We say that we must come to know the difference between mobilization and organization because the enemy will use mobilization to demobilize us. Mobilization is very easy. Very, very easy. Since we are a people who are instinctively ready to respond against acts of injustice, any time there’s one little act of injustice, we can blow it up and we will find people who will come and make some mass demonstration around it. […] And this is what mobilization does, it mobilizes people around issues. Those of us who are revolutionary are not concerned with issues, we are concerned with the system. The difference must be properly understood. […] Mobilization usually leads to reform action, not to revolutionary action. […] We must transform mobilization to organization. We say the enemy will try to use mobilization to demobilize us. Many brothers and sisters who’ve been to the million and more march will say to you, ‘I was there.’ Well, what are you doing today my sister?

— Kwame Ture

Organizing, Not Merely Mobilizing

We have all heard and seen the mass demonstrations, marches, and walkouts that erupted in the Twin Cities, signaling the start of this year of struggle. We’ve heard the tramp of ten thousand people marching against the occupation, the sounds of mobilization; but beneath it, and lasting beyond, for those who know to listen, is a steadier sound — like whispers, like chants. That of the organizers standing sentry on street corners in the aching cold, coordinating grocery runs, rapid response to raids, and transporting students and workers safely. These bands are built by grassroots organization, and it’s precisely the last lesson our enemies want us to learn.

Five years ago, Minneapolis erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd. For that summer, it seemed every city in the world became an uprising, as Democrats scrambled to take a knee and corporations writhed to retire racist brand mascots and grant better media representation. USU spoke with a Communist on the ground in Minneapolis who has witnessed the sweep of 2020 to the present moment. “During this period, it felt like people were taking power in a way that’d be much bigger,” they told us. “Living in south Minneapolis, a police precinct being lit and set on fire, grocery stores looted and turned into mutual aid sites, 200 buildings going up in flames – that was a lot happening. In that short period of time, it felt more than a moment, but it quickly went away.”

All the energy to abolish the police, or even defund them, was funneled by liberal counterinsurgents into tactics that either wasted the time of great masses of the oppressed, or narrowly appealed to the upper classes of the nationally oppressed through job prospects and investment opportunity.¹ The “moment” that was 2020 evaporated into an utter defeat for the oppressed, and a complete victory for the settler-colonial ruling class that ensures daily the death of a countless unnamed Floyds. The only price paid: a handful of temporary concessions this current regime has already pried back with vengeance, and a single sacrificial pig.

As our comrade in Minneapolis said, “As Communists, we were not organized enough to win the masses over when they were ripe to be captured.”

It is the general consensus of principled Communists that this was a watershed moment wasted. Every failure is a lesson, data in the experiment of social revolution; but if no one is keeping track, if no one is recording the results and learning from past efforts, the movement might as well be hurling human lives at the wall to see what sticks and looking away at each impact. But, as it turns out, something has stuck. Something has lodged itself firmly in the communities of Minneapolis, that all resulting efforts to resist occupation have been able to grow from: organizations, persisting from the embers of 2020 to now. It’s our responsibility to learn from them.

In Minneapolis, there was a massive wave of homelessness at the beginning of COVID. Networks of mutual aid popped up because of that. Then the uprising happened, and people started figuring out how to take care of each other. Figuring out food, how to handle work, those networks were built by organizers, and after the mobilized masses disappeared in 2020, these networks remained.

The remarkable pace at which these networks expanded, from the handful of organizations to the intersecting community webs connecting every single city section, neighborhood, and block proves the lessons that Kwame Ture described so perfectly more than half a century ago. It also shows all of us, empire-wide, a roadmap for how to prepare as these “occupations” escalate. Every city on this land is a garrison fort, palisades replaced by cameras, automatic alarms, and barbed wire, so to call any concentration by the federal government an “occupation” is essentially a misnomer. It is merely a reinforcement. It is a concentration of already-existing state repressive powers. But we must not ignore the difference in form. The organizers in Minneapolis have adjusted to the reality of their new opponents.

All law enforcement in this country can and will kill you, we know that. They’re parts of the same arm in this imperialist state. However, what has become clear with these federal agents is that they do not function on the same playing field as a local PD. They do not operate on the same playing field as the National Guard. […] I don’t know if it’s a martyr complex or just talking shit, but I see this tendency from people who don’t live here when they say, “Stop filming and go de-arrest.” Or, “I wouldn’t let this happen.”

I’ll tell you: you would let it happen, or you’ll get killed.

De-arrest is more common in anarchist circles; anarchists here are not calling for de-arrest anymore that I’ve seen, because it’s understood in the city that we don’t stand any chance. You can de-arrest with the local PD. Not with ICE, because there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll kill you and the person they’re trying to kidnap. In the end, you still won’t stop who they’re trying to kidnap.

The organizers in Minneapolis understand fundamentally the dialectic between theory and practice. They have gathered experimental data from their lives, developed practices, tried and applied this theory, analyzed the results, and developed new theory and new practices. They are at the forefront of the fight against the bourgeois government.

The Four Opportunists and the Spontaneous Movement

As the press organ of the All-Empire Worker’s League, we have already taken a stand against the Four Opportunists, those “organizations” that capture revolutionary and radical energy, sweep up developing Communists and the newly class-conscious, and then negate them by combining them with liberals, by denying them access to the levers of power in their own organizations, by teaching them bad theory, and by burning up their energy through endless mobilization with no strategic goals. The Four Opportunists are the CPUSA, the PSL, the FRSO, and the DSA. (See “The 2026 Outlook of the Central Press” and “Liberalism and Fascism With Communist Characteristics” in the Red Clarion).

In Minneapolis, the growth of the spontaneous movement has continued in the face of the Four Opportunists, specifically the FRSO and DSA. USU has had contact with other Communists in Minnesota who tell us that…

De-legitimizing action and organizing is being done by individuals acting on the behalf of FRSO (DSA was also involved on this front). The hegemony held by FRSO makes this possible, as their cadre members are involved in other orgs. There’s another Somali group in Cedar Riverside who call themselves the Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance, but are democrat adjacent and pro assimilation. They were attempting to de-escalate by gathering all the African folks into their homes for that day, telling them to stand down and not confront [Jack] Lang.² Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance was doing flyering, circulating statements via signal group chats or boosting messages that were calling [an] org ³ outside antagonists with no right to organize in Cedar. They cut off supply lines and disrupted organizing work doing this.

When the fascists came to town, Jack Lang and co., the Coalition Against the Trump Agenda (A group made up of a lot of FRSO front orgs) enacted the strategy of “shadowing” the fascists.

Basically, this amounted to them just following them around and yelling stuff at them. However, things did not play out as FRSO planned. Roughly 1000 folks showed up (the divide between the masses and org affiliated was obvious) to counter around 10 fascists with a banner. The FRSO marshals protected the nazis’ banner from the masses, until they eventually lost control and the banner was destroyed in spite of their efforts. Extreme peace policing.

