back-channeling and cliquism as it has unfolded in the Chicago branch.

Actions that undermine trust

It is telling that the clique was formed while the International Marxist University was still underway. Some of the Chicago comrades had come together and organized a watch party that weekend, joining hundreds of comrades across the US and thousands around the world in what was an inspiring event and a spectacular opportunity to raise comrades’ political levels. Those of you who attended the watch party did not suspect that some members of the branch—who had not bothered to register or to join the local watch party—were engaged in organizing a meeting of a different type, behind closed doors.

Comrade A, who has been a member of the organization for five years in multiple cities and should have known better, was the most enthusiastic driver of this group at all times, bringing various matters to a vote and appealing to the clique members to adhere to the decisions of the group. During the initial secret meeting, A acknowledged that the comrades were breaking the rules of the IMT. The Signal group chat was set up with a description that openly mocks and disparages our principles of internal democracy, facetiously describing the group chat as: “Just a group of members in the same branch who happen to be communicating with each other.” 

We can assure comrades that there are better things to do with our time than reading screenshots of the group’s secret conversations. But you don’t have to read very far to see the dishonesty of these actions, which are self-evident from the very start of the chat. The first message from A recapped the decisions that had been taken in the Zoom call, complete with votes tallied: to form a group chat, to attempt to “loop in” another branch member to the clique when “the moment is right,” and to keep secret from the branch the hidden meeting and the “agreement on whichever [unspecified] points.”

A goes on to elaborate that even though the group has agreed not to reveal their bloc to the branch, “we can still support each other when one of us starts discussion or brings up proposals, to make our agreement look natural and spontaneous (which it was, it just happened sooner lol).” The message ends with a note of encouragement: “Each one of you is brave for sticking it out this far, and I am proud to call you comrade!!”

When another member asks for a clarification about what it means to maintain secrecy if comrades would be supporting each other in discussions, comrade XX offers a clarification: “I think the thing is we don’t coordinate our agreement. Like if something comes up in branch discussion we are open that we disagree with the IMT position. But we’re just individuals who happen to have similar thoughts. Not acting as a bloc yet.” 

When it comes to deceiving the members of your own branch, these actions could hardly be more conscious and deliberate. On another occasion, the clique members advise each other on how to approach conversations with other branch members, including members of the branch leadership and non-BC members, as well as a run down of where comrades apparently stand, i.e., who is “staying neutral,” supporting the branch leadership, or “could wind up swinging either way.”

Ahead of calls with the BC comrades and comrade TT, who follows up with Chicago from the National Center on behalf of the CC, clique members advise each other to “be sure to record it,” to pursue a strategy of “playing dumb,” and above all to protect the secrecy of the group: “say you just got all the opinions from Twitter. They’ll probably buy that.” 

At one point in the chat, the comrade who ended up breaking with the clique comments that “Trust has obviously been broken here for this group chat to even exist, and it must be taken seriously for it to be repaired.” 

The task of restoring trust in the branch falls squarely upon the comrades who have undermined it by resorting to secret channels behind the backs of everyone else in the branch. 

Why the mistrust of leadership?

Throughout the conversations of the group, the obsession with secrecy is tied up with the fear of some unknown and unspecified threat of reprisal from the leadership. Comrade ME, in particular, expresses a constant worry about the potential consequences if “leadership” finds out about the clique. 

We ask these comrades, what is it you feared this whole time that prevented you from raising your concerns honestly and openly in branch meetings or in discussions with the leading comrades you know and work with regularly? Since when does the elected leadership of a Bolshevik organization threaten to “attack” members who have disagreements? Has any comrade on the local or national leadership given any indication they were unwilling to discuss patiently with comrades, to hear any concern, and to answer any question? 

Comrade A herself spoke to comrade TT individually, in group calls, and over text and email, on at least five occasions. Throughout the sum total of these interactions and conversations, A raised exactly one concrete disagreement related to the situation in Canada. Unsurprisingly, when TT discussed this with her, A realized and admitted that this disagreement was based on a complete misunderstanding of basic facts involved. And yet, despite multiple explicit commitments by A to be open and transparent, the suspicion and clique activity continued, to the point where A told the clique that her attitude was “fuck playing by the CC’s rules.” 

The democratically elected leadership of the IMT, from the branch level to the national and international levels, has never given comrades a reason to suspect that they would be treated unfairly or that any kind of disciplinary action would be taken against comrades with opposing views. So why the misplaced distrust and outright hostility against the elected bodies of the organization? 

As we explained in the recent circular on the balance sheet of the situation, there is a clear source of this attitude of hostility and mistrust. The atmosphere of mistrust was precisely the desired effect of the political attack from its inception. Just as in Chicago, an entrenched minority of members of the Canadian section resorted to secret channels, cut off from other comrades, where they could reinforce each other’s doubts and build up an increasingly frightening image of the “leadership” as a ruthless bureaucracy intent on “crushing dissent.”

