Factions, Splits, and Entryism in the US Communist Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

“The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty for a few pence. They cravenly preached ‘social peace’ (i.e., peace with the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the ‘sympathising’ intelligentsia.”

Perceptions of material and social precarity in the middle classes (principally settlers, petit bourgeoisie, and the imperialist working class) tend to produce two outcomes, both a product of the heightening of the international class struggle. In the first case, middle class precarity can produce real class consciousness, that is, proletarian consciousness. In seeking answers to the problems faced by the middle classes, a small contingent of radicals emerges who seek education on matters of class conflict, imperialism, colonialism, settler occupation, racism, patriarchy, and the international Marxist-Leninist, Decolonial, Indigenous, and National Liberatory traditions. In the second case, a broader movement of false class consciousness, that is petit bourgeois consciousness, emerges. The latter is what we’re going to look at here. What is false consciousness? This broadly refers to all forms of middle class consciousness which purport to be liberatory. Because of the diversity of interests represented within the middle classes, these forms of consciousness are equally diverse in content, though in practice they all point in the same direction:  continued bourgeois supremacy over the whole world. 

Contemporary liberalism for instance can be analyzed as a form of middle class consciousness: extolling the supposed intrinsic virtues of order and procedure, universal equality before the law, freedom of expression, and “non-violence” as a central tenet of political activity. In false consciousness, the individual begins with the assumption of an ideal reality towards which to strive, and through political action attempts to shape material reality according to these ideals. In actual practice, this produces a dogmatic approach to political activity where these central tenets of Liberalism are more important than the material outcomes. Why is this? Attempts to label liberals as unintelligent, misguided, or otherwise unaware of the contradictions within their approach to political activity are unsatisfactory, as can be quickly seen when these contradictions are pointed out in discourse, and liberalism demonstrates its boundless capacity to deny, distort, and excuse. What then is the material outcome of liberal political activity? Social and institutional inertia, the preservation of the status quo, and ultimately support for and defense of oppressive white supremacist regimes of settler-colonial occupation, and imperialist exploitation of the global south. It’s important to note here that these patterns are not necessarily inherent to any particular ideology, but to the class itself.

The professed ideals are a smokescreen for the material outcome, which is the real intended function of the ideology. This smokescreen serves mainly for the benefit of the ideology’s adherents, who easily learn to live with its contradictions by rationalizing their ideas as being broadly “correct” on the basis of their own material concerns. If they are comfortable, they feel their worldview is approximately correct. It is only when they experience or expect discomfort that they begin to change their worldview, and usually only by demanding the restoration (or increase) of privileges. This additionally serves the interests of bourgeois rule by keeping the politically active sections of the masses debating and disputing one another’s ideological conceptions — conceptions rooted in the material interests of different strata of the middle classes. These debates, while sometimes incredibly lively, all operate within the bounds of the overarching middle class interest of the continued maintenance of the settler empire, and at their most intense represent conflicts for control over the levers of imperial power, but never stray into the realm of revolution. While the right wing of the settler empire is happy to experiment with new methods of control and dominance in the face of crisis, the imperial left wing can only debate and denounce, or at most occasionally roll back or delay particular reforms taken by the right. This leads to a circular process, a sort of political holding pattern that can only react to events and retroactively justify inaction and passivity in the face of crises, rather than actively struggling to change reality. 

Whether their words say so or not, the liberal does not want to solve homelessness, because to do so would require the overthrow of the regime of private property which is fundamental to imperial land speculation, the surest path to “financial security” (that is, upwards class mobility) available to the middle class individual (which most commonly takes the form of “homeownership”). The liberal does not want to free Palestine, because to do so would be to shatter the legitimacy of the institutions which actively maintain the occupation of Palestine, and which at the same time actively maintain the occupation of stolen Indigenous lands inside the borders of the U.S. empire, and which actively maintain the continuing flow of inexpensive commodities and superprofit-inflated worker wages into the empire. 

The liberal may go as far as to couch their demands in radical language, but the demands remain reactionary nonetheless. In the case of homelessness, liberals will advocate for jobs programs, or zoning reform, or expanded homeless shelters, and so on, measures which may or may not produce improvements in the conditions of the homeless population, but which are ultimately aimed at maintaining homelessness as an institution by providing a harmless outlet through which to redirect any resistance against the private property regime. At the same time, the victims of housing exploitation are corralled along lines amenable to the bourgeois/settler state, and violence is employed against them should they resist or fail to comply with the measures imposed. The language may say “end homelessness”, but the demands say “the homelessness regime is in need of maintenance”. In the case of Palestine, the most popular of such liberal measures is the two-state “solution”, which seeks to divert the struggle for national liberation into a formalized acceptance of the occupation by Palestinians, and a concretized formalization of apartheid by the occupation. The language may say “Free Palestine” but the demands say “the occupation has a right to exist”.

With this analysis in mind, let’s now turn to the issue of middle class “communism”. On the 22nd of May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two staff members of the Palestine occupation regime, shouting “Free Palestine!” during the act. In doing so he tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the U.S.-israeli empire. This was, first and foremost, an act of radical love for and solidarity with the Palestinian people, the victims of the occupation’s genocidal onslaught. At the same time, this was an act of political desperation, a refusal to accept the normalization of genocide, whatever the personal costs may be. In doing so, Rodriguez called direct attention to the failure of the “Free Palestine” movement within the imperial core to heighten the struggle and bring tangible consequences to the perpetrators of the Gaza Holocaust. In one stroke, Rodriguez demonstrated that resistance is absolutely possible, and that those of us who have so far failed to organize militant violent resistance to imperial genocide are failing in our duty to uphold and defend the oppressed.

Seemingly frightened to the core at the dreadful thought of militant struggle against the state, the so-called Party “for” Socialism and Liberation, and the so-called “Communist” Party USA both immediately leapt to denounce this heightening of the struggle. Professing a commitment to “peace” and “non-violent struggle” these organizations have eagerly demonstrated in action the real aim of their respective programs: maintenance of imperial rule and the bourgeois monopoly on violence. We already knew this was the case, but the discussions erupting around these revisionist statements point in the direction of the future of this movement, and where the red line of class allegiance is to be drawn. Remember to ask: what is the material outcome of their political practice? This will inform us as to their actual goal, and in turn the outcomes of their practice will inform us as to their class allegiance.

The goal of the settler Communist, as a member of the international middle classes, is to leverage their material and social privileges in the interests of the international proletariat, with the aim of the liquidation and abolition of the settler class. The goal of the settler “communist” is to claim to fight for liberation in word while obstructing liberation in practice. They will therefore wield whatever institutional power they possess to effect this desired outcome. The CPUSA claims to fight for liberation in word, but in practice they canvass for bourgeois parties, instruct their members to “call their senator” in response to genocide, platform and defend zionists, and denounce violent struggle. These proponents of watered-down and sanitized “communism” are not doing this because they are unintelligent or ignorant or otherwise unaware of the aims of Communism, but because these actions serve their real material interests. During the First Inter-Imperialist War (1914 to 1918) the leadership of the Second International famously betrayed the aims of the Communist movement in favor of backing their own respective national bourgeois formations, not because they misunderstood the aims of Communism but because their aims were the interests of their own class, which at the time was benefitting tremendously from the expansion of imperialism and the intense exploitation of the colonized world. Today this opportunistic betrayal of the proletarian struggle repeats itself, as it has for most of the past century, in the settler-run “communist” and “socialist” parties. 

Marxism-Leninism has been proven, time and again through the history of the last century of class struggle, to be the most potent ideological tool wielded by the revolutionary proletariat. In this sense it is a dire existential threat to the continued privileges of the imperial middle classes, whose comforts are predicated on the very system which Marxism sets out to defeat. Despite this, it does not require any greater degree of cognitive dissonance (compared to adherents of liberalism) on behalf of the middle class radical to claim adherence to Marxism while rejecting it in practice. It is equally as trivial to wield the phraseology and aesthetics of Communism in the interests of the settler middle class as it is to wield liberalism for the same. The difference is that while liberalism is at present a decaying order, increasingly seen as obsolete by the masses, Communism is, after decades of decay and decline, currently on the ascent in international power and influence. It is therefore more urgent than ever that committed revolutionaries study Marxism. It is the development of mass consciousness which is the antidote to the opportunistic poison of middle class radicalism. Don’t just accept what we tell you to be the truth! You have to study, learn for yourself, and develop yourself and your understanding. Settler radical “communists” prey on youth and ignorance, turning potential budding revolutionaries into the footsoldiers of the perpetual counter-revolutionary holding pattern. Marching in cop-approved circles waving signs and decrying “violence” in word while supporting it in action as colonized people are actively being exterminated with your tax dollars feels wrong because it is.

