The Kansas Socialist Book Club (KS-SBC) Organizers thought they knew what they were doing, but after some deep reflection and self-criticism, as well as listening to the criticisms of others, they have come to the conclusion that the old model isn’t working and something must change. In a nutshell, it all boils down to professionalism and amateurish attitudes. 

Every revolutionary movement that has ever succeeded got its chops started as a scattering of Marxist study circles. There is a reason for this! Although practice is essential, it’s also true that as Lenin said “Without a revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement.”

Where the KS-SBC leadership, until now, made an error was in thinking the club’s activities equated it with an organization of the same caliber as the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik), the Korean Down-with-Imperialism Union that grew into the Workers’ Party of Korea, or the study groups that emerged in the wake of the Chinese May Fourth Movement which evolved into the Communist Party of China. The Organizers arrogantly but sincerely believed a revolution would spontaneously emerge from merely getting a bunch of people together into an online-only space and having them read a bunch of scattered texts, with absolutely no rhyme or reason to the curriculum other than “people said that’s what they want to read.” This is flat-out wrong!

This isn’t to downplay the significance or the accomplishments of the KS-SBC thus far. In the heart of GOP-Red Kansas, a strong pro-Palestinian Liberation movement has emerged in multiple cities such as Lawrence and Manhattan. Although there are myriad reasons for this, one cannot discount the ideological lessons in radical thought which have been absorbed by multiple protest leaders who organize this budding and still-evolving international solidarity movement. Particularly our study of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s book Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine was one of the most fruitful works that we studied collectively as a group.

An entirely new chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has emerged as well, led by a steering committee composed entirely of members who’ve attended various lessons of the KS-SBC. Say what you will about DSA, but if a book club is leading people into real-life organizing (however flawed that organizing or organization might be) then it cannot be discounted entirely as a failure. It sure as hell isn’t a success, but it’s definitely not a loss because it is being critically reflected upon, recorded, and shared with the broader public. In that sense what would ordinarily be a failure is dialectically inverted into a success.

People also found our lessons engaging. Clearly the KS-SBC was doing something right because many new people would show up every week, eager to engage with and digest political ideas that normally students pay thousands of dollars to take a semester-long course on. The KS-SBC offered this all for free to the community! If it didn’t have value to it, nobody would have ever shown up.

Yet despite these accomplishments, the situation in Kansas is no better off than it was in 2022 when things got started. And behind the scenes of the book club, a lot of things were going on. Comrade Persephone, the primary instructor, was extremely burnt out and fell off the radar. She was not alone in this. Other organizers came and went who taught lessons, and they all felt the same way: burnt out, exhausted, and not seeing a lot of the fruits of their labor.

Furthermore, the rotting ideological creep of opportunism, eclecticism and tailism still dominate the landscape of the political left in Kansas. This alone, much less the existence of a bourgeois state and the lack of a genuine mass revolutionary movement, are all the proof one needs to see that the Kansas Socialist Book Club in its present form is inadequate to the task at hand. If it is to succeed, a change must certainly be made.

In order to correct these errors and proceed down a revolutionary path, the Organizers of the KS-SBC have identified what we believe are the root causes that led to our stagnation and our atrophy. Thankfully, these errors aren’t lethal and can easily be reversed.

Self-Criticism by the KS-SBC Organizers

1. Lack of Ideological Rigor: The KS-SBC falsely bought into the absurd notion of the so-called “Big Tent.” This is a deceptively destructive idea. On its surface, it makes a lot of sense: diversity is a virtue, and the correct way to persuade someone is winning them over in the battlespace of ideas. This isn’t exactly wrong, to be fair. Diversity of thought is indeed a strength, and we should absolutely seek to persuade those comrades who hold sincere but incorrect views to our side. However, that’s not what the Big Tent approach actually does. Instead of thinking about it in terms of diversity, think about it in terms of chaos. If I’m trying to navigate a large group of people, we all need to have our compass bearings aligned. When we agree to march to the north, we want to first make sure that everyone’s compass is pointing towards the same north. What the Big Tent does is throw everyone’s compass into a frenzy and give everybody their own unique interpretation of what north means. This is unacceptable and wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it’s an active danger to the movement.
   
