Factions, Splits, and Entryism in the US Communist Movement

“Of course, the parties of the Second International, which are fighting against the dictatorship of the proletariat and have no desire to lead the proletariat to power, can afford such liberalism as freedom of factions, for they have no need at all for iron discipline. But the parties of the Communist International, whose activities are conditioned by the task of achieving and consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat, cannot afford to be ‘liberal’ or to permit freedom of factions.”¹

This quote — a comparison by J.V. Stalin made in the decade following the October Revolution when leftwing parties split into anti-colonial communists and liberal social democrats — makes no compromises in the Marxist-Leninist view on factions within a revolutionary party. Factions crystallize internal discord into multiple poles within a party which divide its unity and impair it in a life-or-death struggle against the bourgeois regime. This is a simple and clear instruction for those in the Bolshevik Party when considered in tandem with the rest of Stalin and Lenin’s teachings on party unity: “Iron discipline does not preclude but presupposes criticism and conflict of opinion within the Party,”² but this conflict cannot be allowed to form factions or splits.

Yet for those of us who live in modern day countries such as the United States which host a competing cluster of social democratic and communist parties, it is a far more difficult teaching to implement. After all, the Bolshevik Party earned its role as the vanguard of the peoples of the Soviet Union during the crucible of the October Revolution, whereas the socialist parties of the United States are marked by stagnation, isolation, and exhausted prestige. Is one not violating party unity by leaving these groups due to conflicting principles, especially if they leave alongside like-minded revolutionaries? What about those practicing entryism, i.e. those who enter a party already conscious of their conflicts with its practices and principles, intending to either sway it from within or to split from it after gaining organizational experience and resources?

We see entryism and factionalism on full display with groups such as MUG (Marxist Unity Group), embedded in the Democratic Socialists of America. They explicitly identify as: “a DSA faction, and we aim to be a constructive one … we hope to rally the thousands of Marxists in DSA around a shared vision for our movement’s future.”³ While this strategy consciously violates the ban on factions of the Third International, its validity cannot be dismissed out of hand. After all, the Italian Communist Party, which played a decisive role in the fall of fascism and swayed Italian politics in the decade after the second World War, formed out of a split within the Italian Socialist Party. Was this not a product of factionalism?

The Italian Communist Party came to power in the same decades that the Comintern trained international cadres in Moscow⁴ and coordinated policy across the world’s revolutionary organizations. The Third International initially communicated with the Italian Socialist Party as a revolutionary peer, so how did it react to the violation of its ally’s internal unity? In the year preceding the split in the Italian Socialist Party, Lenin repudiated the attitude of communists within the Socialist Party who called for unity with its rightwing reformists:

“Serrati fears a split that may weaken the party and especially the trade unions, the co-operative societies and the municipalities. These institutions, which are essential to the construction of socialism, must not be destroyed—that is Serrati’s main idea … Serrati fears the destruction of the trade unions, the co-operative societies and municipalities, and the inefficiency and mistakes of the novices. What the Communists fear is the reformists’ sabotage of the revolution. This difference reveals Serrati’s error of principle. He keeps reiterating a simple idea: the need for flexible tactics. This idea is incontestable. The trouble is that Serrati leans to the right when, in the present-day conditions in Italy one should lean to the left. To successfully accomplish the revolution and safeguard it, the Italian party must take a definite step to the left.”⁵

Serrati cited a rationale which should be familiar to modern day advocates of ‘left unity.’ Our strength is limited, so we must put aside sectarian differences and weld ourselves together for the sake of the greater good! Never mind the fact that these differences concern the fundamental tactics and aims of the revolution, we can’t afford to lose any assets in the face of bourgeois reaction. This line of thinking captures a superficial logic, but it fails to grapple with the deeper danger of unity with unreliable elements. Is it worth retaining soldiers who believe victory is impossible on the eve of a battle? Each one discharged is another gun lost, but it may simultaneously be another traitor prevented from aiming that gun at your back because they sincerely believe that it is better to survive than die in a cause they have deemed hopeless. I describe the hypothetical traitor’s mindset in this way because it is precisely the kind of fatalism which infested the rightwing socialists of Lenin’s time — a pattern we are sure to see reemerge when communists reach success in the US. Himself a believer in the futility of a revolution isolated to the former Russian Empire, Leon Trotsky aptly describes the attitude of so-called revolutionaries when the October Revolution most needed their support:

“When the Soviet system was being instituted in Russia, not only the capitalist politicians, but also the Socialist opportunists of all countries proclaimed it an insolent challenge to the balance of forces. On this score, there was no quarrel between Kautsky, the Austrian Count Czernin, and the Bulgarian Premier, Radoslavov … Had Kautsky, Friedrich Adler, and Otto Bauer been told that the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat would hold out in Russia — first against the attack of German militarism, and then in a ceaseless war with the militarism of the Entente countries — the sages of the Second International would have considered such a prophecy a laughable misunderstanding of the ‘balance of power.’”⁶

