When it comes to ICE deportations, we must ask the question: Cui bono?

Who benefits?

Who benefits from ICE rounding up and deporting US citizens? Into whose pocket do those benefits flow?

Ask any liberal, and they’ll tell you there’s only one person: Donald J. Trump. “This is irrational, destructive ideology at work! It’s Trump setting himself up to become a dictator!” They want you to believe — they need you to believe — that there’s no world in which someone is making a profit off of the ICE deportations. Ask any chauvinist “Marxist” and they’ll tell you the same thing, but about some “faction” of the “industrial bourgeoisie.” They both need you to believe that ICE deportations don’t play a role in maintaining the social and economic order. The reason is that they need you to believe in the existence of some “good” civil society, in this myth of the “good” America counterposed to the “bad” one.

We cannot afford to be confused, we cannot afford to be misled. We must make a sober and scientific analysis that will tell us who our friends are and who our enemies are. Those “Marxists” espousing the liberal platitudes about the good America, the “good” civil society, have put themselves in the camp of the enemy. Unless and until they perform a real analysis, unless and until they examine the question from the point of view, not of what is comfortable for Western dilettante socialists, but what is necessary for the liberation of the entire world, they will remain our enemies.

We cannot espouse return to the status quo ante. That would be fighting on the side of the liberals, for a liberal victory. We fight, not for comfort, but for liberation.

Without the myth of good civil society, these chauvinists and liberals are rightly afraid of mass insurrection. They are selling you this line because they are trying, whether they know it consciously or not, to forestall a social revolution.

But we aren’t afraid of asking.

So, who benefits?

The white settler population benefits from mass deportation.

A Penn Wharton Budget Model study does in fact warn that overall GDP will fall – over 4-years, by 1 percent, and over 10 years by nearly five percent. But the impact on wages varies by skill class. Wages for high-skilled workers (which Penn Wharton says comprise 63% of the working population, placing a huge group in the petty bourgeois or technical specialist class) fall by 0.5% over four years and 2.8% over ten years. Wages for low-skilled US-born workers increase overall; by 1.1% under the 4-year deportation policy and by 5% under the 10-year deportation policy. ICE allows the white declassed labor aristocrat to work their way back into economic positions similar to those of their hated rivals in the liberal professions (who happen to be petty bourgeois).

The prison-industrial complex, which elevates its employees from proletarian to labor-aristocratic or petty-bourgeois status benefits. Private prisons owned by CoreCivic and the GEOGroup partner with ICE and have received huge investments from expanding ICE contracts ($2.1 billion for GeoGroup, $653.5 million for CoreCivic). CoreCivic employs over 13,000 people across 70 facilities and GEOGroup employs about 20,000 people across 98 facilities. (Because they aren’t obligated to report their total employment numbers, these are estimates). Every single person employed by these corporations benefit from deportations.

The tech companies benefit. Palantir, AT&T, and Deloitte have significant ICE contracts and provide the data systems that underlie the new deportation machine.

The banks benefit. Banks and investment firms such as Citizens Bank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo have all financed ICE contractors and see significant returns on their investment.

If the banks benefit, the imperialist bourgeoisie benefit. Wage theft in the US is highest among industries with high concentrations of undocumented immigrants (restaurants, landscaping and building maintenance, hotels, garment manufacturing, and gas stations). In the initial surges in ICE repression of undocumented immigrants, when sections of the bourgeoisie complained and petitioned that the raids had gone too far and risked hurting their bottom line, the regime relented. At the time, the consensus was towards “immigration policy” under the prior Democrat administrations: just enough repression to terrify the hyper-exploited workers into compliance, but not enough to damage productivity. The calculus has changed.

