Editor’s Note: In the continued flood of members leaving the Party for Socialism and Liberation many have been earnest in their desire to ensure the movement can learn from this organization’s impending collapse. This week we are publishing five new letters outlining various struggles within the organization and its utter inability to solve any internal contradiction.

The first letter conveys the collective frustrations and justified disgust of a NYC District Committee elected by membership to advance base-building, and undermined at every turn by a “duplicitous” central leadership. The next perspective (as well as the last) outlines not only years long struggles between the Salt Lake branch of PSL and national leadership, but the utter lack of any kind of institutional structures to help local leadership through internal or external struggles. Rather than play a guiding hand, national liaisons actively undermined criticism and struggle in favor of putting personal and political differences under the rug—hoping that through liberal interpersonal kindness contradictions would cease and the branch would wholly submit itself to the whims of Brian and Ben Becker (read more here). A majority of the letter writers have spent a significant portion of their lives in dedication to this opportunistic and parasitic organization. Rather than making the most use of these dedicated comrades, national leadership and national liaisons found every way by which they could miss-place this revolutionary energy into work that will never bring about the authors’ revolutionary aims.

Despite the betrayal by this so-called party, some of these letters still express hope that the PSL is capable of change, and that the members within have the means to change it. This could not be further from the truth. The PSL is an opportunist organization of the highest order which fundamentally cannot be saved. As more and more information is brought to light on the undemocratic behaviors of the organization’s central leadership, cover-ups of abuse, refusals to engage in criticism or collective struggle, and the strict enforcement of settler lines on colonial and anti-imperalist questions—there can no longer be any doubt that the PSL exists solely as a mechanism to de-fang the revolutionary movement by misleading earnest radicals into a counter-revolutionary machine. If you are a member you must leave, if you’re a group of disgruntled members leave together and contact the All-Empire Worker’s League. It is time to bring an end to this bloated carcass of a so-called party, to leave it festering will only bring further rot to our revolutionary movement.

The letters have been reproduced nearly exactly as they were received. Minor corrections were made to formatting, citations where added for some quoted text, and names of local members have been redacted. Regarding the redacted names, abbreviated letters have taken their place and our editors have attempted their best to maintain consistency with the references to named individuals. There are a handful of exceptions, with important targets of criticism (Ben/Brian), as well as public figures within or formerly within the organization being fully named. Walter Smolarek’s letter, which is frequently mentioned in the following documents, was published last week by our Editorial Board.

To all those who have been harmed by the PSL’s actions, and its further in-actions, we give our love.

In Solidarity,

Editorial Board of Unity Struggle Unity

NYC District 1 District Committee Letter:

Dear comrades,

We are writing to submit our resignation as the District Committee (DC) of District 1 (Brooklyn and Staten Island) of the New York City Branch and as members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Each of us entered this organization with the intention of dedicating the rest of our lives to it because we genuinely saw it as the most viable vehicle for the advancement of socialism in the United States. We were thrilled to have been elected by our members on the specific, openly-stated mandate of advancing base building in our district. We are resigning because we have come to know with full clarity that it is impossible to carry out that mandate from within the PSL.

We have known for some time that there is an opposition to base building that goes to the top leadership of the PSL, and that the democratic space to put forth our ideas on their political merit is intentionally and underhandedly shut down, both of which we have each experienced individually and collectively. As leaders within the New York City branch, we work in constant close proximity to a clique of national leaders (they call themselves “the center”), headed by Ben and Brian Becker, who have their office here. Publicly and with general membership, they agitate about the need for the working class to get organized. Privately, they are generally hostile to deep organizing work in favor of an agitation-only approach: constant mobilizations, forums, tabling, and flyering. When the PSL creates new organizations, they are primarily as fronts for PSL agitation, rather than means of raising the organizational level of the working class as a whole. Because of the proximity of the NYC branch to this clique of national leaders, we do not functionally have a Steering Committee (SC) that is empowered to draw its ideas and analysis from its membership’s practical organizing or a concrete analysis of our local conditions. We are not provided the practical skills or orientation to durably organize the working class of New York City. Any promising attempts at this kind of organizing are intentionally undermined. This has led to the deep political underdevelopment of our branch.

Those of us who believed that there was any democratic space in our branch were thoroughly disabused of that notion by the NYC Branch Conference held this past March, the first ever such gathering in the history of the PSL. Its stated role was as follows:

1. To directly address the stated challenges and harness the immense potential of our growing branch, we take inspiration from the Party Congress and propose the establishment of an annually occurring Branch Conference. This conference will serve as a dedicated forum for strategic alignment, democratic deliberation, and collective leadership development.
2. The Branch Conference will be constituted by a broad representation of the branch’s membership and activity, representative of the branch’s on-the-ground realities and diverse experience.

Despite the above, which the membership voted to ratify at the Branch internal, previously the nominally highest body of the branch, the Branch Conference was a farce of democracy. None of the base building experience that had accumulated in our district, by far the largest of the 3 districts in the branch, was included in the topics of discussion. In response to the document one of our members submitted on the base building work in his unit, a member of the Central Committee (CC) privately characterized it as a sign of the “anarchistic” tendency in Brooklyn toward mutual aid in a remark to a member of the former D1 District Committee. The document was not taken up for discussion at the conference. During the conference, when our members contributed their views on why the branch should take up base building, another member of the Central Committee openly stated, “The PSL is not a base building organization.”

In sum, we learned that a separate, unelected body had decided on the entirety of the conference agenda, which they organized to favor lengthy presentations by members of the center led by Ben Becker, followed by relatively short periods of discussion. They also decided that we, as elected delegates to the Branch Conference, would vote on a series of resolutions in the final half-hour of the two-day conference, resolutions that reflected the presentations of the center and were crafted by the aforementioned unelected body. When delegates motioned to request clarification on, amend, or table these resolutions, Ben Becker angrily hovered over the mic, eventually castigating the delegate who motioned to table a resolution that mandated the NYC Branch to commit to funding “a new center” as a top priority, declaiming that he didn’t understand why any member wouldn’t immediately understand its necessity. Most delegates had just heard of “the center” for the first time that day, when it was mentioned during a fundraising presentation that preceded the vote on resolutions. When a delegate asked for some definition, another member of the Central Committee dramatically hushed the crowd. We were all left without any clarity on where the center ended and the leadership of the NYC Branch began. Although the delegates voted to put the resolution to a vote by the incoming Branch Committee, the resolution was never raised in that body and it was subtly alluded to at a Branch Internal to appear as if we had voted in favor.

Despite all this, we had believed that it was possible to protect the space within our district for deep, neighborhood-specific organizing work to continue and struggle for a political realignment of the organization based on comrades practical exposure and assessment of its value. However, as the results of this work and comrade’s confidence in it has grown, we have only faced increasing and more direct pressure to squander it from the Steering Committee, and members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee. Often this was done under the guise of directing us to cancel any local activities or otherwise divert the necessary forces from it for the sake of clumsy agitational initiatives, attending recorded webinars, or ensuring maximum member attendance at mobilizations that do not draw from the working class in neighborhoods we organize in. This was done by design, even as the number of members in our branch exceed 280. Other times this was said directly. In a private conversation with one DC member, Ben Becker derided mass organizing for “tethering us to the lowest common denominator of our class.” His disgust for our work and our class is truly appalling.

The open, undemocratic attempts this past week by the top leadership of the PSL to crush our work has pushed us to the breaking point.

Last week, we circulated a strategy document for our district, which was a normal act for an incoming leadership body whereby we undertook an assessment of the previous period that reflected the work of our members, in deep conversation with them, and produced a strategic orientation and an accompanying set of tactics by which they could concretely measure their work going forward. We simultaneously shared the document with our Steering Committee liaison. Instead of receiving our ideas as a valuable contribution to the organization, one of us was called into a meeting with our liaison to be definitively told that our district’s strategic orientation to base building represented a “departure” from the strategy of the New York City Branch, and the national strategy of the PSL. When asked for clarity on what that strategy was, our liaison described it as (limited to) intervening in spontaneous mass movements and agitating for socialism.

In our strategy document, we defined base building as “a historically communist, long-term strategy of increasing the relative organization and strength of our class through working alongside it, winning its credibility, and building our influence. Practically, this is accomplished by committing to particular local areas, weaving ourselves into the fabric of their struggles, earning the leadership of our class, and positioning ourselves to lead the uprisings to come.” We see base building as the only way to durably build the level of working class organization needed to eventually wage revolutionary struggle, and the only way to durably build mass socialist consciousness. Alongside communist cadre, our class must go through its own practical experience by which it comes to see the correctness of our ideas. Simply relaying those ideas is not enough. That is to say, we see base building as the only viable long-term means of achieving the PSL’s stated political program.

In the week following the distribution of our strategy document, the Steering Committee, which contains members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee, coordinated inactive rank-and-file members of the District to discredit the elected leadership of the district by disrupting the planned unit meeting discussions of the document, and further by sending this same group of members, which includes a current Steering Committee member, to disrupt our planned district retreat where we presented and facilitated discussion on the strategy document. After the retreat, we learned from multiple other comrades that this group had all been reading their talking points from a shared, pre-prepared document, and were text-coordinating throughout the meeting. These members have been entirely absent from any of the local, neighborhood work that the district has carried out the past year. For some of them, it was their first time attending any sort of internal Brooklyn meeting in years. The points they raised on both occasions were not based on the political merit of our ideas or the work of active district members, but instead relied on personal attacks against us and pulling rank based on seniority. At the retreat, when we presented a new mass organizing project that we are undertaking, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, for the first time to the whole district, this group sought to sour the broad member support for the project by launching pre-prepared attacks that accused us of wasting Party resources and “gaslighting” our members. Not only were these bad-faith criticisms based on distortions of our position, they were blatantly disrespectful to seven non-DC comrades who presented on the Freedom Center and to the others who had been leading this organizing and thoughtfully discussing and assessing this work for months. We were disgusted by this display of disrespect for our members and our class. It further cemented our certainty of the deep unseriousness of the leaders of this organization.

In addition to these open attacks, behind closed doors we have been undermined by the highest body of the entire national organization. We had invited (now former) Central Committee member Walter Smolarek to speak at our retreat, to which he accepted. We had cited his Liberation School article, “Dual Power and Serving the People in the U.S. Revolutionary Movement,” and experiences building the Philadelphia Branch in our strategy document and were excited for our members to hear remarks from a long-time national leader on why communists should care about the organizational level of our class, and for Walter to learn more about the base building projects in our district. Late into the night before our retreat, Ben Becker convened the Standing Committee of the PSL to vote to block Walter from speaking. We were not provided any explanation.

We were pushed over the edge by our experience at the Branch Committee meeting this week. Four of us are elected members of the Branch Committee and the remaining two are observers. At the meeting, we explicitly asked for clarification on whether the view of the Steering Committee is that our strategic orientation to base building is incompatible with the strategy of the branch and the party. While we had already accepted this, we owed it to our membership to raise this question with the highest body available to us. We also asked for an explanation of the attempt by the SC to undermine the democratic processes of the preceding unit meetings and district retreat, and for the author(s) of the shared talking points document to be identified, because rank-and-file comrades had raised this as a major concern. SC members lied to our faces about the coordinated nature of the attacks and avoided our question about the document entirely. Instead of providing clarity, the Central Committee members who participated in the discussion (with the exception of Walter) concealed their true views on base building, offering confused assertions that they were open to the deep organizing that has gained momentum in Brooklyn, but simply have concerns rooted in their political experience that base building doesn’t work. They concluded the discussion by asserting that it would continue within a smaller body, a future meeting between the SC and DC. The next day, Ben submitted a document to the Branch Committee that opens, “I’m all for neighborhood organizing.” We know this is another lie.

Following the BC meeting, Walter reached out to us. He shared his disgust at the duplicitous conduct at the meeting and informed us that many of the branch and national leaders present had been secretly strategizing for months to crush our neighborhood organizing and other PSL mass organizing efforts across the country. They have counter-organized members of the district to oppose this work. The recent Conference on Organization was designed with this purpose.

Further, Walter shared his resignation letter with us and plan to submit it. His experiences affirm so many of our own. One of us who is employed at the national office that houses some party staff, including members of the national leadership clique, has been repeatedly summoned to a Steering Committee member’s office to defend and explain decisions made by the DC and unit leads to prioritize their neighborhood organizing work. She has been reprimanded, told that these decisions are “unacceptable,” and pried for information. A number of us were previously members of other branches that have have historically had more autonomy, given their distance from these national leaders, and were shocked by the political underdevelopment of the NYC branch when we transferred. One of us has experience as a member of the SC of another branch, where he was directly told by Brian Becker that the branch had to cease its base building work in favor of an agitational flyering initiative.

We were outraged and horrified to learn that the national leadership has been conspiring behind our backs for months to put a stop to our district’s deep organizing work, and to crush the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, which our members have been building with great effort and political seriousness. We don’t see any point in continuing to engage in a farcical process to “resolve” our political disagreements with a leadership this duplicitous.

Our commitment to the members of our district, whether you choose to leave or stay, remains just as strong and sincere as it ever was. For a long time, we believed it was not only the best approach but our responsibility to shield you from the rot at the heart of this organization and the hostility of national leadership to your work. We wanted to protect the space for you to carry out the work you had seen was correct from your own practical experience undaunted by the serious deficiencies in the organization. We have reached the point where that is no longer possible. We have done our best to guide you through this period on the strength of your own practical experience and have reached the end of that runway. Now we must speak plainly. We do not see this organization as able to be reformed nor do we see the fundamental contradiction between base building and an agitation-only approach to be resolvable within it. We have taken the decision to resign with the utmost seriousness and consideration, not only for its implications for our lives, but that of our members, and our class, to whom we hold the highest fidelity.

We are so proud of the ways you have grown as leaders and organizers alongside us. The past several months of training ourselves to become cadre, organizers capable of helping our class to realize its power, and the beautiful, real work of building durable relationships with the organic leaders of our neighborhoods have forever fortified us with a living accountability to our class that far supersedes our commitment to the PSL. We understand why an undemocratic leadership who relies on our warm bodies to unquestioningly carry out their ideas would go so far to keep us from this work. The sober reality is that the ultraleftist rigidity they engender systematically underdevelops the organization and renders it incapable of becoming a serious political force in this country with a mass base. This deeply saddens us. And we agree with Walter that it would be irresponsible for us to continue building this organization.

Given the magnitude of our political difference with national leadership, the lack of democratic mechanisms to continue our work, and our real opportunity to start something new, we have decided to leave the organization with Walter.

We are setting out to continue our work and to build the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, an example of what we see as a definitive example of the next phase of our organizing: a mass organization that formally fuses cadre with the working class by way of base building. We have a proposed interim structure that will allow this work to continue, along with the base building work in Sunset Park, and for us to retain our community partners from across Brooklyn.

We hold great confidence in our ability to continue this work without the PSL. We have largely built it with our members and with our class without branch support in the form of connections, material infrastructure, ideological guidance, or practical skills, and with a great deal of constant undermining. We are excited about what we can build with full organizational focus and capacity.

In terms of what broader organizational form comes next, we second the point in Walter’s resignation letter about it being too early to announce a full political program, but we are committed to building a project on a national scale. We know this will be difficult, but as communists we are committed to doing the difficult, necessary thing, rather than remaining in an organization that we do not believe in and whose national leadership is conspiring to crush the strategic approach and work that we wholeheartedly believe to be politically and historically correct. We invite you to leave with us and we also invite you to continue working with us in good faith as members of the PSL if you see fit.

It has truly been the honor of our lives to serve as your District Committee.

With unshakeable conviction and revolutionary love,

Your D1 District Committee: D. K., E. C., J. R., J. M., M. T., and R. H.

L.M’s Letter:

Dear comrades,

I am writing to submit my resignation to the party.

I write to you with both regret and excitement. As a portion of my total life I have dedicated more of my life to the building of this branch than any other member in the organization. With the leave of absence of Comrade Q I have spent more time in the party than any active member. I was 19 years old when I joined the party eight years ago. I was arrogant and didn’t know anything about organizing besides my limited experience with Planned Parenthood. I was honored to be elected to our first Steering Committee despite being one of our youngest members. The party provided me a political home, tempered my dogmatic and idiosyncratic understanding of theory and provided me a structure. I have dedicated my life to the party and more importantly to the class struggle. When faced with the choice of going to college to further my career prospects or to continue my work leading the branch I chose the party. I simply don’t know what it means to operate as an adult outside of the party organization.

This is why I am filled with a great sense of regret. I wish the party were the organization I thought it was. I wish that we were engaged in the work promised to us when we were recruited. I joined as a part of the first wave of socialist revival in the late 2010’s. Since then the movement and in turn the party have grown considerably and I have become increasingly aware of the limitations of the party to grow into the organization our class deserves and so desperately needs. I will return to these limitations but I must relate to comrades that I have experienced periods of extreme demoralization, not at the state of struggle in the US or of the supposed “backwardness” of our class, but at the state of our party. I’m sure many in our branch have had similar feelings in recent years.

Attached to this document you will find two letters. In the first of which you will find the resignation of Comrade Walter Smolarek. A comrade who joined when I was in 4th grade learning basic algebra. You may know him as the longtime editor of Liberation News and the occasional host of The Socialist program. Smolarek lays out many of the political as well as democratic issues with the PSL. This is why my writing today also carries a great deal of excitement. When I read Smolarek’s letter I felt a deep sense of joy because he was expressing many of the same criticism’s of our party I harbored. I have always made it a point to read every critique of the party I can so I could make a sober assessment of them. I have always found them to be unfounded and based in liberal and anarchistic ideals, until now. Prior to reading Smolarek’s letter I had already been considering whether to break with the party for some time. There is understandably little literature on when and how to split with an existing party. Lacking historical reference I created a set of criteria as to when a split is not only the right of a member but their responsibility:

• The party is organizationally or politically heading in a direction contrary to goal of revolution.
• The party is functionally not capable of reform through ordinary means.
• The member(s) splitting are capable of effectuating a split which has real potential to serve the goal of revolution.

The first two conditions are dependent on one another. If an organization is moving away from its revolutionary goals but does present the realistic possibility of reform towards such ends it is the responsibility of members to struggle towards that end. Let me not be accused of ultra-democracy because I believe if an organization is moving towards revolution even if it cannot be realistically reformed it would be wrong to effectuate a split because in this case the reformers would be those trying to turn away from revolution. However let it be said that inability to reform can itself be a hindrance towards the goal of revolution, especially when that horizon is not close at hand. The final condition has less to do with whether a split should be pursued and more with when. For a while I have been convinced that the first two conditions were met by the PSL. It was only with Walter’s letter that I became convinced that the third condition was met. I could have attempted to form a split months ago but I hesitated at the possibility of any new organization being isolated and suffocated due to its lack of support. This is what I told myself but it would be disingenuous not to recognize some cowardice in being afraid to take the dedicated cadre to do the hard work of building a new organization.

There may be some of you who think that splitting is inherently wrong as it weakens socialist organizations. To this my only response is that the party would not exist without the split performed initially by Sam Marcy from the Socialist Workers Party followed by the split of our founders from the Workers World Party. So the question cannot be reduced to splitters or non- splitters and must be taken on the basis of ideology and organization.

The second letter is something I wrote almost two years ago addressed to the Steering Committee outlining what I saw as the limitations of democracy within our branch. Although the letter was unsent at the time because I determined that our leadership was already struggling against growing factionalism within our branch I have shared it with multiple SC members in the years since. The purpose of its inclusion is to show that independent from Smolarek comrades across the nation, comrades you know, have been coming to similar conclusions. That letter to the Steering Committee was limited by the fact that at the time I thought the party could be reformed and that I limited my criticisms to the branch rather than the organization as a whole. In this letter I will attempt to address these limitations.

The PSL tries to critique American liberal democracy for its emphasis on the form of democracy without its actuality. We critique the idea that democracy is an event recurring every 2-4 years when we vote for leaders. However in function we accept a level of democracy which acts exactly like this. There is no effective recourse to hold elected leadership to account. In the first place our constitution has certain provisions which allow existing leadership an insurmountable level of control over the democratic processes. This is not simply democracy under centralized guidance but a hollowing out of democracy as a meaningful force in our party. The provision in the constitution which allows the central committee to appoint up to 40% of the voting members of congress allows existing leaders to hold a strong(if not insurmountable) plurality. Theoretically this plurality can be overcome but it is practically immovable. In effect it means that those who wish to change the composition of leadership or oppose the CC’s position must work to convince more than 4.5 times as many delegates as the CC does.

This is not to say that the CC should not be able to appoint voting delegates. In the years that I worked on the National Fund Drive Central Committee(NFDCC) I could have been the most diligent and politically apt comrade imaginable but since this work would not have been done at the branch level it would not be factored into members choice on whether to select me as a delegate. So in this manner there is a real need for the CC to have some discretion on delegates but 2 out of 5 delegates is an absurdity. The basic argument surrounding such a provision is that it creates a level of continuity. We should not throw away the concept of continuity but we must ask to what degree should it be prioritized over our ability to grow our working class democracy alongside the movement?

Secondly although the CC does not control a majority through the appointments they are also benefited by other extra-constitutional undemocratic practices. Chiefly a lack of transparency in the workings of leadership. Lenin was consistent in critiquing both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cadet parties for their lack of transparency. It was a point of pride for Lenin that all the problems inside the RSDLP were being laid bare so that workers could make up their own minds about the leaders and misleaders in their movement. In my letter to the SC two years ago I predicted that without transparency the SC as a whole would lose its legitimacy in the eyes of members since they could not see if it was a specific member or group of members behind a wrong headed tactic. This is also true of our national organization. We are able to see the reports from congress but without an ability to see the debates behind the choices we are unable to hold specific leaders to account. If our delegate voted contrary to our revolutionary values how would we know? How would we hold them accountable when elections came around for the next congress?

This is not a hypothetical question. Few rank and file members are aware that at our last congress some members attempted in good faith to disagree with the position put forward by the CC on the question of how to position ourselves relative to artificial intelligence. If we thought the CC was incorrect or that they mishandled the disagreement how would we democratically attempt to change the direction of the party on this vital question facing our class? As Parenti once said, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input.”

It seems as though such accountability and debate are anathema to those who currently run our organization. In pre-congress docs for years we have been told about the goal to massify the party. It is my belief that it is impossible to massify the party if we do not have a means by which to absorb and resolve the debates which will naturally emerge amongst our class. People can accept defeat in a debate on a specific proposal but they cannot be expected to take part in building an organization which doesn’t have any means by which to have such debate.

Many members have made arguments about transparency in recent months. Many of them have been in good faith. However there are members who have raised the banner of transparency from the SC only when it could serve their careerist ends. When they were in leadership they took advantage of this obscurity to misrepresent their fellow leaders to members. However as soon as they found themself in the minority transparency was an ideal to be fought for? No I doubt they will follow us because the cause of democracy and debate was a means towards their egoistical ends.

It is in light of these and other facts that I make the choice to forge a new path outside of the party. It is a difficult step, it is a scary step and there is no guarantees about the future. But I feel I owe it to my class to take it. I have seen too many hard working and genuine comrades become burnt out and turning away from organizing entirely due to struggling against the sins of our party. This is why a wrongheaded party is not just a mistake but something to be fought against as it siphons limited energy from our class that can be harnessed toward revolutionary ends. I have seen many leaders resign quietly. I respect this choice but I think it makes it difficult for the movement to learn any lessons for the future. In leaving the party I think it is vital that we do the work to reflect on the failures and limitations of the PSL as well as its strengths. Dialectics requires that we see the necessity for the party at a specific juncture in history and absorb its strengths while leaving behind as many of its issues as we can.

I have witnessed resignations before and know I may be slandered for many things by the party. I know many of you are dedicated fighters for socialism even when we have disagreed we have fought side by side. My hopes are that even if we have disagreed in the past you will remember that I have always been open and honest about where I stand. I hope that this letter will help those of you who are dedicated to the class struggle to see the limits of the PSL. I invite you to embark with us on a new path to build the kind of organization we were promised when we were recruited.

In Solidarity,

L.M

D.W’s Letter:

Comrades I have chosen to submit to this branch as a whole my resignation, I have done this in violation of the constitution and by-laws because I agree with you all that our branch is in need of transparency to tackle the political disagreements that have paralyzed us for so long, and I believe comrades deserve to understand the type of organization that they are in. I know that this will be characterized in many ways, it may be described as uncomradely, it may be described as disagreement with the possibility of socialist revolution, it may also be characterized as an unwillingness to submit myself to democratic centralism or the will of the collective by accepting the outcome of the SC elections. I want to assure you none of these things are true. I declined nomination because I knew I couldn’t complete the term.

I joined the party 6 years ago because I believe that socialist revolution is not only possible, but that as a mother I have a life long duty to the struggle for socialism. It is not a matter of sentimentality but of practical necessity, it is in it’s actualization that my own children’s future becomes secure. In those 6 years I have spent 5 of them in various appointed and elected leadership roles the last 2 as a member of the Salt Lake Steering Committee. I have worked tirelessly to build our branch and the movement for socialism. I was the State Chair of the Vote Socialist Campaign, at my own expense I have attended international delegations, answered the call for out of state deployments, and earned the confidence of our comrades being elected as a delegate to the 6th Party Congress. I have not made this decision lightly, but I hope that by explaining how I came to it, each of you can make an informed decision as to where to direct your energy without false pretenses.

