The Pied Piper is arguably more dangerous than the hunter, and neither should be discounted.

Background

Mamdani’s campaign started with a surge of popularity riding on radical anti-zionist talking points. A long-time “pro-Palestine” activist, supporter of BDS, and critic of zionist settler violence in Palestine, Mamdani has been a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America since 2017, and the New York State Assembly since 2020. Using his elected position to amplify his particular brand of “radical” politics, Mamdani’s public visibility quickly ramped up following his condemnations of the genocidal zionist reprisals following the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood uprising. By repeatedly stirring controversy within settler power structures and zionist media, Mamdani has spent the last two years building a popular image of a radical “socialist” Muslim within a key hotbed of settler political struggle, carefully ramping up the controversy to keep himself in the media spotlight by spouting radical rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada” and “abolish the police.” In October 2024, he announced his candidacy for the 2025 Mayoral race, winning the Democratic Party primary in June 2025. 

Surprising no-one paying attention, Mamdani began walking back his phony radicalism as soon as his candidacy was assured, currying alliances with key members of the NYC police force, choosing open zionists for his staff,¹ announcing his support for the zionist occupation’s “right to exist,” and declaring his intent to greatly expand the police budget for prosecuting anti-zionist activities. 

Principles of Settler Opportunism

The “socialists” who run for office are little more than political adventurists and opportunists. A political adventurist here means an individual who sees themselves as a heroic figure setting out to save the masses from their oppression. They believe they can “make a difference” by struggling within the system, so long as they retain their “principles.” They set aside the necessity of first constructing a class that is conscious of itself and able to coordinate political action according to a definite plan, and try to instead champion what they individually perceive to be the interests of this class (which does not yet exist!). This necessarily produces an eclectic undisciplined political line, because one individual, or group of individuals (like the many so-called “communist” parties) is not capable of producing a correct political line. Only a vanguard party with the backing of the masses, acting in their interests according to their will, can do this. Adventurists either do not know this, or do not care. They believe that by “showing the way,” the masses can be inspired to spontaneous action in support of their own liberation. They believe that by spurring the masses to all go to the polls, they are at the same time building working class unity, solidarity, consciousness, or whatever. Inevitably, they are ultimately defeated: either they fail to gain any purchase within the system and wash out, or they realize the futility of pushing a “revolutionary” line all by their lonesome and turn to opportunism. To this end, political adventurism is materially indistinguishable from opportunism.

Opportunists are in it for whatever they can get. They may agree in principle with a revolutionary line, but in practice they are more than willing to discard inconvenient segments of the masses in the interest of political expediency. Often they can be found eagerly doing this in anticipation of what they believe will win the most “support” at the polls. Inevitably, their most radical edges are rounded out and dulled by constant contact with the inertia of bourgeois/settler governance. In the game of musical chairs that is settler colonial privileges, the most vulnerable people are the first pushed out of the way, and the opportunists are the ones who take up the task of doing the pushing. Because it may be “politically inconvenient” to militantly struggle against the settler colonial occupation and genocide against Palestine, they tell us that these issues must be set aside “for now,” to be pursued “later” when the movement has built more momentum and mass power. Of course what they fail to mention here is that in doing this they are dividing the masses, weakening the movement by directing mounting class struggle into dead-end reformist avenues down which only a small section of the masses can advance. Their actions lead to the sacrifice of all principles on the altar of “pragmatism.”

Besides Mamdani’s tepid criticism of some of the most depraved zionist acts of violence, the key reforms he promised (and those which have won him such widespread support among the imperial left) are as follows: 

• To freeze rents and build “affordable” housing
• To crack down on “bad” landlords 
• To establish city-owned grocery stores
• To establish free public transit
• To raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030. (This in particular appears to be why the “progressive” settlers are so thrilled.) 

A full explanation of the flaws in the rent freeze is well beyond this article, but suffice to say that whatever attempt he may or may not make at expanding and stabilizing the private property regime, it won’t put a dent in the empire-wide land speculation that is the real cause of the housing crisis. Cracking down on “bad” landlords is laughable, considering the socialist position is not to hound out malfeasors, but to liquidate entire classes. And rather than feeding people directly, Mamdani would prefer to compete on the market by creating his own NYC brand grocery store!

This minimum wage increase will mostly benefit the service workers in the empire’s finance capital, the people who keep the gears turning in the nerve center of global imperialism. The claim being made by the settler “socialists,” is that this push for higher wages for some of the city’s workers is building the mass base necessary to push through some “real” reforms—just later on, at an unspecified date and time. There’s no word on how that’s to be accomplished or what the demands will be, but never mind that, they say, we’re getting paid. How exactly is socialism advanced by the appointment of a bourgeois politician as the mayor of the bourgeois finance capital of the empire in the middle of a holocaust being waged against Palestinians? That this disgusting mockery of human decency is being held up as a beacon of hope for the socialist cause hinges on the idea that wage increases are a victory in themselves, that advancing the conditions of some workers is always an advance for the socialist cause. We contend that this is simply not true. Let’s ask the real question: wage increases for who?

Simply being employed, however wretched that employment may be, is itself a position of privilege and power in the imperial system. Yes, the bourgeoisie remain the top dogs, but people who “work for a living” in the colonial economy are still a privileged group: their class position depends on the continued exploitation of people who can’t work for a living. 

There has never been a challenge to the employment problem, and a major reason why is that following along to the plans of the Imperialists keeps wages high and development uneven, securing employment while simultaneously securing unemployment. 

Example scenario: Capitalist introduces labor saving machines that double productivity. Rather than overproducing, they cut the workforce in half and raise the wages of the leftovers by 50%. Overall, the capitalist just reduced aggregate wages by 25%. The business operates at the same level. They don’t overproduce and break their market position, the workers who didn’t get cut have a huge wage increase that puts a contradiction between them and their laid off siblings.²

– @probablykaffe

Many people are excluded from the “productive” sphere on the basis of nationality, gender, ability, etc. We know that a Black person is much less likely to have access to employment than a white person—in fact, the Black unemployment rate in New York City is more than double that of whites (8% vs 3.5%). Disabled people are often completely excluded from a livable income, with less than 25% of people with any disability being employed, and fewer than 1 in 5 autistic people. According to the 2022 US transgender survey report, trans people in the US face a whopping 18% unemployment rate, more than four times the empire-wide average, which frankly should be considered a demographic crisis. These are entire populations of people who are excluded from the privilege of accessing employment, and those who do gain access are often limited to part time or sporadic/seasonal work. And all of this is before we even get into the issue of the role of US imperialism in inflating worker wages inside the empire at the expense of billions of global south workers. 

It can’t be dismissed how difficult it is to be a low wage worker in New York City. There’s a very good reason people are clamoring for this reform. But as the grip of capital tightens around your throat, disabled people who have been suffering under brutal austerity conditions for years are dying at atrocious rates under state eugenicist campaigns. The fact that these plans don’t address the needs of the most oppressed, and in fact perpetuate their oppression in a mystified and more acute form, should be a warning that Mamdani doesn’t deal in social revolution but rather in reinforcing the capitalist state with a “kinder” face. How does the “socialism” of Mamdami do anything to build solidarity between oppressed groups? What is the plan for carrying this movement to a higher stage of struggle? What is being accomplished here, except grabbing more for a select few while the most vulnerable people continue to languish and die in ever-increasing poverty and homelessness? Is the wealth supposed to trickle down from people with jobs to those without? Everyone needs to eat before you reach out your hand for seconds! If any group is forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of “progress” then inequality is reproduced and oppression persists. What does “universal emancipation” mean to you, seriously? If your “socialist” candidate isn’t running on the democratic mandate of the masses of the exploited, and held to account by that democratic mandate, following a definite plan to continually heighten the struggle and broaden the involvement of the masses, then they aren’t a socialist. Unfortunately, the democratic institutions necessary for this, a vanguard party or socialist state, do not yet exist in this land. Our efforts, therefore, should not be to run candidates accountable to no one, but to build the party capable of holding leaders accountable, so that we can finally seize the state. 

Whose Side Are You On?

We must be very clear on this point: Palestinian sovereignty is non-negotiable, just as much as all anti-colonialism is. There is no middle ground or compromise with the settler colonial system. Either we destroy it or it destroys us. Any position which leaves room for the continued existence of “israel” in any form is a denial of the sovereignty and humanity of Palestinians. In tossing out this issue, by “compromising” with genocide, they draw a line between themselves and the Palestinian people. They separate international humanity into two groups pitted against one-another: “us,” and “them.” In the arena of class warfare this division is fatal. When one section of our forces advances while leaving another behind, reactionary forces are afforded room to encircle and defeat both groups, usually by absorbing the opportunists and killing off the rest. Either all the oppressed advance in unison, or we get picked off one-by-one. Genuine revolutionaries demand that every oppressed group be respected, uplifted, and empowered; this will be done in opposition to the dominant groups, who recognize every gain for the oppressed as a loss for their profit. On the other hand, opportunists are content to allow reactionaries to pick off “inconvenient” groups, so long as they personally benefit in the end.

