The Connecticut River Valley was home to many Indigenous tribes before European settler colonialism. The area now known as Hartford was held by the Suckiag Tribe until they were ethnically cleansed by Dutch and English settlers. Suckiag was valuable due to its prominent position along the Connecticut River. Ever since the displacement of its Indigenous populations, the city now known as Hartford has been a “rearguard garrison”¹ for settler colonialism in Occupied North America and imperialism across the globe. When English Hartford was founded in 1636, the Connecticut colony consisted of scattered settlements along the Connecticut River. These towns acted in self governance for the first time to declare war against the Pequot Nation, which governed what is today southeastern Connecticut. Settlers from the river valley towns sent delegates to Hartford, where the colonial court issued its decree to recruit 30 men from each town to commit genocide of the Pequot. The English also recruited hundreds of soldiers from the Narragansett and Mohegan Nations to assist in the war effort. Together, they killed most of the Pequot and forced the survivors into slavery, with the English seizing all their land. The English successfully took advantage of the competition between Indigenous nations in Connecticut, a tactic of exploiting existing contradictions the modern U.S. state now regularly employs to destabilize nations. Of course, the temporary allies, the Narragansett and Mohegan, also saw all of their land – at first slowly, then all at once – stolen by settlers in the ensuing, decades-long land grab. 

Hartford’s dominant industries at this time were agriculture and rum distillation. Both were dependent on slave labor; in Hartford, Black and Indigenous enslaved people worked the farms, while in the Caribbean they harvested sugarcane that was fermented and shipped up the eastern coast to Hartford and other northern cities. These Caribbean plantations were made dependent on such cities for food supplies, because even though the islands could grow ample food, sugar was the only crop produced on the land since it was more profitable to sell. The Caribbean experienced waves of manufactured famine that continue to this day. Census data for slavery in Hartford only goes back to 1791. In that year there were 263 enslaved people in Hartford out of 2,764 in the state. There were 430 “free persons” (free Black citizens) in Hartford who were members of the city’s proletariat and sub-proletariat. The first recorded murder victim in Hartford was a Black man named Louis Berbice, murdered by his enslaver in 1639. The enslaver, Edward Opdyck, faced no punishment. 

From Garrison Town to Inventor’s Workshop

Hartford became a manufacturing city beginning around the 1850s, when Samuel Colt opened the largest private gun factory in the world. Colt revolvers were key to westward expansion, used by both individual settlers and the U.S. army. A half century earlier, Eli Whitney initiated the local mass production firearms industry with the interchangeable parts design, developed out of a factory in New Haven. A year later, he would invent the cotton gin, kickstarting an exponential expansion of slavery production and New Afrikan misery. Additional companies, such as Billings and Spencer, Spencer Arms, Winchester Repeating Arms, and Smith & Wesson have bestowed a historic tie between settler militarism and Connecticut. 

The city’s role in colonial occupation did not change, but its form of service took on a new, advanced appearance. Amerika’s new settler armies needed advanced, mass-produced weaponry that could overwhelm the western Indigenous nations still fighting for their national territory. Tucked away safely in the Northeast and bolstered by several centuries of superprofits, Hartford was well-positioned to serve as an inventor’s workshop for the next era of military technology. 

We see the same transition fulfilled today by “israel” in Occupied Palestine. The zionist entity is both a garrison launchpad for the U.S. in Asia, and the empire’s principal inventor of military technology. Their weapons are primarily used against Palestinians to continue the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Their secondary purpose is that of testing and experimentation; advanced technology is exported from occupied Palestine to wherever in the world the empire needs them for asymmetric violence, including U.S. cities such as Hartford. 

From Inventor’s Workshop to Financial Hub

Hartford’s modern image as a finance center is characterized by massive insurance companies whose offices take up most of the city skyline. Connecticut’s capital is the birthplace of the insurance business itself. River captains, dealing in enslaved people and foodstuffs for slavery plantations, wanted to avoid the expectable financial hits from the dangerous sailing business; storms, piracy, and disease were threatening enough to the capitalists’ fortunes that it benefited the overall class to compensate one another when an individual merchant lost their investment. Thus, they created a system of profit and risk sharing among the merchant class. The financial logistics of slavery laid the foundation for the emergence of the insurance industry. Hartford is still considered the insurance capital of the world, although there are fewer actual insurance employees working in the city than in the past. 150 of these companies generate $16 billion a year combined. They are centered in the downtown area and housed in the largest office buildings. This industry is, of course, white dominated.

Lastly, Hartford and Hartford county continue to serve the U.S. war machine with several weapons manufacturers. In West Hartford, the Colt factory produces M4 rifles that are continuously sent to Occupied Palestine. The modern “inventor’s workshop” has moved across the Connecticut River to East Hartford, where Raytheon operates a five-story “research” facility to engineer new weapons systems like radars, missiles, and drones for the US and its vassals. A short walk away, Pratt & Whitney builds engines for the F35 fighter jet. While many of these weapons workers are commuters, it is also the perception among community members that the companies are too powerful and entrenched for anti-imperialists to challenge them.  Tracking the city’s development from garrison fortress, to inventor’s workshop, to financial hub of global imperialism, can we really say Amerika was ever not fascist? No, we cannot; it is only the form and proximity to genocide that has changed. 

Demographics

The city has 17 neighborhoods, which are more sharply segregated by national and class contradictions than the average U.S. city. Population maps show that the New Afrikan population is primarily segregated to the north end of the city. The New Afrikan neighborhoods are separated from the Hispanic neighborhoods by insurance offices and the I-84 highway, constructed in 1964 to connect the downtown offices with the white suburbs in West Hartford. As in many cities, the construction of the giant highway through the city devastated the “minority” neighborhoods it crossed over. 

National Groups in Hartford according to 2020 census

Map of the I-84 Highway through Hartford

Although the downtown area saw the highest rate of population growth between 2010 and 2020 (increasing by 53%), this area is still notoriously empty at night and on weekends, when office commuters leave for the suburbs. Downtown is the only neighborhood with a majority white population in Hartford. Note that the North Meadows neighborhood has no official population, since the area contains the Hartford Prison and commercial businesses. (See below.)

Hartford Neighborhoods, Population Change 2010 – 2020

We began our social investigation at the intersection of Park and Main St. In 1969, this intersection was the site of an uprising of the Puerto Rican community against a white biker gang. As the story goes, a white man belonging to the Comanchero biker gang assaulted an elderly Puerto Rican, and the community decided they had had enough. The groups confronted each other in the streets, but Hartford police only arrested Puerto Ricans. This agitated the community even further. The cycle of protesting, followed by police repression, followed by even heavier protesting, would continue for weeks, until an even greater escalation occurred. On August 29, 1969, West Hartford police shot Dennis Jones, a 16 year old New Afrikan, to death. Two days after the murder, a slumlord tenement building burned down, killing three people. These two events were too much for the community to bear, and people took to the streets against both police and white-owned businesses in the north end. But unlike the “Comanchero clash,” this time New Afrikans and Puerto Ricans fought together. The protests spread from the Clay Arsenal Neighborhoods, through downtown, and into Charter Oak and South Green. By September 5, over 500 people had been arrested and 4 people were shot. 

1969 Hartford Uprisings, August-September 1969

This one and a half month period marks the most significant uprising of the oppressed communities in Hartford. Since then, Puerto Ricans have gained representation on the Hartford City Council, giving the community a chance for a larger “piece of the pie” of imperial superprofits. They now have a place in government to address economic inequalities and police oppression. Of course, representation in local politics has not smoothed over the glaring contradictions between different nations in Hartford. Puerto Ricans are still concentrated in specific neighborhoods that receive lower investment ratings than nearby white neighborhoods, and the contradictions of homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty are more present in the Hispanic neighborhoods than in the white-dominated West End. Puerto Ricans make up 74% of the Hispanics in Hartford, but there is a significant Dominican population (8%) now as well. 

Beginning each outing with a briefing of goals and logistics, we set out in both directions along Park Street and the surrounding area. Below are the major contradictions we observed. 

A Note On Methodology 

Methodology refers to a system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity. As Scientific Socialists, our area of study is the material world. Our activity is Social Revolution. This means that we study the material world in order to apply the data we perceive — creatively and usefully — towards our material goals. In the context of a social investigation in Occupied North America, our methodology guides us to find those pockets of space and human groupings which could be the situs of a Communist beginning. 

In practice, this means we need to do a cursory study of the local area before committing to a social investigation on the ground. This introductory investigation may require more than just visual information (the phenomena we can see with our eyes in a community). Most often, we will need to study economic and political data as well. For example, studying that an area has an average household income which is significantly less than bordering neighborhoods could clue us in towards an investigation in that area.  

We chose Park St. for several reasons:

1. The area has a high proportion of nationally oppressed people, primarily from Occupied Puerto Rico, but also from the Dominican Republic and other Spanish speaking countries. 
2. ICE has kidnapped more immigrants in Hartford than in any other city. 
3. Most of our political education work occurs in Hartford, making it the best area from which to draw labor. 
4. Visibly, we observe a high degree of homelessness in the Park St. area. 
5. The street has a number of empty residential buildings, indicating ongoing gentrification.

Homelessness

Roughly one third of the people we interviewed were experiencing homelessness of some sort. Some were living in a shelter or a halfway house. Others reported living outside in parks or under building edifices. One person reported an incident of homeless displacement by the city. According to the community member, a group of people were previously sleeping in tents at Barnard Park. The city reportedly moved them and their belongings to a larger park elsewhere in the city, after complaints of drug use. Of course, these community members reported huge difficulties finding housing in Hartford and Connecticut. 

For every one homeless person, there are 28 abandoned properties. At the site of the Comanchero riot, a new luxury apartment building sits empty. Buildings just like it are being built in several neighborhoods, increasing rent beyond what people can afford. For example, in the North End Blue Hills neighborhood, aging and starved of government investment, the Bowles Park Public Housing Complex was torn down to be replaced with Willow Creek. The new development having fewer dwellings is part of the reason why the Blue Hills population decreased 13% between 2010-2020. 