I am leaving the PSL because I no longer believe that it is capable of carrying out the tasks required of any party that hopes to call itself the vanguard, despite it’s ability to raise its profile and increase its ranks well beyond its current numbers. In my time in the branch there have been recurrent struggles over our approach to mass work and the actual practice of democracy within the party. Having to struggle through differing ideas about a question or practice isn’t inherently a problem. However I have seen how a lack of internal structures and an unwillingness of the National Party leadership to assert authority where necessary has allowed flagrant violations of our constitution and bylaws to occur on a regular basis with no accountability. I have seen over and over the tendency to smooth over disagreements and debates with rhetorical unity, obfuscating all manner of political differences. I have seen first hand how one on one conversations are used to prevent the emergence of disagreement, which almost always relegates the disagreement to the realm of the interpersonal. The consequences have been felt by everyone in our branch even though many of you lacked the information to understand what was happening. I will fully acknowledge that as a member of the Steering Committee I have participated in withholding information that I thought comrades deserved to have to make informed decisions, my only defense is that I did so inline with Party discipline and inline with the directives of the National Party leaders.

Many comrades trace the problems in our branch to the retreat after the Palestine movement began to fade. The issue of democratic participation in discussion and debate, and the responsibility of comrades to carry out the resulting work according to the principles of democratic centralism has long been a flash point. It was the final iteration of housing unit work building the Tenants Union of Salt Lake that offered us the first real test of party structures from my experience. This period in our branch was marked by lively debate in our units and a high level of engagement from rank and file members, members in the units had a high degree of input on how work was unfolding within the confines of building out the tenants union. As a member of the Extended Steering Committee and a lead of the housing unit I attempted to resolve a question about our strategy towards developing TUSL between my unit and SC members in the unit. We had diverging positions and ideas about the appropriate way to move forward so I attempted to resolve the disagreement through all of the channels available, using our constitution and by-laws to guide me.

After having several questions taken to a vote in our unit with the SC members in the minority, our unit attempted to carry out our collective decision, members of the SC used their influence to formally and informally encourage comrades to carry out the work in the way the minority voted. When this was raised to the full Steering Committee in an Extended Steering Committee meeting, it was decided that I would develop a proposal laying out the concrete path we would take to build TUSL, and the SC and Extended SC would vote on it to end the debate. The proposal that I put forward was adopted by the full Steering Committee and immediately SC members in the unit started advising the unit to carry out work in contradiction to the adopted proposal. In response I planned to call a branch meeting on the basis that the branch meeting is the highest body of the branch where I planned to call for a branch vote on the strategy of TUSL. Up to this point the Steering Committee members in the housing unit had pushed for disagreements between comrades to be resolved through informal one on one or small group discussion until they reached consensus instead of encouraging the debate and differences to be clearly discussed in the unit meeting for all members to understand. My position was that if a disagreement existed among the leadership body of the branch and the membership we should be open with the branch about what those disagreements were. Not only so that we could gain the input of the branch but so comrades could adequately assess the decisions of the leadership body and the individual members elected and appointed to it.

Through out this time I was engaging in debate and struggling openly about the direction that we went, however my genuine political disagreement was treated first as irritation, then as an interpersonal clash, and eventually as full blown insubordination and subversion of Party norms. While leadership was understandably frustrated that the branch was bogged down in internal conflict, the position I was putting forward was that in a democratic centralist organization we are expected to have intense debates and disagreements and when consensus cannot be reached we should vote and all be held accountable to carrying out the decision reached by the majority. Given that I had seen members of the SC refuse to accept the decisions of the majority in their unit, gossip about comrades, and move to overturn a decision they didn’t personally agree with, I lacked trust that leaders in our Party are actually accountable to the principles of democratic centralism in practice.

My insistence on bringing this disagreement to the full branch would also mark my first experience with members of the National Organization Department coming to SLC to resolve internal dysfunction. During that visit our liaisons met with the extended steering committee and asked why we were pushing for our proposal to go to a branch vote, I told them I believed I was following the method laid out in the constitution for resolving disagreements like this, I was told that the language of the “branch being the highest body” does make it my right as a member to bring any decision before the branch to vote on, but that isn’t how we handle things in reality. I agreed not to bring the proposal to the branch and our national liaisons helped us come up with a plan for moving TUSL forward which I took up enthusiastically, shortly after their visit the Steering Committee removed me from my role as deputy of the housing unit and removed Liz as the lead. Along with other long time members of the housing unit who had sided with my position in the debate, we were removed from housing work all together. There was never a reason given other than the Steering Committee had decided to do a branch reorganization and that is what the needs of the branch called for.

I must admit that my removal from housing work was a deep blow it was an area of work I’d done since before joining the party, I wrestled with feeling wronged and lied to and I questioned if the Party actually operated the way leaders said it did. I reflected and decided I could look at my removal from housing work as a personal attack, or I could see it as an opportunity to show the members of leadership that viewed me as combative that I was serious about party discipline. I put my all into developing the first iteration of an organized comms team in the branch right before the Palestine struggle would start picking up momentum. The uptick seemed to settle tensions in the branch for a while, we got into a regular work flow but as the movement endured for months we were faced with the question of developing a strategy for our work in the Palestine movement. This was something that the SC said they did not have the capacity to develop and said that it would have the unit take up. Myself and another leader developed a proposal that the unit voted in favor of. This strategy was then challenged by members not in the unit at the behest of SC members in the unit who disagreed with the strategy and found it too confusing for people to understand. This led to the strategy being put up for a vote in a special meeting where anyone from the branch was able to attend. Before this strategy was able to be adopted we had the 2024 SC elections where 3 long time SC members left the Steering Committee. With the election of a new steering committee the contradictions left unresolved from disagreements over the correct approach to mass work and base building and the correct approach to developing political strategy again came to a head immediately.

The period following the election of the 2024 Steering Committee was marked with an extreme amount of disunity internally because it was grappling with it’s members D and K breaking party discipline and sharing internal SC deliberations with a former SC member X and her partner N. This led to a campaign to create a faction in the branch where D and X were hosting secret strategy retreats with student comrades without the knowledge of the elected steering committee. Simultaneously N and X were actively calling decisions made by the new SC into question before the full branch, and used their informal relationships to gossip and disparage the new SC to emerging student leaders. The refusal of a highly respected former SC member to accept the legitimacy of the newly elected SC, represented the first time the authority of an elected Steering Committee as a body would be challenged in the branch. We would later learn in early 2026 that these strategy calls with N and X, never stopped, but I’ll write more on that later.

Following the departure of X, K, and N from the branch D remained on the SC, without K on the SC and finding himself frequently in the minority, he continued to meet with student comrades attempting to counter organize against the decisions of the SC that he personally disagreed with. While Devin was not solely responsible for the hardened positions within the SC, his repeated violations of the constitution and by-laws represented the primary contradiction preventing our branch from being able to become unified around a shared path. This culminated in irrefutable proof that he had knowingly encouraged comrades in Mecha to call a counter event to one he knew the SC had just voted on calling. The SC and our liaison worked at length to consolidate the student comrades being influenced by these actions and open the door for any questions about what they had heard from D and others, our mistake was in not being absolutely clear about what was happening and providing our perspective so that comrades could decide for themselves what to believe. At the time talking about the specific violations comrades had been carrying out was seen as a threat to the unity of the branch and our ability to win over those student comrades, who through no fault of their own had been mislead by leaders of the branch that they trusted.

The lull in the Palestine movement in the summer of 2024 and the final stretch of the Vote Socialist Campaign would follow a familiar pattern, D, L, and, I found ourselves faced with similar questions, and similar diverging understandings of what it meant practically to apply the party line on mass organizing and how we prioritize the interests of base building with the interests of flexibility to respond to the surges of the protest movement or other national campaigns like Vote Socialist 2024. This was also when the branch formally started approaching CU. As I mentioned above D was not alone in hardening the positions in the SC, during this time he did have moments of explosive rage directed at him in SC meetings by L. Instead of being called out directly in those moments, L was privately talked to later about the need to engage with D constructively. Unfortunately the mediation with members of National that was meant to finally resolve the underlying diverging ideas on the correct path for our branch was not scheduled by them. D’s position was that the best tool to build a relationship with CU was TUSL, L and I advocated for us to build an organizational relationship with CU as PSL, our suggested first attempt was in the final weeks of the VS24 campaign, the SC had decided to launch a branch wide push directing all activities to tie back to promoting the campaign. D agreed to talk with B and feel out how she felt about us doing outreach for Salt Lake Immigrant People’s Agenda and sharing materials about the campaign too where it made sense, he also got approval from the SC to bring a handful of comrades to participate. After several outings and no discussion about the Vote Socialist Campaign going on between PSL and CU leadership, Liz and I pushed for us to pause trying to build the relationship with CU until after the election. This was met with resistance from D and meetings with the SC grew increasingly tense. Around this time the SC found out that Devin was hosting a private Black August event with student comrades to do an independent study on the National Question despite members of the NOD actively trying to discuss those questions and provide clarity on them from National. This was the final straw for the SC in which we demanded the NOD take some sort of corrective action towards the factionalizing being carried out by an active SC member.

As a consequence D was asked to stop attending SC meetings and informed by the NOD that he would need to participate in party work with CU accompanied by a comrade who could report back what happened to the SC. Following the election in November the branch launched into interest meetings and in January of 2025 began preparing for the Jan 20th inaugural We Fight Back rally. We approached CU to collaborate and partner with us on the event which they agreed to, after a challenging start and misunderstanding about the social media announcement we pulled off a successful rally. Comrades expressed excitement about the success of those attempts, and the SC hoped to build on that. We attempted to launch an emergency response network that would be developed through organizing meetings held at the LC. Failing to establish any partners or real involvement from CU, we determined we lacked the man power to effectively create these networks with so many people in different areas. We stopped hosting the organizing meetings and attempted to determine a more comprehensive approach to the We Fight Back days of action as the No Kings movement was starting to develop. This would lead to a pivot away from CU and us looking for other opportunities to engage with immigration defense. Devin disagreed with this approach but was no longer in SC meetings, so he used committee meetings and unit meetings to raise what he saw as failures of the elected SC to secure the relationship with CU. Comrades not in the faction were seeing SC members give contradicting directives and were confused by the constant tension. As the end of the term was drawing to a close Liz and I informed our National Liaison that we planned to refuse to accept nomination and threatened to demotivate at the election if Devin was allowed to run without answering to the branch about his misconduct.

Agreeing that some sort of disciplinary action was warranted but unable to approve anything more within the NOD, our liaison told D he could not accept nomination for the 2025 term and that failure to change his conduct would result in expulsion. The plan after elections was to take up the question of immigration work, develop a strategic outlook for the branch, and plug D into work that he enjoyed. It was deeply important to the incoming SC to show him that we saw his contributions as a comrade and that we weren’t going to spend the term trying to punish him or get revenge.

After the SC retreat in April there was a flurry of activity we moved quickly to implement a structure that would allow for comrades to participate in the decisions about carrying out our work, but would centralize the relationship building and strategy development in the SC. It wasn’t perfect and the SC attempted to build a second tier of leaders through one on one asks and opportunities working closely with a handful of comrades. The limits of this were felt immediately, without the explicit role and responsibility of being an appointed leader in the branch comrades we hoped to raise up didn’t have the clarity about what we were expecting of them. Without a regular division of labor and regular meetings comrades were incentivized to pick only the meetings and events that interested them.

Another variable arising out of the SC retreat was the break up between A and L which created a dynamic where often L would verbally attack A and Dodge if they asked clarifying questions or suggested that there was disagreement with her positions. There were many meetings where we were unable to finish our agenda because L would storm out or shut the conversations down. For a lot of this period I attempted to play a mediating role where I was trying to translate the legitimate issues L had to the rest of the body, but also act as a support so that L didn’t feel attacked by the legitimate questions being raised by other SC members. This was an error because it reproduced the dynamic in which SC members and liaisons had one on one conversations to attempt to indirectly deal with the problem which only created the conditions for suspicion.

After an intensely scary experience at an immigration rally that A was the tactical lead for, police appeared to be kettling protestors and Liz in the lead truck got caught between them. She developed a deep distrust of other SC members acting in a tactical role. Only exacerbating this distrust were the tragic events at the No Kings rally in June. L and I had been the tactical and security leads, but after getting to the front of the march that had missed the end point at Wallace Federal, L and I were separated from the rest of the contingent. We had just brought the runaway crowd back around the corner, and were a few yards ahead of the Sky apartments when we heard the shots. We tried to get back to the comrades behind us and turned around not knowing where they had come from and saw Z. The next period was chaotic but at almost every turn we took to get back to the contingent police were charging towards us. Unable to find our way back we called A and told him to lead comrades out of there. Afterwards L experienced severe PTSD which she later expressed not feeling supported in by the SC.

All of these factors had the effect of creating explosive meetings that left every member of the SC stressed out about our weekly meeting. After coming back from Congress, M was assigned as our National Liaison because she would be able to provide the close consultation that the SC needed so that we could finally get work moving in our branch. After several attempts to talk to L and the SC together and individually, she asked L to take a leave of absence for a few months so that the rest of the SC could have some space. L refused and the NOD put her on an LOA from the SC but they did not want us to tell the branch in an effort to protect L’s privacy and to keep the peace. Complicating matters was a convergence of interests of L and D both wanting to engage in immigration work with Bailfund and CU. Liz then knowingly pushed bailfund in chats and directed her partners to lobby for bailfund in other committees against the directive of our liaison. In an unprecedented move in December the NOD formally suspended L for 6 months for uncomradely conduct and failure to abide by democratic centralism. This was the opportunity for the National Leadership to reassert norms and expectations in our branch that even elected members of the the SC are accountable to the constitution and by-laws. Unfortunately P left the party and we were faced with reality that we were starting completely over with a new liaison H.

The approach that H wanted us to take saw the issues in the branch as mostly rooted in the realm of the interpersonal. He spent more time communicating with D than he did asking the SC how things had developed in the branch. When presented with irrefutable proof that X and N had just told comrades to call for new SC elections because they had concerns about the disciplinary action taken against L, H asked if we’d ever talked to X and asked her to stop interfering in the branch, when we said we had and so had our former Liaison, he assured us that he would talk to her and tell her how serious what she was doing was and that she needed to stop. Then he told us the next step was a convo between A and D to determine if it was possible for them to move forward that was mediated by C. D and A reported extremely positive feelings about their discussion. However at the May branch meeting D would then ask A and O to motivate for U’s return and insinuated that to not do so would be undemocratic. Following that meeting he went out with student comrades and shared his disagreement with the SC’s approach to branch work.

Despite no evidence of real resolution, H provided the SC, D, J, R, and E with 4 points to serve as a basis for unity and turning the page in the branch. This is supposed to clarify the problems and help us understand what we need to do to move forward, yet it opens with a point about not litigating the past despite acknowledging we have differing interpretations of what happened over the last “few months”. When I asked how the NOD intended to ensure that the next SC put the agreement into practice and what they planned to change to provide the level of support that a brand new SC would need given the experience of the last two years where the needs of the party often meant that our branch was waiting for National to respond on disciplinary matters long after they needed to be addressed. H assured me they’d be in close consultation and available to support facilitating conversations about branch strategy including about CU with the branch, and that if a comrade were to violate the agreement they would be talked to because they shouldn’t be here. When I clarified, great so you’re saying the NOD is committing to expelling any member that violates this agreement, he said no, he couldn’t commit to that in the abstract.

Another example of the disconnect between the practice of our party and the way that it is defined in our constitution and by-laws was demonstrated when H came to SLC last week ahead of our nominations, the question of L’s suspension ending was looming. As a member of our central committee, he did not know what the suspension was for or how long it was. He told us it would probably be easier for her to meet with members of the SC and as long as she agreed to the agreement then she would also be able to come back. This was shocking to me, why doesn’t the party have some sort of standard practice for handling disciplinary measures? Why is there no record of the discussions or decisions of other liaisons to ensure continuity and fairness for members dealing with such things?

So far I’ve attempted to detail the understanding that I had as an SC member of the problems in our branch. These problems are not comrades, they are structural. L.M’s letter explains some of the possibility of effectuating change through the Congress. I however want to share my experience of how the Party Leadership handles debate and discussion when a controversy is raised. I have witnessed first hand a fellow congress delegate brought to tears on the congress floor for raising a passionate demand for a thorough analysis and debate on a party line. She was told that she was harming the unity of the party and that she needed to speak in favor of their proposal for ending the session on the AI question. They then asked other attendees to also speak in favor of it, without those comrades reading it ahead of time. All of this would have been concealed from the delegates if not for Kei Pritsker formerly of Break Through News, sharing those details with the whole congress on the basis that it was not the right way to engage in democratic debate and delegates deserved to know. Both of those comrades have since left the party.

I waited until today to send this so that I could hear the response from our National Leaders to Walters’s letter, I wanted to ask them what general lessons can leaders take from this to ensure the unity of our branches and I wanted to know what the Executive Committee sees as it’s biggest area of growth. I am a firm believer to fix a problem, you have to admit you have it first, I don’t believe that the Party is willing to acknowledge to it’s rank and file members the real truth about the way the party functions and the calculations that are being made in how their branch is engaged with. It’s obscured from us, and often under the pretense that we are missing context or can’t understand the complex background which made up a certain period.

However the Party also is raising up many cadre who will be capable of winning, because the rank and file members that join this party do so on the basis that they are really building what we say we are. I cannot stay in this party because if I did I would have to lie to my comrades about where I stand. I refuse to accept that we must keep making the same mistakes, or to cover up the mistakes and mishandling of our branch on the basis of false unity.

For those comrades that read this and have questions, I will be honest with you. For those that want to stay, I’m rooting for us to see revolution in our lifetimes. For any comrades that read this and feel like me that you cannot go on this way any longer, rest assured you are not alone and we welcome you in charting a new path.

With Revolutionary Optimism,

D.W

Logistical Question

There is an inherent complexity in this break that due to our longstanding position within the party we have been entrusted with the control of the 501c4 which holds the financial resources of the branch. It is our belief that in any meaningful split with the party there is cause for a just division of resources as we just as much as you have build those resources and intent to use them for revolutionary ends. However the party has historically held the position that anyone who leaves the party due to political disagreements is counter revolutionary and persona non grata. Therefore we make the offer that we sit down for negotiations as to a reasonable division of resources. For legal reasons the 501c4 cannot simply give a large portion of funds to an individual. Therefore we offer to put down several months rent and continue to pay for the existing subscriptions the branch has(canva, comcast, zoom etc.) until such a time when the branch can set up its own 501c4 which can legally receive its share of the funds. Once said organization has legal standing we can begin the process of the aforementioned negotiations to find a means by which to perform such a division.

L.M’s Letter to The SC:

Comrades of the steering committee,

I have long had questions about the real practice of democracy within the branch. I have at different points voiced aspects of these questions but I must reflect upon my own unwillingness or inability to formulate them in any systematic manner. The fullest exposition of these doubts was raised after the SC changed its policy regarding observation of their meetings, which happened in the last few months after I had attended a few such meetings. Comrade A was kind enough to have a call with me to try and explain the reasoning for the change and to hear me out for well over an hour about my concerns. It was my hope that such concerns would be brought to the SC but so as to return his kindness I would like to formulate these concerns so that he doesn’t have to represent a comrade in their absence. I also would take this opportunity to flesh out my arguments—with the benefit of time to research—and respond to some of his initial counter points. In a sentence my concern could be put that unity requires the light of open debate to build. I intend to show that this isn’t just an ideal of “freedom of criticism” but a result derived from the experience of the socialist struggle. I hope that the good faith extended to my initial doubts raised with comrade A will continue in the reception of this piece and that anywhere in which I err I will receive a similarly good faithed critique.

Our current SC has inherited certain issues which have pre-existed its election and I do not envy your task in trying to handle these historic weights on your back. I think the previous SC(that prior to the election of D.W) identified an aversion to disagreement whether that be in professional or interpersonal spaces. I think in general our culture encourages us to look for some higher structure to resolve debates whether that be the boss, HR or the police. Further I think the culture within Utah makes such open disagreements extra uncomfortable. That SC assigned readings which dealt with disagreement and has proposed a mediation process both of which were oriented toward the productive resolution of primarily interpersonal squabbles. I think these are good steps but I think they fail to address that unless we can have productive, democratic and professional debates we will never become a party of a class; a party which can absorb thousands, hundreds of thousands of members. As we grow so too will the contradictions and divergent opinions within our party. Our strength will be in our ability to maintain these contradictions while still being able to act decisively.

One of my long-time concerns is the lack of awareness within the rank and file membership of the real debates and divergent tendencies of our branch. I think this has been caused in the first place by the aforementioned aversion to open critique but also by the tendency for debates to be held in one on one conversation or in conversation between rank and file members and leadership. I will make reference to debates within our TUSL and pre-TUSL work which I think are both emblematic of the issues and were where many members first realized these challenges within the branch regardless of their divergent interpretation of events. The first example will reveal that I do not see myself as above the critiques I level at our branch.

Early in the debates around our housing work, comrade L and I thought there were certain tendencies which revealed a lack of understanding about party principles and the practice of democratic centralism. Specifically around our openly identifying as socialist and putting forward a concrete party program. While we had done some work to make these critiques in our meetings around specific tactics we were employing she and I also went to comrade A to voice our critiques. I believe in a healthier environment and with greater experience we would have made these critiques plain within the bounds of those housing meetings. Over time we did not feel that these concerns were properly addressed within the body and it became clear that there were differing tendencies within our work. These tendencies began to solidify as they tend to into blocs however these blocs and their positions were hardly clear to newer members both of the branch and the committee. Especially when the LC committee was dissolved and absorbed into TUSL the history of the debates was not clear to members. Many of these disagreements over tactics took place between formal and informal leadership in private chats. When you enter a committee and you witness what had at that point become a heated debate without the context it is easy for what were at their core political struggles to appear as interpersonal or petty squabbles. This appearance would inevitably become reality as the increasingly solid blocs had no real method by which to settle their differences. These issues were only exacerbated by problems which have been recognized by subsequent steering committees of the inconsistent reporting of committee work to the SC by its members. Comrades who had legitimate political lines, regardless of their veracity, were viewed as obstinate. The question of their continued membership within the party was even raised. We speak of resolving interpersonal issues but we have had little discussion of how it was a failure of branch structure that they became interpersonal in the first place!

I apologize for the digression into branch history but I feel that it will be helpful in understanding my concerns and why until recently I have had fear to raise them. I appreciate that we are in a less tenuous position as a branch and I believe the work of this and the previous SC have gone a long way in making me feel able to raise real concerns without being viewed as the branch “reply guy” or as contrarian. However as stated I feel we need to continue our work in order to become a party which can claim for itself the place of vanguard. Namely I think while the debates have somewhat simmered down we have not addressed the lack of political openness necessary to have real legitimacy.

In my call with comrade Q I raised my concern that we as a branch do not know what the SC is discussing nor do we know the results of the discussion. I gave the analogy to if the public were unaware of who voted for a specific bill in the houses of the senate. How would we know which senators to condemn and to protest? Which to vote for or against? We would view such lack of openness as a severe lack of accountability and a testament to a lack of democracy. This is the reality within our branch. Comrade A raised a counterpoint that he did not see it as a fair comparison as there is a large qualitative difference between a bourgeois congress and a revolutionary party. I would ask what are these differences? First that they hold state power and secondly that they are viewed by the general populace as more legitimate than our party. The first of which is the goal of all parties which have ever existed and thus I do not think should be relevant to our discussion on democracy. The second I believe only proves my point. They are viewed with greater legitimacy than our party and if they hid their deliberations as we do to our members they’d lose legitimacy as a whole rather than of this or that part of their body. This or that leader.

Much has been made about projecting unity from the SC for fear of exacerbating the fractures within our branch. I ask, does hiding your disagreements build real unity? Or does it lend to the discrediting of the whole membership of the steering committee? When three of you make a bad call and we, the rank and file membership, are ignorant as to the two dissenters, how are we to hold you accountable at the next election? How are we not to condemn the whole of the SC for its errors? Despite pedagogy becoming a buzz word within our branch we have shown little interest in the education of our membership about the tendencies within our own branch.