These were prominent socialist leaders embedded in the countries most directly threatening the October Revolution. They did not believe in its success, so why mobilize workers and risk government repression for a mere blip in the revolutionary process? Kautsky announced in 1918 that “under the conditions of Russia’s life, the dictatorship of the proletariat threatened to lead to the political and social dissolution of the country, to chaos, but thereby also to the moral bankruptcy of the revolution and a preparing of the way for a counterrevolution.”⁷ This belief mutated from ‘merely’ casting doubt in the Bolshevik prospects of victory during their civil war, to labeling the October Revolution a coup d’etat, to finally outright justifying an uprising against the Soviet Union in 1925, calling for socialists to support an uprising against the Bolsheviks even at the risk of aiding the reactionaries hoping for a Tsarist restoration:

“Naturally, it is not impossible that reactionary elements might seek to exploit such an uprising to their advantage. But this very danger may make it all the more necessary for the Social Democrats to exert all their might to exert decisive influence on the uprising, and by no means to sabotage it.”⁸

Kautsky’s transition from seeing the proletariat dictatorship as a fluke to viewing it as an aberration to be overthrown shows the easy slide of rightwing deviation to counterrevolutionary, with the traitor in question sincerely believing in the historical basis of their sabotage. Kautsky’s attitude was far from limited to Germany. He was a theoretical inspiration for Lenin before their split, and he continued to influence socialists such as Pavel Axelrod and Fyodor Dan in the 1920s. It is in this context that we need to consider Lenin’s picture of party unity:

“Victory in the proletarian revolution cannot be achieved, and that revolution cannot be safeguarded, while there are reformists and Mensheviks in one’s ranks. That is obvious in principle, and has been strikingly confirmed by the experience both of Russia and of Hungary. This is a decisive consideration. It is simply ridiculous to compare with this danger the danger of ‘losing’ the trade unions, cooperative societies, municipalities, etc., or of their failures, mistakes, or collapse. It is not only ridiculous, but criminal. Anyone who would subject the entire revolution to risk for fear of injuring the municipal affairs of Milan and so forth, has completely lost his head, has no idea of the fundamental task of the revolution, and is totally incapable of preparing its victory.”⁹

Lenin made no quibbles that the solution to this danger was either the resignation of these reformists or their forceful purge from the party, going so far as to say that “it may even be useful to remove some very good Communists too, to remove them from all responsible posts, if they are inclined to waver, and reveal a tendency towards ‘unity’ with the reformists.”¹⁰ When we consider the Italian Communist Party’s split, we need to consider whether our evaluation of its tactics should proceed from the Italian Socialist Party’s point of view, or the PCI itself. From the PSI’s perspective, the split naturally constituted a weakening of their forces, but from the PCI’s perspective, it was a necessary fulfillment of Lenin’s advice. The reformists were ‘purged’ from the Party by the split itself. In this sense, the PCI would have more truthfully violated the Leninist concept of party unity and democratic centralism by remaining within the PSI and trying to influence its actions — at the cost of the whole party’s effectiveness and the revolution’s prospects of success.

This situation is again similar to the unity between soldiers. If the main force and its leadership discharge soldiers who believe victory is impossible, they are pragmatically adjusting to remove unreliable elements. If the leadership is hopeless and set to surrender, and a contingent of soldiers desert in order to wage their own guerilla campaign, they are operating on the same pragmatism, even if the form differs. As Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin would all agree, not every battle is worth waging, so the correctness of the action is not contingent on who is most belligerent, but who has reached both the correct analysis and the correct tactic reflecting that analysis. Our soldiers thinking of victory should be conceived as those who have faith in the overall prospects of revolution. Those who hold purges to be inherent violations of party unity do so because they “have no need of iron discipline”,¹¹ i.e. they have given up the battle before it is waged.

Therefore, when we return to the topic of MUG, the most questionable aspect of their program is specifically the fact that they continue to operate within the DSA with the intent of steering it from within, rather than splitting and forging their own path. The DSA itself is rife with factions and eschews any hint of iron discipline in favor of being a “big-tent.” In the words of one of its members, Zhao Levi, explicitly arguing for factionalism:

“The DSA is the clearest example of internal factions influencing the party to a revolutionary direction. Michael Harrington, the founder of the DSA, was both a Zionist and an avowed anti-communist, yet because of its democratic nature, the DSA has transformed to become firmly anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist. Unequivocable condemnation of Israeli settler colonialism and recognition of the Palestinian right of resistance and return have been successfully promoted by multiple DSA caucuses. Similarly, DSA caucuses have also openly fought for the censure of nominally progressive politicians who have condoned support for Israel, such Shri Thanedar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and have at times successfully pushed the organization to cease cooperation with such figures.”

