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

— Kwame Ture

Organizing, Not Merely Mobilizing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Four Opportunists and the Spontaneous Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the comrade in Minneapolis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

PSL – “Revolution in Our Lifetime”

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

DSA – “Triumph For the Zionist Left”

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

The League Principle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes:

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

The modern executive branch of the US government is designed to work in the general interests, not only of the entire class of US capitalists, but also for the general welfare of the US economy and, as a result, manages the interests of the entire petty bourgeois and labor-aristocratic classes. But what does this mean? There are three classes that directly benefit from the US empire’s stability and economic success: 1) the big imperialist bourgeoisie, the finance capitalists invested in US firms like Bill Gates, the Kochs, etc.; 2) the petty bourgeoisie, those who own their own capital but also have to work; and 3) the labor aristocrats, roughly defined here as those proletarians who receive more than the global average pay for their labor-time.² It is the political expectation that the executive branch will look out for the interests of these three classes. Affordable college and healthcare and access to purchasing land (usually in the form of housing) is part of that understanding. Most division between the Republicans and the Democrats actually comes down to which section of these classes to favor the most.

The Fed has generally played a neutral role in these feuds, leaning toward the Democratic camp of stability to benefit the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats. The reserve system regulates the country’s money supply, which has a direct impact on the velocity of exchange (how quickly money or credit changes hands; in other words, how many transactions occur in any given time), on the total price of all commodities produced in the US market, and on the total number of those commodities produced. These figures are interdependent and related to one another on a push-pull basis, and they trend toward an equilibrium. That equilibrium can be expressed through the following equation:

(p * q) / v = m

Where p = the price of all commodities produced in the economic unit (the US market), q = the total number of commodities in that unit, v = the velocity of money, and m = the total money supply.³ Changes in any of these variables will cause subsequent changes in the others as they move toward the above equilibrium.

Inflation is reflected in the variable (p). For instance, all things remaining equal, if (m), the money supply, increases, either (p) or (q) must increase, or (v) must decrease. The regulation of this process is central to the purpose of the reserve system to prevent, on the one hand, runaway hyperinflation, and on the other, the velocity of money trending toward zero, either of which would cause a catastrophic collapse in the US economy, freezing transactions and halting production. For more details on the role of the Fed, see “The Inevitable Capitalist Crisis Looms” in the Red Clarion.

The thing now under dispute is the Fed’s overnight bank funding rate,⁴ the rate of interest which other banks must pay to one another or to the Fed if their own money supply is below the reserve amount required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for large broker-dealers to ensure the bank can cover its loans at the end of any given day. This rate determines the interest rate for all lending in the US economy. All other lending rates are set somewhere higher than this Federal rate. The lower the lending rates, the more speculative investments will become as money can be loaned with less risk to the lender and thus the borrower. The reason this number is the source of conflict among the ruling class is because it embodies a contradiction in the interests of the major classes invested in the performance of the US economy.

For the big bourgeoisie, it is objectively better for their capacity to invest and make profits if the interest rates are zero. Although the Fed had historically always maintained some interest rate, in the wake of the 2008 crash the Fed set the interest rates to 0%. The US economy had been on this “life support” rate from 2008 until the 2020 economic crisis triggered by COVID-19. An interest rate of zero, however, will not remove excess money from the economy. At the beginning of 2020, the money supply was at 4,000 thousand billion USD. Today, the money supply is at 19,000 billion USD, reflecting a nearly five-fold increase.⁵ It also tends to make banks more unstable (as they will lend far more than they can safely cover), and increase the velocity of money by encouraging increased lending and investment. As a consequence, either the total number of commodities in US markets must fall (and why would they? There has been no change in production) or the price of commodities must rise. This rise is inflation.

The rise in the price of articles of consumption – consumer commodities – has a negligible effect on the big bourgeoisie. They can afford any increase, however large, because personal consumption is a marginal amount of their overall money. Even the rise in the price of means of production – raw materials, machines, factories, land, etc. – would lag significantly behind the gains made as a result of zero-percent lending at the federal level. Indeed, even if the banks should fail and the economy collapse, history has proven that the big bourgeoisie are shielded from the worst effects of that crash and would be able to buy up the resources of those smaller bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie that are driven into bankruptcy, default, or foreclosure for pennies on the dollar, further concentrating their stranglehold on the country’s economic resources.

Conversely, the labor aristocrats cannot weather such a storm and consumer inflation, particularly of necessary staples like food and healthcare. It can drive labor aristocrats into the ranks of the working proletariat and cost them their comfortable class-basis – their homes, their long-term investments, etc. It is in their interests to keep interest rates high, reduce or slow the rate of inflation, and ensure that the banks remain stable.

The petty bourgeoisie, possessing economic relations that are both bourgeois and proletarian, tend to be more like the labor aristocracy when it comes to this question than the big bourgeoisie. Inflation in the costs of the means of production will inevitably drive a significant portion of the petty bourgeoisie out of their class and down into the proletariat as the continued running of their businesses becomes financially untenable. The upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie – those able to draw on reserves of credit or who are becoming regionally powerful and are on the cusp of entering the lower ranks of the big bourgeoisie – tend to prefer the lowering of the interest rates so they can attempt to grow their money-capital and progress out of their class and enter the big bourgeoisie.

What, then, does this grand jury indictment mean? The Fed has consistently kept the interest rates higher than they had been since 2008 for the past several years. President Trump, acting as the hammer of the big bourgeoisie, has made repeated demands that the Fed lower those interest rates.

On Sunday, January 11, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, released a video statement in which he said that the subpoenas are an attempt to force him to capitulate to the White House’s political demands. That, in essence, Trump will force him out unless he does not agree to lower the federal interest rate. This matters for three reasons. First, it is an unprecedented breaking of ranks and airing of internal political differences between the Fed and the White House. Second, it suggests a continued feud within the ruling class over how to distribute the spoils of empire. Third, if the Fed does lower the interest rate and if, as a result, inflation explodes more than it already has done, this will result in the proletarianization of large numbers of labor aristocrats and petty bourgeoisie, the closure of many routes available to students and young people intent on entering those classes, and an overall increase in the size of the revolutionary mass base.

For us, the first issue means we have an opportunity to expose the machinery of the state and how it functions. We must also be aware of the concurrent risk here; the left-liberals, the Democrats mostly, will use the extraordinary nature of this rupture to bang their anti-Trump drum and try to recuperate their ramshackle coalition. This risk is real and requires our active intervention to minimize the number of petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats who are ideologically drawn back into their orbit.

As to the second reason, we must be extremely wary of declaring that the imperialist bargain between the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the working class is breaking down.⁶ However, we do have the benefit of the bourgeoisie’s own mouthpieces such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to help understand their perspective. Although both sources have been moderate in their reporting of the Powell investigation, both have taken soft pro-Powell and anti-Trump stances.⁷ We can also look to the stock market, which has registered constrained disapproval as investments were moved from stocks into gold.⁸

If there is a fracture between elements of the big bourgeoisie, that group supporting Trump’s nationalist position (as opposed to the old neoliberal internationalism of capital) is growing and the neoliberal position is dwindling.⁹

Therefore, we must begin to prepare for our third conclusion. Trump has rarely allowed himself to be stymied by decorum or procedural niceties. He now holds the US Supreme Court by a wide margin should any of his actions be enjoined by a federal judge. We should first prepare immediate agitation, not demanding that Trump step back and allow Powell to continue as chair, but exposing the manner in which the Federal Reserve serves to stabilize an inherently unjust and exploitative world order. We must do our utmost to ensure the masses correctly understand that any complaints from the Democrats about Trump’s behavior aren’t on their “behalf,” but rather are intended to secure the supply of anesthesia with which they have been dulling the class struggle for a century; that the Democrats are attempting to lull US workers and petty bourgeoisie back to sleep so the empire can continue to burn, loot, and rape the world in their name.

In the intermediate term, we should prepare for a potential economic crash that may result in the unleashing of the contradictions contained by the Fed and its policies since 2020: a collapse in the real estate market and a subsequent depression triggered by numerous bank failures.

Careful attention must be paid in the coming weeks to the way in which this mini-crisis is handled by the state and by the political actors. We must continue to weigh evidence of one kind or another, and determine where the chips will fall so we can formulate a concrete plan of action. As of today, it seems that Trump is routing the supporters of neoliberal stabilization and preparing to enter a new phase of class warfare. This aligns with the White House strategy on increasing friction with ICE and the kidnapping of President Maduro: a global assault on behalf of the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie to repudiate the imperialist power-sharing that had been achieved during the last century.¹⁰ Washington has exploded the “rules-based order” it went through pains to establish over the last hundred years by acting unilaterally, in defiance of international law, and stating the geopolitical-economic interests which it is pursuing, rather than hiding its maneuvers behind high rhetoric of “democracy.”

1. The US central banking system. 
   ︎
2. Here we are using the term labor aristocracy, as elsewhere in pieces published by Clarion staff, to mean anyone who is paid more for each hour of labor than the global average. For more, see Lauesen, Torkil. Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (Iskra Books, 2025). ︎
3. See Marx, Karl. Capital, Chapter 3. This is consonant with Adam Smith’s understanding of the velocity of money.
   ︎
4. Also called the “Federal Funds Rate.”
   ︎
5. The M1 money supply over ten years, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL.
   ︎
6. See, for instance, H.W. Edwards’ groundbreaking work Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy. ︎
7. The Economist, which represents British capital, has much more firmly presented an anti-Trump position on Powell as well as on the ICE killing of Renee Good. The re-emergence of national (as opposed to international) capitalist planning in the US empire has rattled many cages in Europe. See, for instance: Financial Times, “Justice department’s probe into Jay Powell galvanizes Fed leaders to repel Donald Trump’s attacks,” Jan 12; Wall Street Journal’s, “The Fed Fights Back,” Jan. 13.
   ︎
8. On the following Monday, the day after Powell’s video, trading was muted and the DOW opened down 500 points. The transfer of money out of the stock market and into commodities represents a fear that the value of the stock market may fall.
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9. Hatred of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory power has been poured into the Libertarian movement and thus embodies a certain kind of right-liberal settlerism. This has been the preserve of an alliance of right-leaning big capitalists and upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie since at least the early 2000s. It seems this logic is now winning over more and more of the big capitalists themselves.
   ︎
10. The neo-liberal position on immigration has always been the Democratic party line: “We need immigrants to do the jobs no one wants to do, that are too difficult, grueling, intense, or low-paying for real Americans!” The ICE sweeps represent a new ideology that flatly denies this rather grotesque logic and embodies instead the naked nationalist nativism in Washington.
    ︎

Preliminary critique of the work has focused primarily on the erasure of transmisogyny, a particularly glaring omission given the author’s supposed inclusion of “marginalized genders”. This omission, coupled with an essentialist theoretical framework pulled from a radical feminist tradition, lead to the necessity of the piece’s retraction. The Red Clarion seeks to lead the communist movement towards the best path of sexual liberation, which necessitates a dialectical and scientific approach to understanding and combating sexual oppression. The conclusions reached in the article rely on a haphazard array of correlated data that are then assumed to be set phenomena across the breadth of patriarchal societies. The following criticism looks through these major flaws, and opposes the conclusions reached thereafter; as USU struggles towards unified clarity on these vital theoretical positions, we will move towards the publishing of a definitive piece regarding where the movement must take the issues of sexual liberation.

We will first begin with the author’s failure to conduct adequate research on the subject at hand, exemplified by the following passage:

Regardless of if you watch porn, you experience the effects of porn. You are punished by the existence of porn. A study of over four thousand young people in Melbourne found that 59% of men had reported strangling their partner during sex, with 61% of women reporting being strangled, and 78% of trans or gender-diverse individuals experiencing strangulation. Importantly, 61% reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.

This passage mistakes shadow for substance. Sex work is not the base economic relationship from which patriarchal violence emerges, but rather the result of patriarchal economic and social relations that reinforce and reproduce patriarchal relations. In other words, sex work does not create the social exploitation of women, nor lie at its foundation. Sex work is the result of divided labor regime. The scientific study cited by the author directs us to this very same conclusion: “Pornography was the most common avenue by which people reported first hearing about choking during sex (34.8%), followed by discussions with friends (11.5%).”¹ In other words, pornography does not create sexual violence, but rather reinforces it; it is not the cause of sexual violence, but rather its result. Failure to recognize this dialectical relationship that makes sex-divided labor the primary aspect puts us off immediately on the wrong track.

Here we must also make plain a glaring error in our comrade’s citation. The author warns that “61% [of young people in Melbourne participating in the study] reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.” This statement is false. A vast majority (65.2%) of the study’s subjects learned about choking during sex via means other than pornography. This suggests that even if pornography was banned, this ostensibly violent sexual practice would still exist and propagate through other means of social reproduction. With 61% of subjects exposed to but not learning about sexual strangulation via pornography, the study does demonstrate pornography’s role in reinforcing risky sexual practices amongst the general population through repeated exposure. However, with subjects also being exposed to the practice via “…movies (40.3%), friends (31.9%), social media (31.3%), and discussions with potential partners (29.2%),” we cannot give serious credence to the notion that pornography itself is the (or even one of many) progenitor of sexual violence.² At the very least, the failure of the article’s author to catch such a misrepresentation of the study at hand is demonstrative of a methodological sloppiness that cannot be considered Marxist for its lack of an adequately scientific approach to analyzing these social phenomena. The study actually shows that those who “first learned/heard” about strangulation through pornography constitute a mere 34.8% of respondents. The 61.3% number is representative of those who were “ever exposed to strangulation in pornography.” Failing to distinguish these incident rates is a critical error. Despite this sloppiness, our comrade further digs her heels in:

Studies vary on how much of pornography is degrading, verbally and physically, to women and marginalized genders, but as we see rates of strangulation rising, we can rest assured that it is a significant portion. Moreover, a meta-analysis of studies has found that porn consumption is linked with an increased likelihood to commit an act of sexual aggression, even if the pornography was considered non-aggressive.

This passage demonstrates another significant error in the author’s manner of conducting research. When analyzing any phenomenon, particularly social phenomenon where variables cannot be controlled and holistically observed, the correlation of data does not mean there is a relationship of causality. While the research in question does demonstrate that those who consume pornography more frequently “are more likely to hold attitudes conducive to sexual aggression and engage in actual acts of sexual aggression” than those who consume it less frequently, or not at all,³ it does not prove that pornography is the source of these behaviors. Given that not everyone who consumes pornography is sexually aggressive, we can just as easily assume that pornography lends itself to reinforcing pre-developed behaviors.⁴ Only one of these positions lends itself to a Marxist framework of socio-behavioral analysis.