Let it not be said that this is just my opinion. As I raised in my call with Comrade Murphy the RSDLP was the only party within Russia to go to such lengths as to publish the minutes of its congresses. In his work, “But Who Are The Judges” Lenin went so far as to critique the liberal party, the Cadets, for their lack of openness:

“The liberals sneer at the struggle within social democracy in order to cover up their own systematic deception of the public in regard to the cadet party…There are no records of the proceedings of the cadet congresses. The liberals issue no figures of their party membership either as a whole or by organizations. The tendency of different committees is unknown. Nothing but darkness…Lawyers and professors, who make their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and praise open activity by parties while actually flouting the democratic principle of publicly and concealing from the public the different political tendencies within their own party.” (bolding is my own)¹

Let it be remembered that the RSDLP was an illegal party! Which we are not! Yet we feel so unconfident in our disagreements that we hold ourselves to a lower standard. Not just for the public but for our own members? In gleaning lessons from historical examples it is necessary to move beyond the simple question of what was done but to the political purpose for which it was done. Toward this end Lenin’s critique of the Socialist-Revolutionaries is more exemplary:

“[D]uring the period of the greatest liberties, the period of most direct influence upon the masses, they concealed from the public the existence of two different tendencies within the party. The differences of opinion were as great as those within the Social-Democratic ranks, but the Social-Democrats tried to clarify them, whereas the Socialist- Revolutionaries tried diplomatically to conceal them…’Not to wash one’s dirty linen in public’ is a thing the S.R.’s are adept at. The trouble is they have nothing to show in public but dirty linen. They could not tell the whole truth about their relations with the Popular Socialists in 1905, 1906, or 1907…Our Party’s serious illness is the growing pains of a mass party. For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organizations of the Party are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built, and we are building it. We have succeeded in putting the views of our two currents truthfully, clearly, and distinctly before everyone. Personal bitterness, factional squabbles and strife, scandals, and splits—all these are trivial in comparison with the fact that the experience of two tactics is actually teaching a lesson to the proletarian masses, is actually teaching a lesson to everyone who is capable of taking an intelligent interest in politics.”²

The RSDLP made its disagreements public but we as a branch can’t even acknowledge them to our members!? The purpose of open debate as revealed by this quote was to instruct and build the competency of the class in understanding its leaders, misleaders, and the real political lines they represented. If there are fractures within our branch as Comrade Murphy put it we are doing all of these class fighters a disservice by hiding them under diplomatic language! We are treating those who are the most committed to the struggle with kid’s gloves. When we ought to be educating them as to the real sources of division. Is the cause a fear that they won’t understand these divisions? Or is it that we ourselves do not? And thus cannot claim any right as educators. If it is the former I say you are casting doubt on our members and their ability to understand politics intelligently. If it is the latter then it is your responsibility as leaders to stop pussy-footing around issues and get to the heart of matters.

As a more modern reference to support my position let us look at the wikileaks of the DNC in its attempts to obstruct the primary election of Bernie Sanders. When these leaks were revealed a great mass of his supporters saw what Marx and Lenin had said countless times: when the working class wins by the rules the ruling class will do everything in their power to subvert the rules. As such the democrats lost a great deal of legitimacy. While I don’t think we would go to such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not open, in this most open of times for organizing, we risk losing legitimacy if the ruling class should ever reveal the lack of unity amongst our leaders.

If the lack of transparency should be doubted I will make reference to one of the few real debates I was witness to. Before the policy of SC observation was changed I was at a meeting where you voted on the proposal raised by comrade Hovermale in regards to our masking policy. After an intense debate, which left some comrades visibly on the verge of tears, a vote was taken to settle the matter. Three comrades voted in favor and two against. I must admit I was grateful a vote was even taken. However since this vote I have not witnessed, and I may be wrong, any announcement as to this new policy?

This leads into my concerns about the policy about SC observation. Whereas the previous policy allowed one to attend any SC meeting save the portions regarding matters of membership and security now members are expected to provide a concrete reasoning behind their observation. How is one ever expected to do so in this reality in which we actually live when the questions being discussed by the SC are not published? When the ongoing position of the SC is to not reveal the debates going on in its halls? Whether intended or not this policy makes observation of your actions almost exclusively by invitation.

I want to be abundantly clear that I do not advocate for any form of ultra-democracy by which every choice is debated by the full membership. Rather I call simply for real mechanisms by which that membership, which elected you, can hold you accountable. To quote Michael Parenti, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure,open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry,”³ or in this case members.

When I brought up the importance of publicizing the minutes of their congress to comrade A he raised a good question about whether the RSDLP had a similar policy for their local bodies. While I still would like to better understand how they were organized locally I think this misses the historical trees for the forest. As we repeat often there is no one mode of organizing which is eternally correct. My point thus far has been about the Leninist principled commitment to educating the masses as to the different shades of opinion within the party. It must be repeated that the RSDLP existed as an illegal party and we do not. Even within the context of intense political repression of the RSDLP their newspapers did publish their disagreements within the St. Petersburg branch. Our party does not have such localized newspapers as modern communication technology has allowed for a greater degree of centralization through the apparatus of Liberation News.

The last point I will address regarding comrade A’s reply to my initial concerns was that he said comrades in national said they felt we had allowed too much debate to occur without a unified response from leadership leading to fractures within our branch. While he would not share specifics which might be relevant to my reply, on first glance I cannot accept this position.

As stated earlier it was our lack of openness in regards to debate which led to fracturing and the development of petty squabbles. Had leadership issued a unified response during the intense period of debate within TUSL it would have been based on largely unreliable reports from the SC and would only have led to resentment not to real unity. Perhaps if the SC at the time had a real unity based on accurate reporting of the events such an assessment would be correct but as I’ve said in previous meetings: one can declare unity between a hair brush and the kingdom of mammals but this does nothing to give the brush mammary glands. Unity is to be won, not declared.

In conclusion, I don’t have a perfect solution to building unity within our branch which must be built by concrete struggle over our real disagreements but we only do ourselves a disservice by glossing over these disagreements with diplomatic language. I have raised the need before to have real meeting procedures for debate and resolution and I feel I was viewed as being overly formalistic but it is through such procedures that the ruling class has learned to maintain its hegemony regardless of their personal disagreements. If we are to build a truly mass party which can maintain the disagreements which will inevitably become more intense I think we ought to learn from them.

If I did not view the SC and our party with a certain level of legitimacy and hope for our ability to overcome such struggles I would have already left to organize somewhere else. My real hope is that we can shine a light on our disagreements so they can be resolved, not in an anarchistic fashion of perfect consensus but through us being able to disagree and submit to the will of the majority. I hope for no more than something accepted by Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and the whole of European social-democracy in the 20th century: democratic centralism.

In Solidarity,

Comrade L.M.

Anonymous Letter:

Hi all, I am writing this letter to express my resignation from the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Growing this organization has been the major focus of my life for the past 7 years, and I do not make this decision lightly. However, through my experiences with national leadership, especially after moving to NYC 2 years ago and operating in close proximity to the Center, I no longer believe this organization to be capable of bringing about broader, meaningful change for the working class in this country. While in NYC, I have been involved in trying to base build with my class, a strategic orientation that is so diametrically opposed to the PSL’s strategy of agitation and protest that the highest levels of PSL leadership have worked to undermine and sabotage base building work in Brooklyn. My belief in the need for socialism and working class organization is as firm as ever, which is why I believe it my responsibility to take the best possible road to build working class power, which is outside the PSL. I joined the PSL in Pittsburgh shortly after graduating college, but I met the party in Boston as a student at MIT. My first exposure to the PSL was a few weeks after Trump was elected in 2016. My initial enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders turned into a deep disillusionment with the electoral system when the DNC systematically sabotaged his candidacy, and this led to a search for new ways to fight for change outside the electoral system. My first ever protest was the night after Trump’s election. I began getting involved with some student organizing and attending more protests regularly around Boston. My decision to join the PSL came as PSL members built the MIT graduate union from the ground up. I saw how involvement in the union built power to fight for meaningful change for people I knew, and how being a part of a union changed people’s outlook from cynical to hopeful and empowered. I wanted to learn to organize from the people capable of building something as impactful as the MIT graduate union. I was the 5th member in the Pittsburgh branch at the time I joined in March 2019. My time there was mostly consumed by attending protests throughout multiple mass upswings, from the 2020 BLM uprisings to the Roe v Wade decision getting overturned to the Palestine movement. I became well-versed in the rinse-and-repeat cycle of tactics I later learned was the essence of PSL life: protest, flyer, forum, protest, flyer, forum. I knew it was insufficient. I knew we needed to go deeper. I experimented with new ways of organizing around widely felt issues, but attributed any lack of success to my relative inexperience as an organizer.

In summer 2024, I got a new job and moved to Brooklyn. I was excited to learn from new mentors and develop my ability to organize from those in the leading branch initiatives that included writing software for a member management system, creating an education portal for socialist political education, advising PSL members across the country on legal rights when being charged for free speech activity, and more. I was asked by Brian Becker to leave my software job to go to law school, then a few months later asked by Brian again to make staying up-to-date with AI development my main political focus, Brian seemingly having lost interest in encouraging a contingent of comrades to attend law school. I felt the effects of whiplash at the changing speed and urgency for an extremely wide array of national priorities, almost none of them having anything to do with organizing our class. I eventually dropped involvement in the majority of these responsibilities to focus on neighborhood organizing in Brooklyn.

In summer 2025, I was asked to attend the 6th Party Congress as an observer. When a debate around AI was sparked, I was asked to be involved in the resolution as a professional machine learning engineer. I took part in “secret” meetings which consisted of numerous meetings with a small group of about 8 people, including the person who raised criticisms of the party’s AI position. At the same time, the person who raised criticisms privately expressed concerns to me about the nature of the Congress and the lack of comradely debate. At the time, I didn’t understand her concerns and tried to use my role to keep the peace. When asked by national leadership to get on the mic in open discussion about AI to share specific talking points while establishing my authority on the subject of AI, I complied. However, this experience left a bad taste in my mouth and the comrade who raised the debate in the first place shortly thereafter left the organization.

Shortly before the Congress, the PSL made the “Sick of ICE” sick outs in solidarity with immigrants a primary focus of political activity. As a liaison with two branches, I was tasked with ensuring those branches carried out this national priority. In an internal meeting, I raised that the steering committee of one of those branches received broad pushback around the initiative and the branch was not enthusiastic about participating. These criticisms were on the grounds that a general strike could not happen by raising a call on social media and that this looked immature. A central leader of the PSL, instead of being open to criticism, instructed me to intervene more forcefully in instructing the branch to carry out the directive, insinuating that they simply misunderstood the task. A few months later, the central directive of the PSL became the general strike orientation. In a national leadership meeting, Brian Becker motivated for the need to agitate around a general strike and that the task at hand was to raise the working class’s consciousness around the need for a general strike. I was disturbed by his orientation. It contained a number of completely ahistorical interpretations of the Russian Revolution, and completely ignored that a general strike can only be possible through a very high level of organization of the working class. After this, I became increasingly embarrassed by PSL national directives with which I increasingly disagreed, especially including a polemic against the leaders of the Minnesota Model, a statewide coalition of unions, community organizations, and other progressive groups aimed at building working class power who had also raised the call for the January 23 Day of Truth and Freedom in response to Renee Good’s murder. I had already considered the Minnesota Model a template to aspire to, and became incredibly frustrated when PSL leaders openly denigrated the leaders in Minnesota and took credit for the success of January 23. Since then, I have become increasingly aware of the undemocratic nature of both the New York city branch and the overall national organization of the PSL. I have witnessed both Ben and Brian Becker ridicule comrades I deeply respect, both in private settings and in open meetings such as the NYC Branch Conference. I have witnessed coordinated efforts by national leadership to stifle political debates around base building to reaffirm agitating for socialist consciousness as a higher strategic objective. I see base building as a common sense focus on organization of the working class instead of the PSL’s obsession with endless agitation. The fact that base building is such a major threat to the PSL that a debate around it cannot even be allowed leaves me with little hope in the future of the organization.

Through these experiences and many others, I have come to the decision over the course of the past year that I must continue building working class power outside of the PSL. This is an organization that is deeply politically flawed and whose leadership naively believes that agitation and mobilization alone can bring about revolution. If this weren’t bad enough, any democratic pathway to change this orientation is stifled or shut down before a debate can even occur. I believe that in order to win, socialists must organize the working class. I look forward to continuing to fight to make this vision a reality.

E.’s Letter:

Hello comrades,

I wanted to let you know that after careful and thoughtful consideration, I’ve decided to end my candidacy and stop pursuing membership in the PSL. This is a multifaceted decision that was not made easily or taken lightly. I have a few reasons, but before I get into that, I just want to make it clear that I am not interested in taking a break and coming back later; this decision is final for me and there is not room for negotiation, even if my concerns are addressed. I am sending this letter to our Ogden unit because I feel connected to each of you and care about everyone a lot, and I wanted to be as open and honest with y’all as I can.

First, it is important to clarify that I made this decision independently from D’s and L’s resignations. I have taken approximately a month long break and was not aware of their exit until Monday evening. I made this decision two weeks ago and have been trying to find my words since. I do find the things shared in their letters as well as Walter Smolarek’s letter alarming. It has definitely given me further confirmation that now is the correct time for me to exit.

I would be remiss if I didn’t address a few concerns I have had. In particular I have questioned the actual practical application of the constitution and bylaws for some time now, and I found myself returning to them and finding contradictions with what is written and what is practiced. On several different occasions, whether in readings, lectures, or communications, I have felt the familiar tinge of coercion that I know so well from being a member of the LDS church for 23 years. I have difficulty with the NFD, and as someone who is facing financial hardships, something about it has never sat right with me. Dues are something I can understand, but I have felt like I’ve been asked for money by National A LOT over the last year and it has made me uncomfortable. Especially when I don’t see the PSL doing anything that concretely improves the material conditions of anyone with those funds.

These concerns also coincide with the personal experiences of my best friend who was a candidate in another branch in another state. This branch knew of a city council candidate who was predatory and frequently sexually harassed queer youth in the community. My best friend informed their branch leadership and was promised the PSL would not endorse nor affiliate with that candidate anymore. This did not happen and the branch continued to affiliate with and support him despite the evidence. I tried telling myself “it’s just a bad branch” and realized how much that sounded like the oft repeated mantra I had while a member of the church, “it’s just a bad ward.” I know that what other branches do is their own business and not related to the Salt Lake City branch. However, for me it calls into question the integrity of National if things like this are able to happen on a local level.

When I consider also the things that Walter Smolarek wrote about in his letter, it brings many more questions to light about the actions and motivations of National. I have come to find that I no longer trust them, and so I can no longer pursue membership in this organization. I want to end by saying that the last year I have spent organizing with y’all has been life changing and I have learned so much. It has simply become clear that this is not the path that is right for me to take. Thank you for your time, and for everything this branch has taught me about organizing. I will carry this time and these experiences close to my heart always.

Thank you,

E.

Citations

1. Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. “But Who Are the Judges?” Proletary, No. 19., Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/05b.htm ︎
2. Ibid. ︎
3. Parenti, Michael. 2004. Superpatriotism. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 81. ︎

Editor’s Note: Aside from a few minor copy-edits for consistency across the piece, the letter has been republished in its original state.

The following is a letter I wrote to my comrades on June 4th, 2026, in which I formally withdrew my membership from the PSL. I debated whether or not to post it here publicly, and initially decided to post it with the PSL’s name redacted. However, in light of the recent wave in resignations, particularly that of Walter Smolarek, a member of the Central Committee and a 17 year veteran of the PSL, I have decided to post my own letter in full in solidarity with the numerous other comrades who have arrived at the same conclusions and quietly or vocally resigned.

Before I continue, I want to clearly state that the problem is not the individual comrades in individual units, these units are often filled with the most genuine, kindhearted, and passionate people whose energy and time are currently being exploited by a corrupt party. These comrades believe the work they are doing is toward the stated goal of a proletarian revolution, which is why they are defensive of the party and their work. It should be noted that the PSL’s central leadership does not represent these comrades as a whole, and as Walter’s letter points out, there is absolutely no transparency regarding the PSL’s decisions, and this has intentionally cultivated a membership that cannot see the corruption and has no real system in place to challenge it.

The PSL’s internal response to Walter’s letter contains the same deflection I encountered anytime I lent constructive criticism or voiced concerns to leadership. There is only a superficial acknowledgement of “organizational issues,” while the purpose and intent of the criticisms are shifted to personal grievances and a “misunderstanding” of the party line. This shift away from the central thesis of Walter’s arguments, which are overwhelmingly and demonstrably not about a petty personal grievance or a misunderstanding of PSL’s “political line,” is manipulative and dishonest.

Rather, his thesis is a confirmation of a current of dissatisfaction running across Party chapters nationwide, the same conclusions that I, and evidently many others, arrived at independently. It is now apparent that the inferences I drew are, in fact, an accurate description of the PSL’s actual internal workings. And while I affirm the patterns he documents, I do not endorse or validate Walter’s past or present conduct and have found many inaccuracies in his letter that I will detail at a later date. He offers no real criticism of the PSL’s participation in bourgeois elections, and he does not reckon honestly with his own role, as a long-tenured member of the leadership, in many of the errors he describes.

The PSL is already mobilizing its members on social media to discredit the validity of these criticisms, dismissing them as the work of wreckers, that to circulate these criticisms while the organization is “under state scrutiny” is doing the work of COINTELPRO. This is deflection, a pattern of PSL’s central leadership to avoid accountability. A party genuinely worried about infiltration and wreckage would tighten its analysis and its accountability, not move to crush valid criticism. And importantly, naming a pattern of structural rot is not sabotage, the rot is the sabotage, and will ultimately be the party’s own downfall if it does not address it.

I actively pursued membership with the PSL around April of 2025 and became a candidate in June of the same year. To be clear, I did not finish the candidacy classes necessary to become a “full” member, and this was deliberate because the classes, as I note in my letter, were filled with numerous historical/theoretical errors that sought to guide the conclusions of comrades away from their historical intent. In my repeated attempts to address my concerns about the PSL’s political education, strategies, and structure with various levels of local leadership, those concerns were often repeated back at me as though I had simply “misunderstood” the PSL’s political orientation, as though, because I did not understand it, I had not engaged with it, had not finished the classes, and was therefore incapable of grasping its purpose.

Effectively, regardless of how analytical, precise, and specific my concerns were, I was told by local leadership, in so many words, that it was my own deficiency for not “getting” the purpose of our feckless strategies, rather than that I fundamentally disagreed with them. The PSL is deliberately obscuring the fact that these are not trivial differences or simple “disagreements,” their behavior is a named ideological-political tendency within the history of revolutionary movements and parties, and that this tendency is inherently antagonistic to the working class.

The focus of my letter is on the tendency of opportunism (namely, right-opportunism) and revisionism within the party which I ground in the theoretical works of Lenin, Mao, and other revolutionaries. Importantly, my critique of this tendency is not purely theoretical, but is also based on the astounding amount of negative feedback from members of my community that have made me realize how dangerous this tendency is to the proletarian movement. The party’s leadership is deeply disconnected from the needs of individual units and the units themselves are disconnected from the masses.

The overarching thesis of my arguments is that the PSL has wrongfully titled itself the vanguard of the working class while distorting the meaning and function of the vanguard in revolutionary history. “Vanguard” is a relational term, there is no such thing as a vanguard party without the overwhelming support of the working class behind it. That support is not won by presenting the masses with “correct” ideas, it is built by fighting alongside them, by embedding ourselves in the real conditions and struggles of their lives.

The PSL’s work is not organized at the center of the our class’s struggle, it happens at the margins of it, orbiting leaderships own political line, brands, calls to protest or “boycott”, rather than the lived struggles of those exploited by the capitalist system. Because the PSL’s leadership is itself severed from the masses, it can only relate to its own units through top-down command, issuing directives that do not arise from any real struggle of the working class. Nor is there any channel running the other way to surface the needs and conditions of different regions back up to leadership. This is why so many of these commands make no sense on the ground, why, for instance, the PSL can insist on agitating for a nation-wide “general strike” without any of the infrastructure necessary to support one.

As I diagnose in my letter, this is a form of opportunism, called commandism. However, this opportunism cuts in the opposite direction as well, in which the PSL constantly tails after the spontaneous consciousness of the masses, echoing their own sentiments, rather than raising them up. Both of these signal a party that, regardless of how many people show up to our actions or vote for our candidates, is deeply disconnected from the actual daily lives of the people.

That is, turnout measures how many people we can mobilize for an afternoon or election, not whether our work has sufficiently elevated their consciousness by being connected to their struggles. A party with no meaningful connection to the masses is an irreconcilable contradiction. Stalin makes this most explicit in Foundations of Leninism, where he states that the party is “the vanguard of the working class,” but only insofar as it merges with the class, absorbs its best elements, and is connected to it by “a thousand threads.”

Walter offers numerous examples of commandism in his letter that we can draw from, and I touch briefly on my own, but it’s important to understand (as I’ve already stated) that this is a historical ideological-political pattern. In the 1970s, thousands of leftists turned toward Marxism-Leninism and began building new revolutionary parties in a period that came to be known as the New Communist Movement. By the 1980s it had largely collapsed due to relentless sectarian splits, dogmatism, and international communist crises. As it fell apart, organizations tried to account for what had gone wrong, and one of them, the Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee, wrote a study that named these organizational failures. Their description of commandism reads quite similar to what we experience now:

The discouragement of independent thinking and discussion in the party leads to an overdependence on leadership. We have noted the crucial role of organizational leadership. Yet if only officially sanctioned ideas have a place in the party, it can quickly develop a bureaucratic spirit: leaders command, members become ‘employees’… Commandist parties quickly tend toward dogmatism because the cadres will not or cannot take responsibility to apply the organization’s line in an intelligent way to the specific circumstances they face. Even though the members of the organization may discuss how to apply the line, their discussions cannot get very far–because applying a political line in a concrete situation requires dynamic understanding rather than dogmatic memorization. In this atmosphere members avoid reporting problems or failures for fear of being thought disloyal or defeatist.

In our movement, commandism has often reflected the leadership’s mistrust of the members (not to mention their mistrust of the masses) because of the members’ low level of political development. Yet commandism is not a cure for uneven political development; it is a prescription for continuing it. Commandism can never result in members gaining that critical grasp of Marxism-Leninism necessary to develop communist leaders and cadre.

The PSL, as Walter points out, is about as far from being the “vanguard” of the masses as a supposed “revolutionary” party could possibly be. There is a culture of deflection and a refusal to engage in meaningful criticism, in which anyone, or any group, who criticizes, distances from, or rejects the PSL is treated as little more than a “hater” or even a fed. The PSL encourages comrades to dismiss those who distance themselves from us as simply not understanding democratic centralism or Leninist organization, when in reality this is a gross negation of the mass line which only harms our work and our connection to the proletariat.

The PSL manages and contains working-class energy rather than organizing it in the direction of independent proletarian power, becoming what Lenin called a “bourgeois labor party.” Lenin explained that the opportunists are “better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie itself,” because they perform a service for capital that capital cannot perform for itself, which is keeping the proletariat tied to safe, non-threatening, system-preserving activity.

Those who earnestly seek to see the dictatorship of the proletariat in our lifetime must abandon the opportunists, and must realize that their energy has been driven into non-threatening measures that drill their passion into the ground. In the past, when the PSL has had membership ruptures, many of those comrades never rejoined any organization or returned to political work at all, which is far more a victory for the ruling class than for the PSL or the proletariat.

So, comrades, I ask you not to lose sight of why we joined the PSL in the first place, and to understand that there is a great deal of work to be done, and that every day we spend with a party that has abandoned its revolutionary premise is another day without challenging the ruling class, another day it gets to inflict violence on the masses. The remedy for this diagnosis is to complete the task set before us by Engels and sweep away the “colossal pile of garbage inherited by tradition,” namely opportunism, by going to the workers and the oppressed to engage in revolutionary mass organizing at the heart of class struggle.

We cannot allow ourselves to be lost to the wind, nor can we abandon the tasks before us. If comrades read this and are inspired to persist in our historic task of revolution, please reach out so that we may coordinate and determine the path forward!!! Had Lenin remained within the undivided RSDLP, the Bolsheviks would never have formed, and the October Revolution would never have happened. Lenin explained in an issue of Iskra that “Before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation.” You do not stay in the ranks of an ineffective, corrupt party, even when the alternative is a significantly smaller group.

As Comrade Mao said, “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”

Assalamu alaikum Comrades,

I want to begin by explaining how incredible I think each of you are and how much you’ve all inspired me. After having to start over in a state where I knew so few people, watching ICE terrorize my new home and feeling completely powerless without a community to fight back with, I joined the PSL, and it gave me both a community and a sense of purpose. Because of you all, I have so much hope for the future, and I genuinely believe that a revolution in our lifetime is possible and inevitable.

However, I have decided to discontinue my membership with the PSL.

This is a decision I have been dwelling on for months, one that has tugged at my heart and led to immense guilt. My decision to leave has absolutely nothing to do with any of you, and I am so grateful to have struggled alongside each of you. Lenin was famous for announcing his departure from an organization and distributing it to the membership, so, in the tradition of Lenin, I will offer a clear explanation of why I’m leaving. Criticism is a longstanding tradition of revolutionary parties, and I genuinely hope my criticisms are understood in good faith, rather than as an attempt to sow disunity.

My decision rests on fundamental disagreements with national’s political orientation and strategies that, from my perspective, have led to a significant gap between the national leadership and the needs of local units. I have voiced many of these concerns in internal meetings and in private to leadership, and though I genuinely appreciate our incredible unit leads, leadership, and other comrades for patiently discussing them with me, I have not been able to reconcile them.

There is a tendency that continually emerges within revolutionary parties, one that every single revolutionary has had to reconcile with in the past, this tendency is what Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and others have identified as the biggest threat to revolutionary parties. This tendency is opportunism, and importantly, it isn’t a moral failing of individuals within the party, nor is it intentional! Its a structural drift that, according to Lenin and Mao, must continually be combated to prevent this tendency to cause the party to abandon the revolutionary cause altogether. A party that has drifted towards opportunism will still present as a Marxist-Leninist party.

And, indeed, the PSL identifies as Marxist-Leninist, its public political analysis is generally correct, and its propaganda and longer-form content retain the language and conclusions of Marxism, these are what drew me to the party in the first place! Diagnosing opportunism requires an analysis of the political character, content, and action of the party and continually holding it next to the ultimate objective, which is a proletarian revolution. This letter will break down my primary concerns with the party’s political character, content, and action by continually grounding it in the objective goal and pairing it with the wisdom of our revolutionary predecessors. My concerns break down into a few primary categories: political education, party propaganda, failure to convert spontaneity into action, lack of underground work, and electoralism.

