During the 19th and early 20th century, the majority of Marxists assumed that, alone among all social relations, the division of human beings into sex-categories was natural. It was not until Simone de Beauviour’s 1949 Le Deuxieme Sexe (“The Second Sex”) that a well fleshed-out challenge was issued to the essentially physiological definition of sex. Monique Wittig carried this further with “The Category of Sex”.¹ The question has finally, thoroughly, been answered in the firm ground of social reproduction theory, which, when properly applied, entirely eliminates the naturalism of earlier Marxists as well as the racialism and bio-essentialism of Beauviour and Wittig.

To put it simply: there is no “woman” question, there is only the question of social reproduction.

One is Not Born a Woman — Or a Man

First, we must address the science. Biological sex is not an ontological category, but rather a label assigned by a medical professional at birth based on the physical characteristics of a child’s genitals.² There is no simple sex binary. There are groups of characteristics defined as primary (genitalia and reproductive organs) and secondary (body hair and breast development, among others), but these groups are shaped not only by genetics, but also by the hormonal environment in the body. These traits all vary widely among individuals, even with the same “chromosomal” sex. It is common for individuals to have atypical combinations of chromosomes, hormones, or anatomy that do not map to the binary model of sex assignment.³ There is, it turns out, no sex binary in nature.⁴ Even which traits or variations are considered typifying for “male” or “female” bodies differ between different cultures and different cultural contexts.

The categories of man and woman are not found in non-human nature, but rather created by human beings and imposed on nature as a result of the sexual division of labor. Pre-sedentary humanity knew and admitted no sexual division of labor. There was, therefore, no division into sexes among people. Expression of sexual traits, identity, and desire was an affair with no social meaning, something shared entirely between individuals.

What began the regime of divided labor is still unknown. It may be that the mastery of animal domestication gave rise to the sexual division of labor, or that it arose simultaneously with slavery. Whatever the cause, the sexual division of labor was a social technology that caused (and required) early human beings to begin to gender bodies and assign those newly-gendered bodies roles in social reproduction: inferior roles, subject to the expropriation of their labor. At around this time, either the sexual division of labor or the “invention” of slavery (itself predicated on advancements in productive tools, horticultural technology, or a more complete understanding of animal husbandry, which allowed for a single person to produce sufficient food to feed themselves and another, to produce the first surpluses) gave rise to private property (my woman, my slave) and thus, to class society.

Sex as we understand it is a creation of the sexual division of labor. It preceded the advent of class society and became one of its social foundations. Sexual mores, the social oppression of non-heterosexual relationships, and the subordination of all gender and sex expression to the heterosexual, patriarchal family, are all the result of this original and archaic sexual division of labor. It is not possible to complete the social revolution without attacking and uprooting this relation. Any revolutionary movement that fails to contemplate the total emancipation of all sexes and sexual orientations is doomed; doomed to failure in carrying out the liberation of all peoples, and doomed to reproduce class society from its very root.

Sex Orders Class

The economic relation of sex is characterized by the expropriation of the labor of social reproduction. This includes not only the bearing and rearing of children, but all domestic labor necessary for the reproduction of society: the preparation of meals, purchasing of clothing, cleaning and ordering of the household, caretaking of children, disabled, or elderly family members, even the psychological relief of soothing and processing the events of life.

This economic expropriation led to juridical oppression throughout most of European history and is the source of the social oppression faced by marginalized and oppressed sexes. Sex has cut across classes throughout history. It is itself a quasi-class, in that members of any social class may be subject to its relations (economic, social, or even juridical where they still exist). However, because members of the ruling class have historically been able to dictate the ways in which economic relations are imposed, the entry of a person of oppressed sex into the political and economic strata of the ruling class often permits that person to avoid the economic relations of sex (labor expropriation). The bourgeois woman purchases the labor of the proletarian woman — a nanny for child care, a maid for house maintenance, etc. To the extent that an individual is fully bourgeois, they cease to be, in the economic sense, a member of that quasi-class. Social oppression, however, may and does remain.