Pornography, just as any tool of bourgeois social reproduction, functions by providing moral licensing for individuals’ self-interested and exploitative behaviors. To argue otherwise would be to deny personal autonomy, and thus, moral responsibility for one’s actions as an individual. People do not enact sexual violence as a result of consuming pornography, nor even because they are raised in a patriarchal society. Every action one takes in committing sexual violence is of their own volition, even if these social phenomenon may prime them to view such behaviors as permissible. Despite her previous claims in the piece, the author demonstrates a clear lack of satisfaction with treating pornography as a systematic tool that “…emboldens preexisting attitudes towards women, towards sexuality.” For our comrade is not interested in dissecting the material base of sex work.⁵ Even one unfamiliar with feminist analysis can pick up on this from the author’s incessant focus on sexual anatomy; she uses the word “cunt” 14 times throughout the work. The author does not define this term beyond its vernacular usage until its sixth appearance in the piece, and then the definition she provides is the following: “Anyone, not just the prostitute, can be penetrated, anyone can be turned into a cunt, anyone can be dehumanized and alienated from their sexuality and their body.”

Given such an apt definition, we can indeed state that nearly everyone within bourgeois society has been turned into a cunt. Proletarian and lumpenprole alike are alienated from their bodies as they expend their brain and muscles to labor for those with capital to spend. Settler-colonial and imperialist societies alienate the masses from their sexuality by using the violence of the state to coerce them into cis-heterosexual social-reproduction, as seen through the violent criminalization of access to birth control, abortions, hormone replacement therapy, mastectomies, gender reassignment surgery, etc.

Rather than developing a theoretical framework that naturally includes all those who are subjected to the violence and exploitation of patriarchal society, the author vulgarizes patriarchal power into a class struggle of the penetrated vs the penetrators. Everyone, no matter their class or social position, is flattened to the supposed power imbued within their sexual behaviors. Even gay men are not free to be men, for “The receiver, the gay man, is therefore reduced to a cunt as well, an object made for penetration and degradation.” In this absurd calculus, one is either an all powerful cis-heterosexual man (the phallus) or the weak and wretched cis-heterosexual woman (the cunt), a theoretical framework so fragile that even a pebble could shatter it into a million pieces.

If “power” is indeed based on one’s relationship to Penetration, then what are we to make of the men penetrated by women?⁶ When presented without reference to social reproduction theory, this argument simply cannot be reconciled with Marxism. Does this simple act truly turn the system of patriarchy on its head, turning men from exploiters to the exploited? This is no idle question. With the study on strangulation reporting approximately 50% of straight male subjects having been strangled during sex,⁷ and if we accept the notion that this supposed sexual “degradation” is an extension of real material power, we can indeed state that, “The war on women has expanded and mutated once more; it’s recruited our fellow women…” For now men must be on the defensive from this supposed wave of woman-led sexual violence! With 60% of lesbians ever being strangled and 54% ever strangling a partner, and bisexual women respectively reporting 80% and 51%,⁸ Cde. Reed’s struggle against sexual domination would have to extend its front to combat this degeneracy amongst sapphic women. In our comrade’s struggle against supposedly anti-social sexual behaviors we must not forget the worst offenders, transgender people, among whom we witness the highest rates of sexual strangulation, 78% and 74% respectively.

Using the framework presented, one could argue that women who strangle men or women who strangle women are adopting the mechanisms of patriarchy for their own benefit; however, the question then would become “why are men overwhelmingly the oppressors, if acting out sexual violence is in-itself sufficient enough to make one an oppressor?” The article’s theory fails to provide any answer to this question.

Had the author given any thought to the conclusions readers would draw from her prescriptive moral stance on such sexual behaviors, she would have read the publicly accessible scientific paper she cited and come to a vastly different conclusion. From this clear negligence we can conclude that our comrade’s goal was not to provide a proper investigation of these systems, but to find data useful in propping up her positions. The framework provided by this article can only function under the bold assumption that every sexual relationship is either patriarchal heterosexuality, or an imitation of it. The author appears to use the high rate of sexual strangulation amongst transgender people as a means to spark readers’ rage against an imagined wave of cis-men strangling poor defenseless transgender women. This assertion completely disregards transgender people’s actual dynamics and conditions as a population. This essentialist framework gets transgender people killed.

Amidst the ongoing war against transgender people, in which transgender people’s presumed sexual behaviors are used to justify mass waves of social violence and murder, a prescriptive framework adds fuel to the fire by proclaiming non-violent and non-coercive sexual acts as inherently oppressive. When transgender people engage in these sexual behaviors, who is being oppressed?⁹ Transgender people are most likely to be in relationships with other transgender people. With studies on sexual orientation demonstrating that only 19% of transgender women, 2% of non-binary people, and 23% of transgender men are reported to be heterosexual in the United States.¹⁰ If we made use of the framework presented, the movement would have no choice but to condemn a majority of transgender people as irredeemable oppressors. Are we to take such an absurd system, that would make an enemy of a hyperexploited population for acts we have no business meddling in, and take it to practice within our movement? Our comrade may take moral opposition to sexual strangulation, but that in-itself is not a basis upon which a Marxist theoretical framework can be built. Such a framework must be based on an analysis of the material conditions at play, not idealist and puritanical notions on proper sexual relations. 

Sexual behaviors are reflections of social and cultural phenomena, but in isolation they tell us very little about contemporary material conditions. We must constantly go deeper. For example, the social root of something such as a leather fetish is likely a result of the materials’ historical use in military and police uniforms, providing the objects a socially constructed aesthetic of power and authority. So what are we to make of its prevalence in gay and lesbian communities? Due to extreme levels of state repression and violence, the social authority imbued within leather provides an outlet for participants to be humanized through symbolic access to authority and/or resistance to it. The fetish provides an emotional outlet for the constant pressure of social restraint. As a reflection of material conditions, sexual behaviors can act as a tool to reinforce exploitative social relationships. With heterosexual relationships requiring a particularly high level of internal analysis of relationship dynamics, given men being socially conditioned to engage in more aggressive and high-risk sexual behaviors. However, power is not determined in the bedroom. Power is determined by one’s relation to property. 

Historically women have been denied the right to property, actively excluded from economic production so as to be coerced into the labor of social reproduction. With the development of class society, the role of women was largely relegated first as an economic and diplomatic asset in their youth, to later be sold into domestic servitude as a wife and mother. It is only recently that western women have gained the “right” to be workers and not the property of men, a concession made in part to constrain the spread of achievements that resulted from the dauntless and bloody struggles of communist women across the globe and in part as a result of capital’s drive to proletarianize everyone — to dissolve all social relations. Despite patriarchal systems losing ground in this age of collapse for the capitalist system,¹¹ women have not yet been liberated from traditional socially reproductive roles, particularly those of marriage and prostitution. These roles have changed in kind with the economic basis of society. The marriage and legalized prostitution of Ancient Greece are far different in their structure than marriage and prostitution within the capitalist age.  

The piece posits that, within bourgeois society, prostitutes make up “… a class that is designed to be difficult to get out of, as a ruined proletariat, and is slated to be accessible to all men. The state may punish different classes of men more commonly than others, but she is still available to all men.” Further, the author denies these workers their position as laborers, arguing that instead of being members of the proletarian or subproletarian classes they are instead ‘public property,’ — hyper-exploited subjects forced into ‘a form of slavery that is distinctly female.’ If these laborers are truly turned into property or commodities to be bought and consumed, then why haven’t sex dolls and sex toys replaced their existence entirely? It is the same reason humans can never fully be replaced by tools or machines in the production process. What is being valued here is not the mere production of a commodity or the provision of a service, but human labor power. This is why prostitutes sell their labor in the form of timeslots, and clarify the kinds of specialized sexual labor they are willing to perform within specified time-frames. When one buys this form of labor they engage in a form of petit-bourgosie labor exploitation, and like any member of this class the buyer seeks to take as much from the laborer as possible for as low as the wages can go. 

Within the article this claim of prostitute as public property is justified by the argument that sex work cannot be comparable to other forms of labor, as “The prostitute is alienated not just from her profits or her work, but from her body and the most intimate parts of her mind” and that “She is often forced to remain in the prostituted class via coercive forces…” Is the woman working 16 hours sewing with docked wages for every mistake not also alienated from “the most intimate parts of her mind”? What of the railway conductors coerced by contract and federal law to be on call 24/7 while working at minimum 12 hours a day? Is not the denial of sleep and a home life alienating one from their own mental wellbeing? When it comes to coercion, what worker cannot claim the same? Many women in the workplace are sexually assaulted but are forced to either stay quiet or risk homelessness and starvation of both themselves and their families. Other workers are coerced into their labor through the seizure of passports or the pointed guns of the police and hired mercenaries. The bourgeoisie will always seek the maximal level of exploitation. When they buy your labor-power, they buy the contractual right to ruin your body, break your mind, and kill you if it’ll make them even a penny more in profit. The only limit to the bourgeois drive to create profit at the expense of the worker is the level of class struggle. The relative conditions of the working classes are a symptom of class struggle.¹² Whether you are a sex worker, manual laborer, service worker, etc. the capitalist system runs on the rule that you are disposable to the bourgeoisie.

But with its blind drive, its bottomless werewolf-hunger for surplus-labor, capital doesn’t merely push past the moral limits of the working day. It does the same with the physical limits, too. Capital usurps the time that the body needs to grow and develop, and also the time for maintaining the body in a healthy condition. It steals the time it takes to get fresh air and sun. It chips away at mealtimes, incorporating them into the production process wherever it can; as a result, food is added to workers as though they were merely so many means of production, or the same way a boiler is fed coal, machines are fed grease and oil, and so on. Sound sleep destroys and refreshes a person’s vital powers, enabling him to build up his strength, but capital reduces it to only as many hours as it takes to revive a totally exhausted organism […] Only one thing interests capital: the maximum amount of labor-power that can be activated in the workday. It achieves this goal by shortening the lives of labor-power’s bearers, just like a greedy farmer gets the most out of the land by rendering it barren.¹³

[…]

So from society’s standpoint, the members of the working class—including when they aren’t participating in the immediate labor process—belong to capital just as much as the dead instruments of labor do. Even their individual consumption is simply an aspect of capital. It is hard for the worker, that instrument of production endowed with consciousness, to simply run away, since it constantly sends his product from his pole to the opposite pole—i.e., capital’s. Individual consumption is the means through which workers maintain and reproduce themselves, but as it occurs, it constantly destroys their means of subsistence, ensuring that they will keep reappearing in the labor markets. The Roman slave was fettered with chains. Invisible ties bind the wage laborer to his owner: he merely seems to be independent. The constant turnover among the worker’s individual wage masters and the fictio juris of his contract keep this semblance in place. 

In the past, capital enacted compulsory laws whenever it felt that it had to assert its proprietary rights over free workers. Until 1815, for example, it was illegal for England’s machine workers to emigrate, and people committed this crime at their peril, since the penalties it carried were severe.¹⁴

If sex work does not constitute a special super-class, then how do we as communists position ourselves against this particular form of exploitation? To answer this we must first understand the socio-economic nature of prostitution. Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent feminist within the CPSU, provided a clear analysis on the subject: “Prostitution arose with the first states as the inevitable shadow of the official institution of marriage, which was designed to preserve the rights of private property and to guarantee property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs.” Further outlining its emergence within the capitalist age:

The sale of women’s labor, which is closely and inseparably connected with the sale of the female body, steadily increases, leading to a situation where the respected wife of a worker, and not just the abandoned and ‘dishonoured’ girl, joins the ranks of the prostitutes: a mother for the sake of her children, or a young girl like Sonya Marmeladova for the sake of her family. This is the horror and hopelessness that results from the exploitation of labor by capital. When a woman’s wages are insufficient to keep her alive, the sale of favors seems a possible subsidiary occupation. The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path.

Prostitution is a form of socially reproductive labor. Just as maids are hired to clean houses, nannies to raise children, and nurses to care for the old, prostitutes are hired to satisfy personal needs without the buyer being obligated to provide for the care of the worker until the grave. Prostitutes are domestic laborers. If they are in a waged relation which is exploited for profit, they are proletarian. If they are not, they are nevertheless subproletarian, as those excluded from social production.¹⁵ The nature of their work, that of socially reproductive labor, does not alter their basic relation of production.

It is here that class divisions make themselves the most evident. A white cis woman is far more likely to gain access to legal, or at least institutionally protected forms, of sexual labor than a Black and/or trans woman. With white supremacy and cis normativity further providing enough class mobility to allow her escape into the membership of the labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois classes. This was the purpose of western nations’ struggle against so-called “white slavery” in the early 20th century. White slavery was a nationalistic tool used to secure white womanhood from the exploitation of lumpen and proletarian sexual labor. It was never about protecting women from sexual labor, it was rather a “common fixation on protecting the purity of white womanhood, constituting an image of white women’s precarity that was only tangentially connected to the realities of women’s lives.”¹⁶ Reed’s reintroduction of the term is yet another example of her gender reductionist framework, which excludes all other forms of class, national, and disabled oppression. By systematically denying nationally oppressed, transgender, and disabled people from the benefits and wages of the upper classes, the necessity of survival coerces them to flood the market of sexual labor. The resulting reduction of wages and working conditions, alongside a crackdown on legal sexual labor, pushed members of privileged social classes from the streets and into domestic servitude as wives and mothers.

The consumption of sexual labor, particularly in the form of pornography, is so widespread in society that even moral condemnation will do nothing but harm the most marginal of sexual laborers. Laws seeking to limit public access to “sexually explicit materials” have been used to actively suppress access to resources for sexual education, birth control, and transition related medical care.¹⁷

While we could dive further in this historical and materialist analysis of sex work, the breadth of the theory’s deviation from Marxist analysis should now be abundantly clear. Despite her condemnation of liberal feminists for flattening the experiences of sex workers, the author actively chose to disregard the autonomy and humanity of sex workers so that their idealized forms could serve as a prop for her radical feminist analysis. By using the theoretical framework of Andrea Dworkin, a zionist and arguably transmisogynistic theorist,¹⁸ to position men as a cabal seeking the sexual slavery of all women (i.e., people of penetration), the author — in one masterful stroke — both eschews class analysis and creates a false solidarity with sex workers by flattening their varied conditions into one of a universal metaphysical precarity.  Instead of seriously studying the scientific nature of these classes and the material conditions that bring them about so we might properly dedicate ourselves to uprooting these systems of oppression, we are instead given a world that has been wholly abstracted into a totalizing struggle between “men” and women. 

In its conclusion, the piece proclaims that “Our war is not against sex workers but against johns, sex buyers, and consumers of pornography.” This statement serves no theoretical purpose. We can make whatever proclamations we like, but what matters is the rhetoric behind them. The rhetoric of the piece gives ample justifications to the reader for hunting down these progenitors of patriarchal violence while at the same time excusing class collaboration between women (penetrated, the subjects of violence) of all classes:

These commodified individuals are surviving under patriarchy, under capitalism, and under oppressive forces. Until they engage in traitorous behaviors such as, but not limited to; promoting an OnlyFans referral code to 18 year olds to make money off of their content, dressing in children’s clothing, dressing in ways that contribute to the sexual violence minority women and those in the global south face, and/or glamorizing the industry, they are our comrades in the struggle.