One marvels at the immense accomplishment of being able to “at times” cease cooperation with Zionists. Even Levi’s claim that DSA is a “firmly anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist” organization is tenuous at best. Yes, the DSA passed a resolution this year to become a “Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA” with a lean 56% of the vote. It also failed to formally align itself with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or to adopt a resolution in favor of a single-state solution based on Palestinian sovereignty. This is hardly firm and barely anti-imperialist. It is also laughable to cite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a positive example of DSA organizational ethics. Yes, she lost their national endorsement in 2024. This was years after she refused to vote against funding the Zionist Iron Dome in 2021 and after she voted to quash the railroad strike of 2022. Furthermore, Ocasio-Cortez has only lost her national DSA endorsement. In a turn of events which directly reflects the anti-discipline of the DSA, their New York City chapter upheld her endorsement in 2024, and still has her image up in their list of endorsements as of the time of writing, fittingly sharing the list with Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani has already evoked the apprehension of those who celebrated his victory in the New York City mayoral Democratic primary. He has explicitly separated himself from the proposal of eliminating misdemeanor offenses and clarified that “My platform is not the same as national DSA.” The co-chairwoman of the DSA’s NYC chapter further elaborated on this point and tied it to the organizational ethos of the DSA as a whole:

“Grace Mausser, the co-chairwoman of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, said that the priorities of the national organization are not the same as those of the local chapter, which has autonomy to decide its agenda.

“‘New York City D.S.A. and Zohran share a commitment to making our city more affordable for working people, but that doesn’t mean that Zohran adopts every single position that New York City DSA or DSA national has taken,’ Ms. Mausser said in an interview. ‘Zohran’s been really clear that his platform and DSA’s platform are distinct.’

“While the local chapter endorsed Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy, the national umbrella organization did not. But it did celebrate his primary win over Mr. Cuomo, and even claimed some ownership of it.”

This haphazard juggling of endorsements is the natural result of the anti-disciplinary apparatus that MUG wants to claim ownership of. Members of the DSA itself have tired of this pattern of unaccountability among its endorsed candidates, particularly due to the fact that even if an elected member was purged from the DSA, their usual membership in the Democratic Party makes the DSA’s support an afterthought:

“The Democratic electeds are considered the crowning achievement of the DSA, but they’re really a noose around our necks. They are useful for the Establishment because they restrain social movements and redirect them back into the Democratic camp, where they are safely buried … Democratic politicians, whatever their background and starting point, will have a career only if they work to sustain their party and the ruling-class interests it represents. The more political sway they seek to have, the more they must align with the Establishment to get political backing from higher-ups, fundraising support, etc. … For Zohran’s campaign to warrant even critical support from DSAers, he must first declare total financial, organizational, and political independence from the Democrats. This includes both leaving the party and refusing to caucus with them.”

These proposals would be an essential first step to creating discipline in the DSA, but it is doubtful that an organization which barely managed to take a firm stand against genocide this year will be able to reach it anytime soon. The slim margins by which the DSA adopted its resolutions on Palestine are themselves a product of its ‘big-tent’ mentality. Consider how it has been dragged to its current anti-imperialist positions, and imagine how such an apparatus would function during a period of nationwide crisis. If its current inability to control its members is any indication, it could not muster the organizational strength to seize control of the state, much less to defend its gains. This truth again validates Stalin’s understanding of party ethics, i.e. that the parties of the Second International which allow factionalism have no need of discipline because they do not seek to seize power. They prioritize the appearance of internal democracy under conditions of peace over the preparation of a fighting organization suited to conditions of systemic crisis.

This is the apparatus that MUG wants to “transform … into an independent socialist party.” They see many of the same problems endemic to the DSA’s organization, but they are still set on capturing what they see as “the political home for this struggle.” Is this description accurate, and how does MUG’s strategy match up to the history of revolutionary parties? To expand on MUG’s understanding of the DSA, we can turn to the words of Jean Allen, its Interim Editor in Chief:

“The beauty of the Democratic Socialists of America since its rise has been its place as a staging ground for the transformation of theoretical tendencies into practices, its location as a multi-tendency organization, and its sheer size, dwarfing anything else which calls itself the US organized left. Combined, they have created an organization which has allowed the complete recasting of the Left’s fragmentation into practical terms. This has created a new and volatile politics which, due to its state of emergence, leads to often seemingly contradictory positions being held within one organization or one person. But this is for the best … For all its faults, the DSA has acted as a laboratory of the Left…”

MUG’s characterization of the DSA focuses on its ‘big-tent’ nature, meaning that MUG values the DSA for drawing into itself the largest number of leftwing militants as compared with any other party in the US. This is true on its face, but it substitutes the question of what organization is best posed to guide a revolution for the question of where leftwing debate is concentrated. While these questions can naturally overlap, a glance back through history reveals that functional splits from existing leftwing parties tended to be based on how best to organize the working masses, not how best to reach the biggest portion of the proletariat’s advanced elements. One of the PCI’s key leaders, Palmiro Togliatti, noted explicitly that the break with the PSI was intended to provide an alternative organization to the working class, rather than allowing the PSI’s monopoly to continue:

“The erroneous reformist and maximalist tendencies within the Socialist Party were overcome in criticism, but not in any successful action on a national scale. At that time, however, it was the only party, that is the only national political organization, available to the working class. It is for this reason that the Turin movement ended in the declaration that it was necessary to create a new vanguard proletarian party: the Communist Party.”¹²

Note how Togliatti specifies that no successful rectification occurred in the PSI on a national scale. This again evokes the most damning sin of the DSA’s organizational ethos—its utter lack of discipline towards members and chapters. When MUG declares that it wants to “realize DSA’s promise as a programmatically united mass Party,” it is essentially declaring that it is more beneficial to wage years of ideological struggle with other leftwing militants to then assert a proper mass-based strategy from above rather than using a break to build strength through a functional party from below. There is nothing theoretically preventing an individual DSA chapter from emulating mass-linked tactics, such as the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast programs for children. However, the lack of standardization across DSA chapters simultaneously means that it cannot be a uniformly mass-based party. As a result, what MUG sees as the concentration of leftwing debate in the US is more accurately conceived as a mere subdivision of a broad left fractured between the Communist Party of the USA, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, among many others.

