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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.’” ︎

On June 16, 2025, days after the Paramount Insurrection and the popular attacks on the ICE facility at Delaney Hall, Unity–Struggle–Unity Press received a double criticism from our comrades at the Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness identifying two recent articles in the Red Clarion as “left-opportunist,” “adventurist,” “defeatist,” and “bowing to spontaneity.” These comrades ask for a self-criticism to be published by the Press containing the self-criticisms of the two authors and the Editorial Board (“any persons involved in the publishing” of the two articles). The comrades take issue with “Forward the Red Flag,” and “Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics.”

We disagree with the propositions put forward by these comrades and decline to offer such self-criticism. This article contains our response.

To begin with, we must clearly state the comrades’ argument: that the acts of Elias Rodriguez, and all support for those acts, constitute “left opportunism,” “defeatism,” “tailism,” and “adventurism.” The comrades counterpose the strategy of “raise[ing] consciousness for the ultimate purpose of raising the progressive movement’s consciousness.” What this raising of consciousness involves or how it is to be achieved, our comrades are not at all clear! Certainly, given their criticisms, they believe it does not include the denunciation of moribund parties when they distance themselves from political violence, nor can it encompass the defense of spontaneous political terror. Our comrades also warn us that Communists must not prepare the masses to confront the enemy state with guns and bombs. This, they caution, is “the line of an Anarchist!” They urge instead that we engage in a two-line struggle, although with whom is not clear. The masses? The would-be terrorists? The narrow field of other Marxists?

Before we respond to these criticisms, let us define our terms as Marxists understand them. Opportunism is the adoption of politically-expedient but incorrect positions primarily with the aim of capturing a popular sentiment. Adventurism is the action of “tiny groups” or whole parties without roots in the masses. Defeatism is the position that a revolution is impossible or that socialism cannot be achieved. Tailism is the adoption of positions that have already been made irrelevant by mass consciousness.

The comrades begin their criticism of what they identify as our “left” errors with a quote by Bukharin: “All the aims which a party representing the interests of its class vigorously pursues constitutes the party program.” To this we must ask: What is the purpose of this quotation? What party are our comrades referring to? What class? What program? These are things that do not yet exist. What bearing does the conception of a party program have on our activities? I do not understand the comrades to be arguing that there exists a positive party or program to adhere to. It is my hope that they do not refer to an existing class-in-itself, much less a class-for-itself, within the U.S. that constitutes a revolutionary base. No such class presently exists! It is our job to call that class into existence — indeed, it seems our comrades know (or perhaps instinctually felt) this, for they later quote False Nationalism, False Internationalism, “No revolutionaries find conveniently ready-made, pre-packaged, social bases, but must develop and build the masses and themselves in the same process.”

Indeed, we intend to provide an analysis of the immediately revolutionary strata in a forthcoming article, relying on a formula that compares an individual or household’s present wages to:

Wages
– Superwages
– State benefits
– Real property
+ Value of socialized benefits under communism

(which, not coincidentally, provides insight into the formation of a program, where we identify housing, healthcare, child care, education, transportation, food, and utilities as socialized benefits).

Our comrades clearly see the necessity of building the party, but in their eagerness, their analysis considers that party already built. They criticize anarchic tactics that the masses themselves are adopting. Very well! But they go on to criticize this Press for drawing from those tactics object propaganda lessons to rouse the lowest and deepest members of the working classes to act in their own defense. They mechanically repeat the adages of parties of the past, but the historical development of our present situation must be accounted for. The chief error of the CPUSA, etc., is a warmed-over Lovestoneism. This is the real defeatism! The class that should serve as the motor of the revolution has been completely disorganized over the past century. Its members have trouble even dreaming of a tomorrow free from the capitalist state and have entirely swallowed the Lovestoneite deviation. This cannot be combatted by struggling with other Marxists alone; only propagandizing on the actions and trials faced by the masses themselves can bring them to that understanding.

Indeed, we fear that our comrades have misidentified the masses entirely. “The collective,” they warn us, “is not ready for armed struggle.” It is the advanced masses themselves who are the very people engaging in violence in Paramount and New Jersey! Perhaps our comrades consider the sedate, middle-of-the-road centrist as the “masses.” Perhaps they envision Democratic voters as the masses. The masses, however, the revolutionary strata of the masses, are those who routinely do not vote. Their advanced elements are the Communists. Those coming into consciousness must be guided into our ranks in order to form the revolutionary party.

There is no division between us and the masses.

We are already embarked on the journey to form that party. It is the purpose of this Press and the All-Empire Worker’s League to make it a reality. We ask our comrades to consider advancing the project of forming the party, of adding their voice to the others that now flock to the red banner.