Of the people we spoke to who did have housing, many reported homelessness as the biggest issue in the city. Some had been homeless previously themselves. We also spoke to people who disparaged the homeless, to varying degrees, for presumed drug use and lack of social etiquette. Most, however, assign blame in both directions; they might blame the individual for poor choices, while the government is blamed for not helping them. There was a common understanding that the shelter and post-incarceration assistance programs do not help people find permanent housing. To this, several people brought up abuse that takes place within the shelter system.

In connection with the lack of housing, another major contradiction we observed is the dominance of slumlords. Just about everyone we spoke to who had housing was a renter. Most, if not all, complained about their rents going up every year. We could have asked more follow up questions about people’s specific living conditions, such as whether repairs are made, whether security deposits are returned, etc.  At times, our investigators were too focused on getting a general sense of the neighborhood’s problems, and this likely caused us to leave certain wells of information untapped. One reason for this error was that we were looking for broad themes of oppression, themes that could take center stage in a future agitation program. But any possible theme would depend on the experiences of individuals in the Park St. area, therefore we should have sought a detailed explanation of exactly why housing access is such an issue in the neighborhood. The individual and the whole are two ends of the same dialectic, and we should ruthlessly investigate both if we expect to organize in any community. Going forward, we have a better idea of when we need to ask more follow-up questions, and we declare our intention to do so in the future. As part of our investigation process, some of our investigators created a hotline for community members to report incidences of abuse by the structures that be. People can now report slumlords, police brutality, ICE activity, and other instances of oppression to this hotline. This reporting would not only continue the investigation process, but refer us toward material injustices which could form the basis of a future program. A future program could take on one of several forms: agitation, Mass Meetings, Community Defense or CopWatch, Red Aid (Communist form of Mutual Aid), or another experimental program that solidifies our contacts with the masses. 

Police

Several community members reported feeling a sense of danger on and around Park St., especially at night. They reported high rates of crime and heavy drug use. When asked about solutions to these problems, several responded that more police were needed. This was a relatively prominent idea of a solution for many people. A slightly lower number of people had nothing but bad things to say about the Hartford police. They reported corruption, harassment, and a lack of material assistance from the police. Based on these conversations, the contradiction between police and the oppressed communities is not the sharpest contradiction in this part of the city, currently. However, this is an issue that needs to be “brought back” to the people in subsequent outings. Hartford currently has 3.42 police officers for every 1,000 residents, while the national average in cities of similar size is 1.6. Hartford already has over twice as many police officers as comparably sized cities. The city spends 8.8% of its budget on police. Hartford is happy to throw as much money as possible into the police force. 

However, the community either does not perceive this outsized number of police, or the police do not prevent crime in the way community members expect. We know that the latter is the case, and that police do not prevent crime. In order to bring this issue back to the community, our investigators need to explore some tactical questions that get to the heart of the fundamental antagonism between the community and the police force. Some questions we may wish to put forward are: 

• What kinds of crime do you perceive most in the community? 
• If the current number of police is not enough to prevent crime, how would increasing their numbers address the problem?
• How could the community itself perform the task of protecting local residents?

We should also bring forth the current statistics that show an already outsized police force to cast doubt on the idea that more police would reduce crime.  

Occasionally, the people we were interviewing would ask us about our ideas for solutions to these contradictions. We generally responded with a critique of state institutions and the fact that they do not help the people. We highlighted the need for grassroots organizing that did not simply participate in the election cycle. Most responded positively to these ideas, and were happy to share their contact info to keep up with our progress. On this note, we could have done a better job at seeking the community’s participation in the social investigation itself. A common goal of social investigation is to recruit those you are interviewing – the people who actually live there – into the project itself. 

Individualism 

Individualism was a very common outlook among the people we spoke to. In regards to problems in the city, one person phrased it as “caring but not caring.” We have heard nearly verbatim reports from other social investigations in the past. Previously, someone phrased it as, “It’s like I give a fuck but at the same time I don’t.” This tells us that community members perceive the contradictions around them, but do not believe there is any movement currently capable of addressing them. The result is a recognition of existing oppression, and perhaps feeling bad about it, but not yet taking the crucial step of organizing the community. 

Mutual Aid Groups

We encountered one mutual aid/ charity group, Food4Lives, conducting a free lunch program in Barnard Park. The organizers were from a different area, considering the large amount of cars they brought. They serve meals once a week, drawing crowds of over 50 people each time we see them. We did not interact with the group, mainly because all of the members were busy serving meals to the large crowd. We were also somewhat skeptical of what information the organizers could provide on the local community. In hindsight, this was an error on our part because we should not neglect interacting with organizers who may be from outside the community, especially considering we are also not residents of the Park Street neighborhood. We did speak to some community members who were waiting in line for food, who reported that the group has been serving meals consistently for several months. 

Based on their website, Food4Lives does not appear to have a firm ideological standpoint besides feeding the homeless through regular meal services. Their vision is “a community where homelessness is addressed with compassion, empowering every individual to rebuild their lives.” We will make sure to interact with the group the next time we see them in person. In the meantime, our investigators should brainstorm ways in which we can constructively struggle alongside existing charity groups such as Food4Lives. 

From Investigation, to Agitation, to Organization

Social investigation is an important first step to community organizing, but we cannot investigate forever. Once enough information has been gathered and the key contradictions are identified, the organizers should collectively synthesize this information before returning to the community with the “new” information. To “synthesize” means to combine a number of things into a coherent whole. By synthesizing contradictions, we are taking the reported issues and connecting them to the capitalist system as whole. Therefore, when we return to the community with this synthesized information, it is not “new,” but it is being presented in a different form.  

The agitation stage can take the form of speaking with people, posting flyers, or other creative means of propaganda. Whereas social investigation is primarily about listening to the concerns of community members, agitation requires a more mutual conversation. Social investigation is listen, listen, listen, while agitation is listen, respond, listen, respond. It is a conversation in which we expose the contradictions in their barest form, while gauging the community member’s own opinions and political consciousness. 

For example, we know that homelessness is a fundamental law of capitalist development, that this sub-proletariat serves as a reserve labor pool for the capitalist, and that the Amerikan welfare system tries to paper over this contradiction with a small percentage of imperialist superprofits. In the social investigation phase, we hear all varieties of opinion on the homelessness question. We hear both sympathy and chauvinism from property owners. In the agitation phase, we may push back on chauvinist ideas from the petit-bourgeois, in order to investigate which, if any, progressive causes can be used to organize small property owners. For example, a renter may say something along the lines of, “I feel bad for the homeless and I know pushing them out won’t solve the problem, but I hate it when they trespass on my property.” A statement like this shows at least some level of consciousness on the homeless question, but there is still a clear element of respect for private property and a short term interest in labor discipline against the homeless. This sentiment is also another example of individualism; empathy for the homeless person is subverted because they are being personally impacted in a negative way. While we may not fully challenge these ideas on a social investigation, we should challenge them when we return to the community for agitation. 

Among those already displaying a revolutionary, or at least anti-state, consciousness, we can take the conversations much further, and even begin to approach the person’s thoughts on organization. 

We should expect the politically advanced individual to hold unacknowledged contradictions in their ideology. For example, a person may agree with the need to organize the community, and to hold mass meetings outside the electoral framework. In this same conversation, the same community member might express the long term goal of setting up a non-profit organization, applying for grant money, and other forms of integration with the state. We would agree with the need for grassroots organizing and mass meetings, but would almost certainly disagree with the notion of embedding ourselves in the non-profit complex. Those grants generally come with strings attached. The agitation stage is the correct time to pose these problems to the community member, to start a conversation around correct organizing models. 

The agitation phase should be used as a precursor to more grounded and collective forms of organization. We have identified the mass meeting as one possible method having significant potential in many oppressed localities. The mass meeting is not a new concept, having been utilized by Indigenous nations for centuries, as well as among the “heretics” in Medieval Europe. In more recent times, both the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) took their original forms through a series of mass meetings. For more information on the Mass Meeting, read The Mass Meeting by the Red Clarion. 

Investigation Never Truly Ends

While we emphasize the need to create organizing models that extend beyond the initial investigatory phase, there is also the need to continuously analyze the situation through a dialectical lens. The contradictions are fluid; they may be exacerbated or reduced by a number of factors, especially the state, which may or may not make concessions depending on the situation. To say that the investigation never truly ends means to affirm our role as dialecticians, always looking to criticize and improve our past analyses. 

The All-Empire Worker’s League encourages all its member organizations to conduct propaganda among the masses with revolutionary potential. If you or your organization are interested in beginning or refining a social investigation, do not hesitate to reach out. 

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

1. A garrison refers to a fortified location from which military campaigns are planned and enacted against outside groups.
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The labor union, prior to the entry of the US-bloc into the capitalist-imperialist competition at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, served as the “school” of collective worker action in Europe. It was never so in the US, because the US capitalists simply sent restive workers westward to conduct the continental equivalent of European imperialism but amongst Indigenous peoples. The early 19th century unions were illegal, confrontational, and engaged in direct battle with the bourgeoisie and their capitalist states. Although the western countries reeled from this conflict, they were able to manage the contradiction by doling out the rewards of imperialist exploitation. In Europe this manifested as social democracy; in the US, it took the form of Indigenous genocide and the internal Black colony. By the beginning of the 20th century, it was increasingly in the form of the creation of a “white” (Euro-Amerikan, as opposed to the earlier Anglo-Protestant) national project.

By this time, labor unions had become instruments, not of working class power, but of labor discipline. Unions were legalized and given a stake and a share in the US imperialist project. In this way, the unions were “housebroken” and the mass of the labor aristocracy was broadened just as the frontiers were closed and entry into the petty bourgeois homesteader class was restricted. Failure to recognize this fact (which is obvious to anyone who bothers to investigate for even a moment; see, for instance, the rates of equity held by US workers in real property — the average home equity held in the US is $300,000 — has driven many would-be Communists directly into the arms of reaction.

But what were the features of the labor union that made it a school of communism?