This strategy of divide and conquer, directed from the rear by the bourgeoisie and spearheaded by opportunism, goes back to the earliest days of the anti-capitalist movement. In particular it has come to dominate and define imperial politics over the last century. When the interests of those privileged enough to have jobs are prioritized ahead of those who aren’t, the material division between the two widens. The privileges of the advantaged group are reinforced at the expense of the disadvantaged group, which produces an incentive to keep it that way in the privileged group. This is how reaction breeds. The issue with homelessness is not “the lack of supply” but the capacity for landlords to evict tenants. Ensuring everybody is housed and safe needs to come ahead of reducing market prices on apartments.³ The speculative value produced by rent extraction is what drives the constant inflation of property prices, not “undersupply.” When the health and safety of disabled people is considered a secondary concern to the “comfort” of abled people, and (for example) masking is not enforced, disabled people are excluded from the movement, further weakening it. When trans rights are considered a “token” issue and worth ceding ground on in exchange for concessions for “the majority,” the movement further fragments as trans people are left behind to struggle to survive and to die alone. When Indigenous sovereignty is treated as a secondary concern, or a threat to the property “rights” of “the majority,” the settler-Indigenous divide deepens, and one of the most revolutionary elements of all human society is ejected from the movement. It is this way that, in the name of “the majority,” the opportunists carefully and meticulously carve up the movement into bite-sized chunks that the reactionaries are only too eager to devour. The bourgeoisie and settler masses will always demand that we sit down and shut up and in exchange they will grant some privileges to those of us who acquiesce while they slaughter those who won’t or can’t. Every “temporary” retreat from solidarity turns into a strategic defeat for the movement.

In the coming months, Mamdani supporters may pretend to be shocked at his complicity in settler violence and his leadership in maintaining the colonial occupation of Lenapehoking, just as they are now pretending to be critical of his zionism. The signs pointing towards his opportunism were always there for those willing to see. While he did condemn the zionist reprisals on October 8, 2023, he was quick to also condemn the Palestinian resistance within the weeks following, and since then has eagerly participated in spreading zionist propaganda lies about supposed “war crimes” committed by the resistance.⁴ Mamdani has carefully and consistently played both sides, spouting anti-zionist rhetoric out one side of his mouth while materially aligning himself with colonial hegemony with the other. This barefaced opportunism, and its inevitable tragic outcomes, should be wearily familiar by now to those of us with the slightest of principles. It’s plain as day now, just as it has been for years, that Mamdani is just another lying settler pig—perfectly content to take advantage of public outrage against the Palestinian Holocaust for his colonial ladder-climbing career. 

For as much ink that has been spilled and attention monopolized for this man, little mind has been paid to the social processes underlying his ascent to international fame and infamy. Mamdani’s popularity and controversy could well serve as a case-study in how the left wing of capital uses radical window-dressing to conceal maintenance of the status quo, but we’ve had enough such case studies to fill a library. What is happening to us on the ground? Whether you’re cheering and applauding or booing and hissing, you’re watching the show — so how has the so-called “revolutionary left” become so enraptured by what amounts to performance art on a stage inside a colonial garrison? The complete hegemony of the settler empire’s cultural influence continues to mislead and dull the senses of our aspiring revolutionaries, but not by lying to us to convince us that one settler politician or another is a radical. Even the most ineffectual liberal “socialist” will openly admit that they don’t believe Mamdani will deliver anything resembling a radical break. After all, they’ve “learned their lesson” from former DSA campaign outcomes, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vile opportunism. But if they’ve learned their lesson and “don’t expect much” from Zohran Mamdani, what exactly are they doing? The answer is a parallel to Mamdani’s career.

The Social Technology of Settler Socialism

The mass base of Democratic Socialism is the lower and middle strata of settler colonists.⁵ These people are genuinely discontented with the system, but pay attention to their grievances! “Housing is unaffordable, wages are too low, social safety nets are not robust enough, and  education is too expensive.” Wealth and capital have become too concentrated in the hands of a minority, “the 1%,” and they aren’t getting what they see as their due share. Are these the grievances of a revolutionary, or of petulant settler youth and failed settler aspirants? Are these demands aiming towards the complete destruction of the colonial system and the restitution of Indigenous land sovereignty, or are these demands aiming at a “fairer” redivision of the spoils of colonial conquest and imperialist exploitation? Are the grievances rooted in a desire to end class society or to simply make it more comfortable for those fortunate enough to live within the colonial jurisdiction at which their reforms are aimed?

The DSA professes to be a “socialist” organization, so on the surface it appears to be approaching an alignment with national liberatory, decolonial, and communist struggles. But is this really the case? Remember to always analyze the class position of a given organization by the actions it takes, not by the ideology it professes. Ideology is always a more or less accurate reflection of class alignment, but recall the scientific tenet that the appearance of a thing does not perfectly match its content—therefore we have to look deeper. The reflection can be, and often is, inverted. Zionism purports itself to be a liberatory movement, which is an inverted reflection of reality. Amerikan liberalism purports to be interested in universal democracy, which again is an inverted reflection of reality. So, is DSA really socialist? What are the outcomes of DSA’s political activity? As of this writing, no militant organizations or movements have emerged from the DSA, and decades of organizing has yielded little but a few “more radical” Democratic politicians in colonial office positions. The standard explanation given by “communists” within the DSA for its lack of revolutionary action is that the masses have yet to be radicalized, and therefore struggle within the DSA is necessary to bring them the consciousness they need to begin to take revolutionary action. In 43 years, however, the DSA has largely remained ideologically stationary.

This “failure” to radicalize the masses is a constant point of debate and analysis. Many individuals and organizations within the communist milieu but outside the DSA contend that the source of this failure is because the organization is ideologically democratic socialist (i.e. not revolutionary in ideological outlook), and therefore a different, “more communist” organization is required to impart the necessary revolutionary outlook in its adherents. But this is putting the cart before the horse! Ideology does not dictate material alignment, material alignment dictates ideology. The DSA is not a stagnant ineffectual organization because of its backwards ideology—instead it has a backwards ideology because this is necessary to fulfill its actual goals. What are its goals? The purpose of a system is what it does, especially a system which has remained more or less stable and self-reproducing for over four decades. So what does the DSA do? It reels in members of oppressed groups (trans, queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, etc) and disciplines their activities into serving the interests of its colonial middle-class leadership by mixing them into a single “organization” under middle-class leadership. The profession of “socialist” aims is a smokescreen to obscure the actual aims of the organization, which is ultimately little more than colonial, careerist ladder-climbing.

What of the internal criticisms levied at the organization? Many of the members are often very dissatisfied with the outcomes of their political activity, and among the common refrains is the need for more centralized leadership, for the ability to enforce a political line on the politicians they get into office, and for the organization to divest itself from cooperation with zionism. Yet despite a resolution passing in August⁶ enabling the expulsion of zionist membership (which was barely successful, succeeding with 56% percent of the vote), the openly zionist Mamdani continues to be backed by the DSA, and the overall strategy of the DSA continues to be to maintain its involvement in the zionist Democratic Party. The reality of the matter is, despite professing anti-zionism for the first time in its long history, the DSA remains a zionist organization, and its new “anti-zionist” mask is the same “anti-zionism” of the broader imperial left—an anti-zionism that affirms the necessity of the occupation to continue. Little more than a barefaced lie.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The settler empire has long since perfected the social technology of penetrating organizational and community structures built by, or being built by, the oppressed, with the aim of taking them over from within and submitting them to colonial interests. Where the oppressed see a dire need for unity and solidarity in the face of colonial genocide against our siblings in Palestine, the lower and middle strata of settlers see an upsurge in laboring subjects available to fill the ranks of their latest campaign for redivision of the imperialist spoils. That, in essence, is what the Democratic Socialists of America is: far from a dysfunctional organization which routinely fails to meet its goals, the DSA is a well-oiled machine of settler-colonial annexation. In which revolutionary currents among the oppressed are carefully cultivated within a narrowly bounded arena of struggle, both in order to prevent a dangerous rupture of the colonial system, and in order to ultimately benefit the settlers served by the DSA. That this process occasionally settlerizes individuals from oppressed demographics is part of the point—in order for the DSA to function as intended it’s necessary that the occasional individual from an oppressed demographic attains an internal leadership position or a colonial office position, but this is always predicated on the condition that they closely adhere to the interests of colonial maintenance; they must not engage in illegal activities, such as organizing and arming militant struggle. “Class peace” remains the priority ahead of anything else, even when the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children hinge on the taking up of armed struggle. To the settler socialists, their deaths are water under the bridge so long as wages are increased enough to broaden the number of people who can access the colonial land exchange.