This supposed “marxist feminism” tails the utopian organizational strategy of anarchists and radical feminists, wherein the supposed abolition of the state, or relationships with men, will instantly bring about heaven on earth where power and patriarchy are no more. We have only to unite all sex-workers (except those that promote OnlyFans referral codes to 18 year olds, dress in children’s clothing, dress in ways that contribute to sexual violence, and/or glamorize the industry of course) with all women! This super-class of sex-workers-and-women will then… well, what? Rather than building a serious strategy to bring about socialism, these adventurous radicals seek moral salvation by cleansing the world in a purifying flood. As Anuradha Ghandy writes: 

To assert that gender based division of labor is the basis of women’s oppression rather than class still begs the question. If we do not find some social, material reasons for the inequality we are forced into accepting the argument that men have an innate drive for power and domination. Such an argument is self-defeating because it means there is no point in struggling for equality. It can never be realized.

The liberation of prostitutes – and of all those from whom domestic labor is forcibly extracted – comes from the organization of their numbers into a body capable of battling their oppression and all work toward that organization, not from the repeated imprecations to divide the world into sexual abusers and the sexually abused. As Marxists it is our duty to organize, to bring together those who have an interest in fighting for total liberation. The patriarchal state is surely our enemy, as is the concept of masculinity itself insofar as it stands for the theft of labor, but we must be ever wary of the liberalizing drive to universalize victimhood and create a universal victimizer. No matter how strenuously the piece demands the reader to understand that “cunt” is shorthand for being raped, that does not make it so, nor does it make the central division along which society is divided into the raped and the rapists.

1. Sharman, Leah S., Robin Fitzgerald, and Heather Douglas. 2025. “Prevalence of Sexual Strangulation/Choking Among Australian 18–35 Year-Olds.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 54 (2): 465–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y.  Pg. 470. ︎
2. Ibidem. ︎
3. Wright, Paul J., Robert S. Tokunaga, and Ashley Kraus. 2016. “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies: Pornography and Sexual Aggression.” Journal of Communication 66 (1): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12201.
   Pg. 201. ︎
4. The correlation between the consumption of pornography and sexual violence lies in the dehumanizing of the sexual laborers. Even if the viewer were to construct subjectivity for the participants, one that they must construct themselves, as pornography commodifies the alienated images of these workers as they perform sexual labor. The consumer of pornography is a beneficiary of the patriarchal violence that produces this commodity as it only exists for consumption as a byproduct of systematic patriarchal violence. ︎
5. “For the cultural feminists, heterosexuality is about male domination and female subordination and so it sets the stage for pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, and woman-battering…. In their understanding of material conditions, they have taken the physical fact of reproduction and women’s biological role as the central point for their analysis and concluded that this is the main reason for women’s oppression…. Reproduction means both the reproduction of the person on a day to day basis and the reproduction of the human species. But in fact, reproduction of the species is something humans share with the animal kingdom. That could not be the basis for women’s oppression. For in all the thousands of years that people lived in the first stages of human existence, women were not subordinated to men.” Ghandy, Anarhuda, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, 54-5. ︎
6. Obviously, the Marxist analysis is that all real power is founded somewhere in property relations, and that other forms of power are all ultimately mediated property relations. ︎
7. Sharman, et al. Pg. 472 ︎
8. Ibid., Pgs. 472-473. ︎
9. On a case by case basis, it is, of course, possible for transgender people to reproduce patriarchal oppression. Domestic abuse is one form this takes. However, this is far from as simple a proposition as the mechanical oppressor/oppressed relation presented by the article at hand. Indeed, is it not possible that the penetrator in a relationship can be abused? Is it not possible that the penetrating partner can change from one to the other? ︎
10. James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. 2016. “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.” National Center for Transgender Equality. https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf. Pg. 59 ︎
11. Marx makes note of this phenomenon in Capital, that the family loses its material foundation in the capitalist age as children become the collective property of bourgeois society and women are a constant reserve army of labor ever ready to replace men in the workplace. It is through latter socialist social revolutions that women’s liberation has since unfolded. ︎
12. This struggle can itself be enervating to class consciousness, as is the case in the imperialist centers where class struggle has produced not revolution, but an entrenched labor aristocracy. ︎
13. Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press, pgs. 235-236. ︎
14. Id. at 528. ︎
15. In a waged relation, a prostitute is paid a wage by an employer, who keeps the amount that is paid for the sex work. In a slave or semi-slave relation, the prostitute is essentially kept in bondage to a pimp or madam, and receives instead whatever goods they need directly from their keeper, rather than a wage. Those thrust into illegal positions are excluded from legal production. We here incorporate slave and semi-slave relations as subproletarian, for in the age of “free” labor, these are all classes that must sell their labor-power. ︎
16. Harris, Leslie J. “Conclusion.” In The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity, 149–60. Michigan State University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.14321/jj.2990357.11. ︎
17. These and related “internet safety” politics have a long history of particularly targeting transgender and queer people, making both digital and physical spaces more dangerous for these communities. This is a result of queerness and transness being ideologically labeled as sexually explicit, or otherwise as a harmful social disease (Brooke and Turner, 2025; Kayyali & Mithani, 2025). Lawmakers in the UK have sought to expand such existing laws to further require websites to keep track of users sex assigned at birth, a tool that will be used to heavily monitor and further suppress the transgender population in the country if it comes to pass (Santi, 2025). 
    Kayyali, Dia, and Jasmine Mithani. 2025. “Age Verification Is Locking Trans People out of the Internet.” Tech Policy Press. December 8, 2025. https://www.techpolicy.press/age-verification-is-locking-trans-people-out-of-the-internet/.
    Santi, Mariano. 2025. “Data Bill: First They Came for Trans People.” Open Rights Group. 2025. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/.
    Tanner, Brooke, and Nicol Turner Lee. 2025. “Children’s Online Safety Laws Are Failing LGBTQ+ Youth.” Brookings. July 9, 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/childrens-online-safety-laws-are-failing-lgbtq-youth/.
    https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/  ︎
18. Dworkin actively proclaimed women’s struggle for liberation as resembling the struggle of the Zionists for a state in which they could finally find safety from the hoards seeking their death and sexual violation. (Lewis, 2025). Her early theoretical positions on the subjects of transsexuality and criticism of bioessentialism — despite holding a contradictory stance that “One might argue for a liberalization of sex-based roles, but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.” (Dworkin, 1974, pg. 175) — has left a wide range of room for an ongoing ideological struggle on whether Dworkin would be supportive of trans liberation today. In Woman Hating Dworkin stated “it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by faulty socialization. More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society.” and “…transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency (see p. 185) as a transsexual.” (Ibid., 186). With her short term solution to this so-called emergency being that “…every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.” (Ibid., 187), with the end goal being the construction of an androgynous human community that would bring transsexuality to an end by subsuming it into “…new modes of sexual identity and behavior.” (Ibid., 188). Dworkin later gave considerable praise to and actively promoted Transsexual Empire, a violently transphobic work which targeted transition related medical care, and specific transgender women who were subsequently harassed by Janice Raymond’s followers out of public life. While later expressing her distaste of the work’s treatment of transgender people in a personal letter to Raymond (Duberman, 2020, Pg. 161), her lack of public retraction has allowed figures such as Raymond to continually lay claim to Dworkin as an essential figure in the theoretical framework of modern Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (Janice, 2021, pp. 41-47). 
    Duberman, Martin B. 2020. Andrea Dworkin : The Feminist as Revolutionary. New York: The New Press.
    Lewis, Sophia. “Are Women Weak Jews? On Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism.” Spectre Journal.  May 27th 2025. https://spectrejournal.com/are-women-weak-jews/
    Raymond, Janice. 2021. Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. ︎

The United States of America isn’t a nation-state. It never has been; it never can be.

This may be provocative to some, but there is no denying it once the actual structure of the state is understood. This isn’t a historical point of curiosity, but the bedrock on which the United States has been built and continues to stand to this day.

If the United States isn’t a nation-state, then what is it?

Above all, the United States is a settler-colonial state, and it has remained a settler-colonial state for well over three hundred years, going back to when the territories that would go on to form its constituent parts were ruled by the British crown from across the ocean. European settlers of different nationalities crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind increasingly precarious class positions, to seize Indigenous land for themself by force. For this purpose, the Indigenous peoples were murdered, expelled, and forced into unequal treaties that weren’t worth the paper they were written on, until gradually the settler colony turned into an independent, continent-spanning empire that reigned supreme from coast to coast.

In the meantime, the settlement of the so-called ‘New World’ combined with the globalization of trade brought a new horror with it: the transatlantic slave trade, resulting in the abduction, purchase and enslavement of millions upon millions of Africans to provide forced labor on the other side of the world. In the prosperous lands of the so-called American South, ripe for exploitation after the native populations had been expelled or exterminated by the settlers, slavery created the foundation for the quasi-aristocratic planter class. This relation would form the backbone of the southern plantation economy, so vital for primitive accumulation, which paved the way toward fully developed capitalism in North America, by appropriating the labor of the enslaved African masses.

All of this finds its expression through the central ideology of this American settler empire, creating justification for the crimes and consolation through the crimes’ artificially constructed necessity in one: White supremacy.

So far, this should be a relatively agreeable understanding of American history, even if expressed in sharper terms than one would find in the average acknowledgement of historic (always historic, never current) brutality. All but the most reactionary Americans generally conclude that slavery and the genocide of the indigenous peoples aren’t something that should be celebrated long after the fact, and even they will usually admit that racism ‘played a role’ in it. The issue is that the hegemonic narrative starts to become confused and downright bizarre at the latest when assessing everything following the post civil war reconstruction period—a period that is criminally misunderstood by many, which contributes to the confusion—and is given over to historical narratives that are pure expressions of liberal ideology, which insists that equality in the United States is aspirational, and slowly (but surely!) ‘history’ is moving in that direction. Its proponents, often across party lines since internalized white supremacy is genuinely bipartisan, might ask:

Did we not abolish slavery?

(Ignoring the astounding continuity between the modern American prison system and the legal reconstruction of slavery after the Civil War.)

Did we not give the Indigenous peoples rights to their land?

(Ignoring the forced assimilation once the process of extermination was concluded, and the continued existence of the reservation system on tiny fractions of their land.)

Did we not give civil rights to everyone?

(Ignoring the complete banality of formal rights in the absence of equality in all political, economic, and cultural spaces.)

Are we not a nation of immigrants? Are we not all human? Are we not all Americans?

This ‘we’—the worst kind of we, the chauvinist’s national we—is imaginary in all capitalist states, but it is especially empty in the context of the US empire. There is no American national identity with any content beyond propagandized adherence to the symbolism, slogans and personality cults of the settler state, mixed with what is essentially commodity fetishism. The exception is the one identity that outright fascists try to revitalize out in the open, and liberals try to obscure with an incoherent ideology of moral progress: Whiteness—an ever-expanding and yet brutally limited category built around the exclusion of the actual nations within the empire’s borders.

Some of these nations carry names and are recognized by the US as a token gesture, and even that much was often bitterly fought for: Sioux, Cherokee, Shawnee, Navajo, and a hundred more Indigenous nations split into disparate tribal reservations by the process of genocide, displacement and subjugation.

Just as the settler state fragmented Indigenous nations, it forged new oppressed nations through slavery and annexation. Enslaved Africans, ripped from their home continent, transported across the ocean, and over generations deprived of much of their cultural heritage and even their language, formed a distinct national identity through the shared experience of enslavement, liberation and struggle against white supremacy. Similarly, although in less acute circumstances, the people subjugated by the conquest of the western territories once held by the Mexican state were subsumed into the empire, but not into whiteness, and without that, never raised to the status of settlers. When we speak of nations, we mean communities forged by shared history, territory, and struggle—not mere cultural identity. The Black nation in America, for example, like the Indigenous nations in their modern form, was created through violent subjugation and resistance against it. All of this, from the first settlements to the modern condition, exemplified by the underserved reservation and the ‘inner-city’ ghetto, only leaves one conclusion:

The United States isn’t a nation-state. It is a prison—a “prison of nations.”

And it isn’t the first of its kind.

When the Bolsheviks prepared for revolution against the semi-feudal Tsarist state—the original “prison of nations,” as Lenin referred to it—the task of national liberation was often at the forefront, and often controversial; from the question of how to deal with bourgeois nationalism to autonomy for the colonized tribal nations of Siberia. The experiences of the early Soviet Union show that dismantling empire requires combating national chauvinism with proletarian internationalism, which necessarily includes the right to national self-determination.

Consequently, the nations chained by the empire must be liberated from it—this goes for the less than United States now, as it did for the decrepit Tsarist Autocracy a hundred years ago. Let’s take a closer look at the similarities and differences, and what concrete lessons there are to learn for today’s liberation struggle.

The National Question — From Empire to Union State

Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

This, in three words, can be understood as the official ideology of the Tsarist state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was in many ways its answer to surging bourgeois national movements all over Europe, including within the borders of the empire. We will focus on the “Nationality,” which would be better described as national supremacy and primacy of the “Great Russians”— we simply call them Russians today, and the name already contains a hint of their supposed role in the eyes of Tsarism, as a guiding nationality for the “lesser” peoples.

Lenin describes the use of this supremacist ideology, as it was expressed by the proto-fascist Black Hundreds movement and endorsed by the Tsar:

The conditions of life of this vast population [the oppressed nationalities] are even harsher than those of the Russians. The policy of oppressing nationalities is one of dividing nations. At the same time it is a policy of systematic corruption of the people’s minds. The Black Hundreds’ plans are designed to foment antagonism among the different nations, to poison the minds of the ignorant and downtrodden masses […] This dirty and despicable work is undertaken, not only by the scum of the Black Hundreds, but also by reactionary professors, scholars, journalists and members of the Duma. Millions and thousands of millions of rubles are spent on poisoning the minds of the people. — Lenin, National Equality, 1914

So, how are these conditions resolved, and how do they relate to socialist revolution? The most obvious answer, the “common sense” of today’s liberals, as it was of liberals of the last century, is the establishment of legal equality. This was obvious to everyone except the most reactionary chauvinists. Even the 1906 constitution gave token concessions to the national minorities, and finally, the February Revolution of 1917 abolished the remnants of official national discrimination, especially severe against the Muslim and Jewish minorities of the empire. The success of the Bolsheviks was not needed for this hollow “equality under the law,” instead, they went far beyond. While Kerensky’s government of national defense quickly became a government of national oppression, attempting to keep the prison of nations intact by all means—a cause soon taken up by the White Army, much to their detriment—the Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular often against fierce opposition, insisted on the uncompromising right to national self-determination and secession by oppressed nations. This position was kept up during the entirety of the civil war—the only debatable exception is the Red Army’s seizure of Baku to secure an oil supply for the nascent proletarian revolution, and even there, a government of Azerbaijani communists took the lead.