1. Workers were organized and developed experience organizing and running meetings, coming to collective decisions, and exerting power.
2. Collective grievances were compared and conclusions could be collectively drawn as to their source — the contradiction between workers and owners.
3. It was a venue through which the advanced elements and conscious Communist could draw intermediate elements and develop their class consciousness by propagandizing, not only the abstract, but around specific conditions affecting those particular workers.
4. It was directly antagonistic to the continued existence of the bourgeoisie and their state, at least until it was captured.

Present-day labor unions do not possess any of these features. Meetings are pro forma affairs, ill attended, and run by bureaucrats. The unions themselves are managed by professional union hustlers whose job security depends on their capacity to (1) deliver beneficial contracts, (2) come to an agreement with management, and (3) not break any laws, like the ones making it illegal to advocate for revolutionary consciousness or suggest a strike unless the union contract is up.

There is, however, an organ of working class power that possesses these features: the Communist-led mass meeting.

What is a Mass Meeting?

A mass meeting is a gathering of people in one place where they are led by the meeting’s organizers to debate and decide on issues that affect them. The character of the meeting will be determined by, in the first instance, the class character of those in attendance and, in the second instance, by the class standing of the meeting’s leaders. We can think of this as, (1) the potential character of the meeting and, (2) as the direction of change or realization of that character.

A single mass meeting occurs over a period between forty minutes to several hours and is a one-time event. There’s no guarantee that it will develop into a standing organ of working class power, but this question depends on whether the organizers have taken care to answer several underlying issues which will be explained below.

There must be advanced preparation. First, it is important to identify the locality from which the meeting’s attendants are to be drawn. This is ideally an urban working class neighborhood with a high number of nationally oppressed workers and a low rate of real property ownership. This is the mass base of our organizing efforts, and focusing on these areas will ensure a good attendance as well as both a receptive class composition at the meeting and increase the likelihood that anyone drawn into the organization as a result of the meeting will have a revolutionary class standing.

Next, efforts must be made to identify the most pressing concerns affecting the community in question. This is traditionally done by conducting a social investigation. During a social investigation, the organizers go into the community and have detailed conversations with residents and workers. The organizers must keep good notes and direct the topics of conversation into the following areas: (1) the biggest problems the interviewees face on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis; (2) the interviewees’ views on local political figures and bastions of state and civil authority (police, relief workers, religious institutions, local politicians, big politicians, etc.); (3) avenues of relief that are available for community members like local shelters, food pantries, etc.; (4) other local conditions that are particular to that area.

Then, the organizers must analyze the data they’ve gathered. It’s not enough to understand what people say on a surface level. To stop there would be to engage in workerist tailism. The data must be subjected to Marxist analysis, and problems must be understood not only in their surface manifestations, but also in the fundamental contradictions that are causing the problems identified in the reports and investigations. The sharpest contradictions responsible must be sought. The organizers must make explicit the links between these problems, the contradictions that underlie them, and the general tasks of the social revolution in the US bloc: national liberation, sex liberation, and proletarian internationalism. The organizers must have a firm grasp on decolonial, antipatriarchal, Marxist theory in order to avoid the reactionary-opportunist pitfalls that will present themselves.

This analysis is the same kind that’s done when an organization performs other general propaganda work. It is the linking of a particular grievance to the general capitalist system, as embodied concretely in the state and civil society, in such a way as to orient toward proletarian internationalism and a revolutionary outlook.

Once this analysis has been performed and an organizational “line” has been developed which connects the most acute problems of the area with the necessity for organized, antagonistic class action, the necessity to overthrow the bourgeoisie through revolution, the necessity for supporting or attaining national self-determination for the oppressed nations, of national-suicide for the oppressor nation, anti-patriarchal action, etc. — once this has been done, the organization must begin a campaign of mass agitation. A date, time, and place must be set for the mass meeting. Flyers and handbills must be drawn up and copied. Members of the organization must go into the community, armed with this material, and hang posters, have conversations, and hand out literature. The call should be clear: This is the problem; here are its causes; come to a mass meeting to decide (or learn) how to combat it.

If the investigative and analytical stages are carried out correctly, the agitational stage is sufficient, and the date and time are selected with careful attention to the general availability of the masses in the area, then the meeting should be successful. That is not to say that the first few calls for a meeting may not be unattended or sparsely attended. This is not only because of the errors an inexperienced organization is likely to make on their first or early attempts, but also because the organization will not be known and will not yet have currency among the masses.
It is worth noting that the Soviets and councils of the successful Communist revolutions were essentially mass meetings that took on standing form. Indeed, Indigenous nations have been holding mass meetings as the primary method of political engagement for centuries. (See, for instance, Kathleen Duval’s Native Nations: A Millenium in North America, for a survey of Indigenous practices. Random House, 2024). 

What Do You Need?

First and foremost, in order to run a mass meeting you must be organized, that is, you must be a member of a Marxist-Leninist cell that has a defined membership in which labor duties are required of members, has regular and consistent meetings and keeps records, and has written internal rules that govern its structure and actions. Without an organization, it’s impossible to direct a mass meeting effectively or to elevate a mass meeting from a one-time event into a mass organization capable of embodying the will of the working class, which is the ultimate goal.

Your organization must have a sufficient number of real, actually-working members to carry out not only the preparatory tasks, but also to run the actual meeting. We have found that five dedicated cadre-level members is an appropriate benchmark. Each of these five members should be capable of mass work, trained in historical materialist analysis, able to conduct searching social investigations and keep detailed notes, perform analysis on the fly, and have training managing a crowd.

You will also need at least rudimentary graphic design and printing capabilities to prepare the flyers and literature. Your organization will require the use of a large space, whether indoors or out-, to hold the meeting and should secure at least a simple PA system — a megaphone with a detachable mic will suffice. Preferably, all organizers should be able to dress in a manner that marks them out as members of your organization, whether it is a single article of clothing or a shared color. This will allow them to stand out at the meeting and help manage it.

Running the Meeting

It is wise to formally open the meeting by announcing that it’s beginning and asking the attendees to gather around the speaker. Ideally, the speaker will be elevated above the rest of the crowd for visibility and there will be room for at least one other person to stand up there with them.

A short speech is a good way to open the meeting. This should lay out the main topic, any critical ancillary topics, and connect the issue to the imperialist state and the oppressor bourgeoisie. This is a good time to begin getting the crowd involved. Simple questions that can be easily answered (even with just a “yes!” or “no!”) will prime the listeners for engagement and signal that this meeting won’t be a passive affair.

Once the stage is set, the meeting leader should ask the crowd if anyone present has experienced the issue which is the subject of the meeting. If the organizers recognize anyone in attendance who has a particularly good and demonstrative experience, it  can help to call that person to speak first. From this point, tactics will diverge depending on what the organizers intend to do with the meeting. If the goal is just to use the meeting to propagandize, generally elevate class consciousness, test the organizer’s own organization, and make connections with the masses, then the meeting can be comprised almost entirely of calling individuals up to the PA system to speak about their experiences while the meeting leader interposes questions, clarifications, and reframes the issues in a Marxist lens. Once the crowd has been sufficiently propagandized and exhibits a high degree of energy, the meeting leader can deliver a short closing speech to summarize what was said, to draw a broad connection to the capitalist state, to identify the ruling class as the collective enemy, and to stress the need for organization. The meeting leader should propose further meetings and discussions and clearly articulate what organization entails. These somewhat restrained aims are a good target for an organization’s first mass meeting, and may help it develop internal rigor.

That being said, the organizers should never attempt to restrain or repress the organically-occurring maturation of the masses. If the attendees want to engage in debate, discussion, adopt an organizational form, or even settle on concrete steps that can be taken to begin addressing the problem presented, they must not be delayed or put off. The organizers must be ready to capture the energy and foster any kernel of consciousness with real suggestions and real action. This should not turn into a run-away meeting in which the attendees decide to go to war with the state immediately, but neither should the organizers offer platitudes. Real steps may be required.

To that end, it would be wise for the organizers to become familiar with rules of procedure for running mass meetings as an organizational form. These may be home-made, but the latest edition of Robert’s Rules of Order contains good rules for a mass-meeting form that can help an organization run a meeting, maintain a good flow of conversation, and ensure that decisions are made collectively.

The Meeting is Not the End

The most important thing to impart is that the first meeting is only the beginning of organizing. If the organizers wish to push further with their meeting and the mood of the attendees permits it, they should call for a debate on action, set further meeting dates and times, and even consider calling for volunteer officers to serve as an interim executive committee to carry out decisions adopted by the meeting. This body of officers should hopefully contain a mix of the organizers and attendees, and should be subject to elections at the soonest possible opportunity (generally the next scheduled mass meeting).

The organizers should also urge attendees to join any public-facing political education classes they offer. Indeed, this is an excellent opportunity to urge attendees to assist in or join any of the organizers’ other initiatives: Red Aid, community self-defense, etc.

The critical thing is to continue holding meetings, to develop the attendees, and to drive struggle to an ever higher degree. The more meetings are held, the more the class consciousness in the area will be fostered. It is important to ensure that this consciousness does not develop in a reactionary direction, which is why the organizers must be well trained in the most advanced decolonial theory. Armed with the advanced theory and the energy of the masses, the mass meeting is the chief organ of class power available to us at this time.

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

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

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

Political Underdevelopment

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

To quote the USU handbook The Study Group:

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

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

Social Isolation

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

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

Fear of Redundancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Forward

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

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

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

Contact the USU Editorial Board here.

Contact the All-Empire Worker’s League here.

Footnotes

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

In the lead-up to the convention, the Red Clarion published a number of pieces about the CPUSA’s history, lack of democratic processes, and the tripartite problem of its Revisionism, Opportunism, and Tailism, or ROT. This culminated with the article “Claim The Convention,” in which we made it clear that any members who consider themselves Marxist-Leninists needed to seize the convention floor, expel the entrenched leaders, and put forth resolutions representative of CPUSA’s rank-and-file. We insisted that members fight tooth and nail against the party apparatus that was put in place to sheepdog and neutralize them. Of course, we suspected this would be impossible. The bureaucratic inertia of CPUSA has accreted over decades. To chip away at any individual aspect, such as the slate system or the national committee’s vetting of convention resolutions, would be like shooting a charging rhino with .223 — you might inflict a superficial wound, but the beast would still trample you underfoot. To actually slay this gigantic monster, a much higher, illegal caliber would have been necessary.