The imperial extraction machine is not running as it once did. Superprofits (and hence, superwages) are down. The empire’s managers, that section firmly in command of Washington, has made it clear. The empire is striking back. The time of neoliberalization has ended, and the managers are returning to the jodhpur and the pith helm. This year, Marco Rubio told the countries of Europe, “[W]e in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Mass deportations – White Terror – breaks unionization efforts, destroys solidarity among workers, and ensures that people paid under the table remain at the razor’s edge of desperation. This lowers their wages. It is the manner by which superwages, those wages paid by the imperialist bourgeoisie out of the suppressed wages of the third world, those wages garnered through the arbitrage in unequal exchange with the colonized periphery, are controlled and distributed in the center. For the white worker, yes. For the undocumented immigrant or for anyone who might look like they’re undocumented, no. Superwages are not for you.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics data for February of this year shows that Hispanic workers have higher unemployment (4.4% US-wide average vs. 5.2% for Hispanic workers), and Hispanic women are at the bottom of the US pay scale, earning some 53 cents to the white man’s dollar.¹ “Latinas remain lowest-paid group in U.S. workforce, despite historic gains in education.”² In California, home to the largest Hispanic population in the US, Hispanic women earn 49 cents on the white man’s dollar, according to data collected by UCLA in 2025.³

Will there be a bill to pay for the big imperialist bourgeoisie? Certainly, when the labor markets collapse in the sectors most heavily dominated by undocumented immigrants. But who will be hurt? Who benefits? This strategy will line the pockets of the big imperialist bourgeoisie. The ideology they peddle has enraptured the little bourgeois business owners, and will continue to strike sparks in the flinty hearts of the white US settler population… but only up to a point. Because the bill will come owing first to the petty bourgeoisie, who depend on exploiting undocumented immigrants to manage their bottom lines.

In the end, the big capitalists believe they can manage the terror. They believe they can weather the economic storm.

Amidst these sweeping shifts, these systematic injustices, lie endless individual cruelties. Yes, like Michael Parenti said, there were far more “Good Germans” who simply kept their heads down and followed the law, avoided the trouble that comes with justice; but there were the Patriots too. Those who met the jackboots with a smile and a wave, who industrially sought to use the circumstances to stuff their pockets, they’re everywhere in colonial history — they define it. From the blood-dripping “heroes” who fill the history books, to the businessman who reports his competitor, to the housewives who pick through dresses torn from the bodies of the dead, to the woman that gleefully watches her domestic house-cleaning slaves cower under her gaze. These cannibals, these flesh-eaters are the poster child of mass deportation. But the Good American who believes in a fairer settler-colony and the virtuous “work ethic” of their underclass and the Patriot who will send workers to the concentration camps and man the cells with equal glee, are two sides of the same coin.

Both sides are the face of the enemy.

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The Employment Situation — February 2026.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026. Latino Policy and Politics Institute, UCLA. ︎
2. UCLA, 6 Oct. 2025. ︎
3. Id. ︎

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

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

(p * q) / v = m

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The US central banking system. 
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2. Here we are using the term labor aristocracy, as elsewhere in pieces published by Clarion staff, to mean anyone who is paid more for each hour of labor than the global average. For more, see Lauesen, Torkil. Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (Iskra Books, 2025). ︎
3. See Marx, Karl. Capital, Chapter 3. This is consonant with Adam Smith’s understanding of the velocity of money.
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4. Also called the “Federal Funds Rate.”
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5. The M1 money supply over ten years, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL.
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6. See, for instance, H.W. Edwards’ groundbreaking work Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy. ︎
7. The Economist, which represents British capital, has much more firmly presented an anti-Trump position on Powell as well as on the ICE killing of Renee Good. The re-emergence of national (as opposed to international) capitalist planning in the US empire has rattled many cages in Europe. See, for instance: Financial Times, “Justice department’s probe into Jay Powell galvanizes Fed leaders to repel Donald Trump’s attacks,” Jan 12; Wall Street Journal’s, “The Fed Fights Back,” Jan. 13.
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8. On the following Monday, the day after Powell’s video, trading was muted and the DOW opened down 500 points. The transfer of money out of the stock market and into commodities represents a fear that the value of the stock market may fall.
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9. Hatred of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory power has been poured into the Libertarian movement and thus embodies a certain kind of right-liberal settlerism. This has been the preserve of an alliance of right-leaning big capitalists and upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie since at least the early 2000s. It seems this logic is now winning over more and more of the big capitalists themselves.
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10. The neo-liberal position on immigration has always been the Democratic party line: “We need immigrants to do the jobs no one wants to do, that are too difficult, grueling, intense, or low-paying for real Americans!” The ICE sweeps represent a new ideology that flatly denies this rather grotesque logic and embodies instead the naked nationalist nativism in Washington.
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The United States of America isn’t a nation-state. It never has been; it never can be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did we not abolish slavery?