We cannot ignore the spontaneous movement of the masses — this is hardly “bowing” to spontaneity. To disclaim Elias Rodriguez or the Paramount Insurrection as adventurism is to split ourselves from the masses, to declare that the active portions of the masses are in fact not the masses at all. Under this rubric, the masses in motion will never be recognized. We cannot intend to go into direct conflict with the state while wringing our hands about violence against it. On the contrary, we are required to harness this spontaneous energy, not restrain it. The masses must be made ready to do violence. Our comrades accuse us, by refusing to condemn spontaneous terror, of “tailing” the masses. It is the attempt to restrain popular feelings that “tail” the masses — indeed, it is not possible both to bow to mass spontaneity and to tail the masses, for tailism is the adoption of positions that are already outdated, that the masses have already discarded as useless, that have outlived their usefulness.

The comrades also take us to be claiming that any and all anti-state violence heightens the struggle. We say no such thing! But, to deny the evidence of our eyes — the actual heightening of the struggle from October 7, to the Student Intifada, to Aaron Bushnell, to Elias Rodriguez, to the Paramount Insurrection, to Delaney Hall, is to risk a state of permanent tailism and obsolescence. Our comrades are wrong where they suggest that the spontaneous acts of any portion of the masses cannot drive struggle forward. They would, I think, struggle in vain to find any Communist who has held this view uncontested. Spontaneous acts can heighten the struggle, but when they are not guided by the organized party of the revolutionary proletariat, they risk defeat, disorganization, and co-option by the liberal reformist currents.

Although our comrades denounce CPUSA and PSL in words, their criticism in effect embraces the CPUSA position: to allow the “revolutionary” revisionists to teach the masses that Communism is passivity and cowardice.

Briefly, as to our comrades’ last section on safeguarding the movement, here, our comrades fully embrace the CPUSA position with only the slightest hedging. They hold that the security apparatus of the U.S. state requires us to “keep[] our people out of the enemy’s hands and… shield[] them from the political police’s awareness.” No revolution can remain underground. This is a call not to organize an aboveground, unrelated to any of the other issues our comrades address. There is risk. We must be prepared to accept that risk. Anyone who is not prepared to accept that risk is not prepared to be a revolutionary.

These statements also demonstrate a mechanical thinking; there is a dialectic between security and visibility. There is a contradiction between organizing the class and staying hidden. Right now, the disorganization of the class is its defining feature. This means we must overcome that disorganization by above-ground work.

We hope these thoughts are taken in the spirit in which they are meant. We invite our comrades to further conversations on this subject, and further struggle. More, we hope our comrades will take seriously our efforts to unite all that can be united, and, true to their own words, that the thing of greatest importance is the coherence of the movement, act to cohere it and organize it. Let us take concrete steps toward unification.

Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness (SCRC) Letter to the Editor

“All the aims which a party representing the interests of its class vigorously pursues constitue the party program.”

Nikolai Bukharin, The ABC of Communism

This article is a response to and criticism of the recent Red Clarion articles “Forward the Red Flag” and “Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics”. The article discusses specifically the left-opportunism present within both articles regarding the prevalence of adventurism, anarchism, and the general tendency towards the so-called “propaganda of the deed”. We see the defense or affirmation of these tendencies by Communists as opportunistic and defeatist. This is also an example of the present ideological weakness of the Communist movement in the imperial core. Ultimately, it is our understanding that moving beyond this current stage of development regarding the Communist movement, as well as the broader progressive movement, requires that all those who have embraced the Communist ideology further dedicate themselves to the development of a Communist program for revolution as well as the establishment of a legitimate Communist party to struggle out the way forward. This task necessarily demands that Communists refuse the opportunistic instinct to bow to spontaneous action, and instead strive to provide the Communist movement, and the progressive movement, that which it has historically lacked and still desperately needs, revolutionary class consciousness and organization.

There is a common refrain that those who critique in any way the spontaneous actions of individuals, such as the action undertaken recently by Elias Rodriguez, are counterrevolutionary, right-opportunists, or simply cowards. In some instances this line is proven correct, as in the instance of the capitulationist and defeatist anti-violence positions taken by the so-called Party for Socialism and Liberation(PSL)and the Communist Party of the United States(CPUSA) regarding the action. These positions, which totally denounced the action, the CPUSA calling for “militant non-violent protest”, are examples of the ideological weakness and counterrevolutionary limitations of these organizations. Both of these so-called parties refused to embrace a revolutionary line on revolutionary violence against the imperial/colonial violence that is regularly practiced by the enemies of the oppressed and working masses globally. In doing so both PSL and the CPUSA have revealed their inability to guide the conscious development of the Communist movement nor the broader progressive movement that seeks to overcome the present state of things.