For the Bolsheviks, the national right to self-determination was the basis of proletarian internationalism:

In this situation, the proletariat of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognize, not only fully equal rights for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession […] Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers. — Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914

It is no coincidence that Lenin would later stress the negative influences of Great-Russian chauvinism on the early Soviet Union, and, with that, the centrality of combating it. It is no coincidence either, but rather a direct expression of this policy, that the Union Treaty of 1922, which formally established the Soviet Union, enshrined the right to secession for the constituent socialist republics, that the Soviet Union returned land seized from China and Mongolia by the Tsarist autocracy once the revolution took root there, and that where policies of russification or national suppression were implemented the offending members were expelled from the party without hesitation. This program was applied to all colonized nations, from autonomy for the tribal peoples of Siberia to demanding equal rights for those colonized by the imperialist states across the oceans.

The so-called American left should be ashamed that a party leading a revolutionary conflict in one of the most underdeveloped regions of Europe was miles ahead of them when it came to the question of national self-determination over a hundred years ago. In fact, they often reproduce the exact chauvinism so sharply attacked by Lenin.

Of course, not all of this survived into the era of consolidation under Stalin’s leadership, but that is a discussion for another time—the general principle and its importance should be clear:

The October Revolution did not lead to the foundation of a ‘Great Russian Soviet Republic’, and neither can an American revolution lead to the foundation of an ‘National American Soviet Republic’. The right to national self-determination and secession must be upheld under all circumstances. In fact, these rights become only clearer in the American case, because of the class structure inherent to the settler state. Let’s talk about that in more detail.

Facing the Settler — Finding an ‘American’ Proletariat

The argument that is about to follow is the exact type of argument people in the West who imagine themself as prospective revolutionaries don’t like to hear. That makes the argument all the more important, considering most prospective Western revolutionaries never engage in revolution. I’ll try to be gentle.

Unlike in Tsarist Russia, where the ‘Great Russian’ proletariat became one of the chief revolutionary forces for the reasons discussed in the last section, the vast majority of American settlers, even those among them who are supposedly proletarian, have always been complicit in the reproduction of empire. To be clear: This isn’t a moral judgement on individuals, but rather an attempt to approach the objective class relations within the boundaries of the US state, and understand where revolutionary potential can be found and under what circumstances. Without that, making revolution is an impossibility.

To explain the particular class position of American settlers, we should talk about J. Sakai’s often maligned but rarely seriously interrogated polemic ‘Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat’. He didn’t try to be gentle. His fundamental position is that the vast majority of white workers in the US have always constituted a privileged labor aristocracy, ultimately in alliance with the bourgeoisie when it comes to the subjugation of colonized nations. They are settlers, which, in turn, reflects on the self-conception of the American left if they falsely identify them as the primary revolutionary class.

Sakai states this position on the history and present of the American state and with that the American left, explicitly:

The imperialists even concede that their standard ‘U.S. history’ is a white history, and is supposedly incomplete unless the long-suppressed Third-World histories are added to it. Why? The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn’t true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left. Theirstory keeps saying, over and over: ‘You folks, just think about your own history; don’t bother analyzing white society, just accept what we tell you about it.’ — J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

What are we—those of us not interested in reproducing national chauvinism with our analysis of class relations in the US—to make of this? Well, for now, let’s take Sakai’s arguments seriously.

One of the most destructive tendencies of the American socialist movement has been to view the struggle of the oppressed nations against the empire as ‘merely’ an incidental part of the larger struggle against capitalism. This tendency will acknowledge that white supremacy is a central issue, that indigenous self-determination is vital, that reparations for slavery may be necessary, and so forth, while ultimately seeing all of it as an afterthought compared to the ‘real’ fight for socialism. These ‘lesser’ issues are relegated to the eventual destruction of the white supremacist bourgeois state, which will presumably unfold in the revolutionary process that is, for the foreseeable future, exclusively unfolding in their heads.

On what terms is this real struggle supposed to take place, then? The Bolsheviks understood the necessity of a combined struggle on all fronts, so what do these ‘Euro-Amerikan’, self-declared revolutionaries have to offer? They would never say it out loud because that exposes the blatant white supremacist logic beneath, but ultimately they conceive the revolutionary process as one advanced by the white majority, which should ‘accommodate’ or ‘integrate’ non-white proletarians into the larger struggle. And just in case it needs to be said: No, claiming you ‘don’t see color’ like a caricature of the worst kind of liberal, doesn’t change the ideology of this surface-level integrationist tendency, and its complete inability to conceive of a general liberation struggle against the American bourgeois state by those who are actually subjugated by it.

In reality, and this is absolutely vital to understand, the revolutionary process is one and the same as the struggle for self-determination by the proletarian masses of the oppressed nations. They have never been truly integrated by the settler state, and face it as the most severely exploited people within the empire’s borders.

Ignoring this inevitably reproduces white supremacy, and ultimately is an expression of the settlers’ concrete class interest of maintaining their comparatively privileged position as part of the global imperialist hegemon’s labor aristocracy, petit bourgeois landowners, and at the very top, as the imperial bourgeoisie. This is rarely understood in those terms, but is crystal clear when viewed through the historical failures and capitulations of the American union movement and various communist organizations—as Sakai does—which were dominated by a settler majority.

At best—and it really isn’t good at all—it results in treating the conflicts of the oppressed nations, and with that, the vast majority of the most acutely exploited proletarians, as secondary, as it has been done over and over again by class-collaborationist unions in the United States. Instead, the goal is to win concessions from the spoils of empire.

Sakai makes special note of this in his characterization of early trade-unionism:

Underneath the surface appearance of militant popular reform, of workers taking on the wealthy, these movements were only attempts to more equally distribute the loot and privileges of Empire among its citizens. That’s why the oppressed colonial subjects of the Empire had no place in these movements. —J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

At worst, we can see the results in parties like the CPUSA, which gradually turned itself into a sad, parasitic entity attached to the Democratic Party—and with that to the settler state—by abandoning even the semblance of revolutionary action. Why? Because once the Civil Rights Act established formal legal equality, they had exhausted their wedge issue, which initially led them ‘across racial lines’, and reverted to the lowest common denominator for all practically exhausted and theoretically confused communist parties: reformism thinly veiled by red flags. To this day, the CPUSA blatantly denies that anyone except the American bourgeoisie can be understood as settlers, while appropriating the language of national liberation—they, too, have made the ‘prison of nations’ comparison, abusing Lenin’s work only to retreat to the equivalent of a ‘Great Russian’ chauvinist’s position on the matter.

A crass difference can be seen between organizations taking on the role of de facto collaborators with the empire, and those that actually presented a threat to it by focusing on a proletarian liberation struggle, and connecting it to the larger fight against world imperialism. There is a reason why the Black Panther Party became the most advanced communist organization the US has ever seen before it was suppressed, why militants of the Black Liberation Army were killed and hunted down without mercy, why the Indigenous-led Red Power movement was torn apart with armed force and the violence of courts, and why even the generally more ‘moderate’ Land Back Movement and Chicano Movement are under continued surveillance and pressure by American state institutions. They present a real threat by uniting the proletarian masses of oppressed nations within the Empire’s borders in the struggle against the bars of their collective prison.

These movements prove liberation must begin where the empire’s violence is most acute, not where settlers feel most comfortable.

The Terms of the Struggle — Shattering the Prison

Ultimately, the American left has two choices: continue as the empire’s useful idiots, or finally recognize that liberation won’t come from the settlers, but from those they’ve imprisoned in the boundaries of their state. Of course, it is no coincidence that the largest sections of the so-called left have not recognized this, since it is in their class interest as labor aristocrats to close their eyes, and the others are pulled along by their sway in organizations. Class suicide—actively working against one’s own class interests, in more than words—is rarely an appealing notion, and neither is the prospect of a grueling revolutionary struggle that will, for some time at least, shatter the established value chains, reduce living standards and cause panic among those used to living off the superprofits extracted from the labor of the third world and the land of subjugated nations.

This can be no excuse. Facing reality is always preferable to idealist fantasies and lies, produced to enable a false radicalism that is ultimately destructive. Lenin was quite clear on that matter, and the role of such delusions in revolutionary situations:

After their first serious defeat, the overthrown exploiters—who had not expected their overthrow, never believed it possible, never conceded the thought of it—throw themselves with energy grown tenfold, with furious passion and hatred grown a hundredfold, into the battle for the recovery of the ‘paradise’ of which they were deprived […] In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other. — Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

All of this does not mean there is no role for white Americans in this struggle—quite the opposite, in fact, because they have the veil of protection granted by white supremacy others are not afforded—but without understanding their own position, they are bound to reproduce completely dysfunctional and often outright reactionary tactics. And while whiteness is generalized, there are, of course, differences in the concrete class positions of white workers in the United States, ranging from fully integrated labor aristocrats in the empire’s metropoles to the historically superexploited workers of the Appalachians—the fact that this needs to be addressed is already a concession to white fragility, but I want to anticipate the inevitable outrage in the comments somehow.

At the same time, the objective existence of oppressed nations must be seen as an opportunity. The most elemental task of any revolutionary organization is to find a revolutionary class to make revolution with, not as an appendage, not as an imposition, but as one of them, leading the struggle in the clearest possible terms. This is the task of the vanguard party—not to ‘include’ or ‘consider’ the proletarian masses, but to take a leading position from within the proletarian masses.

Consequently, in the United States, the task of this revolutionary organization is not to convince oppressed nations or settlers that they must work together, on a vague and entirely ahistorical and anti-materialist basis akin to liberal denial of the most severe expressions of white supremacy, but rather that their collective liberation is one and the same task. This is what the most advanced socialist organizations like the Black Panther Party advocated for, despite distortions to the contrary that attempt to deny the colonial nature of the state:

The dissolution of the American settler empire, the destruction of the bourgeois state, the establishment of workers’ power, and the uncompromising right to self-determination, autonomy and secession for the nations imprisoned in the boundaries of the empire.

The terms of this struggle are clear—the prison of nations must be shattered.

The Pied Piper is arguably more dangerous than the hunter, and neither should be discounted.

Background

Mamdani’s campaign started with a surge of popularity riding on radical anti-zionist talking points. A long-time “pro-Palestine” activist, supporter of BDS, and critic of zionist settler violence in Palestine, Mamdani has been a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America since 2017, and the New York State Assembly since 2020. Using his elected position to amplify his particular brand of “radical” politics, Mamdani’s public visibility quickly ramped up following his condemnations of the genocidal zionist reprisals following the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood uprising. By repeatedly stirring controversy within settler power structures and zionist media, Mamdani has spent the last two years building a popular image of a radical “socialist” Muslim within a key hotbed of settler political struggle, carefully ramping up the controversy to keep himself in the media spotlight by spouting radical rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada” and “abolish the police.” In October 2024, he announced his candidacy for the 2025 Mayoral race, winning the Democratic Party primary in June 2025. 

Surprising no-one paying attention, Mamdani began walking back his phony radicalism as soon as his candidacy was assured, currying alliances with key members of the NYC police force, choosing open zionists for his staff,¹ announcing his support for the zionist occupation’s “right to exist,” and declaring his intent to greatly expand the police budget for prosecuting anti-zionist activities. 

Principles of Settler Opportunism

The “socialists” who run for office are little more than political adventurists and opportunists. A political adventurist here means an individual who sees themselves as a heroic figure setting out to save the masses from their oppression. They believe they can “make a difference” by struggling within the system, so long as they retain their “principles.” They set aside the necessity of first constructing a class that is conscious of itself and able to coordinate political action according to a definite plan, and try to instead champion what they individually perceive to be the interests of this class (which does not yet exist!). This necessarily produces an eclectic undisciplined political line, because one individual, or group of individuals (like the many so-called “communist” parties) is not capable of producing a correct political line. Only a vanguard party with the backing of the masses, acting in their interests according to their will, can do this. Adventurists either do not know this, or do not care. They believe that by “showing the way,” the masses can be inspired to spontaneous action in support of their own liberation. They believe that by spurring the masses to all go to the polls, they are at the same time building working class unity, solidarity, consciousness, or whatever. Inevitably, they are ultimately defeated: either they fail to gain any purchase within the system and wash out, or they realize the futility of pushing a “revolutionary” line all by their lonesome and turn to opportunism. To this end, political adventurism is materially indistinguishable from opportunism.

Opportunists are in it for whatever they can get. They may agree in principle with a revolutionary line, but in practice they are more than willing to discard inconvenient segments of the masses in the interest of political expediency. Often they can be found eagerly doing this in anticipation of what they believe will win the most “support” at the polls. Inevitably, their most radical edges are rounded out and dulled by constant contact with the inertia of bourgeois/settler governance. In the game of musical chairs that is settler colonial privileges, the most vulnerable people are the first pushed out of the way, and the opportunists are the ones who take up the task of doing the pushing. Because it may be “politically inconvenient” to militantly struggle against the settler colonial occupation and genocide against Palestine, they tell us that these issues must be set aside “for now,” to be pursued “later” when the movement has built more momentum and mass power. Of course what they fail to mention here is that in doing this they are dividing the masses, weakening the movement by directing mounting class struggle into dead-end reformist avenues down which only a small section of the masses can advance. Their actions lead to the sacrifice of all principles on the altar of “pragmatism.”

Besides Mamdani’s tepid criticism of some of the most depraved zionist acts of violence, the key reforms he promised (and those which have won him such widespread support among the imperial left) are as follows: 

• To freeze rents and build “affordable” housing
• To crack down on “bad” landlords 
• To establish city-owned grocery stores
• To establish free public transit
• To raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030. (This in particular appears to be why the “progressive” settlers are so thrilled.) 

A full explanation of the flaws in the rent freeze is well beyond this article, but suffice to say that whatever attempt he may or may not make at expanding and stabilizing the private property regime, it won’t put a dent in the empire-wide land speculation that is the real cause of the housing crisis. Cracking down on “bad” landlords is laughable, considering the socialist position is not to hound out malfeasors, but to liquidate entire classes. And rather than feeding people directly, Mamdani would prefer to compete on the market by creating his own NYC brand grocery store!

This minimum wage increase will mostly benefit the service workers in the empire’s finance capital, the people who keep the gears turning in the nerve center of global imperialism. The claim being made by the settler “socialists,” is that this push for higher wages for some of the city’s workers is building the mass base necessary to push through some “real” reforms—just later on, at an unspecified date and time. There’s no word on how that’s to be accomplished or what the demands will be, but never mind that, they say, we’re getting paid. How exactly is socialism advanced by the appointment of a bourgeois politician as the mayor of the bourgeois finance capital of the empire in the middle of a holocaust being waged against Palestinians? That this disgusting mockery of human decency is being held up as a beacon of hope for the socialist cause hinges on the idea that wage increases are a victory in themselves, that advancing the conditions of some workers is always an advance for the socialist cause. We contend that this is simply not true. Let’s ask the real question: wage increases for who?

Simply being employed, however wretched that employment may be, is itself a position of privilege and power in the imperial system. Yes, the bourgeoisie remain the top dogs, but people who “work for a living” in the colonial economy are still a privileged group: their class position depends on the continued exploitation of people who can’t work for a living. 

There has never been a challenge to the employment problem, and a major reason why is that following along to the plans of the Imperialists keeps wages high and development uneven, securing employment while simultaneously securing unemployment. 

