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

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

That means the movement must develop to address:

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

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

Organizational Defense Against the Universities

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

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

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

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

1. Internal Solidification and Resilience

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

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

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

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

2. Aggressive Legal Defense

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

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

3. Prepare Plans for Tuition and Labor Strikes

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

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

4. Connect with Unionized Workers on Campus

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

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

Student Self-Defense

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

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

1. Identifying the most vulnerable

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

2. Establishing the phone tree

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

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

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

4. Forming on-call defense brigades

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

Safehouses/Underground

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

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

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

1. Establish a network

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

2. Establish safe practices for moving

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

3. Prepare retreat plans for those identified as most vulnerable

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

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

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

This is the Hour

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

A luta continua!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Class Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

New York City: the Epicenter of Haute Bourgeois Power

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

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

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

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

Decaying Finance Capital and the New York Economy

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

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

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

The Monopolists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Non-Monopolist Bourgeoisie

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

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

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

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

The Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie — Parasitic Professional Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imperialist Labor Aristocracy — “White Collar” Financiers

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

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

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

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

Non-Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

City Government — the Pig Class

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

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

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

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

National Bourgeoisie and Petit-Bourgeoisie

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

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

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

The Urban Proletariat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Students

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

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

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

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

The Sub-Proletariat

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

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

The Urban Masses Need Marxist Organization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assembling Many Local Organizations

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

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

The Study Group

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week three: Class Struggle, Chapter 1, Domenico Losurdo

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

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

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

Political Economy Block

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

Organization-Building Block

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

National Liberation Block

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

Sex Liberation Block

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

The Logistics Organization

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Membership

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

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

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

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

We urge you to go forth and build!

A League Conference

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

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

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

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

Onward, to revolution!

First there comes the circle. These are founded organically and spontaneously by advanced workers and petit-bourgeois intellectuals to study the obvious problems that arise from the grinding wheels of capital. A circle is not an organization; it is a group of like-minded individuals who spend time together. They may pursue collective goals, but there is no permanent organizational form to guide the circle in its action. It is merely unspoken consensus which rules.

The circle can mature into a study group, a form that we at the Clarion have promoted for some time. Study groups harden and temper their membership into trained Communists with a basis in theory. There is currently an anarchistic urge in the West to push immediately to action and abandon theory entirely, or relegate it to a secondary role. We must strongly caution against this. In the period before the formation of the party, in the contradiction between theory and praxis, theory is the dominant aspect. “Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement,” Lenin cautioned. Should circles attempt to leap over theoretical development directly to organized action, they will be unable to chart a steady course, fall victim to major deviations, and eventually collapse from the lack of competent, cadre-level membership.

Study groups become cells, active organizations. Once a study group reaches a certain level of political development, membership, and spare labor-power, the study group can become active and begin practicing Red Aid, strike assistance, and organizing among the masses. A study group that does this has become a cell. Cells band together or expand in membership, sophistication, and capacity to become local organizations of many cells, which focus their activity on a narrow locality. These in turn eventually become regional organizations. The collection of regional and local organizations grows into the proletarian party. We find ourselves in a time when the Communist movement in the West is so disorganized and incoherent as to be nonexistent at any scale larger than individual local organizations. Because we are in this time of chaos, where the movement is not cohering, we cannot rely on central authority to build the party; we must instead, rely on local growth. We must grow from the seeds upward, not from the crown down, otherwise we will not put down stable roots — we will not have connection with the masses, and our local organizations will succumb to wooden dogmatism, opportunism, and blundering. As we wrote in our Unity Prospectus:

Local, primary organizations must be encouraged to grow and band together into leagues. They cannot be subjected to centralization at this stage; they must be free to experiment, raise the level of consciousness, etc. Marxist-Leninists, no matter how dedicated, cannot go into the field and create other Marxist-Leninists out of thin air. The synthesis of Marxism-Leninism must be achieved not by importing organizational practices, but by organically rediscovering them.

No central organization can seed primary organizations if it is determined to retain control over them at this stage. Central organs — of FRSO, for instance — are simply too weak and do not hold the undivided faith of the masses. It is only once the vanguard party is constituted that the primary aspect of this contradiction will shift to centralization.

You must thus become one of these Red Gardeners. It is not enough for a single, or a score of Red Gardeners across the U.S. capitalist empire (and its adjunct Canada) to begin their work. There must be hundreds of Red Gardeners, and ultimately thousands, seeding organizations and tending them. We must nurture dedicated, “high-quality” Communist recruits who will care little for their own personal gains and losses, who will subordinate their own egos to the movement, and be prepared to give everything for the advance of the banner.

Where will we find these seedlings? There are four sources of recruits: personal contacts, group meetings, ideological trainings, and raising class consciousness among the workers. As a local organization grows from a circle to a real organization, its capacity to recruit will expand from the first source, through the second and third, and finally reach the last. When it is a circle, you will draw from personal contacts. When it is a study group, you will draw from group meetings and then ideological trainings. When it is a cell, you will draw from the advanced workers directly, having raised their class consciousness through agitation, propaganda, and practice.