Recognizing mistakes and repairing trust

This malicious image could not be further from the truth. We can only conclude that these comrades have invested more confidence in the rumors they hear online—the updates coming through dubious and semi-anonymous sources from people they have never worked with or met in person—than in the elected leadership of the IMT or the comrades in their own branch.

For a Bolshevik, the point of internal democracy is not to assert one’s individual rights and opinions. Rather, it is a means to an end—to achieve greater clarity of ideas and strengthen the organization in preparation for a decisive confrontation with the capitalists and their state. Democratic rights come with responsibilities, including the responsibility to put differences on the table, to be discussed and debated in a healthy and structured manner. What has been the result of the clique’s actions? Have the issues been clarified? Has the branch been strengthened? On the contrary. Far from being “just a group of members in the same branch who happen to be communicating with each other,” comrades were pitted against each other, entrenched in bitter gossip and animosity, and none of the issues were clarified. 

To the comrades of the clique: you have made a serious mistake. But that mistake does not need to be the end of your involvement in our collective fight for the end of capitalism. It is now up to you to prove you belong in this organization. No one is forcing you to be a member of an organization you disagree with. It is on you to decide whether or not you agree with the unwavering revolutionary principles of this International—including our staunch rejection of identity politics. We urge you to reconsider the path you have taken and to commit to open and comradely dialogue to resolve any differences and restore trust, in discussion with the rest of the Chicago branch and the CC, which will be discussing this matter and how to proceed this weekend. 

To the rest of the comrades of the Chicago branch: the IMT is behind you! You comrades live in one of the largest and strategically most important cities of the US. Your task is an enormous one—to firmly plant the banner of the IMT in the eyes of the immense layer of radicalized youth in that vast metro region, countless numbers of which are rapidly moving toward our revolutionary views. A solid branch today, mobilized full steam ahead for the Fall Offensive in step with the rest of the US section, is the path to five Chicago branches, and to the first hundred Chicago members in the years shortly ahead. 

For this, your branch must be a well-oiled machine, made up of comrades ready to fight side by side. You cannot achieve this without the utmost confidence of all comrades in each other, a healthy environment of trust and commitment, and the willingness to overcome all obstacles. Your branch has come through a difficult test—one that can only leave you collectively stronger and more unified than before.

Comradely,

The EC of the US section of the IMT

That was the only email which I know for a fact was shared with the other members of the US section of the RCI (formerly IMT). Below are additional emails which were exchanged, but I have no idea who else has seen them.

I replied to the EC two days later:

Comrades of the EC, 

The information you have been presented with is extremely one-sided and is missing key details, most notably the events in the month leading up to the formation of the group chat.

If anyone wants to hear my point of view, please feel free to reach out. I have nothing to hide. I can also elaborate on all of this in writing if people request. Otherwise, I have no interest in making a scene.

Comradely,

A

The Executive Committee replied one week later later (my edits in all caps):

Comrades,

The EC is writing to follow up on our open letter to the Chicago branch. In the week since we sent the letter, we have received only one reply, from comrade A. Of the five members who remained in the secret group chat after comrade SNITCH came forward to reveal the underhanded dishonesty of this grouping, not a single one of them has had the courage to come clean to their branch comrades. Not one of the clique members has so much as acknowledged that their actions were a breach of our internal democracy, let alone issued an apology to the branch for going behind comrades’ backs and damaging the trust of the organization. 

As we made clear in our original letter, the task of restoring broken trust falls on those who have undermined it through their actions. Thus far, the failure of these comrades to indicate any willingness to break with cliquism or to even acknowledge their actions leaves the branch with no path toward restoring a healthy atmosphere of collective trust, honesty, and revolutionary commitment. It is simply impossible for the branch to conduct its work as long as this remains the case. What reassurances have been given to the rest of the branch that the clique is not still operating undemocratically behind comrades’ backs? None whatsoever. This, as we enter the crucial Fall Offensive period when we need all hands on deck and all comrades rowing in the same direction.

The Central Committee met in person over the weekend of August 27–28 and discussed this situation. After a full discussion and collective input from that elected body, the CC voted unanimously to empower the EC to suspend [first names and last initials of A, XX, XX, XX, and XX] from membership in the IMT. After further consideration and discussion at its meeting on August 29, the EC voted unanimously to suspend all five of these comrades, effective immediately. 

It is in the hands of these comrades to take the necessary actions to restore trust, as comrade SNITCH has already done, in order to have their membership rights reinstated. In the meantime, these comrades are barred from all political activity in the organization, including attendance at branch or any other IMT meeting, and may not access our internal materials or communications or represent themselves as members of the IMT. While on suspension, any comrade who discontinues payment of dues will be considered to have resigned from the IMT. 