Equally as urgent is the need to recognize the direction that settler “communism” is developing. No ideology is static while it has living adherents, and the ideologies of the middle classes are no different. As mass consciousness has developed and grown, the settler “communist” parties have been forced to take up the increasingly radical and revolutionary language of the proletarian struggle and distort it in order to adapt it to their aims. In recent years these parties have started talking of issues like settler colonialism, decolonization, national liberation, gender liberation, and so on. When they think they can get away with it, they denounce these issues as “un-Marxist”, “revisionist”, “ultra left”, etc. If they feel they can no longer hold back the tide of consciousness this way, they may adapt by accepting these ideas in theory while continuing to struggle against them in practice. Beware of “communists” who claim settler colonialism is no longer an ongoing structure, but an event of the past, or “communists” who promote a workerist agenda to the exclusion of Indigenous, Black, Queer, and women’s issues.

The old adage that if you “scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds” holds truer than ever today. Faced with culpability in the extermination of the Palestinians, liberals have roundly demonstrated their commitment to upholding the imperial order no matter the human cost. This development does not create fascists out of liberals, but exposes the classes invested in liberal ideology as being committed to the same interests as fascism. This commitment is inherent to the class, not to the ideology. Though liberalism is fundamentally incoherent, this is owing to its idealistic character which it draws from its reactionary class representatives. Marxism is not fundamentally incoherent, but middle class “communism” only superficially resembles Marxism, and in practical character functions identically to liberalism.

Does this mean that the so-called “communist” parties of the middle classes have more in common with fascism than proletarian Marxism? In most cases this still remains to be seen: will the settler “communists” change their allegiance when a really revolutionary international proletarian party emerges? For many, particularly among the disillusioned youth of the movement, the answer is certainly yes! For many others however, their commitment to the imperial order will win out. With the undeniable necessity of Marxism-Leninism becoming clearer by the day, many middle class radicals are even now preparing to either stem this tide for as long as humanly possible, or to subvert it to their own ends. “Marxism” which openly upholds such reactionary and counter-revolutionary values as US nationalism, the patriarchal family, “anti-woke ideology”, queer/transphobia, zionism, etc, has been emerging. And while the left wing of the middle classes can only hand-wring over the (potential) loss of their privileges and otherwise maintain the counterrevolutionary holding pattern, the right wing is openly preparing to mount a renewed offensive against the proletariat by consolidating the middle classes under the banner of “Marxism”.

We’ve seen reactionary middle class revolutions before. It bears reiterating that the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) called itself a “socialist workers’ party” because it was drawing on popular radical ideas of the time, portraying itself as a “sensible” third way alternative to radical Bolshevik terror and failing capitalism. In our time the ideas have changed somewhat, but the processes of class conflict are very similar in many ways. When our own NSDAP emerges it will drape itself in both the red flag and the U.S. flag.

What are the hallmarks of an organization which upholds false consciousness?

• Attempts to control members, rather than empower them. Members are isolated from their community rather than supported as Communists within their community.
• Stifles development through repetitive tasks and overbearing bureaucracy, rather than making development and the carrying forward of the struggle the key priority.
• Education takes a lower priority to “action”, rather than practice and study being treated as equally important aspects of the dialectic of development. Members are taught what to think rather than how to think.
• Opaque and/or impenetrable internal organizational functioning, instead of clearly defined rules which everyone follows and which everyone has a voice in the drafting and implementing of.
• Communications with central leadership are limited to commands that are carried down the line, rather than a dialogue.
• Leadership is upheld on the “strength” of their ideas, rather than on their contributions of labor to the struggle.
• Decisions are justified by appeals to the authority of leadership, “The Party”, etc. rather than democratic accountability. 
• Leaders are treated as rulers to be obeyed, rather than servants of the membership and the people.
• Ossified leadership structures, leaders are not subject to recall, elections do not happen or are designed to reproduce leadership power rather than empowering the general membership.
• Historical revolutionaries (particularly Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao) are treated as infallible prophets whose word cannot be challenged, rather than regular human beings whose ideas should be studied and understood holistically and within their particular historical contexts.
• Contradictions in the ideology, outlook, organizational functioning, decision making, theoretical disagreements, etc, are resolved with appeals to “faith” in the organization’s mission or leadership, or the words of the aforementioned “prophets”, rather than constructive struggle.
• Attempts to engage in constructive struggle are shut down, treated as “wrecker” behavior, or ignored, rather than embraced as necessary to the development of the proletarian party.
• Finances are kept hidden from the membership, and/or spending decisions are made without the consent of the membership, rather than being open and democratically accountable.
• The voices and contributions of members from oppressed populations (women, Indigenous, Black, Queer, disabled, etc) are dismissed, excluded, minimized, or otherwise disempowered or decentered, rather than being held as central to the proletarian struggle, and empowered and uplifted by the organization.
• Discussions with or about other organizations are discouraged or silenced, rather than being considered essential to the task of building unity among the Marxist movement.

If you feel like you or someone you know may be involved in an organization which upholds false consciousness, we have several articles which can provide further guidance:

• From USU: Cadre Development Literature, Organizing Theory
• On the Cult Form: The Cult Building Tendency
• On CPUSA: A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words, Against CPUSA’s Colonizer “Communism”
• On PSL: Revolution in Our Lifetime
• On FRSO: Colonizer “Communism” in the FRSO, The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO
• On DSA: Organize Within the DSA!, Uncommitted: A Lesson in Counterinsurgency

The struggle for the Party is at times a bitter one, and promises to only grow in contention as the proletarian movement builds momentum and begins to truly challenge the established “communist” institutions. Already many middle class “communists” resort to increasingly coordinated campaigns of harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence in order to assert the “legitimacy” of their particular organization. Committed revolutionaries must understand the backwardness of this approach: To assert authority without the backing of the proletariat, or to attempt to cudgel the proletariat into submission to “the party” can only ever at most postpone the emergence of the Party of the revolutionary proletariat. 

The Party will form the vanguard of the revolution only when the masses of the most oppressed internationally recognize it as their representative and their weapon in the class struggle, wielded by and in the interests of the international proletariat.

Attendance at the conference was split between two groups, voting members and non-voting members. Voting members consisted of those organizations which met the criteria outlined in the convention proposal: have a defined democratic structure, have a nominal commitment to Marxism-Leninism, and have at least five full and active members. Non-voting members were made up of organizations which either did not meet one or more of the criteria or did not grant its delegates the power to enter into preliminary agreements. Among the non-voting members were a number of observer organizations.

Outside of CCAP and CTRRG, the conference was attended by representatives from the Kansas Socialist Book Club (KSBC), Red Help Austin TX, the Atlantic Regional Communist Party (ARCP), the Shenandoah Valley cadre, Unity of Fields (formerly PAL Action US), the People’s University of Amherst (PUA), and Ocean State Student and Worker Alliance (OSSWA), among a few other unaffiliated individuals. Additionally, representatives from the Chunka Luta Network (CLN) and Red Sails were present online for a short while. Of these attendees, only CCAP, CTRRG, and the ARCP qualified as voting members, while Unity of Fields, OSSWA, and the PUA were in attendance solely as observers.

The conference opened with a “State of the Movement” address written and delivered by the CTRRG, which laid out the background for this conference and why it was deemed necessary. The piece assessed the conditions of our current historical moment, and concluded that no Communist Party exists nor has a legitimate Communist Party ever existed on this continent. Therefore, they posit, it is our role to build one. The piece explored the histories of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of China, which were formed through the unification of and struggle between different Marxist organizations and study groups. The principal method by which this happened was the formation of Leagues which unified small, local organizations into “organizations of organizations.” The League form existed as a step up from the local organization and a step below a party. Therefore, the intent of this conference was to struggle over this idea with other capable, principled Marxists and to establish such a League if the struggle led in that direction.