While these other organizations may appear small compared to the DSA, the disorganization of the DSA into disparate chapters means that they are all — in effect — fragments of an organized left which has more publicity than actual unified presence in the lives of the working masses. This situation brings us from parallels with the situation of early 20th century Italy to that in the Russian Empire before the rise of the Bolsheviks. Even in 1917, the Bolsheviks were not defined by being the largest segment of the Russian left, which was instead the Socialist Revolutionaries, who were bolstered by wide swathes of the peasantry.¹³ In a parallel to the modern DSA, the Socialist Revolutionary Party was characterized by a big-tent mentality.

“the PSR was always remarkable for the range of diverse opinion that it contained. In part this stemmed from the aspiration of the party’s founders to absorb all of the populist groups that dotted the political landscape in Russia … It stemmed as well from the absence of a single dominant figure in the leadership, and from the organizational weakness that plagued the party throughout its existence.”¹⁴

The Bolsheviks did not focus on infiltrating and swaying this expression of Russia’s socialist movement. Instead, they focused on solidifying the ideological unity of their own, smaller fragment of the left, i.e. they repudiated the idea of a big-tent socialist party in practice by waging an internal ideological struggle against the seeds of factionalism:

“In the period of the formation of the Party, when the innumerable circles and organizations had not yet been linked together, when amateurishness and the parochial outlook of the circles were corroding the Party from top to bottom, when ideological confusion was the characteristic feature of the internal life of the Party, the main link and the main task in the chain of links and in the chain of tasks then confronting the Party proved to be the establishment of an all-Russian illegal newspaper. Why? Because, under the conditions then prevailing, only by means of an all-Russian illegal newspaper was it possible to create a solid core of the Party capable of uniting the innumerable circles and organizations into one whole, to prepare the conditions for ideological and tactical unity, and thus to build the foundations for the formation of a real party.”¹⁵

This struggle against ideological confusion was explicitly upheld by Lenin, even to the point of supporting both splits from the DSA’s ancestors in 20th century Europe and from leftwing deviations regardless of the potential disruption to the international movement:

“There is reason to fear that the split with the ‘Lefts’, the anti-parliamentarians (in part anti-politicals too, who are opposed to any political party and to work in the trade unions), will become an international phenomenon, like the split with the ‘Centrists’ (i.e. Kautskyites, Longuetists, Independents, etc.). Let that be so. At all events, a split is better than confusion, which hampers the ideological, theoretical, and revolutionary growth and maturing of the party, and its harmonious, really organized practical work which actually paves the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat.”¹⁶

MUG attributes their thought to “the Marxism of the Second International, and above all by those that kept its revolutionary spirit alive in the face of political capitulation: Lenin and the Bolsheviks.” The connection to Kautsky’s Second International is honest, but any ties to Lenin are selective at best and a manipulative farce to gather more radical communists at worst. The historical Lenin would encourage a break with the DSA, fully understanding the further organizational divide this would bring, rather than tolerating ideological confusion and disorganization dressed up in the folksy populist garb of a big-tent party.

Entryism is not only a practice of groups like MUG, however. It is an appealing prospect to individual communists due to the lack of resources and like-minded comrades they may suffer from in the disorganized political sphere. I myself joined my local DSA chapter in the early 2020s because I believed it was necessary to compromise ideological purity for the sake of practice, with a vague hope that I could steer the chapter towards Marxist-Leninist positions. I can say at this point that over a year of ineffectual practice with organized support is easily outweighed by ideological work as an individual, but that is only an anecdote. Many communists could convince themselves that joining ineffectual parties with the intent of steering them towards a different direction is an unattractive necessity of organizing which emulates the pragmatic attitude of Lenin:

“We cannot but regard as equally ridiculous and childish nonsense the pompous, very learned, and frightfully revolutionary disquisitions of the German Lefts to the effect that Communists cannot and should not work in reactionary trade unions, that it is permissible to turn down such work, that it is necessary to withdraw from the trade unions and create a brand-new and immaculate ‘Workers’ Union’ invented by very pleasant (and, probably, for the most part very youthful) Communists, etc., etc.”¹⁷