In essence, under capitalism, only the proletarians are fully members of any oppressed sex or sexuality. The pressure of the patriarchal system often demands individuals reach a separate and individual accommodation with power to avoid  the economic effects of their sex-position; however, in exchange, because these individual accommodations acknowledge the overall schema and actually reinforce, reproduce, and permit the wider oppression of marginalized sexes and sexualities, and because social oppression is a direct consequence of this broader economic relation, these individuals essentially become complicit in their own sexual oppression.

Sex is Found in the Base and the Superstructure

Sex is not simply economic (labor appropriation) or social, but rather is a complex of relations that are dialectically intertwined. Labor appropriation is the basis for sex definition and the social oppression of sex, but once the superstructural elements were created to identify and sort human beings into different sexes (the act of gendering), the superstructural element took on a role of their own in this process.

Identification of individuals as “belonging to” one of the social/economic categories of sex created a cluster of traits that can be sorted, graded, and experienced by other actors. This includes those primary and secondary sexual characteristics listed above, but also includes less concrete traits such as conversational strategies, social behaviors, etc. Sex is not a class but a regime, and the sex-regime that has grown up alongside class society violently genders everyone, at all times.

Not only is there no such thing as a natural, ontological woman (or man), the process of being gendered into one (or more) genders is one that is continuous and ongoing. Gendering, like racialization, is a process that requires effort and violence from the individuals engaged in the social structure.⁵

Adaptation and Synthesis of the Gender Ternary

The most advanced articulation of this theory is the Gender Ternary (coined by the Sizhen System on their substack). This divides the gendered social categories along two lines: the socially legitimized sexes and the subaltern sexes as the first division, and the division between oppressed/oppressor sexes as the second division. Although Sizhen collapses the final two categories, they retain analytical power.

It’s important to stress that these categories are constantly being created and recreated through social (superstructural) interactions and rules. It is possible to move between these quasi-classes — indeed, the functioning of the gender/sex system requires individuals to be moved through these quasi-classes over time in order to function. These are not medical/biological categories, but rather social categories onto which medical/biological ideology is mapped.

This creates the following arrangement, in which the overarching categories remain man and woman, but are divided along a second, normally “hidden,” axis along which the question is whether they are legitimized or subalternized:

• The legitimized oppressor sex: the heteronormative man.
• The legitimized oppressed sex: the heteronormative woman.
• The subaltern⁶ oppressor sex: Any male-sexed individual who exhibits traits outside of the heteronormative becomes subalternized.⁷
• The subaltern oppressed sexes: Any non-male-sexed individual displaying a  non-heteronormative sexual identity or trans person is subalternized.⁸

Quoting Sizhen at length:

“The Subaltern Gender exists as the Punitive Gender: in service of the need to keep the [legitimized oppressed sexes] in check, should they start to “get ideas” in the sense of political consciousness, in their eternal dialectical contradiction with the [oppressor sex]; and in service of the need, broadly, to curtail class traitorism by reifying the superstructural elements of the Gender-Class Ruling Ideology, by maintaining the integrity of the boundaries between these gender-classes [ED: here, we use the term sex quasi-class], and to act as one of the mechanisms by which gender-class mobility is controlled and mitigated.

Gender is a class system. Gendered violence exists to control the movement within and between those classes. The Subaltern Gender Class is one peculiar form [ED: this should be “particular form”] of gender[ed] violence, which exists to be a punitive class in which one is thrust upon sufficient transgression of gender-class ideology or correct protocol.

….