We would also like to use this letter to respond to A’s reply (appended below). Comrade, your response to our open letter failed to acknowledge your serious violation of our internal democratic structures and the trust of your comrades. You have not provided the slightest indication of any intent to break with your dishonest methods. Instead, you defiantly argue that the EC was provided with “extremely one-sided information”—although the only information the EC and CC relied on in our deliberations was your own words, as relayed in the group chat of a secret clique that you actively and consciously organized. 

As a veteran of multiple branches and the longest-standing member of the IMT in the Chicago branch, and as the primary initiator of the clique, your actions constitute a more serious breach of our methods and trust than those of the other clique members. Your failure to recognize this fact casts serious doubt on your future association with the IMT. You say you do not wish to “make a scene,” but by your actions you have already created a sorry one. You also say that you are willing to “elaborate on all of this in writing if people request.” We do so request and await written clarification.

To the other suspended comrades, the door to reintegration into the life of the IMT is open to you. If you are willing to openly acknowledge your actions and work to restore trust, the EC and the rest of the Chicago branch would be more than happy to have your help in the fight to build the forces of Marxism in that important city. If you would like to organize a discussion to begin the process of rebuilding trust and getting back to regular membership in the IMT, please contact your branch secretary.

Comradely,

The EC of the US IMT

This was the last time that someone on a leadership body of the RCI ever spoke to us. However, one member of the “Chicago Clique” other than me gave two last replies on the same day we received this email.

The first reply:

I believe I have obtained video footage of the CC meeting discussing the “clique:”

The second reply (edits in all caps):

I would also like to make clear that, though you’ve decided to use A as a scapegoat for all dissent within the Chicago branch, in actuality A consistently attempted to sooth our concerns. When CANADIAN VICTIM’s letter was first published, A assured me that the IMT leadership would be willing to have a reasonable discussion on possible reforms of the abuse investigation procedures, and that resigning or taking drastic measures like calling for recalls were unnecessary. Once the IMT took the of smearing CANADIAN VICTIM’s letter (and any criticism occurring because of it) as a political attack on behalf of the Petersonian boogyman of “postmodern identity politics” (a blatantly cynical attempt to distract from the actual controversy, which is that serious sexual assaults are occurring with some regularity in the Canadian section, and the investigations into them have been consistently badly mishandled by leadership due to either criminal incompetence or deliberate conspiracy) A again convinced us to stay in the organization and that leadership would be willing to listen to our concerns. Only once it became clear that the leadership was acting in bad faith did we resort to more desperate measures. 

As for the leadership, at the branch level BRANCH SECRETARY’s handling of the situation could only be described as “malicious incompetence.” At no point during this crisis was any real effort made to reach out to listen to or assuage any concerns, nor were there any attempts made to inform members on the situation, nor really to provide anything resembling leadership. In fact, it seemed at points that BRANCH SECRETARY didn’t really realize that there was any crisis at all, and any attempts to explain our position appeared to go right out his other ear. This is why A seemed to be at the nexus of the opposition; she was trying to do BRANCH SECRETARY’s job for him, and since he was far too stupid to see that his obstinance and malice necessitated her to act on his behalf, he blamed her for the discontent caused by his dogshit leadership. 

In addition, talking as an opposition (which we only began seriously in response to the above as well as several meetings with Tom Trottier, where he seemed to deliberately misunderstand our questions) with the we began to suspect BRANCH SECRETARY was lying to us; for instance telling members who had missed meetings information at odds with the actual content of that meeting, or that they weren’t privy to information which they were; as well as talking behind the backs of other members and attempting to renege on agreements made at prior points in the crisis; this (along with similar behavior from Tom Trottier) is what convinced me of the need to record minute information on the leadership; it was clear that you were a bunch of dishonest bastards and we weren’t going to let you play mind games with us. Naturally, showing a spine or any self respect is dishonest behavior. 

It has become clear that the leadership of the IMT does not believe in anything beyond its own power. Thus they are willing to smear anyone critical of their mishandling of rape cases as an opponent to all of Marxism; which is quite a delusion of grandeur considering that the IMT exists solely to bilk naive students into buying reprints of books available for free and to sell an unreadable magazine at other people’s events to fund a clique of lumpy, mediocre bureaucrats. I’m not giving you fucks any more of my money, this was a fucking scam and I should have seen that from the start. 

Love, 

XX

If anyone would like further details on how things played out in Chicago, I would love to clarify whatever I can. I made a timeline of the events from June to September, have screenshots of messages with the leadership, and notes I wrote down during meetings. Given that the EC suspended us without bothering to hear our side of the story in the slightest, none of us think there would be any point in trying to clear our name within a system that was rigged against us from the start.

OH YEAH I FORGOT THIS WAS AN INTERVIEW

Q: What is/was the atmosphere or understanding around dissent in your organization?

Above all, hypocritical. The leadership led us to believe that conflict would be dealt with openly and healthily, but it was the opposite.

Q: What is/was the method of dealing with mundane interpersonal conflict?