(Addendum: I would like to note that the PSL carefully distances itself from identifying as a Marxist-Leninist party. In both their “About” and their “Party Program” sections on pslweb.org, the party never mentions Lenin at all. Instead, they frame themselves as simply ‘Marxists.’ They never specifically utilize Leninist or Marxist phrasing such as “vanguard,” or “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and instead soften these terms with less descriptive language. These specific terms are not “communist jargon” you can abandon for accessibility, they are literally the dividing lines that separate Marxism from reformism.

In The State and Revolution, Lenin writes that someone who extends the recognition of class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a Marxist, everyone who accepts class struggle but stops short of the DotP is a reformist or opportunist. This is an extension of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he is clear that the transition between capitalism and communism is the revolutionary DotP. Comrades, we must recall that the Gotha is a furious polemic against a socialist party watering down its program with vague, conciliatory language to make themselves palatable.)

Political Education

Beginning with political education. As Lenin states, “there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory.” Marxists have gotten a reputation for obnoxiously harping about the need to read theory, this has been exacerbated by those who treat Marxism as a dogma that must be strictly adhered to and applied. But Marxism isn’t a dogma, is it comrades? It is a science! And like any other science, it must be approached using skepticism, observation, hypothesis, and application, but we can build on the existing scientific research instead of starting from scratch. If enough evidence has disproven our hypothesis, we can begin to reanalyze and rehypothesize, rather than continue on without question (that would be dogma).

Theory represents the practice and research of revolutionaries who came before us, who diagnosed the problems in our society and how to address them, with each building off the work of the last, and all grounding their theories in the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. For a revolutionary party, theory is indispensable. Many challenges that Marxists face today are the same challenges that revolutionaries of the past confronted. Reading, understanding, and applying theory not only helps us become better agitators and propagandists, it equips us to make the right analysis and decision in a time of crisis.

Perceptual knowledge comes from our direct experiences with the world, and these perceptions are what help us to realize things like the unfairness in the justice system, wealth inequality, or that everything feels bad all the time. These data points reflect certain realities of the objective world, but they are one-sided and superficial, an impression that reflects things incompletely without revealing their essence. Rational knowledge is what you get when those scattered impressions are synthesized into an understanding of the why and the how. This synthesis helps to explain the laws and relations that produce these impressions. This is, as some of you may know, an overly condensed explanation of Mao’s theory of knowledge which isn’t limited to book clubs and study groups, it requires reflection and is incomplete without actual practice. Practice is what makes theory dialectical and material, rather than purely ideological.

The reason why many of us became leftists is because of this perceptual knowledge that helped us identify the impressions of capitalist exploitation in the world, rational knowledge is what leads us to become Marxists, and application is what transforms us into revolutionaries; this application is what produces new theory. Anyone can recognize and diagnose problems within society. But without taking these observations past their impressions, they will be captured by the ruling class, converted into an understanding that is compatible with ruling class ideology. Due to the nature of ruling class cultural hegemony, their conclusions are what seem most natural or inevitable to us. The theory is what produces the difference between a Marxist and a leftist.

This is why we need revolutionary theory. However, it is entirely unnecessary to start at step zero and to insist on rediscovering, by our own trial and error, things that were settled ages ago. The same way we wouldn’t need to come up with our own theory of gravity in order to understand that what comes up, must come down, as this has already been extensively tested and iterated upon. In the same way, revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin put Marx’s existing theories to the test and developed them further, which other revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro have done with Lenin’s ideas. The body of theory is the rational knowledge of the entire international proletarian movement!

However, theory without application is useless and produces dogmatists who are incapable of acting. As Marx said, the point of studying theory and discussing it is to change the world! Rational knowledge is only verified and developed when it is put to the test in our own material conditions, which is why every revolutionary party should pair practical application with a continual study and revisiting of theory. This doesn’t mean that “right” ideas come only from those who’ve read every volume of Das Kapital. The masses often have many right ideas, but those ideas are usually isolated to individual issues, and our role as revolutionaries is to systematize them into something coherent, a strategy. We cannot do this without theory.

In the PSL, theory is de-emphasized in practice. Our political education often vulgarizes theory and simplifies it to the degree of obscuring it altogether. The format is accessible, which is lovely, but this format cannot and does not supplement engagement with the revolutionary theory and pedagogical discourse that produces rational knowledge. The most important part of theory is NOT the conclusions drawn from it. The value of reaching the rational stage is understanding the analytical movement from impression to essence, so that we can perform that analysis ourselves on new conditions.

The PSL’s political education condenses almost two centuries of Marxist theory, supplemented with other PSL publications, all of which are secondary sources that place a barrier between us and the words of the theorists themselves. In the instances where actual theory is studied, it is often paired with study materials provided by the PSL. I’ve been informed that this is only to provide historical context, which is frequently what makes theory so difficult to absorb (so true). However, as I will demonstrate later in my letter, historical context is not neutral, and providing it pre-interpreted is where the PSL’s conclusions get inserted into the theory itself. (Note: It has been revealed that this is intentional, not incidental. In this letter I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I would revoke today.)

Leadership has framed the PSL’s resources as a pragmatic means of continuing education, one that alleviates the burden of study, which is time-consuming and often inaccessible. But theory isn’t just reading or learning, it is a cycle of analysis and application, and it is the PSL’s responsibility to treat political education as a continual project of sharpening our analysis and strategy. This isn’t to say we should hand comrades a stack of texts and wish them luck!

A presentation of historical context, in a classroom setting guided by analysis and dialogue, lets us develop our analytical skills against the texts themselves. A summary of that history paired with pre-determined discussion points intended to steer comrades toward a fixed conclusion does not. Education is the investment a party makes in its members to produce capable, confident revolutionaries, and the decision to de-emphasize it in favor of PSL-produced summaries is one I fundamentally disagree with.

Lenin himself already assessed the pragmatism in de-emphasizing theory in favor of practice, his conclusion is that there is no middle ground between ruling class ideology and Marxist ideology, without a full understanding of Marxism we will default into ruling class ideology. This default to conclusions that are acceptable to the ruling class, which is subconscious and unintentional, is what produces opportunism. This is what happened in Lenin’s time, in his polemics against the “Economists.”

These were Marxists who believed they should focus on the workers’ immediate economic struggles, wages, hours, conditions, because that is what workers “actually respond to,” and that they should meet workers where they are rather than ply them with abstract theoretical demands. They thought this was the practical, non-elitist, mass-connected approach, and they accused Lenin’s emphasis on theory and professional revolutionaries of being aloof and disconnected from the “real movement.”

Lenin argued that they fundamentally misunderstood the task, which was to elevate the consciousness of the masses, and that because they refused to study theory, they could not see that all they were doing was tailing after the masses. This brings my opening quote from Lenin fully into context:

“Those who have the slightest acquaintance with the actual state of our movement cannot but see that the wide spread of Marxism was accompanied by a certain lowering of the theoretical level. Quite a number of people with very little, and even a total lack of theoretical training joined the movement because of its practical significance and its practical successes… Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.“

Public Propaganda

This leads me into political propaganda. Now, when it comes to the masses, they do not need to be experts in political theory, but it is our job as revolutionaries to bring theory to them. This doesn’t mean we should show up to No Kings chanting that the “bourgeoisie’s appropriation of surplus value from the proletariat is the primary contradiction that will lead to capitalism’s downfall!” However, we are supposed to use our understanding of theory to take the working class’s ideas and connect them to revolutionary theory in a way that they can grasp, and to continually raise their consciousness rather than just reaffirm what they already understand.

What I’ve noticed about the PSL’s agitation and propaganda geared toward the masses (think social media, campaign platforms, statements and speeches) is that it doesn’t seek to elevate the consciousness of the masses (though some of our longer-form content is better in this regard). When Lenin explained that the masses will always achieve a degree of political consciousness (”trade union consciousness”), he was trying to convey that the masses are fully capable of diagnosing the problems in their society based on their own experiences, as we’ve discussed. But this consciousness would not develop into revolutionary consciousness due to the hegemonic function of ruling-class ideology, which was always lurking in the shadows to redirect their political consciousness back into the system rather than away from it.

This is why populist phrases like “eat the rich!” and “people not billionaires” emerge organically from the working class! They’ve identified the economic element that leads to exploitation, but it is our responsibility to provide a class analysis that connects those phrases to the problem, capitalism. The masses are intelligent and will understand this. As Lenin put it, “the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.” When our propaganda only mirrors back what they already understand, we fail in our job to raise their political consciousness.

The Democrats and Democratic Socialists and other reformists center the entirety of their political agitation on socioeconomic “improvements” for the working class but they do not provide a class analysis. This is why Lenin explained that they “limit the tasks of the workers to a struggle for immediate, palpable results; they refuse to recognize that we Social-Democrats cannot reduce our tasks to those that are ‘attainable’ at the given moment… It is precisely the role of Social-Democracy as the vanguard in the actual struggle against autocracy to lift the spontaneous workers’ movement onto a higher plane, to raise it to its proper level of class struggle.” (Note: the Social-Democrats here are the Russian Marxists; Lenin would later break with this term.) Diluting our propaganda into left-populism that isn’t entirely dissimilar to that of the Democratic Socialists (like Bernie Sanders) is a grave error, as Lenin observes: “to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.”

What our propaganda should do is take that degree of spontaneous consciousness a step further by explaining that even if every billionaire disappeared, everyone’s material conditions would remain the same, because “billionaire” and “the rich” only describe a wealth category, and it isn’t the wealth in itself that produces systems of exploitation like wage labor and imperialism. In fact, not all billionaires are capitalists, plenty of capitalists are millionaires or small business owners. Whenever we simply reaffirm that billionaires are the problem, we allow the working class to conflate wealth with class, and we never help them understand that capitalism is the problem, and that IT needs to be abolished. We should have confidence in the working class’s ability to reason and to understand theory (insofar as it applies to their own conditions), and recognize that we may even have much to learn from them.

It is a common pitfall of leftists, not just Marxists, to underestimate the capability and smarts of the working class. Sometimes the argument is made that we still need to “dumb down” our agitprop because the average American reads at a sixth-grade level. This, too, is an excuse. Almost every historical revolutionary had to raise the political consciousness of an almost fully illiterate population. Lenin, Mao, Che, the Panthers, etc., all elevated the consciousness of a peasantry or working class that, in many cases, could not read at all! Lenin called out this tendency to belittle the masses’ capability as follows:

“Attention, therefore, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’ as the Economists wish to do, or to the level of the ‘average worker’… You, gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker’, as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation. Talk about serious things in a serious manner; leave pedagogics to the pedagogues, and not to politicians and organisers!”

Failure to Convert Spontaneity into Action

In the PSL, we have this idea that our primary tasks are to “popularize socialism” and “meet the moment.” Neither of these is inherently wrong. We should popularize socialism in the Marxian sense, and we should meet the moment. Wherever the masses are, as most Marxists argue, we should be there too, to listen to their needs, meet their needs, struggle with them, and elevate their consciousness. In the United States, the ruling class has successfully distorted the history and intention of protests, turning them into a pacifist performance, an outlet for working class rage. But even these entirely harmless, pacifist demonstrations are being pushed into less and less effective means (from protesting in streets to protesting on sidewalks, not being able to block traffic, police escorts, etc.).

As a result, protests are now viewed as a single solitary action lasting an hour or two at most, with everyone returning to business as usual afterward. Some on the left even refuse to attend due to the inefficacy of them. But protests contain immense potential, particularly for revolutionary parties, who should view them not only as a means to agitate and recruit, but as a way to turn the directionless rage of the masses into immediate, organized direct action. This shows the working class exactly what we are capable of while elevating their consciousness. If we show up to No Kings protests only to chant along with the masses, we once more fail to guide their consciousness a step further. As revolutionaries, we are the leaders of the proletarian movement, and it is our job to take the disorganized ideas of the masses and turn them into political action.

We should never push them to do something they aren’t ready for, but we should be able to gauge an individual situation and gently push them toward a more and more impactful flexing of collective power. This means turning pacifist parades into direct action by creating a list of demands, either in advance (with the entire objective of a protest oriented toward these demands) or being ready to create one and encourage a longer, sustained protest from the spontaneous one. This also applies to our current agitation for general strikes, which is one of significant error. When I’ve raised concerns about it, namely that it doesn’t make sense to agitate for one without the infrastructure to support one, I’ve been told that the PSL doesn’t intend to dedicate party resources toward building said infrastructure.

A revolutionary party that is only interested in vaguely gesturing toward the need for a general strike, rather than dedicating party resources and capacity to building the infrastructure, is unintentionally betraying its role as a leader within the proletarian movement. Strike funds, legal defense networks, food distribution, childcare, communication systems, and all the alternative systems are what sustain a successful strike. The historical strikes in the United States all had this infrastructure, built by communist or socialist organizers who prioritized these forms of organization. Such actions are prone to being co-opted by reformists, social democrats, and the ruling class, so it is paramount that communists build these networks rather than allow them to be diverted & squashed by counter-revolutionary forces.

The PSL’s stance on the current moment is what seemingly prevents national from directing resources and capacity toward this. However, Lenin firmly believed that the party should stay ready so it never had to get ready. In their own period of “counter-revolution,” the Bolsheviks did indeed prioritize propaganda and agitation. But importantly, they also used this time to build the skeleton that could support higher-stakes actions, like a general strike, but that often included uprisings many leftists would wrongfully categorize as adventurism. Take the 1905 general strike, which actually shifted the political climate to one of revolutionary potential. Lenin wrote in a letter that the endless deliberation over whether the working class was ready for xyz, or whether to escalate, irritated him. Let me provide the passage in full:

“I need hardly say that I do not undertake to judge of the practical side of the matter… However, judging by the documents, the whole thing threatens to degenerate into office routine. All these schemes, all these plans of organisation of the Combat Committee create the impression of red tape… disputes and discussions about the functions of the Combat Committee and its rights, are of the least value in a matter like this. What is needed is furious energy, and again energy. It horrifies me— I give you my word—it horrifies me to find that there has been talk about bombs for over six months, yet not one has been made! And it is the most learned of people who are doing the talking…. Go to the youth, gentlemen! That is the only remedy! Otherwise—I give you my word for it—you will be too late (everything tells me that), and will be left with “learned” memoranda, plans, charts, schemes, and magnificent recipes, but without an organisation, without a living cause. Go to the youth. Form fighting squads at once everywhere, among the students, and especially among the workers, etc., etc. Let groups be at once organised of three, ten, thirty, etc., persons. Let them arm themselves at once as best they can, be it with a revolver, a knife, a rag soaked in kerosene for starting fires, etc. Let these detachments at once select leaders, and as far as possible contact the Combat Committee of the St. Petersburg Committee. Do not demand any formalities, and, for heaven’s sake, forget all these schemes, and send all “functions, rights, and privileges” to the devil. Do not make membership in the R.S.D.L.P. an absolute condition—that would be an absurd demand for an armed uprising.”

This is why a firm grasp on the history of revolutions, revolutionaries, their mistakes, and their successes, all of which is contained within theory, is crucial to creating a revolutionary party capable of making the correct assessment and decision at a moments notice. Many Marxists would be shocked to find Lenin advocating for what many would classify as “adventurism.” But please understand that I’m not at all stating that every protest should turn into violent “Combat Committees” lol. As I’ve mentioned, a simple list of demands would suffice, and whenever the working class sees victories from these types of actions, it moves their understanding of working class power from the ideological realm into the material realm, making it tangible and achievable.

The PSL has an admirable degree of discipline and responsiveness. As I mentioned, I am continually inspired by you comrades and your ability to set aside your individual needs to respond to the cries of the people! However, our inability to convert spontaneous uprisings into direct action we can support is of concern. We often hold the attention of the masses in a time of crisis, but once the momentum dissipates, so does the attention we hold. Ebbs and flows are natural, but if we are not building infrastructure in the interim to actually prepare the working class for the next crisis, we will continue to lose them when momentum dies down.

Importantly, this cannot be the decision of one individual unit. Dedication to building infrastructure must be agreed upon by the entire party and prioritized by ensuring we dedicate appropriate organizational capacity and resources to it. This is a slow-burning, long term project that requires continual renewal of our dedication. There are days when the free breakfast programs of the Black Panthers didn’t have a single child in attendance, for example, but refusing to give up and maintaining these long term projects will ensure that we stay ready so we don’t have to get ready.

But unfortunately, we often must drop even short term projects to accommodate national’s orientation to prioritize, for example, door knocking. This frequently includes canceling existing actions, like book clubs or community defense meetings, in favor of these more “urgent” priorities. To be clear, I am not discussing when we need to urgently respond to a working class crisis such as ICE raids or emergency rallies! I also understand that we are limited in organizational capacity, and oftentimes we need all hands on deck to be effective in our other strategies.

However, the continual habit of dropping longer and shorter term projects for shorter term ones signals to the working class that we have no interest in seeing these projects through. This continual pivoting is a form of commandism, which is a structural problem when a party grows in size, but it is worrisome that we do not have (many) long term projects we’ve sustained for more than a year. Comrades, I ask you to look into the history of revolutionary movement building and find one movement that has not sustained long term projects! Worse, these pivots are rarely discussed among the units first. They’re decided on by central leadership, either at the national or district level, and comrades are expected to comply.

This is not democratic centralism; abandoning a project, whether at the local or national level, is something that requires discussion when it is not emergent. This is national’s orientation for how the party should be run, and many of you may be okay with this as a strategy, but my analysis is that we regularly sacrifice long term strategies for shorter-term ones that produce small “achievements” but never larger, meaningful “wins” for the working class as a proletarian movement toward the objective of revolution.

(Addendum: Upon reflecting on the PSL’s assessment of the “current moment,” I would like to further push back on this claim. If we look at the political analysis of the world, it is one of revolutionary potential, as evidenced by the political uprisings across the globe. This is not a time of low political action or consciousness; even in the United States, we have had more protests in the last five years than at any other point in history, and more people are turning up to explicitly political action by the millions. Yet we continually fail to raise this spontaneous consciousness further.

So, what is it, exactly, that the PSL means by “meeting the moment,” and what if the “moment” in question is rooted in the same poor political analysis of a leadership that is more concerned with optics and “building the party” than building the capacity to support THE moment for the working class? Because the leadership does not understand what a genuine revolutionary moment looks like, and because they are not cultivating comrades who are capable of utilizing such a moment, we risk squandering the opportunity to elevate the consciousness of the masses to usher them toward that moment.)

Participation in Bourgeois Elections

Seeing as this essay is already approaching 12 pages in its current form, I will keep this critique short but for anyone who is interested, I have written a longer form theoretical polemic and analysis critiquing participation in bourgeois elections for all Marxist parties. Effectively, we spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars within the four year election cycle on these campaigns. We are told that this is a Leninist strategy, but it isn’t really. Those who make this argument rely on Lenin’s polemic in Left-Wing Communism, where he criticized the German and Dutch left for declaring bourgeois parliaments “historically obsolete” on principle alone, he insisted that communists were obligated to participate so long as the masses were still engaged in them.

Once we contextualize Left-Wing Communism, we find that its argument does not map onto our current conditions. Lenin wrote within a climate of immense revolutionary potential, among a working class that was already heavliy organized and politically conscious, and within electoral systems (the tsarist Duma and the Weimar Reichstag) that have absolutely no resemblance to our red-tapped, anti-communist, anti-third party “democracy.”

The Third International, the authoritative codification of how Lenin’s tactics were meant to be applied, also clearly states that any participating party must identify openly as communist, draw a clear line of demarcation from the social democrats, treat elections as a tactic subordinate to other work, and that if conditions are ripe for (as an example) a strike, electoral participation should halt. Our candidates platforms in our recent Vote Socialist campaigns are indistinguishable from those of progressive liberals and social democrats. This is a form of opportunism where we flatten our message to “meet the masses where they are,” but only to keep them there, echoing their spontaneous consciousness rather than systematizing it and raising it a step further.

More importantly, people who turn out to vote are overwhelmingly the labor aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie proper. Roughly half of all adults earning under $50,000 and $100,000 did not vote in 2024. That is over 100 million eligible voters who did not vote. For comparison, only about 22% of adults earning $100,000 or more did not vote. Those who are the most impacted by the system (systemically the poorest, undereducated, marginalized) are those who have already given up on it.

And while statistics do not reveal the complete nuance or the entire picture of one’s class, and those who earn a higher income (such as myself) are capable of joining the proletarian movement, they’ve been repeatedly identified as those with the least revolutionary potential. Further, there are at least 27 millions more (the unhoused, the undocumented, the formerly incarcerated, those in US colonized “territories”) who are legally barred from voting, who our campaigns are also not reaching.

I am not saying we should refrain from participation altogether, but it should heed the contingencies laid out nearly a century ago that distinguish us from the bourgeois Democratic Socialists, and it should be deprioritized. Dedicating party resources to building the infrastructure for a general strike, which the working class has expressed interest in, would be far more valuable. This means establishing distribution networks with storage and pickup sites, neighborhood committees and coalitions, alternative systems to sustain the working class like community gardens (some PSL units in other states are doing this short term), training in first aid, self defense, and childcare.

(Addendum: I am saying that running in presidential and governor races is a woeful misallocation of resources, whereas running in smaller elections across more cities would be significantly easier to win and would have a higher probability of materially improving policy to aid our class, providing the support necessary to engage in class warfare.)

This is exactly what the Black Panther Party did! Their programs were dismissed by other leftists as pointless mutual aid, but they were tactical, a skeleton built to support the proletariat in a time of crisis rather than an end in themselves. As Huey P. Newton put it, they were “survival programs, survival pending revolution, not something to replace revolution or challenge the power relations demanding radical action, but an activity that strengthens us for the coming fight, a lifeboat leading us safely to shore.”

We know their method works here, that it has shaken the ruling class, and we have the Panthers’ own mistakes to learn from, which is again why theory matters. The PSL already knows how to do much of this work, but we don’t currently sustain it long term. We take these types of projects up for short periods and let them crumble in our absence, when sustaining them through the ebbs and flows is where the difficult work is. And much of it must be sustained independently of electoral or bourgeois arenas, so that when the state inevitably moves to crush it, we remain afloat.

In Conclusion

I sincerely appreciate those of you who’ve been able to read through this entire letter. Now, the reasons I’ve provided, for those of you still tuned in, may still seem trivial or unimportant, certainly not a reason to leave the party. But these reasons constitute Lenin’s definition of a party that has unintentionally abandoned the revolutionary premise of Marxism. Without theory, we cannot distinguish revolutionary work from work that only resembles it, and without propaganda that elevates consciousness, the masses will continue to be redirected toward ruling class ideology. This is a critique of the party structure, not of any individual comrades! As I mentioned, each of you is a dedicated, loyal comrade, and I do not question your intentions at all. But opportunism is defined by the use of revolutionary language to legitimize strategies that do not threaten the capitalist system, and that is effectively what our propaganda and political education have resorted to.

Lenin’s point in What Is To Be Done? was that there is no middle ground between revolutionary socialism and liberalism! Any de-emphasis of Marxist theory strengthens bourgeois ideology by default. What makes this dangerous is that the party, functionally, absorbs the energy of dedicated, loyal people who want to be revolutionaries and channels it into work that never actually threatens power, abandoning the necessary and patient work of developing leadership prepared to support the working class in times of crisis.

Every revolutionary leader you’ve ever heard of (Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro, Sankara, Minh, Luxemburg) identified opportunism as the greatest threat to revolutionary parties, more so than violent state repression, because repression leads to revolutionary clarity while opportunism eliminates or distorts it. The worst manifestation of opportunism is what Lenin identified as social chauvinism, when the party actually allies with the bourgeoisie and uses its organizational capacity to achieve their objectives. Lenin explains: “Opportunism is our principal enemy. Opportunism in the upper ranks of the working-class movement is bourgeois socialism, not proletarian socialism. It has been shown in practice that the working-class activists who follow the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeois themselves.”

(Addendum: the PSL has resorted to social chauvinism by mobilizing our organizational capacity to support legislation put forward by the Democratic party such as the recent redistricting in California.)

It may seem as though I’m purity testing the PSL and failing it simply because it doesn’t live up to my ideals of what a revolutionary party “should” look like, that all these theorists I’ve been quoting represent the standard I’m measuring the PSL against, and that we simply aren’t “radical” enough. HOWEVER, opportunism is a structural diagnosis with a long history within Marxist movements, and not a single revolutionary movement has avoided it. It is not representative of the individual moral failures of comrades and their work.

It is identified when a party sacrifices the long term interests of the proletarian movement for short-sighted gains. It is also identified when the question of revolution is continually put off into the distant future and intentionally delayed, treating the masses and the climate as not yet “ready”! Personally, I find this assessment by Parvus (written in 1901, though for transparency, Parvus was a promising revolutionary before the material success of the war persuaded him to abandon the cause, nevertheless, his revolutionary theory remains decent) to be the most astute:

As is well known, it is the dictatorship of the proletariat that opportunism criticises most. It does not directly deny the possibility of realising it, but it doubts it, it pushes it as far as possible into the distance, and above all wishes to eliminate it from present-day political considerations. The conditions, it claims, are still so unripe that they are not yet ready for it. The conditions, claims opportunism, are still so unripe that if the proletariat were to get hold of the machinery of the state, it… would end in a colossal defeat for the proletariat. So, for the time being, we leave the running of the state to those who already do so… And we must regard with trepidation every electoral victory as a step that brings us closer… to our defeat. But due to the inconsistency on which opportunism depends, it of course avoids drawing this conclusion from its premise. But what does it offer us instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it no can no longer countenance as a political guideline? How is the proletariat to abolish capitalist exploitation if not by conquering political power? What should be done, how should the working class act in order to achieve this goal…

It is only logical that opportunism, having abandoned the hope of the political rule of the proletariat, should seek to mediate between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Where socialism has hitherto uncovered the fiercest class antagonisms, opportunism seeks points of agreement. It pursues a policy of compromise. It wants to break off the peaks, to bridge over the antagonisms. This is how the theories of adaptation, of growing over into socialism, arose, with which opportunism seeks to conceal the hopelessness of its standpoint from itself and from the world.