For revolutionaries, what the success of the DSA and Mamdani’s campaign represents is a complete capitulation of the “Free Palestine” movement to settler annexationism and zionism. We’ve failed to differentiate between friends and enemies, failed to take the actions necessary to expel enemies from our organizations and communities, failed to build up the militant organizational capacity necessary to wage armed struggle against zionism, and in doing so failed to defend the lives of our Palestinian siblings in their hour of greatest need for two years ongoing. And yet, Mamdani’s electoral success is lauded as a victory for the left! Indeed, this is a triumph for the left wing of zionism. With hardly a word to the contrary, we’ve rolled over and allowed this travesty to unfold for two years, all the while repeating the inane mantra that “any day now” the masses of settler oppressors will “radicalize” and join forces with the oppressed to aid in the overthrow of their colonial system. In doing so, we’ve demonstrated our own willingness to be complicit in a holocaust so long as this complicity keeps us out of the prison cell and out of the line of fire.

Our Place in History

When freshly stolen land became scarce and prices rose in the late 1700s, the lower and middle masses of settlers eagerly aligned with the planter bourgeoisie to oppose British rule and expand the colonial system. Indigenous peoples bore the cost of their genocidal brutality.⁷ Since then this pattern has repeated itself over and over. At each moment of crisis in the colonial system, the dispossessed and poorer settlers will seek out temporary alliances wherever they can find them to bulk up their ranks for coming confrontation with the ruling strata, but always with the sole aim of securing their own slice of colonial land and their own share of imperial wages.⁸ As times change and ideologies shift and develop, the colonial redistributionists will find alliances in different places. During the period of protracted economic crisis in the 1930s, the redistributionists found alliance with rising Black nationalism, only to cast off their allies the moment a fresh flood of booty came pouring in following the empire’s successful conquests at the close of the Second World War, and by the 1950s the Communist Party USA had successfully liquidated all revolutionaries from its ranks and disavowed national liberation. In the 1960s, a new wave of national liberatory struggles rose, and by the 1970s, settler “radicals” had successfully played out their role in crushing all resistance. The defeated liberation movement became a victorious “Civil Rights Movement” in the settler history books.

Today the same pattern plays out yet again in real time before our eyes: with the colonial system’s internal stratification at historic highs, and faced with the objective necessity of violent armed struggle in support of the Palestinian resistance and against the US empire, the settler “left” floods into our organizations and our discussion spaces, reads our literature and learns our language of resistance, claims to be our allies in struggle, and spends two years marching in circles to maintain the facade, while shoring up support for their preferred reformist. Time and energy and resources that could be spent serving the needs of the most oppressed, building dual power institutions, organizing guerilla strikes against weapons manufacturers and zionist finance institutions, etcetera, gets repeatedly diverted into the same century-old discussions about whether socialists should vote. Those of us aiming to build the revolutionary forces necessary for winning this war find ourselves surrounded by the most dishonest dregs of humanity, grabbing and pulling us back from struggle to keep our labor squarely aimed at shoring up the structures of oppression holding us down. Make no mistake, when $30/hr is firmly in hand, these so-called radicals will ride into the sunset towards their very own mortgages on stolen land and pensions funded by imperialism. 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for personal gain at the expense of the Palestinian resistance is not a betrayal of the “socialist” movement, but the blueprint to be followed by each of its adherents. We’ve already failed to lend Palestine the support it needs for two years ongoing. If the aspiring revolutionaries of our new rising wave of national liberation fail to recognize the myriad methods that settler opportunism uses to exploit our labors for individual gain, we too will take our place in the history books as the defeated “extreme fringe” of a successful movement to redistribute the spoils of genocide and oppression.

1.  Julian Gerson, political director for Mamdani’s electoral campaign, previously served as a campaign manager for US congressman Jerry Nadler. Nadler describes himself as a “committed Zionist” and “a strong supporter of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people.” Gerson is on record saying, “Jerry embodies the idea that one can absolutely be pro-Israel and progressive simultaneously.” ︎
2. From Kaffe in the same thread: “The ratio of the sub-employed population has been roughly the same for the last half century, even as the role of ‘housewife’ has eroded (good riddance), with the shift in joblessness going mostly to the Nationally Oppressed. The abolition of unemployment (a Soviet right), is so little entertained for two reasons:
   1. The Labor Aristocracy refuses to let go of wages and security, even if that value could be re-allocated for increased employment, and erase the security problem. 
   2. The work that desperately needs to be done (i.e. land healing), would reduce dependency on Imperial relations, making it more difficult to compel the working class to reproduce them.
   Instead: insecure-security, stratified wages, uneven development (the cause of high economic migration — the medium of insecurity and stratification), and the ‘public works’ cages a million people yearly, militarizes the population, and (re)builds Bourgeois terrorism.” ︎
3. Hence why housing was a right in the USSR, “Thus a worker cannot be put out of his room, even for non-payment of rent. His wages can be attached, but if he is unemployed his rent is free. He cannot be charged more than a certain low sum, fixed in proportion to his wages.” Anna Louise Strong, The First Time In History, (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1924),149. ︎
4.  “…of course I condemn Hamas. Of course I have called October 7th what it was, which was a horrific war crime,…” ︎
5. According to the 2021 DSA Member Survey Report, 85% of membership is white, compared with only 4% Black representation. 28% of members are full upper-PB with household incomes of $100k or more. 80% of respondents had bachelor’s degrees, and approximately 60% of respondents occupy petty bourgeois or labor aristocratic positions, split between scholars, academics, white-collar, tech workers, non-profit organizations, public sector employees, healthcare or social work, self employed, writer, performer, arts, and political org/union. ︎
6. See resolution R22. ︎
7. “This pretense toward ‘freedom’ continued in 1776 when settlers revolted when London seemed to be loath to continue funding their wars of dispossession against indigenes and the constant conflict with enslaved Africans that was an adjunct of that process” Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 154 in the PDF. ︎
8. See J. Sakai Settlers Ch. 4.4, describing the process of the settler economy importing Chinese labor to displace the Mexican population of the southwest, only to then violently expropriate Chinese industry and landholdings. Afterwards, the same participants in these genocidal purges urged “unity” with Afrikan labor, as the next phase of the developing industrial unionism movement: “Terrance Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor (who had personally called for wiping out all Chinese in North America within one year), suddenly became the apostle of brotherhood when it came to persuading Afrikans to support his organization: ‘The color of a candidate shall not debar him from admission; rather let the coloring of his mind and heart be the test.’” ︎

Mahmoud has not been charged with any listed offense; his crime is his support for the Palestinian national liberation movement. Mahmoud stood against the slaughter of his people and the ongoing theft of their homeland. The fascist Empire is committed to worldwide terror and the enslavement of humanity. The state would rather us remain silent, going about our cleaved lives apathetic to genocide — this is vile and unacceptable. 

Free speech is dead. Did it ever exist in the first place?

Our free speech rights go about as deep as a puddle on the side of the road. The American Fourth Reich, aided by the skeletal Democratic party, has gutted what little was left of so-called “civil liberties” in this country. The U.S.’s liberal democracy was founded on the “rights” of only the white, slave-owning, and propertied classes, leaving everyone else, especially enslaved peoples, grasping for the shards of a deadened life.

Regardless of what the slave owners who founded this country may have intended when they wrote the Constitution in 1791, the settler-imperial government has never meaningfully valued free speech. Just seven years and one president later, the John Adams administration would pass the Alien and Sedition Acts: the Sedition laws criminalized any negative speech against the government, while the Alien Acts let the president deport any foreign nationals. Adams, who was a federalist, used the Sedition Acts to arrest journalists supporting his political opponents, the Democratic Republicans. The minute differences between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans are not terribly significant — (both supported the slavery of New Afrikans and the genocide of Indigenous Turtle Islanders) — suffice to say they were the two dominant tendencies of early USian politics. Adams lost the political battle; the Democratic Republicans won the next election and repealed the Sedition Acts. And the Alien Acts? They remain in effect to this day. The president may therefore deport any foreign national they consider to be dangerous, based on this 225 year old law.  In essence, dystopian state repression is one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy.

The Alien and Sedition Acts would be the first major crackdown on free speech, but they are not the last, nor the most recent. The Democratic-Republicans had their own opportunity to silence mass dissent a few decades later when the abolition of slavery became a contentious issue. In 1836, an Andrew Jackson-controlled Congress ratified a gag order banning any mention of abolition in the halls of Congress. 

In light of the modern national security state, first amendment rights are shallow.  With state surveillance and a history of interference in liberation movements, an American citizen’s speech may be free, but only so long as their words remain barren and removed from action. The Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement: when nationally oppressed groups peaceably assemble, we can see time and time again that the First Amendment often has a selective application. Perpetual surveillance, state assassinations; sharpened knives which they are ready to use against any defiant organization. 