Were we to extrapolate this notion from economic trade unions to political parties, it would support the basic premise of individual entryism. However, this would ignore the preconditions that Leninists have placed on work within separate organizations. Entering into a reactionary trade union as a member of a communist party means having the backing and obligations inherent in that membership. One’s political bearing is monitored and informed by membership in a party, so they are inoculated against the reactionary background around them insofar as that party correctly applies its hegemony. An individual entering into a reactionary or reformist organization without this guarantee is likely to adapt to that environment rather than control it. This is not to say that an influx of members with competing ideologies cannot influence an organization, but it is much more likely to end in the confusion lambasted by Lenin. Communists enter into reactionary institutions to agitate for the class struggle within these forums, not to substitute them for their own organization. Togliatti noted the danger of unorganized protest within reactionary organizations when the Italian communists and other anti-fascists were agitating in fascist social clubs:

“The slogan ‘The Dopolavoro to the workers’ was justly criticized since it might have produced illusion that the Dopolavoro system as such could be taken over and transformed into a class organization. That cannot happen without a break in the fascist dictatorship. But can an individual Dopolavoro organization be taken over? Yes. Are the workers tending in this direction? Yes … Lately, there have even been reports of subversive songs having been sung in some Dopolavoro centers. This in itself represents the winning of some liberties. Then, the attempt is made to assume the administration. This is tried first in furtive forms: the old officer who accepts the supervisor but with the mental reservation of doing as he sees fit. This is an interesting but dangerous tendency. If we don’t put ourselves at the head of this tendency and channel it, not only will it not disturb fascism, but the organization will tend to adapt itself; it will adjust to the current situation. This is why fascism doesn’t always react openly against these organizations. Fascism adapts itself; and so the old officer imagines he is not adapting to fascism and then ends up by really adapting to it. This is where the danger lies: the adaptation of the workers and old officers to fascism.”¹⁸

While the nature of social democratic organizations and ossified communist parties naturally differ from these fascist clubs, the furtive attitude towards dissent Togliatti describes in these anti-fascist workers is a deadly vice typical of those isolated in opposed ideological territory. To avoid being in constant conflict with their fellow members, a communist in an social democratic party must constantly slip into the features of liberalism outlined by Mao Zedong. They must “let things slide for the sake of peace,” “indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one’s suggestions to the organization,” and “hear incorrect views without rebutting them.”¹⁹ I point this out not to shame any comrades for slipping into these vices. There is little point to shaming this conduct while the premise of their membership in these anti-vanguard parties is the primary contradiction.

Cooperation with leftwing or rightwing deviations of socialists is predicated on independent organization. This basic principle is why even the alliance of the communists with social democrats in the anti-fascist united front depended on communists possessing a party which protected itself from social democratic infiltration:

“The unity, revolutionary solidarity and fighting preparedness of the Communist Parties constitute a most valuable capital which belongs not only to us but to the whole working class. We have combined and shall continue to combine our readiness to march jointly with the Social Democratic Parties and organizations to the struggle against fascism with an irreconcilable struggle against Social Democracy as the ideology and practice of compromise with the bourgeoisie, and consequently also against any penetration of this ideology into our own ranks. In boldly and resolutely carrying out the policy of the united front, we meet in our own ranks with obstacles which we must remove at all costs in the shortest possible time.”²⁰

At every turn, we see Leninists asserting that ideological unity is the basic premise of worthwhile political action. In complete opposition to this premise, leaders of the CPUSA like Joe Sims call to “build the united front, to fight back on the basis of the issues without ideological preconditions, including those influenced by MAGA.” Trying to capture a reformist organization like this from below means starting from ideological confusion and hoping that a struggle with other socialists will eventually grant the opportunity for effective action. Refusing to accept this collage of parties in the US seemingly content with a fragmented left, means pushing for a new party which takes seriously the idea of being the progressive masses’ vanguard. However, this position alone is far from enough to achieve its intended outcome. There are plenty of small organizations in the US which understand that the CPUSA, PSL, FRSO, and DSA fail to lead the masses and often refuse to accept the settler-colonial contradiction key to analyzing US society. Declaring this incapacity and then founding a new party is not enough. It is essential to orient oneself around effective work. This work will allow us to build organizations from the resulting structures and mass links. Kim Il Sung made this clear, and he explicitly drew a distinction between this approach and the factionalists of the Korean context:

“Under these circumstances, the Korean communists are confronted with the most urgent task of founding a revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist party, drawing serious lessons from the communist movement in the 1920s. However, we cannot create a revolutionary party the way factionalists did in the past, when a small number of communists got together, without any organizational and ideological preparation, set up a ‘party centre’ and proclaimed the founding of the party.”²¹

“In going ahead with the formation of a party, we must, for a start, set up basic party organizations. This is of great significance not only for making the general preparations for party building more substantial, but also for striking deep roots among the broad masses when the party comes into existence. We must form the party not by proclaiming the party centre first but by setting up fully prepared basic party organizations and then steadily expanding them.”²²

The essential characteristic of these building-block organizations is their mass link. For a Korea occupied by Imperial Japan, that meant an “Anti-Japanese Youth League” and the “Association for the Restoration of the Fatherland” because Japanese colonialism was the primary contradiction constraining the development of the working class.²³ In the context of our North American Republic, the Black Panther Party demonstrated a parallel calculation when its founders began with armed surveillance of police in Black communities. Huey P. Newton noted how theory and practice flowed naturally from each other:

“Wherever brothers gathered, we talked with them about their right to arm. In general, they were interested but skeptical about the weapons idea. They could not see anyone walking around with a gun in full view. To recruit any sizable number of street brothers, we would obviously have to do more than talk. We needed to give practical applications of our theory, show them that we were not afraid of weapons and not afraid of death. The way we finally won the brothers over was by patrolling the police with arms.”²⁴

These examples of mass work raised the contradictions between the working class and their existing society in a novel way. They were tailored to the specific moment rather than simply providing mutual aid to the masses. Therefore, we can predict that the vanguard party which leads the working masses of the US out of its fascist death-spiral will answer the unique needs of its current moment in a way which heightens its conflict with the bourgeoisie. In the US context, this could look like the revival of Black Panther-style disruption of police and ICE agents through arms and legal expertise or it could manifest in community health clinics providing the care threatened by disappearing reproductive and trans rights. It could also come from a theoretical organ which connects with the masses in the manner envisioned by the “all-Russian newspaper” of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?. The exact form of this mass work remains to be seen, but the essential fact to remember is that effective mass work will be matched by a corresponding shock to the balance of forces within the US which will earn its practitioners the mass links and prestige to scaffold towards a mature party.

These features of mass work are why we must look beyond the existing large socialist parties of the US. The CPUSA, FRSO, PSL, and DSA are not identical, but they all suffer from a palpable stagnancy. Whereas the Black Panther Party and the CPUSA of the early 20th century found their way into the public consciousness by forging power for the working masses of the US and fear in its bourgeoisie, the modern socialist parties repeat the same tactics and phrase mongering without gathering their own distinct momentum. Even the DSA’s public presence is more the product of its mobilization for Democratic Party candidates than its achievements in the organization of the working masses. It lacks internal discipline while the modern CPUSA scorns preconditions on external unity, making them both appendages of the Democrats. While the rightwing deviations of these two parties have received widespread attention from communists, their counterparts to the left receive comparatively less scrutiny.

The PSL, while generally more disciplined in its rhetoric than the DSA and CPUSA, arrives at a similar state of affairs via different means. The organization’s 2022 constitution outlines basic notions of democratic centralism, but it simultaneously leaves massive gaps in its treatment of the organization’s members and finances, with zero articles restricting the purpose of its finances²⁵ and the only constitutional requirement of its members being a prohibition against seeking “gain or privilege from their membership.”²⁶ In an organization notoriously marred by accusations of covering up sexual assault, these gaps read less as oversights and more like components of a systemic pattern of an opaque organization style which makes it difficult to track accountability within the PSL. Perhaps there are more robust restrictions on its membership within the PSL’s bylaws, but neither the organization’s constitution, its bylaws, or an outline of its leadership structure can be obtained from the PSL’s online organs, further cementing its outwardly opaque style.²⁷

We must consider the PSL’s actions within this context. Like the DSA, I have no doubt that there is good work being done by individual cadres in local PSL chapters. However, this can amount to little without an effective center, and the PSL’s opaque style severs the symbiotic relationship which should be apparent between its lower organs and its leadership. The national PSL appears most prominently in its forays into the US’s presidential elections, earning public visibility and doubling its tiny sliver of the popular vote between 2020 and 2024.²⁸ While I am certain Claudia De La Cruz and the PSL’s central committee had no illusions about her chances of victory, it is less clear what they expected or wanted from this campaign or its predecessors.

Socialists have long elected officials to bourgeois legislatures in order to advocate for the class struggle from these offices and thereby “prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with.”²⁹ However, a financially and politically demanding attempt to obtain an office doomed from the outset does not result in the victory necessary to show the present political system’s bankruptcy by demonstrating the limits of elected power. Claudia De La Cruz’s campaign raised and spent $387,502.48, with the campaign’s energy largely aimed at getting its name on the ballot “in at least 22 states” in order to give “the campaign a potential path to victory.” Rather than focus its mobilizations and fund-raising on mass work or even the election of attainable offices, the PSL followed in the footsteps of the Green Party and Libertarians by prioritizing the publicity gained by a third-party candidacy over the revolutionary mass work which these funds and legwork could have been funneled towards.

The FRSO tends to be seen as the most radical of these parties, paying greater attention to the issue of national liberation in the US. However, in the theory of its leadership on settler-colonialism and — crucially — the organization’s conduct, the FRSO arrives at the same patterns of its opponents. Like the PSL, the FRSO is an opaque organization able to publish the programs produced by its congresses, but not the constitution or bylaws which guide its purportedly democratic centralist structure.³⁰ Like the CPUSA, the FRSO dutifully tails the Democrats in electoral politics, proclaiming in 2022 that “we must defeat any politicians running for office this November who hold a favorable view of Trump” and only reversing course and refusing to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024 due to the political visibility of the genocide in Palestine: “The specter of a Trump win should not give a pass to the candidate of genocide and war, namely Kamala Harris.” Did the Democrats only become a party of genocide and war in 2024? Of course not, the genocide in Palestine precedes October 7th and so does the Democrats’ support for Zionism. Leftwing loyalty to the Democrats in 2022 gave us such gleeful Zionists as Senator John Fetterman. The FRSO cultivates an image of being the most revolutionary of the large socialist parties, but it follows the trends of advanced mass consciousness rather than leading them.

