“Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency. Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism. People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well — they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves.” – Combat Liberalism, Mao Zedong, 1937

In order to combat the liberalism that grips the throat of the Communist movement in these occupied lands, it’s necessary to reflect on the ways in which liberal ideology and habits are uniquely expressed in the current historical moment.

1. “Someone Should Do Something”

The first type of settler liberalism is perhaps the most common among the settler masses. It is the “someone (else) should do something” type. These individuals are aware to some degree of the hardships and oppression faced by others (and often even themselves) but will at every turn find justification to externalize their responsibility to the land and the oppressed. “There’s nothing I can do” is the credo of the first type of settler liberalism. This first type can often be found twisting themselves into knots to politically justify their self-imposed helplessness, usually by blaming others for their failures. The fault is aimed upon the misleadership of the movement, their attachment to their luxuries and comforts, or their attachment to their personal safety. In the last case they will justify their inaction by inflating the threat posed by the settler state, painting it as an invincible force which must not be provoked to violence. This stubborn attitude leads inevitably to political nihilism or self-interested electoralism (or a deeply cynical overlap of the two). Many individuals who identify as communists, socialists, anarchists, etc but refuse to struggle for radical organization are in fact guilty of the first type of settler liberalism, and are simply using radical rhetoric and symbology to mask their complicity with the imperial system, consciously or not. The salve for this first type of liberalism is organized action with concrete goals, and a rejection of the habit of political performance devoid of substance.

The first type of liberalism has its most complete expression in the mass performative protest, wherein huge crowds assemble to loudly proclaim their demand for someone else to do something (legislators, the public at large, etc.) — or in other words, they proclaim their intention, in full view and supervision by the state, to continue doing nothing. Their purely rhetorical demands and their vapid politics mask the underlying reality that in practical terms they are there to struggle against escalation. Each “protest” prides itself on its mass participation, its multi-national representation, and has as its only concrete demand that everyone seeking to struggle against the state must instead co-operate with it. Consider the leadership of these actions — these are largely petty bourgeois protest organizers (e.g. take the national and professional makeup reported by the DSA’s own membership survey for instance), whose appeals to pacifism, “non-violent resistance”, and “peaceful protest” are largely conscious reactions to the accusations slung by bourgeois media: that protest organizers are enemies of the state, secretly in league with or being tricked by “the real bad guys”, who seek to disrupt peaceful democratic processes for nefarious purposes. Such protest organizers wish to maintain “good optics”, but good optics in the eyes of the bourgeois media only comes by bowing to bourgeois demands. When bourgeois media accuses protest groups of violence and crime, it’s a veiled threat: “whose side are you on, ours or theirs?” The protest leaders wish to avoid the struggles and sacrifices of the inevitable escalation of violence should they truly place themselves on the side of the oppressed, and so regardless of their intentions setting out, by adhering to bourgeois demands for “peaceful protest” they draw their line of allegiance firmly on the side of the bourgeoisie.

Protest leaders making appeals to pacifism are the white flag of surrender to the state. The red flags waved about at these legal protests are merely bait to draw the gullible.

2. “I Have To Do Something“, i.e. the Cult of Action

The inverse of the first type of liberalism is the “I have to do something” form of individual or organizationally amateurish spontaneous direct action. Individuals, either disillusioned by the prevalence of liberal rot in the movement, unaware of the real tasks before them due to inadequate education, or perhaps just mesmerized by fantasies of heroism, ignore the necessity of disciplined professional organization as a precondition for revolutionary activity, and carry out disorganized activity on an individualistic, amateur basis. This is certainly the most sympathetic type, and the closest to revolutionary action.

However, if these second-type individuals come together to form organizations guided by the same second-type error, they will remain limited to local work that can only react to the problems at hand (for example, providing survival services to homeless folks). They will be unable to chart a course for changing local conditions on a lasting basis (for example, by providing permanent decommodified housing to formerly homeless folks). Because immediate action takes priority ahead of political clarity, even the most effective and well-organized work is carried out on an essentially amateur and ad-hoc basis. Without coherent revolutionary politics as the baseline necessity for unity of work, there inevitably comes a point where some of the participants in these organizations have different ideas for what direction to take their work than a strictly revolutionary outlook would provide for. This produces an inherently unstable political unity that will inevitably lead to catastrophic splits.