There are those who say that we should simply leap to organizing the masses now! They are mistaken. In the contradiction between the masses and the cadre, it is the cadre which is currently the primary aspect. We do not have a party, so we do not have a corps of dedicated cadre to help direct the movement; we act now as Red Gardeners so that we may create an army of gardeners. We must raise up legions of shepherds and caretakers.

We urge all of our readers: go forth! Tend your garden. Discover your love in the revolution.

So what does this have to do with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)?

It is exceedingly easy to apply a mechanical analysis to the DSA and dismiss the “party” without a second thought — which many Marxist-Leninists in the U.S. have done. After all, once one identifies the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), or the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) as the most principled organization in the Empire, why bother analyzing a “social-democratic party”? One can simply dismiss it as a pseudo SDP (the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, which was in power during the Weimar Republic and which betrayed the German Communists) and recapitulate the same history of Germany in the early 20th century. “Social democracy is objectively the left wing of fascism” — indeed!

But we are not in the third period of the Soviet Union, the DSA is not the SDP, and there is no equivalent to the KDP (the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, the Communists who split from the SDP). We must analyze the particularities of our historical moment, not do battle with the ghosts of history. Let us consider, then, some objective facts.

1. In 2020, the DSA estimated that it had approximately 66,000 members. This by far outstrips the PSL’s internal “estimate” of 2,000 members and the CPUSA’s claimed 5,000. By any stretch of the imagination, the DSA has more contact with the masses through its base membership than either of those parties through all of their programs.
2. The DSA lacks even the fundamentals of political discipline. Any and every trend and tendency is permitted to openly organize into political factions without expulsion and, for the time being, to struggle for supremacy within the organization. Obviously, this state of affairs will not continue.
3. The DSA is undoubtedly heavily compromised by the intelligence agencies as well as by the extremely reactionary elements’ organization within it. As an organization, it is in the thrall of an anarchistic non-ideology — what its members call the “big tent,” permitting anyone who proclaims even a vague appreciation of socialism and pays their dues to become a member.
4. The DSA has elected a spate of vile imperialist pawns and assets to high office to participate in the management of the U.S-Canadian capitalist empire. These politicians have proven that the organization has no discipline; even against strenuous objections by the DSA, the politicians continue to act in the interests of the empire and they are subject to no repercussions.

What does this information tell us? In the first place, the DSA is drawing orders of magnitude more advanced workers than any other even nominally socialist organization in the U.S.-Canadian empire. In the second place, these advanced workers, who are newly-waking to class consciousness, are being miseducated by the reactionaries their organization combines them with. This intermixing of radicalizing workers and reactionary old-guard social-democrats enables the elders to poison the newly awakened workers before they get their feet under them. These rightist elements are a major stream within the DSA and are intermixed with all the others.

Normally, as Marxist-Leninists, we would deride this organizational mish-mash, this utter incoherency, and it is true that this incoherence means the DSA cannot take up the role of a worker’s party. It cannot legitimately represent the outlook or needs of the workers. Thus, we should put aside starry-eyed optimism about what the organization is and can be.

In order to make sense of the phenomenon we are now observing, we must keep in mind the political development of the revolutionary classes as outlined in our prior article, Battle Lines, but with a further and more detailed analysis of the most advanced section of the workers.

These advanced workers can be separated as follows:

Tailing advanced section. Workers just reaching class-consciousness tend to develop eclectically, to display extreme unevenness in their comprehension of even basic political economy and strategy, and to be easy prey for reactionaries. Indeed, this fraction can be leveraged by reactionaries to form a bulwark of tailism within the revolutionary classes themselves — they can be transformed into their own inverse.

This group of tailing advanced workers are by and large the group entering into the DSA.

Intermediate advanced section. Class-conscious and relatively well-developed, the intermediate advanced workers are essentially that group which have already become fairly well-versed Marxists. They compose many of the Marxist caucuses within the DSA, as well as the bulk of true revolutionaries in the U.S.-Canadian empire.

Leading advanced section. The truly well-educated Marxist-Leninist is a rarity. There are unlikely to be more than several hundred in the U.S. Empire’s geographic territory.

Obviously, it is imperative for the more advanced elements to link up with the tailing-advanced elements before they can be mobilized by reaction. Perhaps paradoxically, the tailing-advanced section is more vulnerable to being misled in this fashion even than the less advanced sections of the working class. This section possesses some preliminary theory, but not a sufficient amount to differentiate between the devious sleight-of-hand performed by imperialist “Marxists,” who have trained their whole lives to deceive the working classes.