An additional note to further illustrate the resource strangulation and white chauvinism of FRSO: [a] Somali organization that led the defense action against Jake Lang in Cedar Riverside reached out to the SRA [Socialist Rifle Association] of Minneapolis for a firearms training. They later learned that there is a strong FRSO contingency in SRA. Once SRA realized this Somali organization was the one that held the defense action, SRA informed the organization that they would not move forward since they “created confusion and gave other (FRSO) organizations a hard time.”

From the comrade in Minneapolis:

One thing I can speak to is, right now, not just in Minneapolis, but nation-wide — we’re seeing opportunism. There’s this tailist need to use this term “general strike“ to try and illicit buy-in from people. For these days of action. We saw this last Friday. The labor unions involved, the orgs involved, it was never called a general strike. It was clear we weren’t calling for one. There were outside groups that decided to call it a general strike. […]

When we mislead people into thinking a day of vacation is the same as a general strike, we do an insurmountable amount of damage to education and getting working people to understand the actual risk-reward of going on strike. And dealing blows to capital which is the point of a strike. That is the big criticism I Have right now. The organizations that should and do know better, continue to use words like general strike.

PSL has pursued a similar strategy in Minneapolis: more than any other group, they have misrepresented the effort to organize petty-bourgeois businesses to voluntarily close as a “general strike.” They encouraged people to use paid time off to participate in marches. This is the PSL’s strategy of class struggle — not as the struggle of the lowest elements of the proletariat against the imperialist system, but as the struggle of the petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic layers to achieve limited political aims. This is not revolution. This is counterinsurgency.

The spontaneous development of the people is breaking free of the chains long cast over the struggle for liberation by the Four Opportunists. In every corner of the US Empire, the grip of the opportunists and the tailists is weakening. We must unite the most advanced theory with the most class-conscious elements of the people and we must fight against the settler-socialism of the opportunist groups. What is this settler-socialism? It is the Marxism of capitulation, a form of revisionism that sees reform as the only path forward and puts the question of revolution forever over the horizon. (See “Revolution in Our Lifetime” in the Red Clarion). In FRSO and PSL, this is partially accomplished through the deceptive organizational structure in which access to internal documents and planning is entirely isolated and inaccessible; day to day members of these organizations are encouraged to pay into them and attend marches, but the strategic and tactical level operates at one remove from the general membership. All decisions are made by a secret group of select few — Blanquism, in other words. (See, for instance, “The Cult Building Tendency” in the Red Clarion). Have you seen calls for marches spring up with less than 24 or 48 hours notice? That’s the work of the Four Opportunists. Whether it is their intention or not, the material result is the bleeding off of revolutionary energy into channels that are acceptable to the ruling class. In truth, it is an attempt to find accommodation with the ruling class and demand a different distribution of power within the imperialist system. It is the plea of the imperialist labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie (who overwhelmingly command the Four Opportunists) for more spoils to be allocated to them and for a greater degree of input into the empire’s political system.

For more on the Four Opportunists and our criticisms, see generally “Stagnant Parties Don’t Deserve Your Time” in the Clarion, and…

CPUSA – “A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words,” “Why I Left the CPUSA”

PSL – “Revolution in Our Lifetime”

FRSO – “The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO,” “Forward Out of FRSO”

DSA – “Triumph For the Zionist Left”

We, and the organizers in Minnesota, reject this settler bargain.

The League Principle

We require a country-wide organization to fight both the Four Opportunists and their labor-aristocratic/petty-bourgeois base and the bourgeois state itself. The lessons of Minneapolis are clear: it is possible to bring elements of the imperialist working class into direct and antagonistic contradiction with the state when we move our strategic goals out of the narrow realm of wage increases and into the realm of the national liberation struggle. White anarchists and Communists, petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic elements, have joined the national liberation struggle against ICE. Breaking the law for the first time, acting directly against the state for the first time, opens a new world of revolutionary potential among the labor aristocracy. Show them that it is possible to oppose the state, rather than seek accommodation with it, and we develop the subjective awareness of revolution. Revolutionary potential is created within otherwise reactionary elements of the population.

However, this is only possible with uncompromising proletarian leadership. Without the anchor of a revolutionary, proletarian organization, opportunism is the unavoidable result. Those members of the imperial labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie who will not voluntarily surrender their class-outlook and who will not voluntarily subject themselves to proletarian class-leadership are our objective enemy.

The principle of the League is the intermediary principle between our present stage of development (scattered, ideologically incoherent, with the presence of small pockets of developed Communist organization at the local level) and the militant party-form. Yes, we need a party of the new (new) type, as the All-Empire Worker’s League has put it,

It’s not enough, though, to just state the obvious: that the US in 2025 is not Russia in 1917, it is not China, it is not Viet Nam, it is not a semi-feudal country or a country in the global periphery. The US is the center of world-capitalist reaction, an imperial hegemon that acts as the backstop and system of last defense for capitalism across the entire world. No metropolitan country has ever seen a successful proletarian revolution….

We must create a vanguard organization of the working class that can purge all opportunism and revisionism from its ranks, educate and elevate the working masses, defeat internal and external chauvinism, unite the liberation struggles of the colonies and semi-colonies, and prepare the reserves of the revolutionary proletariat for direct confrontation — for direct class war — with the enemy state, with bourgeois civil society, and with the world-bourgeoisie themselves, who largely reside within the US-Canadian bloc. In order to satisfy these requirements, we must creatively apply the lessons of 1905, of October, of the course of struggle in China, Viet Nam, Ghana, and the whole periphery.

While we work to create this party, we must organize our various local organizations together and take advantage of the benefits this centralization can provide. While a League is not yet a party, it is an organization of organizations. We have discussed the formation of regional leagues in the Clarion in the past (see “Towards a New York City League of Workers and Students” and “Towards a Boston League of Workers and Students”). It is through this process of regional organization that we can build our capacity to resist the state as well as the class forces that tend to drag Communist-oriented projects in the US empire toward opportunism.

Since 2025, the All-Empire Worker’s League has worked to integrate local organizations and propagate, develop, and advance the theory necessary to combat the opportunists and the bourgeois imperialists. In areas with a high concentration of developed local organizations that are actually engaged in class struggle against the state, we urge them to band together to resist opportunism and form centralized organs of class power.

In regions where the struggle has not yet been heightened to the same degree as in Minneapolis, we urge local organizations to prepare for the same degree of struggle. Our sources on the ground warn that unless we prepare in advance, we will be caught off guard. Washington is willing to kill to suppress class-consciousness and solidarity between the imperialist labor aristocracy and the US proletariat. We have to be ready to counter that violence with the main weapon we have: organization!