The second type of settler liberalism has the most potential to become revolutionary, but only if a really revolutionary outlook takes firm charge of their activities. In all other cases, the activities of this type decohere the revolutionary movement by subordinating revolutionary politics to local matters and by misleading its participants. More often than not, participants in second-type organizing burn out entirely. This can be due to overwork, wherein unprofessional orgs demand excessive volunteer work of their most active and dedicated members. Liberal and hobbyist attitudes often dominate the membership of these orgs and such liberals and hobbyists will never do as much as they can on a consistent and long-term basis (because their priorities are elsewhere!) which places increasing pressure on the dedicated members to contribute more labor to meet the needs of the org. Organizational burnout can also be the result of sheer disillusionment with the possibility of a revolutionary mass movement. After all, when everyone around you claims to be a socialist but fails to live up to these claims in deed and do the work, or years of work go down the drain in an organizational breakdown, it can be very difficult for the local would-be revolutionary to see a path out of their political quagmire.

In the best case scenario, where this liberal approach to political struggle has led to the creation of an organization which is concretely providing for the needs of the community, serious and swift effort must be made by its members to seek the assistance of other, more developed, communist organizations in beginning the process of proletarian professionalization. These orgs may be called upon in sharing the duties the members have taken on, to ensure the services being provided are not interrupted. All possible measures must be taken to ensure the lives of vulnerable individuals are not disrupted or put at risk. The few tenuous roots we actually have in the masses must be carefully defended! Proletarian professionalization will be more fully detailed in a later article, but for the moment should be understood as the process by which an organization and its members adopt a militant, decolonial, anti-american political line both in word and in action. The liberal organization must be split in two: a semi-clandestine cadre org comprised of the revolutionary leadership, and a semi-open mass org comprised of the tailing elements under the control or guidance of the cadre org.

3. “The Multi-National Working Class”

The third type appears to be the most common type of liberalism found within the leadership ranks of the Four Opportunists and the litany of organizations and individuals which orbit and tail them. Each big national organization comprising the Four Opportunists has a slightly different flavor of the Multi-National Working Class line (henceforth referred to as MNWC for brevity), but they all follow a general trend of assumptions, divorced from historical fact and present reality, which pre-suppose the necessity of revolutionary leadership by the white working class.

MNWC is a smokescreen which smuggles white nationalism into the ranks of Communism. How is this the case? Proponents of MNWC may openly speak at great length, sometimes even to the exclusion of anything else, of the great and terrible crimes of the white settler nation, but they always deny the necessity of its complete subjugation and liquidation. They will dance around this denial by inventing mythical prophecies of a “multi-national working class” which will surely soon unite and overthrow their “mutual oppressors”, the big imperialist bourgeoisie (if only the divisive minorities would stop being so self-centered!). The crimes of the oppressor nation are offloaded onto the oppressor elites, denying the white working class’s complicity in Global Colonial Holocaust. MNWC launders this denial by ideologically positioning the white workers as oppressed comrades-in-arms alongside members of the actually oppressed nations, erasing the real material processes which reproduce national oppression in order to absolve themselves of the need to do anything which might jeopardize their material privileges. The MNWC proponents then have the gall to call upon the oppressed to adopt their line in the name of “multi-national unity” and will accuse those who reject this heinous demand of being “wreckers,” “ethnonationalists,” or worse.

What is wrong with this “multi-national working class” view? Why is it incorrect? The reality is that the white settler nation is an oppressor nation. Oppressor nationalities constitute a unique form of reactionary nationalism which derives its ideological cohesion from a cross-class collaboration in imperial conquest. Thus the mythological concept of “American equality” is manufactured along reactionary imperialist lines, sublating the antagonism between worker and bourgeoisie by externalizing and projecting it onto other nationalities. The oppressor nation’s very existence as both a political concept and material force is predicated on the subjugation of other nationalities, therefore the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism necessarily requires the overthrow and subjugation of the entire oppressor nation, not merely its bourgeoisie! The sublated class antagonism can only be restored by militant opposition to the white nation as a whole. The white working class — which serves as the muscle, nerves, and arteries of the white nation — has centuries of blood dripping from its hands on account of its evergreen allegiance to the white nationalist state, blood which has richly nourished the roots that firmly hold their feet in place. The white workers can only even begin to abolish their deeply rooted material positionality as the ever-loyal compradors of colonial genocide and environmental holocaust by completely uprooting themselves and entering life-and-death revolutionary struggle for complete independence from the imperialist system and all the benefits it offers. “Complete independence” should be taken to mean especially and most importantly independence from the land-expropriation regime of colonial private property, which necessarily preconditions unity with revolutionary national liberation. Landback.