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

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

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

Did we not give civil rights to everyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it isn’t the first of its kind.

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

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

The National Question — From Empire to Union State

Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facing the Settler — Finding an ‘American’ Proletariat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Terms of the Struggle — Shattering the Prison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background

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

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

Principles of Settler Opportunism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– @probablykaffe

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

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

Whose Side Are You On?

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

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

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

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

The Social Technology of Settler Socialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Place in History

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

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

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

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

At this point, we must take stock of the situation. We must ask ourselves what is going on, and we must be prepared to understand the motivations of the Trump regime in the context of an overall strategy that has been pursued by the ruling class for at least twenty years. In June of 2000, local US police departments had some 441,000 officers, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ “Local Police Departments 2000.” As of 2024, there are now 808,700 local police officers across the US, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report. The growth of the domestic Phoenix Program (see the Clarion article, “State of Control”), “cop cities,” and the surge of police budgets ($65.7 billion in 2000, $176 billion in 2024 according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis) indicates something is going on.

The federalization of law enforcement isn’t a one-off, and it’s not an accident. The domestic Phoenix Program was consolidated under Bush; Trump’s first term saw the widespread deployment of the National Guard to protect the regime from domestic rebellions in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy “places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow,” according to Paul McLeary and Daniel Lippman at Politico.

The official targets of the D.C. occupation — ie those who are being arrested — are the undocumented immigrant population and young New Afrikan men. Nearly half of the arrested are immigrants lacking citizenship. For New Afrikans in D.C., the occupation is an intensification of the same criminalization they always experience from the white oppressor nation. Young Black men have been the most criminalized national sub-group in virtually every U.S. city since the partial victory of emancipation exchanged the New Afrikan experience from outright enslavement for Jim Crow Terror and genocidal mass incarceration. It starts with a pretextual stop over minor offenses which whites are rarely if ever stopped for. Traffic violations, alcohol containers, marijuana smoke: these are some of the crimes New Afrikans were arrested for during the August 2025 occupation. There is also the continuous criminalization of New Afrikan gun ownership: 1 in 4 of the arrests involving federal goons included gun charges. 

By criminalizing entire blocks, the occupation targets the “minority” nations in the city as a collective. Thanks to the supreme court, ICE agents are now legally permitted to use “race” as a factor in detaining suspected immigrants. This was ICE practice since the agency’s inception, but discriminatory stops are now ratified by the highest court in the Empire. 

Over 80% of D.C. residents are against the occupation; thousands are protesting, but marching in the street will not dissuade those with machine guns and a federal mandate. Heckling fascists with “Hanoi Hannah” audio (“your government lies to you, GI”) will not convince them to drop the gun when there is no militant movement to back it up.  

The federal occupation of major US cities is a stress test for future deployments. The ruling clique in the capitalist class is intent on normalizing ever-escalating installations of occupying troops within the Black national territories and Black majority cities of the United States. We can only anticipate why: the eventual liquidation of the captive Black and Indigenous labor force and the pursuit of a “final solution” to the domestic danger to the ruling class these captive, subject nations represent.

Integration as a ruling class strategy in a white-dominated settler colony simply cannot survive economic downturns. Integration in the U.S. is a top-down process through which portions of the oppressed nations are brought into that segment of workers who gain the most material benefits from imperialism. This privileged class of workers is often referred to as the labor aristocracy. As a bloc, this group is more likely to align with imperial interests, against the interests of the global proletariat. However, long before there is a capitalist crisis brutal enough to shake white people out of their traditional class alliance, the labor aristocracy closes its ranks in protection of white class interests. Analyzing past recessions confirms this tendency; without exception, every economic “recovery” since WWII is defined by an increase in the employment gap between “minority” and white workers.¹

Rather than uplifting the oppressed nations as a whole into the labor aristocracy, integration promotes a few lucky individuals while placing more and more “minorities” outside the labor pool. The Empire’s own unemployment statistics are a severe underestimation of “minority” unemployment; they have been cooking the books since at least the 1980s. Their unemployment statistics do not account for those on public assistance or those in prison. Thus, the unemployment gap between “minorities” and whites is even larger than they are willing to admit.  