Footnotes:

1. Black, Too and Rasul A. Mowatt. Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. Routledge, New York, NY, 2024. Introduction, xi-xxiii and 138-145. ︎
2. Jack Lang is a pardoned January 6th rioter and fascist agitator. ︎
3. “[…] a group of communists who have been organizing in Minneapolis and Saint Paul who are critical of the established Left in the region and are actively attempting to build a viable decolonial Marxist alternative[…]” — From the Communists in Minneapolis. ︎

This most recent scandal again demonstrates the inseparability of the structures of organizing we have criticized in the past from the perpetuation of chauvinism and abuse. As we have written about in the USU Prospectus, it is the top-down structure of major organizations like the CPUSA, PSL, RCI, and FRSO that engender the sort of anti-democratization and stagnant leadership that permit abuses like this to evade accountability to membership. We will offer criticism of that particular structure, and our feedback for what principled communists within and outside FRSO can do to prevent it. 

Following the exposure of a large Marxist organization for systematic permittance, compliance, and covering up of abuses, there is always a sense of hopelessness among conscious members and supporters of the exposed org. Many equate loss of trust in a particular organization with loss of hope in the movement for communism itself. To understand this, we must understand the reasons people overwhelmingly seek out larger organizations to subordinate themselves to, rather than forming their own groups from the ground up. These reasons are:

1. Political Underdevelopment: An individual new to Marxism assumes that an insufficient understanding of core principles and history will make any attempts at group formation, primarily through their own direction, careless or ineffectual.
2. Social Isolation: An individual who feels too socially isolated to begin the formation of a group — they do not have, or are not aware of, proximate access to other unorganized Marxists, and/or do not know where to begin to draw in the revolutionary masses. 
3. Fear of Redundancy: An individual who feels that to start from scratch in organization-building is wasted effort when a suitable organization of principled Marxists already exists within accessible distance. 

Political Underdevelopment

It is precisely the organized pursuit of Marxist understanding that laid the foundation for the emergence of nearly every successful socialist revolution throughout the world (Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, to name only a few). Therefore, if the underdeveloped comrade finds themselves unsure of where to begin, we cannot stress the importance of the study group enough. To study while the world burns is not to waste time, it is the only way to ensure we successfully douse the flames. 

To quote the USU handbook The Study Group:

Therefore, it is no idle fancy that we suggest the study group — the reading circle — as the focus of local work. The study group has historically been the way in which socialists educate themselves and each other. This is the methodology of early socialist development. We must consider ourselves to be in such a phase. We do not suggest the study group because it is simple or because it is the topic which we chose from a hat, but because it is a foundational type of primary Communist organization.

In fact, it is the overemphasis on “action,” before and above theory that will ensure precious time and energy be wasted, yet again. We often see the argument that, “Well, since the dialectic is practice-theory-practice, a group and its members must engage in practice first every single time, then study the results and modify next actions.” But this confuses our place within history; we wander the cramped halls of a library of failures, shelves stocked to burst with recorded practice.¹ What is the history of the Marxist movement in North America, if not the history of wheels spinning in place? This is not to suggest that there has never been progress, but those that did advance the struggle did so as far as they were able and willing to scientifically understand the conditions their actions existed within. 

Social Isolation

For the Marxist that is hesitant to undertake the building of a new Marxist organization due to isolation from other like-minded people in their community, we recommend the following (summarized from the relevant portions of the aforementioned Study Group handbook). First, investigate local conditions to determine demographics and needs. This will inform what the study group will initially set out to study and who in the local area will be most likely to be interested in revolutionary work. After this initial investigation, identify if there are any trustworthy individual Marxists nearby to assist in the formation of an Organizing Committee to adopt basic rules for the emerging organization and plan the first steps in putting it into motion. Whether an Organizing Committee is successfully assembled or the individual Marxist still finds themself operating on their own, they can proceed to the next step which is spreading the word of the study group through fliering or other outreach. We have seen the most success when the fliering advertises a specific text that will be read at a specific time and place, and that there is no expectation of having been familiar with it before the scheduled date.

If, however, the individual Marxist is not able to identify trustworthy individual Marxists nearby, nor engage in much of the on-the-ground investigation and spreading the word that the recommended tactics advise, we recommend getting involved in whatever local organizing is available for the purpose of identifying potential comrades to organize with separately in the creation of the study group. The individual should be wary of the ideological underpinnings of most local organizing, and keep in mind that the most vital work any individual Marxist can engage in is identifying others suitable for the creation of Marxist organizations. It is not the subordination of Marxists to local activism.

Fear of Redundancy

Fear of redundancy when considering building a new organization is, on its own, a valid concern. However, in understanding that it is valid, we must then ask, is the concern well-founded, is it sound? Let us assume, first, that it is. It is true that if you have a principled group of organized Marxists down the street, around the block, within a short bus trip or a bike ride away, then to attempt to build from scratch a new organization of Marxists to address the same community’s needs, to study the revolutionary science, or to otherwise advance the struggle, may be entirely redundant. Even in the cases of an existing organization formed to address a particular purpose (e.g. Red Aid, group study, community defense, etc.) that do not address a particular need an individual would like to organize around, it is in most cases best for that individual or group of individuals to make contact with the local organization and discuss the possibility of joining and forming a branch or committee to the organization that addresses the issue. This has the benefit of additional funding through dues, a preexisting and tested bylaws structure, and the input and labor of more people.

The alternative, more common case, is that through social media or word of mouth, the individual locates an organization of self-proclaimed Marxists, who identify with the same general tendency of the individual, Marxism-Leninism. The individual decides to contact the organization, which seems more than ready to receive and induct them into membership. The individual takes to the work with a sincere drive and passion. Likely, they become regarded by their fellow members as reliable and trustworthy. Principled. 

Then, weeks, months, years later, it happens. Maybe it happens all at once: the individual witnesses, or discovers, or experiences intra-org abuse. Maybe, at first, it’s a subtler, gnawing doubt: a confusing newsletter from leadership that vaguely gestures at some sort of conflict the membership must not allow themselves to be swayed by; the removal of a district organizer with no explanation due to “concerns of privacy”; a series of dead links to organizing cells that no longer exist, discussion of its members heavily discouraged. The more openly the individual confronts these moments of disconnect, these organizational hauntings, the more the individual realizes the organization has begun to shift and squirm around them. The individual’s reputation as trustworthy spoils, now other members seem nervous talking to them; their reputation as principled is outright questioned — “You’re behaving like a wrecker.” The secondary realization will not come easy, that the abuse is not some isolated tumor, but every muscle fiber and bone of the organization. It’s a nightmare, to push for a new life for everyone, only to find you’ve become embedded in a corpse. 