After the initial address, individual organizations were given the opportunity to present reports of their own. Reports were prepared and delivered by the Shenandoah Valley cadre, CCAP, the ARCP, Red Help, and KSBC. Each report explored the conditions of the struggle in each of their localities and centered on specific lessons each organization had learned from their experience organizing. The Shenandoah cadre shared the lessons they learned from a recent split in their organization, CCAP shared its plans for a cadre development program, the ARCP described organizing conditions in Canada and the tensions between settlers and the Indigenous, Red Help discussed their recent expulsion from CPUSA, and KSBC presented their plans for expansion and the process of their education program as well. Each report was followed by a period of discussion whereby people in attendance asked clarifying questions, critiqued elements of the report, and contributed any other relevant experience or information to the topic at hand.

Following the reports, discussion turned to the formation of a Worker’s League. It was during this time that OSSWA raised criticisms that they had developed of the idea of a League and shared their conception of the vanguard party. It was the opinion of these attendees that the reconstitution of the Communist Party should follow the example set by the Peruvian Communist Party using the strategy of concentric construction and clandestine organization. Debate ensued around the applicability of such a strategy to the conditions of the North American Empire, the efficacy of clandestine organizing as an ideological versus a tactical concern, and the method by which mass organizing relates to party building. Ultimately, the voting members agreed to move forward with the formation of the League, with the promise that they would interrogate the strategy of concentric construction and conduct an analysis of its applicability to our current conditions.

Of the three voting members present, CCAP and the CTRRG voted to establish the League. The ARCP, citing labor shortage in their current work, deferred their entry into the League until a later date. Additionally, a number of the observer organizations professed an interest in joining the League as either candidate or member organizations upon reporting back to their respective cadres.

At a special session of the General Body held on September 17th, CCAP voted to ratify the League charter and join as full members.

Analysis

What is a League and why did the conference set out to establish one?

The Lake Quonnipaug Conference came as a step in the strategy for party building as outlined by the prospectus of the Unity–Struggle–Unity Press organization, which is a strategy that we at CCAP have also arrived at and have chosen to adopt. This strategy, as demonstrated by the founding of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party of China, is characterized not by the direct growth of one individual organization that becomes the vanguard, but the establishment of unity between existing organizations and the formation of “organizations of organizations.” A League is such an organization, a second-order organization of which the membership consists not of individuals but of other primary, local, organizations. A League is not a party, however it is still an advancement in organizational complexity and capability over a primary organization, and lays the groundwork for the development of further unity and the eventual establishment of a party.

The purpose of the All-Empire Worker’s League is two-fold. On the one hand, it establishes unity between a number of existing primary organizations on the basis of a shared commitment to Marxism and a shared strategy for party building. It establishes a meaningful and lasting connection between such organizations whereby they are in active, formalized relation and communication with one another to coordinate efforts, struggle ideologically, and provide strategic resources between them. On the other hand, it serves as a living example of the strategy it is following. Ultimately, the party would be founded through the unity between a number of Leagues, therefore it is our aim to inspire others to create unity between principled Marxist formations in their own localities and form Leagues of their own. The All-Empire Worker’s League thus serves as an example that such a strategy is viable and provides a model for others to follow.

Our delegates felt that the conference itself was extremely successful, not only because it managed to achieve its stated aims. Possibly the most important and most valuable part of the conference was the connection made between the groups present. Many of these groups did not have formal communications with one another prior to the conference. Many had not even heard of one another. However, what we found was a collection of the most principled, most revolutionary, most dedicated comrades from all around the country who we established meaningful and lasting connections with. The conference served as a place for principled struggle, for sharing organizing tactics and strategies, for educating one another on our specific conditions and efforts, and for learning from the varied experiences of our newfound comrades.

Conclusion

All the proceedings from the conference including meeting minutes, copies of organization reports, and the Worker’s League charter will be published in full in the Red Clarion. We recommend that any and all comrades who are curious about the conference go and review the materials when they become available. Additionally, we recommend that interested organizations review the League charter and consider applying to join, or consider an effort to establish a League of their own with organizations in their specific locality.

Any questions about the League, the conference, or CCAP’s role in it, please reach out to us through Unity–Struggle–Unity, our Instagram, or our email: cincycap@protonmail.com.

The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, which would give birth to the Bolshevik faction and ultimately the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the science of Marxism-Leninism, held its founding conference in 1898 in the city of Minsk. The Communist Party of China was founded on July 1, 1921. In both cases, the parties were created out of the union of study circles as their principal element. The unification of these study circles into militant revolutionary parties was a necessary step on the road to social revolution. No such solid history undergirds the so-called “parties” in the U.S. and Canada today. Here and now, on September 7th of 2024, fully 126 years after the founding of the R.S.D.L.P. and 103 after the founding of the CPC, the date in the most powerful capitalist empire in the world might as well be 1897.

Not only did the U.S.-Canadian movement never establish a solid foundation — thanks, in part, to the ComIntern’s merger of the CPA and SPA in the early 20th century and the failure to establish an organizational safeguard against the latent reformism and opportunism that already plagued those formations — we have a century of false starts and the wreckage they created to deal with. At the heart of what we can call the American errors are 1) the failure to establish national liberation of the Black nation and captive Indigenous nations as a special stage in the U.S. revolution due to the settler-colonial relations, and 2) the failure to establish gender liberation as a bedrock principle of Communist organization. I can confidently state that, had those issues been properly addressed by the overwhelmingly white petit-bourgeois leaders of the early CPUSA — had the party not sidelined and then expelled Harry Haywood and the other so-called “Black nationalists,” every other error would have been, if not avoided, at least avoidable.

The list of secondary and subsidiary errors made by the movement in the U.S. over the course of the 20th century is too long to enumerate today. Now, we must assess the current conditions and put forward a program and plan that takes these conditions into account. What are these conditions?

I. Rightism Predominates

The overwhelming tendency on the U.S.-Canadian left has historically been and continues to be the predominance of rightist deviations from Marxism-Leninism. This has manifested as opportunism — the adoption of politically popular but non-Communist positions to maintain personal power and popularity — as revisionism — the “revising” of Marxism to remove its revolutionary content — as tailism — the adoption of positions which are already no longer relevant to the masses and their consciousness because they appear to be “safe” — and as simple reformism. The reason for these deviations is manifestly a desire to preserve the system of capitalist exploitation because the corrupt leadership of these formations does not in fact desire a world in which the benefits of national oppression have been eliminated. If the choice, they reckon, is between being socialist but eliminating whiteness, or being capitalist but nice, they proclaim: “Let me be capitalist – but let me be white.”

In other words, the movement has never progressed in any meaningful sense beyond the social chauvinism of the Second International.

To protect their social chauvinist lines, the U.S. and Canadian formations have adopted a perversion of democratic centralism. They cannot admit full democratic participation within their parties because to do so would be to invite real revolutionaries in and jeopardize their century-long legacy of tailism and legal Marxism. Over time, as leadership became insulated from democratic pressure, they parroted the justification of “professional revolutionaries” to give themselves unassailable perquisites, such that leadership in one of these parties comes with stipends, apartments, and paychecks. Every word ever written by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or the founders of the CPC, can be perverted once the living legacy is gone. These parties have adopted the political slogans, but emptied them of meaning and now they spout them to justify the inverse policies of the historical revolutionaries. They are, in a very real sense, traitors to the cause of revolution.

II. Leftism is the Natural Response

The predominance of rightism in the movement throws up its own dialectical shadow: ultra-leftism. When it is impossible to participate in a party with a revolutionary line, and where the existing parties pervert and corrupt the revolutionary line into a reformist one, committed revolutionaries are prone to leftist errors. These are made as a result of the predominant rightist errors, and sometimes even made knowingly, as a corrective. But it is not the ultraleftist deviation that currently threatens the integrity of the movement. The ultraleftists could be brought back into the revolutionary fold of correct theory and practice if (and only if) the rightist deviation were defeated.

The most pervasive version of this ultra-leftist response is what we have jokingly called “anarcho-maoism” in the past. This is a form of extreme misreading combined with doctrinaire book worship of Mao Zedong while excluding the historical context of his works (for instance, the fact that the Communist Party of China was already iron-strong compared to the limp-noodle parties of the modern West) and to essentially read him as an anarchist. Anarcho-maoism focuses almost entirely on “doing the work,” and utterly rejects all attempts to produce and agree upon correct revolutionary theory as “philosophizing.” Anarcho-maoism advocates narrow, local work to connect with the masses above and beyond the work of organizing a functioning party. This is a dangerous deviation, because it deprives us of both the theoretical and practical basis upon which to build up the Communist Party.

Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement. 

Without the Communist Party, there would have been no new China.

III. The First Weapon of the Proletariat is Organization

All across the left, the mistaken call goes up: “just do the work.” Many sources tell us not to worry about the party-form, that we don’t need it yet or that it will arise “naturally” as we connect with the masses. This is a holdover or expression of the same anarcho-maoist ideology which we criticized above. It may also manifest as a type of Third Worldism in which the job of overthrowing the empire is shrugged off from its historical subject, the U.S.-Canadian proletariat, and thrust upon those who are already the most oppressed by the imperial machine, the Third World proletariat. These are two different types of ultra-left capitulationism, two different ways of ignoring the world-historic task set out before us, and ultimately feed back into the rightist belief that the United States capitalist empire is too powerful to be overthrown; the rightists and segments of the ultra-left both ask us to adopt a “holding pattern” until the day that American capitalism falters and a new horizon comes into view.

Other ultra-left sects demand immediate application of terror tactics, the formation of combat organizations, open revolt against the enemy state. This, too, is incorrect. Even in the conditions of a fully-formed party as in Russia, combat organizations of socialists were often used by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, to crack down on socialists, to jail them, to hang them. The use of terror split the socialists from the masses, who were not prepared for it, and isolated these lone terrorists; stranded and alone, they were unable to spark a mass movement.

If our weapons are not, at this stage, arms (guns, bombs, bullets) nor survival programs (food, shelter, showers), then what are they? The chief weapon of the proletarian class is organization. Although our enemy is already organized and supplied with both its main force (the state in the form of police and the armed forces) and its auxiliaries (paramilitary settler-garrison societies like the Oathkeepers), the strength of our enemy does not lie in its organization, but rather in its command of the productive property, capital, and political power. To challenge the concentrated power of the capitalists, which is everywhere funneled down from the glass and steel towers into the battering ram of the police on the street, we must be capable of exerting concentrated proletarian power.

Revolutionary capacity — proletarian class power — is a special characteristic of an organization that is organized in a certain way and which possesses an authentic connection with the masses and which develops and adheres to the correct revolutionary theory. The power of the proletariat is expressed in these two simple truisms:

1. The proletariat is the necessary workforce for all social production and,
2. The proletariat is the fundamental basis, the social foundation, of all capitalist society.

One proletarian alone cannot access the strength implicit in either of these statements. One proletarian cannot alone convince the class to resist the capitalists’ blandishments and lies. So long as the class remains disorganized, this power is latent, sleeping. Only once the class has become organized in a highly disciplined form according to true democratic principles and along Marxist-Leninist lines can it exert its class power. What is the vehicle for this organization? It is the revolutionary political party.

Will it be built spontaneously? No. Only through dedicated study, hard struggle, and long hours of labor will it come into being. The first task of every cell of the Party-to-be must be the production of new, militant, revolutionaries. That is one reason why Unity–Struggle–Unity is working with RedSails on a schema for a series of political education courses.

IV. A Party of a New Kind? No! A Party of the Correct Kind

We have already acknowledged that we lack this vehicle above, that there is no militant, disciplined, revolutionary political party currently organized on the correct lines that would enable the revolutionary class to exert its class-power here in the U.S. or Canada. 

What are the hallmarks of the vanguard party? In both Tsarist Russia and the Qing Empire, the Communist Parties were formed from the unification of study circles and struggle leagues: local, primary organizations that operated on the ground. We must study the party-formation period of these two organizations to learn the “secrets” of what came before. In Russia, where incorrect socialist theories made the formation of the party difficult, one of the preconditions of party formation was the demolition of those theories to pave the way for the R.S.D.L.P.

As Comrade Stalin wrote in the Short Course History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks), (and here, comrades, I apologize, as I will quote at length):

In a number of his writings during this period Lenin criticized the methods of political struggle employed by the principal Narodnik group, the “Narodnaya Volya,” and later by the successors of the Narodniks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries—especially the tactics of individual terrorism. Lenin considered these tactics harmful to the revolutionary movement, for they substituted the struggle of individual heroes for the struggle of the masses. They signified a lack of confidence in the revolutionary movement of the people.

In the book, What the “Friends of the People” Are, Lenin outlined the main tasks of the Russian Marxists. In his opinion, the first duty of the Russian Marxists was to weld the disunited Marxist circles into a united Socialist workers’ party. He further pointed out that it would be the working class of Russia, in alliance with the peasantry, that would overthrow the tsarist autocracy, after which the Russian proletariat, in alliance with the labouring and exploited masses, would, along with the proletariat of other countries, take the straight road of open political struggle to the victorious Communist revolution.

…

Of immense significance, too, was Lenin’s struggle against “legal Marxism.” It usually happens with big social movements in history that transient “fellow-travelers” fasten on them. The “legal Marxists,” as they were called, were such fellow-travelers. Marxism began to spread widely throughout Russia; and so we found bourgeois intellectuals decking themselves out in a Marxist garb. They published their articles in newspapers and periodicals that were legal, that is, allowed by the tsarist government. That is why they came to be called “legal Marxists.”

After their own fashion, they too fought Narodism. But they tried to make use of this fight and of the banner of Marxism in order to subordinate and adapt the working-class movement to the interests of bourgeois society, to the interests of the bourgeoisie. They cut out the very core of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. One prominent legal Marxist, Peter Struve, extolled the bourgeoisie, and instead of calling for a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, urged that “we acknowledge our lack of culture and go to capitalism for schooling.”

In the fight against the Narodniks Lenin considered it permissible to come to a temporary agreement with the “legal Marxists” in order to use them against the Narodniks, as, for example, for the joint publication of a collection of articles directed against the Narodniks. At the same time, however, Lenin was unsparing in his criticism of the “legal Marxists” and exposed their liberal bourgeois nature.

…

In 1898 several of the Leagues of Struggle—those of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Ekaterinoslav—together with the Bund made the first attempt to unite and form a Social-Democratic party. For this purpose they summoned the First Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (R.S.D.L.P.), which was held in Minsk in March 1898.

The First Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. was attended by only nine persons. Lenin was not present because at that time he was living in exile in Siberia. The Central Committee of the Party elected at the congress was very soon arrested. The Manifesto published in the name of the congress was in many respects unsatisfactory. It evaded the question of the conquest of political power by the proletariat, it made no mention of the hegemony of the proletariat, and said nothing about the allies of the proletariat in its struggle against tsardom and the bourgeoisie.

In its decisions and in its Manifesto the congress announced the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

It is this formal act, which played a great revolutionary propagandist role, that constituted the significance of the First Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.

But although the First Congress had been held, in reality no Marxist Social-Democratic Party was as yet formed in Russia. The congress did not succeed in uniting the separate Marxist circles and organizations and welding them together organizationally. There was still no common line of action in the work of the local organizations, nor was there a party program, party rules or a single leading centre.

For this and for a number of other reasons, the ideological confusion in the local organizations began to increase, and this created favourable ground for the growth within the working-class movement of the opportunist trend known as “Economism.”

It required several years of intense effort on the part of Lenin and of Iskra (Spark), the newspaper he founded, before this confusion could be overcome, the opportunist vacillations put an end to, and the way prepared for the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

In contrast, the Communist Party of China faced a relatively easier road to consolidation. The incorrect tactics, theory, and practice of the 19th century had already been exposed globally by the foundation of the Bolsheviks and the triumphs of October by the time the labor struggles intensified in China. There were no major competing socialist formations for the Communists of China to sweep away. Instead, Li Dazhou, a Chinese peasant born in 1889 who became the librarian and professor of Peking University in 1917 and who had fought for national liberation of the Chinese people, founded a study circle in Beijing that would become the core of the party. He also began to publish a Marxist newspaper designed to unify the budding Marxists in the country.

As a result of the leadership of Li Dazhou’s study group during the May Fourth Movement protesting the continued national humiliation of China under the Versailles treaty, Li’s protest against the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, etc. he became one of the leading lights of Marxism in China. Along with Chen Duxiu, Li built up the basic organizations that would unify to become the Communist Party of China.

Both the R.S.D.L.P. and the Communist Party of China were constructed not out of whole cloth; not conjured into being by the dictate of a central organ, but through the diligent creation and unification of local, primary, organizations.