As communists, we recognize the intrinsic cycle of capitalist growth and crisis. Growth periods increase wealth disparities, concentrating capital into fewer and fewer hands, while crisis periods throw ever more people out of the labor pool. But there is something different about the next impending capitalist crisis in the west. Since WWII, or even WWI, the U.S. has been the dominating imperialist power; two World Wars, and especially the decades after WWII, captured unprecedented degrees of market and military dominance for the U.S. empire. While this wealth is not distributed equally, it does have an effect of ideologically connecting the oppressed internal nations with their oppressors. Yes, even “minorities” in the U.S. benefit from imperialism to a significant degree. Comparing “minority” wages in the Empire to wages from the “third world” confirms at least a short-term shared interest in imperialism. But there are limitations and exceptions to this generalized idea. For example, the material conditions on many Indigenous reservations are worse than in some areas of the periphery. Settler Communists should focus on strategies that can provide a support role to liberation movements originating from oppressed pockets, which are also present in the agricultural fields and the occupied inner cities. 

The factor that separates the coming recession is the same one that influenced the 2025 National Defense Strategy: the U.S.’ grip over worldwide imperialism is losing strength. The aircraft carriers and bombers are not as effective as 20-30 years ago. They will continue to murder millions of people, but the oppressed nations now have countermeasures of their own. “A $1,000 dollar drone can take out a $100 million dollar jet.” This could be a positive development for the Eastern hemisphere, but a violent development for Latin America and the oppressed internal nations in the U.S. Empire. At the time of this writing, the U.S. military is staring down Venezuela in the Caribbean, threatening an imperialist invasion to secure the largest oil reserves in the world. The occupied nation of Puerto Rico serves as their forward operating base, reducing the island and its inhabitants into an unsinkable aircraft carrier. 

Their goal is genocide: the ultimate criminalization of the oppressed. It is the last, downward step on the ladder into white supremacist Hell on Earth, defined by work-extermination camps overseen by demonic security forces. If genocide is the last qualitative stage, occupation and ethnic cleansing are the precedents. To be clear, these processes of white supremacy have always been in motion to some degree since the arrival of white settlers on Turtle Island. The U.S. itself formed on the basis of genocide, brought into being over the bodies of the Indigenous Nations and the death-labor of slaves from Afrika. For New Afrikans, slavery gave way to ethnic cleansing. The slaves were “freed” by their northern white oppressors, only to be left exposed to the white supremacist Jim Crow Terror. What bourgeois history refers to as the “great migration” of New Afrikans from the south to northern cities was really ethnic cleansing through lynching and outright exclusion from the labor pool. Today, this ethnic cleansing has flipped on its head, with New Afrikans now being pushed out of the cities through gentrification. Trump’s occupation will only quicken the rate of this ethnic cleansing (dubbed the “great remigration”). How embarrassing it is that the major “communist” parties continue to prioritize “worker unity” in the face of open white supremacy.  

We should expect military occupations to spread across all major cities in the U.S. over the coming months and years. Temporary deployments will give way to a permanent, localized occupation force in charge of brutalizing the “minority” nations. Two weeks into the D.C. occupation, Trump signed an executive order directing the pentagon to create a “rapid response” network of national guard to crush incipient uprisings in the cities. It is likely that the national guard will not be up to the task; they are committed to the Empire, but lack the ideological fervor to carry out the full white supremacist campaign. Instead, the mantle will pass to local white supremacist militias and those security forces showing commitment to the white supremacist project. This article makes use of several statistics and historical references; the conclusion of all of them is that national oppression is the principal contradiction on Turtle Island. National liberation of the oppressed internal nations is therefore the correct organizing line. Remember the perennial words of Comrade George Jackson when taking a peek at what the future will resemble: 

“We must accept the eventuality of bringing the U.S.A. to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers crisscrossing the streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked in, the commonness of death.” 

Within our Lifetime! Organize, or lose. 

1.  MIM (Prisons), Proletarian Feminist Revolutionary Nationalism, page 42 ︎

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.”