Secondly, most of those people claiming to represent some ideological tendency in the U.S.-Canadian empire are  not true adherents of that form of thought, but merely aesthetically attracted to this or that aspect of a tendency. They are generally among the tailing advanced section, not the intermediate advanced section, and will not be able to enter that section until such time as the contradictions sharpen and the lines of battle become more clear to them.

Thirdly, the extremely unstructured internal organization of the DSA means that it is not a conventional social-democratic party, but rather a forum for the organization of cliques and factions. Depending on the geographical prevalence of any trend, a given location may be more or less “party-like,” more or less advanced, etc.

What does all of this mean? Based on these three underlying propositions that:

1. The tailing-advanced workers are entering the DSA in relatively large numbers
2. Most people claiming an ideological tendency among advanced workers are not ideologically committed to that tendency, and
3. The fact that the DSA is not a centralized party but merely a loose group of “fellow-travelers” — a “big tent,”

Then our treatment of the DSA should not be as a social-democratic monolith with the internal organization of a hostile party, but as a broad field where newly-radicalizing workers stand to be exposed to a variety of ideas and streams of radicalism. Thus explicated, it becomes our duty not to stand aside and apart, criticizing the DSA as a stern elder sibling who knows better, but rather to organize its membership into the seeds of Marxist local, primary organizations; to provide political education and democratically guide the masses of tailing-advanced workers through proper political development and militancy.

Some will ask if this is merely entryism, to which we must make a simple but all-important clarification: entryism is an incorrect strategy of attempting to secretly take control of a bourgeois party. The above is distinguishable in several respects, namely:

1. The DSA is not a “party” in the traditional sense, and
2. The analysis does not require attempting to wrest control of the DSA.

This is not entryism. This is the organization of constituent members of the DSA into Marxist organizations that can, at any time, help form the basis for an all-empire party of Marixsts.

The Need for Organization and Discipline

However, this strategy cannot be pursued by lone, disconnected unconnected individuals. When surrounded by potential counter-revolutionary and reactionary currents, one must have a real connection to other principled advanced workers of at least the intermediate-advanced section. The risk is that one is atomized within the party and isolated from revolutionary currents, thus becoming transformed into an appendage of the reactionary streams. Thus, prior to attempting to carry out a local plan of this type, we urge our readers to either form a Marxist organization apart and outside of the DSA that can serve as a guide to these efforts, discusses successes and failures, determine strategy, etc., or else to connect with the Press so other principled members of the Press can help serve this role.

The capacity for the Press to act in this fashion is the result of technical changes in the methods of communication and organization since the beginning of the last century. It is now possible to rely on geographically disparate comrades to act as a central repository of knowledge and aid, pooling their capacities through the internet, and to serve as a blood bank of struggle to answer questions, and so on.

Thus, we urge those unaffiliated advanced workers to organize within the DSA and those already pursuing this strategy to connect with the Press.

Organize the membership of the DSA!

There are some places we can look for answers. Many of us in the movement have been trying to organize for years and failing in various ways. We have to stop and take stock of what’s going on: the how, the why, and what can be done to change the direction of the movement and funnel it back toward confrontation with the enemy state and victory over the enemy classes.

Figuring out how to organize is the basic problem of preparing a revolutionary movement. It’s all well and good to have discourse online about the correct theoretical position on this or that, but, in the end, it’s meaningless if you aren’t also engaged in preparing the revolutionary masses for the act of revolution. That sounds self-evident, right? The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

It’s not clear exactly why organizing principles decayed when previous revolutionary movements failed or were crushed — maybe because they constitute a transmitted skill, a craft-skill. Maybe it’s because they’re the cladding, the meat, the stuff of revolution in a way that pure theory isn’t.

Because we’ve lost this traditional skill, and because we don’t have a functional vanguard party leading the efforts, you’ll notice that we seem to relitigate things a lot. In fact, we often find ourselves arguing about questions that were already argued about and solved 100 years ago. Why? Because without institutions we have no consistent historical memory. This isn’t just an inefficiency — having to re-solve problems that have already been solved is a real material setback in our ability to organize, to plan for and execute revolution.

The first question is: What is organizing? If you can’t answer that, you can’t even begin to organize.

Organizing is not a march, it’s not setting up signal chats, it’s not blasting your events on Facebook. Organizing isn’t having rallies, or showing up to city council meetings, nor is it giving speeches or occupying intersections, banks, or government offices. None of those things in and of themselves constitute organizing.

On the highest level, organizing is the creation of relationships between individuals and groups. When people become organized, they establish procedures and routines that allow for swift, concentrated, decisive action. We’re talking here about revolutionary organizing, that is, the establishment of relationships with the intention of allowing the working class to self-emancipate through a revolutionary party, a vanguard party. It is the creation of permanent, durable, structures among the people that can be called on reliably, time and again, that allow the people to funnel information and channel their needs, and then do something about it.

Specifically, organizing is creating rules and norms of conduct, scheduling standing meetings, delegating power, and otherwise establishing ways to exercise collective power. How do we make decisions? How do we collectively determine what must be done? How do we inform every part of our group what to do? How do we challenge the group consensus? How do we coordinate mass action? These are all questions of organization.

