“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.

All above you dangling were your wise men. I recognized none of them personally. All I knew was from a hundred black and white photographs, all presenting unflattering, villainous angles. A couple, like yours, with faces purpled by pressure, blood massing, riots at the skin. Many more with bullet wounds, taken from executions elsewhere when the idea for this display had struck. Some were decorated with nooses properly tied, though many hung from limbs, and others still from hooks. No doubt from a nearby packing plant. Too far to have been the one your father worked. In the paper I’d read they celebrated this as the return of the Christmas tree, because the year prior that same paper said you’d banned Christmas. 

I moved closer and grabbed what was left of your leg all at once: a strong breeze had shaken you and I couldn’t take the sight. Something primal in me suppressed all disgust. You reminded me of a flag. Perhaps that was what you were meant to be, why the clothes they dressed you in were at first white. 

Remember when we last spoke? I was in your house. You brought me a tray of coffee and sugar. Your daughter listened to the radio, your son left to check the night. That was when they were calling you a despot for arresting your would-be assassins. There were daily papers scattered saying as much, your dog on the couch, a pistol empty on the cushion beside him. The moon swung by its black noose upside down over the house. Your windows had been open when I arrived, and I locked them when you went to the kitchen to fetch me a spoon. You hadn’t noticed, I think. We had dinner, rations mostly, a bag of dried peach halves for dessert, good wine you saved from our university days. We drank our inhibitions and spoke of how hard it was to govern. There was no end to your problems, and limited patience for my solutions. Eventually, I’d torn one of your many newspapers apart — this was the wine — and demanded you censor its lies. I spoke of the necessity of a Red Terror until you, my dear friend, seemed afraid. 

I swept the dried peaches to the floor with my arm. I am tired of your fooling around, I’d said. As for the rights of anyone, of fascists, tell your people they can fuck themselves. Your dog sat up and barked. Your daughter stared. The moon had dug deep bright wells in her eyes. I was shamed into silence. The dried peach halves on the floor, listening to this, in the dark they looked like…

They removed your ears. On both sides of your head there is only  hair that looks caught in the rain, wet. Any idiot can guess this brutal poetry. Retributive justice for an invented crime. Deafen the paranoiac organs of Big Brother. Finally, the snakes are free. Closer now, I see your self. Remembering what you were, piece by piece, becomes how I breathe through the stench. Once two whole wandering legs. Once ten poet’s fingers. Eyes warm as the earth. I see hanging you so low was not just symbolic — you’ve become a tree trunk for carving initials and complaints, nothing romantic. I cut the noose with a hunting knife I found in you. You nearly knock us both over. I lay you in the street. For now everyone is busy, preoccupied with a new, realer terror. Your supporters, the wretched of the earth, either shipped away to some barbed place or filled my nose with their stench. With the handkerchief you once gave me and then forgot, I massage the blood from your face. I do this slowly, while I hold your hand. You won’t be here alone. Now your favorite color, I return the cloth to your breast pocket. I kiss your swollen lips. 

Beside us, the courthouse you so loved burns, casting strange shadows on your tired flesh. If I decide that the flickering of light over your face is the ghost of a smile, I’ll cremate you in that flame, I swear. I won’t tolerate satisfaction, or personal peace. I hope your soul was worth it, it’s Hell for the rest of us. At home, my new home, some of the papers are already calling you an inspiration. All the bastard scholars who never spoke of you while you lived now eulogize you. A nation where all the rebels are losers, they’ll grant sainthood to anyone who fails this spectacularly. Now that you are dead, you are safe for them to worship. I say I’ll burn you, but my face rains on you instead. I have enough fingers to shield yours remaining wholly from the night. Your hands vanish in mine like an infant’s. I wish you’d been half the monster they said you were.

Doesn’t matter. We are lucky to be in this moment right now. For most of history the oppressed have had no way out of their miserable conditions. How many millions of lives were wasted toiling as slaves? How many millions died after a short brutal life at the hands of oppressors? We stand today at an unprecedented turning point in history — we have an arsenal at our disposal that none of the oppressed have ever possessed. We have the clarity of scientific socialism, which allows us to truly comprehend our conditions and our tasks. We have over a century of socialist struggle and revolutions to study and learn from. We have the thoughts, teachings, and experiences of past revolutionaries who dedicated their lives to arming us with the knowledge necessary to defeat capital. We have the internet giving us instantaneous access to all of this information, something undreamed of before our generation. Finally, and most importantly:

We have a dying empire to topple — Imperialism is on its way out. This constant onslaught of increasingly severe crises are the empire’s death throes. We know that fascism arises in response to a crisis of capitalism, as it did in the 20th century in response to the rise of the communist movement. What does the current resurgence of fascism tell you about the state of capitalism? The rate of profit continues to fall as the world economy shifts away from the empire and towards the new socialist superpower. The successes of Chinese socialism cannot be understated, their explosive rise to the economic juggernaut they are today is doing two things to make our task possible: 1) proving to the world the superiority of the socialist mode of production, 2) undermining the economic foundations of imperialism through win-win trade partnerships, preventing the empire from exerting its coercive neocolonial trade practices on underdeveloped nations. 