This is the reality of organizations like FRSO, RCI, and PSL. The members satisfied with working in a faux-radical reformist group stay, follow the rules (regardless of how these change based on leadership’s whims), and, understanding that their satisfaction with gradual change and improved conditions for the labor aristocracy is mirrored in the organization, remain unquestioningly loyal to it. Why wouldn’t they? As patriotic settlers and flag-worshipping elites show us, people become fiercely defensive of the structure serving their interests. For this loyalty, they are rewarded with advancement, leadership, maybe even the highest honor of all: full-time employment as a revisionist, maybe even with a corner office. The FRSO whistleblowers say this plainly (emphasis ours):

Each time leadership protects an alleged abuser, those who see the problem clearly either leave or leadership pushes them out, while those who can rationalize the decision remain. Over successive incidents, the organization becomes composed of people who have demonstrated willingness to defend leadership’s protection of alleged abusers. Leadership advances from this filtered pool.

Chrisley Carpio² and Michela Martinazzi³ were present for the Tampa and Gainesville incidents, and defended Dustin⁴ both times. Jared Hamil⁵ was the Tampa District Organizer in 2014. Fern⁶ was the DO of Gainesville in 2013 and Jacksonville in 2016. Sol Marquez⁷ defended Dustin in Tampa. They’ve all since been promoted to national leadership positions in FRSO.

Meanwhile, the members who are most desperate for real sweeping change, no matter how bitter the struggle, the most ready to be revolutionary, are resigned to the rank-and-file. These dedicated comrades are usually the most committed, initially, to the communicated “cause” of the organization. Usually nationally oppressed, disabled, queer, and/or trans, these members give their blood to the organization. It is useful to emphasize the ways in which the “multi-national working class” line that organizations like FRSO hold, and that we have criticized, helps to facilitate an opportunist position not just externally, but internally as well, as we now see clearly. It is by this line that opportunists can lecture members about how it is the advocacy against chauvinism and abuse which disrupts the “solidarity” and “stability” of this supposed multi-national working class. Real determining factors such as settler-colonialism and imperial superwages are flattened for the sake of a model that prizes false unity and not shaking the boat. Sometimes, in spite of being surrounded by this rhetoric, members try to struggle within the organization, like they were told to again and again, only to be stonewalled, silenced, disciplined, and gaslit. The system serves its purpose and crushes all attempts at real revolutionary struggle. Afterwards, these comrades are isolated entirely, betrayed, and often left too burnt out to pick the banner up again. Both leadership and the capitalist state are satisfied by this outcome. Leadership gets to continue its maintenance of a structure purged of genuine communists who may threaten business as usual, and the state eagerly pats them on the back for demobilizing these radicals. Is it any wonder these organizations have persisted in their current form for so many decades?

These organizations always set themselves up as the true inheritors of the future, in contradistinction to the tiny microsect or local study group.  This is how they market themselves — it is the only way they can justify their own drawn out existence. They say, “Well, what else are you going to do? Start a tiny group of three people that claims it represents the masses?” the same way  the Democratic Party defends its position saying “What are you going to do? Run as an independent?”. It is the same logic painted red and yellow. The rhetoric of the reformist clouds the horizon. This is repeated ad nauseum within these organizations and then repeated by members to people outside the group. Even when the principled communists flee these sinking ships in disgust still ready and willing to organize, too often does this toxic idea stick to them, signaling the sequel: the communist goes looking for another “big” org. 

It is crucial we do everything in our power to ensure this doesn’t happen. The choice is not between languishing in bloated reformist NGOs or isolated in some puny microsect for all time. This is a false binary. The true path forward is what has worked for most socialist revolutions around the world. The party of the people is not born from some downtown office that directs the formation of new cells like a chain restaurant establishing franchises. Rather, it is precisely the tiny, local group of principled communists that shifts history, step by step, until a leap and bound, to the party of the people. To summarize the portion on this in the USU Prospectus⁸: the correct path begins with the formation of the local organization, uniquely adapted to local conditions and able to establish roots among the local masses in a way these franchise organizations are incapable of. The local organization then reaches out to other primary groups of principled communists regionally and then around the country in order to collaborate, coordinate, and struggle in a process that eventually enables the establishment of real organizational unity. 

These local organizations are not subordinated to a tiny sect filtered through several vetting processes to remove any trace of real revolutionary consciousness. They democratically determine their own representatives to the second-order organizations they form to coordinate and reproduce their unity. It is through this initially, vitally horizontal process that a greater set of bylaws are written and ratified, a set of practices and standards. Through a series of conferences these local organizations eventually form the party-to-be. 

This is how the vanguard party emerges, not in the backwards manner that the CPUSA, PSL, and FRSO have undertaken. This top-down schematic followed by the chauvinist organizations is the correct blueprint only if your design is a weapon wielded against the people. We, however, wish to help the revolutionary masses build a great cannon to obliterate chauvinistic violence forever. The All-Empire Worker’s League has begun this process. 

Looking Forward

We commend the efforts of our comrades to lay out a plan for agitation and exodus of members from FRSO. As challenging as it may be, it is often far more important that the most principled communists, with the capacity to do so without risking burnout, remain within the exposed organization. Not for anything so foolhardy as to “change the system from within” (you cannot negotiate with the snake from the pit of its stomach), but to agitate and heighten the struggle to a fever pitch from within. As they do this, these communists must seek out sympathetic comrades within who take these abuses seriously but remain unsure for the reasons above. Each rallying cry for justice will peel back the rotting mask of democracy from the revisionist’s face; the skull of reaction will be grinning, sharp, and naked. 

The strategy of agitating around an attempt to seize the structure and body of the organization from its center may be useful in winning over the sympathetic comrades mentioned above, still in the grip of the apparent hopelessness of organizing outside the vast structure FRSO operates. But just as the authors of the exposé recognize, this goal will never be achieved. It is like a radical program that “demands” the United States government liquidate its military. This is a goal of the radical movement, but it is not something that will ever be given, only seized. However, just as part of that recognition is seeing that the settler-bourgeois state machinery will be smashed and replaced with a new structure to defend the revolution of the oppressed, the agitators in FRSO must see the structure of FRSO not as something to be taken and used, but something to be left in the dustbin of history. It is not an organizational system useful to those of us who demand revolution, it is a multi-level-marketing scheme with a beret. 

It is the people you will find while raising hell that will be invaluable to you. You must link arms with the most solid, passionate comrades you can find and only jump ship when you have enough hands to commandeer the lifeboats. Treat the chaos of this scandal as a proving ground for the most trustworthy and audacious communists. When you find your people, we have some resources to help you get started. Just as we were honored to offer our feedback and labor to the reporters of this abuse, we eagerly await your input, curiosity, and fire; not just as members of Unity–Struggle–Unity, but as part of the All-Empire Worker’s League. Meet us, organized and principled, and be treated as you are, as you’ve proven yourself to be: comrades.

Contact the USU Editorial Board here.

Contact the All-Empire Worker’s League here.