Example scenario: Capitalist introduces labor saving machines that double productivity. Rather than overproducing, they cut the workforce in half and raise the wages of the leftovers by 50%. Overall, the capitalist just reduced aggregate wages by 25%. The business operates at the same level. They don’t overproduce and break their market position, the workers who didn’t get cut have a huge wage increase that puts a contradiction between them and their laid off siblings.²

– @probablykaffe

Many people are excluded from the “productive” sphere on the basis of nationality, gender, ability, etc. We know that a Black person is much less likely to have access to employment than a white person—in fact, the Black unemployment rate in New York City is more than double that of whites (8% vs 3.5%). Disabled people are often completely excluded from a livable income, with less than 25% of people with any disability being employed, and fewer than 1 in 5 autistic people. According to the 2022 US transgender survey report, trans people in the US face a whopping 18% unemployment rate, more than four times the empire-wide average, which frankly should be considered a demographic crisis. These are entire populations of people who are excluded from the privilege of accessing employment, and those who do gain access are often limited to part time or sporadic/seasonal work. And all of this is before we even get into the issue of the role of US imperialism in inflating worker wages inside the empire at the expense of billions of global south workers. 

It can’t be dismissed how difficult it is to be a low wage worker in New York City. There’s a very good reason people are clamoring for this reform. But as the grip of capital tightens around your throat, disabled people who have been suffering under brutal austerity conditions for years are dying at atrocious rates under state eugenicist campaigns. The fact that these plans don’t address the needs of the most oppressed, and in fact perpetuate their oppression in a mystified and more acute form, should be a warning that Mamdani doesn’t deal in social revolution but rather in reinforcing the capitalist state with a “kinder” face. How does the “socialism” of Mamdami do anything to build solidarity between oppressed groups? What is the plan for carrying this movement to a higher stage of struggle? What is being accomplished here, except grabbing more for a select few while the most vulnerable people continue to languish and die in ever-increasing poverty and homelessness? Is the wealth supposed to trickle down from people with jobs to those without? Everyone needs to eat before you reach out your hand for seconds! If any group is forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of “progress” then inequality is reproduced and oppression persists. What does “universal emancipation” mean to you, seriously? If your “socialist” candidate isn’t running on the democratic mandate of the masses of the exploited, and held to account by that democratic mandate, following a definite plan to continually heighten the struggle and broaden the involvement of the masses, then they aren’t a socialist. Unfortunately, the democratic institutions necessary for this, a vanguard party or socialist state, do not yet exist in this land. Our efforts, therefore, should not be to run candidates accountable to no one, but to build the party capable of holding leaders accountable, so that we can finally seize the state. 

Whose Side Are You On?

We must be very clear on this point: Palestinian sovereignty is non-negotiable, just as much as all anti-colonialism is. There is no middle ground or compromise with the settler colonial system. Either we destroy it or it destroys us. Any position which leaves room for the continued existence of “israel” in any form is a denial of the sovereignty and humanity of Palestinians. In tossing out this issue, by “compromising” with genocide, they draw a line between themselves and the Palestinian people. They separate international humanity into two groups pitted against one-another: “us,” and “them.” In the arena of class warfare this division is fatal. When one section of our forces advances while leaving another behind, reactionary forces are afforded room to encircle and defeat both groups, usually by absorbing the opportunists and killing off the rest. Either all the oppressed advance in unison, or we get picked off one-by-one. Genuine revolutionaries demand that every oppressed group be respected, uplifted, and empowered; this will be done in opposition to the dominant groups, who recognize every gain for the oppressed as a loss for their profit. On the other hand, opportunists are content to allow reactionaries to pick off “inconvenient” groups, so long as they personally benefit in the end.

This strategy of divide and conquer, directed from the rear by the bourgeoisie and spearheaded by opportunism, goes back to the earliest days of the anti-capitalist movement. In particular it has come to dominate and define imperial politics over the last century. When the interests of those privileged enough to have jobs are prioritized ahead of those who aren’t, the material division between the two widens. The privileges of the advantaged group are reinforced at the expense of the disadvantaged group, which produces an incentive to keep it that way in the privileged group. This is how reaction breeds. The issue with homelessness is not “the lack of supply” but the capacity for landlords to evict tenants. Ensuring everybody is housed and safe needs to come ahead of reducing market prices on apartments.³ The speculative value produced by rent extraction is what drives the constant inflation of property prices, not “undersupply.” When the health and safety of disabled people is considered a secondary concern to the “comfort” of abled people, and (for example) masking is not enforced, disabled people are excluded from the movement, further weakening it. When trans rights are considered a “token” issue and worth ceding ground on in exchange for concessions for “the majority,” the movement further fragments as trans people are left behind to struggle to survive and to die alone. When Indigenous sovereignty is treated as a secondary concern, or a threat to the property “rights” of “the majority,” the settler-Indigenous divide deepens, and one of the most revolutionary elements of all human society is ejected from the movement. It is this way that, in the name of “the majority,” the opportunists carefully and meticulously carve up the movement into bite-sized chunks that the reactionaries are only too eager to devour. The bourgeoisie and settler masses will always demand that we sit down and shut up and in exchange they will grant some privileges to those of us who acquiesce while they slaughter those who won’t or can’t. Every “temporary” retreat from solidarity turns into a strategic defeat for the movement.

In the coming months, Mamdani supporters may pretend to be shocked at his complicity in settler violence and his leadership in maintaining the colonial occupation of Lenapehoking, just as they are now pretending to be critical of his zionism. The signs pointing towards his opportunism were always there for those willing to see. While he did condemn the zionist reprisals on October 8, 2023, he was quick to also condemn the Palestinian resistance within the weeks following, and since then has eagerly participated in spreading zionist propaganda lies about supposed “war crimes” committed by the resistance.⁴ Mamdani has carefully and consistently played both sides, spouting anti-zionist rhetoric out one side of his mouth while materially aligning himself with colonial hegemony with the other. This barefaced opportunism, and its inevitable tragic outcomes, should be wearily familiar by now to those of us with the slightest of principles. It’s plain as day now, just as it has been for years, that Mamdani is just another lying settler pig—perfectly content to take advantage of public outrage against the Palestinian Holocaust for his colonial ladder-climbing career. 

For as much ink that has been spilled and attention monopolized for this man, little mind has been paid to the social processes underlying his ascent to international fame and infamy. Mamdani’s popularity and controversy could well serve as a case-study in how the left wing of capital uses radical window-dressing to conceal maintenance of the status quo, but we’ve had enough such case studies to fill a library. What is happening to us on the ground? Whether you’re cheering and applauding or booing and hissing, you’re watching the show — so how has the so-called “revolutionary left” become so enraptured by what amounts to performance art on a stage inside a colonial garrison? The complete hegemony of the settler empire’s cultural influence continues to mislead and dull the senses of our aspiring revolutionaries, but not by lying to us to convince us that one settler politician or another is a radical. Even the most ineffectual liberal “socialist” will openly admit that they don’t believe Mamdani will deliver anything resembling a radical break. After all, they’ve “learned their lesson” from former DSA campaign outcomes, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vile opportunism. But if they’ve learned their lesson and “don’t expect much” from Zohran Mamdani, what exactly are they doing? The answer is a parallel to Mamdani’s career.

The Social Technology of Settler Socialism

The mass base of Democratic Socialism is the lower and middle strata of settler colonists.⁵ These people are genuinely discontented with the system, but pay attention to their grievances! “Housing is unaffordable, wages are too low, social safety nets are not robust enough, and  education is too expensive.” Wealth and capital have become too concentrated in the hands of a minority, “the 1%,” and they aren’t getting what they see as their due share. Are these the grievances of a revolutionary, or of petulant settler youth and failed settler aspirants? Are these demands aiming towards the complete destruction of the colonial system and the restitution of Indigenous land sovereignty, or are these demands aiming at a “fairer” redivision of the spoils of colonial conquest and imperialist exploitation? Are the grievances rooted in a desire to end class society or to simply make it more comfortable for those fortunate enough to live within the colonial jurisdiction at which their reforms are aimed?

The DSA professes to be a “socialist” organization, so on the surface it appears to be approaching an alignment with national liberatory, decolonial, and communist struggles. But is this really the case? Remember to always analyze the class position of a given organization by the actions it takes, not by the ideology it professes. Ideology is always a more or less accurate reflection of class alignment, but recall the scientific tenet that the appearance of a thing does not perfectly match its content—therefore we have to look deeper. The reflection can be, and often is, inverted. Zionism purports itself to be a liberatory movement, which is an inverted reflection of reality. Amerikan liberalism purports to be interested in universal democracy, which again is an inverted reflection of reality. So, is DSA really socialist? What are the outcomes of DSA’s political activity? As of this writing, no militant organizations or movements have emerged from the DSA, and decades of organizing has yielded little but a few “more radical” Democratic politicians in colonial office positions. The standard explanation given by “communists” within the DSA for its lack of revolutionary action is that the masses have yet to be radicalized, and therefore struggle within the DSA is necessary to bring them the consciousness they need to begin to take revolutionary action. In 43 years, however, the DSA has largely remained ideologically stationary.

This “failure” to radicalize the masses is a constant point of debate and analysis. Many individuals and organizations within the communist milieu but outside the DSA contend that the source of this failure is because the organization is ideologically democratic socialist (i.e. not revolutionary in ideological outlook), and therefore a different, “more communist” organization is required to impart the necessary revolutionary outlook in its adherents. But this is putting the cart before the horse! Ideology does not dictate material alignment, material alignment dictates ideology. The DSA is not a stagnant ineffectual organization because of its backwards ideology—instead it has a backwards ideology because this is necessary to fulfill its actual goals. What are its goals? The purpose of a system is what it does, especially a system which has remained more or less stable and self-reproducing for over four decades. So what does the DSA do? It reels in members of oppressed groups (trans, queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, etc) and disciplines their activities into serving the interests of its colonial middle-class leadership by mixing them into a single “organization” under middle-class leadership. The profession of “socialist” aims is a smokescreen to obscure the actual aims of the organization, which is ultimately little more than colonial, careerist ladder-climbing.

What of the internal criticisms levied at the organization? Many of the members are often very dissatisfied with the outcomes of their political activity, and among the common refrains is the need for more centralized leadership, for the ability to enforce a political line on the politicians they get into office, and for the organization to divest itself from cooperation with zionism. Yet despite a resolution passing in August⁶ enabling the expulsion of zionist membership (which was barely successful, succeeding with 56% percent of the vote), the openly zionist Mamdani continues to be backed by the DSA, and the overall strategy of the DSA continues to be to maintain its involvement in the zionist Democratic Party. The reality of the matter is, despite professing anti-zionism for the first time in its long history, the DSA remains a zionist organization, and its new “anti-zionist” mask is the same “anti-zionism” of the broader imperial left—an anti-zionism that affirms the necessity of the occupation to continue. Little more than a barefaced lie.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The settler empire has long since perfected the social technology of penetrating organizational and community structures built by, or being built by, the oppressed, with the aim of taking them over from within and submitting them to colonial interests. Where the oppressed see a dire need for unity and solidarity in the face of colonial genocide against our siblings in Palestine, the lower and middle strata of settlers see an upsurge in laboring subjects available to fill the ranks of their latest campaign for redivision of the imperialist spoils. That, in essence, is what the Democratic Socialists of America is: far from a dysfunctional organization which routinely fails to meet its goals, the DSA is a well-oiled machine of settler-colonial annexation. In which revolutionary currents among the oppressed are carefully cultivated within a narrowly bounded arena of struggle, both in order to prevent a dangerous rupture of the colonial system, and in order to ultimately benefit the settlers served by the DSA. That this process occasionally settlerizes individuals from oppressed demographics is part of the point—in order for the DSA to function as intended it’s necessary that the occasional individual from an oppressed demographic attains an internal leadership position or a colonial office position, but this is always predicated on the condition that they closely adhere to the interests of colonial maintenance; they must not engage in illegal activities, such as organizing and arming militant struggle. “Class peace” remains the priority ahead of anything else, even when the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children hinge on the taking up of armed struggle. To the settler socialists, their deaths are water under the bridge so long as wages are increased enough to broaden the number of people who can access the colonial land exchange.

For revolutionaries, what the success of the DSA and Mamdani’s campaign represents is a complete capitulation of the “Free Palestine” movement to settler annexationism and zionism. We’ve failed to differentiate between friends and enemies, failed to take the actions necessary to expel enemies from our organizations and communities, failed to build up the militant organizational capacity necessary to wage armed struggle against zionism, and in doing so failed to defend the lives of our Palestinian siblings in their hour of greatest need for two years ongoing. And yet, Mamdani’s electoral success is lauded as a victory for the left! Indeed, this is a triumph for the left wing of zionism. With hardly a word to the contrary, we’ve rolled over and allowed this travesty to unfold for two years, all the while repeating the inane mantra that “any day now” the masses of settler oppressors will “radicalize” and join forces with the oppressed to aid in the overthrow of their colonial system. In doing so, we’ve demonstrated our own willingness to be complicit in a holocaust so long as this complicity keeps us out of the prison cell and out of the line of fire.

Our Place in History

When freshly stolen land became scarce and prices rose in the late 1700s, the lower and middle masses of settlers eagerly aligned with the planter bourgeoisie to oppose British rule and expand the colonial system. Indigenous peoples bore the cost of their genocidal brutality.⁷ Since then this pattern has repeated itself over and over. At each moment of crisis in the colonial system, the dispossessed and poorer settlers will seek out temporary alliances wherever they can find them to bulk up their ranks for coming confrontation with the ruling strata, but always with the sole aim of securing their own slice of colonial land and their own share of imperial wages.⁸ As times change and ideologies shift and develop, the colonial redistributionists will find alliances in different places. During the period of protracted economic crisis in the 1930s, the redistributionists found alliance with rising Black nationalism, only to cast off their allies the moment a fresh flood of booty came pouring in following the empire’s successful conquests at the close of the Second World War, and by the 1950s the Communist Party USA had successfully liquidated all revolutionaries from its ranks and disavowed national liberation. In the 1960s, a new wave of national liberatory struggles rose, and by the 1970s, settler “radicals” had successfully played out their role in crushing all resistance. The defeated liberation movement became a victorious “Civil Rights Movement” in the settler history books.