Those aren’t the only questions of organization, though – one of the big ones, the ones that gets ignored by lots of US and Western “Communists” is — what kind of revolutionary organizing are you doing? What are you building? There are two broad answers: mass organizations, and party organizations.

So if organizing is bringing structure, stabilizing relationships, and formalizing decision-making to the people, what are agitation, mobilization, and planning? How are they related to revolutionary organizing?

Agitation

Agitation is a kind of communication that focuses on one event, one contradiction. When you agitate, you are attempting to make a single idea powerfully clear to broad numbers of people. “By agitation, in the strictest sense of the word, we would understand the call upon the masses to undertake definite, concrete actions and the promotion of the direct revolutionary intervention of the proletariat in social life,” as Lenin says in What is to be Done.

“The agitator will take as an illustration a fact that is most glaring and most widely known to his audience, say, the death of an unemployed worker’s family from starvation… will direct his efforts to presenting a single idea to the “masses,” e.g., the senselessness of the contradiction between the increase of wealth and the increase of poverty; he will strive to rouse discontent and indignation among the masses against this crying injustice, leaving a more complete explanation of this contradiction to the propagandist.”

Agitation is the act of taking a single event as an illustration and using it to propel the masses (or some sub-group thereof) forward into action. Haranguing workers at a bus stop or at the unemployment line is agitation. The goal of agitation is to convince workers to get angry. They must get so angry that they are willing to act.

Mobilization

Mobilization is the next step after agitation. Agitation prepares the masses for mobilization. Mobilization is turning the working people out to perform a single, discrete action. A march, a sit-in, a blockade: these are all examples of mobilizing the masses.

Obviously, agitation plays a huge role in mobilizing people. There are other logistical challenges to overcome, though. When you plan a march, there’s a lot of work that feels like it’s organizing, like it’s building durable structures. For instance, forming a committee to make signs and posters, forming a committee to pick a route, etc. The problem is that, when the mobilization is over, all those committees dissolve back into the ether.

You have built nothing.

You can see that this is true when you start to prepare another mobilization. It may be easier to get in touch with certain important figures in the community because you met them at the last march, sit-in, or protest, but you will have to form new committees from scratch, re-do most of the work that went into the prior mobilization, and so on.

This does not heighten the organizational level of the masses, or if it does it does so only in a very very minor and limited fashion. It would take an eternity of marches to “organize” the proletariat.

Planning

Planning is how you get from meeting to meeting. If you’ve agitated the people, mobilized them, and then at the end of that mobilization, planned to bring together the “organizers” who helped you, this will seem, for the moment, very much like you are increasing the organization of the masses. You have a group that will meet again!

But nothing the group does will last. You’re building sandcastles at high tide. Why? Because in each of these scenarios, there is no self-conscious effort to construct an organization. The difference between organizing and merely acting isn’t necessarily the stages of actions you undertake but rather the reason you are undertaking them and how you do it.

That is, any of the above-listed tactics can be useful in organizing — but unless you make self-aware attempts to connect the masses together with organizing, with establishing durable revolutionary institutions, they will never lead to that on their own. In that sense, it’s very similar to the idea of “heightening the struggle.” Organizing the proletariat is literally the first step, the first plateau, in heightening the struggle.

Don’t just agitate, mobilize, or plan; when you take these steps you should be using your opportunity to grow the size of your organization and to provide organizational examples to the local working class people. You can and should try to convince them to organize on their own with the ultimate goal of, at some point, integrating into your formation.

Ok, so what about the difference between mass and vanguard organizations? You’ll often see this distinction in Marxist-Leninist writings, and it usually is not defined for you.

Before we get too deep into the topic, we need to digress to talk about the vanguard. This can be a confusing subject, so it’s worth covering in detail, and correctly. 

What is the vanguard?

In 1983, Ernest Mandel wrote Vanguard Parties. He said “You cannot have a spontaneous socialist revolution. You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying. And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders.” He goes on, “If the workers would be at the highest point of militancy and consciousness all the time, you would not need a vanguard organization. But, unfortunately, they are not and cannot be there under capitalism. So you need a group of people who embody a permanently high level of militancy and activity, a permanently high level of class-consciousness. After each wave of rising class struggle and rising class consciousness, when a turning point arrives and the actual activity of the masses declines, consciousness falls to a lower level and activity falls to nearly zero… It serves as the permanent memory of the class and of the labor movement, memory which is codified, in one way or another, in a program in which you can educate the new generation which then does not need to start from scratch in its concrete way of intervention in the class struggle.”

Right now, there are many fragmented organizations aspiring to vanguardism: small groups and grouplets, smaller by far than a party — and, after all, the revolutionary masses in any given location can only have one vanguard party. Because there is no party that is recognized by the laborers as its vanguard, because there is no party that has a large, even substantial, base in the working class, the vanguard is currently unfocused and unformed. It does not matter whether the group considers itself the vanguard. The question is the majority of the advanced working class.