However, our agitation served a secondary purpose. It exposed the CPUSA and its leadership, before all but the most deranged, hardline party cultists, for the undemocratic careerists and DNC running dogs that they are. In support of our articles, our agents conducted postering and flyering actions at the convention. The most hardline CPUSA members revealed their cultish mentality with their drastic responses to this agitation: destroying (or, in many cases, attempting to destroy) our flyers, and scrawling misogynist insults on them (fitting for the Chauvinist Party USA). These extreme responses are typical of cult-like indoctrination. Some CPUSA members took stacks of 10 posters and ripped them apart. Our proposed resolutions were modest, but the dread they instilled in CPUSA hardliners was palpable. These cultists reacted with fear, revulsion, and logical contortion to justify the perverse “democratic centralism” of their dead organization. This type of panic is an indication of weakness and enervation in an oppressor; it is the fear that they will be exposed to be powerless before the masses; it is the fear that they are being seen as they truly are, and brought to a reckoning.

The utter perturbation of CPUSA’s staunchest advocates proved that, had the infirm and scattered opposition within CPUSA been able to unify, it would have been possible to vanquish the revisionist colossus. In other words, the revolutionary membership was much stronger than it itself believed. Had they organized with intent to derail the corrupt resolutions from the outset, rather than engaging in a Fabian delay to see what would happen, or had they chosen to disrupt the zionist speaker, instead of discreetly walking out, they would have thoroughly exposed the entrenched leaders and party as the enemies of the working class and oppressed peoples that they are. 

Fortunately, although the opposition was unable to act, CPUSA did the movement a favor and chose to out themselves. With their disavowal of settler colonialism as the principal contradiction in North America, which the Red Clarion thoroughly examines in “Against CPUSA’s Colonizer ‘Communism’,” the CPUSA have cast off any pretense to claim the title “Communist.” Through class reductionism, they revealed their fascistic intention to suppress the class struggle. In describing their rejection of settler colonialism as the “primary” contradiction, rather than by utilizing the correct term, “principal,” they proved themselves to be either illiterate or wilful distorters of Marxist theory. In cutting short debate on the proposed resolution to endorse Biden (in all but name) and leaving it to be determined by the incoming national committee, they showed that their own constitution and democratic processes are anathema to them. Through the sleight of democratic process that is the CPUSA slate system, they ensured the ROT at the core of the party remained in power without even the hope of a responsive challenge. Even the supposed floor nominations that occurred were a charade of democracy, an optical illusion for the benefit of the party’s detractors and doubters. The floor nominations appear to have been fixed in advance to nominate primarily sycophantic careerists at the expense of representatives from southern states. Of course the northern, corrupt, chauvinist bureaucracy has once again cut out the Black national heartland!

All of this seems disheartening, we know. Ultimately, however, we must recognize it for what it is: a gift. An enemy cannot be properly fought until it is known. The convention burned away any illusions that the CPUSA is in any way on the side of working and oppressed peoples. The hardliners have given us the gift of self-identifying as a real enemy to struggle against. By arguing against the continued existence of settler colonialism in the North American context, they have also drawn the battle lines along which this struggle will take place. They have denied the anti-colonial struggle and national liberation as preconditions for a just society, and denied that they constitute a vital phase of the social revolution. There is no longer any need to struggle alongside CPUSA as any sort of fellow traveler. They are labor zionists, colonizer “communists,” and may now be derided as the enemy.

NIGHT-VISION – Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, by Butch Lee and Red Rover first circulated in the activist underground thirty years ago. Despite presenting a scathing premonition of how capitalism and neo-colonialism would function in the 21st century — a vision that has only become more accurate since its publication — it remains obscure. The text has been relegated to a peculiar limbo. Its content is much harsher and more discomforting than the cultural criticism that resonates in liberal-academic circles, yet NIGHT-VISION also seems fairly unknown among its intended audience of queer-feminist Marxists, Maoists, and anarchists. In the only other review this author could easily locate, one written 13 years ago, J. Moufawad Paul argues that Marxists may disparage the text’s deviations from orthodox Marxism — for instance, its authors ascribe rationality to the anarchy of production and have an anarchistic enthusiasm for “autonomous struggles in the midst of chaos.” But while the text contains some un-Marxist conclusions and unwieldy notions, these are reasons to read NIGHT-VISION, rather than dismiss it. After all, for the immortal science to deserve its status, it should endure this kind of cage rattling.

NIGHT-VISION contains compelling analyses of gender, nationality, and race, and how these have created different classes and new class struggles beyond those typically described in Marxist texts. Even if some of what Lee and Rover have concocted is dubious, it remains worthy of interrogation. Their perspective, and fiery rhetoric, are a welcome change from the mire of discourse on these subjects found both online and in physical organizing spaces. 

Lee and Rover bake race, gender, nationality, etc. into a modern class structure, developing the idea that oppression forges only discrete classes, and that other identities are “class in drag.” For example, instead of using the standard historical phrasing, in which colonization created Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity as races, the authors argue they were created as classes. They argue for a deeper reading of how race, gender, and nationality alter relationships to production. For instance, they expand upon the Sakaist notion that the white proletariat constitutes a separate class from the Black, Indigenous, and Third World proletariat. They depict how the common exploitation of previously distinct African and Indigenous peoples, who had been of separate races and nations, homogenized them into the monolithic oppressed classes of the Black Slave and the Native. Black peoples’ shared experiences as slaves and the imposition of common languages like English or French created the nation-class identity of “New Afrikan.” Similarly, the experience of being marked for extermination through genocide, the cultural genocide against their languages and customs, and the enclosure on “the res” created the Indigenous nation-class, whose role in production, according to the settlers, is to go extinct.

This is a riff, or a logical extension to what Marx and Engels describe when they articulate how economic crises in capitalism are crises of overproduction — it is no longer just commodities, productive forces, or capital itself that are overproduced, and need to be disposed of, but entire societies and classes. This is worth pondering, even if it’s counterintuitive to scientifically break down how dying out is distinct from not owning the means of production.

NIGHT-VISION draws from an extensive theoretical basis. It cites heavily from the expected canon like Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney, but also draws on criminally under-read revolutionaries and theoreticians such as Amilcar Cabral and Samir Amin. The influence of J. Sakai’s Settlers upon the text is abundantly clear. But what Lee and Rover do with these texts is extend their analysis to the furthest peripheries of society — arenas of oppression that frequently go unacknowledged, even by the strata of would-be revolutionaries, communists, etc. The authors apply the traditional Marxist lens of historical materialism to neo-colonial circumstances such as the narcotics economy, the textile sweatshops of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the semi-slave operated semiconductor factories of Hong Kong. They emphasize, through visceral descriptions and first person accounts, the abhorrent conditions that make the Western standard of living possible. Again, their critique invokes Marx himself, in that it is, “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” 

Lee and Rover’s portrayal culminates with the assertion that neocolonialism consists of the squalorous 19th century conditions Marx described in the mines and factories of his time, magnified and permeating to the furthest corners of society, on a world scale. This sounds obvious, but they argue that some Marxists have benefited from their class position to the extent they now misunderstand key Marxist concepts, such as primitive accumulation and the basic definition of certain classes. In Capital Vol.1, Marx defined primitive accumulation as “the expropriation of immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner” that creates the first capital, and makes capitalist relations possible.  In NIGHT-VISION, Lee and Rover contend that most readers of Marx only understand the surface equation of what Marx meant — different Europeans conquering and enslaving first each other, and then broadening their conquest “outward in ever-widening circles of colonialism, in particular to Indian and Afrikan slavery” (185) — but NIGHT-VISION’s most compelling thesis is that primitive accumulation actually began as witch hunts in the 13th century. 

This claim is a bit of a historical oddity, as the historical consensus is that witch hunts didn’t begin until early modernity, i.e. the 16th century. The discrepancy is due to the authors’ conferral of witchlike qualities to the semi-monastic Beguine and Beghard communities that existed in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Though similar to convents, Beguine communes were not formally part of the Church. The authors denote efforts by the Church to expropriate Beguine property and persecution of Beguine women, such as Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1310, as the first witch hunts. 

Lee and Rover further describe how the witch hunts took on institutional form from the 15th century onward, and were social camouflage for the genocide, economic dispossession, and proletarianization of women. Due to the decimation of available labor from centuries of war and the Black Death, European countries and churches had an economic imperative to expropriate widows and any women who resisted their own commodification and their enclosure as the primary inner labor colony.

If you think this sounds exactly like Silvia Federici’s seminal 2004 text, Caliban and The Witch, you’d be right. But while Federici’s text received academic plaudits, was widely translated, and is taught in universities, scarcely anyone’s read 1993’s NIGHT-VISION, regardless of the texts’ sameness. Now, I’m not an intellectual property respecter, or someone who thinks plagiarism is necessarily wrong — in fact, different analysts using the same scientific tools should replicate the same conclusions about history. Still, the variegated treatment of Federici and her works, compared to Lee and Rover and their works, does speak to another of NIGHT-VISION’s conclusions — that the bourgeois classes are intellectually and materially parasitic upon the proletarian classes.