“Now the struggle will be unfolding primarily within the revolutionary trend around the program, strategy and tactics of socialist revolution which is first of all a question of how is revolution unfolding objectively, the ideological line, and second of all what shall communists do about it, the political line.”

Committee for Scientific Socialism, History of Two-Line Struggle on Party Building

That fact acknowledged, the line that regards Elias Rodriguez’s actions not as adventurist but instead as “liberatory acts of spontaneous terror”(Gracchus) is plainly opportunistic. Spontaneous actions by individuals or by organizations that outstrip the current stage of development of both the objective conditions as well as the capabilities/consciousness of the subjective forces of progress is the essence of adventurism. Communists can and should understand the manifold reasons and forces behind all things in reality, however, there is a line between understanding and affirmation. It remains painfully true that the present organization of the Communist movement and progressive movement at large is currently incapable of stopping or even noticeably slowing down the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by the Zionist entity and its master the USA. This reality is beyond regrettable and deeply shameful to admit, but more than this it remains necessary that this fact be acknowledged. The collective is not yet ready for armed struggle in part because they are not yet conscious of the necessity of armed struggle. Discounting the present state of the progressive movement and running ahead of it in practice without its unyielding support can only and has only resulted in activists, organizers, would-be revolutionaries, and their organizations being overwhelmingly targeted and destroyed by the enemy’s political police. The apparent lack of desire to combat and end this veritable hemorrhaging of our people from the movement at large is due principally to the worship of spontaneity embraced and proselytized primarily by anarchists.

There are certain ideological and political principles that all those who have chosen to embrace Communism and the struggle for its realization must also comprehend. These principles are borne out of the historical and current experiences of Communists struggling for revolution and the end to the rule of the exploiting classes. Opposing anarchism/adventurism and refusing to align oneself with the belittling of the conscious element is one such principle. Comprehending what we as Communists should know through both study and practice, that spontaneous actions cannot be depended on for the development and sustenance of class consciousness, is another aspect of this commitment. The Communists of this era should feel free to be inspired by the ongoing spontaneous actions and rebellions, these are clear signs that the forces of progress and resistance are alive within the masses of oppressed and working peoples. However, we should remember that our duty is to raise our consciousness for the ultimate purpose of raising the progressive movement’s consciousness. The forces of progress and resistance must be cultivated and developed into revolution; dependency on spontaneity has proven insufficient for this monumental task.

“Just as it is important to remember that theory is not just book learning, it is important to remember that practice is more than engaging in spontaneous struggle.”

I Wor Kuen (IWK), Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building

The claim within Forward the Red Flag that “one of the tasks of the Communists, especially now, while the revolutionary class in the West is scattered and incoherent, is to teach the masses to reach toward a revolutionary horizon; it’s to give the working class the power to imagine a future where they actually confront the enemy class and its footsoldiers not metaphorically, but actually—with guns and bombs” is not the line of a Communist but that of an Anarchist. Where they should argue for coherence of the Communist and progressive movements into revolutionary organizations, they instead argue only for confrontation with guns and bombs. Confrontation with guns and bombs is nothing new to the struggle against the settler-bourgeois state. Confrontation with guns and bombs, and the call for such confrontation, is not enough to develop class consciousness or foment revolution. Communists who know at all the history of the struggle here know this fact, because in the history of the struggle here it has not been enough. The weather in the Communist movement has unfortunately not changed very much since the seventies.

In addition to this ideological and political failure, the author’s further claim that Russia “had to pass through Narodism before it arrived at Marxism Leninism”(Gracchus) unqualified by the fact that this passing only came as the result of bitter ideological struggle between the Marxists and Narodnaya Volya is questionable at best and undeniably problematic. This line lends itself to the legitimizing of the current anarchist trend in the progressive movement. The very trend that has done more to disorganize movements than to organize them, like with the STOPCOPCITY movement in Atlanta. Omitting this fact regarding the history of Communist struggle cannot go without direct criticism, therefore a written self-criticism is called for as a consequence of this lack of ideological and political consistency and quality. In addition to this call for self-criticism, a reading list will be provided for assistance with overcoming this lack of historical and ideological consciousness.

“Opportunism is the sacrifice of the long range interest of the working class for the immediate interests of a minority of the working class. It is bourgeois thinking developed as a trend in the working class movement. Common forms of opportunism in the working class today include such outlooks as reformism, trade unionism, national chauvinism, narrow nationalism and anarchism.”