In the RCI, the stated procedures for handling any kind of disagreement or internal conflict are completely at odds with the way it actually plays out. Interpersonal conflict is treated the same way, especially when it has to do with abuse.

Q: If someone had a personal problem with someone else, what was the policy? How was it handled?

“Report it to your leadership.” After that, there’s no guarantee of what will happen. Even the official abuse policy leaves the decisions of how to proceed entirely up to the leader to whom the allegation is reported. The policies that do exist state that “this comrade in a leader position may decide to do x or y thing,” but there is no requirement whatsoever on anything they must do, no matter the circumstances.

Can you see how a leader can take advantage of this procedure (or lack thereof) to suit their own needs? Who’s to say that the leader is not an abuser, just like Alex Grant was? In Canada, leaders of the Executive Committee have always been allowed to appoint themselves on the Control Commission (not to be confused with the Central Committee; to my knowledge, the RCI does not use abbreviations for the Control Commission), which is the body designed to address and process abuse allegations within the organization.

This is one way in which the US section was better: Executive Committee or Central Committee members were not allowed to appoint (technically propose in the slate, which in practice amounts to appointing, more on this later) themselves to be on the Control Committee. “Was,” not is better, because the US section struck this clause from their membership handbook in 2023.

In a way, it does not matter who the executive committee appoints to the control commission, even if the membership miraculously manages to overturn the slate, because the executive committee gets total control over when the control commission is convened. So if a member reports an abuse allegation to the executive committee, the executive committee might decide not to convene the control commission, and does not need to provide a reason for deciding not to do so. The control commission gets no say in this; by the rules of the organization, their hands are tied, and they cannot do anything.

Q: What is/was the method of dealing with what were perceived to be major political deviations? How were deviationists handled?

In the RCI, if you are a deviationist because of even minor political disagreements, or if the leadership considers you to be a deviationist because you were the victim of abuse: the leadership publicly shames you, attempts to isolate you from other members, and gaslights you into giving up and leaving. In the rare event that doesn’t work, like in Chicago and Portland, they suspend or expel you from the organization entirely. 

Q: Were deviationists rehabilitated? If so, how?

Abusers are rehabilitated whenever the leadership thinks they can get away with it. To my knowledge, no member who either left or was kicked out for opposing abuse or having political differences has ever been rehabilitated.

Q: Was the criticized person brought back into any kind of unity with the group?

No, not to my knowledge. I only know of one or two members who returned after resigning, or being suspended or expelled, and they were the recipients of abuse allegations, at least one of whom was related to the scandal in 2022. The one about whom I am certain has the first name Mitch, and he is a member of the Canadian section. I do however think that Alex Grant is out permanently, which is hilarious given how unconditionally the other members in leadership positions had his back during the scandal in 2022.

Q: Was there any element of community criticism, as opposed to self-criticism? Were the criticized people encouraged to respond in detail to calls for self-criticism, rather than simply rolling over?

None of either, only leaders criticizing their followers.

Q: What literature was provided on democratic centralism or self-and-community criticism?

For self-and-community criticism, none. The RCI is Trotskyist, and considers the concept to be Maoist, therefore to be automatically disregarded.

For democratic centralism, there is a lot, both in articles which can be found online, and in internal documents, such as the membership handbook. The RCI considers itself to be democratic centralist. In practice, it is entirely bureaucratic centralist. There is no democracy in this group. I learned that the hard way.

Real socialist democratic centralism is far more democratic than a bourgeois democracy could ever hope to be. However, the RCI makes the US legislature look like an anarchist utopia. At least under capitalism in the US, you get to vote for individual candidates, and choose between two parties which can realistically win an election. If the US had the slate system of the RCI, the election ballots would only show one option to vote for, which encompasses all members of the government, and you could either approve or reject it. As far as I know, no slate within the RCI has ever been rejected. In fact, there is no procedure detailing what happens if a slate is rejected. The leadership does not even pretend that that is a possibility.

THE SLATE SYSTEM: A METHOD OF TOP-DOWN CONTROL

In short, a slate system is used during an election within an organization, when the leadership body (or a faction of the leadership body) proposes a slate. A slate is a list of all the leadership positions in the organization, with one candidate for each position which the leaders wish to fill. The leadership body votes on a single slate, which is then proposed to the rank-and-file members, who can either vote to approve or reject the slate. Rank-and-file members are not allowed to participate in the decision of the leadership body about who is put on the slate. The RCI permits no factions, so therefore the entire extent to which the rank-and-file members are allowed to elect their leaders is by approving or rejecting the entire slate. Rank-and-file members are not allowed to approve or reject individual candidates, nor is more than one member allowed to run for a position once the leadership body has proposed a slate.