The white working class, as a class, can never find unity with the workers of the oppressed nations — rather white individuals who break from white society will continue to find unity with the oppressed by actively seeking the abolition of the white working class. Revolutionary-minded settlers must engage in revolutionary reconstruction of their identities — participate in the creation of a new, anti-settlement, socialist identity — and purge themselves of their oppressor-national class ideology in order to fully participate in the political life of the new society. Only those whites who see this reality clearly and firmly grasp all its implications can be considered revolutionary. The so-called “communists” peddling MNWC should be exposed for what they are: liquidators of revolution whose principle concern, regardless of what other words fall out of their mouths, is the reproduction of white privileges predicated on national oppression. In a word, white nationalism.

The third type of liberalism is the most dangerous and insidious. Where ever it has ideological hegemony it slanders the international tradition of revolutionary communism by claiming its name and its inheritance. The third type’s leaders position themselves atop colonial corporations bearing red branding, whose sole business is selling bloody scraps of the flayed hide of communism on the political market. Their depraved insistence on flattening national oppression into a difference of opinions serves a concrete purpose, which is to sustain the ideological hegemony of white supremacy among even the most left-radical of settlers. This process reproduces the unity of settler colonial politics by reframing non-antagonistic differences (white worker and white bourgeois) as “antagonistic,” and reframing antagonistic differences (settler and colonized) as “non-antagonistic.” Thus a mythology of communism as a white movement is manufactured and turned against the oppressed, acting in lockstep with colonial white supremacy. A twisted reflection of liberation is waved before us promising us salvation if only we help the whites get better wages. As a consequence even those settlements with large populations of white radicals become rigidly and impenetrably white supremacist. A potential ally of the revolution is thereby turned into a militant defender of the spoils of colonial conquest.

4. The Bourgeois Media Revolutionary

All media of communications in the age of universal class dominance are necessarily class media, thus the political character of social media takes on the political character of the dominant class, and all aspects of the functional processes of social media become aspects of the functional processes of class development and class conflict. Social media, i.e. the dominant means of communication (in a previous age this was commonly newspapers) becomes a critical component of the class superstructure, and class oppression is in part structured through and embodied in social media. The flow of information through all channels is tightly regulated according to the interests of the dominant class, and in the case of social media this is most plainly evident in the form of “the algorithm,” but also is heavily influenced by and determinant of legal regulations, market structures and incentives, accessibility and infrastructure, location and language, and the daily habits, devices, and software used to access social media.

The fourth and final type of settler liberalism we will discuss here is the revolutionary of bourgeois social media. Often recognizing the above three types of liberalism as such, the liberal of the fourth type rejects the clueless misdirection of the first type, the amateurish tactics of the second, and the bureaucratic obstructionism of the third, and thus left with no apparent alternative political avenues to pursue, finally arrives at the point of individual or amateur online agitation. The fourth type sees clearly that all internal opposition to the imperialist state lies scattered and fragmented and atomized, unable to build sufficient strength to stand up on its own two feet, and they resolve correctly that the solution at hand is unity of action, and that agitation must be conducted towards such. Taking to the figurative streets of social media they shout their message from atop their soapbox and begin to develop a following.

All too often they fail to see that the soapbox itself was issued to them by the bourgeoisie, and that the crowd gathering around it was brought to them by the bourgeoisie. Both the entertainer and their audience begin to perceive that new, more radical, and more revolutionary thought is growing in strength as the audience grows. The parasocial relationship that forms between this bourgeois media personality and their followers convinces both that a qualitative change is occurring, and that this strategy is working.