I Wor Kuen (IWK), Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building

The author of Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics makes similarly opportunistic considerations of Elias Rodriguez’s actions. The claim that Rodriguez “tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the US-israeli empire”(Winter), seems to argue that the struggle til May 22nd had not been tangible, and is tangible only now that Rodriguez is in enemy hands and beyond our still limited/non-existent organizational capabilities of freeing him. Furthermore the claim that Rodriguez’s actions represent a “heightening of the struggle”(Winter) is also opportunistic. Is the struggle heightened every time an individual undertakes violent action against the enemy state? If so then this form of heightening is undoubtedly insufficient for heightening the struggle to the level of revolution, seeing that individual actions against the enemy state occur and have occurred regularly for the entire history of the struggle in the US and in the Zionist entity. The conclusion instead should have been, recognizing the insufficiency of individual spontaneous actions, adventurism, that Communists should further commit themselves to the consolidation of the movement for conscious collective armed struggle against the enemies of the colonized and exploited masses.

In their attempts to rightly critique the capitulationist and counter-revolutionary positions taken by PSL and the CPUSA, both authors go too far and lend their conclusions to anarchistic operations. They, like many in the progressive movement, are in awe of spontaneity and it leads them to uncritically support spontaneous actions committed by those who have insufficient faith in and understanding of the masses of this land. The current lack of a Communist program for revolution and the absence of a party are not license for today’s Communists to forfeit ideological principle for the sake of combating capitulationism, revisionism, and right-opportunism. What our movements lack it is incumbent upon the conscious element to develop and provide. That development still underway, failure to resist bowing to spontaneity is a harm to both the Communist movement and the progressive movements generally.

“The unity between ‘left’ and right opportunism is that both belittle the subjective factor in its ability to correctly assess the social conditions and in its role of consciously bringing politics to the masses and transforming the spontaneous movement into a class conscious one.”

I Wor Kuen (IWK), Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building

Elias Rodriguez should have been surrounded by comrades and acted with the unyielding support of the Communist and progressive movements as he undertook armed action against the Zionist entity and its factotums. That he went without these things is not his fault, but the fault of the current political and organizational insufficiency of the Communist movement. Until we have united our movement around a Communist line on revolution, a program, and until we have consolidated this unity through the establishment of a Communist party, people with the will to struggle like Elias will be left without in their struggle against the forces of reaction. If Elias Rodriguez “would not have done what he did, because there would have been a viable alternative”(Gracchus) then the conclusion reached by every Communist should be that Communists must provide the progressive movement, which is continually conveying a desire to struggle, its viable alternative to spontaneous rebellion. Such a viable alternative can again only be realized through the process of developing a truly revolutionary program and the establishment of a Communist party.

The principal responsibility for Communists in the imperial core is to lead and guide the development of the progressive movement, not tail the spontaneous rebellions that are the inevitable consequence of the constant exploitation and oppression wrought by the settler-colonial bourgeois state.  If the consciousness of the exploited and oppressed masses is limited, and it is, then the practice will also be limited whatever it appears to be at the moment. The principal task of Communists at this current stage of development is to cultivate revolutionary class consciousness among the exploited masses. Revolutionary class consciousness, more than just the acknowledgement of bourgeois exploitation and colonial/imperial violence, means being conscious of the need for and inevitability of the total dictatorship of the oppressed and working masses over and above the current ruling classes of oppressors. This kind of consciousness is not ready-made nor can it be the result of spontaneous or haphazard practice. For its development it requires dedicated ideological and political training in the theory, history, and practice of scientific socialism.

“No revolutionaries find conveniently ready-made, pre-packaged social bases but must develop and build the masses and themselves in the same process.“

False Nationalism, False Internationalism

Call for Self-Criticism from Red Clarion authors

To remain consistent with the goals listed in the Red Clarion mission statement; to develop revolutionary consciousness in the masses and a revolutionary vanguard party, and because you have declared yourselves Communists, we representatives of the Southern Coalition for Revolutionary Consciousness, who have united  to the same goals, are calling for a collective public self criticism from any persons involved in the publishing of “Forward the Red Flag” and “Liberalism and Fascism with Communist Characteristics” on the basis of these articles’ left-opportunism and affirmation of adventurism. We also request a public reassessment of spontaneity and left-opportunism, clarifying for readers that criticism of right-opportunism should not lead to the unprincipled affirmation of anarchism and adventurism generally.

If Communists allow the development of the revolutionary movement to remain at the level of spontaneous action, then we have chosen to sacrifice the future vanguard for moments of temporary excitement and acts of adventurism. Acts that more often than not lead to little more than arrests and movement stagnation must be struggled against. We suggest a thorough reading of the works listed in the provided reading list. We also call for a public reassessment of Elias Rodriguez’s action that emphasizes the importance of a legitimate Communist party to the consolidation of movement practice. Finally, it should be acknowledged that his action, and other such adventurist undertakings, are not required for the development of a legitimate Communist party.  In being critical of these mistakes, and struggling for a more-correct way forward, we not only allow ourselves to evolve, but also affirm the scientific character of our ideology. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge, correcting flawed practices, alongside comprehending the lessons from our revolutionary predecessors, is how the future we have united to building becomes inevitable.