To derive gender-class from “identity,” which is to say “how one Identifies,” is itself an idealist error, which locates the origin of gender class as a manifestation of a spiritual ritual of identification, and which retroactively creates a past experience of gender class after identity is achieved. This is necessarily incoherent. Gender is never a choice. To say “Trans men are men” is as much of a tautology as to say “I am a transgender woman because I Identify as such.” It is a liberal analytical concession to the prevailing discursive technologies of the Transgender Tipping Point-era, which were strategic decisions which prioritized the legitimization of “validity” rather than a correct, materialist analysis of gender….”⁹

Total Liberation Requires Liberation of the Forces of Social Reproduction

This is the ultimate conclusion of the “Woman Question” addressed by Marxists over the past two hundred years. Freedom for any individual requires freedom from the oppressive class-system of sex and gendering. In order to achieve this liberation, we must ground our analysis on firm materialist bedrock. The material basis of sex is the expropriation of labor — the sexual division of labor. The entire superstructure of sex and the gendering of human bodies rests on the bedrock of the sexual division of labor; although it operates, at times, without direct reference to this bedrock, with the end of the regime of divided labor, it will be possible to abolish the superstructure of sex-oppression.

The social revolution must uproot the property relations of sex and gender as a special task. This will see the complete depatriarchalization of world society, the abolition of all regressive and outmoded views on sex, sexuality, and human interaction. It will establish real equality between sexes, alleviate the inordinate weight of domestic and reproductive labor on oppressed sexes, and guarantee the right of existence of those sexes and sexualities that are under threat by the patriarchal capitalist order.

Gender, sex, sexual preference, and sexual expression will become entirely an affair for individual expression, and cease to have any political or economic meaning.

1. (1982). ︎
2. American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “Just the Facts: Biological Sex”. ︎
3. Id. ︎
4. That is, sex is not an ontologically-existing category found natively. Mechanical Marxism sees ontologically-existing categories everywhere, which is a relic of primitive Enlightenment-era scientism. This is the same process of reification that we can see in, for instance, scientific racism. It is marked by the social creation of an analytical category, then the privileging of the analytical category over material reality. ︎
5. It is important to note that the radical feminist proposition that being a man is characterized by being a rapist or an abuser and that being a woman is characterized as being subject to sexual violence is incorrect, in that it sites the division of labor only at the level of sexual violence and obliterates the superstructural elements. ︎
6. Here, Sizhen (and I) use the term, as Gramsci did, to indicate someone who is denied control over the hegemonic social forces. ︎
7. By sexed, we mean anyone subject to the social process of gendering who is sorted into the category of “man,” and who is therefore able to appropriate the labor of those sorted into the social category of “women.” This includes passing trans men, but does not include trans women. ︎
8. On the social nature of sexing, see note 4 above. ︎
9. (emphasis mine, editor’s notes in brackets). ︎

“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.

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

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

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

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

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Conquest of Crumbs

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

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

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citations

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

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

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

The 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!

In 2025, we will have reached a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Someone born in the year 2000 will, in those short 25 years, have experienced multiple “once in a lifetime” events. These include worldwide recessions at an increasing frequency, a global pandemic that has claimed millions of lives, massive floods, wildfires, ever-worsening heat waves, and multiple U.S.-led or U.S.-directed wars in the Middle East, including most recently, the intensification of the ongoing Palestinian genocide by “Israel” which has laid bare the global resurgence of open fascism.

All the while, this 25-year-old individual has seen their wages stagnate in the face of inflation, making even the most fundamental necessities of life, such as groceries and stable housing, increasingly unaffordable. In short, things are pretty bleak.

But why is this? Why are things the way they are? Are these just random and unrelated events that make the lives of the vast majority of people more difficult? Is there little or nothing we can do about it?

Or, is there a thread that connects all these problems and crises together?

Marxists understand that the global capitalist system is that thread, and that the solutions to the myriad crises facing us will only come about by unravelling it and building a new social and economic system. Marxism is a method of analysis that allows us to bring the true nature of capitalism into focus, demystifying how our world works, and stripping back the layers of capitalist propaganda we have been fed our whole lives.

“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”

Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done (1902)

What is (and isn’t) Marxism?