2. No Reproduction of Organizers: Burnout has been a HUGE issue for the KS-SBC up to this point. Every single individual who took on a leadership role eventually suffered from severe burnout and mental health consequences because they were overworked. The reason for this was because the Organizers were not taking conscious steps to reproduce themselves. The Book Club was successful at drawing many interested comrades into the fold. At the peak of its activity, it wasn’t uncommon to see as many as fifteen people in a weekly session. But that kind of work, on top of parenting, dealing with disabilities, having a full-time job, and making room for self-care and personal hobbies, is a hell of a lot of work to juggle. It’s even worse when there doesn’t seem to be much of a political result. Sure, people would show up. But what happened after? Nobody was being mobilized, nobody was organizing, and it felt like leading a Sunday school more than a revolutionary movement.
   
3. No Offline Analog: Revolutionary movements cannot occur purely online. The internet, for better or worse, is a part of organizing life for so long as the KS-SBC continues to be a book club. At the end of the day, folks have to meet up in person, face to face, and organize offline. The book club was purely online. This was an error plain and simple.
   
4. No Structure: The final nail in the coffin would be a lack of order and structure. For a bunch of self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists and Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, the Organizers didn’t have any of the democratic centralism, iron discipline, or organizational chops that Marxist-Leninists love to talk about. They were, for lack of a better way to put it, a couple of dudes and one woman who liked to read and talk about books. This amalgamation went a step further and decided to invite a bunch of random people into an online chat room to talk about the books. This in itself is better than nothing. However, a revolutionary organization of disciplined cadre, it is not.

How has the KS-SBC remedied the issue?

To say all of these issues are all solved and remedied would be just as much of an error — albeit a different sort of error — as the ones we were committing. What is happening is that we are attempting to remedy our errors. How are the Organizers correcting their mistakes? The answer is simple, comrades: we drafted bylaws!

The bylaws address every problem laid out above. They impose order and structure on chaos. They lay out an explicit and democratically agreed upon pathway to reproduce cadre. They also impose ideological coherence by requiring all KS-SBC Organizers while still allowing for diversity of thought, robust theoretical disagreement, and comradely debate. Finally, the Organizers are shifting emphasis onto in-person study throughout cities with our Branch system. This is being done while simultaneously preserving our capacity and ability to broadcast lessons online, so that those who cannot meet up in person still have the opportunity to get political education.

Addressing Objections

When bylaws were proposed way back in March 2024, a number of objections were raised by the members. The Organizers would like to take this opportunity to address such concerns.

Many people felt that the Organizers’ attitudes were undemocratic in spirit. To this, skeptical comrades are encouraged to take a gander at the Flint Hills Marxist Study Group page and see how the fine line between ideological rigor and democratic input is balanced. Nobody wants to be assigned homework, but at the same time every member of the server is here to learn. Part of learning means you take direction from people who know the material better than you do: that is to say, the instructors. Anyone who is uncomfortable with that idea is free to leave or simply not attend a lesson. Nobody is forced into affiliation with the Kansas Socialist Book Club, and everyone can vote with their feet if they so choose.

Furthermore, the Organizers recognize that despite the explicit reorientation in a Marxist direction, that they have cultivated a broad “leftist” space in Kansas. The Organizers don’t want to alienate comrades from the KS-SBC, even if they disagree with us by identifying as anarchists or Trotskyists or what not. So to clarify any doubts or misconceptions: nobody is being purged, and nobody is being kicked out. Rather, what’s happening is that the individuals who were already organizing lessons and putting in behind-the-scenes work are asserting boundaries as to what we will and will not teach. Those who put in the work of education ultimately get a say in how they organize and utilize their labor-power. This is one of the foundational beliefs of socialism.