Yesterday, on September 10, 2025, the white supremacist nazi Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a hate rally. Sorry, Charlie! He was silenced in the midst of a racist screed about the origins of gun violence in the US — one he’s practiced before. He was merely expressing the unspoken rules of gun ownership in the United States out loud.

Kirk was asked “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last ten years?” The nazi replied, “Too many.” The audience member responded, “In America, it’s five. Now, five is a lot, right, I’m going to give you — I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?”

Kirk replied, in his last words, “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

What stirring last words! Why did he spend his final breath asking his audience whether they wanted to count “gang violence” in the list of mass shootings? Because for Charlie Kirk and the ruling class, the question of gun ownership is simple. Every person should own a gun. The unspoken corollary to that is that only property owners are people.

For Charlie Kirk, as for the many others in the ruling class, rights are for property owners. Property owners are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly men. Kirk knew that. He didn’t want “criminals” to own guns, and wouldn’t you know it, many “crimes” are defined or criminalized by poverty. He doesn’t want trans people to own guns, only cis people. Kirk stood for the proposition that all cis white men should own a house and a gun, they should patrol the internal frontier of their country against the poor, against Black people, against trans people, and against workers.

Sorry, Charlie!

We have not one tear to shed for Mr. Kirk, his backers, his supporters, or his ruling class friends. And unlike Mr. Kirk, we don’t agree that property owners should have guns. Only the working class, the poor, the sex-oppressed, the nationally oppressed and their agents, organizations, and tribunes should be armed. Until that day comes, Mr. Kirks’ allies will continue to talk out of the side of their necks.

“The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty for a few pence. They cravenly preached ‘social peace’ (i.e., peace with the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials of the working-class movement, and the ‘sympathising’ intelligentsia.”

Perceptions of material and social precarity in the middle classes (principally settlers, petit bourgeoisie, and the imperialist working class) tend to produce two outcomes, both a product of the heightening of the international class struggle. In the first case, middle class precarity can produce real class consciousness, that is, proletarian consciousness. In seeking answers to the problems faced by the middle classes, a small contingent of radicals emerges who seek education on matters of class conflict, imperialism, colonialism, settler occupation, racism, patriarchy, and the international Marxist-Leninist, Decolonial, Indigenous, and National Liberatory traditions. In the second case, a broader movement of false class consciousness, that is petit bourgeois consciousness, emerges. The latter is what we’re going to look at here. What is false consciousness? This broadly refers to all forms of middle class consciousness which purport to be liberatory. Because of the diversity of interests represented within the middle classes, these forms of consciousness are equally diverse in content, though in practice they all point in the same direction:  continued bourgeois supremacy over the whole world. 

Contemporary liberalism for instance can be analyzed as a form of middle class consciousness: extolling the supposed intrinsic virtues of order and procedure, universal equality before the law, freedom of expression, and “non-violence” as a central tenet of political activity. In false consciousness, the individual begins with the assumption of an ideal reality towards which to strive, and through political action attempts to shape material reality according to these ideals. In actual practice, this produces a dogmatic approach to political activity where these central tenets of Liberalism are more important than the material outcomes. Why is this? Attempts to label liberals as unintelligent, misguided, or otherwise unaware of the contradictions within their approach to political activity are unsatisfactory, as can be quickly seen when these contradictions are pointed out in discourse, and liberalism demonstrates its boundless capacity to deny, distort, and excuse. What then is the material outcome of liberal political activity? Social and institutional inertia, the preservation of the status quo, and ultimately support for and defense of oppressive white supremacist regimes of settler-colonial occupation, and imperialist exploitation of the global south. It’s important to note here that these patterns are not necessarily inherent to any particular ideology, but to the class itself.