“The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side.”

Mao Zedong, Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work

“We have the Marxist-Leninist weapon of criticism and self-criticism. We can get rid of a bad style and keep the good.”

Mao Zedong, Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Note on Movement Security and Care

Anyone who does not feel any concern at the thought/possibility/likelihood of themselves or others being arrested or targeted by the political police or the other organized servants of reaction either does not know the history of the struggle both here and abroad or has simply decided not to care. Whatever the reason, such a perspective on matters of movement security and longevity is objectively detrimental to the struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperial/colonial domination. This brand of amateurishness has resulted in scores of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries being brutalized, imprisoned, and murdered by the enemy state and their forces. Countless more have chosen to abandon movement organizing entirely on the basis of their negative experiences of engaging with the enemy. At present we have neither the organizational infrastructure nor the resources to protect those who have embraced the struggle. What is worse is that the progressive movement in general seemingly lacks the conscious belief that our activists, organizers, and developing revolutionaries should be protected, that their lives should be valued above and beyond mere spectacles for the masses that have long gone unmoved by mere spectacles.

The “goal of security,” as laid out by J. Sakai in Basic Politics of Movement Security, “is to protect the movement itself, to let the larger struggle against capitalism move forward.” Adopting a lackadaisical perspective on what individuals should be prepared to risk in the struggle, or how they should undertake risks, does not at all protect the movement, but instead views the very people needed to forward the movement as merely cannon fodder for the political police and the enemy state. No one should be expected to “throw their lives away” for the realization of the revolution. Lives must be given and dedicated to revolution, aimed at serving the revolution. The revolution is not served through getting arrested or brutalized by the police. It is not served when people imagine that the only or best way to confront or resist the violence of the settler-colonial bourgeois state is by bowing to spontaneity and forgoing conscious development. It is on the conscious element to ensure that every sacrifice, every gift of a life to revolution, has the impact on the struggle that such a sacrifice should always have. There have already been so many sacrifices, and there will necessarily be countless more to come.

The revolution is inevitable, but the process lags every time Communists concede to carelessness and defeatism regarding our movement, our responsibilities, the broader struggle, and decide to bow to spontaneous action. It is more meaningful to struggle for keeping our people out of the enemy’s hands and increasingly shielding them from the political police’s awareness. It’s more meaningful to work now on developing the networks, strategies, and organizations that will ensure, whatever ways the enemy state and the political police seek to attack the movement, the movement will continue moving forward. 

Reading List

• False Nationalism, False Internationalism, E. Tani and Kae Sera
• What Is To Be Done, Lenin
• On Practice, Mao
• Materialism and the Dialectical Method, Cornforth
• History of Two-Line Struggle on Party-Building, Committee for Scientific Socialism
• Make the Struggle for Marxism-Leninism Mao “Tsetung” Thought Central in Party Building, I Wor Kuen (IWK)

In protest of the increasingly blatant genocidal and anti-democratic nature of the party, over 700,000 Democratic voters had selected “Uncommitted” during the 2024 DNC primary election. Only around half of states even permit a selection of “Uncommitted;” had every state allowed the option, millions more people would have done so. Before “Uncommitted,” the movement began with a campaign named “Listen to Michigan,” cofounded by Layla Elabed and Abbas Alawieh. Both are career Democratic strategists. Over a series of weeks, they organized a Get Out the Vote Campaign which won over 100,000 Uncommitted votes. The mass campaign spread across the empire, and on March 18, Listen to Michigan launched the Uncommitted National Movement — founded on the goal of achieving a ceasefire in Palestine. Anyone with experience in electoral politics should have predicted what would happen next. Absolutely nothing was done to quell the zionists’ extermination campaign, but the Democrats in power changed their tone. They would voice their “concern” over a massacre while sending the bombs to carry out the next one. Abbas Alawieh claimed the Party was engaging in serious dialogue with Uncommitted despite none of the group’s demands being met or even taken seriously. Notably, Uncommitted never explicitly threatened to use their leverage against the Democrats. Not only did the party call their bluff, but they pivoted even further rightwards. More so than Biden, Harris’ campaign explicitly courted Republicans, moderates, and subhumans like Dick Cheney. Every night of the Democratic Convention featured Republican speakers. A pre-vetted, no doubt tamed speech from a single Palestinian, however, was too much to ask. While the representatives of Uncommitted were shunned inside the convention, protesters outside the convention hall were mocked as they read the names of murdered babies. The convention was a celebration of “lethal force” against Palestinian children: a spectacle of blood and death. 