To be explicitly clear: anyone of any left-wing ideology is welcome to utilize our Discord server as a space to conduct their own political education. There’s never been a rule saying comrades can’t use the server to host their own lessons. Anyone is welcome to use the KS-SBC server to discuss broader socialist ideas, even if those ideas aren’t Marxist in nature. Furthermore, comrades are not only welcome but also encouraged to coordinate with one another and meet up face to face to study in person. As long as the content of the lessons is not about preaching national socialism, then anyone is welcome to use the discord space for broadly “leftist” educational purposes.

The long story short is this: We’re not an anarchist book club. We’re explicitly Marxist and we are explicitly Revolutionary.

We welcome anarchist comrades to use our space to teach anarchism if that’s what you want, but don’t expect us to teach it to you. If you feel so strongly about reading Peter Kropotkin, or studying the legacy of the Krontstadt Sailors, then go voluntarily organize your own spontaneous affinity group and Do The Work, comrade! Though the Organizers of the Book Club might not agree with that ideology, they will still support you in this effort by offering the server as a space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tempered Weapon is Strong

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

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

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

Building the Machinery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Proposal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc. is their first end. But, at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need — the need for society — and what appears as a means becomes an end.

Karl Marx

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

One of the most destructive trends encouraged by capitalism is the ideology of “rugged individualism.” Under the dominion of Capital, each person is forced to act as a discrete economic unit, fighting with other discrete economic units (you know, what we regularly call “people”) for a slice of a pie that isn’t big enough to go around. “It’s us,” says the logic of Capital, “against the world.” This economic war of all-against-all has inspired a whole library of apologetics. Bourgeois philosophers make their excuses for the brutality of the system they support by telling us that if only everyone looked out for themself and pulled hard on their bootstraps, there would be prosperity enough for all. They tell us to look after our neighbors by looking after ourselves. Then, when looking out for number one turns out to be insufficient to overcome the economic walls built up by the owners, when it doesn’t bear fruit, they tell us “It’s because you didn’t work hard enough, it has nothing to do with systemic oppression and marginalization.” 

In reality, it is impossible for a person to live without or “against” society; it is only through our relationship to society that we are able to understand ourselves as individuals at all. Any emancipatory project must encompass the fundamentally social nature of the human person as both the source and culmination of liberation.

But we are entering a period of dawning class consciousness. One of the best ways to feed the hunger for answers that accompanies this new awakening is through the study of historical revolutionaries and revolutionary projects.By studying the words of those who once engaged in the same struggle for liberation, we can root our activity in the rich soil of the historic class struggle.

So, we read, and we learn. Perhaps at first, we do so alone, but at a certain point theory must meet practice. Solidarity — the act of standing up for someone, of standing with someone, not because of any personal relationship but based solely on their need as a person — is the ethos of the revolutionary movement. But solidarity that remains a theoretical ideal is not solidarity at all; it is a kind of mock-solidarity, a cold simulacrum, a lifeless statue. To move from theory, from study, to practice, to action, we must make the intermediary step: theory-as-act. The study group, socialized study, is the next step in that journey. Working together through a dense political or philosophical text strengthens our understanding, and it strengthens the social bonds that capitalist society  attacks through alienation, individuation, and atomization for the purposes of extracting profit.  

In his collection of teachings, Only Don’t Know, Zen Master Seung Sahn speaks of the liberatory power of “together-action”:

Together-action is like washing potatoes. When people wash potatoes in Korea, instead of washing them one at a time, they put them all in a tub full of water. Then someone puts a stick in the tub and pushes it up and down, up and down. This makes the potatoes rub against each other; as they bump into each other, the hard crusty dirt falls off. If you wash potatoes one at a time, it takes a long time to clean each one, and only one potato gets clean at a time. If they are all together, the potatoes clean each other.

In the study group we help each other to shed the hard crusty dirt of capitalist ideology more effectively than any of us could alone. 