Allowing opportunism to remain unchallenged is tantamount to allowing the party to forfeit the revolution. We will continue to invest our time and energy into strategies that never pose a threat to the ruling class, we will tail after the masses to “meet the moment,” we will substitute left-populist sloganeering for class analysis, we will never earn the trust of the working class, we will make short-sighted pivots that sacrifice the long term project of cultivating the masses, and we will distort the revolutionary character of our messaging.

Worst of all, we will be unprepared to assist the masses in times of crisis. One of the most dangerous aspects of opportunism is that it is rarely intentional (though it certainly can be)! As Lenin states, the opportunist “does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless. Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.”

In conclusion, I hope my criticisms do not read as an attack on the decent, genuinely good work we have done for the working class. I am aware of how strong my critiques are, and how, like myself, many of you have found a political home and community in the PSL, and it is not my intent to diminish that. The point of this letter is NOT that the PSL’s work is totally pointless or unimportant, nor that everyone should abandon it. The PSL does meaningful and important work, and for many, that work is valuable enough to continue.

But I do not believe this work, in its current form, is building the infrastructure or capacity to support a proletarian revolution.

Though it may not be apparent to everyone reading this, I have tried to address these concerns with varying levels of leadership and to emphasize the need for improved tactics, strategy, and political education. Over the last year I have suggested internal book studies, strategic mutual aid, infrastructure building, self defense training, targeted strikes, and more. Many of these suggestions were supported by our (amazing) local leads, but they require the material support of the PSL’s central leadership, and cannot be carried out by one unit of 6 to 10 people. (Addendum: They have absolutely no interest in doing this type of work.)

I have insisted on different formats for our public-facing “meetings” and “forums,” which often become a lecture with preset discussion points. I’ve heard from at least a dozen people that this format alienates them from attending, people who came expecting their own observations to be heard and taken seriously as a contribution to the struggle, are instead lectured at and forced to engage in timed, predetermined discussions. This overly corporate formula for community organizing is what happens when leadership tries to formalize the cultivation of political consciousness in a way that is totally removed from the actual proletarian movement.

There is nothing wrong with having an agenda or discussion points to keep a conversation productive. The problem is that they reverse the pedagogy of the oppressed, resorting to a style of dialogue that treats the community as empty vessels to be filled with the “correct” knowledge and guided to the “correct” conclusion, rather than letting us be led by them and learn as much from them as they might from us. To assume that only we possess all the knowledge, and must therefore guide their conclusions accordingly, underestimates and, as Paulo Freire argued, dehumanizes the working class and their capabilities.

What has troubled me most in my time with the PSL is that every time I have offered productive criticism, a change of tactics, an improvement to our political education, I have not been truly heard. The responses from upper leadership are often so defensive that you would forget I am a member of this party who deserves to contribute to it meaningfully! My criticisms have, rather, been taken as an attack on you comrades and your hard work.

In my final conversation with [Redacted], I was told that the only way for me to “understand” the work is to “do it.” As if I have not attended dozens of protests and rallies, given speeches at them, driven 20-plus miles in the middle of a workday to defend my comrades from police, ICE, or counter-protesters, as if I haven’t been teargassed and shot at trying to aid my community and my comrades, as if I haven’t harassed my friends and family to vote for our candidates, as if I haven’t tried to bring the PSL to my Muslim community, as if I haven’t spent my own money, time, and energy struggling along the party line with everyone else.

As if it were not from these experiences that I made my observations and earnestly sought to contribute by analyzing where we could improve! For God’s sake, I have been in the PSL almost as long as I have lived in this state lol! It has been the center of my life here. How utterly demoralizing to have my critiques received as though they come from an overly dogmatic, unrealistic armchair revolutionary.

I ground this letter in theory to show that these concerns have a history, a solution, and a name. The PSL claims to be Marxist-Leninist and uses theory to justify many of its stances, and it is for that reason that I have brought theory into this discussion, to substantiate my perspectives with historical precedent, in the hope that they will be taken more seriously after my departure. (Addendum: I implore comrades to genuinely reflect on their work in the party and determine if that work is valuable enough to continue at all.) But I know leadership has meant no ill will and did not intend to push me away or diminish my perspectives. I know they are defending work they believe in, and I still believe in them as individual comrades.

Despite these efforts, despite my attempts to raise these concerns with higher levels of leadership, I have not been able to reconcile these differences. And because I cannot reconcile the party’s strategies, I cannot defend them. It is for these reasons that I have decided to leave the PSL.

I want to end with a special thank you to [redacted comrades] who have taught me so much through their own actions, who have offered me friendship and comradeship, who have had more faith in me than I have at times had in myself, and who I know will continue to do meaningful, hard work both in and out of the PSL, work that all future comrades can depend on to lead them toward the good fight. That love extends to each of you, and I look forward to seeing everything that you all will accomplish and cheer you on from the periphery. <3

Love you all! Salaam!

Recommended Reading:

• The Labor Aristocracy: The Material Basis for Opportunism in The Labor Movement
• Lenin’s polemics against the Economists
• On the Tactics of Opportunism
• The Foundations of Leninism – Theory
• The Foundations of Leninism – The Party
• BE CONCERNED WITH THE WELL-BEING OF THE MASSES, PAY ATTENTION TO METHODS OF WORK
• Mao’s Little Red Book
• How To Be A Good Communist

“Our analysis has found that this Americanism manifests in the U.S. Communist movement as two opposite and complementary, major organizational problems: aversion to criticism and obsession with criticism. Both are manifestations of extreme liberal individualism and both trend towards the movement’s greater fracturing, atomization, and dissolution…. The former, aversion to criticism, is…the liberal-individualist’s defense mechanism, an avoidance tactic that serves to protect one’s fragile ego from shattering under pressure….

“We must become as the storm that sets the trees and the grain to trembling, that causes the ripest of the fruit to fall; from all formations and half-built organizations and from the petrified corpses of formations that still bear green shoots, we aim to sort and sift, to winnow and combine, the most advanced, the most prepared, the most militant into a single ferment of revolutionary dialogue.”

—USU Editorial Board, The Prospectus, August 2022

We have frequently remarked on the prevalence of an anti-democratic tendency among the supposedly Marxist-Leninist organizations that claim all-empire status in the US – the CPUSA, PSL, and FRSO.¹ We have published pieces about the cult-form taken by the opportunist organizations.² In particular, we warned that the Party for Socialism and Liberation has no long-term revolutionary strategy and is, instead, merely a brand-building exercise.³

Over the past week or so, two letters have emerged from internal PSL channels. The first purports to be written by one Walter Smolarek, a Central Committee member. It is addressed internally, to other PSL members, and lays out the justifications for his resignation. Although there are several questionable points contained in it, the main critiques of the letter are sound and align with criticisms that we have repeatedly made.⁴ The PSL Central Committee is alleged to have responded with a now-leaked internal letter that might as well be titled “My ‘Not Involved in Human Trafficking’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.”

First, the areas in which we disagree with the Smolarek letter: 1) Walter Smolarek was implicated in the Central Committee’s suppression of a sexual abuse investigation. This represents the most extreme example of the very anti-democratic chauvinism the author highlights, and should have been appropriately addressed.⁵ 2) The Smolarek letter also makes the mistake of separating the “movement” from the masses, and improperly positions the class conscious (whether newly or not) as being somehow part of a separate “stream.” The letter mistakenly divides attempts to win hegemony over the movement and attempts to win leadership of the masses. These are dialectically related and, in any period, before the masses can manifest their organized will in the form of a vanguard party, the incorrect theories and false-starts within the movement must be soundly and thoroughly discredited and defeated.⁶ To that end, it is impermissible for us to separate out the class conscious as a special group; they are the leading elements of the masses. While we are building up bases, we must be fighting the war of ideology against the distorters and liquidators of Marxism – like the PSL.

The Central Committee’s response is laughable, and should need no commentary from USU to expose it for the fraud that it is. It openly embraces the petty bourgeois notion of “branding” as the battle to win. For the PSL, socialism is a brand and its chief efforts are to act as the marketing manager of socialism among the labor aristocracy. The Central Committee does not even bother to refute some of the most damning accusations (for instance, that Brian and Ben Becker wrote most of the speeches or dominate the entire theory-production process in an undemocratic fashion). Indeed, it merely confirms that they are chasers-of-spontaneity, worshipers at the altar of the popular movement, and devoted first and foremost to expanding the PSL “brand,” above, beyond, and to the exclusion of actually building the required organizations among the people, and above, beyond, and to the exclusion of combating the settler labor aristocracy and the petty bourgeois socialism that dominates the field.

Indeed, how could they combat it? After all, PSL embodies one of the main tendencies of petty bourgeois socialism today. Despite their high-flung rhetoric accusing Smolarek of dismissing the possibility of revolution in the US, it is the PSL Central Committee that, through their theory of organizing, dismisses this possibility except as a branding exercise. Read carefully and compare the claims, and it will be apparent that the PSL is thoroughly bankrupt as an organization and serves only to mislead the masses and trap their newly-conscious strata.

This is why the League reiterates the position of our updated Outlook: down with the Four Opportunist Organizations of the PSL, CPUSA, FRSO, and DSA, and let us move forward toward the construction of a real militant vanguard with a proletarian internationalist outlook and an anti-settler standpoint!⁷

1. See, for instance, “The Social Reproduction of the Revisionist Party” (April 16, 2026) and “CPUSA Resignation” (October 30, 2025).
2. Although the piece was about the IMT (International Marxist Tendency), it could equally have been about CPUSA, FRSO, or PSL. “The Cult-Building Tendency” (April 2, 2024).
3. “Revolution in our Lifetime” (March 6, 2024).
4. See particularly, “Against Settler Socialism: Lessons from Minneapolis” (March 24, 2026).
5. Fashbusters, “PSL Whistleblowers Refute Central Committee’s Defense of Steven Powers”.
6. See, e.g., V.I. Lenin, What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats (1894).
7. See, “The 2026 Outlook of the Central Press of the All-Empire Worker’s League” (2026).

Editor’s Note: The letters have been reproduced exactly as they were received save for the fact that the Smolarek letter was followed by 19 blank pages in the document that was sent to us, and that numerous formatting issues (paragraphs breaking mid sentence) in the CC letter have been fixed.

Resignation from the PSL – The Smolarek Letter

Comrades, I am writing to submit to you my resignation from the Central Committee of the PSL and my resignation from membership.

I have been a member of this organization for 17 years, more than half of my life. When I first joined, I used to sneak out of my parents’ house to attend Party meetings and had to open a P.O. box to receive Party literature. I spent years building Party branches in various cities — Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Asheville, Baltimore, Louisville, Lexington and elsewhere. I was elected to the Central Committee three times, and before that was an observer present at every CC meeting for seven years. I worked for over four years on the Loud & Clear podcast alongside Brian Becker, then later on The Socialist Program. When the National Communications Department was established in 2022, I was made its director, and I have written the bulk of both external and internal Party materials for several years now, including ghost-writing materials for individual Party leaders. This is all to say that I have truly dedicated myself to the Party — this has been the singular purpose of my life. I do not make this decision lightly.

In recent years, I have been working in the “Center” of the Party, the New York office, which was established about three years ago, and I have become deeply disturbed by the crystallization of trends which I previously hoped were marks of the organization’s newness. These trends are the deep political dishonesty of the organization’s top leadership circle; the lack of serious strategic assessment; sectarianism and hostility towards mass organizing; the recklessness of the organization’s top leadership; and the marginalization of leaders who raise disagreements on a sincere political basis. I hoped and believed that the maturation of the Party would create the conditions for these problems to be overcome, namely that the emergence of more leaders from the branches could bring a greater health and honesty to the organization. But the reverse has become true. As the top leadership has gained access to more resources and more dutiful personnel, these tendencies have only hardened.

Rather than producing a more thoughtful, more rooted national leadership, I have seen person after person I respected come into the Center only to assimilate into total deference to Brian and Ben Becker, or otherwise quietly leave.

Seeing this, I have many times wanted to leave the organization. These last two years have been the most difficult in my Party tenure. I have wrestled over the responsibility to fight for “the party” and my recognition that it is not and will not become a true revolutionary party, a vehicle for the working class to win power. These last two years, I have made the calculation to conceal my full political views in order not to be displaced from central leadership, not out of a desire to retain any title but out of serious concern for the irresponsibility of the impulses of the Party’s top leaders and a commitment to mitigating them. This is a pitiful position. But I firmly believe that if I had done anything other than this, I would have been rapidly marginalized from meaningful positions of leadership and would not have been able to prevent top Party leadership from making decisions that would endanger the entire membership in gravely serious ways. I have decided now that this is no longer a meaningful contribution to the struggle for socialism.

Why now

The breaking point for me has been witnessing the profound dishonesty of the Branch Organizing Conference and the hardening of the leadership’s antagonism towards organizing the working class.

Comrades do not generally know that the Branch Organizing Conference only came to life because Ben Becker was concerned about bringing the Bylaws changes that he sought to make to the floor of the Party Congress. He worried that the changes, most notably significantly lowering the requirements of membership, would be controversial. His solution was to propose bringing together a body of hand-picked branch leaders to act as an acceptable enough substitution for the Congress to sign off on the changes. But in the process of putting together this group, he got carried away and the idea grew and grew into a de facto second round of the Congress — but without the constitutionally mandated processes, elections, and rights. In the end, the same hesitations over bringing the Bylaws to a vote led to them once again being put off, this time to the Central Committee.

In the end, the Conference became more of a defensive pep rally meant to reinforce, or “unify”, the Party around a celebration of its supposed “vanguard” status in defense against growing internal problems. After the Party Congress, there was a series of quiet resignations from Congress delegates based on concerns with the Party’s core political analysis and the suffocation of internal debate. There has also been a growing panic amongst the top Party leadership that several areas are succeeding in developing base building projects and conducting their own internal education.

The Conference became a key venue to check this trend, but with great efforts made to disguise the Party leadership’s true aims. Members were not told that their leaders are against base building and mass organizing work, that they view it as being in direct competition with growing the PSL. Members were not told that the leadership is suspicious of branches exploring education beyond that provided nationally from the PSL or TPF.

Instead of making direct interventions that could be debated on their political merits, members were presented with a wildly inflated picture of the PSL’s strength and an orientation on the current political landscape that anticipates nearing ruptures of a revolutionary proportion. The practical implication of such an outlook is that members must make their singular focus “building the Party” in preparation for these impending critical openings. They were given cherrypicked history lessons on the Bolsheviks and the U.S. Communist Party suggesting the PSL is on the brink of a massive expansion in scale and influence. Members were also presented with promises of a new, expansive and immersive, long-term educational period, a “National Cadre Development Program” that the national leadership will be driving — thus, no need to be driving education at the local level. In reality, this was a last-minute appropriation of an existing multi-part educational series that runs through the PSL’s line on the full history of the core debates of the Communist Movement from the 1860s through the fall of the Soviet Union. It was developed by founding members many years ago, and a couple of branches continue to utilize it as introductory education.

Another instructive example of what has been going on behind the scenes is the semi-controversy that arose around a seemingly new labor orientation given at the conference. In the panel on organization entitled “Building the Organization to Scale,” there was a speech given by a young union member who is not part of the national leadership. It may have seemed curious to attendees that this speech was not given by a member of the Labor Department leadership or Central Committee. That was because Ben and Husayn recognized that the content of this speech was a departure from the previous orientation that had not been run through other Labor Department leaders, and thus sought to distance themselves from direct responsibility for it. The comrade’s speech made the argument that we should reconsider the value and viability of organizing and moving unions. They’re too few, too weak, and too slow. Instead, our orientation to workplace organizing should focus on promoting Party literature, forming discussion groups, and recruiting coworkers to the Party and to the Action Network.

This orientation was shocking to many people in the audience, and, immediately, there were texts being exchanged asking about this apparent reorientation. By the time audience comment was through and the speakers were returned to for final comments, the speaker gave a comment that walked back much of what he had said.

In the Central Committee meeting following the conference, Husayn, Ben and Brian Becker made it a point to remark on the speech, distancing themselves. They characterized the speaker as “flippant” and spoke of the problems with “speaking in shorthand.” The reality is that Husayn wrote the talk that the speaker gave. He also wrote the comment the speaker delivered walking it back. Further, this is the orientation that all of them have quietly been giving for some time. This is at least the third time that I have heard this orientation presented. Yet if other leaders were to try to contest the position, they would deny any disagreement.

This maneuvering by the top party leadership is not in and of itself new. I have seen a hundred times over how the top leadership will go to great lengths to defeat a political trend they disagree with not through direct and open political struggle, but through some sort of disorienting maneuver that never makes an admission of conflict. What is new is the potential that has emerged within the organization for real, impactful work that I am watching be stifled. Witnessing this is revealing to me the stakes of allowing this farce to continue. It is capturing and suffocating the possibilities of the embryonic socialist movement. I believe that this is a greater threat than anything.

I have been extremely disturbed by the secret machinations within the New York office to extinguish or wrest control of the base building projects gaining ground in Denver and Brooklyn. Both areas, through separate processes of development, have found their way to building community center projects that operate as genuine mass organizations. There was an initial attempt to dissuade each area from this direction, but when the dissuasion didn’t work, the approach was taken to give leaders of both areas the impression that the top leadership was nonetheless supportive of their projects and interested in further debate and discussion. Behind closed doors, the national leadership has been working with insiders in both areas to inform on and undermine the projects. I know this both from being in proximity to these conversations and because I have been asked to play a role in this subterfuge.

In recent months, I have been aware of growing outrage in the office about the Brooklyn leadership’s focus on cultivating community partnerships and relationships, and most vehemently the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center. I have been approached multiple times, in secret conspiratorial huddles and one-on-one meetings, trying to ensure that I don’t sympathize with the efforts. It is well known that I believe in the centrality of base building for the communist movement today — I helped lead base building projects in the
Philadelphia branch and have written extensively on the subject. I have tried to generally avoid involvement in these discussions because I know the only goal is to pin me to a position against the members in Brooklyn. I have, however, heard other members receiving orientation on counter-organizing within the district.

Avoiding involvement became impossible when I was asked repeatedly to put my name to a document opposing base building in Brooklyn, a position I clearly do not support. I was asked first by Layan and Wyatt at the Branch Organizing Conference, then again in the New York office in a one-on-one with Ben Becker. I declined directly, saying that I agreed with the Brooklyn strategy of base building and explained why. This triggered yet another meeting with Ben Becker, David, Gabi, and Wyatt, where I was told that Brooklyn’s approach, which included raising comradely but critical analysis of the efficacy of previous work, would make the branch ”feel bad” and “feel confused”. I explained why I thought having honest assessment and differences of views expressed internally was healthy. I tried to steer the conversation in the direction of the political and strategic principles in dispute and explained why I agreed with the base building strategy. This was met with tears and anger, then it was made explicitly clear by the four of them that they viewed base building as incompatible with the approach of the PSL. I informed them that the previous night I had been reached out to by the Brooklyn leadership to speak at their district retreat based on my experience and writings on base building, and I had planned to go. They said they did not object to me speaking at the retreat, but reiterated how “confusing” they thought it would be.

Shortly later, the same night, Ben called me four times to urge me not to speak. The final time he called me, around 11:00pm that night, he told me that the Standing Committee of the Central Committee had just held an emergency meeting and voted that I could not speak at the retreat. While explaining why I disagreed with that decision, that I am a Central Committee member — one of the longest tenured members of the organization and the national leadership — expressing sincere political views that are not outside of stated Party line, I accepted and informed the Brooklyn leadership I would not be attending.

I later learned that at this retreat, a group of five members intervened forcefully, disruptively, and in a clearly orchestrated manner. Each of these members is current or former staff. The entire retreat, these five members read from a document on their phones, in a way that was completely unsubtle and visible to all attendees. One of the members emotionally stormed out. Having the experience of 17 years in the organization, and a decade in national leadership, I am certain that this was coordinated by Ben.

Later in the week, I was sat down by Brian Becker for more than three hours, questioned about my loyalty, and plied with what was clearly meant to be intimidating information. I was informed directly of the national leadership’s plans to kill the political trends coming out of Denver and Brooklyn. I was informed that he and others have been working secretly with select members of the Denver Steering Committee to incapacitate the other Denver leaders who have developed strong critiques around the issue of mass organizing and the PSL’s political orientation. He characterized the section of the leadership driving the Colorado People’s Center disrespectfully, and claimed that Lillian House specifically is driving a a strategy for mass organizing based on personal grievances. This is astonishing, as Lillian has been an open advocate for local mass organizing and base building for the entire time that she was in New York. In fact, this was a major source of frustration for the leadership, particularly for Ben, who found Lillian’s participation in leadership discussions annoying and would often say so to others. It is absolutely well known that the Colorado People’s Center is a project with the explicit aim of base building and mass
organizing. She reported multiple times within top leadership meetings on the project, and just two weeks ago, Brian applauded the center in front of the Central Committee. The national leadership has repeatedly given the impression that they embrace the project and Lillian as a dynamic leader, while behind closed doors they have denigrated both her and Denver and followed them with suspicion. Now, without an acknowledgement of the political difference, they are planning to empower their chosen representatives in Denver to temper the current direction of the People’s Center and bring the Denver to temper the current direction of the People’s Center and bring the branch back in line. After spelling out what they intend for Denver, I was asked pointedly if I wanted to remain a national leader, and if so if I had to exercise the expected discipline.

Finally, last night, trying one last time to address this issue in what should be the democratic bodies of the Party, the Brooklyn leadership asked that their strategy be discussed at the meeting of the New York Branch Committee. This is the body above the Steering Committee in New York that six of them are part of. When the point came up in the agenda, the junior members of the branch leadership came right out with it and expressed that base building was in contradiction to the strategy of the branch and the Party. But the members of the national leadership present, with the exception of myself — Ben, Karla, Layan, Manolo — shifted to the tactic of denying that there was a fundamental difference being expressed. Once again, with gross feigned magnanimity, they opted to conceal their views on a controversial issue so as not to risk a debate that could weaken their grip on the organization, just like with the Branch Organizing Conference and so many other instances. I expect that in the coming days, they will adopt the same posture internally, arguing that mass organizing is something they support.

I know this is false and I am not just inferring this. I have heard them talk behind closed doors for months about their opposition to the base building and mass organizing work that comrades are doing across the country, and have read draft documents they’ve written to combat the trend. This position was alluded to in a document written by Brian Becker that characterized mass organizing work as “too pedestrian,” but Ben Becker wrote more explicitly against base building and mass organizing in a document titled “Turning to the working class: What it should mean and what it shouldn’t.” This document was circulated amongst the inner circle in the New York office, but was ultimately not shared
out of concern that it would cause debate. In preparatory documents for the conference, key objectives included establishing that “pivoting is the essence of revolution,” and “deep organizing..isn’t part of [our] theory of revolution.”

It would be naive and irresponsible to take part in any further “processes” within the organization to deal with these questions. How can I continue to play dumb, knowing how such commissions and working groups are formed solely to drag out and delay resolution on an issue until a disfavored view loses its momentum. Congress attendees, consider where the promised “AI commission” and “Trans liberation commission” went? Even if any type of process actually were to come into being, it would be characterized by the same concealment of views and false “unity” to secure agreement while the actual decision making and implementation would remain completely under the control of Brian, Ben and the circle they keep around them.

Comrades, remaining in this organization has become the inverse of my political principles and I find no room within it to fight. I can no longer ignore the conclusion that I have been in the process of reaching over the years, and have now arrived at. Despite the presence of many people whom I respect and admire in the organization, the PSL is a fundamentally dead-end project driven by shallow and opportunistic leaders. These leaders squander the vibrancy of their most dynamic organizers and under-develop those who place their trust in them. I do not believe that the PSL’s narrow agitational focus and exaggerated political analysis is adequate for the tasks of our time. I do not believe there is the possibility of meaningfully moving the organization. I do not believe it is permissible for a communist to continue onwards in this organization in light of these conclusions.

I firmly believe that membership in the PSL must be based on a voluntary commitment to the organization’s clearly and openly stated political line and structure. I believe most members have essentially no idea what the PSL’s top leaders really think, how this impacts the directives members are tasked with carrying out, and how the organization really operates. I feel a responsibility in choosing to make my own exit to share insight into the dynamics beyond this final experience that have led me to a certainty this organization is a dead end-dynamics that are only plainly visible to the small handful of people that are allowed into the inner circle. I am not going to give an exhaustive account of my experiences, but I hope to shed enough light that others can believe their own eyes about the organization and its limitations and make an informed decision about how to exercise their political commitment to the movement for socialism, as I have made mine.