V. But What is the Party of the Correct Type?

Let us look at the structure of the CPSU and the CPC, the debates around their forms and formations, to understand the structure of a Marxist-Leninist party, for we will not find it incarnated in the so-called “parties” of the United States or Canada.

The split between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in the R.S.D.L.P., which led directly to the foundation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was precipitated around the question of “Paragraph 1” of the party rules draft presented by Julius Martov for the second party congress, held in 1903. This concerned membership in the party and what was required to be a member. Martov’s draft became the party rules for the Mensheviks; Lenin’s, for the Bolsheviks.

Martov’s draft reads: “A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who, accepting its programme, works actively to accomplish its aims under the control and direction of the organs of the Party.” Comrade Lenin took issue with this formulation, correctly stating that this was “only an empty phrase. That Party members must work under the control and direction of the organs of the Party goes without saying; it cannot be otherwise, and only those talk about it who love to talk without saying anything… can the organs of the Party exercise actual direction over Party members who do not belong to any of the Party organizations?” Comrade Lenin’s reformulation was that members must belong to a Party organization.

And what does Comrade Lenin say about the Party at large? In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, he writes “The word ‘organisation’ is commonly employed in two senses, a broad and a narrow one. In the narrow sense it signifies an individual nucleus of a collective of people with at least a minimum degree of coherent form. In the broad sense it signifies the sum of such nuclei united into a whole…. the Party is an organisation, should be an organisation (in the broad sense of the word); at the same time, the Party should consist of a whole number of diversified organisations (in the narrow sense of the word).” He says, “The Party should be a sum (and not the mere arithmetical sum, but a complex) of organisations.”

At the same time, the Bolsheviks had to struggle mightily against the “circle principle,” the idea that individual party organizations had “rights” of their own. The party is more than just a sum of organizations, an organization of organizations, but a unity divided into cells. Comrade Lenin and the Bolsheviks also struggled over what democratic centralism meant. In 1906, Comrade Lenin published Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action in which he strictly defined democratic centralism’s relation to criticism. This is critical, because criticism and self-criticism is the chief weapon of struggle within the Party (which we will see when we turn to Comrade Mao’s On Correcting Mistaken Ideas In The Party and other writings): “The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies the universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.”

In our context, a primary organization is therefore the cellular network of Marxists working in any given region, enterprise, or locality and performing real work to develop its membership in political understanding of Marxism-Leninism as well as developing connections with the masses and elevating their consciousness. In essence, the organically-forming local Marxist organizations already engaged in real Marxist work, from ongoing logistics and survival mass-oriented programs to political education and cadre-building, are the basic stuff of which the Party will and must be made. In other words, the organizations that have sent delegates to this very conference are the building blocks of the Party-to-be. We will hear reports of work later today in order to more fully understand and communicate the conditions in each region that is represented here.

VI. Class Consciousness is Rising

What else typifies our current moment in the heart of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist block? The tide of class consciousness has reached a lifelong high. Why is this? To put it very simply indeed, we have come to the end of a long period of capitalist-imperialist stabilization in which Western capital was relatively more powerful and secure than it had been and we are entering — or have entered, with the outbreak of war in Ukraine and Palestine — a period of instability and crisis.

Beginning in 1991 with the forceful disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and the reopening of one sixth of the surface of the earth to Western capital and the depredations of its markets, the instability of the imperial centers in Washington, London, and Berlin was more or less ameliorated. This doesn’t mean there weren’t a series of crises within the Western block; the crash of 2008 and the Eurozone debt crisis of 2009 are stand out examples of the periodic capitalist crises evidenced even during this period of stabilization. However, the periodic crises did not throw the Western capitalist block into a sustained depression. The Western capitalists were able to crawl out of the occasional and intermittent holes into which they stumbled by virtue of the overall character of stabilization.

This period lasted roughly thirty years, between 1991 and 2019. In 2020, the COVID crisis erupted across the world and stabilization can be said to have come to a close. As the Western block began to decompensate, other signals of this shift in the overall character of capitalism emerged: the 2020 June Uprisings in the U.S., the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to prevent the joining of that country into the NATO block, the 2023 invasion of Palestine in response to the heroic October 7 strikes, etc. Civil unrest within the core of the capitalist block has become endemic, and periods of calm are relatively fewer and shorter between. Labor struggles have become more acute, and several major strikes have either been broken by the U.S. government or capitulated through their leadership. Standards of living are decreasing in the imperial core. Despite the muttering of bourgeois mouthpieces, actual wages have fallen sharply. The median household income in 2019 was roughly $69,000/year. At the current rate of inflation between 2019 and 2024, that would have had to rise to $85,000/year to maintain its equivalent purchasing power. In actuality, the median household income in the first quarter of 2024 is roughly $59,000/year. That is a fall of 14%.

The imperialist contract, the promise of superprofits in exchange for class peace, has broken down.

National consciousness is also rising. It is, in fact, national liberation that will provide the wedge that will split apart the capitalist block and put an end to the Western capitalist empire. Every time class consciousness rises and then recedes, it reaches a higher resting state and the next explosion of consciousness carries the high-water mark further and faster, leading to progressively more intense bursts of class-activity. The U.S.-Canadian proletariat is not yet aware of itself as a class-in-itself, but this awareness is growing. As the awareness of American imperialism becomes more widespread, the basic features of class are becoming more and more widely known. As the system of imperialist spoils and the distribution of imperialist superprofits breaks down, the working classes of the capitalist empire are beginning to rise, to look around them, and to realize their actual position vis-a-vis the ruling classes. Each failed rising creates a new population of activists who are aware, who are becoming more well-versed in organizing techniques and tactics, and who have seen the state repress their movement. There is a straight line through the sixteen years between Occupy and the 2024 Student Intifada.

It is now our task to harness that rising tide. The Communists must stand at the forefront of all progressive movements, and there is nothing more world-progressive than attacks on U.S. empire across the world. At this time, resistance against the imperial genocide of Palestine, backed by the U.S. colonialists for the security and profit of the zionist state, is the forefront of the class struggle. It is recognized as the forefront of the global class struggle across the world. This is our proving ground.

VII. Building Capacity, Building the Party

It is now our duty, then, to build the basic blocks of the Party-to-be so they can be united in an inter-circle struggle. Today we are taking the first tentative steps toward unification.  It may be that, like the first Congress of the RSDLP, we fail to achieve our lofty goals today. We have set our sights high. Yet, even should we fall short, the fires we light today will help us clearly see the way forward. 

In order to settle theoretical issues once and for all, we must have an organization capable of democratically debating them and testing them against the world through manifest practical action. That organization is none other than the Communist Party — I don’t say reborn or reforged, because the Communist Party in the U.S. Empire has always been compromised, going all the way back to its foundation. Let us say a real Communist Party of a type that has not been seen in the U.S.-Canadian block before.

The road to the militant party is long, but we are embarking on that journey today. We must create organizations capable of reproducing Communist cadre. We must pool our resources together, use the technological advances that unlock our capacity to work across regions, across cities, across the continent. We must labor diligently toward the day we can confront the enemy state.

History is with us. The time is right. It is the tidal force of history that brought all of us here today to embark on this great project. It is my suggestion — and to be clear, not mine alone, but developed with the other theoreticians at Unity–Struggle–Unity and the members of the Connecticut Radical Reading Group — that we must first unite in an organization of organizations, continue working toward a loose effective unity across the entire empire, then, when we have brought together those circles, to unify them such that they are no longer a federation of organizations but a single, powerful, militant, revolutionary political Party that can challenge the enemy state on every field: economic, political, military.

We propose today nothing short of casting the very metal from which the social revolution will be forged!

A person who shows up to protests is called an organizer. A person who is a member of a leftist group is called an organizer. A person who administers aid to the people is called an organizer. Even someone who works for a non-profit may take up the title of organizer without much challenge from others.

The confusion arises because the definition of organizing is obfuscated; diluted by liberal commandeering. After all, an organizer is someone who organizes, so, in order to properly apply the title of organizer, we need to figure out what actually constitutes organizing.

Is organizing building and supporting unions? Is organizing providing aid to the masses? Is organizing holding protests and marches, trying to get as many people as possible to join your group, holding book clubs, or debating theoretical differences with others? Yes, in some ways, it encompasses all of these things. But these definitions lack an essential aspect which ties all of these parts together.

