“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”¹

Introductory Note

Before I begin, I would like to be transparent in sharing that this piece is largely reflective of my own experiences and observations of myself and others. Only in the past year (after more than four years of actively organizing and calling myself a Marxist) have I built up the courage and ability to truly notice, and more importantly rectify, my own liberal hobbyist tendencies. I want to encourage others who see themselves in this piece to do the same. Such rectification has come about not through metaphysical, undefined markers such as time or age, but as a result of intentional rigorous political education, reflection, struggle, and discomfort. The most important part is that I have not done any of these things alone. My beloved partner and comrades have helped me learn and grow in ways that I never thought were possible. So, to get things started, I wanted to thank my comrades in CCAP and the AEWL for their continued guidance and wisdom, not only generally but also with helping in the development of this piece. I never thought I would be able to actually write anything, but you allowed me to believe in myself. You all genuinely give me life and every action I take is inspired by you. In this horrid and dying place, in the face of true evils and insurmountable odds, if we have each other and are armed with the scientific application of Marxism, I am certain that we can win.

Secondly, as I will elaborate further in this piece, hobbyist tendencies stem from unchecked, individualist selfishness (a form of liberalism) which runs rampant among the west, particularly among the white settler amerikan left. To this point, in this article I will use “we” to refer to white leftist amerikan settlers, particularly those of the privileged petit-bourgeois or “petit-actionnaire” class. I am directing this piece mostly towards my peers in this similar class position. For further reading on the petit-actionnaire class, I highly recommend Morgan Phos’s article titled the“The Middle Class is Not a Myth“. In it, Phos lists one of the defining factors of this class as a unique phenomenon existing between the traditional definition of both proletariat and petit-bourgeois classes. People who “receiv[e] a lessened [but still significant] share of the imperial pie” but are still “enriched during the financial market’s upswings” through investments such as savings/interest accounts, small enterprises, ownership of land/property, and university education.²

On Hobbyism

Many settlers not only benefit, but also participate — whether actively or passively, willingly or unwillingly— in the genocide and suffocation of the Global South. Thus it is plain to see that our current “leftist” movement is filled with unprincipled organizations and individuals consisting of opportunists, misogynists, influencers, sellouts, spineless electoral candidates, u.s. “patriots,” and as we will get to, hobbyists. As frustrating as this is, it is to be expected of a nation that has been so ideologically stunted as theorized by Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa:

“If underdevelopment were related to anything other than comparing economies, the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the United States, which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder.“³

Amerikan settlers suffer from a horrible and fatal case of liberalism and racist narcissism, while also living in the most powerful country on the planet with enough resources to suck the life out of everything that exists. We are genuinely raised to believe — and in many cases fully DO believe — that the u.s. has pretty much always existed and always will, and not only that, but also that it is the greatest place on Earth to live, and those other slummy countries can only wish that they had it as good as us. When this evil narcissism and oblivious selective memory is combined with actual world power and multiplied across the minds of millions of people in a single nation, it is no wonder that even our “socialists” consistently miss the mark and fall into the traps of hobbyism.

Hobbyism, or “the hobbyists”, are those individuals or even entire organizations who simply treat Marxism and Communist organizing as a hobby, rather than their life’s work or purpose. This is a grave error plaguing our movement today.

By definition, a hobby is an activity that an individual does in their free time. Even here in this definition, we see western mind-bending at play. The concept of “free time” implies that there is a separate portion of your time, in some instances even a majority of your time, which is not free, i.e. your “work time.”

Since many Communists are forced to work wage-labor jobs to survive, it is true that organizing is something that they do during their “free time” (outside of work time). However, this results in many organizers wrongly conflating their free time enjoyment activities with the work they do as an organizer. Doing one activity or another in your free time does not make that activity a hobby; the distinction lies in your prioritization of different free time tasks or activities. It is still important to make time for hobbies and interests, as they are vital to our own individual well-being, and thus allows us to have the capacity to do important organizing work. But rather than being viewed as an enjoyable, feel-good activity (i.e. a hobby), revolutionary organizing must be prioritized on the same plane as that of your own survival, and the survival of your family and community.

As stated above, hobbyism is a form of liberalism. It is easy to identify the liberals engaging in hobbyism, as that is essentially what liberal “activism” is. They use their artistic abilities to make quirky, funny protest signs, knit/crochet pussy hats (or its newest iteration, “melt the ICE” hats), or design Instagram infographics with milquetoast messaging. As Communists, we are quick to notice in what ways we are more dedicated and serious in our goals than the liberals. However, in leftist or Marxist circles,there are often individuals who conflate their hobbies and their activism, i.e., they see them as one and the same and do not see a need to separate them.