Footnotes

1. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Marx. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852. ︎
2.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO, leader of the FRSO Student Commission, and president of National Students for a Democratic Society.” (Copied from source.) ︎
3.  “Member of the Central Committee, current District Organizer of FRSO New York.” Ibid. ︎
4.  “FRSO member who was accused of sexual assault in Gainesville, Tampa, and Jacksonville and protected by FRSO leadership. Left FRSO in 2018.” Ibid. ︎
5.  “Leader of Labor Commission” Ibid. ︎
6.  “Member of the Standing Committee of FRSO. DO of Gainesville when FRSO protected Dustin Ponder in 2013. DO of Jacksonville in 2016.” Ibid. ︎
7.  “Leadership of Legalization 4 All and FRSO Chicano/Latino Commission.” Ibid. ︎
8.  Worth highlighting is the subsection of our Prospectus on FRSO specifically. Written years ago, before our criticisms of them for settler chauvinism and these most recent revelations, and thus offering them more good faith than it turns out they deserved, the section still holds up in diagnosing the issue of structure that produces FRSO’s moribund theory and practice: “FRSO recognizes in theory that primary organizations must be built. However, despite claiming that they are a pre-party formation and not a party, they operate like a party-in-miniature, with congresses, a Central Committee, and central decision-making. The efforts of local FRSO organizers are directed at creating primary organizations — the local is being directed by the center. This reverses the necessary stages of growth of the Party.” ︎

The existing countrywide formations that claim to represent some form of proletarian class-power (in whatever embryonic state) are hopelessly compromised. It has been one of the major labors of Unity–Struggle–Unity Press to investigate each of these organizations to determine the theoretical rigor, organizational design, and strength of principle. Since the foundation of this Press in 2022, we have investigated and determined that each of the major “Marxist-Leninist” groups — PSL, FRSO, CPUSA — suffer not only from fatally anti-democratic structures, but also from terminal and fundamental errors of theory that cannot be corrected because of the entrenched leadership and opportunism or chauvinism that still reigns in each formation. We have witnessed CPUSA’s disastrous embrace of social fascism at and after its last “convention” and the expulsion of the pro-democracy clubs, precisely as we predicted, and following the very same pattern laid out by the CP Canada a year earlier during their bankrupt “convention.” Indeed, by analyzing the conditions of CPUSA and CP Canada, we were able to warn that the CPUSA would repeat the errors of CP Canada and the result would be the same: that is what occurred.

Last year, we published a pamphlet (“Towards a New York City League of Workers and Students”) in which we established an analytical framework and plan for local organizing in a major U.S. city. This pamphlet applies the same methodology to the city of Boston.

It is necessary for the working class to possess a weapon to confront the ruling class. It is necessary for the working masses in the U.S.-Canadian bloc to be educated (and to educate themselves) on the duty of internationalism and to chart a path not toward the aggrandizement of their current positions, but towards the destruction of the imperialist state itself, in order to bring about not only the liberation of the oppressed masses of the Global South, but to secure its own liberation. It is necessary to strike at the chains the workers of the imperial centers have helped forge and to draw them away from the side of their “own” bourgeoisie.

The formation of this weapon of class-power is already under way. League-type organizations have been formed in several cities and localities in the U.S. This Press has been continuously reaching out to existing local Marxist-Leninist organizations in an effort to knit them together, to realize the completion of that weapon. The fact remains, however, that the number of existing organizations that are prepared to adopt a sufficiently (decolonial) Marxist-Leninist program is still too low. More organizations must still be formed. The advanced ranks of the working classes must be united with the most advanced theory. In order to overcome our numerical deficiency and the theoretical deficiency of the currently arch-chauvinistic movement, we urge the formation of advanced study groups in the major cities of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

We urge our readers to begin by reading our pieces on organization: “Organize!”, “What is Organizing?”, The Study Group, and “Towards a New York League of Workers and Students.” The purpose of the study group is not to simply remain a study group, but to gather who can be gathered and set the right foot forward in formation.

Why the City?

Marxist parties and modern socialism are the products of the cities. Even in semi-feudal or semi-colonial countries, the parties that eventually won the countryside were formed in the cities. Advanced workers are naturally to be found in greater concentration in the urban areas. This is where advanced industry, even in the “late capitalist” United States, is to be found.

The reasons for the primacy of the cities at this stage are many:

1. The living, working, and transportation accommodations of cities are social, as opposed to individual. Apartment buildings encourage the mingling of interests as well as social groups. Public transportation throws together all manner of people, but mostly working ones. Public spaces provide the opportunity to meet, interact, and spread ideas and literature. This is in sharp contrast to the atomization-by-design suffered in the suburbs where each “family” is cabined off from the other.
2. The absolute numbers of people living in urban areas mean there are more advanced workers overall available for organizing. When bystanders are drawn into the struggle by our actions in the cities, more of them are involved incidentally (and thus radicalized) than in rural areas.
3. Communication and meetings are both easier in areas with strong internal linkages — public transportation and public meeting places.
4. The supply lines of cities are narrower and more tenuous, easier to disrupt. Cities represent “nerve centers” of capitalist enterprises. Therefore, organized action in cities also benefits from a force multiplier as it can more easily affect larger numbers of capitalist organizations.
5. Politics are more “concentrated” and it is therefore easier both to exert leverage on politicians by means of class power where they live in the midst of the people or in places easily accessible by the people, and it is easier for local organizations to seize local political power. The degree by which workers outnumber the ruling class is heightened in cities where more workers are concentrated.
6. As the masses increase in size in an urban area, the state repressive machinery cannot keep pace. For instance, in 2022 Boston had 301.3 police officers per 100,000 residents, as comparable to the average for cities in the Northeast under 10,000 people (300 per 100,000). Because of the additional influence and power of large groups of people, this represents a force far less capable than that in small and medium-sized cities.

Class Analysis of the Boston Metro Area

The total population of the metropolitan area of Boston is roughly 4.9 million people. Of that, some 250,000-350,000 people are students in attendance to one of the 50+ schools of higher education in the region. The absolute population of students is higher than many mid-sized U.S. cities!

However, we must be cautious about the class-character of Boston as a whole. It is overwhelmingly petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic. This necessitates concrete considerations as to which professions to begin to organize in and around, which localities are necessary to organize, etc.

Here it becomes critically important to examine the question of national oppression: In 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reported that median net worth for white households in the metro area was $250,000, while Black households held a median net worth of $8.

There are, therefore, two routes toward establishing the primary organizations required to build a league in Boston. Both avenues should be pursued simultaneously by different groups, with the decision of which avenue to be dictated primarily by the differing access of the involved organizations to different communities, resources, and tools. Essentially, organizing must start among the proletarian/sub-proletarian populations and the petty bourgeois population and work toward unification into the league-form.

Boston Metro Is Over One-Third Petty Bourgeois

Taking data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wages reports, we can quickly see that the predominant minority of productive relations in Boston are petty bourgeois. There are, for instance, 276,210 management workers (8 of which are actually bourgeois CEOS), 234,750 business and finance workers, 136,640 technical workers in computers and mathematics, 64,870 architects and engineers, 64,140 scientists, 26,730 petty bourgeois legal workers, 40,070 media workers, 184,560 healthcare practitioners, and several thousand post-secondary teachers.¹ The total number of petty bourgeois occupations is around 1,023,528, which comprises 36% of the 2,794,300 members of the Boston metro labor force.