There are so many sincere, dedicated people in the PSL, and the intention of this letter is not to harm them, though I recognize it will be disruptive. I am departing not to abandon the fight for socialism, but because I am determined to commit my life to a real path towards winning it.

The fantasy of the Socialist Consciousness thesis

The core political line of the PSL is an opportunistic distortion of Leninism that conveniently aligns with the PSL’s marginal position in relation to the working class. Most members are likely not totally clear on what their organization imagines is the path to a successful socialist transformation of society in the U.S. While they are instructed intensively in the minutiae of the Party’s line on historical and geopolitical issues, members are largely left to themselves to deduce what the PSL’s theory of revolution might be.

Most members develop a sense that it is something like this: As capitalism inevitably produces injustices, the revolutionary party calls or joins protests. It recruits participants in these protest movements by expressing views that participants come to see as correct. When there are not protests, the party does agitational outreach to show itself and change the minds of more people. Capitalism’s own dynamics ensure that this cycle can be relied on to continue. Eventually, the capitalist system produces a crisis acute enough to throw the system into question, and if the Party is big enough, the protests can become a revolution.

This is essentially it. The PSL dresses up this simplistic concept with the socialist consciousness thesis — the idea that unique historical conditions preclude any path to revolution but to widely popularize our particular definition of socialism, positioning the party for the abrupt seizure of power at the time of a revolutionary crisis.

It is my firm belief that the PSL deliberately uses imprecise language, delivered with supreme confidence, to obscure the superficiality of its strategic and tactical approach. If the PSL can be said to have any strategy, it is to announce its ideas as often, loudly, and on as many issues as possible.

The socialist consciousness line is textbook idealism — that there is a magic set of words that can prepare the working class for revolution. This flies in the face of what communists historically have held: that the working class comes to class and revolutionary consciousness through the process of profound experiences gained through struggle, and, yes, repeated agitational exposures from the trusted organizers they fight with side-by-side.

The socialist consciousness theory relies on such a simplistic and flattened view of politics that it ignores almost every major question facing the working class and socialist movement — the atomization of the working class, the strength of right wing influence amongst the working class, the unprecedented powers of the capitalist state.

It is reasonable that members will be defensive of the PSL’s documents. It is unfortunately necessary to disabuse the membership of the idea that the core political documents of the PSL are carefully considered products of collective study, debate, and discussion. There is no meaningful collective leadership shaping the core political perspectives of the PSL beyond Brian Becker, Ben Becker, and formerly Eugene Puryear. In fact, core political documents often stem from a sudden thought that occurs to an individual. They are typically hastily assembled and often have basic historical and logical errors. It is not at
all uncommon in recent years for the Central Committee to receive documents without notice, cobbled together just in time for meetings, that are full of typos and are essentially recycled content from previous documents. (This has improved now with the prolific use of AI chatbots.) This gets by because of the strong cultural norm within the national leadership, shaped since the founding of the organization, to unanimously and enthusiastically praise whatever documents or directives are received from top Party leaders.

The basic historical analysis that forms the premise of the PSL’s Socialist Consciousness thesis is wrong. Is it really true that socialist transformation could not come to the United States through the struggle for democracy or the struggle for national liberation? What about the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the country came perhaps the closest it has ever been to socialist revolution? This was based on the internal national liberation struggles of the oppressed nationalities of the United States, principally the Black nation, waged in concert with the anti-colonial struggle of the people of Southeast Asia that delivered the U.S. empire its most humiliating military defeat. Brian himself directly contradicted the Socialist Consciousness thesis at the 5th Party Congress with a shift in its central theme. Shortly ahead of this Congress, Brian learned about an obscure Supreme Court case, Moore v Harper, and a related fringe legal concept called the “independent state legislature theory”. Brian extrapolated from this that a faction of the bourgeoisie was intent on using this case to end the democratic form of government in the United States and install a right-wing dictatorship. Thus, the central task of revolutionaries, as articulated in the 5th Party Congress, must be to urgently turn towards the struggle to defend democracy, a struggle which could only be defeated by a
people’s movement led by the PSL, which then could lead to a socialist revolution.

The fundamental contradiction between the central proclamation of the 5th Party Congress and the PSL’s official Socialist Consciousness line was never acknowledged or explained. They existed simultaneously in direct contradiction. That no one even on the Central Committee ever challenged this speaks to the culture of blind deference expected of all PSL members, even elected national leaders, to Brian Becker.

Not a party but a tendency

It is only possible to understand how the organization could have such a one-dimensional
approach by appreciating its lineage. PSL calls itself a party but, by concrete measures, it is an ideological tendency: an organization defined by its comprehensive political line, or as the PSL calls it, its “highly refined worldview”. A party is an organization that can credibly claim to represent a class or a section of a class. A party is solidified through a historical process in which the relationship between organization and base is formed; prior to that it is a preparty formation. A tendency is an organization that gains ground not by organizing the working class but by gaining influence amongst radicals. This is
not a criticism over semantics — the PSL calling itself a party as a reflection of its aspirations is reasonable enough — but a matter of clarifying the nature of the PSL as an organization.

The PSL’s basic approach was imported from the organization PSL emerged from — Workers World Party — and remains fundamentally unchanged. The PSL did not split from WWP over politics, but over the degradation of WWP as a functional organization.

The main difference between PSL and WWP is that today there is a much smaller “movement” within which to compete than in the 1960s and 70s, when WWP was at its prime. Ironically, the empty left landscape has benefited the PSL, which has become at least one of the biggest fish in a small pond. The leaders of PSL feel validated in the correctness of their approach — by doggedly raising its own flag in protests and on social media, the PSL has grown in reputation and numbers. Since breaking out on their own in 2004, they have surpassed WWP and anything WWP ever was, becoming one of the dominant forces in the small U.S. left. The PSL is hypnotized by this relative success. The
way PSL speaks of itself, many people internally and externally are shocked when they learn the PSL only has about 4000 members, and after more than twenty years of existence, its activity still does not go far beyond the protests and street outreach you can see from social media.

There is at least a logic to building a tendency in a period where a powerful working class movement exists, for revolutionaries to make their primary task working to influence the course of this movement. But today, in the aftermath of decades of global revolutionary defeat, the systematic destruction of left and working class organization in the U.S., and the advance of the organized far right — to organize an ideological tendency is to embrace historical irrelevancy. We are often told that “the biggest campaign is to build the Party.” Actually, the biggest campaign must be to address the diminished position and power of the working class. Through this process, a real communist party can be born. The PSL could achieve unquestionable hegemony within the existing left and still have no prospect of affecting real social change. We cannot lose sight of the most elementary of our political convictions, proven time and time and time again, that the masses make history. The prospect of a victorious socialist revolutionary struggle is contingent upon the participation of the working class, organized as a class.

The PSL’s internal culture and structures guard this extremely insular political perspective. If PSL members are trained, it is to learn and regurgitate the Party’s line — “to speak as leaders of the nation” — not to internalize the Marxist method and how it can be applied in deep and rigorous political study, discussion, strategizing, and experimentation considering the problems of our day. PSL members are in fact guided away from asking tough questions. Why do our events and protests seem to mainly mobilize activists from a middle class background and rarely people from the more oppressed strata of the working class directly affected by the issues in question? Is this a problem a protest-oriented organization can solve? One can see why such questions are
guarded against.

It is extremely abnormal for a communist organization to have such a low level of internal political engagement as the PSL. Critical debriefs are not a practice of the top Party leadership, not a part of the Party Congress process, not conducted by the Central Committee, and they are even banned within the New York City branch at the direction of top Party leaders. Where there are exceptions in the branches, it is to the credit of branch leadership and membership.

The paranoia that prevents self-reflection is rooted in political insecurity. There is an unspoken ban on members engaging with other contemporary left currents. Many members are likely unaware that there are sophisticated socialist debates within the U.S. left right now over strategy and tactics. There are significant socialist-led base building efforts making headway in New York City, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles, in many parts of the country. Any form of rigorous engagement with the questions, proposals, experiments, and debates of our day that are occurring outside of the PSL are treated as a danger.

In fact, in the New York office there has been panic in recent months after learning that some members have read interviews from non-PSL leaders of the Minneapolis general strike published in Jacobin, and another group of members have been taking the Jane McAlevey Organizing for Power class.

The organization’s structural deficiencies after more than twenty years of existence demonstrate plainly the PSL’s defective internal character. There is no functioning national education department and there never has been for more than a few months. The National Organization Department was only recently made into a real department, but since the organizer who led this work was pushed out of the Center, the department has rapidly degraded into little more than a surveillance and mobilization structure wielded by the top national leadership. Currently the NOD is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars employing highly skilled software developers to create an AI-powered app to compile comprehensive reports from all areas of the Party for the top leadership circle without having to deal with time-consuming personal engagement with branch leaders. This app will be used to ensure compliance with national directives and surface openings like Minneapolis for the national leadership to opportunistically claim credit for. The National Liaisons system — initially developed to be a network of support that surfaced the needs of the branches and facilitated the development of schools, trainings, resources, and consultation, is today overseen by the leaders of the National Organization Department with an almost singular purpose of ensuring compliance with national directives. There have been no schools, trainings, educational materials, or organizer-to-organizer exchanges developed by the NOD in now over a year. Forums for the engagement of leaders beyond the top leadership circle like the Party Organizer and the National Council have rapidly degraded into just more echo chambers for Brian and Ben Becker and sites to enforce the into just more echo chambers for Brian and Ben Becker and sites to enforce the latest agitational initiative.

Concealed hostility towards mass organizations

Many members think that their organization is invested in building mass organizations. The PSL’s top leaders, behind closed doors, believe members must be kept from this work. Mass organizations, they say, don’t yield recruits, tie members up in responsibilities that keep them from “pivoting” to protest calls, and make the membership “conservative”. For a tendency that is concerned exclusively with advancing its own position, the logic holds. Mass organizing, as compared to purely agitational activities, brings the organization into contact primarily with people who don’t already share it’s ideological perspective. It does embed organizers in a position of responsibility to specific groups of workers. It does result in organizers who are deeply in touch with the gulf between the PSL’s political line and where the masses of working people currently are. All of these things are extremely necessary.

Brian and Ben in particular recognize that their members believe in mass organizing work, and they thus carefully obscure their full political views with vague language and opt to kill mass organizing the long way. Rather than argue politically for the correctness of their position, they simply deny this work oxygen.

Branches are every day making attempts to develop local organizing campaigns, partnerships and coalitions, and mass organizations that build deep relationships with working class communities. Many branches have started to write branch strategy documents specifically to make progress on these objectives. This is a practice that came out of the Philadelphia and Denver branches and is viewed with suspicion by the top Party leadership, especially as it has inspired other cities to think critically about expanding the type of work a branch does.

With some exceptions, without training or guidance from the national organization, with constant orientations to force clumsy agitational campaigns into this work, and with repeated disruptions from competing national directives, long-term organizing efforts generally don’t make it past an elementary level.

When branches do get far in prioritizing such efforts, the national organization treats it as a major threat.

This was something I experienced even before the current manchinations within the Party Center in New York, as a branch leader in Philadelphia when we were building the PSL’s first Liberation Center. Originally, the concept of a Liberation Center was to build a lasting institution in a working class neighborhood that becomes known for addressing the issues directly relevant to the day-to-day lives of the people living there and build struggles around them. Liberation Center volunteers would go out into the community, get to know people, develop a deep understanding of the neighborhood, get involved in the lives and efforts already existing there, and offer labor and their center as resources to strengthen these efforts and propose new initiatives of our own. Through this, the relationships would be built that would tie the Party deeply to these communities and open up the space to build deep political consciousness over time in the neighborhood.

Brian, Ben, and Eugene sought to halt this proposal. It was ultimately settled with an unofficial deal that Philly would be allowed to continue but would have to represent the project within the Party using language obfuscating the real political proposal. I regret complying. I have seen over the years the consequence of blurring important political debates. Many cities have tried to emulate the Liberation Center concept, but without understanding it. In most places, it has more or less become diluted into just another name for a PSL office — a space primarily for PSL promotion.

The PSL uses the language of mass organizations, but it does not actually build them. A mass organization is a durable organizational form that involves a base of people outside of the party who are brought together to fight not just on the basis of agreement with a given position (like housing is a human right) but on the circumstances of their lives (like living in the same building or neighborhood). The PSL creates not mass organizations, but brands to put out protest calls, front organizations that consist of the same membership, and a supporter network. They all narrowly revolve around the PSL.

It makes sense that the PSL, as a tendency, finds mass organizations slow and frustrating. Again, a tendency is defined by its political line. That is what distinguishes it and attracts other radicals and greater influence within the left movement. If the PSL is engaged in low visibility, long-term work with people who are not going to immediately join and generate greater visibility, then newly radicalized people may end up in other left groups, losing potential numbers for PSL. If the PSL premises its success on growth and recruitment amongst radicals, then it is logical to favor activity that puts it at the front of every protest, in every flashy battleground, speaking on every hot issue, because that’s where the radicals will be able to see our position and find us.

This dependence on flash and visibility creates a particular tension with labor organizing, which cannot appeal only to the already ideologically sympathetic workers, but must do the long and hard organizing of moving all workers in the union regardless of pre-existing political views.

While the PSL espouses a desire to build the union movement, and there are PSL members who play important roles in trade unions and have led significant labor struggles, the PSL’s top leadership views this at just another site for the PSL to raise its flag high. Behind closed doors, the comrades engaged in the labor movement are routinely treated with exasperation, as “always the most conservative element of a communist party.” Comrades are directly instructed by the Party’s labor department to minimize their involvement in union organizing drives so that they can more fully focus on “talking politics” to their co-workers and recruiting them to the PSL or PAN. Comrades who are labor leaders are expected to readily deliver endorsements for protest initiatives and provide legitimacy to hastily decided calls like the general strike orientation. But the responsibilities of true mass leaders are in direct tension with quick-return agitational interventions.

Concealed sectarianism

For an organization that has been around for more than 20 years, the PSL is remarkably isolated. PSL members are told over and over that they are not in a sectarian organization, but their organization has a very limited view of who is worth cultivating relationships and collaboration with.

It is true that the PSL will work with most anyone, no matter how silly or discrediting, as long as they advance a PSL initiative (take General Strike US, for instance). But short-term utility is the primary basis of assessing external organizations and partners: will they or won’t they advance a PSL initiative. Given that the PSL’s work is oriented towards its own advancement and not that of working class organization, many serious working class formations are not very relevant to the PSL.

In the partnerships it does pursue, the narrowness of the PSL’s goals lead to an extreme expectation of control. Members are trained in the importance of the Party being the “anchor” of any coalition it is part of. The “anchor” is a euphemism for the force that makes all core political decisions and has executive authority to handle on-the-spot decision making without challenge. Members learn that having other groups around the PSL that follow our lead is worth the trouble because it provides a shield against red-baiting from the right wing and identity-based attacks from the left. These expectations put a short expiration date on the partnerships the PSL pursues, especially those that have any responsibility to a social base, and indeed members are repeatedly instructed that “breakups are inevitable” and cadre should avoid forming too close a bond with anyone outside the PSL.

In reality, no organization that represents real social forces will forever be content to accept direction from an external “anchor” that expects the level of subservience that the PSL does.

This sectarianism is not just petty; it results in the squandering of historically important opportunities. In the 2024 election, for example, the Stein campaign came to the PSL leadership to propose that the Green Party and PSL unite their presidential campaigns. Because of paperwork deadlines and restrictive ballot access laws, it would only be possible for Stein to be the formal presidential candidate and Claudia De La Cruz would have to be vice-president. But Stein was willing to organize the campaign in a way that she and Claudia would be presented as co-equal candidates running in an alliance, both equally empowered to speak on behalf of the campaign. This proposal was met with emotional meltdowns by multiple top Party leaders. The offer was rejected. This was the basis on which the PSL killed the possibility of a powerful third-party unity ticket, in an election in which the two major parties put up a repeat of the most quintessentially detestable capitalist candidates — Joe Biden and Donald Trump — for the second time to the American people.

Why reforming the organization is impossible

As a communist, I would not issue this resignation had it not become unmistakably clear that there are no democratic structures in the PSL that could effectuate a change in orientation. While the Party’s Constitution outlines a genuine democratic centralist structure, this is not what the Party’s national leadership practices. I have already described to some degree the real internal functionings of the party, but comrades need a fuller picture to really understand.

The top Party leadership carefully constructs a cosmetic democratic structure The top Party leadership carefully constructs a cosmetic democratic structure that brings only innocuous details up for discussion and conceals its real decision-making process. While the Party Congress is under the impression that it elects the Party’s national leadership, the real leadership is simply Brian and Ben Becker, formerly and to a limited degree Eugene, now to a limited degree Manolo, and whoever is permitted into their informal leadership clique. I speak having spent the last decade or so within this clique.

Unless you are brought into this clique, becoming a Central Committee member is essentially inconsequential. It does not on its own involve greater practical or political responsibility. The Central Committee gathers a few times a year, brought together at the convenience of the leadership clique. Central Committee meeting agendas are given less attention than most branches give to organizing SC retreats. Similar to the National Council, the bulk of the meeting is consumed by long lectures from Brian, Ben, and formerly Eugene.

In the 14 years that I have been attending CC meetings, I have come to understand that even when a decision is made by the Central Committee, that decision is only implemented if the leadership clique chooses to make it a priority. Countless hours have been spent at CC meetings discussing “big ideas” from the core leadership that never materialize. At the same time, ideas that Brian, Ben, or Eugene change their mind on or disapprove of personally will be quietly abandoned without consequence.

Attendees of the December 2024 Central Committee meeting will remember a proposal to build on the momentum of the 2024 presidential campaign by pursuing a united front in the electoral arena during the 2026 midterm with other left-wing forces opposed to the two-party system. This would then form the basis for initiatives to form a new third party that could present a unified, credible left-wing slate in the 2028 election. Every CC member who participated in the discussion spoke in favor of the proposal and it was adopted. But at a secret gathering two months later of the informal leadership body operating out of the Center, the initiative was discarded after five minutes of discussion.

The Party Congress is a carefully controlled performance allowing only superficial discussions. At the last Party Congress, both Ben and Brian Becker asserted openly that the purpose of the Congress is not to make major political decisions but to “build Party unity”. This was honest. The entire Congress process is tightly orchestrated to strengthen devotion to the Party, not to take up political questions. Great care is taken to avoid the surfacing of debates. At the last Party Congress, a participant openly disagreed with the PSL’s proposed line on AI and was met with a coordinated string of comments lined up by top PSL leaders to decisively shut down the disagreement. Many attendees were confused and concerned by the display. Another delegate openly criticized it from the floor. Both of those members have quietly resigned since.

In reality, the functional leadership of the Party lies with Brian and Ben, to be executed without debate by their immediate staff of devotees, organized in both small private meetings and a “Political Coordinating Committee” — the current unelected leadership clique that acts as a substitute for the elected Executive Committee. This team was assembled outside of any sanctioned process from hand-picked staff. Many times ideas that impact the focus of the entire organization are swiftly decided based on minutes of deliberation in this group.

Take the “general strike” line. Considering this has become the main intervention of the PSL in the anti-Trump movement, comrades may reasonably assume it was the product of extensive and measured discussion by the Central Committee or another elected leadership body. That is not the case. On October 14, the Political Coordination Committee met to discuss the No Kings Day protests that were coming that weekend. Democratic Party-aligned forces were showing greater interest in the big street protests. So was the PSL. Brian Becker asked the group if people expected the protests to be large. Most people said yes. This surprised Brian, who became worked up with jealousy over the large protests. He decided that the PSL needed to intervene in the No Kings protests to wrest influence from the liberals. Suddenly this became a moment of historic importance. The way to force the Democrats out was to put forward a demand that would give the initiative to the Party. The PSL would take up tactics to trick the No Kings Day leaders into adopting the language of “General Strike” by making the demand look like a groundswell, like enlisting several branches to make giant hand-painted banners at the last minute with the hopes that it would be captured on aerial footage and go viral.

That is the true story of how this line was adopted — a line that has cost the PSL relationships and legitimacy, infected the PSL with grandiosity, demanded from its members execution of the most absurd underhanded tactics, and has forced PSL members to embrace and defend a farcical political proposition.

This kind of leadership is only possible because a great deal of thought and energy has been put into assembling around Brian and Ben a team of people who will not only accept decisions made in such a ridiculous way, but work who will not only accept decisions made in such a ridiculous way, but work tirelessly to bring them to fruition. This dynamic has become more pronounced than ever with the tightening of the relationship between the PSL and the People’s Forum and the availability of more funds to hire staff from the NFD and now PAN. The leadership clique has now assembled a team of some dozen staffers who are highly administratively efficient and have round-the clock availability, but are mostly politically inexperienced and highly competitive with one another. The resulting dynamic is an organizational culture where every gathering is a race to see who can raise their hand first to express their enthusiastic agreement with the latest big idea and drop everything to execute the “new initiative”.

Predictable from a sociological standpoint, the in-group is maintained by enforcing a strict delineation of the out-group. Brian, Ben, Eugene, and Manolo all cultivate an intense culture of gossip, surveillance, and competition amongst their staff. Many times this has resulted in outsiders being removed from roles on the basis of some spun-up criticism resulting from rounds of speculation, never to be told directly the real reason for their removal. Disagreement is treated as disloyalty and is attributed to personal defect, especially when expressed by women. Behind leading women’s backs, they are described as negative, insecure, abrasive, and jealous. Explanation of their political engagement is tied to their physical appearances and imagined associated insecurities.

If someone who has been brought into the leadership clique starts to fall into disfavor, they are put out to pasture in some way or another. This is typically accompanied by a quiet but far-reaching campaign of meetings and phone calls to characterize the ex-clique member as described above.

The brittleness this internal culture creates represents one more serious obstacle to the internal correction of the defects of the PSL.

Why this can’t wait

For years I was convinced that the only principled thing to do was to stay and build “the Party”. But realizing that the PSL is not and will not become a true revolutionary party of the working class, I believe it is irresponsible to continue investing time in this organization.

Inevitably, this decision to leave and to share my resignation will be portrayed as treason at a moment of heightened political intensity. This is the excuse of every self-serving bureaucracy in history that is unable to defend its actions every self-serving bureaucracy in history that is unable to defend its actions based on their merits. The extreme nature of the political moment we are in is in fact what makes accepting the PSL’s leadership failure intolerable.

Examine the PSL’s record in the second Trump administration, with the foreseeable attacks on immigrants, the expansion of the repressive state apparatus, the slashing of essential public services, the dismantling of key restraints on executive power. The PSL, supposedly the revolutionary party of the U.S. working class, made no meaningful preparation. The PSL’s top leadership merely churned out fruitless big idea after big idea.

In the immediate weeks following Trump’s second victory, the PSL declared the need to focus on agitating around the “bread and butter” economic issues that swung the election for Trump. A series of pamphlets were designed on everything from the postal service to Social Security — 11 in total — and sent out to the branches.

A few weeks later, the leadership was convinced of the false idea that Trump would quickly lose interest in deportations, but still convened an “immigrant rights working group” that did not produce any coherent campaigns. The “don’t open for ICE” outreach campaign was put together by the Communications Department as a face-saving measure.

In February, the PSL decided there was not enough resistance and it must launch a new round of days of action to protest Trump’s domestic policies, under a new brand with viral potential. The name of this brand was the subject of several long meetings where nothing was decided. It was ultimately determined that an “off-site” meeting was needed. A room was rented for two days in a building a few blocks from the PSL office and meals were catered so that these top leaders could be “free from distractions”. The total price tag for this brainstorming session was about $4,000. It produced a name, “World Without Billionaires” and big plans for a new website and social media pages. World Without Billionaires ended up being dropped before it was ever launched.

In April, Trump issued an executive order as part of his “tough on crime” crackdown, giving the Department of Defense 90 days to come up with a plan to make Pentagon assets available for use by domestic law enforcement bodies. This gave rise to a renewed “martial law” fantasy akin to the Moore v. Harper fixation. While Brian, Ben and Eugene became convinced that a fullscale fascist coup was coming in just 90 days, the response was not to build a united front to defend democracy, but instead to recirculate the Moore v Harper united front to defend democracy, but instead to recirculate the Moore v Harper pamphlet. They also became consumed with ridiculous and extremely costly contingency planning. When the 90 days came and went, the leadership clique quietly moved on without acknowledging the false premonition.

In May, the intense protests against ICE in Los Angeles brought the Center’s attention back to immigration and the Party was again “turned on a dime” — not to serious organizing projects among immigrant workers, but to the “Sick of ICE” initiative. This campaign banked on branches that had built their own immigration work to make it take off. But it was completely out of touch with the conditions and limitations of these projects. Branches were blamed for the initiative’s flop, and throughout June, the Party was forced to keep trying to make it go viral.

Come July, the national organization had to race to catch up on preparations for the Party Congress that had been completely neglected. A little under two weeks before delegates were scheduled to arrive in New York, the “Interim” Coordinating Committee (the unofficial substitute for the Executive Committee and Standing Committee that preceded the Political Coordinating Committee) began taking up the agenda of the Congress on an emergency basis. The entire event was sloppily thrown together at the last minute. Because there was hardly any time to prepare, the sessions of the Congress were heavily filled by extensive talks from Brian, Ben, Eugene, and the immediate circle of men around them. Despite dominating the agenda, they repeatedly spoke over time. Discussion periods were so rushed that comments were cut at times to 90 seconds, making some delegates talk too fast to be understood, and most sessions did not get to the full line of delegates on stack. Besides the heavily choreographed “discussion” around AI, the Congress mostly ran like an extended National Council call, where members of the leadership clique elaborated on general political observations and projects that were already in progress.