Before the regime will criminalize your collective expression, two circumstances must generally be met. 

1. The expression must be dissent, i.e., it must go against the regime’s foreign or domestic policy.
2. The expression must be popular. The degree of popularity can vary, but generally, the dissenting speech or collective expression must be popular enough for the regime to consider it a threat to its rule or the implementation of its policy. 

Popular dissent is forbidden.  

If this clownish blockheaded President is trying to weaken free speech rights on campus, he is late to the party. Colleges and universities across the Empire beat him to the punch by launching a full scale offensive against the right to protest before the Fall 2024 semester. Protests now have formal time limits. They are banned in popular gathering spots. Fascism on the Amerikkkan campus is objectively bipartisan. Trump’s threat is a promise to build upon the groundwork that was laid last year. Do not be scared. For fear is your greatest enemy. Now, we’re all able to see clearly without the blinding, twisted distortions of Democrats who use identity essentialism as bait in order to duplicitously rally support for their graveyard of a party, and therefore gut the very undercarriage of revolutionary understanding and action of the mass of vexed workers.

Saturday’s attack on student resistance was orchestrated by the regime’s use of the word “terrorist;” it is, by all means, a propagandistic term in the modern U.S., the same way “communist” was in the past, and is in the present. The state of course uses the veneer of a mythical “antisemitism” to justify its draconian measures. Claims of a phantasmal antisemitism from the very same administration that goes around giving Nazi salutes. Remember, the Trumpian gendarmes are the very same ilk that said “Jews will not replace us.” The very same people whose base committed a massacre in a synagogue,  now want to wage a “holy war,” which they pretend is for the very Jewish people they tried to mass murder. 

However, we must recognize that we’re in the depths of a revolutionary moment. The inflection points of class war are nearing a breaking crescendo, and it is up to us in the anti-imperialist movement to understand this dialectic of intense struggle and form a clear and firm guide to action. Now is the time to unite with left and progressive forces (While not compromising the proven Marxists analysis) to defeat the fascist juggernaut. In the age of techno-imperialism and the mass slaughter of our people, we must do away with the muddled Trotskyist tendency of splintering into groups of 50 (that has historically gutted the left in this country) and form a temporary alliance to defeat the strangling repression of the Trump regime. We, the mass reserved army of labor must pick up the red banner and fight for the liberation of all those colonized, imprisoned, and hyper-exploited. 

Every New Yorker should be furious. 

But where should that fury be directed? To Eric Adams, current mayor of the city? He is a valid target, but to solely blame him and those like him (individual actors of the local, state, and federal government) is to miss the forest for the trees, rotten and withered as those trees may be. The crimes of Eric Adams and his toadies in authorizing and implementing the new 60 day limitation on shelter occupancy for migrant families are crimes they must answer for. But these crimes against the people are not aberrations of an otherwise healthy system, they are as diseased and rotten in their nature as the system which spawned them; like fruit from the branch. 

And while some may regard the articles above and remark “Well, this is all about migrant families, really. The illegal ones especially!” those folks aren’t looking at the data. The Chief Financial Officer reports a 22% increase in the amount of homeless children in the education system between 2023 and 2024, an increase that does not correspond with an increase in migrant family populations present in shelters.¹ 

Furthermore, while the comptroller data does show an increase in Hispanic persons documented among the homeless beginning somewhere between summer 2022 and late winter 2023, it also shows a fascinating abnormality in the data: a great canyon that plummets as low as 10,914 families TOTAL present in the state shelters during the month of March, 2022 (See figure). Then, just one month later, it spikes back up and then climbs dramatically for Hispanic families, somewhat for Black Families, and more slightly for all other categories. 

How does this happen? It’s simple. The state does only as much as is necessary to ensure that business can continue as usual.

See here: Housing and Urban Development (HUD) waivers granted due to the pandemic, along with other programs initiated during the years from 2020 to 2022, ran their course and were ended or rendered inert. The HUD waivers specifically became invalid on March 1, 2022, which just so happens to be the point on the graph where shelter inhabitancy plummets. The graph above makes perfect sense then: The aid programs that had served as floodgates stemming the tide of a steadily growing homelessness crisis burst open, and so a flood of new families entered the formal shelter programs as pre-existing families who were once in those shelters scrambled to renew their occupancy. These early pandemic programs, including rent freezes and free emergency housing in commercial hotels, kept the most precarious families housed, until they didn’t.  Then, the suffering masses of workers — migrant or otherwise — were consigned to the streets not by accident, but by calculating and willing actors doing their part to keep business moving. 

They knew this would happen, if not explicitly, then implicitly. The logic is all too easy to follow, and many organizations warned of such consequences back when COVID-19 benefits were being cut. But it wasn’t just COVID-19. It’s been decades upon decades of capital accumulation, mismanagement, and decay. Not even the bourgeois corporate media can deny this fact, as illustrated by a CBS News report this October which relayed that New York City has only processed 65% of SNAP and 42% of financial assistance applications on time this year. 

This is why Eric Adams and his goons are merely playing a role, why they are “actors,” and not the sole perpetrators in this travesty. They are part of a greater schema, that of capitalism — particularly, that of an empire in its most advanced stage of growth, which is beginning to experience its inevitable and historical decline. This is not to excuse anyone for their actions, but to put the current problem of homeless children and families into a perspective informed by a type of analysis that grounds us in evidence and accounts for the clash of interest between classes of people: dialectical-historical materialism.  This is the science by which Marxists understand and act upon the present; a science that any person can understand, and may even be engaged with in a lay-person’s fashion, such is its ubiquity and validity. 

People know why they are suffering. We know why there are families left to rot in the streets. We know why one in eight NYC schoolchildren sleeps in a shelter or out in the cold. But the system, hegemonic and deeply rooted in our culture as it is, is skilled at obfuscating the truth; shifting the blame, or at the least misdirecting the concerned with incorrect ways of resolving the problem. This is not an issue that will be solved by Eric Adams suddenly finding the goodness in his heart and becoming a better man; it will not be solved by electing a more upright and righteous mayor to steer the decaying ship. It will not come because we merely want it to; as it stands, the bourgeoisie (see Blackrock), and in the case of housing, the petit bourgeoisie (individual landlords), gain much from the continued suffering of the hardest workers and the ever present threat of homelessness. By design, it is this shared class interest among the rich and powerful which dictates policy in a capitalist state, and it is this bourgeois-dictated policy that tears children from warm homes to fatten overstuffed wallets. This conflict of interests, this contradiction, can only be resolved through class struggle and class war. 

Currently, in NYC, there are over 120,000 active hotel rooms and anywhere between 33,000 and 67,000 housing units vacant of any occupants; a rough total range of 187,000 to 153,000 empty potential homes across the five boroughs.²

Then, based on the 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS), there is a general demand for 275,000 households/residents, a demand which supply “failed to meet.” And while it is true that the maximum range of empty housing units by our current measure still falls short of the 275,000 figure by at least 88,000 units, the fact that so many beds remain empty cannot be ignored. The price for these units, and the use of these units in the case of hotels, far exceeds or is irrelevant to the desperate masses struggling just to keep a roof over their head, and the reason is simple — profit is the chief motive which drives capital, and capital is what bourgeois and liberal society enshrines as the most important element above all else. Yet this notion would seem to be incorrect, one may think, because is it not pointless to keep units empty rather than have them filled while charging a lower rate? Would this not create at least some profit for the owner? It would! 

Indeed, something would be gained by all parties, and society at large, if even a fraction of the above housing units were given over to the homeless to be rented below the “market value.” The effects of homelessness can truly never be understated, especially for children, and it doesn’t take rigorous study to understand that a stable family is a productive family, both for their own sake, and for their communities. Jobs cannot be reliably attended to when you have no idea where you’ll be sleeping that night, or if you’ll be arrested for “vagrancy,” just as well as schoolwork cannot be adequately completed by children whose parents must rifle through trash in order to feed them. 

But none of this matters to the bourgeoisie or the petit-bourgeoisie beyond how they take base offense to the “unsightliness” of the homeless. To them, what matters is the accumulation and valorization of their own capital. In the case of landlords and hotel operators, this is done through commodifying shelter, the most basic element of survival, and uses the bourgeois and pre-bourgeois social structures to justify and legalize the constant parasitism of their class off the backs of their renters, the working class; the people at large.

“If accumulation, the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, necessarily creates a surplus laboring population, the latter becomes, in its turn, the most powerful lever of accumulation — even a condition of existence of fully developed capitalist production. This surplus- population forms an industrial reserve army belonging to capital just as absolutely, as if it had raised and disciplined it at its own expense. Independently of the natural increase of population, it provides capital, to meet its varying requirements, with a mass of human material always at its disposal for exploitation.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 25.