The professed ideals are a smokescreen for the material outcome, which is the real intended function of the ideology. This smokescreen serves mainly for the benefit of the ideology’s adherents, who easily learn to live with its contradictions by rationalizing their ideas as being broadly “correct” on the basis of their own material concerns. If they are comfortable, they feel their worldview is approximately correct. It is only when they experience or expect discomfort that they begin to change their worldview, and usually only by demanding the restoration (or increase) of privileges. This additionally serves the interests of bourgeois rule by keeping the politically active sections of the masses debating and disputing one another’s ideological conceptions — conceptions rooted in the material interests of different strata of the middle classes. These debates, while sometimes incredibly lively, all operate within the bounds of the overarching middle class interest of the continued maintenance of the settler empire, and at their most intense represent conflicts for control over the levers of imperial power, but never stray into the realm of revolution. While the right wing of the settler empire is happy to experiment with new methods of control and dominance in the face of crisis, the imperial left wing can only debate and denounce, or at most occasionally roll back or delay particular reforms taken by the right. This leads to a circular process, a sort of political holding pattern that can only react to events and retroactively justify inaction and passivity in the face of crises, rather than actively struggling to change reality. 

Whether their words say so or not, the liberal does not want to solve homelessness, because to do so would require the overthrow of the regime of private property which is fundamental to imperial land speculation, the surest path to “financial security” (that is, upwards class mobility) available to the middle class individual (which most commonly takes the form of “homeownership”). The liberal does not want to free Palestine, because to do so would be to shatter the legitimacy of the institutions which actively maintain the occupation of Palestine, and which at the same time actively maintain the occupation of stolen Indigenous lands inside the borders of the U.S. empire, and which actively maintain the continuing flow of inexpensive commodities and superprofit-inflated worker wages into the empire. 

The liberal may go as far as to couch their demands in radical language, but the demands remain reactionary nonetheless. In the case of homelessness, liberals will advocate for jobs programs, or zoning reform, or expanded homeless shelters, and so on, measures which may or may not produce improvements in the conditions of the homeless population, but which are ultimately aimed at maintaining homelessness as an institution by providing a harmless outlet through which to redirect any resistance against the private property regime. At the same time, the victims of housing exploitation are corralled along lines amenable to the bourgeois/settler state, and violence is employed against them should they resist or fail to comply with the measures imposed. The language may say “end homelessness”, but the demands say “the homelessness regime is in need of maintenance”. In the case of Palestine, the most popular of such liberal measures is the two-state “solution”, which seeks to divert the struggle for national liberation into a formalized acceptance of the occupation by Palestinians, and a concretized formalization of apartheid by the occupation. The language may say “Free Palestine” but the demands say “the occupation has a right to exist”.

With this analysis in mind, let’s now turn to the issue of middle class “communism”. On the 22nd of May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two staff members of the Palestine occupation regime, shouting “Free Palestine!” during the act. In doing so he tangibly brought the struggle for liberation into the rear base of the U.S.-israeli empire. This was, first and foremost, an act of radical love for and solidarity with the Palestinian people, the victims of the occupation’s genocidal onslaught. At the same time, this was an act of political desperation, a refusal to accept the normalization of genocide, whatever the personal costs may be. In doing so, Rodriguez called direct attention to the failure of the “Free Palestine” movement within the imperial core to heighten the struggle and bring tangible consequences to the perpetrators of the Gaza Holocaust. In one stroke, Rodriguez demonstrated that resistance is absolutely possible, and that those of us who have so far failed to organize militant violent resistance to imperial genocide are failing in our duty to uphold and defend the oppressed.

Seemingly frightened to the core at the dreadful thought of militant struggle against the state, the so-called Party “for” Socialism and Liberation, and the so-called “Communist” Party USA both immediately leapt to denounce this heightening of the struggle. Professing a commitment to “peace” and “non-violent struggle” these organizations have eagerly demonstrated in action the real aim of their respective programs: maintenance of imperial rule and the bourgeois monopoly on violence. We already knew this was the case, but the discussions erupting around these revisionist statements point in the direction of the future of this movement, and where the red line of class allegiance is to be drawn. Remember to ask: what is the material outcome of their political practice? This will inform us as to their actual goal, and in turn the outcomes of their practice will inform us as to their class allegiance.