As socialism in China continues to develop and mature it will increasingly outcompete and lay bare the utter obsolescence of the capitalist mode of production. Already production in some key industries has reached levels of centralization and automation which capitalism struggles to match. Competition from advanced Chinese firms is cratering the rate of profit in these industries — capitalism already can’t compete in green energy and electric vehicles and is turning to extreme protectionism in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable. Socialist state-directed research and education have secured China’s lead in many emerging technologies, a trend which is likely to continue as capitalist education falls further behind with increasing state austerity measures. Where will we be after another ten years of capitalist decay and socialist development? It must be stressed that this situation is wholly new. Imperialism has never been weaker, and this gives us a world-historic opportunity to finally slay capital for good. 

We know from Lenin the three key aspects of a revolutionary situation are: 1) a crisis in the ruling class, where they are unable to continue to rule in the old way, 2) the suffering and want of the oppressed classes grows more acute than usual, and 3) as a result of the above the activity of the oppressed classes increases and they begin to take independent action. Does any of this sound familiar to you? If you live in America you know as well as I that nobody in Washington has any plan whatsoever for how to solve any of the increasingly dire issues tearing American society apart, and as crises continue to pile up they will inevitably be faced with issues which necessitate and force change which they are similarly incapable of responding to, which is when we need to be prepared to take action. It is clear that this is the direction we are heading. 

Everyone is desperate for change, and anti-capitalist sentiments have gone from the political fringe to a pressing issue on everyone’s mind in the space of less than a decade. The 2020 uprisings proved conclusively that the American people have revolutionary spirit and are willing to stand up and fight for a better future. The resurgence of the trade union movement proves the masses are beginning to remember the necessity of organization against capital. All we are missing is a revolutionary vanguard party capable of taking charge of the situation and leading the masses to a higher stage of struggle, to revolution. With only slight variations, we can see these trends across the entirety of the imperial core. 

The left in the imperialist countries is small and disorganized, but it is within our power to organize it. No movement has emerged because the left is plagued by infighting and scandals — why is this? We as a movement are lacking a humble commitment to political education.

Political education is the single most essential component of a revolutionary struggle. It binds the other components together. Following the counter-revolutions at the end of the 80s, Marxism experienced a tremendous decline across the world as the masses lost faith in its liberating power. In its place has grown opportunism, revisionism, anarchism, and all other sorts of deviationist tendencies that history has proven are dead ends. We desperately need educated Marxists to combat these tendencies and to educate other socialists. This is not a sectarian sentiment; much of Lenin’s enormous body of works is dedicated specifically to tearing apart incorrect tendencies. Mao greatly encouraged “line struggle” within the party for this reason. This is fundamental to revolutionary struggle. This does not mean splitting into tiny irrelevant sects whenever you disagree with anyone. Lenin struggled tirelessly for many years within the RSDLP to push it towards a correct revolutionary Marxist line. We need to follow his example.

Revolutionaries of the past prioritized political education for good reason. Ho Chi Minh personally translated Marxist texts into Vietnamese and read them aloud to illiterate peasant farmers because he and they understood they could only be truly revolutionary if they were educated. The Bolsheviks took great pains to set up entire illegal press operations in secret so as to publish Marxist literature. They understood, and we must understand, that Marxism is a science and it must be treated and studied as such. You could not take up chemical engineering without first a rigorous scientific study of chemistry, and you can not become truly revolutionary without first a rigorous scientific study of Marxism.

We must each dedicate ourselves to study with the aim of being able to:

1. summarize and teach fellow proletarians the content of the theory
2. creatively apply the dialectical method to the issues facing us today
3. decisively combat incorrect ideas and tendencies

With political education comes the ability to form a correct and coherent political line. With correct political lines comes unity of purpose and action. It is only through this unity that we can begin to win the masses over to the revolutionary struggle. At the same time, it is important to avoid book worship, to do better than to dogmatically copy the words and actions of dead men. We learn from their methods and build on them and apply them to our context. We learn to become scientists of revolution, we learn from what the great minds in our field have already figured out and we go on to work out our own problems.