Today the same pattern plays out yet again in real time before our eyes: with the colonial system’s internal stratification at historic highs, and faced with the objective necessity of violent armed struggle in support of the Palestinian resistance and against the US empire, the settler “left” floods into our organizations and our discussion spaces, reads our literature and learns our language of resistance, claims to be our allies in struggle, and spends two years marching in circles to maintain the facade, while shoring up support for their preferred reformist. Time and energy and resources that could be spent serving the needs of the most oppressed, building dual power institutions, organizing guerilla strikes against weapons manufacturers and zionist finance institutions, etcetera, gets repeatedly diverted into the same century-old discussions about whether socialists should vote. Those of us aiming to build the revolutionary forces necessary for winning this war find ourselves surrounded by the most dishonest dregs of humanity, grabbing and pulling us back from struggle to keep our labor squarely aimed at shoring up the structures of oppression holding us down. Make no mistake, when $30/hr is firmly in hand, these so-called radicals will ride into the sunset towards their very own mortgages on stolen land and pensions funded by imperialism. 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for personal gain at the expense of the Palestinian resistance is not a betrayal of the “socialist” movement, but the blueprint to be followed by each of its adherents. We’ve already failed to lend Palestine the support it needs for two years ongoing. If the aspiring revolutionaries of our new rising wave of national liberation fail to recognize the myriad methods that settler opportunism uses to exploit our labors for individual gain, we too will take our place in the history books as the defeated “extreme fringe” of a successful movement to redistribute the spoils of genocide and oppression.

1.  Julian Gerson, political director for Mamdani’s electoral campaign, previously served as a campaign manager for US congressman Jerry Nadler. Nadler describes himself as a “committed Zionist” and “a strong supporter of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people.” Gerson is on record saying, “Jerry embodies the idea that one can absolutely be pro-Israel and progressive simultaneously.” ︎
2. From Kaffe in the same thread: “The ratio of the sub-employed population has been roughly the same for the last half century, even as the role of ‘housewife’ has eroded (good riddance), with the shift in joblessness going mostly to the Nationally Oppressed. The abolition of unemployment (a Soviet right), is so little entertained for two reasons:
   1. The Labor Aristocracy refuses to let go of wages and security, even if that value could be re-allocated for increased employment, and erase the security problem. 
   2. The work that desperately needs to be done (i.e. land healing), would reduce dependency on Imperial relations, making it more difficult to compel the working class to reproduce them.
   Instead: insecure-security, stratified wages, uneven development (the cause of high economic migration — the medium of insecurity and stratification), and the ‘public works’ cages a million people yearly, militarizes the population, and (re)builds Bourgeois terrorism.” ︎
3. Hence why housing was a right in the USSR, “Thus a worker cannot be put out of his room, even for non-payment of rent. His wages can be attached, but if he is unemployed his rent is free. He cannot be charged more than a certain low sum, fixed in proportion to his wages.” Anna Louise Strong, The First Time In History, (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1924),149. ︎
4.  “…of course I condemn Hamas. Of course I have called October 7th what it was, which was a horrific war crime,…” ︎
5. According to the 2021 DSA Member Survey Report, 85% of membership is white, compared with only 4% Black representation. 28% of members are full upper-PB with household incomes of $100k or more. 80% of respondents had bachelor’s degrees, and approximately 60% of respondents occupy petty bourgeois or labor aristocratic positions, split between scholars, academics, white-collar, tech workers, non-profit organizations, public sector employees, healthcare or social work, self employed, writer, performer, arts, and political org/union. ︎
6. See resolution R22. ︎
7. “This pretense toward ‘freedom’ continued in 1776 when settlers revolted when London seemed to be loath to continue funding their wars of dispossession against indigenes and the constant conflict with enslaved Africans that was an adjunct of that process” Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 154 in the PDF. ︎
8. See J. Sakai Settlers Ch. 4.4, describing the process of the settler economy importing Chinese labor to displace the Mexican population of the southwest, only to then violently expropriate Chinese industry and landholdings. Afterwards, the same participants in these genocidal purges urged “unity” with Afrikan labor, as the next phase of the developing industrial unionism movement: “Terrance Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor (who had personally called for wiping out all Chinese in North America within one year), suddenly became the apostle of brotherhood when it came to persuading Afrikans to support his organization: ‘The color of a candidate shall not debar him from admission; rather let the coloring of his mind and heart be the test.’” ︎

It comes as no surprise, then, that uranium shipments in and through Navajo Nation territory have resumed. Energy Fuels, Inc. and the Navajo Nation (represented by President Buu Nygren) reached an agreement in January which allowed for the transport of uranium over Navajo land. The uranium has been and will be transported to a facility in Utah by the Energy Fuels company, a U.S. energy company.

The historical problem of uranium and the Navajo Nation is not lost on the Navajo people. During World War 2 and the Cold War, the United States government illegally violated treaties with the Navajo to mine and transport uranium on their land, resulting in outbreaks of radiation sickness and cancer, and later deaths. The generational impacts of this mining continue to this day.

The United States, in its ongoing dream of expanding its empire, seeks to procure uranium for energy, military, and economic purposes. Navajo protest is not congruent with this dream, and so businesses and the federal government have tirelessly worked to undermine Navajo sovereignty and steal the coveted uranium ore from the land which the Navajo call home, and transport said uranium over that land. 

What results is the following. 

1. A demonstration of U.S. colonialism in action. The 1868 Bosque-Redondo treaty established the Navajo reservation (the largest U.S. reservation), and Article IX of said treaty established the United States’ authority to build railroads and other infrastructure over the Navajo lands. What is at issue here is a corporation, on behalf of the United States, violating the land of the Navajo, which is in accordance with the wording of the 1868 treaty and the actions which surrounded it (including the termination of U.S. treaties with Indigenous nations in 1871).
2. A demonstration of the necessity for common action and solidarity efforts. In the summer of 2024, the same company had illegally transported uranium. Upon discovering this gross violation of what little sovereignty they were supposedly allowed, the tribal authorities attempted a roadblock, though were too late in doing so, as the uranium trucks had already passed through the Navajo lands. The subsequent resistance eventually resulted in the settlement that is now allowing uranium transport over Navajo Nation lands. This response was drafted and supported by the comprador Buu Nygren, who notably is married to Arizona State Representative and former Prosecutor Jasmine Blackwater-Nygren, and has expressly acted against the wishes of a large number of members within the Navajo Nation, who called for negotiations to be halted.

The perspective of one member of the Navajo Nation who wishes to remain anonymous is that the actions of current President Buu Nygren, and more importantly the colonial overlord government, only serve to hinder the well-being of the citizens of the Navajo Nation. 

The respondent made clear that “Nygren was looked at with hope because he was from a younger generation,” and that “many of the younger voters in the Navajo Nation felt betrayed and lied to.” Nygren has worked with the company Energy Fuels, Inc. and was instrumental in signing the January deal to allow the shipment of uranium through Navajo land. Per the anonymous source, “When Navajo people want freedom over their land, it becomes frustrating that the President of the Navajo Nation agrees to allow uranium transport and mining again.”

To this day, communities across the Navajo Nation are impacted by the mining of uranium. One such community is Church Rock, which has a long history of mining the uranium the U.S. government used for its nuclear weapons. In 1979, Church Rock, a small community of about 2,950 (of which only 20 are non-Indigenous), was the subject of outrage after a uranium spill on the Rio Puerco. The disaster, which is to date the largest nuclear disaster in U.S. history, and the third largest accidental release of radiation after Chernobyl and Fukushima, is all but forgotten. Just two months prior to Church Rock, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown occurred, and the national response was immediate, with President Jimmy Carter visiting the site just days after. Church Rock was never visited by a U.S. President to address the disaster. The impact of the Church Rock disaster is not well researched, with a 2003-2007 study through Clark University, and an EPA profile being the only major sources of research on the matter. Nygren’s allowing the uranium operations to begin again is a disgusting insult to the survivors and victims of Church Rock, and is a clear indication of where his interests stand, that being with capital, and not his constituency.

The Bosque-Redondo treaty again demonstrates that the United States interest in the Navajo Nation is purely colonial. Wherever the U.S. stands to gain, the Navajo people will lose. According to the anonymous interviewee, “The land given to us by Bosque-Redondo is not suitable for agriculture or building a life on. The education and medical resources we receive are the absolute bare minimum. The U.S. Government took advantage of us in 1868, and now we are again seeing the effects.”

When asked about how to combat the transport of uranium and other colonial actions, the respondent said, “The younger Navajo 7th generation needs to think about the implications of what our ancestors taught us and participate in the sovereignty we have now. We need to make our government accountable for us. Protests that are happening must continue in the form of blocking highways and disrupting infrastructure. We need to take charge for what is ours, because if we don’t, we can say goodbye to our land and sovereignty. If the U.S. comes to take what little sovereignty we have, will we just let that happen?”

The respondent encourages everyone, both Navajo and not, to complain to chapter houses [Local Navajo Nation representative organizations], which are across the U.S., and make your voices loud. “This shouldn’t be pushed under the rug like everything else has with our nation.” 

The continued struggle against U.S. colonialism by the Navajo people is a demonstration of the need for an internationalist struggle against U.S. colonialism and imperialism in all corners of the empire. The Navajo cannot be left to stand alone in their struggle, because their struggle is the struggle of all colonized and working peoples under the violent oppression of the imperialists. The Navajo Nation has for centuries been fighting a war that can only be won through the upending of the whole capitalist imperialist system. This war will be won by the self-conscious uniting of the Indigenous nations, New Afrika, and the conscious workers of the oppressor nation on a truly internationalist foundation built on a struggle for self-determination of all oppressed peoples.

“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.

Up to half of this “aid” has been in the form of shrouds for Palestinian dead, and the remainder has not been distributed. No food or supplies have reached the population since the 2nd of March. Almost everyone inside Gaza is suffering from severe malnutrition, with disease rampant and medical services overwhelmed and under constant bombardment. Over 3,000 people have died in the past two months. Ninety-eight people were killed on Tuesday this week.

They aren’t sending aid.

They’re sending tanks.

A comprehensive invasion is currently ethnically cleansing the strip from north to south. The zionists have established increasingly shrinking “humanitarian zones,” outside of which Palestinians are killed on sight, and have forced the nearly 2 million surviving Palestinians in Gaza into highly concentrated “refugee camps” in the south. The zionist state regularly bombs these refugee camps, resulting in horrific casualties. Since the 15th of May, the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, israel’s bombardment of the surviving population of Gaza has intensified to unprecedented levels. Around 100 people are being killed every day by the relentless bombings. 

Every leading scholar on genocide worldwide is calling this what it is, but the mainstream media refuses to report accurately on conditions in Gaza. They refuse to admit that this is an intentionally targeted genocide, being waged with our tax dollars, our “defense” industry, and our complicity. Instead they are under standing orders to continue to run PR for the genocidal zionist occupation of Palestine. The world’s governments continue to make symbolic gestures, denouncing the occupation’s actions in words while continuing to support it in practice..

The United States is the primary beneficiary and driver of this zionist atrocity; all pressure must be exerted on the United States government to cease. This genocide is U.S.-backed, U.S.-funded, and is being carried out with tactical direction from U.S. soldiers.

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY IN THE ZIONIST HOLOCAUST.

Immediate action is desperately needed on all fronts:

Arms shipments to the zionist occupation of Palestine must be stopped immediately. Visit workersinpalestine.org/who-arms-israel for a list of weapons companies involved in materially enabling the genocide.

Relief is desperately needed for the hundreds of thousands of people starving under intense bombardment. Visit gazafunds.org to contribute to relief funds, every donation helps the people of Palestine resist genocide, every donation is a potential life saved.

Visit chuffed.org/project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza to help provide e-sims to keep Palestinians in Gaza in contact with their families and the outside world.

Visit bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott for information on which companies are investing in, or directly involved in the occupation. 

Spread this message everywhere you can. This Holocaust is being systematically covered up through mainstream media silence and social media censorship. Visit clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2025-05-23-emergency-bulletin-zionists-begin-last-stage-of-genocide for the web version of this article, or unity-struggle-unity.org/palestine-emergency-bulletin-tri-fold for a printable PDF copy. Get this message into as many hands as possible! With every hour that passes more innocent men, women, children, and babies are being murdered. U.S. bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes, built with parts from Canada, the E.U., targeted by surveillance drones from the U.K. 

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY. 

INACTION IS COMPLICITY. 

THIS HOLOCAUST IS BEING CARRIED OUT IN OUR NAME.

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENDING IT.

“Commodities begin to be exchanged because of an act of will: their owners agree to dispose of them reciprocally. In the meantime, people gradually come to rely on use-objects produced by others. Constant repetition makes exchange into a normal social process.”

“Our commodity owners learn, then, that the same division of labor that makes them into independent private producers also makes the social production process — and their relations within it — independent of them, the producers themselves: they learn that their independence from one another emerges in and is complemented by a system of all-around dependence on things produced by other people.”

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

Recently, Cde. Potato published a work in Red Clarion entitled “No One is Coming to Feed Us.” While the piece brings to the forefront important issues regarding food supply chains in the United States, its surface level analysis coupled with individualistic calls to action reflect a deeply disruptive tendency within the contemporary communist movement. This paper serves as a substantive critique to the faulty theoretical lines of thought contained within Cde. Potato’s piece, while also providing a new framework for systematically addressing political issues that will aid us in our struggle to obtain political power and bring about a socialist state.

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

As communists, using scientific analysis of contemporary and historical social relations to determine the correct path of revolutionary struggle is the key aspect of our work. What differentiates Marxism from other pseudo-intellectual attempts at social analysis is that humans are not prescribed natures as independent actors or socially dependent subjects, but are understood in their contradictory truth as both. As an individual you can act in ways that benefit both yourself and those around you. You can go vegan, reduce food waste and compost the rest, and even plant native flowers to help local pollinators. The issue with individual action lies not in its moral nature as a good thing that you should do, but in its quantitative relation to broader society. One person going vegan in a country of over three hundred million is going to have a negligible effect on average consumption habits and their subsequent environmental impacts. However, local concentrations of thousands of vegans and a national population of over a million can begin to introduce qualitative changes in broader society. This is the dialectical nature of social development.

Historical progressions in social-economic relations keenly reflect this process. The bourgeoisie did not always exist, nor did they simply emerge from the mist to bring about a new age of gunpowder and roaring steel. Instead they emerged slowly out of the contradictions of feudal society. These small groups of proto-bourgeois eventually found one another and began to organize towards the interests of their class. Bit by bit the bourgeoisie concentrated and began to disrupt the feudalist biospheres. By the time feudalist society caught onto this process it was already too late to prevent the capitalist age. Feudalist classes had two options: they could either consign themselves to a slow death or face the guillotine. The bourgeois eventually won their class war through bitter struggle and brought about the contemporary age, in which capitalism has subsumed and guaranteed the death of all former social divisions of labor.

Anyone who calls themselves a communist must understand this process, as it is by the same means which we will bring about communism. There are no shortcuts or tricks that allow us to avoid direct confrontation and simply declare the world anew. We are as much subjects to history as we are its progenitors. Winning our war with the bourgeoisie will necessitate a strict dedication to proven revolutionary strategies and the scientific development of new tactics informed by historic failures and contemporary material conditions. The population of cadres politically developed enough to engage in such a struggle may still be small in number, but just as the bourgeoisie and feudal lords before them, we will achieve our social revolution through quantitative action.

Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for our movement. In the face of the end of unimpeded imperialist expansion, the liberal mask of the American empire has fallen. The bourgeoisie have turned their gaze to the core in the hopes that by ripping out the copper wire and using the floorboards as fuel they can hold out against a global turn towards anti-imperialism. We have seen this self-destructive tendency emerge in several ways. On the international scale, the American bourgeoisie have begun to forcibly open up the empire’s vassal states for rapid and brutal economic exploitation. This has primarily emerged through the use of economic crises induced via tariffs, the threat of annexing territories, and the move to end NATO to demonstrate the European bourgeoisie’s reliance on the United States as an occupational force. While these moves have shocked liberals within the imperial core, they are simply a continuation of the empire’s shift towards open imperialist brutality. The longstanding strategy of obscuring the violence necessary to maintain the settler and aristocratic laboring classes has been replaced with an ideological drive toward fervent celebration of complicity in the brutal murder of the globally hyper-exploited. With socialist and anti-imperialist resistance drastically reducing the ratio of surplus-value that can be extracted from the third world, the first world has been turned to as a fresh store of labor and resources prime for rapid primitive accumulation. 

On the national scale, we have seen the violent enforcement of the patriarchal social division of labor through the targeting of transgender people as a third sexed class. Making state backed and extralegal violence against transgender people an acceptable social reality makes all deviations from gendered norms, particularly those done by women (trans or otherwise), a viable marker for increased levels of exploitation. Regarding the nationally oppressed, the state has abandoned the policy of courting select segments of these populations to increase their tokenistic representation in the exploitative classes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and aristocratic labor to justify the continued brutal immiseration of the vast majority of their populations; replacing it with the open and fetishized brutality of their hyper-exploitation. This too is not unprecedented. Over the last two decades the state has forced migrant laborers into increasingly precarious conditions of survival through the slow erosion of legal protections, the expansion of surveillance, encouragement of settlers enacting extralegal violence, and the expansion of administrative violence through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Conditions of precarity that have forced this population into becoming a slave-like class of hyper-exploited laborers.

With capitalism’s barbarism now laid bare, millions have been galvanized to take action against these systems of exploitation. While the revolutionary energy of this moment is undoubtable, the ability of any of these movements to effectively harness them to bring about lasting social change is doubtable at best. Once again liberals squander this energy through haphazard and disorganized fits of reaction, such as the recent “economic blackout” that excluded small businesses from their supposed boycott of the American economy, or the national “hands off” protest which included an ideologically muddled list of complaints and no real demands. Those who have yet developed socialist consciousness mistake these protest movements as the means to develop and consolidate power. However, their lack of organization and long term planning leads to apathetic nihilism among the masses when the movements inevitably fail to achieve any of their idealistic goals. As long as there is no a communist party to lead the masses and uplift them from base trade union consciousness, these spontaneous actions will continue to act as a roadblock in the path of socialist struggle. To seriously address these crises requires us to direct our efforts away from spontaneous action, and towards the extensive construction of the communist movement’s organizational capacity. 

You can engage in this work by joining or organizing a local Marxist Leninist book club. After building up a solid base of educated and militantly consistent cadres can you then direct your organizations capacity around a central project, whether that be communal gardening, mutual aid, becoming an anti-ice rapid response network, etc. This tiered process of development will provide you the means to effectively harness local revolutionary energy to not only enact social change, but to slowly institutionalize your organization as a node of political power. This essential work on the micro level will aid in the eventual consolidation of these nodes into a communist party that can harness our collective power towards dismantling the empire once and for all. While the struggle may seem daunting, revolutions have never been won in a single decisive blow. Rather they have succeeded against all odds by dismantling the enemy piece by piece.

The Conquest of Crumbs

As communists in the heart of the imperialist core, there is a vast array of issues we must address to build the foundations for socialism. A key issue that is rapidly exacerbating social contradictions is capitalism’s tendency towards ecological destruction through the metabolic rift. Current production processes and consumptive demands outstrip our environment’s ability to reproduce the raw resources these commodities rely upon. A process from which we have witnessed the total destruction of biomes through pollution, over extraction, and the mass eradication of hundreds of species. Faced with the existential threat that climate change poses, the global bourgeoisie was faced with a choice: either perpetuate the capitalist system by having the state intervene in the process of accumulation so as to restabilize the environment’s process of self-reproduction, or remove all fetters and pursue accumulation at any cost in the hopes some miracle cure for climate change will come along. Being nothing more than soulless husks that physically embody the spirit of capital, the bourgeoisie enthusiastically chose the latter. The ramifications of which have only just begun to hit the insulated imperial core. As Cde. Potato notes in their work No One is Coming to Feed Us, the rapid spread of pollution, disease, coupled with climate change are overlapping factors that will cause serious disruptions in food supply chains. Conditions that require us to face a serious question, who will feed the people?

Cde. Potato’s answer to this question is rather slapdash. Instead of outlining tactics and strategies by which local orgs could begin building the logistical means to feed the masses, we are given six individualist actions one can take to help bring about ecosocialism.

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

1. Grow your own food as much as possible to get a functional understanding of what your local ecosystem can produce
2. Support the food sovereignty of Indigenous communities by learning about what they are already doing
3. Support migrant farm workers by learning about what they are already doing
4. Organize to end child labor and prison labor through boycotts, advocacy, and direct action
5. Support local farms with an emphasis on perennials and orchards. Trees take YEARS to replace, these are the farms we can’t afford to lose
6. Recognize that “farmer” is not a specific term that automatically means petit bourgeois. Focus on the ownership class of agribusiness or Big Ag.

The author’s call for everyone to learn how to not just grow their own food, but to can and preserve this food on their own demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how systematic this issue truly is. This call for individual and small group preparation for a food crisis calls to mind the settler-colonial prepper mindset more than an effective socialist strategy. There will never be the spontaneous emergence of enough gardeners and small scale farmers to feed the people. These pressing conditions require a deeper centralization of agricultural production, not its decentralization.

Let’s say that you, as an individual, want to become more independent from national and international bourgeois agricultural production. So you decide to grow some potatoes in your backyard. Let’s assume you’ve got a natural green thumb and through hard work you’re able to produce 80 potatoes each containing about 100 calories. Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day, that would result in only a 1.09% decrease in your caloric dependency. If you were to compare the value of each potato given the labor time it took to till the soil, add fertilizer, consistently water them, cover them with leaves so they don’t freeze, harvest them, etc., the amount of labor stored within each potato would far outweigh the price of any you could buy at the store. Attempting to produce your own food at home, while a lovely hobby, is a complete waste of socially productive labor, as the socially necessary labor time to produce these products at scale will always be far outside your capacity as an individual laborer.

If you wanted to reduce your dependency by 10% you’d have to produce at least 73,000 calories, and spread that caloric intake across several nutritional sources such as onions, potatoes, rice, and beans. Of course this work would be made easier in a collective, but doing so comes with exponentially increasing costs. If each person is working towards the same goal you have to produce 73,000 calories for every member within the collective, divided across X number of crops, times an array of values for each crop’s individual requirements for land, water, and labor time necessary to produce a decent yield. Not to mention the financial costs of tools, seeds, etc. Taking on such a monumental task requires one to effectively answer several questions. For example, how are you acquiring enough land to grow that many crops? The majority of people do not own several acres to just start a farm. Even in suburban areas you’d require several front-and-back yards worth of land to feed more than a handful of people. Furthermore, which members of the working class have enough free time to dedicate themselves to farming on top of their jobs and domestic labor? Existing subsistence farmers still rely on the daily work of the whole family to produce enough food to eat or trade to maintain themselves. Finally, where will you obtain the money to maintain this project? Your comrades may be able to chip in through dues, and perhaps well-off members of your community may donate to such a noble cause. Yet, as soon as a financial crisis hits your pool of funds will dry up. There is simply no way to succeed on this path without the substantial support of an emergent socialist state.

When it comes to Indigenous food sovereignty Cde. Potato tells readers to research what their local Indigenous groups are, offer up support for their food sovereignty projects, and to “…shift your mindset to default the authority on agriculture and land management away from profit-driven science and towards Indigenous knowledge.” While it is good for comrades to know the conditions of their local tribes, the lack of direction given shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of these tribes. Indigenous organizations already have to deal with the incessant ignorance of well meaning liberal “allies” that come to the table with no means or tools to aid tribes in their liberatory struggle, yet demand to be educated and cultivated as activists so they can achieve moral salvation. As communists we must avoid adding to this feckless pool of good samaritans, and instead work to achieve the organizational capacity to work with these tribes in coalition. To have cadres who can be put to work using spades to put spuds in the ground or be an active presence to help in the protection of Indigenous farmers from settler violence. 

Beyond this lack of political activation, Cde. Potato refuses to explain what the struggle for food sovereignty looks like in the United States. In the place of such an explanation readers are given a collage of random news articles about Indigenous organizations, federal programs, and small businesses, with no context given for what each meaningfully does in the long term struggle for tribes sovereign management of their own food production, consumption, and distribution. No thought is given to the ways in which ecological colonization, the capitalist enclosure of land, and the genocidal destruction of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and traditions has made many tribes’ traditional food systems nearly impossible to reproduce. Nor is there consideration given to the fact that not all tribes have a strong traditional relationship to agricultural production. Take the Northern Arapaho tribe. Situated in the plains, the tribe’s primary form of caloric intake came from hunting local wildlife and gathering wild grown food. This in turn led to periods of extreme precarity before the introduction of the horse and gunpowder rifle guaranteed a more consistent means to sustain the tribe on wild game (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 74-75). The same level of nutritional variety and food security did not rematerialize until the 1940’s with the emergence of family gardens and increased levels of small game hunting. Gains that were again swept away within a few decades due to capitalist and colonial encroachment (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 78-80). While contemporary efforts such as the Growing Resilience project on the Wind River Reservation was able to achieve some gains in food sovereignty through the development of home food gardens, further efforts are still drastically constrained by extremely limited access to resources and capital.

To understand what role we as communists can play in the work to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty it’s important to first contextualize the project within contemporary material conditions. Food sovereignty represents several political goals in one project: tribes securing access to plentiful and healthy food, the ecologically sustainable production of this food, and the means to develop agricultural production in relation to their own needs and ambitions. While each is key to achieving the political project as a whole, most Indigenous people in the United States struggle with either hunger or being able to regularly obtain nutritious and healthy food, so of central importance to the current struggle is securing access to food. When food sovereignty is brought up by non-Indigenous people the focus is rarely on ending the systematic colonial violence that is the infliction of hunger on Indigenous populations, rather the ecological benefits of Indigenous food systems are made to be the main focus. This is because liberal interests lie not in aiding Indigenous people in their struggle, but using their knowledge to save the Bourgeois and the settler-colonial classes that served as their foot soldiers from the environmental catastrophe they themselves brought about. 

Despite these ideals placed on the back of Indigenous tribes they currently do not have the means to fix over two centuries of genocidal environmental destruction. The level of development required for tribes to achieve food sovereignty may at first look nothing like the ideals of ecological stability or growing crops native to a geographic area. It may very well require industrial levels of agricultural development owned, operated, and managed by the tribes themselves. Instead of family and community gardens that feed a handful of people, it may look like the efficient use of socially productive labor through the implementation of heavy machinery, greenhouses, and a variety of other large scale forms of agricultural production. The burden of fixing climate change alongside feeding not just their people, but everyone who will remain on Turtle Island, is a burden that should not be placed solely on the back of these nationally oppressed peoples who are pushed to the absolute extremes of precarity. To expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fix the ongoing environmental catastrophe forced upon them with nothing but a small amount of individual financial, moral, or volunteer support, is not merely an absurdity, but outright cruelty.

If communists are genuinely interested in helping to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty, then we have to develop the means to materially support them. The collective efforts of a communist club can do far more to aid these tribes than any individual deciding on a whim to look into what’s going on. A club could work with food sovereignty projects by helping to organize a donation drive, volunteering club members labor to help build and maintain gardens or farms, or find other ways to provide material and logistical support like offering car rides or free mechanical maintenance. Instead of this ceaseless chatter about what Indigenous sovereignty could do for us, we should be figuring out what we can do at scale to aid in their struggles and fight to restore their land.

When addressing the conditions of migrant farm workers, Cde. Potato again refrains from fully addressing what these conditions are and how readers can engage in migrant workers struggles. The only direction readers are given is to follow United Farm Workers (UFW) “for updates and attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training if you can.” Information that is only useful if you live in California, as the UFW has little to no organizational presence outside of the state. Further, this call to action yet again shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of self-organized migrant workers. Workers who are expected to trust absolute strangers with not just their personal safety, but the safety of their family. An astounding amount of trust has to be given for these workers to tell a stranger they’re a migrant, particularly when ICE agents are rounding folks up while in plain clothes and many white people are more than happy to report migrants so they can take part in the spectacle of state enacted colonial violence.

Migrant workers can be found in every state of the country, doing not only local agricultural work, but much of the hard physical labor of proletarian jobs that the broad swath of Americans are totally uninterested in doing. Just as these workers can be found in every state so too can you find organizations fighting to improve their material conditions. Some states may have orgs dedicated to this specific struggle or chapters of national organizations such as the ACLU may have rapid response networks of trained legal observers who can show up to ICE raids to inform people of their rights and do everything within their legal ability to prevent an abduction. As an individual it is far more useful for you to get in contact with one of these orgs so they can train you and put you to use in the local struggle rather than simply keeping up on the news. What migrant workers need is not self-educated sympathy, what they need is organized groups of people who will fight to protect them from the violence of their employers and the settler-colonial police force that is ICE. Politically centralized orgs, even in some of the most rural and conservative states, have been able to use long term strategic planning to prevent both deportations and the construction of ICE detention centers. The only way migrants can regain any sense of stability is through the support of highly organized groups that provide safety through rapid-response networks, legal support, volunteer translators, or even the provision of daily necessities such as food and water.

Child and prison labor are similarly under-discussed by Cde. Potato. Child labor is nothing new to capitalist development. Whether it be in the cotton mills, coal mines, or modern day meat processing plants, the blood of child laborers has long served as a fountain of youth for the dead labor known as capital. Liberalism’s main function in the United States has been to obscure the violent exploitation contained within nearly every commodity so that aristocratic laborers can consume them without guilt, so they can eat their $10 cheeseburger without once thinking about the child who lost their hand carving up the flesh they now so greedily consume. The reappearance of such overt exploitation in the imperial core is merely a sign that the imperialist super-profits that once protected America’s aristocratic laboring class from such conditions have drastically eroded. All this change means is that to maintain current rates of surplus-labor extraction within the imperial core now requires adult laborers’ direct competition with child labor. This will continually get worse until we bring about socialism. Cde. Potato also engages in the longstanding myth that prison labor is a profitable enterprise, and thus believes a boycott could do anything to affect it. Prisons in America do not exist to produce a profit, but primarily serve to suppress and concentrate the nationally oppressed and precariat so as to sequester their classes revolutionary potential. The carceral state is a central foundation for maintaining the imperial settler-colonial state. These conditions cannot be ended without engaging in long term socialist struggle.