This seems like an obvious and redundant observation, but Lee and Rover use the framework they establish throughout the text to distinguish different class boundaries than those identified by orthodox Marxists. They take Marx’s observation that the first proletarians in England were women, children, and alien labor from England’s first colonies in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and carry it forward to the present. English men from every social strata resisted becoming proletarian for as long as they could, and constituted the first parasitic class. Today’s proletariat are the women, children, and alien labor of the Third World. It also includes the labor of the colonized and dispossessed who live in First World countries, who are collectively called the “Fourth World.” As capitalism expanded, first through colonialism and then neo-colonialism, access to membership in the parasitic classes also expanded, first to other “white” men, then to “white” women, and so on. With time, even formerly proletarian classes, such as the white working class, acquired the capacity for parasitism. After all, although the euro-American auto worker and the South African child semi-slave who mines Vanadium for pennies a day have the same relation to production, they clearly experience different degrees of exploitation. NIGHT-VISION claims that the gulf between these workers places them in different classes. It questions what meaningful solidarity western workers can possibly extend to the practically invisible and oppressed classes of the marginalized world, when their way of life is wholly dependent upon continued exploitation.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” For these reasons, capitalism always contains the conditions for class struggle and its own inevitable demise at the hands of the oppressed. What NIGHT-VISION does best is describe the “disturbances of social conditions,” that it defines as new classes and class struggles. Its study of historic and modern conditions is riveting. It creates a compelling parallel between capitalist crises of overproduction and the capitalist overproduction of class parasites, both of which act in concert to foment capitalism’s destruction. Ironically, the fate of capitalist parasites is the same fate that colonialism and then neo-colonialism attempt to impose upon their subjects — namely, extinction.

Where the text is weakest, unfortunately, is “what is to be done” with the information it presents. Its advocacy for disunity with parasites is only decorative, evocative language for what in practice is a call for unity between oppressed peoples. A communist movement will obviously isolate and repress class parasites. Its construal of uncounted numbers of national, racial, and gendered classes, some oppressed, some parasitic, in a web of struggle, is ultimately facile. After all, “socialism means the abolition of class” — for that to be possible, oppressed classes must align along their common oppressions, and not exacerbate struggles between themselves.

Overall, NIGHT-VISION is a double-edged sword. Its depiction and indictment of neo-colonial realities, “the terrain upon which we’re fighting” is stark, necessary and unforgiving, but it doesn’t offer compelling tactics for fighting on that terrain. Its construction of class creates new questions and as many semantic obstacles as it seeks to overcome. The authors’ tendency to excerpt at length from other works — there’s a thirteen page excerpt from another Butch Lee work, The Military Strategy of Women and Children, for example — may be helpful to a reader who’s new to theory or is unfamiliar with the source material. Lee and Rover may have intended NIGHT-VISION as an accessible compendium of thought for their movement. However, I found the quotations excessive in both length and quantity. Still, NIGHT-VISION’s fiery rhetoric and observations will appeal to readers interested in decolonization and land back, queer liberation, and feminism. At the end I couldn’t help but feel reaffirmed and encouraged to re-read Marx and Fanon, whose indelible presence permeates the work, even if the authors achieved this in an unorthodox manner. Ironically, the white working class — and chauvinists like those at Midwestern Marx, who have recently been attacking the NIGHT-VISION’s theoretical tradition — would benefit immensely from reading it, but they are also the most likely to dismiss it outright.   

The settler state and its police refuse to search for the bodies of these women. The cracker government gives various excuses — all inadequate — for its inaction, such as the three years it would take to search the landfills, the expense of up to $184 million, the possibility of exposure to toxic chemicals, and the sheer gruesome nature of what may be discovered. One excuse not invoked by the state: the potential to uncover many more corpses than those of the four aforementioned women, which would be a scandal for the police and government.  Meanwhile, Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson bloviates about building a memorial, and about “feasibility studies.”

All of the above is reminiscent of a previous prominent Canadian serial killer, Robert Pickton. Pickton claimed to have murdered 49 women, of whom 26 were confirmed, but he was only found guilty and sentenced for killing six. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police originally only searched Pickton’s pig farm in order to score easy money by ticketing unregistered firearms. They dragged themselves to investigate further when they found two missing womens’ blood and property. It took five years and cost $70 million to unearth the remains of the 26 women on Pickton’s farm. After his conviction, the Canadian Supreme Court found no further reason to continue trying Pickton, as there was no higher punishment possible for him. It will be much the same for Skibicki, who is already charged with first degree murder. He will be quietly put away and the government will claim justice has been served. But the conditions that allowed him and Pickton to commit their crimes, to murder Indigenous women under the settler state’s radar, will remain for as long as the Canadian state persists. For example, Robert Pickton’s brother David Pickton, who was previously convicted for groping and threatening to rape and cut a woman into pieces, walks free today. His freedom only required his claim ignorance of his brother’s crimes, despite having worked on the farm where they took place.

None of this is accidental. Whenever Canada looks into its past, it always unearths more Indigenous bodies than it bargained for. In 2021, a search uncovered a mass grave of 215 Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. More schools across Canada and the U.S. were searched. This resulted in the discovery of the bodies of more than 10,000 Indigenous children. The liberal Canadian media describes these events as “tragedies” and publishes reports of unheeded recommendations. For example, the government found many instances of what it called “police mishandling” in Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, a 2012 British Columbia provincial government inquiry into the Pickton murders. This report had dozens of recommendations for the police and provincial government, but none were taken seriously. Indigenous leaders accuse Canada of disregarding the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and children. This is true, but misses the full picture.

In actuality, the settler terror incarnate in the murder of untold thousands of Indigenous women and children is vital to the Canadian state. The settler government “cares” only insofar as the violence must continue. To accuse the police of “mishandling” these cases is an understatement bordering on injustice, for the police are not mere bumbling fools. True to their role in the history of Canada, they are active collaborators with settler terrorists! Some Canadian police admitted in the 90s that they would rather solve one murder of a white, bourgeois victim, than investigate the deaths of a dozen prostitutes — who are disproportionately drawn from Indigenous and racialized women. Police comments of this nature were documented in case studies into the Pickton murders, such as Stevie Cameron’s On The Farm. As for the perpetrators, liberals consider them monstrous, and rightly so, but fail to recognize that becoming a serial rapist-murderer is the logical apotheosis of settlerism. There are no acts more viscerally colonial than direct, individual sexual violence and murder against the colonized. To understand the causes of this violence, and its ubiquity in Canadian society, one must recognize the mountain of colonialist cruelty in Canada’s dark and genocidal history — the mountain these acts stand atop. 

The inability to recognize such grotesqueness condemns liberalism as a failed ideology. Even when some well-intentioned liberals document the atrocities in historic works such as Clearing The Plains, by James Daschuk, or true crime texts like Cameron’s On The Farm, the most they can accomplish is a grim witness-bearing. There is no prescription in liberalism to end the spilling of Indigenous blood by settlers and the settler state. The best liberalism can offer is some befuddled discourse and solemn “remembrance.” As Daschuk said in an interview with Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix news in 2016, referring to the deliberate mass starvation of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian government, “the stories were so profound and the truths, in some cases, were so ugly that we can’t turn our backs on them.” But what does it mean to not turn one’s back? In Canada’s case, not a lot — typically some mumbled apology and dead-end state “inquiries.” In that same interview from nearly a decade ago, Daschuk stated, “I think we’re at a moment. I think there’s enough momentum, and goodwill in the general population” to “examine how our society might right its inherent inequalities.” But in the years since, this hasn’t transpired, nor can it. The graveyard of failed bureaucratic endeavors surrounding Canada’s genocidal past and present, which includes the now-dissolved Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Forsaken inquiry in British Columbia, and whatever crib-strangled half-effort will soon emerge in Winnipeg, is only expanding, while the “inherent inequalities” remain and genocidal injustices continue.

Anti-colonial resistance must be found beyond liberal frameworks. On July 7th, the pig government of Manitoba told the families of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, to their faces, that they would not search the Brady landfill, despite the feasibility study demonstrating that a search was possible. In a hollow and tired deflection, Premier Stefanson cited safety concerns to workers conducting the search, and suggested that the search should be the federal government’s responsibility. In response, Indigenous activists, including Morgan Harris’s daughter, Cambria Harris, rightfully and immediately blocked access to the landfill, returning to a protest tactic first applied last year, when these murders first came to light. This people’s blockade against the settler government is continuing, even though the City of Winnipeg filed an injunction on Tuesday, July 11th to have it forcibly dispersed. Naturally, the demonstrators are unlikely to acquiesce to the city’s demand, and have every right to hold their ground.

The reoccupation and blockade of their own stolen land is an essential tactic for Indigenous resistance to colonization across Turtle Island. From present struggles in Wet’suwet’en and Landback Lane, weaving back through the “IdleNoMore” movement and “NoDAPL” protests at Standing Rock, Indigenous actions have been most successful when they impede the movement of the settler state, settler capitalist firms, and settler “private citizens,” and settler access to land. Looking only slightly further back into history, the settler government’s fear becomes palpable when it is confronted with armed land reoccupations, as occurred during the Kanesatake Resistance (Oka Crisis) in 1990, and Wounded Knee in 1973. These brave acts of popular anti-colonial resistance stand at the head of five centuries of Indigenous resistance, and will continue until settler colonialism is finally dismantled. The nascent actions to blockade Brady landfill are only a thread in this storied history.

Unfortunately, until they are united in a broad people’s anti-colonial movement, these actions can only delay and prolong the ongoing displacement and genocide regime of the U.S.–Canada settler empire. It is a death by a thousand cuts. The 1980–94 Clayoquot protests (The War in the Woods) did not prevent greedy settlers from harvesting old growth lumber in British Columbia for long — similar events unfolded only three decades later in the 2020–22 occupation at Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek). The capitalists, motivated by their unceasing, existential drive for endless profits, will never willingly stop; they will raze the whole Earth, if they are allowed to do so, and they will be aided at every step by the capitalist class-dictatorship state. Clayoquot and Ada’itsx demonstrated that the state has endless patience and capacity to jail peaceful protesters. The plaudits heaped by the state on acts of peaceful resistance, thereby condoning and denuding these actions of revolutionary impetus, are another obstacle. Still, it’s clear that while Canada, its police, and its corporations exist, there can be neither lasting peace nor permanent victories in the Indigenous liberation struggle. There can be no justice for the tens of thousands of children buried beneath residential schools or for the uncounted hundreds, if not thousands, of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Unfathomable cruelty characterizes the Indigenous experience in Canada and across Turtle Island. The settler state offers only this choice: they may live on the rez (reserve/reservation) and contend with an ongoing cultural and literal genocide, or they may leave. If they leave, however, they’re extremely likely to be criminalized, rendered homeless, victimized by physical, emotional, and sexual violence (including disappearance and murder), or any combination of these traumatic experiences and horrible fates. If they are murdered, their bodies can be buried in landfills or fed to pigs. Their spirits and families can find no peace. Yet liberal settlers dimly wonder why the phrase “Reconciliation is Dead” is popular.