We cannot afford to wait any longer. We do not have the luxury of the easy comfortable life so many in our parents’ and grandparents’ generations led. The very biosphere that sustains us is in mortal peril. Our very lives depend on revolution. Our children’s lives depend on it. Our grandchildren’s lives depend on it. Every human being who will ever be born depends on us taking action right now. I urge you to take a moment to reflect on this. Unknowable billions are watching us in this very moment through their history books. What will they see? We each have only a single precious irreplaceable life to live on this single precious irreplaceable Earth. Will our descendants see us willfully wasting our lives numbing ourselves with entertainment and escapism as our oppressors willfully lay waste to our world? Or will they see us heroically dedicating our lives to at long last put a decisive end to capitalism? Will we choose the easy path of slow suicide, or the difficult path of asserting our humanity and reclaiming our dignity by casting off our shackles?

The empire is ripe to fall, but it will not fall of its own accord — we must make it fall. We must learn to form a truly revolutionary, dedicated, disciplined vanguard. We must learn to become leaders. We must learn to wage the class war in organizational, theoretical, and military terms. We can’t wait around for someone else to take the lead. It has to be us. It has to be YOU.

The theory is more accessible than ever. M.L. Reading Hub has a wonderful curriculum with free annotated PDFs and study materials. Marxists.org has thousands of Marxist texts available for free. ProleWiki has thousands of articles to help deepen your understanding of Marxist theory and history, and an extensive resource library. Red Menace podcast has brilliant explanations and breakdowns of key Marxist texts. Socialism For All on YouTube has hundreds of excellently narrated audiobook recordings of nearly every major Marxist text. Gather the politically curious and fed up people in your life and study with them. There is no excuse. YouTube videos and memes are great for propaganda but nothing substitutes actually engaging with the material, studying it, internalizing its lessons, and carrying it into the real world to put it into action and build a mass movement. 

We need revolution, and it is within our grasp. Not in a hundred years. Not in fifty years. We can and must build it and carry it out within the next decade. If that sounds unrealistic, consider that it is far more unrealistic to sit around waiting for revolution to arrive on our doorstep “some day, eventually” while the imperialists strangle our Earth to death. We must have a clear goal in mind in order to seriously carry out our task. Revolution is a deadly serious business. Revolution demands serious, disciplined, professional commitment. The future of humanity and life on Earth demands this. We must thoroughly internalize this truth and make revolutionary struggle the chief priority in our lives.

Communism will prevail! Let’s make it happen!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, let us begin…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Monthly Review at https://mronline.org/2019/09/07/down-with-the-rebels-against-the-bill-of-sale/ . It has been updated by the author for this publication.

Over one hundred years ago, on the morning of October 7, 1919, a group of two hundred to three hundred armed Haitian rebels launched an attack on U.S. occupation forces in Port-au-Prince. Wielding “swords, machetes, and pikes,” these cacos (as they were called) entered the city with hopes of national liberation, driven to insurrection by a brutal, racist U.S. occupation.1  This occupation had subjected Haitians to the hated forced labor system of the corvée, seized control over Haitian finance, and rewritten the Haitian Constitution at gunpoint, enabling foreign companies to acquire land in the country.

Though well-armed with grievances, the rebels were outgunned. American troops and their Haitian gendarmerie decimated them with rifles and automatic weapons. Rebel leader Charlemagne Peralte was able to escape (for the moment), but dozens of rebels were slaughtered, their base camp overrun, their one field cannon seized.2

By November 1919, Peralte himself would be betrayed and assassinated, his lifeless body strung up and photographed by his killers as so-called proof that resistance was futile. The American occupiers deliberately spread the photo of Peralte’s corpse across Haiti, attempting to demoralize supporters of the uprising. But standing stripped to the waist, strapped to a door with his arms flung wide, the slain Peralte resembled nothing so much as a victim of crucifixion, martyred by the American Rome. The propaganda image boomeranged on its makers, creating an unintended consequence: Charlemagne Peralte became hailed as a national hero.3

As many as three thousand Haitian people would be killed in what has been called the Second Cacos War (1917–20). Yet despite such repression, Haitian resistance to the U.S. occupation would continue for the next decade among students, peasants, and workers alike, until the exit of U.S. troops in 1934. As Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat put it in a 2015 New Yorker article:

During the nineteen years of the U.S. occupation, fifteen thousand Haitians were killed. Any resistance to the centralized, U.S.-installed puppet governments was crushed, and a gendarmerie—a combination of army and police, modelled after an occupation force—was created to replace the Marines after they left. Although U.S. troops officially pulled out of Haiti in 1934, the United States exerted some control over Haiti’s finances until 1947.4

The distorting and oppressive impacts of the U.S. occupation have been felt in Haitian society ever since. As scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot have shown, the restructuring of the Haitian state during this period—from its financial institutions to its dreaded military police—created an enduring and corrupt governmental entity that answered less to the Haitian people than to local elites and foreign interests.5

The American occupation of Haiti (1915–34) had unintended consequence in the United States itself as well, where it spurred anti-imperialist consciousness and organizing. As Steve Striffler reviews in his critical history, Solidarity: Latin America and the U.S. Left in the Era of Human Rights, resistance in the 1920s was first centered in the African American and Haitian émigré communities, with figures such as James Weldon Johnson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) playing a critical role. The focus on U.S. abuses in Haiti encouraged greater internationalism within the existing “Negro” rights movement, while drawing together a broad anti-imperialist tendency that included magazines like the Nation as well as elements of the radical socialist/communist left. “Such efforts,” Striffler writes, “made the occupation increasingly unpopular in the United States by the mid-1920s, and created space for expanded opposition in Haiti,” ultimately making the formal military occupation untenable.6

One legacy of this oppositional movement can be found in the work left behind by politically engaged authors, who, in their creative and critical writings of this period, foreground Haiti and the burning issues its history raises. Across the 1930s, U.S. radical writers looked to Haiti not just to dramatize Black victimization or American brutality, but for insight and inspiration that could empower progressive labor, antiracist and antifascist struggles in the United States and worldwide. As Benjamin Balthaser has shown in his recent book Anti-Imperialist Modernism, left-wing writings from the period of the U.S. occupation of Haiti often emphasized the historical, revolutionary agency of this long-oppressed people.7 Against the grain of dominant North American discourses that routinely depict the Haitian people as helpless victims, unruly mobs, postapocalyptic zombies, exotic-erotic tourist attractions, or raw human material ripe for exploitation, anti-imperialist literary representations of Haiti from the 1930s treat Haitians as potential revolutionary subjects. The now-well-known work of C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938) was not alone in its insight, but rather emerged from the crucible of a broader radical movement that sought to put Haiti front and center—both as capitalist profit center and as site of revolutionary ferment.8

Among the all-but forgotten figures in this underappreciated anti-imperialist movement was the writer Guy Endore (1900–70). Turning to study the history of Haiti just as the formal U.S. military occupation was coming to its end in 1933–34, Endore was inspired to create one of the great neglected, anti-imperialist works in twentieth century U.S. literature, his historical novel of slavery and revolution, Babouk—a book that is still in print, thanks to socialist Monthly Review Press. Born in Brooklyn, raised partly in Europe, partly in an Ohio orphanage, fluent in French as well as German from youth, Endore lacked a sense of a stable social position. He would state later that he had “never been able to discover exactly where I fit in…everything sort of cancels out in me. I’m neither European, nor American; neither Jew nor Christian; neither of the country nor the city; neither of this century nor the last; neither rich nor poor; and even in my studies, I was always divided, always torn between the sciences and the arts.”9 By the mid–1930s, Endore was, like many young writers of his generation, turning to the left. He would spend two decades as a committed member of the Communist Party (CPUSA)—finding there a kind of home for his homelessness. However, though his political awakening was shaped by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, “it was when I studied that Haiti business,” Endore recalled, “that I really began to take a side and began to see that there were exploiters and exploited.”10 In Babouk, “my intention,” he wrote, “was to make the reader feel and smell and taste the crime of slavery, until he abominated it; and not only historical slavery, but all those too-numerous characteristics of it that have survived into our own day.”11

Such comments make clear that while eighteenth century Saint Domingue was Endore’s immediate focus, his aims extended beyond that singular situation. He sought to intervene not only in the historiography around Haiti, but also in contemporary 1930s struggles for social justice. To pursue this split purpose—addressing not just “historical slavery” but its present surviving aspects—Babouk deploys a self-conscious narrative voice that frequently “interrupts” the action of past events to comment directly to the modern reader, drawing parallels to more contemporary injustices and pointing out the failures of traditional history or literature when it comes to representing such issues. While working closely from primary historical documents—thanks to his fluency in French—Endore crafted a meta-historical form that could simultaneously do justice to the historical reality of Haiti, while also allowing the fires of exploitation and revolution there to illuminate a broader contemporary web of capitalism, racism, and empire. Babouk thus deserves attention today not only as a historical document of the “Hands off Haiti” movement, but also as a provocation to revolutionary thought and practice more generally.12

To be sure, this radical book emerged from an unlikely quarter.