No amount of humiliation or open duplicity from Blue Fascists would stop the unelected leaders of Uncommitted from fulfilling their original goal: saving the Democratic Party from defeat in November. On September 19th, they released a slimy statement implicitly endorsing Kamala Harris. Only an experienced Democratic operative could have written this statement. Instead of officially endorsing Harris, they told their members to “vote against Trump.” They also warned against voting for any third parties. If this sounds to you like it is telling you to vote for Harris, you have a keen ear! Everyone should understand by now that her victory would have done nothing to save Palestinian lives. Of course Trump is not going to bring peace to West Asia, but neither would Harris. The only thing her election would have done is lend legitimacy to the continuation of Democrat-led war crimes.

The problem with Uncommitted National is not that they accepted money from a Democrat aligned SuperPac. The problem is that they completely misunderstand how to use their (now dissipated) political leverage. Their “pressure” never extended past begging Democrats to grow a conscience. Those sending the bombs do not — will never — cede their commitment to a genocidal outpost of imperialism. But Abbas Alawieh and Layla Elabed do not seem to get this; they continue to hold on to the deluded belief that the Democratic Party can be pushed by the voters to do anything that isn’t in full service of the bourgeoisie. In hindsight (or should we say foresight), the material purpose of Uncommitted should have been to prove that Democrats are not subject to proletarian pressure. The party cannot change.  

One also has to question how many “Uncommitted” voters were registered to vote by Uncommitted during the primary season. Their website confirms: “we are registering people who have never voted to participate in politics, collectively, and we’re not done just yet.” For them to register young voters radicalized by the genocide, then tell them to vote for the genocidal Democrat eight months later is a textbook example of counterinsurgency. 

When it comes to mass election campaigns, the general election functions like a bear trap covered in honey. Radicalized people are led into this trap, transfixed by sweet sounding “serious” dialogue. Once you are stuck in the election’s claws, you can enjoy the honey for as long as it lasts. But when it inevitably dries up, you remain stuck in the same place, left to starve or eat through your own foot. This is voting in the empire. Between bleeding out and starving to death, committing yourself to the bourgeois hunting match will do nothing to improve your — and definitely not Palestine’s — condition. 

The correct course of action is to avoid the election trap altogether, and to help your friends and family escape it, too. The people setting these traps are out there. They don’t hide who they are. Your comrades are out there too. Many are still hidden in between the trees, but you can spot them if you look closely enough. Join them, and watch out for traps along the way.

Tendrils of revisionism, opportunism, and tailism (ROT) clench onto the convention documents, and seek to drag the party back into its days of bleakest reaction. The entrenched leadership clique, represented by Sims and Cambron, but avatared in the grinning form of John Bachtell, seeks only to window-dress the funneling of dues to People’s World and of hard-won radical energy back to the Democratic Party. Many of the 23 convention resolutions have openly reformist aims that content themselves with moldy scraps leftover from the bourgeois government’s table. A Communist Party must act like a Communist Party, not sleepwalk alongside sleepy Joe, shaking hands with ghosts when there’s a real world to seize. As the legendary Irish socialist James Connolly declared, “For our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth.”

What does it mean to want the Earth? It means the end of imperialism, the end of the genocides in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, and everywhere across the globe. It means decolonization of settler states such as the U.S. and Canada, and full self-determination for all peoples. It means the end of foreign domination over Haiti, and an end to the American enforced isolation of Cuba and the DPRK. It demands the depatriarchalization of society, the emancipation and structural liberation of women, LGBT+ persons, and gender nonconforming persons, and the abolition of disability as an oppressive social structure. Possibly most urgent, it demands the radical reorientation of all of society to prepare for and combat the impending climate apocalypse.

It may be true that many of these points appear within the CPUSA’s convention resolutions, but they are malformed and, like produce that has been chemically treated to not sprout, they are seedless. They cannot, in their current form, revolutionize the CPUSA into the party it needs to be, or its Communists into the revolutionaries they need to be to build the world that we demand. They have remembered to be moderate, but have forgotten to demand the earth! Each resolution is guilefully crafted to speak the words of Communism, and to enact the essence of capitulation.