That is to say, the elements that will eventually comprise the vanguard party all exist, but they haven’t condensed or been brought together yet. They are coalescing, but rather than coalescing evenly into a single organization, they’re joining together and making many little organizations, little beads of water on the side of the glass, that will eventually run together and pour down into a mighty stream that overturns the glass, the table, and everything else in the room.

But, as Cde. Mandel said, this process is not automatic.

Here’s what Stalin says in The Proletarian Class and The Proletarian Party, 1905 :

Up till now our Party has resembled a hospitable family, ready to take in all who sympathise. But now that our Party has become a centralised organisation, it has thrown off its patriarchal aspect and has become in all respects like a fortress, the gates of which are opened only to those who are worthy. And that is of great importance to us. At a time when the autocracy is trying to corrupt the class consciousness of the proletariat with “trade unionism,” nationalism, clericalism, and the like, and when, on the other hand, the liberal intelligentsia is persistently striving to kill the political independence of the proletariat and to impose its tutelage upon it — at such a time we must be extremely vigilant and never forget that our Party is a fortress, the gates of which are opened only to those who have been tested.

The Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (the future Communist Party of the Soviet Union) instituted the following requirements for its membership: one who accepts the program of the Party, renders the Party financial support, and works in one of the Party organizations.

In 1926, Stalin explained, “The levers or transmission belts [of the dictatorship of the proletariat] are those very mass organizations of the proletariat without the aid of which the dictatorship cannot be realized. The directing force is of the advanced detachment of the proletariat, its vanguard, which is the main guiding force of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

“The proletariat needs these transmission belts, these levers, and this directing force, because without them, in its struggle for victory, it would be a weaponless army in the face of organized and armed capital. The proletariat needs these organizations because without them it would suffer inevitable defeat in its fight for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, in its fight for the consolidation of its rule, in its fight for the building of socialism. The systematic help of these organizations and the directing force of the vanguard are needed because in the absence of these conditions it is impossible for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be at all durable and firm.”

A vanguard organization is a formation of and for Communists which helps to embody the conscious, directed efforts of self-emancipation of the revolutionary masses. It is the “nerve center” of the Communist movement. Vanguard organizations are composed of the most class-conscious and advanced members of the working classes, and their membership is restricted; only those who agree with (and by definition, understand) the program (meaning a political program must also exist, there must be political positions staked out by the organization for it to be considered properly a “vanguard” organization), work in a formation organization, and support the formation with labor and/or money, are offered membership in a vanguard formation.

The task of the aspiring vanguard organizations right now is to engage in the “two line struggle” against revisionism in the Communist movement and toward unity in the spontaneous movement. Eventually, the vanguard organizations must work to unify the miscellaneous other organizations and mass formations of the spontaneous movement.

What is a mass formation? A mass formation is any organization that does not require its membership to submit to ideological authority or an ideological program. In Stalin’s example these include the soviet councils, the trade unions, etc.

For the purpose of our current moment, mass organizations are those groups that are formed or joined by Communists for a specific purpose or to mobilize and agitate among other workers on progressive issues; For instance, PSL’s ANSWER Coalition or its rent caravans, CPUSA’s organizing to get unions certified, etc. These are examples of mass organizations.

The tasks of mass organizations and vanguard organizations could not be more different. The task of the vanguard organizations right now should be to link up and consolidate all forms of struggle into one movement, one great army of struggle, against the capitalist state; to train and educate new Communists (“reproduce” the revolutionary movement), to struggle to find the correct lines; to work to unify all conscious and Marxist-Leninist streams into a single anti-revisionist party. 

The task of the mass organizations is to act as the “belts” and “levers” of the proletariat and to convey direction to the vanguard organizations — and to allow the vanguard organizations to interpenetrate and unify with the masses, to drive the masses onward from height to height, to intensify the struggle, and to draw ever-wider sections of the population into the fight.

Confusing these two types of organization has led to all kinds of problems.

These definitions rely on separating out types of tasks (vanguard, mass) and types of membership (vanguard, mass). So we have the tasks of the vanguard and the structure of a vanguard formation; we have the tasks of the mass orgs, and the structure of a mass formation. We can break down the problems into two categories.

Vanguard tasks, mass membership. If a group attempts to undertake vanguard tasks — unification of the independent struggles, preparation for war with the enemy state, training of new Communists, etc. — it will rapidly degrade in capacity, admit undeveloped members into positions of power, produce deviations in theory, and disintegrate into self-serving opportunist formations that exist purely to replicate themselves. They’ll admit federal agents into their ranks and those secret police will purposefully accelerate these problems.