The goal of the settler Communist, as a member of the international middle classes, is to leverage their material and social privileges in the interests of the international proletariat, with the aim of the liquidation and abolition of the settler class. The goal of the settler “communist” is to claim to fight for liberation in word while obstructing liberation in practice. They will therefore wield whatever institutional power they possess to effect this desired outcome. The CPUSA claims to fight for liberation in word, but in practice they canvass for bourgeois parties, instruct their members to “call their senator” in response to genocide, platform and defend zionists, and denounce violent struggle. These proponents of watered-down and sanitized “communism” are not doing this because they are unintelligent or ignorant or otherwise unaware of the aims of Communism, but because these actions serve their real material interests. During the First Inter-Imperialist War (1914 to 1918) the leadership of the Second International famously betrayed the aims of the Communist movement in favor of backing their own respective national bourgeois formations, not because they misunderstood the aims of Communism but because their aims were the interests of their own class, which at the time was benefitting tremendously from the expansion of imperialism and the intense exploitation of the colonized world. Today this opportunistic betrayal of the proletarian struggle repeats itself, as it has for most of the past century, in the settler-run “communist” and “socialist” parties. 

Marxism-Leninism has been proven, time and again through the history of the last century of class struggle, to be the most potent ideological tool wielded by the revolutionary proletariat. In this sense it is a dire existential threat to the continued privileges of the imperial middle classes, whose comforts are predicated on the very system which Marxism sets out to defeat. Despite this, it does not require any greater degree of cognitive dissonance (compared to adherents of liberalism) on behalf of the middle class radical to claim adherence to Marxism while rejecting it in practice. It is equally as trivial to wield the phraseology and aesthetics of Communism in the interests of the settler middle class as it is to wield liberalism for the same. The difference is that while liberalism is at present a decaying order, increasingly seen as obsolete by the masses, Communism is, after decades of decay and decline, currently on the ascent in international power and influence. It is therefore more urgent than ever that committed revolutionaries study Marxism. It is the development of mass consciousness which is the antidote to the opportunistic poison of middle class radicalism. Don’t just accept what we tell you to be the truth! You have to study, learn for yourself, and develop yourself and your understanding. Settler radical “communists” prey on youth and ignorance, turning potential budding revolutionaries into the footsoldiers of the perpetual counter-revolutionary holding pattern. Marching in cop-approved circles waving signs and decrying “violence” in word while supporting it in action as colonized people are actively being exterminated with your tax dollars feels wrong because it is.

Equally as urgent is the need to recognize the direction that settler “communism” is developing. No ideology is static while it has living adherents, and the ideologies of the middle classes are no different. As mass consciousness has developed and grown, the settler “communist” parties have been forced to take up the increasingly radical and revolutionary language of the proletarian struggle and distort it in order to adapt it to their aims. In recent years these parties have started talking of issues like settler colonialism, decolonization, national liberation, gender liberation, and so on. When they think they can get away with it, they denounce these issues as “un-Marxist”, “revisionist”, “ultra left”, etc. If they feel they can no longer hold back the tide of consciousness this way, they may adapt by accepting these ideas in theory while continuing to struggle against them in practice. Beware of “communists” who claim settler colonialism is no longer an ongoing structure, but an event of the past, or “communists” who promote a workerist agenda to the exclusion of Indigenous, Black, Queer, and women’s issues.

The old adage that if you “scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds” holds truer than ever today. Faced with culpability in the extermination of the Palestinians, liberals have roundly demonstrated their commitment to upholding the imperial order no matter the human cost. This development does not create fascists out of liberals, but exposes the classes invested in liberal ideology as being committed to the same interests as fascism. This commitment is inherent to the class, not to the ideology. Though liberalism is fundamentally incoherent, this is owing to its idealistic character which it draws from its reactionary class representatives. Marxism is not fundamentally incoherent, but middle class “communism” only superficially resembles Marxism, and in practical character functions identically to liberalism.

Does this mean that the so-called “communist” parties of the middle classes have more in common with fascism than proletarian Marxism? In most cases this still remains to be seen: will the settler “communists” change their allegiance when a really revolutionary international proletarian party emerges? For many, particularly among the disillusioned youth of the movement, the answer is certainly yes! For many others however, their commitment to the imperial order will win out. With the undeniable necessity of Marxism-Leninism becoming clearer by the day, many middle class radicals are even now preparing to either stem this tide for as long as humanly possible, or to subvert it to their own ends. “Marxism” which openly upholds such reactionary and counter-revolutionary values as US nationalism, the patriarchal family, “anti-woke ideology”, queer/transphobia, zionism, etc, has been emerging. And while the left wing of the middle classes can only hand-wring over the (potential) loss of their privileges and otherwise maintain the counterrevolutionary holding pattern, the right wing is openly preparing to mount a renewed offensive against the proletariat by consolidating the middle classes under the banner of “Marxism”.