The form and structure of the study group provide fertile ground for cultivating the growth of a radical political movement. In a society that is so hostile to revolutionary politics, the study group is a venue for making connections with other people who are working for the same end. The connective power of the internet is fantastic and is particularly important for comrades who have circumstances that preclude them from participating in-person. However, it is also important to physically come together with people in a local community, reaching out to break down the walls of isolation that capital so implacably builds.

Building or finding a study group may seem like an intimidating task. Luckily many radical texts and resources are available online for free. Sites like marxists.org are an excellent resource for accessing classic texts from Marx, Engels, Lenin and more. Additionally, you can use the resources on unity-struggle-unity.com. Your group is welcome to read and discuss the articles posted at the Red Clarion or as a source for material to help with local outreach. Our Guide to Study Groups is a fantastic resource to start out with. You can also correspond with us — many of our Pressworkers have experience forming study groups, and can suggest starting points for delving into these expansive resources. 

It can sometimes feel daunting and isolating living in a society dominated by people who not only don’t care about anyone but themselves, but teach us that we should do the same, that we should shrug off our basic humanity. Worse, they tell us that this cruelty is what makes us human. We cannot give in; we cannot allow ourselves to believe the lie that we are each alone, that we stand against the world on our own two feet. A radical political project must make clear from the start that we are in and for the world. It is only by relying on each other that we have a chance at saving the world. A study group is an excellent place to start. 

Organizing a workplace in rural Virginia isn’t easy. Some may say it isn’t worth the time and energy; dig a little deeper and the truth will emerge. Virginia is for unions.

Anyone that has worked in a distribution center in Weyers Cave, an apple processing plant in Mount Jackson, or a superstore in Christiansburg knows that if ever there was a place ready for unionization, it’s here. Since the introduction of the institution of capitalism in the early settler-Republic, the western part of Virginia has been used and abused for its resources and labor. Capitalist cartels like Blackrock, Vanguard, and the governor’s own Carlyle Group turn screwing workers into a sport — and the winners are whoever can crush more people while, of course, their profit margins grow.

It’s easy to accept the economic assaults on our communities as inevitable. There’s no shortage of stories in the media that detail the impacts of decline and treat the south, by and large, as a wasteland of backward ideas. But is that true? Is the American South merely some benighted, agricultural and coal hinterland? Or is that the story the capitalists need to sell to keep us divided and complacent? Under the surface, away from the prying eyes of CNN and Vice producers, there’s a different story. A story about workers; a story about bosses.

Today, workers refuse to accept the “right to work” lies. As recently as the 2020 Legislative session, the ruling Democrats in the State Senate broadcast a message via legislation that unions will never work in Virginia. These Democrats had no issue with blocking bills that would have removed the current prohibition on state worker collective bargaining and outright refused to hear discussion on the elimination of one of the most punitive “right to work” laws in the nation. While those same Democrats allowed a bill to pass that would give local governments the authority to vote on whether or not their employees can engage in collective bargaining, limiting the scope to local government workers while leaving over 100,000 state workers behind sends a signal that workers rights are not a priority even for those who consider themselves to be the most “progressive” elements of the capitalist regime.

Today, unions nationwide are seeing a revival of popular support and organizing energy, with the rank-and file leading the charge. Workers have developed strong and growing organizations like the Amazon Labor Union and Starbucks Workers Unite. Labor is recovering from the long winter, stretching and ready to fight.

The relationship between organized labor and the left has been strained since the days of Samuel Gompers’ (Founder of the American Federation of Labor) and (first President of the AFL-CIO) George Meany’s “business unionism”.  Business unionism was developed as a major component of the growing wave of anti-Communism stretching across the United States, exhibiting unions deference to the capitalist system. Meany once confronted non-union workers by saying “we didn’t want the people…; we merely wanted the work. So far as the people on the work were concerned, for our part they could drop dead.” Although communists once played a major role in labor organizing, years of red scare campaigns have often left Communist organizations at odds with unions. According to Fletcher and Gapasin in their book Solidarity Divided, the AFL-CIO barred Communists from the membership and (with U.S. government funds), developed anti-Communist institutes to train unionists on the supposed benefits of “free-trade”. AFL-CIO institutes like the American Institute for Free Labor Development would become players in the efforts to overthrow the democratically elected governments of Guyana in 1964 and Chile in 1973. Although labor federations like the AFL-CIO have begun to reverse their outright anti-Communist messaging of the 20th century, the U.S. labor movement is a far cry from the days of Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones. Given the growing assault on workers in the United States by capitalist oligarchs and private equity, a rapprochement between the left and organized labor has become a necessity — but a necessity on Communist terms.