For instance, in its Palestine resolution, there is implicit recognition of the zionist entity contained in its phrase “just peace in Israel/Palestine” and the comment concerning “supporting the work of fraternal parties in Palestine and Israel.” This recognition negates the possibility for peace. The only thing a so-called Communist party in ”israel” could adequately work towards would be the annihilation of its own state — this U.S. imperialist outpost — but we can see from their proposed, “two states for two Peoples,” that this is not their goal. Thus, the CPUSA hamstrings its own potential so long as a fraternal relationship with the Communist Party of “Israel” (CPI) exists, and the resolution as it’s phrased leads to a dead alley. A genuine resolution would exclude all colonizers, their institutions, and even their “Communists.” For no matter how friendly the fox, it can’t negotiate the return of the henhouse. Or as the Palestinian writer Mourid Barghouti said of left-wing zionists, “A killer can strangle you with a silk scarf or can smash your head in with an axe; in both cases you are dead.” We are at a time of heightened Statesian consciousness and fury towards the imperialist zionist project and the governments that give it life. Now is not the time, nor should there ever be a time, when garroters with silk scarves can influence the demands of Communists.

Implicit in the resolution on Palestine, and the resolution on an internationalist and anti-imperialist CPUSA, is a refusal to denounce colonialism, and tacit support for imperialism in its most ruthless form — the form of the zionist imperialist outpost! Through its recognition of fraternal parties in every country, regardless of the actual character of those countries or parties, the CPUSA is dragging its would-be Communists into complicity with humanity’s most depraved butchers. To “promote a policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other nations; to support movements in other countries striving for national sovereignty and self-determination; to support multilateralism and equality among all nations: and to offer a correct, Marxist-Leninist analysis of imperialism” presupposes the possibility for equality between colonizers and the colonized, oppressors and the oppressed. It is a silver-tongued disavowal of Marxism-Leninism that’s calling itself correct, and a damning liquidation of class struggle.

In its resolutions concerning “full equality for Native Peoples and Tribal Communities, LGBTQ+ equality, Women’s equality, and Latina/o equality” the emphasis on equality is apparent. But equality for any of these peoples is a structural impossibility within the U.S. system, so the real demand can only be a tepid, liberal representationalism. It is ultimately a demand for more diverse oppressors and compradors; for more Indigenous betrayers and sellers of Indigenous lands and rights, for more quisling women to erode abortion rights, and more queer drone strike operators. The party does not demand national liberation or self-determination — to do so would be to demand the destruction of the capitalist state, which the leadership of CPUSA neither want nor condone.

Similarly, many of the points have CPUSA concerned with the rights of these various groups and other members of the working class to vote, but deliberately avoid mentioning in the system of which ruling class the votes will be cast. This is not work for Communists. Communists must demonstrate to the masses the real powerlessness of voting in a bourgeois system, and make it clear that the only possibility for change lies beyond that system. This cannot be achieved if the CPUSA encourages the oppressed and working classes to vote as if it’s meaningful, which is merely encouragement to invest in one’s own oppression.

In fact, numerous other resolutions, if adopted, would vitalize the bourgeois system, rather than undermine it. These include the resolutions on Social Security, Medicare for All, Immigrant Rights, and Housing. The content of these resolutions sounds pleasant, but they are bribes for the working and oppressed classes against the full realization of their real rights. Just as the original New Deal forestalled an American Communist revolution by giving the working class a greater share of the imperial plunder, so too would any of these acts be signed in the blood of Third World children. For this reason, Communists must push back against the idea that “we just want healthcare” and so on.

The root of this putrescent language, which suffuses the convention resolutions and documents, and dangles over the party’s future like a noose, grows from the mouths and literature of the party’s ideologues and organs, such as its National Committee and People’s World. It is most pungent in their insistence, which we at the Red Clarion have previously investigated, that it’s vital for the “future of democracy” to defeat “Trump, Trumpism, and the MAGA Republicans,” or that Trump represents the only real strain of fascism in the U.S. These coils of reformism, which threaten to strangle any revolutionary potential from the CPUSA, must be sliced apart through a real struggle at the convention. The principle of “curing the sickness to save the patient” must be adopted by all resolute Communists within CPUSA. These poisoned resolutions must be defeated and healthy ones planted in their stead. True Communists must lay claim to what the revisionists, opportunists and tailists have possessed since the Webb years, claim their convention and the party-still-to-be.

Can it Be Done?

In short: no. But that shouldn’t stop anyone who considers themselves to be a true Marxist-Leninist from trying. The effort will prove the question, and if it truly is impossible to seize the convention from the ROTten faction, then attempting to do so will reveal the corruption for all to see. So, why not? What are the things preventing a seizure of power by the revolutionary faction? How have the reformists secured their power completely? By examining these questions, we can also lay out the plan most likely to succeed in toppling the ROTten leadership.

The perversion of democratic centralism that prevents clubs from forming plans for the convention and restricts all dialogue to the convention floor means that the National Committee, which has no such bar on discussing the future of the party, forms a de facto “faction” capable of organizing and marshaling its resources prior to the convention. The National Committee will not just come into the convention with an organized plan, it has organized the entire affair. The N.C. creates the slate of candidates, approves the membership at the convention, runs the convention, etc. It is not only the chiefest of “factions,” it is a faction that is running the show at every single level, where all power is concentrated. It shouldn’t surprise you to know that all appeals of discipline also go to the N.C.