Mao writes in Combat Liberalism:

“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.”⁴

Hobbyism stems from a similar class-urge as careerism and is its dialectical opposite. The careerist seeks to resolve this contradiction (limited supply of time and responsibilities) by turning their organizing work into a full-time job, and thus descends to opportunism to ensure they can make a buck. The hobbyist attempts resolve it by making organizing into “play time,” often to absolve guilt or ease one’s worries about capitalism and their role in it. Hobbyists see Communism as something to do on the weekends, a cool aesthetic/personality trait, or a way to gain social media followers. I really encourage the reader here to identify any ways that they have noticed this tendency in themselves. It’s important to realize that the hobbyist is ultimately a liberal who is fine with the continuation of global suffering and will just hold rallies ad infinitum, run their candidates, and stockpile all of their funds until the very end. Flashy Communist aesthetics are often diametrically opposed to real, risky organizing. The hobbyist is loud and blatant to assure themselves of their dedication; the true Communist is not, to prevent the eyes of the state from falling upon them. Is this who you want to be? At what point will or won’t you give up on everything that is worth fighting for? It is time to be serious.

I would like to clarify here that I am not arguing that hobbies are useless or a waste of time. Quite the contrary! We still need interests outside of Communism, we still need hobbies. We cannot transform into warrior-monks and deny our human needs for mental breathing room. Creative outlets are imperative to our well-being, especially as the world around us crumbles. However, hobbies should be treated as assets for, and secondary to the movement for revolution, decolonization, and socialism.

Additionally, there is a difference between using your skills for the movement and treating organizing like a hobby. If you make music, host a benefit show to fund revolutionary activities or mutual aid; if you enjoy writing D&D campaigns, practice polemic and agitprop writing; if you’re good at drawing or knitting, commission your pieces to fund actual revolutionary organizations; if you’re into exercise or body-building, teach your comrades how to fight and defend themselves. All of these examples are important for the movement, but they are not the end all be all of organizing. The real work starts with rigorous study, struggle, and party building — eventually leading to tangible action to bring down the state apparatus.

Rachel Corrie, an amerikan settler who dedicated her life to the anti-zionist movement on the ground in Palestine, puts this in perspective for us as well. In a letter she wrote to her mother, just three weeks before being martyred by the iof in 2003, she writes:

“This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore.I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop.“⁵

If you say you want a better world, yes, your hobbies and interests, things you find joy in, are extremely important to make time for — and — none of them are more important or worthy of your time than doing whatever you can to bring the murderous u.s. empire to its knees. This is especially true for the white settler Communist. What the movement needs now is dedicated individuals and organizations who are willing to make the struggle for decolonization, world liberation, and socialism, their life’s work. This means risking it all. This means giving up your life, or the one you thought you knew.

“Risking it all” in this current moment does not equate to going out and committing reckless acts of terrorism that gets you or your comrades killed. In fact, as a revolutionary, at this moment in time, your death or incarceration would hinder the movement and your comrades significantly. Even martyrs who have died for the cause, whether by their own hand or not (to name a few: Aaron Bushnell, Rachel Corrie, and Tortuguita, may they rest in peace) arguably have not furthered the movement in a meaningful way, as we still exist under an incredibly oppressive fascist state apparatus. However, this does not mean that their deaths, along with all other revolutionary martyrs around the world, are in vain or will not be avenged.

“Giving up your life” in this context means that any way possible given your unique situation, you dedicate yourself to the movement. You practice criticism and self criticism constantly. You read, write, learn, and struggle. You go where work is needed, you make time. The hobbyist talks about “hating capitalism” and “revolution” but is still mainly focused in building their lives and careers as individuals. They are primarily concerned with their comfortable lives with their careers, precious savings, superwages with annual raises, and their 401(k)s. Even if they in theory disagree with the origins of settler ideals such as nuclear family goals and property ownership, a vast majority of left leaning individuals aspire towards these goals in the imperial core.