The most concise demonstration of this fact lies in the FRSO’s name, because the FRSO is not a party in its self-conception, but an organization “building towards the creation of a new Communist Party.” This is a description which acknowledges the FRSO’s limitations in size and national reach, rejecting the concept that a party may be prematurely “proclaimed or declared into being.”³¹ However, it is also a damning self-diagnosis when we recall that the FRSO is four decades old. It declared in 2005 that “Overall conditions are good for building the struggle of the multinational working class.” Assuming this to be true, it has taken decades of heightening conditions for this organization to reach the maturity required to obtain headquarters, and it speaks on this accomplishment as if it is only the opening salvo of its party-building process: “We said we would secure headquarters, and we did. Now, we are saying we will build a new communist party in the United States, and we intend to do just that.” The FRSO talks like an organization on the cutting edge of the US’s revolutionary movement, but at every turn we find that its actions indicate a collective of revolutionaries caught in the tide of the maturing working masses rather than charting its own course.

Besides the stagnancy shown in the practices of the CPUSA, PSL, and FRSO, these democratic centralist organizations refuse to interact with each other with the clarity and aggression of parties vying for the position of the masses’ vanguard. Read any piece by Lenin published in the formative period of the Bolshevik Party, and you will find the most critical and sardonic treatment of his opponents within the party and in the competing anti-capitalist organizations. He was never afraid to name names or accuse deviating communists of serving the interests of the bourgeoisie. Now search the press organs of these three parties for comparable analyses of the mistakes of their competitors and the correctness of their own approach. In the FRSO’s Fight Back! News, PSL’s Liberation News, and the CPUSA’s People’s World, the closest example I could find was a book review from People’s World which attempted to — in typical CPUSA fashion — politely dismiss the validity of Black nationalism as acknowledged by the FRSO.

These organizations, always quick to lament the lack of unity in the US leftwing and deride the isolation of their ‘sectarian’ critics, seem to avoid justifying their own division into separate parties. It is a behavior which evokes the retort Lenin gave to Trotsky for his criticism of the Bolsheviks’ refusal to prioritize unity among communists:

“You consider that it is the ‘Leninists’ who are splitters? Very well, let us assume that you are right. But if you are, why have not all the other sections and groups proved that unity is possible with the liquidators without the ‘Leninists’, and against the ‘splitters’? … If we are splitters, why have not you, uniters, united among yourselves, and with the liquidators? Had you done that you would have proved to the workers by deeds that unity is possible and beneficial!”³²

The truth is that there are real differences between these parties which cause their division, and they — like their counterpart’s in Lenin’s time — recognize this implicitly but refuse to explicitly act accordingly. The absence of this mutual criticism means a tacit acceptance of the ideological borders drawn in the US left. To the members of these organizations, the best way to dispute my analysis of these parties is by explaining the strategies and victories which distinguish their party from its competitors. Any defense focusing on the growth of their own membership, their funding, or their vote pool only proves the obvious reality that anti-capitalist sentiment is growing worldwide. The best way to defend the vanguard potential of any of these parties is by detailing a recent history of what tactics have failed to produce momentum for the US left and how the party is acting to avoid this failure and using class analysis to chart a new course. Organizational secrecy is a valid argument in favor of a certain degree of opacity and against giving specific, sensitive information, but if we cannot compare tactics, structures, and actions, than we are handing the bourgeoisie a preemptive victory. As quoted at the beginning of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?:

“Party struggles lend a party strength and vitality; the greatest proof of a party’s weakness is its diffuseness and the blurring of clear demarcations; a party becomes stronger by purging itself.”³³

For those of us who are already disgusted by the stagnancy of the US left and eager to see the contradictions of the settler-colonial republic studied and torn wide, there are innumerable options available to start real revolutionary work which do not involve joining a party which squats on its part of the US left like a fiefdom. We need class analysis of the same style and specificity as Mao’s “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.”³⁴ We need work which generates a perceptible growth in the political maturity of the working masses. And organizationally, we need a style of discipline which understands splits and purges to be dialectically intertwined with unity. The aforementioned US parties are not stagnant due to some inexplicable stroke of misfortune. In an environment like the settler-colonial head of imperialism, the immaturity of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie’s ability to distribute the profits of imperialism to soften class conflict means that finding the correct class analysis, the correct form of work to raise the contradictions between these classes, and the right shape of the organization meant to lead them are each monumental tasks with no exact precedent to refer to. The first step to tackling these questions is not throwing yourself headfirst into the work, but recognizing that theory, mass work, and organizing mutually inform and produce each other. The vanguard party of the US context will temper itself by realizing the dialectic flow between these elements.