While we may not be speaking of a very industrial working population with regards to NYC, the modern U.S. economy, being one which is exceedingly dominated by banking-related finance capital, the general rule still applies. The landlord class, and the bourgeoisie more broadly, do not suffer, but benefit from, and are always able to prey on, the desperation of the people in order to fleece greater and greater amounts from our already light purses. 

In this sense, capitalism is not concerned with the use value of even the most basic things, such as food, education, and shelter. The use values of these things only matter to corporations insofar as they can be marketed and sold, such that the bourgeois class grows richer. And by this logic the burden on the buyer, the large proletariat class, grows more and more, such that bourgeois profits may be infinitely expanded. Naturally, this leads to a crisis, as infinite growth is impossible, and we saw in 2008 what becomes of a country when it suffers an uncontrolled collapse of the housing market. In a way, that collapse never ended, and to this day, we, the people, are still suffering the harm caused to us by the arrogance, greed, and short sightedness of capital and the systems which support it. 

Thus we are left with the harrowing realities on the ground; a child from Santa Clara committed suicide due to the bullying he received from being homeless. This occurred just eight days before U.N. World Children’s Day, in the last remaining country on earth who has not ratified the U.N.’s Charter on the Rights of The Child, Somalia having done so back in 2015. This is the reality we have been forced to accept, under pain of death and imprisonment should we ever try to resist. 

But resist we must. 

A better world is possible, and we need not speculate how situations such as the one in NYC and the U.S. more broadly can not only be alleviated, but anticipated and avoided entirely. The People’s Republic of China, despite its large population and history of poverty, has effectively eliminated homelessness through measures including a household registration system, which ensures access to hometown social services, and laws requiring local governments arrange proper assistance to those who still lose housing, rather than punishing or expelling them. The great strides of the Chinese people, and the people of socialist countries overall (Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cuba, etc.), are possible only through complete control of the state belonging to the working class. With a dictatorship of the working and oppressed peoples — a rule of the people, by the people, and for the people, in truth and not just words — we will put homelessness and poverty in the dustbin of history where they belong. 

1. Current estimates suggest 50,000 migrant families with children lived in shelters over the summer of 2024. Doing some simple math, dividing the prior estimate of 146,000 homeless children currently enrolled in some form of schooling by the 50,000 families recorded by the city’s comptroller across all the summer months, then you would have to presume, on average, that each family has 2.9 children being cared for. And while that is not only dubious to claim from the perspective of mere probability and statistical chance, it is also a figure representing an incomplete population! The above estimate of 50,000 only accounted for migrant families who lived in shelters, and the 146,000 figure accounts for all unhoused children enrolled in schooling across the five boroughs. And of those 50,000 migrant families, only 13,500 of those families were housed in shelters during the month of September, 2024. Looking back on the readily available data reporting on the number of families present in September 2023, we can see the figures are practically the same. Therefore we can include that the homeless population is rising steadily, and that the source is not uniquely foreign in origin.  ︎
2. This figure was arrived at by taking the number of active hotel rooms and adding them to the upper and lower bound limits of vacant housing as documented by surveys from 2022 and 2023, the most immediate and relevant data the author could find on the subject. Specifically in The City’s article on the subject, the average amount of rent stabilized units vacant in the city yet not available to potential renters was compared with the figures they gave for vacant units of any available housing, not just rent frozen unitsy. By taking the low estimate of 33,000 and the high estimate of 67,000, and adding each to the estimate of 120,000 active hotel rooms, our range of available housing is made clear.  ︎

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

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

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

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

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

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

Class Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

New York City: the Epicenter of Haute Bourgeois Power

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

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

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

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

Decaying Finance Capital and the New York Economy

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

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

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

The Monopolists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Non-Monopolist Bourgeoisie

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

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

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

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

The Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie — Parasitic Professional Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imperialist Labor Aristocracy — “White Collar” Financiers

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

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

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

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

Non-Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

City Government — the Pig Class

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

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

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

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

National Bourgeoisie and Petit-Bourgeoisie

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

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

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

The Urban Proletariat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Students

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

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

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

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

The Sub-Proletariat

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

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

The Urban Masses Need Marxist Organization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assembling Many Local Organizations

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

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

The Study Group

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week three: Class Struggle, Chapter 1, Domenico Losurdo

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

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

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

Political Economy Block

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

Organization-Building Block

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

National Liberation Block

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

Sex Liberation Block

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

The Logistics Organization

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Membership

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

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

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

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

We urge you to go forth and build!

A League Conference

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

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

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

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

Onward, to revolution!

This year’s theme was “Sleeping Beauty: Reawakening Fashion.” It featured dresses too delicate to be worn and a walk through the history of fashion, while ignoring the historical moment occurring in the real world. One block from the Gala protestors chanted, “Gaza! Gaza!” and waved Palestinian flags. These students, protesting their universities’ role in funding the genocidal zionist project, spilled into the streets, demanding from these celebrities their voice alongside the rallying cry of those demanding an end to the genocide. Police arrested twenty-seven of them, but you can still hear those voices on the media footage of the event, chants breaking through the metal barricades set up on the street to reach the ears of the wealthiest and most influential fashion party in the U.S..

The dress code was supposedly the “Garden of Time,” a J.G. Ballard story about a wealthy couple who are on the verge of being attacked by an angry mob, forestalled by their magic garden, whose flowers stop time when picked. They rely on plucking roses to turn back time,  but roses and time are both running out. The garden withers; time comes for the couple, turning them to stone and their palace to dust. With the police barricading the surrounding streets and their silence on a genocide, these celebrities are acting out the Ballard story on the grand scale; the spectacle is meant to buy time for a system doomed to die at the hands of a mob.

As boozy celebs pranced about in Manhattan, the zionist occupation rained hell on Rafah, answering the protests with an ear-splitting run of explosions. Joe Biden, never one to restrain his imperialist dog in the Middle East, immediately folded on his so-called “red line.” The insulting opulence of the Met Gala was set against a backdrop of unceasing violence. At an event two days later, billionaire Kim Kardashian overheard, “Free Palestine” and replied, “Free everybody!” This sanctimonious neutrality, this “All lives matter” equivalent to an ongoing genocide, demands our criticism; the genocide in Gaza is as plain as day, and we do not accept that the best anyone with a platform can do is half-baked platitudes. We need to put the pressure on.

In another sense, though, all residents under the umbrella of the U.S.-Canadian Empire are in the Garden of Time, picking the flowers. This system will not last forever. The exploited nations are throwing off their shackles. The Met Gala itself relies on the fickleness of fast fashion, providing a respectable veneer for the destructive waste of the fashion industry. Fashion brands use the Gala for promotion, while profiting heavily from the destruction of the environment and exploited labor of the Global South. One would think, given the Gala’s theme, that these designers would pay mind to the environment they share with us, but we instead saw designs meant to be thrown away. This is an empire that uses things up and spits them out. The clothing goes into a landfill, the factory that made the clothing dumps its pollution into the water, and the human beings who made work under obscene conditions are then cast aside.

The crimes of fast fashion are the crimes of the U.S. Empire. It’s not just poor taste that inspires celebrities to carry ice purses, nor is it simply bad moral judgment that they ignore the cries of the protestors. They need the imperial system to continue to keep hold on their obscene wealth. The glitterati will always stand against the people; their wealth comes from the imperial ruling class.

But our struggles are the Palestinian struggles; the world’s struggles. U.S. police “innovation” is tested on Palestinians in occupied territory before it comes home. Capitalists — and zionists —  run slave mines in Africa, and their political interference in Latin America creates hundreds of thousands of refugees. The climate deteriorates further under the capitalist system, and they offer no solutions. The walls of the garden of time are cracking. The empire is crumbling. The ruling class is losing control.

On the question of Palestine, the tide has turned. The working people of the world, particularly the young, see the zionist entity for what it is: a genocidal state with the full backing of the US. The U.S. celebrity network celebrates in lavish outfits while our government funds and backs a genocide, but you wouldn’t know it with the coverage of the event. The media is merely the hand that washes away the blood of empire. Our government buys missiles and sends them to kill tens of thousands of Palestinian children trapped in Gaza where they cannot run; every new “safe” space becomes a bombing target. Zionist forces maim and kill civilians without hesitation. U.S. military technology is key to Israel’s entire war effort. Yet our political caste refuses to reign the zionist state in, because our outpost in the Middle East is too valuable and our empire too rigid for even genocide to make Joe Biden constrain the zionist monster.

We are living on borrowed time; the capitalist system cannot fix our climate, and the world cannot bear the weight of American consumption much longer. Our flowers are running out. Americans need to stand with the protestors and make our voices heard. We cannot afford to turn away, to retreat further into senescence and decrepitude. We must reject the genocide in Gaza along with the system that requires it. Reject the silence of celebrity and hold the American ruling class to account; put their feet to the fire and secure our own liberation. It is this that will make a truly international revolution. The Black struggle, the Indigenous struggle, and the Palestinian struggle are all struggles for national liberation. The broader class struggle — our struggle — depends on their unconditional victories. The same imperial system conducting this genocide brings its murderous lessons home to use against us. We need to struggle together, or we will die together. We who live in the heart of the empire have the choice; we did not choose this empire, but we can choose its destruction. We have the tools to remake the world. Reject our genocidal ruling class. Stand with Palestine. Stand with liberation. Stand with life. Free Palestine!