In practice, any slate is bound to succeed, because any member who is discontented enough with the slate to vote no is far more likely to just leave the organization than vote no, for several reasons. One, you’d have to wait for the national congress, which only comes once every two years. Two, you’d probably try other options to try to change the slate first. Regardless of whether your grudge is interpersonal or based on a political position, you’d end up banging your head against the wall, because you’re arguing with a group of yes-men, who always vote unanimously, and always agree with whoever is above them. Who would want to stay in that situation? Well me, my dumb ass wanted to stay in that situation, until they got impatient and kicked me and half the members in my city out.

The act of kicking us out confirmed what some of us had already figured out, and others of us had been unwilling to accept. The executive committee really was manipulating the rank and file members. They were trying to quarantine us, and gaslighting us into either accepting what was plainly untrue, or leaving once we could no longer tolerated it, as any self-respecting person would do. As soon as they understood we were willing to put up a long, determined struggle, to not shut up until our demands were met, they burned us and suspended us as fast as they could.

I was pretty cult-brained prior to that point, and even on the night that I read the second email from the EC, I lied in bed thinking I could still get to them, and convince them to have a reasonable conversation with us. I spent the previous two months trying to convince the other discontented members not to leave, because I thought they should stay and discuss what changes they wanted to be made, instead of giving up and leaving. I regret this every day, but I had taken the bait given to me by the leadership that the organization had “democratic structures,” and encouraged open discussion and debate. Surely, there had to be some members on national or international leadership bodies who were genuinely concerned about stopping abusive behavior, and stopping the train wreck that the leadership was creating through their chauvinistic and manipulative responses to the allegations, right?

Well, there was one such member of the US executive committee, who resigned after the other EC members threatened to suspend him. His crime? Talking with an RCI member from Canada about the scandal over the phone, twice. That’s it. No plans to enact change, just sharing details about what happened. To my knowledge, the Canadian member was not on any leadership bodies, and not directly involved in the situation at all. About a month into the scandal, after the national leadership in Canada, the US, and the international secretariat had all released horrible statements, the EC member in question resigned.

The other EC members justified this by saying that different national sections have their own autonomy, and that we should leave each other alone to do our thing. This is in fact the exact opposite of how the RCI works, with an international leadership body that has authority over the national sections, and international congresses once per two years precisely so different countries can decide on joint decisions, and tell each other what to do.

A few days later, this EC member told me that what the official EC position was saying about him were “distortions” and “not accurate.” Another ex-member could probably add a lot more clarity on this particular event, and if anyone requests, I can seek out further information about what happened there. After almost two years, I have forgotten a lot of the small details.

However, with this ex-member, I remember having the understanding that they had developed a reason not to trust the Canadian executive committee, especially Alex Grant, and therefore began his own small investigation. “Investigation” might be overselling it, because it genuinely sounds like he had just two phone calls with the rank-and-file Canadian member. 

Somehow, the other US EC members caught wind of this, and threatened him with suspension. As to why the leadership would feel so desperately threatened by him asking questions, it is hard to say for certain, but it certainly did make it appear like some of the other leadership were attempting to cover up evidence related to the scandal.

HOW CAN I TELL IF A SOCIALIST GROUP IS A CULT?

I’ll begin with why I consider the RCI to be a cult. The RCI is a group where:

• The leadership bodies have total control over who else gets accepted into a leadership body.
• No members of a leadership body can be recalled except by other members on the same leadership body, or by someone at a higher leadership body.
  • Formally, the rank-and-file is allowed to put it to a vote, but only at a National Congress which comes once every two years. I have never even seen a motion to recall make it so far as to be voted on, or even discussed, at a National Congress. The leadership simply hounds any rank-and-file member who supports the recall until that member gets frustrated and gives up.
• The highest ranking leaders have total control over the mechanisms for processing abuse, and are free to do as they wish, as long as the other leaders on the same level or higher approve of them.
• Several of the highest-ranking members have been alleged, first-hand by their victims, of sexual abuse and harassment toward members and non-members, most of whom are far younger than these leaders.
• The leaders regularly use public shaming to punish rank-and-file members over even minor disagreements.
  • Obviously this happened in Chicago, but they also publicly shamed the Canadian abuse victim who wrote the open letter about the instances of abuse in 2022.
  • Additionally, members in Portland tried to start the discussion about implementing minor changes to the language surrounding abuse at the 2023 National Congress, and were met with vicious public shaming by the national leadership for daring to suggest such an idea. This shaming took up a large portion of time at this event. Here is a google drive link of documents related to this incident.
  • One other funny detail about Portland is that, in one ex-member’s words: “I brought up the old sexual harassment with Woods and Co in branch once.” Alan Woods is the “leading theoretician” of the RCI, according to one RCI article. I had learned about this other scandal as well after learning about the one in Canada. The ex-member continues: “And [another Portland member at the time], old comrade from the Militant who was in my branch [the RCI’s name in the 80s in the UK], said: ‘[the girl at the center of the scandal] dressed to attract men.” This is the mentality that the highest-ranking and longest-standing members of the RCI are coming from.
  • Portland refused to relent to this bullying, and the EC responded by quietly expelling them. The EC did not even admit to expelling them, they just stopped responding to them entirely, and ceased all communication, ghosting the Portland members like a bad date.
  • This public shaming continues until the dissatisfied members either capitulate and fall in line, or give up and leave the organization. Public shaming is an intentional tool used by leaders across the board, even on the local level. It is a strong tool for eliminating members who pose even the slightest threat to the leadership. The “public” aspect of the shaming serves to send a clear message to the rest of the rank-and-file members. The message has a dual character. Agreeing with the leadership is extremely easy when you are not the direct target of the shaming, and reinforces your in-group mentality, strengthening your trust and dependency on the leaders for validation. On the other hand, it is a threat, that this is what will happen if you deviate from the opinions of the leaders. The majority of members subjected to public shaming just leave.
• In the rare event that public shaming alone does not resolve the issue, such as in Chicago, the leaders simply suspend or expel their enemies.
• Members are also extremely financially exploited by the organization.
  • The leadership is in a constant state of adding more and more expenses that they cannot afford, in the hopes that their investments will allow them to grow faster and increase their revenue later. The leaders encourage members to dig as deep into their pockets as they can, even at the cost of basic needs. Meanwhile, several of the highest leaders have a vacation home, a rich family which they can lean on for financial support, and frequently go on vacations such as kayaking retreats with each other. I would not say that they have mega-church levels of inequality, but maybe if they had more members, then they might. As it is, there certainly seems to be a greater share of petty bourgeoisie than workers at the top, as well as workers with a rich family to support them, as opposed to the rank-and-file, whom they are milking dry while they are struggling to pay for basic necessities.
  • I would not say that I have seen evidence of embezzlement, but knowledge about the finances of the organization are closely guarded by those at the top. Information regarding the financial records on a national or international level are practically never shared to rank-and-file members, except for the exceedingly rare cherry-picked facts which make the leadership look good. So really, if there was any evidence of embezzlement, the only way that the news is likely to come out would be an audit, some other government investigation, or a whistleblower, none of which appear likely at present.
  • I think I also remember hearing that the RCI’s tax records classify them as a book publisher, i.e. a private, for-profit company. I could try to fact-check this if anyone asks.

Truly, the RCI is bureaucratic centralism from top to bottom. I think it is fair to call it a cult as well. I remember speaking to one recent ex-member who expressed doubt about considering the RCI a cult, saying, “Define cult.” I responded, “Give me a definition that they do not fit. They fit every one.” This ex-member considered it, and responded that using the label of cult does not help our cause, because members will hear it and immediately disregard the rest of what we have to say. I responded that this is also true for actual cults.

I recognize that calling a group a cult is very easy to do, and much harder to disprove, for just about any group. In the eyes of the RCI, they see abuse allegations in the same way. But unlike the RCI, I do not think that we should write off abuse allegations as a counterrevolutionary psy-op, and I think that some groups are more deserving of the label “cult” than others.

Speaking from personal experience, I spent the two months of the scandal and the first few months after my suspension, thinking that there was no easy way for me to explain what had happened to normal people, who had never heard of the RCI. I was worried that this experience might be something that they could ever understand. However, when I tell people that I was in a cult, they instantly understand so much about the experience, and the way the RCI operates. The financial exploitation, the unchecked power that the leadership has over the rank-and-file, the lack of democracy, the firm discouragement of all disagreement, the public shaming, the abuse of power by the leaders and the lack of consequences when they do so, the sexual abuse and harassment and the way that the leaders respond to it — it all just clicks for people when I use the term cult, and they understand it as if they were there the whole time.

The two months during the scandal that I was still a member, my leaders constantly gaslit me into thinking I was wrong for being more concerned about the sexual abuse allegations than they were. However, every conversation I have had since I first learned about the abuse has confirmed my side of the story. Believe me, I needed a lot of reassurance before my self-doubt about the situation finally began to fade. Here was an organization that I trusted with my life for five years, and then once the scandal broke, they reacted the opposite of how I expected and trusted them to react. At the time, it looked like a switch flipped, as if I woke up one morning and found myself in a completely different group than the one I had come to know. As more time passed, I realized that this was the nature of the RCI all along. They just did a good job of hiding it, until a scandal broke out which they could not hide.

THE RCI AFTER 2022

The leadership has probably managed to continue to hide their true nature to any members that joined the RCI after July 2022. The RCI used to have a strict vetting protocol for new members, but this seems to have faded over the last two years. The method appears to have changed to onboarding new members fast, getting them involved in branch activities and paying dues as fast as possible, and accepting a high level of turnover.

There also appears to have been a bit of an ultra-left turn over the last two years, indicated by the fact that the British section has finally abandoned the Labour Party (the RCI split from the CWI in the first place over their refusal to leave the Labour Party). The International Executive Committee voted to rename the International Marxist Tendency to the Revolutionary Communist International, to coincide with this change in strategy.