The sum of this experience is sometimes called the “Fourth World” — in which primarily Indigenous and Black people, but also gender nonconforming and disabled people, live Third-World conditions in allegedly First-World countries like Canada or the United States. In this framework, Fourth World communities are understood to occupy a unique underclass, beneath the settler working class proper. Fourth-World workers are locked in a web of contradictions with the capitalists, the First-World workers, and the “Fourth-World” propertied classes all at once.

Fourth Worldism dovetails with Engels’ theory of labor aristocracy and Sakai’s theory that settler proletarianism is a myth. In letters to Marx in the 1850s, Engels worried that England, then the “most bourgeois of nations,” feeding itself on the spoils of hundreds of millions of people in its colonies, would soon have not only a bourgeoisie — its capitalists — but also a “bourgeois working class.” Marx and Engels feared that England’s colonial plunder would be sufficient bribery for its working class to betray their own class interests at the expense of racialized workers and workers abroad. Marx, for instance, wrote that the English working class would never free itself from “its own” capitalists until it stood in solidarity with liberation movements in Ireland, India, and other British colonies. The situation Engels described is sadly true in Canada and the U.S., where the settler proletariat has, time and time again, betrayed its class interest as workers to align with the settler capitalists, at the expense of  Turtle Island’’s colonized and other “Fourth World” peoples. Sakai takes Engels concept to its furthest extreme and claims, “Amerika [or canada] is so decadent that it has no proletariat of its own, but must exist parasitically on the colonial proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities.” For Sakai, settlers only exist to brutalize the Indigenous proletariat, whose slaughter and dispossession built the luxuries they enjoy.

Regardless of whether we find these theories plausible and rigorous, or nonsense, the wretched lived experience of Canada’s Indigenous populations cannot be denied, nor can the solution to their predicament be avoided. The Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island understand that the settler state will not change its colonialist character out of good will; it will only capitulate to any demands made from a position of power. As Mao said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The present mobilized resistance, while heroic, must spark the revitalization of Indigenous revolutionary anti-colonial organization, complete with the capability for armed struggle. When Indigenous nations make the settler pay in capital, real estate, political standing, comfort, and blood for his broken treaties and residential schools, his sprawling suburbs and golf courses, his oil pipelines and cleared forests — then and only then will the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty become realizable. The 1974 successful re-establishment of Ganienkeh as Kanienkehaka (a sovereign nation governed by its own laws and traditions) by the Mohawk, against the U.S. government, shows only an elementary hint of what could be. Let a thousand Ganienkehs overgrow the entirety of Turtle Island!

Among the settlers there is a desperate need for mass cultural upheaval. We must expunge the cultural and economic conditions that culminate in the violation and murder of Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois, Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, and the thousands of other Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). This begins, at the community level, by terrorizing the terrorists — by keeping a vigilant watch on settlers who show any political inclinations toward fascism and any personal inclinations toward domestic, sexual, and other interpersonal violence. Pickton and Skibicki could never have gotten away with their crimes for so long, had they not been shielded by whole communities, who (at best) looked the other way and (at worst) aided and abetted them. But this is only the elemental level. The solution cannot be merely personal and communal; it must be political. Communists must heed the call of Indigenous liberation. Full decolonization, which can only mean the abolition of the existing settler state and the utter destruction of the U.S.–Canada Empire and its settler society, the total restoration of Indigenous sovereignty, and the prolonged reeducation of the settler population must be included in our minimum programme. This is the only way towards any semblance of genuine “Truth and Reconciliation.” Only the anti-colonial revolution can achieve anti-colonial justice. If projects cannot uphold this bare minimum, they will be eradicated in the forthcoming revolution. If we settler would-be Communists fail to reeducate ourselves, then we will rightfully reap the 531 years of rape and murder we continue to visit upon this land and its people.

Author’s Endnote: In this piece I have used standard capitalization for illegitimate place names, such as canada. Rest assured, this was only done for legibility, and I don’t consider canada to be a legitimate nation.

Since the tragic Covenant School shooting in Nashville on March 27th, the capitalist media and fascist reactionaries have begun a campaign of defamation on several trans women. Kayla Denker, a trans communist and armed community defense advocate, as well as Alana McLaughlin, a trans MMA fighter of similar political background, have been continuously slandered as terrorists, antifa thugs, extremists, and supporters of Audrey Hale, the perpetrator of the Covenant School shooting. In typical fashion, the capitalist promise of free speech and free press seems to only mean the right of the ruling class to lie with impunity while silencing and drowning out the truth. It would seem ruining the life of upstanding citizens is of no consequence to the fearmongering corporate media when profit can be made from inciting outrage!

Two particularly harmful lies have been boosted by the mainstream press. On March 5th, Ms. Denker posted a video on TikTok and Twitter posing with a rifle and a caption supporting armed self defense:

However, after the Nashville shooting, right-wing trolls sent her video viral, insinuating that it was published after the shooting and in solidarity with Audrey Hale. This blatant lie was then picked up on by the Daily Mail, who not only repeated the lie — and as of writing this article, the lie remains published — but the article as originally published called her an Antifa member and implied a connection between her and a “Trans Day of Vengeance” march — which had also been scheduled prior to the shooting. Ms. Denker has made clear she has no affiliation with any organizations and was not involved with organizing any march. In a follow-up video responding to the press coverage, she resolutely refuted any connection with or sympathy for Audrey Hale, condemning his actions. Similar coverage was made by Newsweek, though the story has since been edited to reflect proper chronology.

Even with a late (and partial) correction to the record, it’s clear that the damage of the inflammatory rhetoric and defamation has already been done, as Ms. Denker privately expressed fears that she may lose her Archeology job over the overwhelming onslaught of character assassination from the press and social media.

It seems that Ms. Denker’s fears were well founded. After two weeks of probation — enough time for the media to move on — she was indeed fired from her job as an archeologist. Where are the crusaders against cancel-culture who will defend a trans woman wrongfully terminated over pressure from social media? Where are our valiant defenders of free speech? Apparently nowhere to be found! And as if potentially ruining a woman’s career were not enough, Ms. Denker has also been the victim of an onslaught of personal hate, harassment, and even death threats. Apparently the volume of death threats reached such an unprecedented degree that the FBI contacted her to warn her about them and even encouraged her to remain armed.

Then there is the coverage of Alana McLaughlin — or rather, a right-wing sock puppet account posing as Alana:

This is not Ms. McLaughlin’s account, nor her words. Any child could easily recognize this cartoonishly villainous monologue as bait intended to incite feelings of victimhood in Christian nationalists. And yet the excellent journalists of the Daily Mail, with all the integrity of a used condom, uncritically shared the post without investigation, going so far as to label the troll as an “activist.” Such malpractice! Such apathy to truth! It’s truly unforgivable. Furthermore, as a trans woman in sports, Ms. McLaughlin is certainly no stranger to controversy; commenting on the disinformation, she simply expressed intentions to sue the Daily Mail:

This is not simply the honest failure of the journalism industry, nor even simply the opportunism of individual actors in the market. Ms Denker and McLaughlin are simply casualties amid a coordinated push to target the rights of all trans people, who are being held collectively responsible for the actions of Mr. Hale. Take, for example, Benny Johnson, production chief at Turning Point USA, who tweeted to an audience of over a million people that: “One thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists.” Former president Donald Trump, as well as representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, both publicly speculated about the role of hormones in Mr. Hale’s actions, despite no evidence that he was even on hormone replacement therapy — let alone in lieu of any evidence that masculinizing HRT causes violent aggression in trans men. Donald Trump Jr. similarly expressed that “there’s a clear epidemic of trans/non-binary mass shooters.” Ben Shapiro, infamous fascist pundit and media personality, went so far as to advocate banning trans people from owning firearms. These sentiments are a clear pattern of escalating fascist rhetoric from the far-right demagogues in media and politics.

As the American Empire loses its grasp on its position in the current imperialist order, as conditions within the empire continue to deteriorate and destabilize, it is increasingly imperative for fascists to manufacture a scapegoat responsible for all the woes of society — lest people develop class consciousness and turn against the capitalist system. Between the necessity to create such a bogeyman, and between the financial imperatives of profit-driven and advertisement funded “news” networks to prioritize clicks and views beyond all else, this hate mongering is the inevitable result. Capitalism, decaying empires, they breed hate and fear to sow division among the ranks of the working class, to prevent unity and solidarity, to prevent revolution. Only once political and economic power has been seized and nationalized by the working class can this crisis of disinformation be resolved! Only then can fascism be vanquished for good! Only then can transmisogyny be destroyed!

As for Ms. Denker, like all the other casualties of the capitalist press, she is now left to fend for herself. Please consider contributing to her gofundme campaign to cover legal and survival funds.

Last month, from August 5 to 7, the State of Israel heightened its ongoing military conflict with Palestinian forces in the Hamas-governed Gaza enclave, provoking a low-intensity battle with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a minor far-right Sunni Islamist party, as well as smaller PIJ-allied factions. In an operation codenamed “Breaking Dawn,” the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched a barrage of so-called “targeted airstrikes” into the Gaza strip, the densely urbanized Palestinian enclave bordering the southwest corner of Israel. PIJ and its allies returned fire, launching around 1,100 rockets into Israel, without definite targets.