Unions have seen a sharp decline in total membership, shedding 712,000 rank-and-file members since 2010 according to Radish Research. In spite of a multi-billion dollar war chest, many unions are still embracing fortress unionism and failing to invest in actual organizing and organizers. From the Communist left, a lack of a coherent workers party shows that the current state of worker organizing needs a new approach. Unions are the school of Communism; it is through organizing labor into effective forms that can withstand the pressure of the capitalist bosses that we learn how to defend ourselves. Without the Communists’ presence in the unions, they will return to “business unionism.”

Organizing isn’t easy. Even figuring out where to begin is a stumbling block for many. While many approaches have been tried, the most successful ones are based on structures that have been developed scientifically. The organizing methods developed by the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union —District 1199 — have been studied extensively by labor theoreticians like Jane McAlevy. 1199 grew from a niche union local to one of the most powerful unions to walk the picket lines during the American Civil Rights era. The lessons they left behind are applicable now more than ever.

United Campus Workers of Virginia uses the 1199/McAlevy model to train members on how to organize. UCWVA is a rank-and-file union meaning that the union members themselves are the ones doing the hard work to organize. Union members lead organizer training sessions on a regular basis so that all members have an understanding of what it takes to win fights against the boss. They place an emphasis on this training and education so that all members have the tools needed not only to grow the union but make it sustainable.

The methods used by the United Campus Workers of Virginia, while highly effective for labor organizing, can be applied to organizing broad sections of the working class outside of an industrial context.

The Shenandoah Socialist Collective, based in Harrisonburg, Virginia, has begun experimenting with this model in their efforts to organize houseless community members. SSC operates a free breakfast program that feeds approximately 50 unhoused community members twice weekly. These meals are meant to meet some of the most basic needs of the community while offering opportunities for SSC organizers to understand their community’s needs, wants, and political goals. 

Although SSC’s experiment with the 1199 method is in its early stages, positive developments have been made in efforts to organize houseless residents in their fight for shelter. Recently, UCWVA members invited Shenandoah Socialist Collective to participate in a training session on how to use Structured Organizing Conversations (SOC’s) to find out people’s needs and build solidarity with them. SOC’s allow organizers to approach a conversation with someone methodically, keeping a goal in mind while focusing on listening to someone’s story.

Jane McAlevy states that an SOC should be 70% listening and 30% talking. It encourages us to hear stories and respond to them in a way that agitates people without focusing on anger. Agitation in the conversation then moves to inspiration by having the person leading the conversation put forward a grounded vision for change. This allows people to see that despite the issues in front of them, solutions exist and those solutions can be achieved with their involvement. This grants the opportunity to make a hard ask of someone. Whether they are being asked to join a labor union or to contribute their labor to a Red Aid program, the SOC conditions us to ask people a direct question; a question that respects their agency to make the right decision for themselves.

The event was well attended and allowed SSC members the opportunity to see how the lessons learned through labor could be applied to organizing in a socialist context. As a nod to their comrades, the UCW members added training scenarios that would be applicable to SSC’s body of work, particularly around issues impacting the unhoused. This training will aid SSC in their efforts to organize Unhoused Councils that will work to address community needs proactively, rather than relying on reactive campaigns that have happened in the past with limited success.