In addition to being a turn toward ultra-leftism, and an attempt to scrub their name’s association with abuse scandals, this coincides with an intensification of the blind optimism projected by the leadership, which serves the role of convincing more people to join, and exciting the already-existing members to devote more of their time and money to growing and maintaining the group.

It also coincides with a further abandonment of their presence in the existing mass parties and the labor unions, in favor of focusing more closely to student work, directing new members to an insular group where they will be isolated from the broader population (another method of control employed by cults). To their credit, student work has been by far their most successful means of recruitment in recent decades, so that turn could be justified by that alone.

However, college freshmen are by far the most common recruits from student work. College freshmen usually have just moved to a completely different town, and are just beginning to figure out who they are, what they want to do with their lives, and how they want to relate to other people, sexually and otherwise. 18-and-19 year olds tend to have a lot of anxiety about the uncertainty of their future, the overwhelming amount of choices ahead of them, and the lack of any clear answers. At this age, it can be refreshing to find a group that gives you all the answers, and tells you exactly what to do. I should know — I was one of them.

Religious cults and human-traffickers are also well aware of this fact, which is why they target people in this age range, and are commonly found on college campuses. Given RCI leaders’ track record of committing and defending their abuse of younger members, I think there is ample reason to be alarmed by their increased focus on the recruitment of students.

TO CURRENT MEMBERS OF THE RCI

To any members of the RCI who joined after July 2022:

You are being lied to by your leaders. Any member who joined before then, who is still around, is willing to defend abuse by proven abusers, and publicly shame people who come forward with allegations, smearing them as a liar and an enemy of the organization. At the very least, they stood by while other members did so, and are unbothered enough by their behavior to continue to give the leadership their money, and try to pull more people under the control of these leaders. Either they are guilty, or complacent. You have to snap out of it, and leave before you give the RCI any more of your lives.

To any current members of the RCI who joined before July 2022:

If this is somehow your first time learning about any of this, and you are thinking about leaving the organization, or fighting to change it from the inside, I strongly recommend you just leave. If you try to push for change like I did, even if you do everything by the book and the way that the leadership claims to want you to do so: at best, you are going to find yourself banging your head against the wall until you realize that it’s futile and leave, and at worst, you will wind up traumatized, and kicked to the curbs as if you never meant a thing to them. You don’t mean a thing to your leaders, no matter how much you think otherwise. They are only interested in taking advantage of you, and wasting as much of your time and money as you allow them.

If you already knew all of the facts here, regardless of what you think of my opinions, and still support the RCI:

Fuck you. Your organization snatches up young, radicalizing workers, then chews them up and spits them out. You waste their time. You exploit them financially. When they finally leave, at best, you make them hesitant to trust a Marxist group ever again, and at worst, you traumatize them (or justify and protect another member who traumatizes them), and they drop out of politics for the rest of their life. You are not in a revolutionary party, but a vicious barrier to the formation of a real revolutionary party. You might think you have good intentions, but your actions cause nothing but harm. You are pathetic, and I will never stop hating you.

NAMES OF OTHER COMMUNIST CULTS

Unfortunately, the RCI is far from the only small communist cult of its kind. In the US, the PSL has had similar abuse scandals, and the leaders reacted in much the same way. The SEP (with the paper called WSWS, World Socialist Web Site) regularly publishes articles casting doubt upon high-profile abuse allegations against random celebrities, siding with the alleged abusers. The CPUSA, SWP, RCP, both iterations of FRSO, and Socialist Alternative all give me similar impressions, although I cannot point to a specific publication as proof, but someone else might be able to. The DSA has had sexual abuse scandals arise, and possibly reacted similarly, but I honestly do not know enough details to make any definitive statements about them. I would love to see people chime in with more information about these groups, and how they address abuse within their ranks.

There are other recently dissolved groups in the US from the last five years, which have more reading materials regarding their abuse scandals. The Black Hammer Organization and the CR-CPUSA were the quintessential examples, which both collapsed in 2022, due to state intervention and a revolt by the members, respectively. They both dialed the cultiness up to levels that none of the above groups are likely to reach anytime soon, engaging in kidnapping, hazing of new members, death threats, and more.

The International Socialist Organization is also worth mentioning. In 2019, a sexual abuse scandal and cover-up surfaced to the public, much like the RCI in 2022. However, unlike the RCI, rank-and-file members sympathetic to the victims quickly took the reins of leadership. Their final articles published by their organization are all still online, and show a great level of detail of how events unfolded, and how different factions held greatly differing opinions. This one demonstrates that the leadership responded far better than the RCI did, and gives the impression of a sincere apology, and a commitment to do better. Whether that is an accurate assessment of their response is hard to say from an outsider’s perspective. Still, it was too little too late. The ISO voted to dissolve itself a few weeks later.