Someone looking to bourgeois (capitalist) politicians, media outlets, and academic sources to find an accurate and fair description of Marxism, Communism, or left-wing ideas in general will have a difficult time. In most popular media, Marxism is either depicted as an outdated ideology that has nothing to offer a modern world, or as a dangerous “authoritarian” dogma that seeks to rule over people with an iron fist. But are these depictions anywhere close to reality?

Marxism is, of course, named after Karl Marx, the 19th century German political theorist, social scientist, and economist who (literally) wrote the book on capital.

His life’s work was explaining what capitalism is and how it relates to politics. Along with his long-time collaborator and comrade Friedrich Engels, he laid the foundations of what we call Marxism today.

However, this does not mean that Marxism begins and ends with the works of Karl Marx himself. Marx and Engels openly built off the work of figures such as Adam Smith, GWF Hegel, Robert Owen, and many others.

Since Marx and Engels’ time, a long list of theorists, activists, and revolutionaries have expanded Marxism and adapted it to different contexts and times. The strength of Marxism lies not in the perfect wisdom or character of one person, but in its ability to analyse the world using scientific methods that illuminate the fatal contradictions in capitalism.

Understanding capitalism gives us the opportunity and the ability to chart a course towards a better future. Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action. Marxism is the theory for the education of the working and other oppressed classes, and its usefulness is its scientific philosophy and methodology; not the personal opinions of Marxists or even Marx himself!

Scientific Socialism

Marxists often get accused of being naïve utopians, but in fact much of Marx and Engels’ early work was critiquing utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Marxists do not imagine a perfect socialist society and then attempt to impose that ideal onto the current reality. Instead, we use scientific methods (evidence, research, critical analysis, etc.) to help us understand the world as it is now, and how we can change it.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

When Marxists talk about socialism, we are referring to a political and economic system formed after capitalism has been overthrown by the working classes, but where aspects of capitalism still remain and are being gradually eliminated by the new socialist state. These lingering elements of capitalism include, but are not limited to: commodity production; the necessity of money; and reactionary ideologies such as individualism, national chauvinism, misogyny, and racism. The overthrow of the capitalist class and the establishment of socialism is, however, the first step towards resolving these lingering contradictions.

To achieve this socialist transitory stage requires the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. This is not a dictatorship of one person over all others, which would be antithetical to Marxism, but the overthrow of the current dictatorship of the bourgeois class of the few and the establishment of supreme power in the hands of the revolutionary proletariat of the many. There is no “one size fits all” solution. Socialism develops according to the unique conditions of each region.

Communism is a future stage of development under which the last remnants of capitalism and class society have been eliminated globally, and the need for a state to manage the many contradictions of capitalism has disappeared.

Dialectical Materialism

Dialectical materialism (diamat) is the core philosophy of Marxism. From this philosophy comes a scientific framework for understanding changes in the world, and more importantly, for enacting change ourselves.

Dialectical thinking is rooted in the principle that all things in existence are constantly interacting with one another, and that these interactions are the basis for change. Dialectics is based on logical constructs that contain two or more aspects that oppose, act on, and require each other for existence. In Marxism, these constructs are most often called contradictions.

Contradictions are in all things and are in constant motion. Nothing exists in isolation from everything else, and all things are in a state of constant change. If we want to understand something (be it an animal, a piece of music, a political ideology, or a global economic system), we have to understand the internal contradictions within that thing as well as the external contradictions. Internal contradictions are the basis of the thing while external contradictions are the outside conditions and forces interacting with it.

“In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis.”

Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (1937)

The internal properties of an egg will determine if the egg hatches into a bird or lizard, while simultaneous external conditions that surround the egg (like temperature and location) will determine whether it incubates and hatches, is cooked, is eaten by a predator, or simply rolls from the nest and is broken.

Fundamentally, a contradiction is composed of two or more aspects. The contradiction of capital and labour has two main aspects: the capitalist class and the working class. Both classes are required for the other to exist, but both classes are opposed to one another.