Tonight is the night of the ram and the truncheon. The arm swinging it wears a Democratic Party armband. Push just a little against the ruling class, and they will band together in a slavering mass of ghouls and devils. We see you; the students and the workers see you.

To the conciliators: you have your choice. Stand with the people or with their enemy. To the ruling class: you have overplayed your hand. Tonight you have shown the students and workers of the cities your contempt, and treated them like the colonies and semi-colonies.

Look to Washington, and see them for what they are: the craven and cringing lackeys of wealthy masters. Look beyond their charade at the skin-and-bone; they are wearing your blood as rubies, they are slurping the marrow of your kin.

But what will their ram bring them? Their truncheon? Their armored trucks and towers? Tonight these cronies give birth to the future red brigades who will prepare on earth the hell that does not wait for them in another world – the hell they so rightly deserve.

Together, we will walk through the inferno to destroy them. They, the parasites who feast on our flesh and delight in our misery; who grow gravid with the wine of our suffering, will know fire, as we will know fire. And when we are done, the world will be the better for burning.

All it takes is a single spark – a single spark to start a prairie fire. They have struck the spark. The fire is burning. It will race beyond their control. The old wood will burn, the ancient groves will be cleared away, and the sun will shine again on a new forest.

The time is coming when we will bring their feast – the feast of two centuries! – to an end. We will drive the ghouls down into the dark corridors of history. Children will grow with only faerie stories of the monstrous exploiters. They will grow knowing them only as myth.

But when those children ask “where were you when the fire was struck” and “where were you when the fire raged,” you will look back and know that you took part. You will be able to say with sorrow and joy, “I was one who helped make this new world, for you.”

On the night of April 30 going into the morning of the first of May, May Day, the New York City police department piled into armored trucks and troop carriers. They went armed with batons and truncheons, with ladders, towers, and rams, to Columbia and CUNY, intent on shattering the resistance to the regime’s war on Palestine. In the nighted hours, before the rising of the sun, it became clear that the war is not the zionist war on Palestine, but the U.S. war. The representatives of imperial law and order stood together and declared with one voice, Democrat and Republican, from the mayor of New York City, the Democrat Eric Adams, to the trumpets of the White House and the Biden regime, that they are the unabashed servants of monopoly capitalism. Together all forces of “order” are lackeys of a single master: U.S. imperialist capital.

At the same time, across the country, UCLA’s encampment suffered attacks by paramilitary zionists: gas canisters, bricks, and lit fireworks were hurled into the camp, sending twelve student-radicals to the hospital. As we would expect, the police in LA stood back and permitted this brutal attack on the camp. Despite the violence, when the sun rose on May Day, the encampment had survived. The UCLA camp holds their ground.

Hours before the troops arrived at Columbia and CUNY, the student encampment at Brown was broken by the cowardice and capitulation of its leading committees, who chose to protect themselves rather than their mission, and broadcast an order to disband after the Brown made them empty promises of hearings on divestment…in October.

It is clear that this concerted effort on the camps was coordinated by a central strategy. We can see the hand of the White House behind the stooped pawns in blue. It is no mystery that Biden’s regime moves the pieces, even while Biden himself sipped warm milk and geriatric vitamin supplements peacefully in his cushioned bed.

In New York City, the NYPD closed off four blocks surrounding the Columbia campus. They marched in columns of armored officers, supported by a fleet of combat vehicles and jail buses, sometimes forcing patrol cars through crowds of students and workers, to approach the gates of the campus. In a crowning irony, student journalists were corralled and penned in Pulitzer Hall so they could not report on the brutality the NYPD were about to unleash on the defenders at Columbia.

Bringing up their siege towers, the NYPD forced entry to the defenders’ fortress at Hind (Hamilton) Hall, smashing through the windows and plowing into the defenders ranks. All told, some hundred or more students and workers at the encampment were arrested and shunted into prison buses to be transported to the city’s decaying prisons and lockups. The members of the encampment, with a high degree of political awareness, knew that despite the raid, they had won. Unlike the cowardly or duped leadership at Brown, they accepted nothing from the university, made no self-destructive bargain. Although they were ultimately arrested, the movement itself is in-tact and they can soon begin their work anew.

The Night of the Ram has shattered the domestic quiet of the empire. Crises are coming at an accelerating rate: between Ferguson and the 2020 June Uprising, eight years passed. Between the June Uprising and the 2024 Student Revolt, a mere four years have elapsed. We will see these crises come faster, with greater effect, and with ever-escalating crackdowns from the parties of law and order.

The bourgeois politicians in the form of the centrist and even the “progressive” Democrats have revealed themselves to the people as mere lickspittles for imperialist capital. They have let loose the dogs of war on their own people, treated the workers and students the very same way they treat the semi- and neo-colonies abroad. Cesaire’s thesis — the barbarization of the homefront with the savagery of the colonial front — has been proven true, even in the eyes of workers unaffected by the student movement.

Moreover, the Night of the Ram will inevitably produce hundreds of new radicals. From the wreckage of Hind Hall there will come the future red brigades, the theorists and armed battalions that will overthrow this unjust society which has, for too long, deserved annihilation. The days of capital are numbered, and the parties of law and order should tremble. The children of the revolution have raised their cry: I was, I am, I will be!

1. Financial Divestment

Divest all of Columbia’s finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine. Ensure accountability by increasing transparency around financial investments.

2. Academic Boycott

Sever academic ties with Israeli universities, including the Global Center in Tel Aviv, the Dual Degree Program with Tel Aviv University, and all study-abroad programs, fellowships, and research collaborations with Israeli academic institutions.

3. Stop the Displacement

No land grabs, whether in Harlem, Lenapehoking, or Palestine. Cease expansion, provide reparations, and support housing for low-income Harlem residents. No development by Columbia without real community Control.

4. No Policing On Campus

End the targeted repression of Palestinian students and their allies on and off campus, including through university disciplinary processes. Defund Public Safety and disclose and sever all ties with the NYPD.

5. End the Silence

Release a public statement calling for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza, denouncing the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, and call on government officials to do so too.

Columbia is the largest landowner in New York City. Its endowment totals $13.64 billion. The students of the encampment have compiled and distributed a chart showing how exactly Columbias Trustees directly profit from the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. 

The students of Columbia have learned the meaning of solidarity over the past year.  During a Palestinian “divestment now” rally in January, two pro-apartheid students, both former  terrorists in the Occupation Forces (IOF), attacked demonstrators using a chemical weapon. They sprayed activists with “Skunk,” a chemical developed by the zionist occupation and used for crowd control in the West Bank. As would be expected, the zionist NYPD has failed to make any arrests in connection with this attack. The school then took action against students who dissented against the genocide by “dismissing or removing five faculty members from the classroom, suspending 15 students and suspending two student groups — Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.”

The current protest began on April 17th. That same day, the campus administration threatened protesters with suspension and arrest, but no arrests were made. The University shut down the campus and blocked the entrances. They then called in the NYPD, who loomed in military equipment while hundreds of other students and community members stood in witness of their fellow classmates. Support protests for the encampment came together outside the school. 

As Columbia’s ruling-class administrators called on the jackbooted NYPD, members of Congress were questioning the administration about reports of so-called “antisemitism” on campus. As is typical for zionists, the hearing was bloated with the tired and putrid stance that anti-zionism equates to  antisemitism. “Inquiries” included the incredible question (which I am sad to inform you actually came out of a government official’s mouth in 2024) by Rick Allen (R-Ga.), asking “Are you familiar with Genesis 12:3?” Allen followed up stating “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham … If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you … Do you consider that a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?” (The only consolation this writer currently has is that conservatives are at least saying the quiet part out loud. Though, these days it seems the most infuriating is watching Liberals feign concerned sincerity.)

School staff, who were primarily people of color and women, entered the encampment to try to negotiate its disbandment. This is not the first time we have seen the ruling class has chosen individuals from oppressed backgrounds and nations to use as a battering ram against their community. As professor Ruha Benjamin passionately stated in her recent Spelman Convocation 2024 speech: “Black faces in high places are not going to save us. Just look at the Black woman’s hand — [U.S. ] Ambassador at the UN — voting against a ceasefire in Gaza.” 

Initially it seemed that Columbia was willing to work with students towards a resolution. After meeting with students, the administration agreed that it would provide financial transparency for investments with the University Senate executive committee.