The IDF airstrikes hit apartment complexes, a cemetery, and other public buildings and areas, and killed at least 35 people — 13 enemy combatants, 2 police officers, 5 uninvolved Hamas and Fatah operatives, and 15 Palestinian civilians, including 9 children — according to reports compiled by Ha’aretz. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is reported to have unintentionally killed 14 Palestinian civilians, including 7 children, with malfunctioning rockets that hit urban areas in Gaza, including a refugee camp; these reports, initially made by Gaza-based journalists, have been corroborated by the Associated Press. According to Al-Monitor. Of the 900 or so PIJ rockets that reached Israel, over 97% were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system. No IDF soldiers or Israeli civilians were killed during Op. Breaking Dawn. By the end of the IDF–PIJ battle, at least 49 Palestinians had been killed, while as many as 360 were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Overview of the IDF–PIJ Battle

The battle followed a series of recent escalations by the Israeli Occupation Forces in the occupied West Bank. On March 22, an ISIS operative carried out an attack in the southern Israeli city of Be’ersheva, killing four civilians before he was shot dead. Over the next few months, sporadic shootings, car rammings, and knife attacks were carried out by Palestinian militants, dubbed a “new terror wave” in the Zionist press, which altogether resulted in 19 Israeli casualties — mostly civilians, plus some border police and soldiers — according to Time Magazine. The IDF responded with mass arrests in the West Bank — over 500, according to the Times of Israel — sparking violent clashes. By the end of July, according to Al-Monitor, 53 Palestinians had been killed by the IDF. The epicenter of these escalations was the Palestinian city of Jenin, situated in the northern West Bank, where over 30 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF this year, including a famous Al-Jazeera journalist who was covering an IDF raid.

The “West Bank” is the area east of the 1949 Israeli–Jordanian armistice line and west of the Jordan River, designated by the 1992 Oslo Accords, along with Gaza, as the territory for a Palestinian state in the U.S.-formulated and internationally-endorsed “two-state solution.” Despite the formation of the State of Palestine in 1993, most of the West Bank is either directly controlled by the State of Israel or militarily occupied by the IDF, with Israeli administration based in the large swathes of the territory that have been settled by Israeli citizens since Israel’s victory in the 1967 “Six-Day War” — a situation that is condemned by almost all countries, international bodies, and relevant NGOs as an illegal occupation, violating international law. The only country that has consistently defended the occupation, aside from the State of Israel itself, is the United States of America, which has used its permanent seat on the UN Security Council to veto UN General Assembly measures, such as sanctions, against Israel. Successive far-right Israeli governments, as well as the current big-tent government, which includes “socialists” and a center-right Arab party, have supported continued settlement expansion and indicated plans to eventually officially annex most or all of the West Bank.

On August 1, the IDF raided Jenin and arrested Bassem al-Saadi, West Bank leader of al-Quds Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s military wing. During the raid, the IDF also shot and killed a 17-year-old PIJ militant, Dirar al-Kafrini, in a brief firefight.

In response, over the next few days, PIJ leaders in Gaza threatened retaliatory attacks against Israel: As quoted in the Jerusalem Post, Khaled al-Batsh, chair of the PIJ politburo, declared on August 3, “We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel.” Between August 2 and 5, the IDF and al-Quds Brigades prepared installations on either side of the Israel–Gaza border.

On August 1, as tensions escalated following al-Saadi’s arrest, Israel closed the Gaza border, interrupting fuel transport. By August 6, the lone power plant in Gaza was forced to temporarily shut down for lack of fuel. The residents of Gaza, who usually have access to electricity for only 12 hours per day, were reduced to 4 hours per day of electricity for the duration of Op. Breaking Dawn.

Finally, on the morning of August 5, after last-minute UN and Egyptian negotiation attempts failed, the IDF launched what the Israeli government characterized as “preemptive strikes” on PIJ positions near the border, initiating the battle. 

Israeli Interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his Defense Minister Benny Gantz ordered the strikes without consulting his Cabinet, after obtaining the approval of the “left-wing” Attorney General of Israel, Gali Baharav-Miara, who signed off on all military actions short of a formal declaration of war. Lapid took his current position as “interim” Prime Minister in July — barely a month before authorizing Op. Breaking Dawn. He is, however, a veteran functionary within the occupation-state, having previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance, and Minister of Strategic Affairs (which largely deals with efforts to counter the global, Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against the Israeli state, Israeli industry and trade, and Israeli academic and cultural institutions). Many political analysts, both in Israel and around the world, have speculated that PM Lapid, who is behind in opinion polls ahead of the upcoming 2022 Israeli general elections, initiated Op. Breaking Dawn to drum up support from his right-wing militarist base, which currently favors former PM and current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Likud Party by wide margins. Such cynical and violent political maneuvering is common in Israel. Palestinian lives are often taken in military operations ordered by Israeli politicians and military officials to boost their political clout.

In any event, Israel’s purported justification for “preemptively” bombing Gaza, namely to maintain “public security,” is clearly false. Given the near-perfect success rate of its U.S.-funded Iron Dome defense system in intercepting rockets, Gaza-based militaries present virtually no danger to Israeli civilians. Commentators in Israel and worldwide widely condemned the IDF strikes as unprovoked, as well as extremely disproportionate.

Moreover, as a matter of “military ethics,” it is standard procedure for Israel to carry out targeted assassinations of enemy combatants and politicians regardless of whether civilians may be harmed. A widely-cited 2005 article by two Israeli authors in the Journal of Military Ethics, titled “Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective,” has served to entrench the practice, especially in “targeted airstrikes” against Palestinian militants in Gaza. When the IDF murders a 5-year-old girl, as it did in its “targeted airstrike” on Tayseer al-Jabari, al-Quds Brigades commander for northern Gaza, this is considered justified as an acceptable counter-terrorism casualty by Israeli politicians and the Zionist press. This policy has been repeatedly decried as “collective punishment,” a violation of international law, by most countries in the UN General Assembly, and is one of the many violations that have raised demands to have Israeli officials tried in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Al-Quds Brigades retaliated by 9:00 p.m. on August 5, several hours after the first IDF airstrikes. The PIJ was joined by military cadres from the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Maoist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), two minor Communist parties in Palestine.

On August 6, the Israeli Occupation Forces arrested another 19 members of the PIJ in the West Bank. The occupation carried out further raids, arrests, and assassinations of Palestinian militants and politicians in the West Bank for the duration of Op. Breaking Dawn, storming refugee camps, forcibly arresting Palestinian freedom fighters, and starting gunfights that killed more Palestinian children.

After three days (66 hours) of IDF bombardment, Egypt, which often takes the role of mediator between Israel and Palestinian forces in Gaza, successfully organized ceasefire talks between Israel and PIJ. The ceasefire was brokered Sunday, August 7, and a representative of the UN Security Council confirmed the next day that the ceasefire had gone into effect on Sunday, shortly before midnight. 

In all, Op. Breaking Dawn and the violence precipitating its authorization has been the most intense in Palestine in just over a year — since May 2021, when Israel and Hamas, the party that governs Gaza, with support from PIJ, fought an 11-day battle. The May 2021 outbreak resulted in over 200 Palestinian casualties in Gaza — 128 civilians, according to the UN, and between 80 (according to Hamas) and 200 (according to Israel) militants — with over 2,000 people wounded, as well as 14 civilian casualties in Israel, inlcuding Jews, Arabs, and South Asian migrant workers. The battle coincided with riots in major cities, including Lod, Akko, and Jerusalem, characterized by bombings and arson attacks against homes, synagogues, and mosques, as well as racist lynch mobs, in which one Arab and two Jewish civilians were killed. Irregular fighting in the West Bank and along the Israel–Lebanon border resulted in the deaths of 28 Palestinian militants, one Hizbullah militant, and one Lebanese civilian. This outbreak followed months of protests in Palestine and worldwide over the planned evictions of several Palestinian families from their homes in the predominantly Arab, affluent, and historically politically influential Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, amid ongoing Zionist efforts to replace the current residents with a Jewish majority.

The Situation in Gaza

The Gaza strip, centered on Gaza City, is internationally recognized as part of the State of Palestine, but currently stands as a de facto state of its own, territorially and politically independent of both the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. Gaza has its own government, military, and civil infrastructure. However, Gaza remains economically dependent on Israel, which, in partnership with Egypt, enforces a naval blockade of Gaza, and controls the territory’s fishing waters and energy supply. Much of Gaza’s workforce commutes to Israel for jobs. Gaza also relies heavily on foreign aid, primarily from wealthy European Union countries. The enclave has been governed by Hamas, or the “Islamic Resistance Movement,” a right-wing Islamist organization, since 2007, and various Hamas-aligned Palestinian forces also operate within the enclave.

The present situation began to take shape in 2005, when Israel unilaterally “disengaged” from Gaza, demolishing all Jewish-inhabited settlements and forcibly removing all Jewish residents from the territory. Full civil and military control over Gaza was then handed over to the State of Palestine.

Elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) were held in 2006. At that point, since 1993, when the State of Palestine was formed, Fatah, a centrist and secular nationalist party, had been the sole governing party, winning an outright parliamentary super-majority in the 1996 Palestinian PLC elections and the presidency in the 1996 and 2005 Palestinian presidential elections. However, in the 2006 elections, Hamas, running for the first time, won an outright majority (74 of 132 seats) in the PLC. This was despite concerted U.S.–Israeli efforts to fix the election in favor of Fatah: USAID spent millions advertising for Fatah, while Israel prevented Palestinian residents of eastern Jerusalem, projected to favor Hamas, from participating. (Eastern Jerusalem is claimed by the State of Palestine as its capital, but was unilaterally annexed by Israel in the 1980 “Jerusalem Law,” after being taken from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War.) Additionally, electoral factions had formed within Fatah over allegations of corruption, splitting its ticket. Not only was Fatah unseated, but so was the Palestine Liberation Organization, the big-tent coalition of Palestinian parties that formed in 1964 to organize the Palestinian nation (including the diaspora) for international recognition, initiated the Oslo Accords, and helped lead to the formation of the State of Palestine.