These opposing classes are engaged in a long struggle for dominance. Capitalists fight to maintain their control, and workers fight to gain control. When a social revolution occurs, the capital-labour contradiction inverts in favour of the workers, the workers become the ruling class, and suppress the capitalists

It will then be the job of the workers to gradually eliminate the conditions for class society until no class divisions exist. The capital-labour contradiction will finally be resolved.

Materialism

In philosophy, the word “materialism” carries a different meaning than its common everyday usage. Here, materialism does not refer to someone being materialistic, i.e., only being concerned with physical possessions or wealth. Instead, materialism is the understanding that the universe we live in is made first and foremost of matter. Our thoughts and ideas originate from and are only possible because of matter.

This doesn’t mean that materialism is completely deterministic. We still (mostly) have control over our thoughts and actions. However, the choices we make are shaped by the material conditions we find ourselves in. The relationship between thought and matter is, like all relationships, a dialectical one, but matter is the primary actor. A carpenter makes the choice to act and turn a block of wood into a chair, but this is only possible because the physical properties of wood allow them to do so. No matter how skilled the carpenter, they cannot build a chair out of air because the physical properties of air do not allow it.

Historical Materialism

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

Historical materialism takes the principles of dialectical materialism and applies them to the development of society over time. Marxism identifies class struggle as the fundamental motive force behind human social development in class societies.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

By taking a scientific study of human history, we can see how the conflicts between different classes in a society, shaped by changes in the mode of production (how a society fulfills the material needs of its population), resulted in changes to the overall structure of that society.

For example, near the end of the Middle Ages, the development of mechanised production and an increase in global trade allowed for a small class of European merchants to grow their wealth and political power. Eventually these protocapitalists grew powerful enough to challenge and even overthrow the feudal nobility, giving rise to modern capitalism and the liberal state. But, by creating a new ruling class in the form of the bourgeoisie (capitalists), capitalism also created a new global working class (the proletariat). In doing so, capitalism, as Marx put it, created its own gravediggers, since the proletariat has nothing to gain by their continued exploitation under capitalism.

Historical materialism gives us the tools to understand historical events and observe general trends in present-day developments. It is not however a crystal ball that lets us predict exactly what a future socialist or Communist society will look like. We do not know, and cannot know, what shapes art, music, religion, sports, or many other parts of human society will take under a yet-to-be realised new socioeconomic order.

“Marxism comes to the world as an historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans or, let us go back to Asians; when the Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts. They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. So that method and factual data were obviously interwoven, and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting. It was the task of the Chinese to deal with that and to adapt it and to scrutinise it and see how it was applicable to their society. First and foremost, to be scientific, it meant having due regard for the specifics of Chinese historical and social development.”

Walter Rodney, Marxism and African Liberation (1975)

Oppression and Exploitation

Oppression and exploitation manifest in innumerable ways under class society. They are inextricably connected to and caused by the stratification of society into different classes. The purpose of oppressions may differ, but they all ultimately serve to benefit the ruling classes of said class society. In the present age these oppressions and exploitations serve capitalists in capitalist society.

Economic Exploitation

“Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That’s why I poop on company time.”

A common refrain

Economic exploitation—at its most fundamental—is extracting more value from a person’s labour than they are paid. Under the capitalist wage system, a restaurant worker might make 15 dollars per hour. However, in that hour as a result of their labour, they create 100 dollars of value by assembling and cooking meals.

Instead of receiving the full 100 dollars of value, the capitalist who owns the restaurant (the means of production), pays the worker only the promised 15 dollars, uses a portion to cover facility costs, and pockets the rest as profit. This profit is called surplus labour value and was created by the labour of the workers. The boss keeps wages as low as possible while ensuring workers remain unaware of this thievery.

You, as a worker, may feel like you are being cheated every day at work. This is because you are. At a fundamental level, we all understand this!