It has always been and will always be essential for Communists to organize the masses. However, the task of organizing doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel everytime a new campaign is begun. Through relationships of solidarity and skill sharing, the task of organizing the working class becomes more tangible and realistic. When we apply the lessons of 1199 to the theories we learn as communists, we can put time-tested organizing tactics to the test. These tactics prioritize scientific organizing and encourage organizers to listen more to the stories of the working class. They help us keep our organizing work sustainable and grounded so that more workers join to carry the workload together. They help us to teach the working class that the victories ahead can only be won through their own labor. If we can use the lessons of the past to influence our future, a better world is sure to be on the horizon.

New England neo-Nazi organization on the march in CT

In the past several weeks, the openly neo-Nazi organization “NSC-131” has stepped up its activities in Connecticut. The organization appears to have recently initiated a recruitment, visibility, and terror campaign across the state. Its members have so far flyered around Bristol, Hartford, West Hartford, and Southington, spreading their Nazi propaganda and seeking like-minded fascist militants.

Connecticut, as with other states in New England, has become a breeding ground for a new wave of fascist recruitment. For instance, one of the leaders of the Patriot Front, Alex Beilman, is a Meriden resident originally from Wallingford. And this isn’t the first time that NSC-131 has taken action in Connecticut: In May, for instance, NSC-131 members hung a Nazi banner from a Hartford overpass. The organization was founded in Massachusetts in 2019 and has been rapidly growing in numbers, expanding into new states and counties, and forming connections with other fascist organizations since then.

The basis of NSC-131’s ideology is white supremacy, with particular emphases on anti-blackness and antisemitism. The organization absurdly claims that white settlers in New England and the U.S. generally are “under attack” and must be “defended” from such “threats” as civil rights organizations (they name Black Lives Matter), Black and Latino street gangs, anti-fascists in general and Communists in particular, an elaborate (and fictitious) Jewish conspiracy, and the other usual targets of Nazi conspiracy theories and violence. “NSC” stands for “National Social Club”, which refers to the “National Socialism” of the Nazi Party, while 131 is a code for “Anti-Communist Action” (ACA).

NSC-131’s leader, a man named Chris Hood, came out of the “libertarian” fascist Three Percenter and Patriot Front organizations and is widely suspected by anti-fascist activists to be an FBI informant, as are many leading figures in civilian-fascist movements across the U.S. Other known members of NSC-131, whose identities were revealed in a doxxing campaign carried out by anti-fascist activists, include men by the names of Liam MacNeil, Andrew Hazelton, Harrison Fournier, Jeremiah Shivers, and Tyler Moody.

The forces of fascism at work in America

Who is Hood and who are his Nazi followers? White suburbanite psychopaths; the spoiled, dead-eyed sons of wealthy small business owners, landlords, real estate developers, white-collar professionals, and cops; silver spoon-fed university students at UMass Lowell; “security experts”, NRA-certified firearms instructors, members and ex-members of white-power militias, such as the III%ers; undercover cops and undisguised klansmen. NSC-131 is a club for future mass-shooters and fascist insurrectionists of the type who carried out last year’s January 6th pro-Trump coup attempt. These neo-Nazi civilian fascists are the shock troops, the unofficial brownshirts, and the state-sanctioned terrorists of the settler-capitalist ruling classes, and they will only become more violent and better organized as the accelerating periodic crises of capitalism jolt the imperialists and lesser capitalists into heightened panic and frenzied reaction against the oppressed masses.

Nazism is not new or foreign to this country, nor is it an aberration in American history. American neo-Nazism is nothing but the U.S. Empire’s founding principles taken to their extreme, yet logical, conclusions. This not-so-unique variety of fascism is the purest expression, unbridled by “liberal” sensibility and decorum, of the class interests of our propertied-settler enemies. In past decades, this American-made fascism has been taken up by Know-Nothings, Klansmen, Eugenicists, and Hitlerites, and represented by such captains of American expansion as Andrew Jackson, Henry Ford, and Ronald Reagan. A manifestly fascist America — the America represented by a president like Donald Trump, a ruthless billionaire like Jeff Bezos, and a reactionary jurist like Clarence Thomas — is the inevitable result of economic processes that began with the landing of English settlers in New England, their genocidal extirpation of the Native peoples, their enslavement of Africans in the Carolinas, and their militant expansion west. This is America.