Initial attempts to facilitate a peaceful transition of power failed. Although Hamas had officially taken leadership, Fatah officials refused to recognize its authority. Fighting broke out between Hamas and Fatah, starting with minor clashes and assassination attempts against Hamas leaders, and then escalating to a low-intensity civil war. By the time peace talks had successfully ended the fighting, Hamas had been forced out of the West Bank and retreated to Gaza, which it wrested from Fatah. Thus, since 2008, Gaza has been governed by Hamas, while the West Bank has been governed by the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is more aligned with Hamas than Fatah, and is actively pursued by the Israeli Occupation Forces, has made Gaza its base of operations, although it is also active in the West Bank.

No elections have been held in the State of Palestine since 2006, largely because Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and current president, is corrupt and increasingly unpopular. If an election was held in the near future, Hamas would almost certainly win an even larger majority than it won in 2006. The prospects of such a result are against the interests not only of Fatah and Israel, which has a stable working relationship with Fatah, but also the imperialist interests of the U.S., European Union, and Russia — the major parties to the “Quartet on the Middle East,” which has facilitated the “Israeli–Palestinian peace process.” The Quartet insists upon the fundamentally unjust, and increasingly unpopular, “two-state solution,” in which the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine remains divided between the State of Israel and the State of Palestine — one state that privileges a Jewish majority and another state that is almost exclusively Arab.

Hamas has waged four major battles in an ongoing “war of attrition” against Israel since it took power in Gaza. However, it stayed entirely on the sidelines during the August 2022 IDF–PIJ battle. “Our people are waiting for the Palestinian resistance to take the decision and retaliate.” So said Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, on the night of August 5, 2022. IDF jets had already killed at least 10 people, three of whom were civilians, including a five-year-old girl named Alaa Qaddoum. 

Continued Raids in the West Bank

On August 9, two days after the Israel–PIJ ceasefire, the Israeli Occupation Forces raided the city of Nablus in the West Bank. Their target was Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, a 26-year-old commander of a local cell of Fatah’s network of armed militias, collectively known as al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Al-Nabulsi stands accused of planning a number of attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers and has been wanted by the occupation forces since February this year. Rather than surrender himself to arrest, al-Nabulsi and two others barricaded themselves in a residential building and prepared to fight to the death; in a final video stream, al-Nabulsi said he would die a martyr and implored Palestinians to “never forsake the rifle.” A firefight broke out between the occupation forces and Palestinian militants, and over 60 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were injured in the crossfire, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Fatah issued a statement on al-Nabulsi’s death, in which they declared that “the cowardly crime of assassination will only increase our people’s determination.” The PFLP said the resistance “has emphasized the failure of the occupation,” and Hamas hailed the epic heroism of those who died protecting al-Nabulsi. Armed resistance has become increasingly popular among Palestinians in the West Bank, particularly the younger generation, and the various parties and factions are responding to this trend. The more the Israeli forces intensify military pressure, the more closely the freedom fighters across the Palestinian political landscape — whether affiliated with Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, Hamas, or the PIJ — will be forced to stand together, and the more closely Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization will be drawn towards the necessity of reconciliation.

At the same, despite the official statements issued by the entrenched, corrupt, and stale Fatah leadership, the bravery displayed by al-Nabulsi and other young militants reveals the party’s growing unpopularity with the Palestinian masses. The revolutionary youth of Palestine are increasingly looking towards armed resistance, even in those cells attached to Fatah, rather than the “legitimacy” conferred by the U.S.-led “international community” for the party’s adherence to the unjust “two-state solution,” its two-faced collaboration with the State of Israel, and its total dependence on the import of financial capital from imperialist Western European state-sponsors.

The bigger picture: Israel and U.S. Imperialism

This explosion of Zionist militarism in the past year and more is the latest chapter in a century-long genocide that has its origins in the Zionist political movement that emerged in 1880s Western Europe.

Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer, formulated the nationalist ideological framework, which he described as a “colonial” movement in his diaries, after witnessing the antisemitic “Dreyfus Affair” in France, and as a direct response to the so-called “Jewish Question” — i.e., what to do with the Jews in Europe? The proposition put forward by “racial” antisemites as early as 1750, that Jews are a parasite attached to the “white race,” and should therefore be removed from European society, was a pillar of later Nazi ideology and culminated in the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Herzl’s utopia was a world in which antisemitism had been eliminated by reconstituting the Jewish people, then dispersed in diaspora communities across the world, as a nation-state in Palestine; a world in which the Jewish people were “normalized,” because they would have become like any “normal” European nation-state. (Of course, with historical hindsight, we know that the establishment of the State of Israel has done nothing to eliminate or diminish global antisemitism.) Amid fresh waves of pogroms in the Russian Empire and new antisemitic laws throughout Europe, the nascent Zionist movement managed to recruit large contingents of the Jewish bourgeoisie, liberal intelligentsia, and some rabbinical authorities by convincing them of the proposition that Jews needed to, and could successfully, leave Europe, as well as all other regions of the diaspora, for Palestine. The Zionists proposed a bargain with the colonial powers of Europe: In exchange for funding Jewish settlement in Palestine, the Zionists would open what was then an underdeveloped, feudal region of the Ottoman Empire to Western European capital. Herzl initially attempted to convince the Ottoman sultan that the Jews would, in exchange for Palestine, develop the region and support and level out Turkish monetary policy. The sultan, mainly concerned with holding together his crumbling empire, could not afford to draw ire from Muslims and Arab nationalists in Palestine, and refused. The Zionist movement then turned to the powers of Europe, especially the British Empire. 

This evil bargain lies at the basis of the Zionist project. In 1947, nearing the end of the British Mandate, a civil war broke out in Palestine between the Jewish Yishuv (Hebrew for “community”), which included a mix of centuries-old Jewish communities and recent arrivals, and Arab nationalists, supported by armies from the surrounding Arab-majority states. By 1948, following the Israeli declaration of independence, the Zionists achieved their biggest success: the destruction of Palestinian civil society by the ethnic cleansing of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs — half of the Arab population of Palestine at the time. This was the Nakba (Arabic for “cataclysm” or “catastrophe”). Since then, continuing to the present, the Israeli Occupation Forces have sought to “complete” the Nakba by utterly annihilating the last vestiges of Palestinian sovereignty and nationhood.

In the decades since the Nakba, Israel has sought abroad for sponsorship from the imperialist states, and found in the U.S. Empire a willing partner. In the post-war order, the ghouls at the heart of U.S. imperialist foriegn policy were willing to sponsor any state or group that could be used as a bulwark against the threat of Communism. At a time when Arab nationalism would dovetail with socialism and the development of Communism in the Arabic world — indeed, right as the growth of pan-Arabism threatened imperialist oil production — the Cold Warriors of the U.S. Empire stepped on the scene to back the Israeli occupation and genocide. This has been the status quo until today.

Those behind the occupation sit comfortably in their mansions in the Berkshires, their penthouses in New York City, their enormous ranches in the occupied U.S. countryside, and in the White House in Washington, DC. The architects of the Palestinian extermination, the Nakba, the Cataclysm, are the monopoly capitalists of the United States Empire and the lickspittle politicians that serve as their agents. Neither of the major parties differ when it comes to Israel and the occupation: both are wholly and entirely dedicated to completing the Palestinian genocide abroad, just as they are both dedicated to completing the Indigenous genocide at home.

But who are these capitalists? How are their interests served by the genocide? The U.S. embassy itself explains: “[c]ritical components of leading American high-tech products are invented and designed in Israel, making these American companies more competitive and more profitable globally.” Cisco, Intel, Motorola, Applied Materials, and HP all have partnerships, research labs, or factories in occupied Palestine. Some 2,500 U.S. firms have their homes in Israel. Israeli capital coming into the U.S. in investments is approximately $24 billion USD. U.S. capital has established a “free trade” agreement with the Israeli occupation government, and trade between Israel and the U.S. was worth $50 billion USD in 2016. Israeli markets are inter-penetrated by U.S. products, extending the lifespan of U.S. capital. Thanks to the imperialized periphery, Israel has the highest concentration of engineers and PhDs per capita in the world: a veritable nation of petit-bourgeois technical experts, ready-made to provide war technology that will first be tested on Palestine before it is used abroad by the U.S. military.

The average factory worker in Israel makes 79,000 Israeli New Shekels per year — the equivalent of $24,162 U.S. Dollars. The average salary for a factory worker in the territorial U.S. in 2022 is $32,507. Capital can be put to use in advanced technical manufacturing in Israel for far cheaper than in the imperialist center. This means the more jobs that U.S. monopolists can export to Israel, the higher the general rate of profit. Advanced electronics can be manufactured there cheaply, and then resold in the imperialist heartland at the price they would have cost if they had been manufactured inside the US.

Perhaps most importantly, the colony of Israel stands at a crossroads of global oil trade, and from the military bases within its borders, the U.S. can exert pressure on its “allies,” like the US-backed dictators of Saudi Arabia, as well as its enemies, like the anti-US government in Iran.

It was none other than the leader of the current criminal regime in the White House, sitting U.S. President Joseph Robinette Biden, who once declared that Israel was so strategically key to the empire that “[i]f there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved.” Every year since 1985, the illegitimate settler-empire of the U.S. has given the settler-state of Israel at least $3 billion U.S. dollars. In 2019 alone, the U.S. also gave Israel $4 billion U.S. dollars in military aid. The U.S. guarantees $8 billion U.S. dollars in loans. These numbers don’t even begin to capture the so-called “foreign military financing” provided to Israel on a yearly basis, or the fact that a large amount of the equipment in use by the IDF is American. Indeed, the IDF uses Gaza as a testing ground for advanced US-imperialist weaponry.

In every sense, Israel is now a colony of the United States, which provides its arms and armaments. The U.S. Empire has a vested interest in the colony, and in making sure it thrives at the expense of Palestinian lives. Israel, just as much as the United States, is the enemy of liberation everywhere. In exchange for Yankee weapons, the Israelis teach the Yankee police how to choke and kill; in Israel, they stand on the neck of Palestine. In the US, they stand on the neck of New Afrika.

The Zionist Israeli government is a single link in a vast chain wrapped around the throat of the world. That chain has its anchors in the United States.