Organizing is the process by which an organization is developed. It allows for the repetition and replication of an organization’s processes. It is the sorting of chaos along a defined structure. A socialist organization involves the development of unity between groups of people, a process which aims to transform our chaotic, uncoordinated efforts at change into a coherent force; a unified voice.

What do we mean by an organization? An organization is not simply a group of people who adopt a name and a logo and go to protests together. An organization is a structure with a clearly defined purpose, function, and rules. It is a vehicle through which the efforts of many can be unified and channeled towards a specific end. When we organize, we attempt to take hold of the chaos of the various levels of consciousness at work among the masses. We attempt to harness the progressive trends that naturally arise within oppressed classes, mold it, sharpen it, and thrust it like a spear into the heart of oppression. What do you need to forge a weapon from raw material? Machinery, tools, and clarity of purpose.

When we organize, we strive to craft the machinery that will forge the weapon. We strive to create the structures, the practices, the strategies and the tactics that will be utilized to free us all when the time comes. Some of this work has been done for us already, for there is a wealth of knowledge left behind from our predecessors during their own attempts at change. But there is much work to be done.

A Tempered Weapon is Strong

There are those who desire to use the weapon before it is ready. Some try to strike with a dull blade, some with the ingots, and others hurl the unrefined ore at the great walls of capital, to burst upon impact and become nothing more than dust. They may be impatient, anxious, and unwilling to put in the work to build the proper machinery.

There are also those who fail to strike at the iron while it’s hot. Wait too long and the metal cools, becomes brittle, and shatters upon impact. They are too obsessed with the machinery for the sake of the machinery itself. They lose sight of the purpose of the machinery and the purpose of the weapon. 

The socialist left is rife with these trends, each of which must be exposed, criticized, and corrected if our weapon is to be built and used effectively. Struggle is the method through which we temper our blade, sharpen its edges, and ensure that it strikes true. Disagreement is an essential part of development, and struggle is the method of utilizing disagreement in order to discern truth. No single individual has all the answers. No one person or group is correct about everything at all times. However, somewhere within the minds of all people are the seeds of truth. It is only through struggle within and between groups that as many viewpoints as possible can be accounted for and the truth be revealed.

Building the Machinery

We are all part of the machinery, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not. We all have our roles to play. The machinery represents collective effort, it represents the victory or the defeat of us all. The battle looms and our weapon must be ready. Will you choose to be a well oiled part of the machinery, or will you choose to leave yourself rusted and chipped, dulling the same edge that you aim to sharpen?

We must work together. That doesn’t simply mean showing up to each other’s events; it doesn’t mean exchanging contact info, being cordial, and liking each other’s posts on Instagram. It means collaborating and coordinating, consciously, to build the machinery that will forge our weapon; to build the organization that represents our collective efforts and collective interests. It means creating a political formation capable of withstanding repression, capable of defending itself, and capable of lifting us all up.

This is the main function of our organization, Cincinnati Community Aid and Praxis. While we are an aid organization, we are not a charity. We do not do aid for the sake of aid itself. We seek to eliminate the conditions that create aid necessary in the first place, which can only be done with the spear. Our aid programs serve a few purposes. Firstly, we aim to serve the most downtrodden of our communities and help them to survive until tomorrow. Secondly, it allows us to grow closer to the communities we serve, ensuring that our ties to the masses are never severed. And finally, our aid programs give us the opportunity to hone our theory through our practice, our practice through our theory, and to exercise the structure of our organization to expose its shortcomings and to build its strength.

This last reason is the most important. When we engage in on-the-ground work, we put stress on our organizational structure. Coordinating an aid program requires relying on management of resources, logistics, and coordination. Every time we run one of our regular programs, we take time to examine our performance, analyze our effectiveness, and assess the current conditions and the need for other efforts. Through this process, we develop. We constantly adjust our practices, our structure, and our understanding in response to our mistakes, our shortcomings, and any other information we gather from our work.

Though our aid programs are our most public-facing aspect, it is only one fifth of our actual operations. There are four other committees within our organization, each with varying purposes, but all oriented towards one goal: building the machinery. We are what we consider a primary organization; a pre-party formation. The most valuable thing we can do as a primary organization is contribute to the struggle. That means developing a robust understanding of the material conditions of our locale, formulating theories regarding the character and structure of our formation, putting them to the test with practical work, and, most importantly, sharing what we have learned with others.

Envision yourself within your organization, and your organization within your community, not as an individual body, but as individual cells within a single body, a body that is learning how to walk.

Engage with us in good faith. Unite with us over our commonalities. Struggle with us over our differences. Allow yourself to be driven forward by others as they are driven forward by you. This is a call for action, but it is also a cry for help. We cannot do this alone, nor can you. We need each other, and victory can only arise through our coordinated and collective effort.

A Proposal

CCAP is a pre-party formation and an organization. When we organize, we are in the process of developing the members of CCAP and the locale in which we operate, as well as the organization itself. It is something all leftist organizations should have in common.

But there are higher levels of organization that we aim to achieve. Every advance in the complexity and capability of our collective organization is a step that will allow us to take on bigger and better challenges and provide us the foundations to advance the next steps. It is a process of development. There is no way to be at the top except to start at the bottom. 

An individual who grasps class consciousness is at a higher stage of development than one who does not. An individual who gives themselves to the study of revolutionary theory and the study of the machinations of the world is more advanced than the conscious individual. An organization is more advanced than the educated individual. An organization of organizations is more advanced than a single organization itself…and so on and so on until the collective level of the organization of the oppressed classes is at the stage that it can wage effective struggle against the forces that be.

In Cincinnati and across the country, there are many individual, isolated organizations all doing similar or adjacent work. We have our differences, yes, but on the whole we are more alike than not. It is upon the things that we hold in common—our convictions, our goals, our beliefs—that we can unite. Once we have united, we will utilize our differences to engage in discussion and debate and advance ourselves as a collective.

Just as it is erroneous for an individual to believe that they know everything, it is equally as erroneous for us to believe that we have nothing to offer each other as organizations.

What is needed is an organization of organizations, something qualitatively different from the various coalitions, networks, and alliances that currently dot the landscape. This umbrella organization is not just a show of symbolic unity, it is a material unification of groups into a cohesive whole. Should we unify with another group in our city, our two groups would become one organization, of which CCAP is just a single part. This unifying of organizations advances the collective organizational complexity of the movement as a whole and allows us to take on bigger challenges than we can as isolated groups.

This is the meaning of organizing: engaging in the efforts to build not just a movement, but a complex structure with a defined purpose and the capability to engage in operations that advance towards our common goal. As organizers, this is the activity in which we consciously take part.

Does this involve building unions, running book clubs, and going to protests? Yes, it does, at different times and to different degrees. But it is essential for you, if you believe yourself to be an organizer, to expand your understanding of what an organizer actually does. An organizer is not just an activist, they are an architect, a builder, and a blacksmith forging the weapon.

At the current moment, we are struggling without sight in the dark, pulling this way and that with no form or direction. We have a history to learn from, yes, but the conditions of our struggle are novel. We are individual cells of a single body, and we are only just learning to walk.

If you consider yourself an organizer, understand what it means to organize. Understand that while conducting aid programs and holding town halls and staging protests is important, these are surface level actions and don’t constitute a movement. It is not enough to simply espouse radical politics and hope that will change the world. The new world must be built and you as an organizer are a builder.

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.

It is possible to win and it is possible to win in our lifetime.¹ This is a necessary starting point for any socialist revolution, anywhere, including in North America. Only when we begin with this proposition can we map a path to the seizure of state power. Any other starting point is defeatist. We are not here to equivocate, revise, or delay. We are here to bring about a total revolution in social relations.

It is shocking, then, to see professed revolutionaries in North America repudiate this principle. For example, when arguing for the support of international struggles, advocates will deftly expose the evils of imperialism and rightly insist upon solidarity in response, but what further direction do they give to those they win over? They direct us into elections, lobbying politicians, academic debate, and symbolic protest. In effect, the people with the closest proximity to the enemy are told they must act only as cheerleaders for resistance movements catching U.S. bombs abroad. Overthrowing our ruling class isn’t on the agenda, despite the benefit to international struggles that would come if we could tie down even a fraction of the U.S.’s ability to project violence across the world. The failure to consider this possibility cuts off all thought of accumulating the forces needed to make a rupture within the United States. And because accumulating forces through developing deep ties to the masses is the most stable base from which to escalate confrontation, dismissing this path also dismisses effective and sustained tactical escalations, such as coordinated direct action or sabotage.