Bibliography

1. Stalin, J.V. The Foundations of Leninism. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. (p. 106-7) ︎
2. Ibid. (p. 105) ︎
3. Points of Unity. MarxistUnity. Accessed August 29, 2025. https://www.marxistunity.com/. ︎
4. Togliatti’s Lectures on Fascism are an example of this educational exchange, being delivered in Moscow, 1935 to Italian working-class students at the Lenin School.
   Togliatti, Palmiro. Lectures on Fascism. New York: International Publishers, 1976. (p. vii) ︎
5. Lenin, V.I. “On the Struggle of the Italian Socialist Party.” Marxists Internet Archive, 2002. Originally published November 12, 1920. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/04.htm. ︎
6. Trotsky, L. Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1935. (p. 16) ︎
7. Kautsky, Karl. The Bolsheviki Rising. Marxists Internet Archive, 2002. Originally published March 2, 1918. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/03/bolsheviki.htm. ︎
8. Kautsky, Karl. Die Internationale und Sowjetrussland. Berlin: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1925. (p. 49)
   *Quote sourced from machine translation, original german quote below.
   “Natürlich ist es nicht unmöglich, daß reaktionäre Elemente eine solche Erhebung zu ihren Gunsten auszunutzen streben. Aber gerade diese Gefahr kann es erst recht notwendig machen, daß die Sozialdemokraten mit aller Macht darauf hinwirken, entscheidenden Einfluß auf den Aufstand zu bekommen, keineswegs ihn zu sabotieren.” ︎
9. Lenin, V.I. “On the Struggle of the Italian Socialist Party.” Marxists Internet Archive, 2002. Originally published November 12, 1920. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/04.htm. ︎
10. Ibid. ︎
11. Stalin, J.V. The Foundations of Leninism. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. (p. 106-7) ︎
12. Togliatti, Palmiro. On Gramsci and Other Writings. Edited and translated by Donald Sassoon. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979. (p. 174) ︎
13. Smith, Scott B. Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918-1923. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2011. (p. xii) ︎
14. Ibid. (p. xiii) ︎
15. Stalin, J.V. The Foundations of Leninism. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. (p. 89) ︎
16. Lenin, V.I. “‘Left-Wing’ Communism—An Infantile Disorder.” In Selected Works in One Volume: Essential Aspects of Lenin’s Contributions to Revolutionary Marxism, 516-91. New York: International Publishers, 1971. (p. 582) ︎
17. Ibid. ︎
18. Togliatti, Palmiro. Lectures on Fascism. New York: International Publishers, 1976. (p. 84) ︎
19. Mao Zedong. “Combat Liberalism.” Marxists Internet Archive, 2004. (Originally published September 7, 1937) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm. ︎
20. Dimitrov, Georgi. “The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communis International in the Struggle of the Working Class Against Fascism.” In Selected Works: Volume II, 7-88. Sofia: Sofia Press, 1978. (p. 79) ︎
21. Kim Il Sung. Works 1: June 1930—December 1945. Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1980. (p. 163) ︎
22. Ibid. (p. 9) ︎
23. Ibid. (pp. 117, 164) ︎
24. Newton, Huey P. The Huey P. Newton Reader. Edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2019. (p. 59-60) ︎
25. Constitution of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Fifth Party Congress, 2022. (p. 18) Retrieved from https://dn721905.ca.archive.org/0/items/party-for-socialism-and-liberation-psl-constitution-2022/Party%20for%20Socialism%20and%20Liberation%20PSL%20Constitution%202022.pdf. ︎
26. Ibid. (p. 15) ︎
27. As of the time of publication, October 5th, 2025, there are no documents on the PSL’s leadership, constitution, or bylaws accessible on its main website, press organ, or theoretical mouthpiece:
    https://pslweb.org/
    https://liberationnews.org
    https://www.liberationschool.org/
    If someone is able to locate an avenue to finding these documents publicly available, please message me and I will update this article accordingly. ︎
28. The PSL earned 85,685 votes (0.05%) in 2020 and 165,191 votes (0.11%) in 2024.
    Gabbatt, Adam. “‘We Are Working-Class Women of Color’: The Long-Shot Socialist Run for the White House.” The Guardian, January 7, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/07/claudia-de-la-cruz-interview-socialist-candidate-2024.
    https://ballotpedia.org/Claudia_De_La_Cruz ︎
29. Lenin, V.I. “‘Left-Wing’ Communism—An Infantile Disorder.” In Selected Works in One Volume: Essential Aspects of Lenin’s Contributions to Revolutionary Marxism, 516-91. New York: International Publishers, 1971. (p. 547) ︎
30. As with the PSL’s website, if someone is able to locate the FRSO’s internal rules on its main online organs, please message me so I can amend this article accordingly.
    https://frso.org/
    https://fightbacknews.org ︎
31. “Class in the U.S. and Our Strategy for Revolution.” In FRSO Program, 17-25. https://frso.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/frso-program.pdf. (p. 24) ︎
32. Lenin, V.I. “Disruption of Unity Under Cover of Outcries for Unity.” Marxists Internet Archive, 1996. (Originally published May 1914) https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/x01.htm. ︎
33. Lenin, V.I. “Preface.” In What Is To Be Done?. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/preface.htm.
    (Lenin is quoting a letter of Lassalle to Marx from June 24, 1852) ︎
34. Mao Zedong. “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.” Marxists Internet Archive, 2004. (Originally published March 1926) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm ︎

“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.