As if this weren’t enough to guarantee the N.C. control of the convention floor, the very use of the slate system secures its total dominance over party affairs and the future composition of the party itself. The N.C. signs off on expulsions and disciplines, hunts down “factions,” and so forth. It also selects its own replacements on the slate. It is functionally impossible to vote for a candidate that has not been pre-approved by the N.C. Although it remains technically possible to bring up a candidate’s nomination on the convention floor, campaigning before the convention begins is explicitly prohibited by the rules against factionalism, which rules out “campaigning” at all.

Lastly, however, and most critically, the millions of dollars of resources controlled by the leadership of CPUSA isn’t owned by the party. The New York City headquarters building, recently assessed at the value of $9 million and rented out by the party (making the party itself a landlord!), isn’t owned by the party, but rather by Advanced Realty (which also isn’t owned by the party). People’s World isn’t owned by the party, but by Longview Publishing (which isn’t owned by the party). In fact, the party, as an entity, has no legal recognition in any state and is not federally registered as anything. Each state “party” is an “unincorporated club.” This means that the party is, under bourgeois law, incapable of owning any property or money. So who owns all of these things?

Individual party leaders. John Bachtell runs Longview Publishing. Advance Realty is run by Libero Della Piana, who is also the managing director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an NGO. The party launders its money through a number of NGOs, of which the Drug Policy Alliance is only one. Others include the Alliance for a Just Society, People’s Action, Race Forward, the Center for Third World Organizing. While this may seem to be a clever scheme to keep party assets from the hands of the federal authorities, in fact it is merely a way to allow federal authorities to more appropriately manage “party” assets. By maintaining them primarily in NGOs, which receive grant money, the assets are required to report directly to their federal backers and managers exactly what every penny is spent on. Even further, party leaders employ their own significant others and children in those NGOs, from which they draw a salary. John Bachtell lives from the donations of party members to People’s World, even though the party does not own, control, or manage its own newspaper.

Even if the revolutionists were capable of making use of the rules of the convention to purge the National Committee, restructure the party, and purge all of the rot from the constitution, rectify its lines, and prevent a split, to bring the party’s money under party control would require the good will of the entire rotten leadership. The best the convention could do would be to pass a resolution demanding the current leadership turn over the assets, which the convention would have absolutely no way of enforcing. The party has no bourgeois legal “right” to that money.

Worse, these putrid leaders have shown their willingness to throw away the party constitution whenever it suits them. Should an organized opposition appear at the convention, there is no doubt that party leadership, just as C.P. Canada did two years ago, will rise up in a counter-revolutionary wave and have that revolutionary opposition completely expelled from the convention, or somehow prevented from bringing their resolutions to a vote.

So What Do We Do?

Organize now. Find your allies now. Prepare a plan for the convention floor. Build up a series of resolutions and prepare to make use of every procedural trick available to you. Pass a self-denying resolution barring all current leadership from serving on the next National Committee and pass a resolution demanding an open commitment to revolution from any future N.C. member.

During the breaks and when you have free time off the convention floor, agitate among your fellow delegates. Explain the true history of the party, and the need to purge it of its rot. Go in for the fight.

Comrades, it is up to you. You cannot afford to be tepid. You cannot afford to lower your head and accept crumbs from the corrupt leadership. It is now all or nothing.

We are with you. Generations of Communists have tread this path before you, laying down life and limb. Do you intend to crumple at the first challenge, or fight for a better world?

Claim the convention!

SAMPLE RESOLUTIONS

WHEREAS the perversion of democratic centralism that prevents full discussion of proposed resolutions and limits new resolutions to those that have been pre-approved by leadership places revisionism and opportunism fully in command of the party apparatus, LET IT BE RESOLVED that the convention rules be amended to: i) permit each speaker to hold the floor for 10 minutes, ii) adopt in full Robert’s Rules of Order to govern procedure, and iii) be explicitly permitted to offer new resolutions on the convention floor.
WHEREAS the revisionist drift of the party for the past fifty years has caused it to fall away from the masses, tail the Democratic Party, and lose its character as a proletarian institution, LET IT BE RESOLVED that this convention hereby enacts a self-denying resolution which shall disbar any present members of the National Committee or anyone who has served on the National Committee in the past decade from appearing on any slate before this convention or being elected or appointed to the National Committee or its subcommittees for at least four years and LET IT FURTHER BE RESOLVED that any candidate for the National Committee shall be required to take an oath of commitment to the proletarian revolution before the convention prior to being placed on the slate.