The economic exploitation of the worker—the extraction of surplus labour value—is the fundamental rule of capitalism. Without exploitation, the capitalist makes no profit. With no profit comes no capital accumulation, which is the entire goal of capitalism: endless profit.

The exploitation “of man, by man” works simultaneously with the exploitation of the land, oceans, and air as class society necessitates the extraction of raw materials without regard to what nature, and by extension ourselves, need to survive.

National Liberation, Decolonization, and Land Back

Marxists are internationalists. The liberation of humanity cannot happen unless all nations are free from colonial oppression and imperialist exploitation.

National liberation and self-determination includes the right to secession from oppressive regimes. This includes Indigenous nations within settler-colonial states such as: Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel.

In settler-colonial states the contradiction between the colonised nations and the colonising nation is the principal contradiction (the contradiction which informs all others), and not the contradiction between the (majority settler) working classes and the capitalist class (although this contradiction remains important). When this is the case, settlers of the dominant colonial state must embrace the concept of Revolutionary Defeatism by working tirelessly to ensure the defeat of their own settler-colonial nation state and liberation of indigenous nations.

It is the responsibility of all communists on this continent to combat settler chauvinism wherever it emerges among the masses, within our organisations, or within our party programmes.

“Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation.”

Vladimir Lenin, Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1904)

Against Racism and White Supremacy

Marxists are fundamentally opposed to racism and are at all times against white supremacy. This also means white Marxists make a conscious effort to challenge their own racism.

White supremacy is tied to capitalist exploitation and manifests through anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, Sinophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry. These chauvinisms are used to continually divide the working class and convince the privileged—in Canada primarily the white settler class—to view people of other races and nationalities as their enemy rather than the capitalists who exploit them.

Against Patriarchy and Misogyny

Marxists reject misogyny and patriarchal social relations and systems. This includes opposing sexist attitudes towards women and other oppressed genders, but also in seeking to abolish patriarchal institutions such as the nuclear family. Of course, this must also mean working against patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes and systems within our own organisations.

Marxist feminists understand that the liberation of women and all oppressed genders is not a separate issue from economic exploitation and other forms of oppression. The accumulation of private property was accelerated by tethering it to male lineage, where men in a family contributed to the fortune by their labour, to be passed down through the eldest son. Reproductive labour, that which reproduces the conditions for production (making food, keeping house, raising children), was placed on the shoulders of women as unpaid labour.

This delineation and subjugation of women is a necessary component of private property. Thus, we understand that women’s “liberation” under capitalism can only ever mean liberation for a relatively small number of wealthy, mostly white, and cisgendered women in the imperial core. The past liberal feminist movements have proven this. Despite winning women’s “freedom” to work, the subjugation of women continues as they are often still required to perform unpaid reproductive labour in addition to productive labour.

“The proletarian women’s final aim does not, of course, prevent them from desiring to improve their status even within the framework of the current bourgeois system, but the realisation of these desires is constantly hindered by obstacles that derive from the very nature of capitalism.
A woman can possess equal rights and be truly free only in a world of socialised labour, of harmony and justice. The [liberal] feminists are unwilling and incapable of understanding this; it seems to them that when equality is formally accepted by the letter of the law they will be able to win a comfortable place for themselves in the old world of oppression, enslavement and bondage, of tears and hardship. And this is true up to a certain point.
For the majority of women of the proletariat, equal rights with men would mean only an equal share in inequality, but for the “chosen few”, for the bourgeois women, it would indeed open doors to new and unprecedented rights and privileges that until now have been enjoyed by men of the bourgeois class alone. But each new concession won by the bourgeois woman would give her yet another weapon for the exploitation of her younger sister and would go on increasing the division between the women of the two opposite social camps. Their interests would be more sharply in conflict, their aspirations more obviously in contradiction.”