On the encampment’s second day, rather than working with the students, the administration set the dogs of capital, the police, upon their students. In the morning three students received an email notifying them that Columbia had suspended them, evicted them, and that if they remained on campus they would be arrested for trespassing. By doing this, the University immediately deprived students of their housing, belongings, education, meal plans, and health insurance. This was all done in service to Colombia’s profitable relationship with the genocidal ethno-religious settler-colony called “israel.” In the letter to the NYPD, Minouche Shafik claims that “I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.”

Suspended students later received an email from Barnard’s CARES (Community Accountability, Response, and Emergency Services) that they had 15 minutes to gather their belongings.

It is worth noting that the mascots for capital acting as its agents in this showdown are the Muslim university president of Columbia, the Black mayor of NYC, and the Latino Chief of Police. Around 1pm the police descended on the encampment and arrested over 100 students and two NLG (National Lawyers Guild) Legal Observers while employees of the school took the student’s property and, in a move inspired by the state’s draconian treatment of houseless people, stomped on food and poured out water. 

The NLG Legal Observers, recognizable by their neon green hats, are frequently present at protests. They attend protests as a neutral party that is there to monitor and document police behavior towards protestors.

Columbia Administration and the NYPD have made concerted efforts to block the press’s access to the students, leading to the Columbia School of Journalism posting the following on their Twitter: “If you are a credentialed member of the media and have been denied access to campus, please send us a DM [direct message]. We will facilitate access to campus.”

The students suspended by the school were identified by the University as “leaders” of the encampment — which raises the question of how a private institution identified them.

All this from a school that offers an M.A. in Human Rights and courses titled: Indigenous Rights and Settler Colonialism in North America, Children’s Rights Advocacy, Gender-Based Violence and Human Rights, Refugees, Citizenship, and Migration.

Columbia hosts a “Center for Palestine Studies” which includes an Edward Said Archival Collection housed in a special reading room, a lecture series, and a research fellowship in Edward Said’s name. Said, the author of Orientalism, was a world renowned Palestinian scholar and a lifelong advocate. Surely, he is rolling in his grave as his image is used to repress the fighters for Palestinian freedom.

The current protest echos other student movements at Columbia including an anti-racism and anti-Vietnam War protest in 1968 where students had a weeklong standoff with police. Students held the dean hostage for 24 hours. Cops eventually  stormed the campus and arrested over 700 people. On April 4, 1985, “students chained closed the doors to Columbia’s administrative building, Hamilton Hall, and sat on the steps, blockading the entrance. They were there to protest the University’s investments in corporations that operated in Apartheid South Africa”. Within two hours 250 others joined the protest. On April 8th, with 5,000 students in attendance, Jesse Jackson made a speech at the encampment. The blockade lasted 21 days, ending on April 25th.

In another move of stunning cognitive dissonance, Columbia has this statement on its website about the 1968 protests:

“Columbia is a far different place today than it was in the spring of 1968 … The fallout dogged Columbia for years … Columbia now has one of the most socio-economically diverse student bodies among its peer institutions. It has added a new campus designed to be open to the community and pursues fields of inquiry unheard of a half-century ago. Columbia is commemorating the 50th anniversary of those long-ago events with a deep dive of scholarship and exhibits chronicling what happened then and its effects today.”

The police have used drones, helicopters, and hundreds of cops (derogatory) to surveil and detain peaceful students who in the words of NYPD Chief John Chell said the “clear and present danger” was identified by Columbia, not by the NYPD. The NYPD reported no violence or injuries associated with the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,” Chell said. 

By April 22, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment had Community Guidelines. Which are:

1. We all commit to remain grounded in why we enter this space — as an act of solidarity with the Palestinian people facing the deadliest year in a 75 year long, U.S. (and Columbia) -funded, genocide of the Palestinian people.

2. No desecration of the land, no littering. Please pick up your trash.

3. We recognize our role as visitors, and for many of us, colonizers, on this land. We camp with an acute awareness that we do so on colonized Lenapehoking land, which after being ethnically cleansed of its Indigenous population has experienced subsequent waves of racist displacement, including most recently by Columbia University in the displacement of the Black and brown Harlem community.

4. No drug use/alcohol consumption inside the camp.

This may make people uncomfortable, increase risk of police targeting, and ultimately this camp exists in service of Palestine, and “partying” in such a space would be an offense to the cause that has brought us here. If people would like to smoke, they can do so outside of the lawn. We don’t want to police each other or each other’s patterns of substance use, but want to ensure that people feel comfortable in the space.

5. Respect personal boundaries — tight quarters are not an excuse to cross physical boundaries without Affirmative consent.

6. We commit to never photographing or videotaping another community member without their affirmative consent.

7. We commit to not share the names or details of anyone we meet in this camp space with someone in the administration as we realize they could be targeted and this could cause them great harm. We keep us safe, that includes refusing to comply with any demands if the NYPD, private investigators, or Columbia admin try to force us to disclose the identities of any of our fellow students!

8. We commit to assuming best intentions, granting ourselves and others grace when mistakes are made, and approaching conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.

9. Please think of community members when making decisions about autonomous action. Not everyone has consented to the same levels of risk, but everyone will be affected by decisions that community members make. 

10. We commit to not engaging with zionist counter-protestors. They seek to distract us, and we must remain steadfast and unified.

Cornell West, Susan Sarandon, Norman Finklestein, and Chris Smalls have all made appearances and encouraged the students. While encouraging, it is important that this movement remains self-governed and is not co-opted by outsiders and moderates. 

Arresting over 100 students has backfired on Columbia. While the arrests were taking place, other students moved to a different campus lawn to set up a new encampment. Protests in solidarity with the students have spawned around New York City. The University of North Carolina launched their own encampment protest, as has Yale, Emerson College, MIT, Tuft University, U.C. Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. Miami University in Ohio held a solidarity demo. Boston and Harvard University held walkouts. Student actions continue to spring up all across the U.S. and have jumped the ocean to include similar actions in the U.K. and Australia. 

In the face of intense state violence and academic sanctions the Columbia student’s encampment is still going strong. However, in order to achieve their aims and express true solidarity with Palestine, the encampment must escalate towards revolutionary militancy. This means occupying more than the designated lawn. Most importantly, the groups who organized the encampments must become politically organized, and form democratic committees to resist all co-option, capitulation, and destruction of the encampment. Only by becoming organized can the student movement forge itself into a weapon of revolutionary action, and deal the university administrators and the zionists a devastating blow.

 Rent stabilization is a legal status created by the city government under which landlords can only increase the rent by a certain percentage every year. They may not evict a tenant unless the tenant has violated the lease, and they must sign one or two-year leases with the tenant (as opposed to the landlord’s favorite type of lease, the oral month-to-month, where they can evict or eject tenants for no reason at all at the drop of a hat). New York’s rent stabilization guidelines were created in 1969 as “market-friendly” alternatives to the more stringent controls on rent increases during and immediately following World War 2. These policies had been seen as necessary to keep workers — whose labor was needed in the city’s manufacturing industry — from being displaced by soaring rents. However, by the 1970s, advances in shipping and computation technology allowed capitalists to increasingly export labor costs to the Third World. Hard-fought union struggles increased the wages and working standards of industrial workers in the U.S. Meanwhile, capitalists hired death squads to terrorize laborers in the Third World, and stymy socialist and union organizing. They then took advantage of the non-existence of strong union contracts in the Third World to pay these workers far less than their U.S. counterparts. This left urban working-class communities who had relied on these jobs to support themselves, particularly Black communities, who were also systematically denied mortgages for suburban homes, with no prospects for decent wages.

 As New York City deindustrialized, the city government cut the social services of these neighborhoods with the explicit goal of displacing the residents — what they dubbed “planned shrinkage.” The impacts were immediate and devastating. Just under 1 million people were displaced or killed by the sudden loss of social services. When it was no longer profitable to the capitalists for workers to live in the city, the state began to erode rent stabilization, including the elimination of rent stabilization for any building constructed after 1974. Real estate speculators took advantage of the many buildings in disrepair and in escrow and bought them for pennies on the dollar. Landlords invested in the reconstruction of these buildings because, once reconstructed, they were no longer subject to rent stabilization. They “reconstructed” them for the explicit purpose of evading rent stabilization requirements!

By the 1990s, corporations began to open offices in New York City, bringing their administrative workers with them. Neighborhoods that were depopulated under “planned shrinkage” were filled by office and service workers. This influx of people provided renewed ways for landlords to profit. The New York State government, in order to facilitate their profiteering, continued the attack on rent stabilization. In 1994, it legislated that any unit whose rent was more than $2,000 per month could be destabilized. Landlords began a frenzy of alteration and tweaking to their units in order to justify a $2,000 rent. Once the properties were destabilized, these same landlords left them to decay once more while they collected inflated rents.

Rent stabilization was never designed to end homelessness or housing insecurity. It was an attempt by the city to manage the contradiction between rapidly rising rents that force the poor to leave the city and the need for a working-class to fill jobs in the city, while protecting the class of people who profit from rent collection and exploitation of labor — the landlords and capitalists. 