The RCI was watching closely as the ISO collapsed. I think that the RCI leadership learned from that experience, particularly, how to prevent the RCI from collapsing when met with an abuse scandal. Instead of taking the lesson that abuse should be prevented and treated in a healthy way, the lesson that they took was that dissent should be clamped down on immediately with utmost force, and they should paint a picture of a leadership which did nothing wrong as quickly and decisively as they can. They saw that the ISO leadership relented, and allowed the rank-and-file to recall and replace them with people sympathetic to the victims, then those new leaders voted to dissolve the organization. The RCI leadership said at multiple times during the scandal, that if they accepted the victim’s account uncritically, then the only option for them would be to liquidate the organization entirely. This is why they considered the victim to be an “enemy of Marxism,” i.e. a cynical hostile agent, with the sole aim of destroying the RCI. The RCI leaders demonstrated that they were willing to sink the entire organization into the ground before relenting to any demands for change in leadership and procedure. Sounds like a cult to me. Unfortunately, they’re not the only one.

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY CULTS ON THE LEFT?

The US has a bit of a unique reputation for cults, but I am sure that cults dot the landscape of socialist organizations in plenty of other countries. I can speculate about why workers and petty bourgeoisie are drawn to cults under capitalism in the general sense, but as to why communist cults specifically are so common, I still do not know. Even Christian cults are far outnumbered by churches without cult-like qualities. Yet, healthy communist organizations appear drastically outnumbered by communist cults, at least in the US. Are communist cults consciously propagated by capitalist governments in order to cripple the workers’ movement? Are they a natural consequence of the organization structure of the Bolsheviks being applied in the modern day, where material and subjective conditions are very different, and do not necessitate the high level of centralization and control which were vital in securing the revolution of the Bolsheviks? Are they just the result of a high need for a communist group to protect itself from attacks from the state, which might include abuse allegations (although I do not know of any examples of a capitalist government weaponizing allegations in this way)? I really cannot say.

MY ADVICE TO COMMUNISTS SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT GROUP

To anyone reading this, hoping for a recommendation of a better group to join, I am embarrassed to say that I do not have one. I have spent the one-and-a-half years outside a cult working on myself, trying to make myself happy, and trying not to get sucked into another cult (which is very common for ex-cult members). I still feel too hurt and untrusting to proactively look at what my options are.

I first learned about Unity-Struggle-Unity Press when I saw them searching for people to interview who have “been in a left org that discourages criticism of the organization and its leaders,” and I have not had much of a chance to get to know them yet. I will say that I am reassured by these statements on the front page of their website:

Although we may decide, in the near-future, to solicit donations to help us cover operating costs (currently paid for out of our own pockets), unlike many similar “Left” projects, we will never profit or otherwise personally benefit from the Press. Our goal is to raise consciousness, heighten organization, and build toward a unity of Marxists — not to line our pockets.

We take transparency seriously, just as we believe all Communist organizations should. To that end, visitors can view the minutes of all of our Editorial Board and General Volunteer-Staff Body meetings, as well as our financial statements, and our bylaws on this website.

Editors Note: These minutes and financial statements are now only available by request due to the Editors and Distributors of the press being subject to intense scrutiny following our anti-zionist paper with the lead article To Stop Marx and the threat of certain press-associated people with losing their employment.

The RCI and all of the organizations which I mentioned above would never make such assurances. No leaders in a cult would ever freely volunteer minutes from their meetings to rank-and-file members, and especially not to visitors. No pyramid scheme would ever freely volunteer their financial statements. And in the RCI, their membership handbook (equivalent to bylaws) is considered strictly internal information, and only revealed to people in the process of joining. These facts alone make Unity-Struggle-Unity Press far superior to any other communist group that I have encountered.

But please, if you take nothing else from what I have to say, think for yourself. Before you join a political organization, and start to contribute your time and money to them: think carefully about the way that the group is structured, and the actions it takes, not just who they claim to be, and what positions they claim to support. I used to belittle communists for not “organizing,” or more realistically, just being a part of a group (since I wouldn’t consider being a part of a cult to be “organizing”). Now, I have learned that joining the wrong organization can be far worse, for yourself and for the worker’s movement, than simply joining no group at all. You have to be cautious and skeptical, or else there are a thousand groups who will eagerly swoop in to take advantage of your selflessness. It’s easy to feel good about being selfless, when you have someone with authority over you eroding your self-worth, and insisting that you are helping others, when you are really just helping them gain money and control over others.

Have some self-worth! In order to become a communist under capitalism in the first place, you have to have a big heart. You have to have the courage to stand against the people in power, if that is what it takes to help the powerless. It is a shame that some people lose sight of that after being a communist for long enough. If you never let go of that feeling, and love yourself as highly as you love others, then whenever you do become politically active, you will do more to help the movement than a cult ever has, and ever will. Have faith in yourself!