After the Party Congress, the big initiative became the general strike. After Brian pushed the PSL to call for a general strike at No Kings Day, the PSL became the subject of ridicule online and amongst other organizers. This made Brian become obsessive, and any external mention of a coordinated work stoppage, whether in Chicago or Minneapolis, became the site of an intense campaign to get the PSL’s chosen language taken up. The work of the Communications Department became almost exclusively content creation promoting the idea of a general strike.

Ultimately, in the exceptional conditions of ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis and the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a coalition in Minneapolis called for a statewide work stoppage. The PSL viewed this as their shot to bring their proclamations to life and sent in dozens of organizers to do outreach, particularly focused on getting the language of “general strike” adopted wherever possible.

The historic success of the January 23 general strike was underpinned by years of deep organizing led by a united front of mass organizations that the PSL had zero involvement in, widely referred to on the left as the “Minnesota Model.” Surely the PSL’s outreach efforts helped to make the day a success. But the PSL had the arrogance to claim primary credit for the success in Minneapolis, when it had done no long-term organizing there, was not part of the coalition that initiated the call, and merely sent in outsiders to popularize what was already in motion.

The organizers who embraced these PSL outsiders without sectarianism were denigrated to the PSL’s National Council repeatedly after they failed to adopt the PSL’s demands to extend and expand the general strike. Refusing to take no for an answer, the PSL used a Somali student organization as a front to push forward with the call, suggesting it was coming organically from the Minneapolis forces behind the 23rd. Members were frantically directed to seek endorsements from other organizations, and the Communications Department was deployed to create graphics that would trick influencers and celebrities, outraged by the murders, to recirculate what they thought was the Minnesota demand. This ultimately succeeded in popularizing a mass action on January 30. Husayn, who led the PSL deployment to Minneapolis, later bragged to me that “the students had no idea what they were getting into.”

Whether you agree or disagree with the historical correctness of forcing the January 30 call through by any means necessary, the PSL’s swaggering arrogance in the aftermath should be alarming. Instead of having any interest in examining the long term organizing that allowed Minnesota to achieve such a show of force, or a desire to clarify and repair relationships, the PSL has contented itself to publish externally on its own role, and internally extoll its own leadership, even declaring itself now the proven vanguard.

The responsibility of socialists today

Socialists today have the responsibility to rebuild a left that can contend for leadership of the working class. We must rebuild from a period of distortion and defeat. We must forge a left that can survive a repressive state that has demonstrated that it respects no legal nor moral constraint.

To take up these challenges, we must engage honestly and soberly with the challenges of our day and reject false shortcuts. We must build organization that cultivates cadre with both discipline and a deep responsibility for study, debate, experimentation, and assessment. We must task up the long-term work of raising the level of organization of the entire working class, not just already-politicized activists. We must build the organizational forms, campaigns, and united fronts necessary to concretize the power of the working class. We must engage in robust and sincere dialogue with other socialists pursuing various projects, rather than proclaim ourselves the vanguard and wait for everyone else to get in line behind us.

I am leaving not because I don’t believe this is possible, but because I do.

I have made peace with the years I have spent in the PSL because I have realized that in order for a viable communist left to be rebuilt, one with genuine cadre who grapple with the lessons of the last century and the novel challenges we face today, there needed to be an intermediate generation of communists who experienced the inadequate remnants of the last wave of left organizing and developed the critiques necessary to go beyond what we inherited. If even a handful of individuals emerge from this generation with clear vision, having accepted their agency in charting the next stage of communist organizing in the U.S., then I believe that we have made a step forward, not backward.

I know that this handful has been formed, and maybe more. I am leaving alongside the leadership of the Brooklyn District to take the next step in the formation of a viable socialist movement in this country. While we will leave smaller in number than if we remained in the PSL, we are confident that in the long run, cultivating a healthy seed is a better choice than continuing to tend to a dying tree. We will engage respectfully with the members of the PSL who remain, understanding that it is hard to grasp the true nature of this organization without the proximity we have had.

With determination for what comes next,

Walter Smolarek

Response from the Central Committee

Response to Walter Smolarek’s Resignation 

PSL Central Committee internal statement 

[Not to be re-shared, distributed or posted anywhere] 

Summary 

Two members of the PSL Central Committee (Walter and Lillian), working with a small group in Brooklyn, formed a secret faction and have broken off to launch a new organization that is premised on conclusions that are far different from the PSL’s political line. The faction is attacking the PSL and its elected leadership with a personalized and sensationalized narrative, hoping to persuade members to resign, but the political essence of the faction is the fundamental issue. They reject the need to build a communist, Marxist-Leninist party in the near future. They reject the optimistic assessment put forward by the PSL that a mass socialist revival is underway, and the objective basis exists to develop a large-scale communist party by actively intervening in all the emerging struggles and movements with a clear and popular presentation of the socialist horizon. Rather than revolutionary optimism, their factionalism is rooted in a deep pessimism, that the right-wing of the capitalist class is ascendant in every way, that the far-right will gain from the explosive contradictions of capitalism, and that the left is worthless. According to their presentation, all the mass movements in recent years in the United States, including the mass movement against racism in 2020 and for Palestine since 2023, have been worthless because they have not led to lasting reforms to improve the lives of the working class. The only thing that would give such movements value is if they translated into “enduring” “intermediate” mass organizations of the working class — the model for which they have never explained. It does not matter that these movements have shaped the consciousness of tens of millions of people, exposed the imperialist state, spurred the formation of hundreds of new radical organizations and collectives, affected the political correlation of forces, and drawn tens of thousands towards parties like the PSL. Walter Smolarek, one of the two leaders of this tendency, recently told us that even if the PSL grows to 50,000 members, it will be meaningless. 

Leaders of the factional attempt to divide the party have stated that the top priority should not be to build a revolutionary Party, but to build “mass organizations and institutions of the working class,” to rebuild the “social fabric” and “subjective forces” destroyed by neoliberalism, after which a genuine Party can eventually be built. At a recent CC meeting, one of the leaders explicitly rejected the concept of the “actuality of revolution” — dismissing the idea that revolutionary possibilities will open up in our lifetime and working towards this should be the Party’s chief objective. Walter Smolarek insisted in the last week that the Party’s notion about the prospects of revolution in the United States are ‘ridiculous.’ From this non-revolutionary outlook several conclusions follow: the Vote Socialist 2024 campaign was a mistake because it could have folded into the Jill Stein campaign; agitating for a general strike as the tactical horizon of the anti-Trump movement was wrong; and the January 30th National Shutdown was a mistake because it damaged our relations with social-democratic leaders of certain unions and non-profits. No matter that the Vote Socialist 2024 campaign helped popularize socialism in a way that no independent socialist campaign has in decades. No matter that a general strike did actually take place. No matter that the Jan 30 shutdown actually advanced the living struggle of the masses and pushed back the Trump administration’s invasion. These conclusions are rooted in significant political differences from the PSL, and constitute a political basis to leave it. The underlying theory represents a form of reformism and “economism,” which Lenin fought against his entire political life, and if adopted, creates a road straight towards social-democracy and NGO-ism. A huge section of today’s progressive labor unions and NGOs are led or mentored by ex-revolutionaries who made the same calculations in the 1970s and 1980s: to wind down their Party formations, to focus on non-revolutionary mass organizations, to supposedly prioritize blocking the right-wing, to gradually drop explicit anti-imperialism and socialism so as to not alienate the liberal bourgeoisie, all while telling themselves they remained loyal to Marxism and reading Marxist books together in private. They are still dedicated to a better world — but they lost faith in revolution, adopted a different read of the objective situation and logically adopted a different strategic framework. The political dispute is not about the merits of mass organizing, or whether or not to go among the working class, especially the lower and deeper strata to fight alongside them for their immediate grievances. The Party engages across the country in this kind of work in neighborhoods, workplaces, disaster zones, and elsewhere, and we seek to do even more of it, deepen it and systematize it. Walter’s document conveniently denies this work is happening. The orientation of the Party is to jump at every opportunity to join or stimulate a site of struggle, to advance struggles wherever they are in motion, and to try and bring existing mass organizations of the working class into motion. With the Party participating and fighting alongside them in the struggle, carrying with it agitation and education, we know that any struggle, no matter how big or small, can lead people to the socialist conclusion — that the working class must seize political power. All this activity is why thousands of young workers have been won over, recruited and trained by the Party, as well as an increasing number of existing leaders of the class — all of whom are erased in this portrayal of “already politicized activists” from the middle class. The vanguard party is forged through all manner of economic and political struggles, and serves as the true durable institution of the working class because it carries with it all the lessons of previous political and economic struggles, and weaves them back into the living struggle. These are the basic elements of Leninism, which the faction is attempting to liquidate by borrowing a mishmash of social-democratic theories (most heavily from Jane McAlevey’s writings and trainings). 

Unfortunately, this faction never made their views known for debate. Instead, they plotted in secret, possibly for over a year, and launched an unprincipled campaign behind the back of the leadership and most members to create a secret faction within the Party. This is all now confirmed from the notes of the Brooklyn District leadership, going back months, which reveal a sophisticated and coordinated operation to intentionally build a faction. Members of the District were individually tracked and assessed based on their “level of awareness” of the faction and their “level of consolidation” to its line. The long-term goal was to take over the branch step by step by getting their adherents in positions of influence, while masking their different political line. To succeed, faction members were oriented to have evasive communication with the New York Steering Committee about Brooklyn organizing, so as to not draw out larger political conversations. New Brooklyn members who volunteered for other citywide activities (such as petitioning for the “Andre for the Bronx” campaign) were carefully approached and “inoculated” with phone calls that appeared to just be check-ins, but were intended to ensure people weren’t lost to “the center.” They prepared their questions in branchwide internal settings not to stimulate genuine discussion, but to draw out potential new recruits for their faction. The goal was to identify real or perceived contradictions in the branch, which always exist, and raise them just enough to recruit without being discovered as a hostile force. 

At the same time, their notes reveal a strategy to conceal their differences from the Branch Committee — the highest body of the branch which they were a part of — because it might have triggered a larger political discussion and resolution (when they wouldn’t have the forces yet to win power). They collectively decided not to run for the Steering Committee so the political issues would not be drawn out there. Once they successfully captured the District Committee, their plans escalated to carve out space inside the organization, to remove unit leads deemed unreliable to the faction and to bureaucratically isolate comrades who were “with the center.” But it appears they moved too fast, making the Steering Committee aware that something deeper was going on. We have receipts for all of this. 

A huge amount of energy they could have actually spent on base-building in the working class they instead spent on secretly base-building inside the Party. 

Without ever raising their differences within the existing structures of the Party, they suddenly resigned, circulating documents filled with falsehoods and distortions, yet still revealing their defeatist, pessimistic view of the prospects for socialism in the United States. They never raised their arguments internally or used the existing Party structures, which are fully available for resolving differences, or for having votes on fundamental issues of strategy, tactics and program. That is because their goal was never to resolve differences. They worked to conceal their views over a long period of time so they could build up their forces secretly, and quietly reorient people to their liquidationist approach by pretending there were no political differences. Their faction had nothing to do with the absence of debate, despite their presentation. Their departure was triggered because there was about to be a debate. They would have to submit to the majority position under the norms of democratic centralism and then would lose their momentum. Resigning in this fashion gave them a kind of fake moral high ground, a way to gain sympathy with comrades who legitimately want to improve the Party. 

What finally provoked the faction’s departure was that the debate was now going to come out into the open, to be discussed and debated in the Central Committee and other leadership bodies, including in New York. Resigning after losing a debate would have left them too weak to launch an organization. They clearly decided it would be better to allege, falsely, that no space for debate was available inside the Party, and then cobble together a wide range of distortions and grievances, unrelated to the core political issues, which could shock people into resigning and joining their new group. 

Most jarring was Walter’s vague and false allegations about the treatment of women leaders and staffers in the party center. Half of the staff in the center are women, as are over half of the Central Committee. He does not speak for them, and has no right to. Knowing they would reject his characterization, he conveniently dismisses this as a feature of “blind deference” among a “staff of devotees,” while dismissing the Central Committee as “inconsequential.” The central role of women leaders, achieved in the PSL through their track record in the struggle (not quotas), does not mean our work in this area is complete. This has been and will continue to be an area of focus for our Party. Because patriarchy is so integral to capitalism, bourgeois society ascribes a gendered division to labor, with men playing more political roles and women confined to logistics and administration. This tendency plays out in all organizations, including within left organizations, and therefore has to be constantly and consciously combated. Nathalie, a long-time CC member in San Francisco and a mass worker-leader, wrote an individual response to Walter’s letter, which will soon be circulated to the National Council. In it she says: 

“I serve now on the Central Committee with Gloria, Sheila, Karla, Satya, Claudia, Rachel, Karina, Sarah, Claire, Layan and Hannah who I feel I must name because we as women leaders were wholly erased in the preposterous descriptions of the internal culture of our leadership. I am proud to sit with other leading comrades on the CC all of whom, if you are to believe this letter, are relegated to a position of ‘total deference to Brian and Ben Becker.’ I speak for myself when I say that Brian and Ben have earned my respect and I have learned a great deal from both of them. However, the idea that we women comrades and leaders only move politically and organizationally in deference to Brian and Ben should not be entertained.” Walter doesn’t even consider the possibility that the high level of unity among the Party’s leadership and staff in the center might be forged through years of working together, struggling through issues, developing a common perspective and high trust. When he says “people I once respected come into the Center only to assimilate into total deference,” this is a way of saying: a series of independent leaders, capable of forming their own opinions, came in to the center and ended up working well with the Party’s top leadership. It is preposterous to turn this into a bad thing. 

Walter and the leaders of this faction are not whistleblowers. They are not trying to improve the organization or resolve any deficiencies. They are weaponizing the fact they were inside the leadership and privy to certain information and internal contradictions to selectively present a distorted narrative that, they hope, will lead comrades to sign up for a new organization that they will now lead. This grouping is actively reaching out to PSL members around the country, trying, and failing, to break them away from organization. 

Rather than present the political differences honestly, they are preying on comrades’ physical distance from the national leadership and the difficulty of separating fact from fiction. They are also preying on deeply ingrained anti-communist and anti-Party tropes — of power-hungry and unelected leaders, living large, with secret agendas different from what they espouse publicly. Never did we think that by including Walter into leadership discussions of real issues in the organization, he would then exaggerate and distort them to launch a new group. As this factional campaign erupted, the PSL is under the highest level of state scrutiny in its 22-year history, with leading Trump administration officials vowing to “dismantle” the organization, and the right-wing media sniffing around us at every turn. To conduct a political struggle in this way — first through concealment and factionalism, then through the mass circulation of angry, vindictive letters — is a gift to our real enemies, the capitalist state, which seeks to infiltrate all leading progressive organizations, identify contradictions and exploit them. After this statement, we have no intention to spend any more time dealing with this faction, either in writing or otherwise. We will of course defend our Party and our membership. But we already have an enormous set of tasks in front of us: to advance the class struggle, to build the socialist movement, and to continue improving our Party. We are resolute in our path. We are confident that the liquidationist character of their new organization will soon be made evident in practice. 

Below are some of Walter’s arguments, responded to point by point, as well as a series of lessons and takeaways. 

— Central Committee of the PSL. 

This statement was reviewed, amended, and adopted unanimously, 23-0. 

Point-by-point rebuttal 

On his strategy of concealment 

Quote: 

I have made the calculation to conceal my full political views in order not to be displaced from central leadership, not out of a desire to retain any title but out of serious concern for the irresponsibility of the impulses of the Party’s top leaders and a commitment to mitigating them. This is a pitiful position. But I firmly believe that if I had done anything other than this, I would have been rapidly marginalized from meaningful positions of leadership and would not have been able to prevent top Party leadership from making decisions that would endanger the entire membership in gravely serious ways. 

This explicit admission of political concealment so as “not to be displaced from central leadership” is indeed “pitiful.” But he does not provide one example of ever doing anything to restrain the so-called irresponsible “impulses” of the top leadership which were “endangering the entire membership in gravely serious ways.” By power of suggestion, it insinuates illegal adventurism — where there has been none — and merely stokes panic and alarm. It is pure recklessness to write in such a manner. The Party leadership has been open with cadres across the country about the new McCarthyite operations targeting the Party, and we have made it a top responsibility to defend our members arrested falsely in the struggle. We have a demonstrated track record of navigating a range of security threats, while still growing the Party and maintaining our militancy. This excuse for staying silent rings hollow. The real reason Walter stayed silent is that he wanted to stay in leadership. To have his true ideas put up for debate in the Congress or Central Committee — the ones he expressed in his resignation — he would have been defeated. Maybe the majority of the Congress would not have elected him to the Central Committee if he presented such non-revolutionary conceptions. Maybe the Central Committee would not have re-elected him as Communications Director if it knew he had a totally different view of agitation, communications and the explicit promotion of socialism. That wouldn’t be undemocratic suppression; it would be totally democratic. That Walter tries to give his concealment a heroic purpose is absurd; it’s a violation of the elementary principles of democracy and a betrayal to everyone who voted for him.

On the Conference on Organization and revision of By-Laws Quote 

Comrades do not generally know that the Branch Organizing Conference only came to life because Ben Becker was concerned about bringing the Bylaws changes that he sought to make to the floor of the Party Congress. He worried that the changes, most notably significantly lowering the requirements of membership, would be controversial. His solution was to propose bringing together a body of hand-picked branch leaders to act as an acceptable enough substitution for the Congress to sign off on the changes. But in the process of putting together this group, he got carried away and the idea grew and grew into a de facto second round of the Congress — but without the constitutionally mandated processes, elections, and rights. In the end, the same hesitations over bringing the Bylaws to a vote led to them once again being put off, this time to the Central Committee. 

The distortion here is indisputable. The Fifth and Sixth Party Congress both voted to authorize the incoming Central Committee to revise the By-Laws. No new idea about membership was being smuggled into our By-Laws by a small group. The Congress passed the following resolution, the last section of which speaks directly to the membership issue: WHEREAS, the Bylaws of the Party for Socialism and Liberation were last amended in 2023; and 

WHEREAS, the Central Committee has the authority to amend the Bylaws following an appeal to the membership for amendments provided the amendments are taken up at an in-person meeting (see Appendix Resolution to Amend Bylaws in the Bylaws); 

WHEREAS, the membership has submitted amendments following an appeal for such submissions; and 

WHEREAS, the Party has more than doubled in size since the time of that amendment; and WHEREAS, the Party’s increased visibility has and will continue to create more opportunities to recruit from broader sectors of the working class; and 

WHEREAS, the Party must adapt its structures and membership norms in order to effectively utilize the opportunities created by this quantitative and qualitative growth; THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED the Sixth Party Congress tasks the incoming Central Committee with considering the amendments provided by the membership AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED the Sixth Party Congress tasks the incoming Central Committee with amending Sections 3 (“Local Organization”) and 4 (“Party Membership”) of the Bylaws. The amendments shall account for new branch structures necessitated by growth (i.e. units, districts, branch committees, branch congresses), evaluate which provisions have already become outmoded based on existing practice or are practically unfeasible, and establish a simplified presentation of membership requirements that facilitate the Party to recruit and retain members from broad sections of the working class while still retaining the fundamental distinction of the Leninist Party form (based on consistent activity, not mere agreement on paper.) [emphasis added] 

Walter is being dishonest in the extreme. No small “hand-picked branch leaders” would be deciding on the By-Laws after the Congress, but the newly elected Central Committee itself. It’s worth reminding comrades why we did this. As Walter knows well, we spent huge parts of the Second, Third, and Fourth Party Congresses on the Constitution revision process. In each of these, nearly whole days were taken up with long debates and votes on particular phrases on non-political procedural issues, which could not be revisited again for years. As the Congress grew in the number of delegates, these textual revisions became more challenging, and so the 2019 Fourth Party Congress adopted a resolution to separate the By-Laws and Constitution into separate documents explicitly so that future Congresses could focus more on political and organizational issues. Unlike the Constitution, which represents the foundational organizational principles, By-Laws procedures would need to be adjusted more frequently than every three years since we were growing out of our existing organizational norms. So the CC has been reauthorized at each of the subsequent Congresses to revise By-Laws, and it has done so. Walter knows that the current by-laws revision process is the same as it has been for years, but conceals it. 

If one looks deeper, he has actually turned the reality of this conference upside down. Even though the CC had the full mandate to make such By-Laws changes on its own, we wanted more debate and feedback about such important issues. Rather than trying to secretly “lower the membership requirement,” Ben and Husayn openly motivated for a simplified presentation of membership requirements at the Sixth Party Congress, which then adopted this task explicitly in the above resolution, in pre-Conference documents, and at the Conference itself. This was not done in secret. 

What he describes conspiratorially as “lowering the requirements of membership” ultimately was proposed as changing meeting attendance from “required” to “expected,” putting meeting attendance under “Party work” rather than a standalone condition of membership, and an expanded definition of Party work to facilitate members doing organizing at their jobs and in their neighborhoods, while still reporting and coordinating with their local units. At the October 2025 CC meeting, rather than vote on the revisions, the CC decided to convene the first ever Conference on Organization to hear from branches at all levels on how changes to the branch and membership terms would impact their local organizing — to not rush into things. Rather than passing the changes at the CC, we continued to work on them and then sent them to all Steering Committee members in the whole country, along with a lengthy explanatory document. All SC members were given an opportunity to submit changes, and 170 of whom were then invited to the conference to provide feedback in person. Dozens of comrades submitted questions, thoughts or amendments to the range of by-law revisions under discussion. Then there were 90 minutes of open discussion in front of the Conference in which the membership definition change was discussed. 

The Conference in May 2026 could not vote on the revisions because it is not a duly elected body to do so. The Congress had authorized the CC only to make changes, not the Conference. Who explained this to the Conference attendees? Walter. He wrote the pre-Conference memo explaining the By-Laws revision process — and he did so correctly and precisely. So he hasn’t forgotten anything; he is deliberately sowing confusion. 

This discussion of membership requirements and By-Laws in fact speaks to the democracy of the organization. 

Local internal education

There has also been a growing panic amongst the top Party leadership that several areas are succeeding in … conducting their own internal education. The Conference became a key venue to check this trend, but with great efforts made to disguise the Party leadership’s true aims. … Members were not told that the leadership is suspicious of branches exploring education beyond that provided nationally from the PSL or TPF. 

Response 

There has never been a national effort to stop branches from developing their own educational materials. The main criticism from the branches has been the opposite: the inadequacy and irregularity of the production of national educational materials — not that they’ve been shoved down their throats. Improving this has been identified as a priority at the last two Congresses and repeated Central Committee meetings. Comrades have demanded more standardized internal education materials to be used locally, and updated candidacy classes. It led to the formation of the Education Department in 2022 — which was then disrupted by the fact that the two co-Coordinators became our presidential ticket — and which is now being rebuilt. That is why the National Cadre Education program and materials, another project Walter was brought into a couple months ago and never criticized, was greeted with wide enthusiasm by branch leaders across the country. 

Has any branch ever been reprimanded or treated badly for developing materials “beyond that provided nationally from the PSL or TPF?” There was indeed one recent example of “suspicion” of a branch’s internal education priorities, and that was with Denver in May of this year. What was the basis of this “suspicion”? A Steering Committee member circulated a document to her branch alleging that a new substitute candidacy program had been developed independently by another SC member and the National Liaison (Lillian). In these classes, all five of which were taught by these same two people who have since resigned, there was not a single mention of the Party at all, no reference to its strategic framework, and no Party branding. A third SC member then wrote to the national organization that he believed the whole branch was being made to take these classes to reorient them away from the Party. These two Denver SC members worried that, given other comments they had overheard, it was part of a political consolidation process to lead towards a factional break. When the charge of factionalism was made, members of the Central Committee flew out to Denver and met everyone in question and asked directly about the accusation of factionalism, which they vehemently denied as a lie, and which we then took at face value. As for their local class series, we came to the following group agreement with all members of the SC that we then presented to the branch: “The 5-part class series is not a replacement for the existing PSL candidacy material, which will still be used by sponsors for new candidates. Once new PSL candidacy classes are instituted nationwide, these will be adopted in Denver, with local sessions added if so desired by the SC.” A month later, those who denied they were organizing as a faction have indeed left as a faction. The 5-part series is apparently being prepared as the educational program for those who have also left in Brooklyn. So the one time in 22 years we’ve been “suspicious” of a branch’s internal education, it was because of the vigilance of two out of three of the branch’s SC members, and it was weeks later confirmed as indeed part of a factional operation.

Ability to debate the Party’s strategic framework 

Instead of making direct interventions that could be debated on their political merits, members were presented with a wildly inflated picture of the PSL’s strength and an orientation on the current political landscape that anticipates nearing ruptures of a revolutionary proportion. The practical implication of such an outlook is that members must make their singular focus “building the Party” in preparation for these impending critical openings. They were given cherry-picked history lessons on the Bolsheviks and the U.S. Communist Party suggesting the PSL is on the brink of a massive expansion in scale and influence. 