Originally, Endore had been commissioned in 1933 by a commercial publisher to write a “Caribbean romance” set against the horrifying “backdrop of tom-toms.” Exoticizing travel narratives of Haitian “voodoo” had been in vogue since the U.S. occupation 13 and Endore was at this time best-known as a horror writer, especially for his New York Times bestseller Werewolf of Paris (1933). But Endore’s research, which included an extended trip to Haiti, led him to produce a very different kind of book, one that not only brings the horrifying “backdrop” of Haiti into the foreground, but inverts the nature of the “horror” we encounter. The horror here is not on the side of ‘native savagery,’ but of so-called ‘civilization’.

From its first page to its last, Babouk confronts us with the callous strategies and often monstrous technologies of physical and ideological repression that were building blocks of colonization and slavery. Readers turning to Babouk for a glimpse of the ‘monstrous Other’ are likely to be surprised, for the book compels us to recognize how the true monstrosity afflicting Haiti were the products of capitalist ‘reason’ in the service of profit and empire.

And so, sent to Haiti to write a romantic/horrific page-turner, Endore wrote instead a masterpiece to overthrow masters with, a horror tale in which the three-headed monster is capitalism, racism, and empire, and the heroes are slaves in revolt. His commissioned employer, Century Press, seeking a different kind of horror, refused to publish the book and other major commercial publishers followed suit. Clifton Fadiman, then editor at Simon and Schuster and lead book reviewer for the New Yorker, wrote Endore privately to compliment him, “Babouk is a powerful, moving piece of work,” but he added that “it won’t sell because it’s just too horrible. The reviews would warn people away from it. We would be afraid to handle it.”14

Fadiman was not far off in his commercial estimates—though considering his position of influence, his lament was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Brought out by the small radical press Vanguard, Endore soon found his novel denounced by the New York Times as an attempt to inspire a “race riot,” and criticized in the New Republic by reviewer Martha Gruening, who charged Endore with producing not a novel at all, but a mere “calendar of horrors.”15

Make no mistake: there is plenty in Babouk that could be seen as “horrible,” beginning with the history itself—enslavement, resistance, and ruling-class repression. Moreover, the writing in the text often retains an element of the sensationalist horror style that put Endore on the map. The very first page of the book contains a detailed discussion of the “work” done by a “genius,” a so-called professional “nigger taster” whose trained tongue helps tell which of the enslaved are healthy enough to be purchased, and which not. (The slave traders after all, are interested in cheating one another as well, hiding the illness of their captives with perfumes and make-up and even fake teeth.) Later chapters detail grotesque diseases and conditions aboard the slave ship, the torture techniques used to punish rebel slaves, and even the brutal pike-impaling of a white infant at the height of the slave rebellion. The book at times seems to sarcastically revel in revealing the historical monstrosities that enslavers and colonizers devise to manage and rationalize their vicious regime.

Endore’s wager seems to have been that his talent for the graphic and gothic could be leveraged to bring a broader popular readership to confront uncomfortable social and historical truths. He had clear political motivations for Babouk , but, as he put it, he also “wrote the book to sell.”16 In 1934, somehow, it had not seemed impossible for a book to be both an anti-capitalist horror and a commercial hit. After all, hadn’t his 1933 horror novel Werewolf of Paris topped the best-seller lists, despite (or perhaps because of) its class-conscious account of the Paris Commune?17

But it would be a mistake to write off Endore’s vivid depictions of violence as mere sensationalism, or as a left-wing replication of the “exotic discourses” that predominated in U.S. depictions of Haiti at the time.18 Similarly, it would be a mistake to see Endore’s representation of the repressive effects of imperialism and slavery as a gratuitous objectification of black bodies, aimed at stirring the sentimental emotions of (predominantly white) readers. Rather, Endore’s goal in so vividly depicting historical horror is to bring to consciousness the ways that the most seemingly extreme and “monstrous” acts of the slave system—for instance, the public burning of slave rebels, the clipping of ears from runaways, elaborate regime of torture, and so on—were in fact ‘logical’ and ‘rational’ outgrowths of the capitalistic logic of profit-maximization and social control. At the same time, Endore draws out the ways that such extreme measures of repression testify to the pervasive resistance of the enslaved; had the enslaved ‘accepted’ their dehumanized lot, such brutal techniques would not have been deemed ‘necessary.’