Mass tasks, vanguard membership. If a vanguard organization attempts to accomplish mass tasks, it will remain isolated from the masses where it must instead connect with them — by denying general membership, it will be isolated and unable to engage constructively in the chosen areas of struggle. A pro-union formation agitating to get cards signed that is composed of only vetted Communists, for example, will remain too small, too narrow a proportion of the workers at the workplace, to effectively reach the other workers. Membership in this kind of organization will be overworked, understaffed, and isolated from the masses.

Mass organizing

When you’re doing mass organizing, the goal is to create durable mass organizations that help agitate, educate, and mobilize the masses toward a concrete end. Mass organizations draw the masses into the struggle by giving them work to do in self-emancipation.

For example: if you decide to run a feed-the-people group (or a “Red Aid” stand, as we in our organization called ours), and you determine that it will be a mass organization, your first goal should be to recruit non-Communists to help you run it. A mass organization should be:

• Not-explicitly Communist
• Designed to address a specific community or mass need (food insecurity, housing, unemployment, transport of pregnant people seeking abortions, etc.)
• Run or strongly influenced by vanguardist elements who are already organized outside of the mass organization
• Approachable, should draw in outside elements and widen the circle of those engaged in the struggle
• Possess an internal logic or organization that protects the organization from being paralyzed by “consensus forming” procedures, lead astray by continuous diversions, and so on

The chief goal of a mass organization is to involve the masses in the struggle of emancipation. This means mass organizations should directly confront the enemy state in largely non-violent ways.

This is a way to draw funding and labor from petit-bourgeois and bourgeois liberals who are interested in the struggle but who would never start organizing with explicitly Communist organizations. If possible, the more well-to-do membership of mass organizations should be maneuvered into confrontation with the state or, when it is safe, they should be encouraged to take illegal actions to address the issue the mass org is fighting for in order to harden them against liberalism.

We should remember that even petit- and haute-bourgeois individuals can become valuable members of the struggle if they are pulled into it. Social oppressions, such as gender and sexuality oppression, or national oppression, are generated by the economic relations of the proletarian class, but they continue to affect even petit-bourgeois and bourgeois people.

For instance, the wave of repression of abortion rights that’s currently sweeping the U.S. is opposed by many petit- and haute-bourgeois liberals; this particular social oppression is felt keenly by them.

If you were able to organize these people into groups that could safely break the law and know they were breaking the law (by, for example, driving abortion-seekers across state lines), these liberals will become steadily more hardened to opposing the state, steadily more accustomed to the idea that they should discard the useless electoral channels, steadily more prepared to engage in other areas of the struggle.

During this whole time, of course, you should be propagandizing to them. In a mass organization, Communists can integrate directly with the most advanced elements of the class that are not yet Communist and instill them with consciousness through active propaganda. As you do this, you will identify potential Communists who are ready to come over and do more intense work: the mass organization will thus double as your recruiting ground.

Vanguard organizing

When organizing vanguard formations, the first thing to keep in mind is the very uneven development of individual Communists in the United States. That likely holds true throughout the entire West, at least in the imperial core.

The first and most necessary thing a revolutionary organization needs to be able to do is reproduce its membership — to reliably take non-Communists and turn them into fully developed cadre. That means before you can do any kind of vanguard organizing successfully, you’ve got to secure a way to replace yourself and any other founding members. Believe us, from tried and failed practice, there is no way to learn to train people while you are actively engaged in vanguardist organizing. This is running a marathon while you’re trying to tie your shoes.

What’s the best way to train new Communists? Honestly, probably Workers’ and Communists’ Schools, but we don’t have any of those that aren’t 100% revisionist and trying to start your own requires so much infrastructure and labor that you’d already need a vanguardist organization in order to try. Essentially, it’s putting the cart before the horse to try to organize a school for Communists because there aren’t enough trained Communists to run it.

There are probably other ways. The time-tested way to train new Communists and even out development, though, is through the reading group. Reading groups are neither mass organizations nor vanguardist organizations — they’re educational tools used by vanguardists to engage in collective struggle with people who are not yet Communists or who are underdeveloped Communists, and through that struggle to reach a higher degree of development themselves, to develop the people they are reading with, etc.

So, if this is a priority, how do we gauge when people are developed? We’ve found the following scale to be helpful:

• Associate or friend of the movement, sympathizer. Anyone with a revolutionary (or pro-Communist) consciousness and outlook who believes in a revolutionary ideology that is compatible with the organization, its overall revolutionary vision, methods, strategy, and who wants to support the organization either directly through labor etc., or indirectly but who can’t make the commitments necessary to join as a full member.

• New or learning communist. Recently radicalized people. They may or may not already possess a basic working knowledge of theory, but their development is still early or inconsistent and substantially lacking in relevant areas. They may already possess basic practical organizing skills, but are inexperienced with essential Communist work such as interacting with the masses, performing analysis, practicing democratic centralism, criticizing and self-criticizing, combating chauvinism or liberalism, etc.