The consequences of such failures are immediate and dire, as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has repeatedly highlighted. Even while vocal support for Palestinian national liberation skyrockets in the U.S., meaningful disruption of the U.S. empire’s heavy involvement in the genocide remains rare despite being an obvious strategic opportunity. To quote a statement by the PFLP on October 28, one of many similar calls to action:

“This aggressive alliance will not be dismantled by timid positions or half-hearted stances, but requires an escalation of serious revolutionary action against all these forces, primarily the United States and the other forces of the aggression alliance.”²

In other words, purveyors of the line being critiqued here perceive international solidarity too narrowly. They separate our struggle from the global struggle for liberation, and they maintain or widen the divide between revolutionary classes and nations, between the core and the periphery. And yet, if we take the recurring advice of the most advanced decolonial movements and their leaders, it is that we should learn to fight alongside them and push to be as combative and militant as they are; that the further we are able to push in that direction as a movement, the greater our contribution to their struggles against U.S. imperialism. In the words of Adolfo Gilly from his Introduction to Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism,

“Instead of pitying us and being horrified by the atrocities of imperialism, better fight against it in your own country as we do in ours… That is the best way to help us and put an end to the atrocities.”

Some dismiss this advice based on a conscious belief that revolution in the United States is not possible. For others, impossibility remains an uninterrogated assumption. But this is the tricky thing about scientific socialism and the political mode: whether or not a revolution is truly possible cannot be known in advance. It is a thesis, an axiomatic starting point. The actual possibility can only be resolved in the experiment and synthesis, in political practice. This starting point is as much required for proving the revolution as it is for proving its impossibility. It is the starting point towards either building the mass movement and party necessary to win, or, even in losing a revolution in the imperial core, having concretely supported the international struggle. 

Organizing for international solidarity is far from the only place where this tendency to side-step the question of revolution appears. This tendency is rife within all manner of issue-specific organizing and self-described activism in the U.S. In the sphere of nonprofit organizing, where promising revolutionary rhetoric sometimes appears, systematic thinking about how to realize a revolutionary seizure of power and any consideration of how their own programmatic work may or may not relate to that is completely off the agenda. Mention it aloud and you will find yourself either the subject of patronizing smiles or hushed into silence as though the very thought is forbidden. 

The overriding directive from leadership in these spaces is that any possible revolution is, at best, so far into the future that speaking about it is a distraction from the work of harm mitigation and legal reform. Push too hard on the matter and force them to address it publicly and they will misrepresent what it means to take the question of revolution seriously, dismissing the discussion as an ultra-left call to immediately move into armed struggle, as if there aren’t obvious steps to be taken between a reformist starting point and the ultimate destination of a seizure of power. So, on the one hand, they will give lip service to revolution, name-dropping and quoting revolutionaries from past struggles, but, at the same time, they will energetically marginalize and silence anyone who would call on them to live up to those quotes because it disrupts their foundation funded programming and pulls the horizon of revolution too close for comfort. 

This orientation to revolution as something perpetually on the horizon is unfortunately very common, even among those forces who are explicit about their belief that a revolution is possible. Such organizations have developed programs around accumulating forces to win a revolution, when the time is right, but their methods and practices make clear that they don’t really believe in achieving victory any time soon, certainly not in our lifetime. 

To the extent that there is a strategic orientation around accumulating forces, it is typically framed around two often overlapping projects: contesting elections and party building. For example, the hegemonic program within the DSA of electing minority legislative delegations and losing presidential elections presumes the only path forward is to gain a foothold within the government itself and, from there, mitigate the harms of capitalism. You can even see some adherents of this path dismissing other trends on the basis that their electoral faction is serious about governance, as if a handful of legislators who can’t consistently coordinate around policy and messaging in a body with over 500 members has anything to do with governing. But they promise that, at some point in the distant future, they will accumulate a majority position in government, albeit working alongside the oppressor and at the ultimate pleasure of a relatively unmolested ruling class — that’s “democracy,” after all. The possibility of actually winning the world we want is so thoroughly dismissed by these social democratic tendencies that it is simply not discussed, or perhaps it’s the case that the vision of the world they want is so stunted that it’s not all that different from what we already have.

But what of party building as a revolutionary project? The most basic understanding of political history makes clear that to seize state power we must have a revolutionary party. The question then is whether any of the party building projects in the U.S. take the possibility of victory seriously. They do not.

Consider the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), for which party building is not only their end goal, but evidently the limit of their entire program. Methodologically, PSL’s party building centers around the accumulation of members, a process built out of a constant churning of almost exclusively petit-bourgeois recruits.³ Similar to the DSA, it is presumed that, at some point, enough will be accumulated that the organization will be able to play power politics with the ruling class.

Important strategic considerations are completely neglected; for instance, how to develop deep and durable roots among the masses, or how to protect party networks from repression. Further confusion is created by intervening in electoral politics solely for the purpose of gaining even more members. The PSL’s allergic reaction in the Palestine mobilizations to anything tactically beyond marching in circles is similarly self-defeating.

The failure to escalate the Palestine protests, indeed the active deescalation coming from PSL, is illuminating, as both a massive strategic blunder and a betrayal of this moment. PSL has significant access to the networks that have been mobilized and a robust communications infrastructure, such that it could lead hundreds or thousands of people to block a port, or a military base, or to occupy weapons manufacturers. They also have the logistical capacity, proved by their contribution to the massive November 4th protests, to maintain those blockades and occupation for days or weeks, or at least until they were forcibly dispersed by the police. If they stepped forward other organizations would contribute as well.⁴ So, why don’t they? 

At this point, they can’t blame the unwillingness of a movement whose members are being driven to martyrdom for lack of an avenue to end the most brutal genocide humanity has ever witnessed. The answer, it seems, is that they are not interested in confronting the ruling class, even when the people are demanding it. Rather, they are interested in riding this wave of mass protest while recruiting as many new members as possible, and then pushing them into the PSL’s presidential campaign, which has as its only practical purpose the recruitment of yet more members. But then what? At what point is party building complete enough that you can use the organization to actually fight? And is the size of the party the only determinant of when it’s time to fight? What if fighting back is the greatest recruitment tool you could ever hope for?

This is where the magnitude of PSL’s strategic blunder can be seen. There is no surer or faster way to build a party than by winning over the millions of people currently activated by the heroic resistance in Palestine. The most obvious path in this direction would be to lead the masses where they want to go, which is into direct, forceful confrontation with the people and institutions prosecuting this genocide. Actively avoiding and deflecting the pressure for more militant action fully demonstrates that, despite their stated program, PSL is not building a party that can contest for power.

If PSL were to instead facilitate the increasing militancy of the movement, it would expose itself to strong state repression, and its leaders would face very serious personal risks. Yet, this is an organization that lionizes the experiences of communist revolutions and national liberation struggles throughout history — struggles in which key leaders took risks that landed them in prison, exile, or worse, and they still won. Pointedly, these are the kinds of risks that the leadership of the Palestinian Resistance have been making for decades. Why not us? What greater honor than to face repression for unleashing the combativeness of the masses to stop a genocide and support the Palestinian’s national liberation struggle? 

The great shame of the PSL is that there is no other formation with the avowed intention of making a revolution, the broad network of members and relationships with adjacent organizations, the media apparatus to point the masses at strategic targets, and the logistical capacity to sustain such protests. As it stands, the most confrontational our movement can get is to engage in episodic and symbolic protests, perhaps shut down a bridge, a tunnel, or a highway for a few hours. At the more militant end, the best we can do is for small groups to engage in civil disobedience or direct actions that harass the enemy. These are the limits that PSL and others are actively defending at the national and local level. Unless something gives, they will keep calling toothless “Shut It Down” protests with their partners until the movement demobilizes, but not before many thousands more Palestinians have died, and not before they’ve pulled thousands of people into their campaign to not elect Claudia and Karina. 

Imagine having the capacity and opportunity to unleash the masses and move with them in fighting the ruling class, even with the foreseeable result of being beaten back by the agents of state violence, and not taking it. Now, imagine refusing that opportunity at a moment when millions of people are positioned for mobilization and feeling the kind of emotional intensity that would drive a person like Aaron Bushnell to self-immolate. It’s frankly outrageous. And it’s not just a lost opportunity for the PSL, but for all of us. 