We’ve seen reactionary middle class revolutions before. It bears reiterating that the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) called itself a “socialist workers’ party” because it was drawing on popular radical ideas of the time, portraying itself as a “sensible” third way alternative to radical Bolshevik terror and failing capitalism. In our time the ideas have changed somewhat, but the processes of class conflict are very similar in many ways. When our own NSDAP emerges it will drape itself in both the red flag and the U.S. flag.

What are the hallmarks of an organization which upholds false consciousness?

• Attempts to control members, rather than empower them. Members are isolated from their community rather than supported as Communists within their community.
• Stifles development through repetitive tasks and overbearing bureaucracy, rather than making development and the carrying forward of the struggle the key priority.
• Education takes a lower priority to “action”, rather than practice and study being treated as equally important aspects of the dialectic of development. Members are taught what to think rather than how to think.
• Opaque and/or impenetrable internal organizational functioning, instead of clearly defined rules which everyone follows and which everyone has a voice in the drafting and implementing of.
• Communications with central leadership are limited to commands that are carried down the line, rather than a dialogue.
• Leadership is upheld on the “strength” of their ideas, rather than on their contributions of labor to the struggle.
• Decisions are justified by appeals to the authority of leadership, “The Party”, etc. rather than democratic accountability. 
• Leaders are treated as rulers to be obeyed, rather than servants of the membership and the people.
• Ossified leadership structures, leaders are not subject to recall, elections do not happen or are designed to reproduce leadership power rather than empowering the general membership.
• Historical revolutionaries (particularly Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao) are treated as infallible prophets whose word cannot be challenged, rather than regular human beings whose ideas should be studied and understood holistically and within their particular historical contexts.
• Contradictions in the ideology, outlook, organizational functioning, decision making, theoretical disagreements, etc, are resolved with appeals to “faith” in the organization’s mission or leadership, or the words of the aforementioned “prophets”, rather than constructive struggle.
• Attempts to engage in constructive struggle are shut down, treated as “wrecker” behavior, or ignored, rather than embraced as necessary to the development of the proletarian party.
• Finances are kept hidden from the membership, and/or spending decisions are made without the consent of the membership, rather than being open and democratically accountable.
• The voices and contributions of members from oppressed populations (women, Indigenous, Black, Queer, disabled, etc) are dismissed, excluded, minimized, or otherwise disempowered or decentered, rather than being held as central to the proletarian struggle, and empowered and uplifted by the organization.
• Discussions with or about other organizations are discouraged or silenced, rather than being considered essential to the task of building unity among the Marxist movement.

If you feel like you or someone you know may be involved in an organization which upholds false consciousness, we have several articles which can provide further guidance:

• From USU: Cadre Development Literature, Organizing Theory
• On the Cult Form: The Cult Building Tendency
• On CPUSA: A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words, Against CPUSA’s Colonizer “Communism”
• On PSL: Revolution in Our Lifetime
• On FRSO: Colonizer “Communism” in the FRSO, The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO
• On DSA: Organize Within the DSA!, Uncommitted: A Lesson in Counterinsurgency

The struggle for the Party is at times a bitter one, and promises to only grow in contention as the proletarian movement builds momentum and begins to truly challenge the established “communist” institutions. Already many middle class “communists” resort to increasingly coordinated campaigns of harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence in order to assert the “legitimacy” of their particular organization. Committed revolutionaries must understand the backwardness of this approach: To assert authority without the backing of the proletariat, or to attempt to cudgel the proletariat into submission to “the party” can only ever at most postpone the emergence of the Party of the revolutionary proletariat. 

The Party will form the vanguard of the revolution only when the masses of the most oppressed internationally recognize it as their representative and their weapon in the class struggle, wielded by and in the interests of the international proletariat.