Alexandra Kollontai, The Social Basis of the Women Question (1909)

Against 2SLGBTQI+ Oppression

A proper Marxist analysis will demand the full liberation of 2SLGBTQI+ peoples everywhere and seeks to abolish homophobia, transphobia, and any other manifestation of anti-2SLGBTQI+ oppression. While it is true that, historically and presently, some socialist states have enacted homophobic and transphobic policies, we regard this as an error and a failure on the part of those particular states, some of which (such as Cuba) have admitted their faults and begun to rectify those mistakes.

People who don’t fit neatly into the restrictive boxes of sexuality and gender expression set forth by capitalist society find themselves at one of the sharpest inflection points! Their existence and desire to express their humanity are an affront to private property’s rigid gendered economic roles. These roles, and their resulting rigid social roles, are forced upon people, often violently.

Non-capitalist societies built on a communal way of living often respect gender diversity where labour is not as harshly delineated. Whether through colonialism’s centuries long attempts to exterminate Indigenous societies or capitalism’s further atomization and immiseration of all workers, both seek to crush gender diversity even as they may pay it lip service. Only through the liberation of all 2SLGBTQI+ peoples will everyone be free, and only through the destruction of capitalism and colonialism will 2SLGBTQI+ peoples be free.

Against Class Reductionism

Many “Marxists”, particularly in the imperial core, treat “economic” class (worker v. owner) as the only factor worth considering, ignoring that struggles like Indigenous/settler or imperial/imperialized struggles (as examples) are class struggles too. “Economic” class is critical to understand, but Marxist analysis does not begin and end there. A proper Marxist analysis includes a dialectical understanding of how various class struggles interconnect and affect one another.

The liberation of colonised peoples, the liberation of women, and the liberation of 2SLGBTQI+ peoples are class struggles. They need to be understood as being inclusive. To focus solely on one and not the other is reductionist and serves to fracture the movement.

Revolution, Reform, and Armed Struggle

“We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”

Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (1971)

Marxists are revolutionaries. We do not seek to simply soften the edges of capitalist exploitation, but to overthrow capitalism altogether. While reforms can be beneficial in the short term, the histories of reformist social democracies show that this path inevitably leads to a weakened working class movement, and so-called “socialist” leaders who are more concerned with keeping the status quo than fighting for liberation.

Additionally, social democracies have a strong tendency to be nationally chauvinist. Achieving marginally better rights for those within the nation while paying for it through colonial and neo-colonial projects is not socialism. Social benefits for people living in the U.S. and Canada (as part of the Imperial core) come at the expense of increased exploitation of the Global South and internal colonies.

This does not mean, however, that Marxists desire violence. We should seek nonviolent means to resolve contradictions and conflicts whenever possible. We also oppose reckless and adventurist acts of political violence that only put comrades at risk, encourage state repression, and impede the liberation of the working class and oppressed peoples.

Unfortunately, the reality is that there are few—if any—examples in history of a ruling class that gave up its power peacefully. Indeed, capitalist states have shown that they will go to any lengths to repress and destroy working class and other liberation movements, up to and including fascist coups against socialist governments, the assassination of socialist leaders, economic embargoes, and sabotage. Marxists understand that the working classes and oppressed nations must be willing and able to defend themselves and fight for their liberation by any means necessary.

Conclusion

“The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich business men owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.”

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1987)

In closing, Marxism is the key for better understanding the world we live in. But, Marxism not only offers a coherent worldview; it also gives us the theoretical tools necessary to enact change on our world. It is a methodology which continues to speak to the struggles of the downtrodden, which is why it has become the most commonly used and most effective weapon at the workers’ disposal to combat the capitalist boot on our throat.

Karl Marx understood that human beings are social creatures. We do not exist as isolated individuals, but instead yearn to be part of a community where we live, work, learn, and share our lives in solidarity with one another. Building a better future for humanity and ending the centuries of exploitation and oppression will require a collective effort unlike anything seen before.

While this might sound overwhelming, we can all start now by organising together in our communities and workplaces. We encourage you to join a revolutionary Marxist group in your area, or help organise one if none exist. We look forward to working side-by-side with you to build a better world for all.