Anti-fascist tactics and fascist reaction

Unfortunately, some of our anti-fascist comrades (and some long-time grifters operating in online anti-fascist spaces) have “taken the bait” and retaliated against this fascist upsurge from a weak and unprepared position. Uncensored images of NSC-131’s posters, flyers, and other promotional materials circulated online, going viral thanks to (rightfully) angry shares, effectively providing our enemies with free advertising. Without carefully censoring contact info, well-meaning but unthinking anti-fascist activists have all but ensured that NSC-131 will reach its intended audience of “disaffected” neo-Nazi youths. Meanwhile, the recent doxxing campaign against NSC-131 has, very predictably, provoked a violent reaction, against which we are unprepared to defend ourselves and oppressed communities in New England.

While we of course support any and all effective anti-fascist action, we implore our comrades to think as strategists, not as adventurists. Exposing, inconveniencing, intimidating, and street-fighting with fascists might offer catharsis to some, but such actions must be planned to inflict maximum damage with minimum repercussions, and self-defense against the inevitable fascist reaction must be prepared ahead of time. We must strike only once we can achieve a total, decisive, conclusive victory over our enemies, only once we can effectively end them. We must utterly destroy our enemies without getting destroyed in turn, and without allowing the oppressed masses to suffer the brunt of fascist reaction. We cannot sacrifice the safety of our comrades, our allies, and vulnerable persons among the oppressed masses for the fleeting dopamine rush provided by the sort of ephemeral, ultimately meaningless “victories” against a handful of opponents we saw this week.

Community self-defense urgently needed!

Fascist violence is almost never punished by the state. In fact, FBI operatives often groom and set loose mass shooters; the horrific mass shooting carried out in Buffalo this May is the most recent example of such operations. Aside from this, warning signs of violence from angry, anti-social white men are routinely “overlooked” and “ignored”, if not actively fostered, by the police and other agents of the State. That’s one of many reasons why we can’t trust the government, local or federal, to end the problem of rising fascism. And this is a problem — one that’s not going away.

So, what’s the alternative?

Community self-defense. The State will not defend oppressed communities; it is up to us to keep ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, and our communities safe from fascist violence. We must organize and defend one another.

So, what should you do?

Talk to your friends and family today. Talk about what’s happening with your neighbors tomorrow, and promise to look out for one another. Hold a community meeting this week. Go to your community centers, churches, mosques, synagogues; meet in libraries, public parks, and people’s homes. Learn self-defense and first-aid skills with your loved ones and neighbors. Organize a neighborhood watch and carry out patrols to keep the most vulnerable folks in your community safe. Calmly follow and intimidate civilian fascists and cops until they leave your streets.

Do not trust the police. Do not talk to the police. Do not rely on the police. The police support fascist violence. Cops and klan go hand-in-hand.

To our anti-fascist comrades:

We call on all anti-fascists in New England to go out and serve the oppressed communities targeted by the forces of fascism — civilian and State alike. Bring the masses education, raise their consciousness, hold mass meetings, learn from them and attempt to meet their needs, and organize and equip them with skills and tools in preparation for practicing community self-defense. Create the conditions that will allow us to victoriously and permanently expel NSC-131, Patriot Front, and all other civilian fascist organizations from our cities and counties.

We cannot win through superior arms — not yet. We cannot win through superior violence. Early clashes and confrontations, amateurishly instigated from a position of weakness, will only embolden, harden, and serve to expand NSC-131 and their larger network of fascist organizations; do not make the most vulnerable persons among the oppressed masses suffer the wrath of fascist reaction at this stage, when we lack the means to fight back and win. We can only win, long-term, through superior organization and superior strategy.

Update!

Since the writing of this article but before its publication, a local committee of concerned persons has formed in Bristol, Connecticut. This is the Bristol Anti-Racism Brigade (BARB), which has begun discussions about how to counter this open Nazi action.