As an exploration of history, Babouk remains remarkable for the way it explores the dialectic of oppression and resistance, foregrounding how contradictions among the ruling classes themselves (such as the contradiction between maximizing short-term profit and sustaining long-term social control, or the contradiction between different blocs of rival property owners), opened space for resistance from below. Even such a totalitarian system as racialized chattel slavery had its cracks and weak links. At the same time, Endore zooms in on slave resistance, emphasizing the importance of cultural practices—and especially practices of collective story-telling—as a crucial site of mass resistance and revolutionary preparation.

Through the story-telling gifts of his eponymous character Babouk, Endore suggests the ways in which the verbal arts can be used strategically, raising the consciousness and sustaining the spirit of the oppressed, while puncturing the myths of racial or class superiority that seek to naturalize ruling power. Thus, at the same time as it confronts us with the stark limits of traditional Western historiography, Babouk—as imaginative fiction—explores the importance of creative culture for preparing the path to revolution. Babouk himself might be read as a figure for the radical artist that Endore may have aspired to become, working with complex inherited cultural materials—African trickster stories and European Bible tales alike—to forge unity among the oppressed and to clarify the need for a general revolt.

Thus, while Endore constantly exposes the background apparatus of exploitation, the main story of Babouk reimagines the leadup to the Haitian Revolution, through the coming-of-age story of a character based loosely on the historical figure of Boukman Dutty. Remembered as a crucial catalyst of the early uprisings of 1791, known for his key role at the ceremony of Bois Caiman, Boukman’s early death left subsequent leadership to other, now better-known figures, such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. It also left Boukman himself something of a historical mystery, creating room for much subsequent historical debate, while providing Endore with the space for reimagining the unrecorded pre-history of the revolution.19

Endore presents Babouk as a field slave, emphasizing his talents as an unconventional, yet popular story-teller. In stark contrast to those nationalist writers of the 1920s and ’30s who sought to champion Haiti in the face of imperialist degradation by celebrating its long line of strong black military men, from Toussaint and Dessalines to Henry Christophe, Endore chose instead to foreground a lowly field worker, whose only power among the Haitian masses comes through his well-chosen words. Though Toussaint and Dessalines are never mentioned by name in the book, Endore implies a sharp distinction between Babouk and those leaders who were “as astute as the whites” and would come to dominate the Haitian state after the revolution. Emphasizing the “gold bedizened uniforms” of leaders who seek to imitate their former masters, Endore reminds us that some of these figures were all too eager to compromise with colonial powers, some even proposing the reintroduction of slavery. “Babouk,” Endore writes, “had nothing to do with these.”20

Babouk thus attempts a tense balance: conjuring the emancipatory spirit of slave insurrection and emphasizing the revolutionary importance of storytelling, but without romanticizing the contradictory aftermath of a revolution that—despite its historic achievements—would leave in place new forms of egregious exploitation and inequality. Recalling Peralte’s attack on Port-au-Prince, Endore chooses to focus Babouk’s climax not on a heroic moment of victory, but on an insurgent attack that fails…but that (like this historical uprising led by Boukman in 1791) helps usher in a broader mass upsurge. As we finish Endore’s novel, we are still in 1791, the Haitian Revolution represented not as monumental accomplishment of the past, but as an insurgent necessity of the present. He leaves us looking at the burning sugar cane fields beyond the walls of the city; the horizon of emancipation remains a future to be fought for: What side will we be on?

In this way, Endore distinguishes his narrative from accounts that portray the human aspirations of the Haitian Revolution as fulfilled with the achievement of national independence alone, as if the formal rejection of foreign rule had thereby ended economic exploitation and extreme social inequality in the formal colony.

In his critical report from Haiti in 1934, “Haiti and U.S.A. Occupation,” published concurrently with Babouk, Endore specifically targets the ruse of bourgeois nationalism as a main danger to the cause of liberation. In this (nonfiction) piece, published in the antifascist magazine Fight, Endore offers a sharp class critique of Haitian nationalism (and the U.S. liberalism that embraces it), taking aim at the notion that rule by the local elite represents genuine progress as far as the working Haitian masses are concerned. This local elite is a class of exploiters, he underscores, just as much as U.S. financiers and occupiers, notwithstanding their claims to the contrary.