The petty bourgeoisie must be organized not along wage struggles, workplace improvements, etc., but rather along their progressive ideological lines. As we know, the petty bourgeoisie are a vacillating class; they are sometimes progressive, sometimes regressive, as befits their position between the waged workers and the ruling class. In order to organize them as a class, we must be attentive to the positions they have that are progressive; by focusing on these and directing their energy to ever-escalating struggle in that arena, it opens an opportunity to introduce political education into their midst. While we cannot expect the majority of the class to shed their petty bourgeois ideologies, there are benefits to the radicalization and education of even a minority, as this class has access to resources (both material resources and social connections) that would otherwise be denied a Communist league.

Most of the students in the Boston metro area are also from petty bourgeois households, and the temporary nature of being a student means that even when they are not from petty bourgeois extraction, they have a tendency to adopt a petty bourgeois outlook. Thus, student organizations should consider themselves to be part of this class-stratum and address their political development and strategies accordingly.

Those groups organizing among the Boston petty bourgeoisie must identify the most pressing progressive issues that confront that class or into which that class is willing to get involved. This will likely include confrontation with the federal government over the withdrawal of imperialist superprofits in the form of school funding, attacks on cherished liberal institutions, reproductive health, childcare support, etc., as well as LGBTQ+ defense and forms of anti-ICE defense. We should be striving to organize them along lines of national and gender solidarity: 1) nationally oppressed community defense, 2) ICE defense, and 3) defense of transgender people (and the sex-oppressed, to fight against the encroachment of patriarchal reaction). These defense organizations would be the most progressive and most liberatory of all possible lines the petty bourgeoisie can be drawn into.

By drawing the progressive petty bourgeoisie into illegal and anti-governmental actions, the mental deadlock that surrounds their inability to conceive of radical social revolution will be broken up. When they no longer trust the institutions of class-governance, they will become amenable to political education on the abolition of class society itself. This doesn’t, of course, mean that they should be immediately integrated without proper proletarian education!

Once a strong, proletarian core of organizations has been founded to provide itself as the anchor of a Communist league, those organizations that are primarily petty bourgeois or which are primarily organizing and drawing on the petty bourgeois class can effectively act in support of the proletarian interests in the area to relieve the immediate hardships affecting nationally oppressed workers and the lower strata of the proletariat, which include the presence of capitalist police in their communities, food and housing instability, etc.

Who are the Proletarians?

To determine where the revolutionary proletarian line falls, we first take those who are employed in proletarian (waged) labor and then compare the present income of that labor against the superprofits redistributed to U.S. workers by weighing it against the global median income. The global median yearly income is around $18,000 per household.²

We must then calculate the value of socialized services that are currently private and paid for out of wages in the Boston metro area: rent, healthcare, food, transportation, utilities, and childcare. These are…

Boston metro rent: $42,336/year

Healthcare: $18,000/year³

Food: conservatively, $9,000/year⁴

Transportation: $13,575⁵

Utilities: $1,560

Childcare: $22,000⁶

The total costs of these services, which would be provided by a socialized government and proletarian class-dictatorship, is $106,471. Even if the median Boston household income of $78,000 were reduced to the global average of $18,000 (a $60,000 loss), the median income proletarian in Boston would still gain $46,471 worth of services and socialized guarantees if the regime of private property were overthrown tomorrow.

This means that greater than half of all proletarian workers in healthcare support (184,000 total), food preparation (212,080 total), grounds and buildings maintenance (78,720 total), sales (216,980 total), administrative support (299,890 total), production (101,830 total) and transportation of materials industries (166,340 total) are in the strata of the immediately revolutionary proletariat.

Even if only 1% of those above workers were able to be mobilized, that would represent some 12,500 workers, a sizable revolutionary force.

Obviously, this is somewhat complicated by the ownership of substantial real property (a house or apartment) or other investment capital. Those proletarians who own real property must be generally excluded from the revolutionary strata and considered to be labor aristocrats, as they will obviously stand to lose that real property in the near term of any revolutionary movement.

The rate of homeownership in the entire metro area is only 35%. There are variations within the city, the highest area being West Roxbury (63.6%), the lowest Fenway/Kenmore (8.6%).⁷ The eight regions of the metro area with the lowest homeownership rates are Fenway/Kenmore, Allston/Brighton (21%), Roxbury (33%), Central (27%), East Boston (27.5%), the South End (33%), Back Bay (33.8%), Jamaica Plain (34.9%), and Mattapan (35.5%). According to the 2023 U.S. census data, Fenway/Kenmore has a median household income of $59,612, Allston/Brighton has $74,672, Roxbury $52,364, East Boston $92,079, South End $90,142, Back Bay $118,367, Jamaica Plain, $130,533, and Mattapan $50,946.⁸ It should come as no surprise that the nationally oppressed New Afrikan population in the Boston metro area is highest in Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester.

Organizing is highly encouraged in the Fenway, Allston, Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester areas. Oppressed national groups should be organized into fighting formations by Marxist-Leninists and made capable of ejecting bourgeois state agents, particularly police, from their communities. At the same time, organizations must be established by workplace in all areas where the contradictions are sharpest for the working class. These must be geared toward an eventual all-out confrontation with the forces of capital on the economic front (production, transportation).

Billionaires in their Midst

Of the class of big imperialists, 24 live in the Boston metro area. These include Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity, Robert Kraft, CEO of the Kraft Group, Jim Davis, owner and chair of New Balance, John Henry, owner of the Fenway Sports Group (married to the CEO of the Boston Globe) and Stephane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna. There are 27,000 millionaires living in the metro area, cheek to jowl with the working classes of oppressed nations that support their extravagant and wasteful lifestyles.

This means that mobilization against the ruling class can begin inside the metro area itself.

The Noose Is Being Fashioned

We have seen the continuous expansion and increase of local police departments on the ground over the past 25 years. In June of 2000, local U.S. police departments had 565,915 employees, including 441,000 officers.⁹ As of 2024, there are now 808,700 local police across the country.¹⁰ That is nearly a two-fold expansion of local police officers alone. There were 17,654 officers employed by INS in 2000, 10,820 employed by Customs, and 11,523 employed by the FBI.¹¹ In 2020, there were 66,215 Homeland Security officers (which absorbed INS and Customs) and 13,575 FBI agents.¹² There is no question: the local and federal police state is being expanded. Now, it is increasing with ever-growing speed. The proliferation of the Homeland Security “fusion centers” (see the Clarion article, “State of Control”), as well as “cop cities,” is accompanied by ever-expanding budgets for police departments to outfit themselves as soldiers ($65.7 billion in 2000, $176 billion in 2024).¹³ Now, the White House is federalizing National Guard units and deploying them to occupy U.S. cities — presently in the District of Columbia, and soon to be deployed in Chicago.