What we see here is that the PSL’s specific methodology of accumulating membership is self-evidently not going to build a party with durable roots amongst the masses, or even a broad level of respect. They are determined to not grasp the once in a generation opportunity to gain the broad respect that would create a basis for quickly sinking roots among the masses. Deep support among the masses being the only basis for defending a party against a fascist crackdown, their inability and lack of interest in developing that support means they will not be able to weather the kind of repression we will see with a second Trump presidency. Worse, their list of members is completely transparent to the forces of state repression, as they generally have people sign up with an internet form.⁵ So, not only do they not have a basis for defending themselves, they have inadvertently created a door-knocking list for a fascist roundup. You wouldn’t do this if you believed that a revolution, win or lose, was possible within the next 10-20 years. It is quite clear that, although PSL has a program that presumes winning is possible, they have no serious expectation of ever accomplishing it in our lifetime. Once again, actually winning a revolution is perpetually on the horizon.⁶

Moving past false party building projects, if we start from the position that overthrowing the ruling class and seizing state power for a socialist project is possible in our lifetime, and we take the development of this potential seriously, some important realizations arise. Chief among these realizations is that organized force is necessary to overthrow the ruling class of the United States. If that’s the case, a revolutionary movement must build the infrastructure, both ideological and material, needed to project that force and to survive the reaction. To put it in simple terms, on the ideological side we need broad exposure to our ideas and political program and we need a strong partisanship to that program among significant sections of the classes that would form a revolutionary coalition. Within that network, now bound together ideologically, we will find the material elements of the infrastructure of resistance. The preeminent material element is the movement partisan or party cadre who form the nodes in this network, tying individuals and communities together in struggle, spreading propaganda, and securing resources to protect and support the movement. The end goal is an above-ground network that distributes information and resources, with an underground (the capacity for self defense, hiding and being hidden) embedded within it. You’ll know you’re there when the masses are willing to harbor revolutionaries from state violence, even at great personal cost.

So, where do we begin? We have the starting point: that a revolution is possible in our lifetime. We have a bare-bones idea of what’s required to accomplish that. Beyond that is a gaping chasm of unknowns. The most critical question being who are the people that are the base of a revolutionary movement in the United States? Almost unanimously, the answer would be the working class. But that obscures almost as much as it illuminates. What working class? Where? What about elements of the proletariat and semi-proletariat forced into the labor reserve? What about any remaining vestiges of peasantry, or immigrants with peasant backgrounds? What role can the petit bourgeoisie play, or even class traitors among the big bourgeoisie? And how do national and other identities running through these classes and subclasses crystallize into identifiable revolutionary subjects? When communists are faced with these questions, the most basic questions of our craft, we don’t wave them away and rely on stale doctrine, dusty traditions, and hoary assumptions. We investigate. 

We understand based on historical experience that winning will require organized political violence with mass support, so we understand that building that mass support is a prerequisite to victory. Our immediate question is both with whom to build that mass support and how exactly to do it. In essence, we need to identify who the revolutionary masses are, who their enemies are, and who forms the vacillating middle forces between them. This has to be a specific and concrete analysis of actual class dynamics in situ. The “method” handed down through the communist movement in the United States of simply presuming a class structure based on schematics derived from doctrine developed over 100 years ago must be abandoned. That’s not to say the schematic is unsound, but it is not politically actionable. It doesn’t tell you concretely with whom to organize or how.

In terms of how to undertake this investigation, what methods to use, and how to train ourselves to do it well, I can only point to examples and suggest potential models, while also sharing a sense of what we should not do. First, a thorough class analysis that creates a basis for actual political engagement with class elements of an incipient revolutionary movement is not something that can be found hiding in a library. What can be found in books are instances of similar investigations, usually partial and outside of our current context, which can suggest methods of investigation. Additionally, “book” research is a source of broader information about the social formations in North America and how they link to the periphery, which can help identify promising targets for further investigation. However, the main element of the investigation is actually talking to people face to face. In other words, this is the type of investigation which would require methods that look more like journalism or ethnography than parsing through reams of economic statistics. 

An example of this method and its output would be Mao Zedong’s Report on an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan. Another example can be found in the practice of Amilcar Cabral and the PAIGC, which is described in Basil Davidson’s The Liberation of Guiné: Aspect of an African Revolution. Investigations that model a more formal structure would be W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro, which used systematic survey methods. The methods of Mao and Cabral are processes for developing actionable political analysis and, at the same time, they are themselves elegant political interventions. In addition to training ourselves in methods of communist political practice, the process of speaking with people directly about their class existence, their hardships, grievances, and systems of support, is one of introducing our movement to them. If done right, this introduction begins the process of winning them to the revolutionary movement, and winning them to this movement is the essence of building the infrastructure of resistance, including a revolutionary party.

Do not misunderstand: this investigation doesn’t happen while setting aside current struggles for a later time. It must be done at the same time that other struggles are advancing, and it must be done from within these struggles. Critically, this is not a prescription for stepping away from the movement for Palestinian liberation. Rather, that struggle must be escalated strategically and tactically. On the strategic side, our slogans need to move from demanding a ceasefire, to demanding total liberation for the Palestinian people, and they must connect the realization of that demand with a goal of overthrowing the U.S. ruling class that is the driving force behind israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. On the tactical side, small groups engaged in civil disobedience need to escalate to direct action. Those doing direct action should consider escalating to sabotage. At the mass scale, those organizing marches of hundreds or thousands need to be pointing those mobilizations at more strategic targets, and working towards more sustained interruptions of operations at these targets. And, across the board, leadership sitting at the gateways to this movement need to stop deescalation, while explicitly endorsing escalation in both word and deed. 

In the last five months, the struggle for Palestinian liberation has radicalized millions of people in North America and has shifted the political center of gravity. This shift has contributed to a whole train of prior fractures in the global system of capitalism-imperialism presided over by the United States and its imperial bloc. Where the temporary shutdown of capitalism in response to the COVID pandemic shot cracks through the system, in the United States this was followed by the George Floyd Rebellion, further weakening the structure. At the same time, an objective increase in the conflict between capital and labor ensued, including the attempted recuperation of capital’s position prior to the pandemic, most painfully through the unleashing of price inflation across the necessities of life. Internationally, the Global South has embarked on an inexorable process of asserting its sovereignty, decisively marking the zenith of U.S. hegemony. As these fractures have developed, a wave of fascist political advances has washed over the collective West. And overarching all of these stresses have been catastrophic changes to the global climate system, the very cradle of life on the planet. This was our reality on October 6, 2023, and it was in this context that the Palestinian Resistance broke through, shattering the system of global domination that is the source of ruling class power in North America. It may not look as if the system has fundamentally come apart, but that is only because the broken pieces are falling in slow motion and have yet to land. All of these conditions have decisively pulled the horizon of revolution into our lifetime. 

So, let us begin…

¹ This intervention is intended to be non-antagonistic and to engage politically conscious people in thinking through these questions. To paraphrase Mao Zedong, my intention is to struggle against incorrect views for the sake of building unity and getting the work of revolution done properly. If the language is sharp or totalizing and without caveat, this is due to the need for clarity in political interventions, as compared to the obscurity of academic and scholastic interventions. An unequivocal position in favor of one end of the contradiction is necessary to point out a course correction. It is not a full dismissal of the validity of the other side of the contradiction or the complexity of our reality. 

² For the full English text of this PFLP statement, beginning with “[t]he duty of the nation and supporters of Palestine is to escalate the struggle against the forces of aggression,” reference Resistance News Network or the Red Clarion’s archive.

³ This method of “building the party” is replicated in almost every communist/socialist party in the United States.

⁴ It should be noted that it is not only the PSL that is failing in their responsibility to help the masses identify impactful targets and facilitate actions against them. Every major organization involved in the broader movement for Palestine in the U.S. has either failed to identify strategic bottle-necks in the war machine, or has interfered against the use of appropriate protest tactics for disrupting them in a sustained way. 

⁵ It is a fact, established through Edward Snowden’s leaks, that the NSA literally makes a copy of all electronic communications in the United States, with years of traffic stored in databases to be “google” searched by a whole bevy of federal law enforcement agencies. The absolute minimum in security for a communist organization in this context is to keep your membership sign ups off the internet.

⁶ It is theoretically possible for the PSL to shift away from their opportunistic program and practice, and I hope they do, but we can’t wait around for it.