At the same time, Endore’s essay makes an effort to understand why well-intentioned liberal or African American intellectual observers feel the impulse to rally to a nationalist defense of Haiti, as “the last refuge” of “Negro pride” in a world dominated by European colonialism. But to identify Haitian elite rule with a refuge from racism or class domination, Endore argues, would be not only “erroneous” but “vicious.” “A Negro bourgeoisie can and has in some places replaced a white bourgeoisie with no improvement in the lot of the majority,” as he points out. “Such are the fruits of Haitian nationalism acquired so painfully at the price of the lives of a hundred thousand Negroes.”21

Nor is Endore’s problem only with the nationalism of the Haitian elite. Rather, he generalizes the point, arguing that “national prejudice is only a different form of the class system by which the ruling class is assured of always having someone to remove its garbage or do its unskilled factory work, someone whom the ruling class will despise and keep in his ‘place.’” Whether in the United States or elsewhere, Endore writes, race prejudice is “fostered by capitalism to disrupt the strength of the proletariat by preventing the oppressed white worker from acting in concert with the Negroes.” (We can hypothesize that Babouk was aimed in part at helping those oppressed white workers to see why they should act in concert with their black brethren and reject the racist bait of their own ruling class.)

Endore closes his Fight article by asking readers to “strip the bright paint of patriotic idealism off the Haitian upper classes and reveal what is beneath,” while at the same time forging a “Hands off Haiti” movement that sides not with the “gros negre kulaks,” (that is, the wealthy Haitian landowners), but with the “cacos spirit” for the “realization of full social justice.”

Clearly, Peralte’s Cacos insurgency of 1919 was not far from Endore’s mind as he attempted to articulate a class-conscious anti-imperialism.

While Endore abstains from commenting directly on the U.S. occupation in Babouk itself, there can be no doubt that what he learned from Haitians themselves had a major effect on his novel.

For instance, during his trip to Haiti, Endore learned of how the U.S. military occupation facilitated massive land theft, turning literacy itself into a weapon against the Haitian masses. It was “easy” to steal local peasants’ land, Endore recalled:

You just go up to a man and you say, “Who owns this land?” He’ll say, “I do.” Then you go to the land records office and you record your name for that land, and then you go to him and you say, “I’ve got a record for this land. I own it. Where’s your record? Let’s see which one is the real one.” Of course, he hasn’t got a record.… If the man refused to leave [the land] the American would threaten him with a gun, and if he was halfway decent, he’d give him a job. So, in this way, a number of plantations were built up.22

Acutely conscious of the power of written “records” backed by guns, it is surely no coincidence that, near the climax of Babouk, as the Haitian masses set fire to the sugar fields outside the capital, Endore champions the insurgents, not merely as race rebels or as black workers, but as “rebels against the bill of sale.” Employing his ironic narrator to ventriloquize a self-righteous ruling class, he sarcastically declares:

           Here is our bill of sale! Flag of the unmapped land that covers the earth!
           Revolt against that if you dare and you will be broken on the wheel!…
Millionaires! you true internationalists who regiment your workers into countries, hoist aloft your flag: the bill of sale!
           You wretches out in the burning plain before Le Cap, where is your bill of sale? 
           What! Have you [slaves] taken your liberty and you have no bill of sale?
           Then beat the general alarm!… Down with the rebels against the bill of sale!23

Reframing the historic slave revolt this way, Endore distills from the rebellion of 1791 a universal meaning that can resonate with readers in other places and times, beyond the immediate context of the fight to end chattel slavery or colonialism. To be sure, as is now widely known, generations of Haitians have been burdened with a massive and odious “bill of sale” forced on them by French gunboats and U.S. banks after 1804, as penance for its costly “theft” of property in flesh, (a debt the equivalent of $21 billion today).24 But Endore’s “bill of sale” frame resonates even more broadly, allowing us to see a kinship to other struggles as well, wherever the militant movement of the people comes up against the sacred “property rights” of their would-be masters—whether that be in the form of an eviction blockade, a workplace occupation, or the expropriation of the expropriators of Marxist prophecy.

In such a way, Endore implies that the mass of humanity—across the illusory lines of race and nation—is still in a sense enslaved to the domination of “the bill of sale.” At the same time, he suggests that the kinds of brutal repression brought down on eighteenth century Haitian rebel slaves may lie in wait for all those who are serious about depriving the ruling class of their most precious property. Babouk thus asks readers to see in the revolt of Haitian slaves the vanguard of a more general and global revolution, while confronting us all with the sobering fact that, if the goal is revolution, righteous grievances alone will not be enough.