We must realistically consider whether the old planter ideology of racists like Thomas Jefferson (the “peaceful” extermination of Black slaves to remove the threat of rebellion), most recently reclaimed by open fascists and white nationalists (beginning with Charles Manson, but continuing with The Turner Diaries, SIEGE, etc.) has been adopted by the leading clique of the ruling class. These expansions of the police and their integration into a country-wide network and the federal armed forces are the opening moves of the complete liquidation of the oppressed and colonized nations. The Euro-American nation will operate the U.S. empire as an overseer herrenvolk state; an acknowledgement that the nationally oppressed constitute an internal threat to capitalist order.

The fact that this system is being assembled without significant opposition from any of the ruling class “progressives” or “centrists” (including the entire roster of Democrats and Independents) suggests that all elements of the ruling class are at least passively onboard with this project, and we should expect no relief from that quarter. This makes it all the more pressing to organize Communist groups that can, and will, combat it. Only with conscious elements in the lead can we ensure that Euro-American workers are broken away from “their own” bourgeoisie, the leading imperialists.

The urgent tasks of Communists are, with respect to the white “great” national workers (the national-oppresser, Euro-American proletariat), to break their dependence on the captured unions and to set them at odds with the big bourgeoisie, to instill consciousness of internationalism and national solidarity with the internal colonies and semi-colonies. With respect to the nationally oppressed and colonized people within the U.S., the task is to establish self-defense units and organizations capable of uniting into a leading party that will strike back at the state and its operatives.

There is presently an opportunity to do just that in Boston; to create local organizations that can unify into a metro-wide league, capable of acting in concert and preparing the way for the unification of all local leagues into a Decolonial Marxist-Leninist party.

1.  According to the 2023 survey by the BLS.
   ︎
2.  World Population Review, calculated at roughly $9,000 per individual.
   ︎
3.  Calculated per capita at $9,097 according to researchers at JAMA. “Tracking U.S. Health Care Spending by Health Condition and County,” Joseph L. Dieleman, Meera Beauchamp, Sawyer W. Crosby, et al. (Feb. 14, 2025).
   ︎
4.  According to the USDA.
   ︎
5.  Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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6.  Per child, according to a LendingTree study.
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7.  All homeownership rates taken from the City of Boston, Research Division and Planning Department, “Boston by the Numbers: Housing,” 2013.
   ︎
8.  According to U.S. census data collected during the 2023 American Community Survey.
   ︎
9.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Local Police Departments 2000.” 
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10.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    ︎
11.  Bureau of Justice Statistics “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2000,” (Jul. 1, 2001).
    ︎
12.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2020 – Statistical Tables,” (Sept. 29, 2023).
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13.  U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Government current expenditures: State and local: Public order and safety: Police,” retrieved from FRED 9/2/25.
    ︎

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 ︎

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no division between us and the masses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nikolai Bukharin, The ABC of Communism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

False Nationalism, False Internationalism

Call for Self-Criticism from Red Clarion authors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note on Movement Security and Care

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

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

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

Reading List

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

“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.

Last week, the popular consciousness once again exploded: Elias Rodriguez, unable to find an organization that was prepared to meaningfully confront the economic and political machinery of the U.S. state — unable to find some way to strike at the U.S. backbone for the zionists’ genocidal army — took desperate, direct, action. He killed two genocidaires in the heart of their rear base, the United States.

With this act, Elias has done more to expose the opportunists who wrap themselves in red flags than a century of angry condemnations. As the news and capitalist police rushed to connect Elias with the PSL that “party” for socialism and liberation issued a statement disowning him. “We have nothing to do with this shooting,” their media people wrote — but they didn’t stop there. “We have nothing to do with this shooting and we do not support it.”

OK, they’re under pressure to prevent the state from swinging its heavy hammer in their direction. It’s a cowardly but comprehensible move from an organization with no underground that has never laid out a clear theoretical path from the present moment to a future revolution. A Communist party cannot hide its plan for revolution!

The CPUSA then released a long-winded weepy statement condemning “MAGA” and Trump and openly denouncing violence. They never mention, of course, Joseph Robinette Biden or his genocidal advisors. Scores of Trotskyists began to wail and gnash their teeth, doing their best to deny Elias’ heroism.

These people have either forgotten or are intentionally distorting the goals and meaning of the Communist movement. Our aim is to carry the red flag forward, to rally all progressive forces to fight for liberation. Liberals, who make even their protests serve to uphold the capitalist-imperialist systems of oppression, despise liberatory violence. Pacifism is the credo not of the revolutionary, but of the priests of capitalism, of the adherents of order. Our work is to destroy the capitalist order.

One of the tasks of the Communists, especially now, while the revolutionary class in the West is scattered and incoherent, is to teach the masses to reach toward a revolutionary horizon; it’s to give the working class the power to imagine a future where they actually confront the enemy class and its footsoldiers, not metaphorically, but actually — with guns and bombs.

Anything that makes that job harder, like scandalizing the outbursts of liberatory violence that come with the sharpening of contradictions, is not only a poor tactic, it is actively reactionary.

Petty-bourgeois social democrats and “Communists” tend to be cowards. Unable to imagine revolution, unable to conceive of fighting or (imagine it!) dying for a better world, because they already have so much to risk, so much to lose. They have an instinctive fear of destabilization and violence. Psychologically, that occurs because the capitalist state and the status quo works for their class. They see, in the state and its politicians, their actual representatives, or at least their proxies. They see, in the state and the police, human beings; themselves.

Denouncing violence will not endear the working class to communism. It will not fool the agents of the capitalist state. It will not deflect scrutiny or prosecution. By denouncing explosions of liberatory violence, a Communist does not correct the “error” of the masses in their use of individual terror. Warping Lenin’s criticisms of the Social Revolutionaries can’t justify a Communist in rejecting liberatory acts of spontaneous terror. Adventurism is the act of an organization that disorganizes the masses, not the spontaneous expression of mass anger. There is no coherent class consciousness in the U.S. to disorganize, let alone a party that might disorganize it.

What is the source of this gross misdiagnosis? The Trotskyists and revisionists have identified Elias Rodriguez’s acts as the result of organized terrorism, directed by a theoretically insufficient party, like the violence of Narodnaya Volya or the Social Revolutionaries. What they fail to realize is that Russia had to pass through Narodism before it arrived at Marxism-Leninism; Narodism was the unconscious urge without scientific analysis that helped to organize the class. The second thing they fail to recognize is that there is no revolutionary party in the West. If there were, Elias Rodriguez would not have done what he did, because there would have been a viable organized alternative.

And yes.

That party might make use of terror against the state.

It’s election season in the USA, and once again, we are being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils. On one hand, we have Donald J. Trump with his dangerous racist rhetoric, his misogyny, his open bribery and crimes. On the other hand we have Joseph R. Biden with his uncritical support for genocide, his repetition of zionist lies, and his continuation of Trump’s fascist border policies. How is one to choose and proudly cast a vote for either of two obvious evils? 