Thus placated, the aspirant revolutionary and their audience endlessly tread water and swim in circles through the very same morass containing the above three types of liberalism. A bourgeois social and economic dynamic develops to support and reproduce these relationships, wherein the bourgeois media revolutionary becomes a petty bourgeois proprietor of an entertainment business peddling their political message.¹ Constrained by the censorship of advertisement and sponsorship deals, and the censorship of algorithmic content delivery, and the self-censorship implicit in “building a brand,” in marketing their ideas and so on to an audience of largely petty bourgeois radicals, the fourth type completely loses sight of the revolutionary horizon and drowns their own ideals in the murk of class naturalization. The class character and therefore class function of their activities and of the social media environment they perform their activities in is rendered invisible. They lose sight of the class character of the practical aspect of their activities and place exclusive focus on the theoretical aspect of their activities. The class content of the dialectic of theory and practice is flattened to the “pure” class content of the theory, and unable to move forward with this alone their practice devolves into an endless campaign to struggle for a “pure” understanding and approach to revolutionary politics.

For the fourth type, the universal is subsumed into the particular, the concrete totality of political practice becomes the theoretical and the struggle therein,² and every difference of opinion in strategy threatens the shaky and unstable practical basis for the work. Every theoretical disagreement in effect becomes a disagreement in practical activity and threatens a split, and the long-term outcome of this tendency is the regular fractal fragmentation of political unity into sects and microsects, whose re-building and re-coherence is only ever a temporary illusion of misunderstanding to be exploded back into disunity at a moment’s notice. The incoherence of the movement, in the eyes of individuals immersed in this environment, thereby becomes exclusively the “fault” of everyone else except the individual or organization in question. Criticism and self-criticism are seen as wrecker behavior and defeatism. A deep emotional insecurity is produced, and the necessity of candid discussions on the class character of these activities is subsumed into the cold detachment of bourgeois “professionalism” — rather than proletarian professionalism, which necessitates an ability to receive and give criticism while recognizing one’s place within a collective whole, the “professionalism” of the bourgeoisie is the competition of individual brand management; each criticism received as an existential attack, produced in an environment where a brand only strikes at another to climb their dazed body like a ladder.

“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs”

To presume that theoretical struggle can precede organization is to misunderstand the purpose of both. A proletarian approach to politics can only be an organized approach. Regardless of their level of theoretical sophistication, any given single individual or undifferentiated mass of informally or loosely associated individuals can never practice proletarian politics. “Discourse cycles” must give way to formally planned inter-organizational struggle, the terms and purview of which must be agreed upon in advance by the organizations in question. The principle of democratic centralism, of freedom of criticism and unity of action, can then produce the conditions for proletarian discipline, wherein individuals are held accountable by their organizations who in turn hold one another accountable through inter-organizational criticism. Unless political struggle is consciously structured as disciplined and co-operative organizational struggle, theoretical struggle remains the exclusive domain of artisanal craftsmanship. No matter how intricate, sophisticated, beautiful, and scientifically precise the artisan’s craftwork is, it remains the exclusive domain of petty bourgeois production and will not advance to the status of proletarian production without a conscious plan for building organizational discipline. This is the basic precondition for any forward motion.

1. At times a more “grassroots” “community” may form instead of an individual and audience, wherein the individual and audience comprise one another. “Communities” can take many forms but generally have an amorphous or nebulous structure largely reproduced by the content delivery algorithm itself (typical of platforms with follower and group systems), or are rigidly contained within walled gardens of activity (e.g. platforms with discrete “servers”). In any event however, the underlying bourgeois base relations reproduce the bourgeois superstructure by the same process patterns as the individual-audience dialectic described above, albeit with a greater emphasis on accumulation of social capital rather than money capital. ︎
2. The ideological expression of the revolutionary purist however often takes a contradictory appearance to the above, wherein the “practical” aspect of the work is articulated as primary. This excessive focus on practice ahead of theory becomes the theoretical over-emphasis, and therein the Cult of Action is reproduced. The Cult of Action demands the perpetual subordination of theory to practice, but in doing so misunderstands the purpose of theory and merely rigidly adheres to a “practice first” theory. ︎

“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.