• Basic rank-and-file. These are Communists who are at least a few months into activity, who are intentionally developing their revolutionary understanding, possess a well-rounded (if basic) grasp of theory, have a fair amount of practical experience, and have a bank of useful skills. They can usually be relied upon to fulfill org duties, but they may be half-hearted, undermotivated, or inconsistent in their attendance or work.

• Motivated rank-and-file. Similar to or marginally higher in development than “basic rank-and-file” comrades, the motivated rank-and-file consistently, reliably, and whole-heartedly fulfill their obligations to the best of their ability, communicate continuously and proactively with comrades, take revolutionary work seriously and with a militant outlook, and reorganize their personal lives to work for the org.

• Developed rank-and-file. As distinct from the basic rank-and-file members, developed rank-and-file have a high level of ideological development, but are unwilling, under motivated, or unable to free up the time and energy/labor necessary to fulfill their duties to the org reliably, consistently, whole-heartedly, and militantly; they often fail to put the needs of the org first.

• Cadre. The cadre is the backbone of any Communist organization, and will comprise around 10-30% of any given formation. They are comrades who have devoted years to the revolutionary movement, have reached the highest levels of ideological development, have a wealth of practical experience and skills, are unwaveringly militant and committed to building the revolution, are willing to make sacrifices and self-criticize for the betterment of the movement, and are willing and able to lead. Cadre provide the stiff iron spine of the org, motivating rank-and-file, showing up to events, and making sure things get done.

In order to have a functional vanguardist formation, you want to aim for at least 10 cadre-level members who can carry forward organizing work, train new members, identify potential cadre, etc. Without at least a good number of cadre, your membership will fall off and burn out.

BUT WHAT IS ORGANIZING?

We still haven’t answered the question in practice. Sure, it’s building formal relationships. What does that mean?

Organizing is, to put it simply, the construction of organizations. If you’re organizing as a vanguardist formation, you need to lay out rules for building consensus and holding meetings, rules for discipline, etc. 

We’ve found that Robert’s Rules, which has been the basis for most meetings in the Anglosphere since they were published in the 1880s works really well. You can pirate the full pdf, but you could also just get the reduced copies that are out there.

We don’t like the Occupy-created rules of order (stack, raising hands, etc.) because we feel like they trend toward formless meetings. Lack of formality (formally choosing a chair, formal rules for when you’re allowed to do what) means that arbitrariness — the whims of the most popular or the loudest people — generally rule. Yeah, you do you feel like a dork using Robert’s Rules of Order, almost like you’re putting on airs — but practicing with the rules gets you used to them, and their formality means that everyone feels like they’re getting a fair shake.

So, you get your people together and teach them how to hold meetings, how to form discussion groups, write reports, and how to keep this up over a long period. This is organizing. Creating these relationships in a way that they last.

Bring people together, not just once, but many times, to talk about things that are problems. Discuss ways to address them. Assign tasks to individuals. Between meetings, take concrete action to complete assignments. At the next meeting, gently chastise people who haven’t completed assignments and ask them why. Reassign things that aren’t getting done. That’s organizing.

We must organize.

The Press Organization of Unity–Struggle–Unity Press, responsible for the publication of the Red Clarion and the other USU material, hopes that this statement can help serve not only to clarify, ratify, and renew the ideological and strategic principles of its membership and to set forth, our goals and the means for achieving them, but that this republication can also serve as the bedrock upon which other groups may build.

At this moment, the most pressing task for Communists is to cohere into local, primary organizations. We urge all Communists to find like-minded people and begin to organize — not into the temporary, easily-dismantled groups of march organizers or event planners, but into a primary organization. Reading groups are a good place to start, and we have published a short handbook for the formation of such groups (see The Study Group, published by USU). We urge all of our readers to form such organizations, and to ratify statements of principles such as these.

Strategic Principles

The overriding need is to build the Party. Lacking an organized vanguard, we cannot tackle the larger tasks at hand. The Party must be built on sound foundations, and must reject all the corrupt opportunism that has poisoned the movement in the West since the 1930s. We must reject opportunism and revisionism in the construction of the Party, and fashion it in such a way as to prevent opportunism and revisionism from dominating Party affairs.

Democratic Centralism: The most powerful weapon we have against opportunism and revisionism is the true and correct practice of Democratic Centralism. The so-called Democratic Centralism of the Western parties — particularly of such formations as the revisionist CPUSA and the PSL — is to stifle all criticism and dissent, to order from on-high the tasks of the day or hour, and to prevent changeover in leadership.

The principle of Democratic Centralism of the Party must be one that permits dissent and even the organization of factions in times of peace, when contradictions are relatively lax. This is the model given to us by Lenin, by Mao, by Ho Chi Minh, and by countless other revolutionaries. Freedom in criticism, unity in action. These are the bywords of Democratic Centralism.