Comrade George Jackson in 1969 expressed this conundrum succinctly, “The fascists already have power. The point is that some way must be found to expose them and combat them. An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die.”

As communists, we should analyze this election scientifically. We can look at present and historical conditions to reach our answer of what is to be done.  

Rajani Palme Dutt in 1935 spoke on the dangers of lesser evil voting, “the continued hesitation and retreat of the reformist working class leadership at each point (policy of the ‘lesser evil’) encourages the growth of fascism. On this basis, fascism is able finally to step in and seize the reins, not through its own strength, but through the failure of working class leadership. The collapse of bourgeois democracy is succeeded, not by the advance to proletarian democracy, but by the regression to fascist dictatorship.”

We understand that, throughout history, liberals have always sided with fascists. [Editors: Liberals here mean not only the left “aisle” of the U.S. state, but the entire tradition behind liberalism; these liberals — private property owners opposed to absolute monarchy and systems of privilege — definitely turned on the movement for liberation when it attempted to extend its work to property in the middle of the 19th century and have been implacable enemies of anti-propertarian ideologies ever since.] Liberals vote and govern in ways that protect their private property and bourgeois interests. While working class liberal-minded folks can be reached with a message of class solidarity, the professional managerial class will always protect their interests. 

Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds. 

Tailing the Democratic Party is out of the question. This major party is fully beholden to the corporate interests that finance it. The DNC is the party of Silicon Valley, of defense contractors, and is now the party of war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza. We, not only as communists, but as humans, cannot back Joe Biden for president in 2024. 

It should go without saying, but we also cannot back the Republican Party. They are the party of Christian Nationalism, of right to work laws, of abortion bans and homophobia. No, we will not support the GOP nor Donald Trump. 

Section Four of the CPUSA Party Program states:

Both Democrats and Republicans have collaborated over many decades to restrict ballot access for ’minor’ parties, massively increasing signature requirements to get on the ballot and increasing the percentage of votes needed to remain on the ballot over several election cycles. Many media outlets also restrict democracy by focusing on the horserace and personality aspects of elections, reporting endlessly on polls and perceptions rather than on coverage of the issues of importance to voters.

We, as the Communist Party, are considered a minor party. We are running several candidates in local and state races, but we are not running a POTUS candidate in 2024. While we recognize that electing socialists and communists into the bourgeois system will not change it (only revolution can accomplish that goal) we understand that electoral struggle is one method to spread our message of working class solidarity, and to show the masses that the system under which we live is the cause of our pain. We can and should utilize bourgeois electoralism to advance our cause. 

There are many minor parties running candidates with platforms that align more closely to our goals than those of the major bourgeois parties. So the question now is: “Shall we form a United Front against fascism with one or more of these minor parties?”

The Party for Socialism and Liberation is running a presidential campaign in 2024, and standing with them could be a great opportunity to form a United Front against the fascism of the neoliberal Democrats and the MAGA Republicans. 

The PSL candidates, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia, have seven major policy goals stated on their website: 1. Seize the Biggest 100 Corporations, Create A New Economy for the People, 2. Overthrow the Dictatorship of the Rich — Build a Democracy That Serves the Working Class, 3. End the Rule of Money and Lock Up the Corrupt Elite, 4. Cut the Military Budget by 90% — Peace, Not War with China & Russia, 5. End the War on Black America, 6. Defend Women’s Rights, Full Equality for LGBTQ People, and 7. Save the Planet from Capitalism. 

These seven simple goals are not wholly different from the CPUSA party program goals. Claudia and Karina are also under no delusion that they might win the election or if they were to, that their victory would fundamentally change the United States. It couldn’t, but, as Lenin explained, running socialist candidates at all levels is one way to spread our message of socialism, and this is their goal in 2024. 

Many CPUSA members have a lot of experience working with Party for Socialism and Liberation comrades on the ground in our communities. We understand that they are good, principled comrades. PSL has been incredibly active in the FREE PALESTINE movement, they rallied with us against the Dobbs decision, and have worked with us on lobbying city councils regarding issues of policing. 

Dr. Cornel West, while not a Marxist, is running a progressive campaign for president as an independent candidate. His platform contains the following pillars: 1. Economic Justice, including a $27/hour minimum wage and breaking up monopolies, 2. Worker Justice — establishing a workers bill of rights and ending “right to work,” 3. Environmental Justice, 4. Health Justice by nationalizing the entire healthcare industry and protecting women’s and LGBTQ healthcare, 5. Racial Justice, including reparations to Black Americans, 6. Transformative Justice — ending mass incarceration and investing in alternatives to policing, 7. Voter Justice — instituting ranked choice voting, 8. Education Justice — canceling all student debt and making community and state colleges tuition free, 9. LGBTQIA Justice, 10. Gun Violence Justice, 11. Immigration Justice, and 12. Global Justice. 

The Communist Party has worked with Dr. Cornel West in the past through the Poor People’s Campaign. He has never claimed to be a Marxist, but he is an anti-imperialist. Take a closer look at his twelfth campaign pillar, Global Justice. This plan includes the goal of an expeditious closure of global U.S. military bases, disbanding NATO, and ending all weapons shipments to Ukraine to instead invest in peacemaking; ending military aid to Israel, ending zionist apartheid of the Palestinian people, and pressuring the U.N. to establish a program for Palestinian dignity and liberation; ending the embargo on Cuba and normalizing relations by removing the nation from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list; and no intervention, military or otherwise, in Haiti. 

Dr. West’s platform of anti-imperialism is well thought out, and stands in stark contrast to the stances held by either leading bourgeois party in the United States. Working through an independent grassroots campaign like his is one way we can spread our message of working class solidarity and anti-imperialism. He is a candidate who has aligned with us in the past, and would likely welcome our alliance in this election cycle. 

If we want to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, we need to work together with other progressive forces, and this election season is an opportune time to reach out. We have built-in allies in the PSL, the Dr. West campaign, Palestinian liberation and anti-war groups, labor unions, and workers all over the country disillusioned with the two corporate-aligned imperialist parties. We can use our collective power to show people that we don’t have to settle for an “evil” candidate, but that we can demand a different way of life. We can disrupt this election cycle, and use it to bring working class Americans into the struggle. 

So, let’s form a true United Front against fascism in 2024. Let us join forces with other socialist and communist parties, unions, and unaffiliated comrades. Let us work together to defeat all the faces of fascism, including both major political parties in the USA and their corporate overlords. Let us stand firmly against zionism, and all aspects of settler colonialism. Let us collectively say “No!” to militarization of the southern border, “No!” to the oppression of women and trans people, and “No!” to the over-policing of Black and Brown neighborhoods. 

Let us say “Yes!” to solidarity, “Yes!” to working class power, and “Yes!” to socialism. Let us say “Yes!” to a United Front against the fascist threat. We have nothing to lose but our chains.