The second to last chapter of the novel ends with a description of how Babouk’s slain body is decapitated, dismembered, and publicly displayed—not unlike Peralte’s own—as a warning to those who would challenge the masters’ power. But like the photo of the martyred Peralte, the displaying of Babouk’s corpse does more to incite rebellion than to quell it. In this way, Endore pays closing honor to the cacos martyrs whose brave attack on imperialist occupation—however ill-fated—nonetheless helped raise the consciousness of people who came after them, including North American writers and activists such as himself. Perhaps Endore wagered that, like the death photos of Peralte, the depicted brutalities of his own book would help inspire new waves of revolt.

Coming off Babouk, in 1935, Endore seemed to be full of the sense of radical possibility, publishing a vision for what he called a “new school of Marxian historical fiction,” whose principal aim would be “the revelation of the hidden but unending class struggle of the ages.” His enthusiasm for the work to be done is palpable as he lists what might have been his next series of books: “Gracchus [Babeuf], Spartacus, the Crusades, the Peasant Wars, colonial expansion—history is replete with magnificent untouched material that the old novelist bent on portraying love triumphant, picturesque adventures or some trivial plot, could not use.”25

But, sadly, Endore would not complete—indeed, would hardly even begin—the avowedly revolutionary literary project he outlined. Quickly, he fell from this vista of enthusiasm; Babouk sold only a few hundred copies, met mixed reviews, and soon went out of print. Even sympathetic comrades failed to grasp the richness of his radical work. African-American Marxist literary critic Eugene Gordon praised the book in The New Masses as the “best of its kind” and yet, notwithstanding Endore’s comments to the contrary, criticized Babouk as “too nationalistic,” suggesting that it implied a modern world driven by racial resentments, rather than the systemic forces of capitalism.26

Having his forgotten masterpiece fail to connect was a profoundly deflating experience. By 1941, while still publicly identifying as a communist, Endore wrote not to herald a new revolutionary genre, but to lament a radical conundrum:

The writer’s task is to amuse, to interpret, to exhort. It is my aim to do all three together, whenever possible.… The predicament of the writer is that the average person wishes to be amused and not instructed in his short leisure; he does not wish to be made aware of his misfortunes; he wants something to help him forget; while the upper classes threaten to tear the social structure down with them, if, by interpretation or exhortation, their privileges are attacked.27

Still later, Endore lamented: “I wrote [Babouk] to sell, but I misjudged the people, I misjudged the time, everything. So, I turned away from that kind of writing and worked on motion pictures.” (Soon after he would be blacklisted from Hollywood for his communist political affiliations.) Chastened by Babouk’s failure, Endore would later refer to himself as a “hack writer” who wrote only “for money to support myself and my family, and that’s it.” It is important to underscore that Endore would remain active for decades, as a writer of Hollywood screenplays and popular novels, and as a communist activist, authoring pamphlets against racism and teaching writing in CPUSA-run schools near Los Angeles. But the revolutionary fusion of literary and political intervention that Babouk represented was no longer on his agenda. Yet decades later Endore would still refer to Babouk as his “forgotten masterpiece.”28

But though it failed commercially in Endore’s own time, Babouk deserves renewed consideration in ours, from those interested in reimaginings of slavery and the Haitian Revolution, and more broadly. For by closely studying the singular history of Haiti, Endore presents us with broader insights about the ongoing class struggles that continue to drive world history, while offering a radical critique of the ways that inherited literature and dominant history tend to hide those struggles from view. At the same time, Endore points us towards the need for a different kind of historical imagining—and a different kind of story-telling—that might become a weapon in the revolutionary struggle. At one point in the novel, Endore apostrophizes his own main character, confronting the paradox of recovering voices of resistance that all too often have been lost to written history:

Babouk, we have gone beyond your century. Your voice is lost in the past. Your wavering voice is lost in the steaming field of Saint-Domingue. It is lost both in time and space. And yet it cannot be lost altogether, Babouk. It cannot die in a void. Oh, no. All the wavering voices of the complaining Negro, be they of the dead or of the living, of Africa or America, yet they will someday be woven into a great net and they will pull that deaf master out of his flowery garden and down into the muddy stinking field.29

If studying Haitian history helped inspire Endore to take the side of the exploited and oppressed, Babouk weaves together stories of struggle, arming readers for the battle to come. Whatever we ultimately make of the literary weapon he forged, Endore’s own story reminds us that, by confronting the horror and hope of history, it is possible for people (even from ostensibly ‘privileged’ groups) to transform themselves and their work in solidarity with the oppressed.