Criticism that does not imperil the capacity of the Party to pursue a democratically-determined course of action is necessary. That means engaging in struggle against incorrect lines by debate, discussion, and even through calling new meetings of Party organs to challenge those lines is critical to a healthy party.

Criticism and Community Criticism and the Two-Line Struggle: We jointly recognize that the Party will be subject to a two-line struggle. Although the two-line struggle more properly refers to a period after the beginning of socialist construction, we may apply it in a different way during the early Party period as meaning a struggle against the infectious forces of opportunism. Petit-bourgeois elements will be an important part of the Party — but they must shed their petit-bourgeois consciousness. Only the truly proletarian class position can triumph.

The two-line struggle can be more properly stated as the struggle within the Party as opportunist and deviationist tendencies coalesce into non-Proletarian lines. These come in the form of both right- and left-deviation. So long as class society continues to exist, so long as the old ideological forms persist, line struggle will be a necessary component of Communist organizing. But line struggle can only properly occur in the context of a vanguard party which is recognized by the masses as the vanguard of the working class movement. No debate or struggle over correct ideological and political lines, regardless of the necessity of that struggle, can manifest as a party program absent the Party.

This is why we hold it necessary to set the minimum conditions of unity with other advanced elements — the points of unity — but impossible to set the outcome of any line struggle in advance. Points of unity flow directly from liberatory principles and past revolutionary practice. Lines flow from the immediate challenges facing an already-constituted party.

The engine for this struggle is criticism and community criticism, or the practice of identifying harmful trends and subjecting them to the purifying power of the community meeting. The perversion of self-criticism that dominates the parties, sects, and “pre-parties” of the West is merely a tool of social control and abuse. This must be rectified and returned to the proper proletarian model.

An Organization of Organizations: Lenin articulated the fundamental structure of the party as an “organization of organizations.” The Party is not a monolithic structure in which all work is concentrated at the head; it is not a federated structure in which organizations act in a league. It is an organization that encompasses within it many different individual organizations of many different types.

The Founding Conference: We acknowledge that the movement is still in its nascent stages. There are advanced workers, proto-Communists, and even Communists caught up in the nullifying and pacifying bodies of many formations in the West. These advanced elements must be shaken loose and brought together in a Unity Convention or a Founding Conference.

Tactical Principles

To accomplish our long term strategic principles, we must apply tactics. These tactics must also be guided by a plan, which leads us to the tactical principles by which we act.

Raising Class Consciousness: The first and most primary struggle of any Communist should be to raise the class consciousness of the working masses. At the same time as we work to organize the movement, we must also organize the proletariat itself.

Building Primary Organizations: Primary organizations — local formations with real organization, that is, real rules, connections, strategies, goals — will form the foundational or core of the Party. It is incumbent on those of us who have access to empire-wide platforms like our Presses to work to spark or crystallize the formation of these primary organizations everywhere we can.

By growing, shepherding, and nurturing these primary organizations, we will act as gardener, helping bring the Party to be. By building these primary organizations and providing them with the channels of communication, we will be building the very foundations of a convention or conference in which to formally organize them.

Criticizing Opportunism: In order to free up the locked labor, energy, and genius of those advanced workers that have been sequestered into dead, revisionist, or floundering formations, we must ruthlessly criticize the opportunism of these formations and distribute publications to their members.

Principles of Liberation

We are Marxists-Leninists and social revolutionaries.

Marxism-Leninism is a living body of revolutionary theory and method; it is the culmination of revolutionary experience from the whole history of the class struggle.

We take ideological and practical guidance from the relevant experiences and contributions of revolutionaries from every land and region.

We agree that all peoples have the right to self-determination. 

The universal realization of that right within and without the existing U.S. empire and its junior partner Canada. The decolonization of North America is a precondition for a just society.

The anti-colonial and national liberation struggles constitute a special stage of the social revolution.

The struggle includes the liberation and self-emancipation of the Black nation of New Afrika, all pre-columbian Indigenous peoples, and the U.S. Empire’s colonial territories.

We are materialist feminists.

Materialist feminism is distinguished from the reformist and unscientific feminist trends by: (i) recognition of gendered oppression as structural and (ii) recognition of the failure of reforms to bring about true emancipation.

We are committed to depatriarchalization, entailing the full legal emancipation and structural liberation of women, LGBT+ persons, and gender nonconforming persons, and all efforts will be taken to ensure this is practiced in the Group’s organization.

We shall vigorously defend the rights of women, LGBT+ persons, and gender nonconforming persons within its membership and shall endeavor to make study and work accessible and safe for such persons through a process of internal depatriarchalization.

The abolition of disability as a social structure and for the liberation of disabled persons is a vital component of the social revolution.

We Urge You To Join the Struggle!

These principles can stand as points of unity among and between organizations, as well as within them. We urge all our readership to carry forward the struggle under the banner of liberation, and to share that struggle with the press.

Together, we will press forward to victory over all decrepit, decayed, reactionary forces and toward the final liberation of all!