If feeding people is a genuine concern and if, as Cde. Potato argues, supporting local farmers is imperative to achieving this goal, then we must undertake a serious analysis of their needs and character as a class.  Despite Cde. Potato’s claims to the contrary, farmers are a petit-bourgeois class. Renting land, tools, and having to buy fertilizer do not disqualify farmers from membership in this class. If renting one’s constant capital is all it takes to not be a member of the petit-bourgeois class, then the local cafe or bakery owner is also a member of the working class because they have to rent the building in which their business operates. Whether they own or lease the land, becoming a farmer still requires having access to the capital and labor necessary to not just start their farm, but maintain ownership of it through the exploitation of surplus labor. This labor may come from their unpaid family members, migrant workers, or seasonal agricultural workers. Whatever the case may be, they actively engage in exploitation and thus cannot be labeled as peasants, proletarians, or even aristocratic laborers. Further, Their reliance on government subsidies and the willingness of locals to buy their produce at higher prices places them in a reactionary position against both the bourgeoisie and those that seek to overturn the state. Without state intervention their class would be fully subsumed by what Cde. Potato describes as “Big Ag.” Not only are they petit-bourgeois, but they serve as an active force of colonization.

It is a simple fact that anyone who owns land in the United States is an active participant in settler colonialism. On the east coast this participation is rarely seen and felt as there the tribes’ physical, social, and historical relationship to the land have been the most thoroughly eradicated. It is in the West, wherein lies the largest concentration of reservations, that we witness continuous acts of heinous violence inflicted on Indigenous populations. Police, white workers, ranchers, and farmers regularly engage in the trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of Indigenous peoples. White settlements built on reservation land expand themselves to further exploit native people and resources, while the means of social reproduction is restrained to conditions of utter desperation within the tribes. These conditions of precarity provide an opportunity for settlers to engage in further exploitation by getting Indigenous people addicted to drugs and alcohol. The war against Indigenous people never ended in the United States, the same tactics and tendencies have been in continuous use by colonizers for well over 500 years. Liberal society simply chooses to wash away the blood on its hands by silencing Indigenous voices and sequestering their violent subjugation to the least populated areas of the country. 

Local farmers are just, if not more, guilty of perpetuating this systematic violence. They have no legitimate claim to the land they till and grow food on beyond that which is enforced by the settler-colonial state. The right of eminent domain makes this relationship clear, as any land can be claimed by the state for the expansion of infrastructure to benefit the military and the national means of production. This makes their class one of highly concentrated, yet split reaction against all those who may attempt to expropriate their land and capital, i.e., the industrial bourgeois, the state, and Indigenous tribes.  This is why as communists we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the anarchist tendency to reduce every class and struggle to that of David and Goliath. Just because a class of people views the bourgeoisie as a threat does not mean that they are our ally in the socialist struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie’s reliance on the capitalist system of exchange to maintain their means of production and access to a wide pool of exploitable labor puts them in a natural opposition to the socialist cause. Even if that were not the case, Lenin’s critique of the cooperative movement remains a salient reminder of why we must struggle against these anarchist tendencies contained within Cde. Potato’s work:

“Do you really think that the capitalist world will pave the way for the cooperative movement? Capitalism will try to take power over the cooperatives by any means necessary. This ‘anti-authoritarian’ cooperative group of English workers will be crushed in the most ruthless way possible and will be made into servants of capital. They will depend on capital via a thousand threads so that the newly created trend, which you sympathize so much with, will be caught as in a spider’s web. Pardon me, but all of that is unimportant! Those are all details! What is needed is direct action of the masses, and as long as that is not happening, nothing can be said about federalism, communism or social revolutions. Those are all children’s toys, prattling without any firm ground under our feet, without power, without means, and it does not bring us any step closer to our social aims.”

Vladimir Lenin, A meeting between V.I. Lenin and P.A. Kropotkin

Capitalism will not allow you to leave its social relations! You can free yourself as much from their overwhelming pressure using collective farming, housing, cooking, etc. as a submarine can free itself from the pressure in the Mariana Trench by opening up its hatch. The capitalist class will smash you into mush just as it has done with every attempt at individualist revolution for well over two centuries. The choice is simple. Engage in vanguardist organization, or die being remembered for nothing but hindering the revolutionary movement. In order to win, these petit-bourgeois anarchist fantasies must be smothered in their bed, before we lose another decade to their cult worship of spontaneous and individual action.

If you want power you have to think as if you already have it. You have to think about how resources will be transported, you have to think about how people will be supported, think about where funds will come from, think about how to maintain people’s morale, and you have to take your enemies seriously. If we take for granted the fact that local farmers’ agricultural production will be of key logistical importance in the revolutionary struggle, then to prevent local farmers’ total capture by reactionary forces our short term strategy must be to direct the energy of their class struggle against our mutual enemies. Such work has already been done in getting farmers to join the ecological struggle against the construction of pipelines by arguing against the use of eminent domain and demonstrating to them how their farm could be destroyed if a leakage were to occur. Further work can be done to organize the struggle against factory farms due to their mass production of and spread of livestock diseases. Gaining the full trust of these farmers in the socialist cause will necessitate the construction of a sophisticated party that has the logistical means to ensure their goods are transported and traded at a fair price, can secure the maintenance of their means of production, and possibly reduce the economic pressures they face by providing free technical, mechanical, or physical labor through party cadres. To manage this contradiction of aiding this settler class and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, the emergent socialist state’s mass agricultural production must be placed under the management of Indigenous experts. Through this process the land and capital of industrial agriculture can be expropriated into the hands of Indigenous tribes, providing the foundation for the eventual expropriation of all settler-controlled land for the benefit of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples.

This paper is not a condemnation or a call to shy away from the necessary work to provide food security for the masses. It is however a call for comrades to recognize the path to do so is not an easy one with simple solutions. Taking on the task to feed the people is a vital struggle for our movement to take on, and doing so will significantly aid the development of our logistical capacity and political power. If your club or organization is interested in taking on this work then you should follow these steps: first, ensure you have developed the institutional means to take on and cultivate new cadres. If local needs outstrip your organization’s capacity and it collapses, that will harm the movement far more than developing the essential skill of patience within your cadres. Second, secure a regular supply of food through donations, organizational funds, or whatever means are at your disposal. Third, find and build connections with those in your area who lack the means to secure food on a regular basis. Learn their stories, struggles, and work to find out what they want and need. Fourth, connect with other organizations doing this work. Ask how they’ve come to their current strategy, what has worked and what’s failed, see if there’s any way you can support one another.

The struggle for a socialist world is not a game and there is no salve by which we can fix all the harm capitalism has brought upon humanity. The only path for liberation is to engage in massive struggle propelled through the people. As communists our responsibility is to become a collective leadership the masses can trust, to not just courageously overturn the present, but to safely guide them through this tempest with vision unclouded by idealism. When the people ask the question of who will come to feed them, our goal must be that it comes with the quick reply, “The party is here to feed you.”

Citations

Arthur, Melvin, and Christine Porter. 2019. “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 9 (2): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.012.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1902) 1961. What Is to Be Done? Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press.

Over the coming weeks and years the three stages of the ceasefire agreement are supposed to be completed (that is, if the zionists do not reverse the process). The conditions are: the beginning of a ceasefire, the releasing of settler hostages, the freeing of Palestinian political prisoners, the clearing of IOF forces out of Gaza, and humanitarian relief. Stage two formally establishes the ceasefire and consists of more freeing of Palestinian political prisoners. Stage three is the great reconstruction of Gaza.

In the past, Democrats pointed fingers at the Bush family for their genocides in Iraq. Now, Palestine, Gaza, this is their genocide. The Democratic Party genocide. The Biden-Harris genocide. They said the other party would do genocide worse — but now it is wholly the operation of the Democratic Party. Still, arguing Trump is worse when it comes to Gaza can be ascribed only to ignorance and lies. Every Democrat who said there was no way to stop the genocide has nothing to say now. Nothing remains in the bank of excuses — it is empty, they have no choice but to embrace reaction even more explicitly and to deny the blatant reality that has arrested their efforts.

Reactionaries will try to sell the lie that this ceasefire changes the entire situation. Fundamentally, no change in the relation between colonizer and colonized has been affected. Palestine remains in antagonism with the zionist entity; struggle for the liberation of Palestine continues as long as the zionist entity continues to exist. It is a temporary move, not a permanent qualitative leap.

It is important to stress this because as we write these words, the zionist imperialist running dogs are now proceeding to storm the streets of Jenin in the West Bank (after already having stormed Jenin time and time again in the years of constant attack and bombardment). Zionists are ordering displacement of Palestinian people in Jenin and are trying to kill the Palestinian resistance there, which is itself, like Gaza, a home of refugees displaced from other Palestinian communities. To the degree that Gaza is able to live in so-called “peace” shall be the degree to which Jenin is being bombed and raided.

Gaza — every city; north, south and central — is left completely in ruins. Not a single part has been untouched, there are but rubble and broken families scattered about, the people dreaming of relatives that today only exist as memories. Already before October, Gaza suffered high rates of PTSD, depression, and poor mental health — particularly among youth. How much has it risen, after 400 days? Now more than ever before, the terrorized Palestinian people will fight for their nation; the Palestinian people have repeatedly had to bury entire family lines and have been militarized by it. If it was to be argued that this was about clearing Gaza of resistance fighters, even the highest-ranking zionist officials know (though perhaps want to forget) that this is impossible — unless every Palestinian person is murdered. The women and youth are now militarized. Gaza’s streets were filled with civilians chanting “we’d rather die than be humiliated.” And this is why zionism can only mean the complete extermination of the Palestinian people. A permanent ceasefire is impossible — it will not hold, it is simply extra time for the zionist entity; a ceasefire is an unsolved antagonism, it will last as long as the previous ceasefire that was agreed to in 2021. There have been many ceasefire agreements — practically every zionist operation in Gaza has ended with a ceasefire, though the firing never ceases — and soon after the zionist offensive against Palestine started back up in full swing.

We have to stay vigilant. Palestine must remain our pulsing priority, all the more so because we are in the imperial core — the decaying, moribund, spiritually dead core that has been trying and failing miserably to wash its hands of all of the Palestinian blood that has stained it. 

What, in any case, is a ceasefire when the West Bank is still under attack? What is ceasefire while relentless, unyielding settler expansion continues into Gaza, along with the continued colonialist whitewashing and demolition of everything Palestinian? What is a ceasefire when Palestine is still under blockade, when Palestine still cannot control its resources and the zionists can cut them off at any time, when Palestinians do not even have houses to live in during wintertime?

Criticism must be made of those who insisted only upon “ceasefire now” in the west: a westerner is someone drowned in material privileges from the super exploitation of the entire world. On this basis, chauvinism is a conditioned trait of the westerner. To be cured of it they must be persistently, unceasingly educated in a decolonial Marxist politic that leads them to supporting resistance of the third world against “their own” bourgeoisie, imperialism, and colonialism. “Ceasefire now” accomplishes nothing in this direction — it only requires temporary attention to a colony, rather than the persistent demand for the immediate liberation of the colony. We will not stop and shall not rest until the dissolution of zionism. “Ceasefire now” only means taking the knife out of the back of the oppressed by a few inches. It neither removes the knife nor covers the wound. It does not start any process of healing and restoration. This demand being so strongly emphasized will bring with it many “pro-Palestine” westerners who only care for Palestine when the terror is most explicit — and they will be distracted and apathetic. These people will forget about Palestine and will turn away to join the rest of the world in its collective amnesia and complicity. 

We have a ceasefire, but it is a ceasefire within the bounds of genocide. On the part of zionists and the imperialists which direct them, the point is still to make Palestine nonexistent, and to make the Palestinian people a bygone fact. Netanyahu tried to delay the ceasefire agreement — one of the many signs that the zionist entity is simply, by virtue of existence, incompatible with peace. And on the morning of January 29th, a zionist air strike murdered ten Palestinians in the West Bank, purportedly “militants.” Every Palestinian is a militant to the zionist entity because the Palestinians have dared to not be eradicated. 

It is being argued this ceasefire is an agreement the Trump administration helped push — this interpretation is incorrect. A certain use for this claim might be found as a jab at the genocidal Biden administration and the genocidal Democratic Party to show how, for all their supposed “progressivism” and “concern for human rights,” they did not stop the genocide or even bring about the ceasefire. Instead, they did the opposite. But this forgets what is crucial; the ceasefire agreed to was the same one the Palestinian resistance itself several months ago proposed, which the zionists initially rejected. When it comes to the ceasefire, one point must be borne in mind: the Palestinian resistance has forced it through political-military power. They have forced it through mortars and explosives, through liquidating tanks and by shooting back at zionist invaders. It was not the doing of any one person, but rather of the Palestinian resistance going on the offensive. The zionist entity spent 400 days fighting against the Palestinians for daring to refuse quiet submission to holocaust. The spirit of the Warsaw ghetto uprising existed within them, and all the passion went into fighting zionism. All the genocide, all the killing, and yet the Palestinian resistance has only become stronger. By the end of it, the zionist entity was simply losing, and they couldn’t possibly make it appear otherwise except to their most rabid supporters.

The zionists cannot win what they have already lost. They bombed all of Gaza, terrorized all its people but Hamas and Al-Qassam are still standing in Gaza today. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Al-Quds brigades are still standing. The PFLP and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades are still standing. And more brigades are emerging in the embrace of mass spontaneous demonstrations.

Marxists will always support armed resistance by Gaza and Palestine. “Well-meaning” young Marxists like to argue that zionists are first to attack in nine cases out of ten, and that in the case of October, the al-Aqsa flood, they had no choice; that the root cause stems back far before October. Perhaps in the context of talking to very confused people, this is sensible (hasbara monopolizes upon the insistence that there was no sign of this uprising coming and that it was some wanton act of violence), and most certainly this has to do with social context before October — but ideologically speaking, this is fundamentally not the point, because regardless of when the oppression began, Marxists support uprisings of the Palestinian resistance, supports national liberation wars, and supports them with utmost enthusiasm regardless of who attacks first, regardless of if it seems “unexpected” or not, regardless of whether or not it seems to have been timed correctly or strategically, regardless of all the ploys of the oppressor to placate the population and surrounding countries with deceptive promises and false peace treaties. With Palestine, the concern is not whether one side or the other attacked first. The concern is national liberation and the blow against imperialism and settler colonialism — an attack on capitalism itself. The violence of the oppressed is supported because it is scientific and a cleansing force against colonialism and imperialism.

All eyes must remain on Gaza because the zionists will violate the ceasefire again; it is not a matter of if but of when. It will come in the form of savage zionist terror that manages to surprise the entire world again and become even worse than before. 

All eyes must remain on Palestine, but also on Lebanon and Yemen, both of which the zionist entity will repeatedly aggress against regardless of this ceasefire agreement. 

And all eyes must remain on all the agents of terror who in one way or another perpetuated this genocide. They must not be allowed to sleep in peace. We shall swamp them with the irate and strenuously haunt them with the deceased. And when the ceasefire inevitably fails, it is they who will be at fault for all of the renewed suffering and the renewed terror.