Rather than force the landlords to rent out these stabilized units, New York City Mayor Eric Adams gave landlords $10 million to renovate stabilized units and list them at market prices. The city government revealed its true nature by protecting and facilitating the profitability of speculative enterprises. The mayor of New York City gave free money to the landlords, not free housing to the people.

According to data gathered by the city of New York, about half of non-owner-occupied New York City apartments are rent-stabilized. This allows many families and individuals to continue to reside in neighborhoods they grew up in, and prevents rent costs from eating their entire paycheck. Rent stabilization is an undeniable good; we can and should defend it. Still, we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking its protection or expansion will make housing really fair or equitable, let alone that it can bring about an equitable world. As long as the landlord class controls the production and distribution of housing, they use housing as a means to enrich themselves while bleeding the working class of the crumbs we receive as wages. One of the chief functions of the U.S. government is to manage the crises caused by this kind of speculation. However, contrary to the commonly held misconception that the government does this to help the people, their role is to ensure the bankers and landlords who gamble with the people’s money can get bailouts, handouts, and a leg up.

It is our responsibility to end this domination and bring about a society in which goods and services are produced according to ability and distributed according to need, not hoarded for the luxury of a few. We who seek to end this domination must form study groups with our friends, coworkers, and loved ones to collectively understand how this system of domination works. From these study groups, we can organize tenants to collectively struggle against our landlords for better living conditions. 

We must organize defense units, and prevent the protection racket known as the NYPD from evicting our neighbors out of their homes and displacing our homeless neighbors from their camps. It’s through these organizations that we, the working class, can exercise our power. As we do, we will take on not just the immediate effects of the housing crisis (the necessary survival programs for the houseless, eviction-defense squads, etc.) but the very institutions of government that permit the landlords to flourish and, ultimately, the landlords themselves. It’s not just New York City, as practically any working-class person can attest. Housing is either unaffordable or unattainable across the entire United States and Canada. Wherever we may be, we must embed ourselves in and establish organizations like these and put an end to the rule of parasitic landlords and bosses!

The fear that underlies the white mind is not a fear of ghost stories or Pet Semetaries, but a real fear, a justified fear, that those who have been economically and socially oppressed — redlined into crumbling apartment blocks, thrown into prisons and jails without remorse or pretense of justice, deprived of legitimate economic opportunities, shunted into under-funded schools, and driven into the lowest, most menial ranks of the U.S. workforce — might dare to rise up against those people who put them there. This fear infects the white mind of the U.S. Empire. It manifests in different ways between the left- and right-fascists. Democrats respond with spineless programs promoting social equality through neoliberal hiring incentives and meaningless moments of “social recognition,” such as donning Kente cloth in the U.S. Senate rather than taking steps to abolish the police state. Republicans and their right-fascist allies have a different strategy: unleashing universal white armament, in which every white man is a deputy and every nationally oppressed person is an outlaw.

In service of that universal armament, the National Police Association and other right-fascists have been working overtime to transform Daniel Penny, the man who murdered Jordan Neely, into a white national hero. The New York City police failed to arrest Penny at the scene of the crime and some media outlets and right-fascist politicians are now calling the killer a “good samaritan.” One of those politicians is the governor of the state of Florida where, in 2020, a local sheriff threatened to “deputize every lawful gun owner” in response to the legitimate outpouring of anger and grief at the murder of George Floyd that became the June Uprisings.

The mentality of the frontier has been played upon for a century by the arms industry. It is precisely this social urge that unites the otherwise incomprehensible positions of the National Rifle Association, namely: against guns in the hands of Black communities, but for guns in the hands of everyone else. In the 19th century this was the open position of the government itself. For instance, the 1856 Supreme Court opinion in Dredd Scott v. Sandford stated, without any ambiguity that if Black people:

were entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race [sic], who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union… the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State. (Emphasis added.)

Dredd Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 417 (1857) (Superseded by Constitutional Amendment (1868)).

Thus, at every turn, the white patriarchs, and those aspiring to the role, have been encouraged to view themselves not as subject citizens of the U.S. Empire, but rather as the embattled homesteaders standing their ground. We cannot know if Penny himself felt this charge to defend white civilization or if he was merely an ex-Marine looking for someone to murder. We can, however, surmise that among his two accomplices (who have gone unnamed by the police or the media) and the other people on the subway car who gave their silent approval to the killing, many felt this satisfaction of defending the frontier. Indeed, social media has been pummeled by the joyous cries of self-proclaimed “feminists” (they are nothing of the kind!) congratulating, or at least excusing, the brutal slaying because they themselves feel threatened by unhoused people like Jordan. These women play, to a T, the part of the homesteader’s wife, congratulating the big strong man with his rifle — or wielding the rifle themselves to protect their “property” from the natives. This is the predictable — and predicted — result of a system that treats Black persons as something other than human, as disposable sources of labor, as farm animals.

In reality, we know that the emancipation of women and the emancipation of the oppressed nations — Black, Indigenous, Latiné — must come together as part of the overall social revolution.The New York courts are, of course, on Penny’s side. Although he was charged with the crime — indeed, the District Attorney could hardly afford not to charge Penny after the NYPD’s riotous and brutal suppression of protests calling for Penny to face justice — he was released on a mere $100,000 bail. The average bail amount for second degree murder in New York is $250,000. First degree murder, which this killing undoubtedly was, has an average bail set at $1 million. We can be certain that the judicial system has no intention of holding Penny accountable. It is likely that, unless the people of New York act to pressure the courts and the D.A. to punish Penny, he’ll be given a plea deal on a low-level assault felony. Indeed, the only way to be certain that Penny sees justice is for the people to mete it out to him themselves.

Only a militant, well-organized people’s movement can get justice for Jordan.

The NYPD purchased two of the drones, these “Digidogs”, for $739,000 using funds outside the official city budget through a program that incentivizes the NYPD to seize cash and other property from the community to be used for their own purposes. They call this “asset forfeiture,” and it is standard practice for the armed militias serving and protecting private property in every corner of the United States.

The police are empowered to seize property through forfeiture simply by claiming that the property was involved in criminal activity whether or not you’ve been convicted, or even charged with a crime. In fact, unless they are challenged, the police don’t even have to present evidence that the theft is justified; when the cops seize property in order to auction it off and keep the cash for themselves, the burden is on the victim of this stickup to show up to court and argue that the property was not used in a crime or acquired through crime. This is a very difficult process that often requires a lawyer and frequently results in the property staying in the hands of the police. With the cost of legal fees, you might even be better off trying to buy your own property back at the police auction.

Adams hosted this charade barely a week after announcing his plans to cut funding 4% city-wide in the new budget. While New Yorkers wait to find out what essential services are slated to be ripped out of our hands, we are presented with this unabashed mockery. Of course, we never expect the Landlord-Cop comfortably reigning over us to care about our needs, our rights. But it seems he is also incapable of basic human shame! Well, the budget is now released. So while he and his goons in the NYPD get shiny new drones to harass us with, what do we get?

We get a $1 billion cut to education! With all the glaring flaws of our school system, they must have done a rigorous study of NYC schools and determined that our children were $1 billion too educated last year. Never mind the underpaid and overworked educators who are forced to personally buy supplies for their overflowing classrooms; Adams is attacking the heart of the issue!

We also get a 4% cut in the Department of Buildings! These are the people responsible for staffing and inspecting construction projects throughout the city. Surely, the parking garage that just collapsed in lower Manhattan, and the 4-year high in construction site deaths are due to the DOB having too much money for hiring construction workers and safety inspectors.

And more good news! The Pig-In-Chief heard all of our complaints about NYC libraries being open too much, and has proposed cutting $53 million out of their budget so that they can reduce Saturday hours and be rid of Sunday hours entirely.

So where is all of this money going? Along with boasting about the record amount of funds this budget will keep in the reserves, the Mayor also reached a deal with the NYPD police “union” that will raise salaries across the board, some as much as 40%. This deal includes back pay all the way to 2017, as well as more flexible overtime hours just to tie a neat bow on it all.

Every time they ignore our demands that our money go towards vital social services instead of the NYPD it’s a crime. Year after year, they shift more money to the NYPD’s obscene budget at the expense of New Yorkers’ education, healthcare, housing, and infrastructure. And when that extortion is not enough for them, they also rob us in the streets at gunpoint and head to midtown to show off the cutting-edge surveillance tech they buy with the new funds. Tech that will, as always, be weaponized against the people who paid for it.

The NYPD exists to protect the landlords and all others who live on the income of their private property, or more accurately, live on our backs. Until the working class takes the reins of power from the exploiters, our taxes will always be used to protect these private property interests at the expense of our wellbeing. An organized working class fighting for all of our collective interests is the first step towards ridding ourselves of the parasites and their armed thugs forever.