Response 

To be precise, the formulation we are using is that building the Party is the “top priority,” not the “singular focus.” This has been the Party’s top priority since its founding in 2004, even when we have been involved in all kinds of movement-building and mass organizing. What we are identifying now in the objective political situation, especially compared to our founding years, is the opportunity for the Party to grow into a much stronger force. It is the largest revolutionary Marxist organization in the country; it has a solid foundation of cadres and branches around the country; it is entering a period of increasing social, economic and political ruptures and crises of legitimacy that will intensify mass interest in socialism and create new mass struggles that will intensify interest in getting organized. 

As for a “strategy of revolution,” elements of this have been sketched out many times in classes and documents over many years, keeping in mind that a certain level of abstraction is necessary since the future cannot be scripted. The following language was sent to Walter just last week, and was up to be discussed and debated again at the upcoming Central Committee, containing the following Draft Theses 

The Party’s overall strategic priorities are stimulating mass struggles, developing depth of cadres, growing its influence within the working class, and building mass socialist consciousness. 

These priorities flow from our theory of revolution, which requires 1) the objective existence of a revolutionary crisis — the most dynamic and complex political situation conceivable, when there is not only an intolerable situation for the working class but paralysis among the ruling class; 2) the existence of a vanguard Party with sufficient strength, influence, and capacity for centralism to act as needed; and 3) the majority of the working class being won over to socialism. Winning political hegemony over the radicalizing layer of the class requires a sustained, creative, multi-front campaign of agitation and propaganda: mass communication on every burning issue, cultural interventions, electoral campaigns, and a consistent public presence that presents the PSL not as one organization among many but as the communist party of the United States. That will happen because the organization proves itself to be correct in its analysis, capable of building effective movements and united fronts in the living struggle of the working class, and can show the credibility of its program by recruiting workers from all sectors. The strategic framework of the PSL, codified across the last three Party Congresses, begins with a political assessment of the objective situation: we are living in a period of rupture, produced by new contradictions that are not resolvable under capitalist property relations and US imperial control of the global order. … Diagnosing this conjuncture is not the same as saying revolution is imminent, or that the left is automatically the main beneficiary of these shifts. It means that the political terrain is very unstable, more so than in decades, that the potential for widespread struggles and the conditions for dramatic shifts in mass consciousness exist, and that our strategy must be calibrated accordingly. Our revolutionary optimism is based on the analytical recognition that capitalism will not be able to solve these existential structural contradictions, and they are thus prone to explode in unmanageable ways. The timing of these ruptures can not be predicted but their arrival is inevitable. Before revolution, societies tend to proceed through stages of mounting disequilibrium, political crises of legitimacy, events that serve as shocks to the system, and then finally unforeseeable triggers. Common features include unwinnable wars, ecological disasters, intra-ruling class struggles, and financial crises. We cannot know where in the historical process we are. The question is whether we are agile enough, strong enough, and politically prepared enough to act as the world shifts. The idea that all this, and the overall thesis of building mass socialist consciousness, has not been directly put forward before the membership and the leadership for real discussion on its merits is absurd. It goes back years and years. Even in the last month related to the Conference, Walter has had every imaginable opportunity to debate the question of scaling up the Party and the political assessment on which it is based. Here is the exact timeline: 

● April 20: The core political framework of the Conference is circulated by Brian to a group of 12 Central Committee members and other leaders in New York City, where it is discussed at great length in a two-day retreat. Each comrade speaks about their views on the document and its central theses. Walter participates in the discussion but offers no disagreement. The document is open for additional edits before going to the Central Committee. Walter proposes none.

● April 27: the document is circulated to the whole Central Committee and a virtual meeting is scheduled for May 2 for discussion. Walter is present, it is discussed for over 90 minutes. Walter expresses no disagreement.

● April and May: The Conference planning committee, which Walter was a part of, meets weekly, works out the agenda, core points and organizational documents of the conference — the conference he now trashes. Walter speaks up on a range of issues, like everyone else in the committee. He expresses no disagreement on any of the core political analysis or themes in the meetings or in the office.

● May 8: The political document is circulated to the National Council and an open discussion was held there in front of all steering committees nationwide. No disagreement from Walter there, or outside the meeting, or after. A submission form is sent to all attendees to submit documents in response to the political framework document. Around 10 comrades and multiple branches write in with their reflections. Walter sends in nothing.

● May 22: The Central Committee has an in-person all-day meeting prior to the Conference to discuss its political themes and objectives. At the meeting, Brian makes the point that we should not go through an immediate period of rapid growth, and should focus on internal consolidation for a period. This is debated, but Walter sits silent.

● May 23-24: Walter gives a presentation at the conference about anti-billionaires sentiment, and how this has been built through repeated mass movements and political turning points over the last 20 years. He literally had the stage and the mic and the opportunity to speak to the whole leadership but expressed no alternate view. The Conference proceeds for two days. Walter expresses no disagreement, either in front of the body or in the presiding committee.

● May 25: The CC has a debrief the day after — in which many areas of improvement and critiques were raised by many members of that body. Walter stays silent. 

● May 26: A feedback form is circulated to all conference attendees about the By-Laws, or any other reflections from the Conference. Several important submissions come in. Walter submits nothing.

● May 28: The conference planning committee organizes its own debrief, in which Walter finally spoke and only for the first time said the conference lacked a clear “action plan for the branches,” but again expressed no political disagreement. He agrees (clearly disingenuously) to a series of post-Conference tasks, including volunteering to help with planning new training schools for unit leads and Steering Committee members, write new organizational manuals, and help convene working groups on different fronts of struggle precisely to develop more action plans.

● June 2: Ben circulates to the Conference Presiding Committee a Draft Report, with each paragraph presented as a separate political thesis so that each can be debated by the Central Committee. The preface to the document reads: “The [theses below] are intended for discussion, amendment and ratification at the Central Committee, to ensure we have formally adopted a strategic framework for the Party before we move forward. Each thesis can stand on its own for discussion, but together they constitute the political and organizational framework for the period ahead. We can of course add to it as well, if there are elements of our perspective that are not captured here but need to be worked out.” Walter offers no thoughts.

● June 5: The Central Committee receives the draft report, with a virtual meeting scheduled for June 14 to discuss, amend, and adopt it.

● June 5: Walter resigns eight hours later in the name of “democracy,” trashing the conference.

How could such a deliberately evasive person now present himself as the champion of open political debate and transparency? 

Communist organizing at the workplace 

Another instructive example of what has been going on behind the scenes is the semi-controversy that arose around a seemingly new labor orientation given at the conference. In the panel on organization entitled “Building the Organization to Scale,” there was a speech given by a young union member who is not part of the national leadership. It may have seemed curious to attendees that this speech was not given by a member of the Labor Department leadership or Central Committee. That was because Ben and Husayn recognized that the content of this speech was a departure from the previous orientation that had not been run through other Labor Department leaders, and thus sought to distance themselves from direct responsibility for it. The comrade’s speech made the argument that we should reconsider the value and viability of organizing and moving unions. They’re too few, too weak, and too slow.

Instead, our orientation to workplace organizing should focus on promoting Party literature, forming discussion groups, and recruiting coworkers to the Party and to the Action Network. 

Response 

The comrade in question did not say “we should reconsider the value and viability of organizing and moving unions” — this is utter distortion. He is a worker-leader of one of the key union drives in the country! That is a campaign the Party has sent several key cadres into. What he presented in this case was what we can do in workplaces where traditional union activity is impossible or practically dead. To correct Walter’s distortion, we need only quote from the Draft Report on the Conference, which he received days before his resignation, and, like all the other Draft Theses, was going to be up for discussion and amendment among the CC. The thesis on workplace organizing reads: 

“We are deploying more members into audacious labor union work than ever before. This involves strategic implantations and concentrations in certain industries and developing new agitational tools to build an expanded base in the working class. Our approach to all union fights is to make them fights for the whole class, as well as schools of socialism, with the [recent teachers] strike as a great example of how long-term work in strategic areas can lead to outsized impact. Our goal in new organizing is — in the best tradition of Communism — to make them social crusades and battles, especially seeking out opportunities where the intervention of devoted comrades can move larger numbers and lead to breakthroughs that ideally sparks a new contagious wave of labor revival. 

“Still we must recognize that ninety percent of workers in this country are not in a union, and that number is increasing. Based on the current organization of work, especially the large number of workers now working contractualized, remotely or in small teams, there are significant obstacles to winning unions and contracts in big parts of the working class — especially via the current NLRB process. If the only way we know how to bring socialism into the workplace is by first building a union, we start from a position of having no access to the vast majority of the working class. Union organizing is important where conditions for it exist, and the party should pursue it there but it cannot be the only instrument to reach the working class on the job (where people spend a majority of their waking hours). The examples of the PSL Shipbuilders in Virginia — ten workers, one candidate member, a shop paper, built entirely without institutional resources — demonstrate that it is possible to build socialist organization, raise class consciousness, and recruit to the party in workplaces without active union life. We should seek out any and all creative ways to bring socialism to the masses in the workplace and draw the most advanced workers into the party.” 

One may agree or not with this perspective, but it was not hidden. We were about to discuss it in the Central Committee and among the Labor Department leadership before it would be circulated as an orientation to the membership. 

Party support for community centers 

I have been extremely disturbed by the secret machinations within the New York office to extinguish or wrest control of the base building projects gaining ground in Denver and Brooklyn. Both areas, through separate processes of development, have found their way to building community center projects that operate as genuine mass organizations. There was an initial attempt to dissuade each area from this direction, but when the dissuasion didn’t work, the approach was taken to give leaders of both areas the impression that the top leadership was nonetheless supportive of their projects and interested in further debate and discussion. 

Response 

There was neither extinguishing or wresting control of anything. The desire to support creative projects and interest in further debate was genuine. Denver was not dissuaded from the work of building a community center. There was in fact an immediate and enthusiastic offer to fund it and support it, with comrades’ dues. In addition to continuing to pay one national staff person who had moved to Denver and became its Co-Director, the other Co-Director was also funded nationally! We did this because we assumed we were all aligned politically. In fact, when the funding was agreed to, it was said that we hoped we could reproduce such centers in all regions of the country. Many of the Party’s top leaders — those described falsely as enemies of base-building — have personally co-founded similar community centers in other cities, and have many positive lessons to share from these experiences. There was no articulation of any ideological disunity at this time from Denver or any notion that their conception of “base-building” would require the liquidation of Party-building, or a rejection of the Party’s strategic framework. These two comrades on staff had the least amount of national oversight of any staff people, based on assumed trust that they were working hard on local projects and had little time for anything else. One of them was asked repeatedly to help organize the Conference on Organization, but she declined. What other branch has two full-time local staffers paid by the national organization? 

There was no “subterfuge” against Denver either. When one SC member in Denver on her own accord circulated a document criticizing those two Denver staff members for preparing the Colorado People’s Center in a manner that wasn’t transparent with the branch and the SC, and erased the Party, this was brought to our attention. The Party center had zero role in that document being written or distributed, and up to this point had no idea there was any division in the Denver SC. Then, a third Denver SC member wrote a document to the center alleging a faction was being secretly organized. Only at that point did we become aware that underneath Denver’s limited communication with the center was a significant dispute, and we informed the rest of the Party’s leadership that something was up (including Walter). Walter was then in the center and persuasively told us “there’s no way” these Denver leaders intended to leave the organization, concealing that he was already setting the stage for a new organization himself. Ben and Claudia traveled to Denver and came back optimistic, reporting that the charges of factionalism had been denied, the SC had been apparently stabilized. While the comrades had shared some long-held disagreements with the national perspective, we hoped a new stage of political candor would open with Denver. Lillian declined to present her views to the Conference, when offered. Instead we planned to return to Denver after the Conference to have a more rigorous discussion about the relationship between base-building, movement organizing, and Party-building. We affirmed that different strategies can be used in different local contexts, and affirmed that we have never adopted a one-size-fits-all approach to branch-building. That discussion never happened due to the faction’s departure. In fact, the faction left to preclude the discussion. 

Immediately upon returning to Denver from the Conference, Lillian — who had said nothing inside the CC meeting debrief — launched into an open attack on the conference at their branch internal before all the membership, violating the prior agreement of the Steering Committee and violating the group agreements from a few weeks prior, which was to first bring disputes to higher bodies. There was never any real intention to debate. 

Brooklyn District leaders organized a faction and debate was not suppressed 

In recent months, I have been aware of growing outrage in the office about the Brooklyn leadership’s focus on cultivating community partnerships and relationships, and most vehemently the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center. I have been approached multiple times, in secret conspiratorial huddles and one-on-one meetings, trying to ensure that I don’t sympathize with the efforts. … I have tried to generally avoid involvement in these discussions because I know the only goal is to pin me to a position against the members in Brooklyn. ,,, Avoiding involvement became impossible when I was asked repeatedly to put my name to a document opposing base building in Brooklyn, a position I clearly do not support. I was asked first by Layan and Wyatt at the Branch Organizing Conference, then again in the New York office in a one-on-one with Ben Becker. 

I informed [the SC] that the previous night I had been reached out to by the Brooklyn leadership to speak at their district retreat based on my experience and writings on base building, and I had planned to go. … The Standing Committee of the Central Committee had just held an emergency meeting and voted that I could not speak at the retreat. … I later learned that at this retreat, a group of five members intervened forcefully, disruptively, and in a clearly orchestrated manner. Each of these members is current or former staff. The entire retreat, these five members read from a document on their phones, in a way that was completely unsubtle and visible to all attendees. One of the members emotionally stormed out. Having the experience of 17 years in the organization, and a decade in national leadership, I am certain that this was coordinated by Ben. 

This is quite an astonishing narrative. After admitting to concealing his views for years, and pretending to be in agreement with the Party’s strategic framework, Walter feigns surprise that people fell for his trick and approached him to intervene politically to help build a higher level of organizational and ideological unity between a local steering committee and its district leadership (which was then claiming, disingenuously, that they had no political differences with the Party). Yes, comrades went to him because they considered him as someone with a balanced and nuanced view, who was well regarded by the Brooklyn District leaders and the NYC Steering Committee, had written about base-building before, believed in popularizing socialism (they thought), and could now write an updated synthesis that shows how the building of mass organizations at the neighborhood level would fit into the Party’s overall strategic framework based on its years of experience. Members affirmed to Walter “this will be good because it can bring the issues out,” and Walter seemed to initially agree. Walter was asked to “huddle” by the NYC Steering Committee so he could help strategize how to have an organized discussion and productive synthesis after the District retreat, a retreat the Steering Committee expected would be volatile based on the disagreements already expressed by members in their unit meetings. Those members were not coached or organized by Ben, a totally false allegation. The Steering Committee had decided not to try and fight it out with the District leadership in front of their own members. The city’s elected leadership hadn’t been invited to speak, hadn’t been consulted about the strategic document before it was circulated, and had no chance to have a meeting beforehand to discuss it. The process was backwards for a Leninist party, but they decided not to intervene anyway. Further, in the context of an emerging political dispute between a Branch and District leadership, it wasn’t appropriate for a member of a Central Committee to go into a meeting of the membership and take a side against the city leadership. That is why we have higher bodies. 

How is it that Walter was so ready to violate the basics of democratic centralism that he has taught to so many others? Was it just a noble commitment to debate? No, the truth is that the Brooklyn District leadership had already decided to use this retreat as the next big step in consolidating a faction. 

The groundwork for Brooklyn’s faction had been laid for months. The retreat and discussion over base-building merely provided the trigger for them to move. Their campaign involved removing unit leads who they considered disloyal, discouraging members in the District from attending other events in the city, and deliberately limiting communication with the Steering Committee to the least possible so they couldn’t be accused of totally breaking Party norms. This went on for months. Walter, sitting in the same office as the Steering Committee, apparently reported back to the District leadership their growing frustration about all this. Meanwhile, the faction oriented their core leaders to say as little as possible if asked anything about what organizing was happening in Brooklyn, to be evasive, to minimize, to not agree to individual phone calls and meetings, and not provide answers that could lead to follow-up questions or discussions. Their notes show the scale of the operation. The goal was to buy time and consolidate forces. Meanwhile, the faction pursued selective outreach to individual members in other Districts who they thought might have organizational frustrations and grievances. 

In his final week in the office, Walter agreed to write a manual on branch building that would be used as a training document for the whole membership, which would go over base-building and Party-building at the neighborhood level. He agreed to spend the summer planning major Party events and schools, alongside other CC members who would plan this out together. The whole thing has been proven to be a deception. Or, rather, he was going to continue to do this work on false pretenses for a while longer until the Brooklyn faction revealed itself. Some of Brooklyn’s faction canceled their dues prior to the Branch Committee meeting. Their notes show months of factional planning. Yet now they claim that it was at this meeting, where the debate finally started to come out, that their democracy was suppressed. That debate was meant to continue two days later, but instead they considered it the most opportune time to leave. If they had stayed, and if a consensus position was adopted, or a majority vote taken, they would have been defeated and not been able to claim “no space for debate” in their resignation letters. 

False presentation of base-building 

Quote 

I have heard them talk behind closed doors for months about their opposition to the base building and mass organizing work that comrades are doing across the country, and have read

draft documents they’ve written to combat the trend. This position was alluded to in a document written by Brian Becker that characterized mass organizing work as “too pedestrian,” but Ben Becker wrote more explicitly against base building and mass organizing in a document titled “Turning to the working class: What it should mean and what it shouldn’t.” This document was circulated amongst the inner circle in the New York office, but was ultimately not shared out of concern that it would cause debate. In preparatory documents for the conference, key objectives included establishing that “pivoting is the essence of revolution,” and “deep organizing..isn’t part of [our] theory of revolution.” 

Response 

Beware the strategy of selective omission. Here is the full quote of what Brian Becker called “too pedestrian” — and it is not a rejection of “mass organizing” at all: 

“There is a mistaken notion that our goal is to simply assimilate into working class communities, become familiar with the issues in those communities, be accepted by those communities, and then, over time, we will develop individualized relationships with a select number of people who will then join the unit and join the Party. This is way too pedestrian. Our focus should be reaching those parts of the population that are already becoming political, becoming radicalized, or are in motion in response to a form of injustice or exploitation. (Emphasis added). It is when people are engaged in struggle that their ideas change, and it is when they are in those struggles that they realize that they want to join an organization to become effective.” What Brian is clearly describing is a passive, slow and uninspired (“pedestrian”) approach to Party-building, which sequences it behind individual relationship-building and leaves out the struggle of the masses. Instead of this pedestrian approach, the document emphasizes getting engaged in any site of struggle, against any form of injustice, and that is where we will build our movement, our Party, and where people will be open to new ideas. This is the basics of Leninism — building socialist consciousness through engagement in the struggle, and drawing those with socialist consciousness actively into the Party — but the fact that Walter so strenuously objects to it, going so far as to misquote it, shows he has gone far down the road of economism that Brian’s document warns against. 

In Ben’s unpublished and unfinished document “Turning to the Class: What It Should Mean and What It Shouldn’t,” we can find none of the quotes mentioned here. These quotes seem to just be invented to pin a position on Ben that he doesn’t hold. Ben sent his draft document to Walter for comradely feedback — and because he never got any from him or the rest of the presiding committee, he therefore didn’t circulate it right before the Conference. But the questions of mass organizing, the meaning of base-building, best practices and methods in neighborhood and workplace organizing, all of these are constantly being discussed by the Party at all levels, and the stated goal of the Party in recent national meetings is to develop a more comprehensive theory of branch-building. The Party has no history whatsoever of concealing our views on any of these issues. Each issue of The Party Organizer always seeks case studies for such ground-level mass organizing work, as examples that all members can learn from. 

Preliminary Lessons for the Party

Is every element of the document an invention? No. There are, of course, always real deficiencies in the organization, which we readily accept and many of which we have already been working to resolve. 

Decisions without execution: For instance, Walter throws a jab about the absence of the “AI commission” and “Trans liberation commission” decided upon at the Congress. True. But he was a Central Committee member just like the rest, and on staff, and showed no initiative himself to bring either of these into existence. Perhaps he was too busy, but to lay this shortcoming at the feet of one or two leaders is dishonest. There are many projects we have decided upon that are not yet brought to fruition. We are sure every branch leadership in the country could review its notes and find projects and tasks it agreed to do, and did not yet carry out. We aren’t proud of this phenomenon, but it’s the reality. This isn’t about anything but capacity, time, and the many shifting pressures and new things the organization is responding to, which need to always be prioritized. In this particular case, we have never built a commission on ideological questions — although we know they are part of the communist tradition — but we want to. So now have to figure out the methods to bring it into existence as a new organizational process. 

Expanding and formalizing leadership: Walter repeatedly complains about “actual decision making and implementation would remain completely under the control of Brian, Ben and the circle they keep around them.” This is a mischaracterization. What we do have is the elected executive leadership of the Party (the Standing Committee of the Central Committee), in which Walter for a few years participated as an observer. Elected executive leaders do in fact decide on what to prioritize amid a huge variety of contending pressures and opportunities. That staff are then used to implement such decisions of the elected executive is also not nefarious. What is a real problem, which we have sought to resolve, is the smallness of the group, and the informal method with which some decisions get made. Even elected leaders to the Standing Committee, if they’re not present at all times, can be out of the loop, creating new problems. Unlike a corporation, we have to assume any of our top leaders could be taken off the playing field by the state at any moment. This makes it a prime priority to train more leaders and to share information among leaders, and between branches and the center, so that information does not become centralized just in individuals, but institutionalized. We have begun to introduce new reporting routines for this purpose, and are discussing how the CC can be reorganized for more in-person and virtual meetings. 

In this spirit, we created the Political Coordination Committee, which Walter derides as an “unelected leadership clique.” This was done to expand the circle of leaders beyond the elected Standing Committee, and to expand high-level political discussions to a larger number of cadres and leaders. It was created first as an interim body at the height of the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing in all elected CC members in New York, as well as the full-time staff leading major national departments and areas of work. Far from anything covert, a presentation on how this body functions, and how the organization of the center needs to be improved even further, was given to the whole CC in the October 2025 meeting. This development has widened leadership discussions and debates, not narrowed them, and drawn in many rising women leaders, including elected Central Committee members — who Walter dismisses as undeveloped “blind” followers and functionaries. One recent resolution of this body is to carry out more intensive political education to further develop this next generation of ideological and political leaders. 

While the Political Coordination Committee has been an advance, we still need to resolve the overstretched nature of certain leaders, which creates frustrating bottlenecks, as well as the unevenness of reporting, note-taking and accountability for prior decisions. We’ve discussed the challenges we’ve run into in sharing information across the leadership, working across teams, and methods for keeping the whole Central Committee informed and engaged, while they are themselves dealing with demanding work schedules across many time zones. This is complicated work, and we have no blueprint to work with. We are constantly seeking new methods to improve. 

Party culture and functioning of the center: In multiple leadership bodies, and in the CC itself, we’ve also discussed in recent meetings the need for deliberate training in communist values and “Party culture” to foster more collaboration, avoid cliquishness, deal with conflicts head on, and more. This has to be prioritized. CC members openly presented at the Congress how a center was both a necessary development and could give rise to bureaucratic inter-office politics and cliquishness — as well as the danger of factionalism! At multiple Central Committee meetings, and in our most recent days-long leadership retreat, we identified how problems of informality and adhoc-ness of certain decision-making and leadership structures can exacerbate such tendencies, as well as the informality around scheduling, on-boarding, and work expectations. 

By-Laws for the national organization: None of the above problems are secrets. In fact, we restated at the Conference on Organization how the next stage of By-Laws and procedural revision would be to improve and systematize our national functioning, where we still are quite underdeveloped given the size of the Party. As the Party grows, each stage creates an enormity of new tasks, projects, problems and threats, which strain the existing organizational norms. This dialectic will never end — we expect the pressure on the center will only increase as the Party scales up further. 

Scaling responsibly: At our recent leadership retreat, we resolved to study the best practices of other types organizations that have scaled up, the literature on leadership, cross-team collaboration, and to carefully consider the formation of new national departments with their own kind of executive leadership. This requires study of both communist and non-communist organizations. 

Leadership identification: Finally, these resignation documents also present us with an opportunity for reflection about how people get into positions of central leadership to begin with and long-standing staff. The criteria for that has always been based on personal trust, hard work, initiative, but the party must more deliberately train all of its staff and leaders and cadres in non-stop ideological formation and in communist values — including to practice radical honesty with one’s political views and concerns. Once on staff, revolutionary optimism and belief in the Party can never be taken for granted, but must be consistently reinforced through study, discussion and a living connection to the class struggle. 

In summary, we will keep pushing forward with all these areas of improvement, and many others, not because of the resignation documents or the claims of the faction. These were all issues that were being openly discussed already, which is why Walter knew how to twist them.

In our view, no organizational changes would have prevented this factionalism because at the root it is not fundamentally about people or processes — it’s a totally different political outlook. For them, now is not the time for a revolutionary perspective, a cadre-based vanguard party, or a time to anticipate and prepare for ruptures. Where we see opportunity, they see a wasteland. 

Where we see ruling class instability, they see stability. Where we see a generation of young working people coming towards socialism, and towards the Party, they wave this off as meaningless. Those theoretical differences, and totally different readings of the political conjuncture, will become more and more apparent in the field of practice, and it is where their theory will be tested and the debate will be settled. We are confident in our path.

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.
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2.  World Population Review, calculated at roughly $9,000 per individual.
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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).
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4.  According to the USDA.
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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.
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8.  According to U.S. census data collected during the 2023 American Community Survey.
   ︎
9.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Local Police Departments 2000.” 
   ︎
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).
    ︎
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.