I know this to be true because this was me. The petit actionnaire class exists in such droves because the pull to conform, the benefits — however slim they really are — are intoxicating and convincing. One of the most fundamental (and suffocating) tenets of whiteness and settler ideology is to succumb to the urge to look away. Only by staring into the most stained parts of myself was I able to wake up to reality and begin to confront my errors. Every “leftist” in amerika who considers themselves a revolutionary must constantly combat these hobbyist and opportunist tendencies, because none of us are immune to it. We must face the uncomfortable reality that the world we know is dying, if not already dead. You must truly and genuinely ask yourself: do you really want a revolution? Do you really want a war? Are you willing to sacrifice, whatever it takes? Answer quickly, because we are out of time. As George Jackson states in Blood in my Eye:

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”⁶

What do you have to lose? Come to terms with losing it. Stare into the gaping, black hole inside of this world and inside of yourself, soaked black with the blood of millions. You will want to look away, and it is important that you do not. This is the solution to the “privilege” question that is often mentioned in progressive circles. You must not only get used to discomfort but actively seek it. You will not have time for the things you wanted. You will not hoard any wealth you might have access to. You will not save for “retirement” in 30-40 years. You may have hobbies and interests, but ultimately the skills that you have should be used towards the cause of socialism. If you’d rather look away, and stay in your safe and oblivious bubble, admit this to yourself and leave the revolutionary circles. You aren’t welcome here.

If you are caught in the middle, recognizing the reactionary and hobbyist tendencies within yourself but wanting to overcome them, I encourage you to be honest and open with yourself and your comrades about this. We all have fear, we all have hesitations and drawbacks. But you must not retreat. Again, choose your fate and choose now.

It is not a recommendation, but a requirement, that as Communists, we must still find joy and pleasures in those things that are inherent to us being humans on Earth. Take care of yourself, because your comrades and the movement need you. Take time for your interests, your lovers, your children, your comrades; but your dedication, your purpose, in the end, is towards a better world, and towards the destruction of the united states and towards a new world order. You can work for a better world, not separate from, but for and in conjunction with your community, your lovers, children, and comrades. We must constantly remember Huey’s words:

“Revolutionary suicide does not mean that i and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.”⁷

1. Mao, Zedong. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Vol. 1. Pei-Ching I.E. Peking, [Foreign Languages Press] ; Oxford, 1978, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. ︎
2. Phos, Morgan. “The Middle Class Is Not a Myth.” The Middle Class Is Not a Myth – by Morgan Phos, The Red Compass, 20 May 2023 ︎
3. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 1972. London, Verso, 1972, pp. 16-17. ︎
4. Mao, Zedong. Combat Liberalism. Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1967. ︎
5. Rachel’s Writing and Emails from Palestine | the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. 29 Aug.
   ; 2007, rachelcorriefoundation.org/rachel/emails. ︎
6. Jackson, George. Blood in My Eye. 1972. Great Britain, Penguin Books, 1975, pp. 15–16. ︎
7. Newton, Huey P. Revolutionary Suicide. 1973. London, Penguin Books, 2009, p. 3. ︎

We sat down to talk with Em Cohen, whose meta-level critiques of general movement strategy and tactics we’ve deeply appreciated, and felt it would be valuable to delve into further. While Em frequently writes about Judaism and Zionism through the framework of “philosemitism,” in this conversation we chose to focus on a question that has been on many people’s minds: why hasn’t the so-called u.s. left, despite all of the efforts made over the last two years, been able to meaningfully intervene in a live-streamed genocide? And now that u.s.-led imperialism is descending into its death throes, unleashing some of the most naked expressions of violence we have perhaps ever seen, threatening to take out Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba even as it continues its whole-sale destruction of Gaza — where are we going wrong? We urge folks to check out more of Em’s writing and analysis at medium.com/@emcohen.

W4G: To start, could you talk a little bit about your critiques of some of the underlying frameworks that you think shape the strategies and tactics of the so-called “u.s. left?” You’ve written before about the way that there is a mismatch between the revolutionary-sounding rhetoric that we use, and the liberal or reformist nature of many of these tactics, which are designed to appeal to the moral conscience of the ruling class — or as you say, to simply register the fact of our dissent and nothing more. Can you give some examples of this?

EC: Whenever a situation provokes righteous anger, and society seems like it’s about to burst into flames, the popular protest organizations that have come to be known as the “u.s. left” jump into action. Like a well-oiled machine, they post the same graphic that they always post, with the same font and the same logos and the same endorsers, calling for another iteration of the same protest. If it’s not dubbed an ‘emergency action’ and announced that night, their faithful members spend the days leading up to the protest imploring everyone to show up and ‘bring all their rage.’

On the day of, they truck in loads of signs to pass out that make extensive use of radical slogans and imagery. They have a few organizers shout fiery speeches about people power, smashing imperialism, and freeing them all into sticker-covered megaphones. The crowd boos and cheers. Whenever the speakers mention some evil person or corporation or state, the crowd chants shame. Then the protest ends and everyone goes home. Over the next day or two, independent protest photographers comb through the footage they collected and make sure to post a bunch of really cool pictures and time-lapse videos showing just how many people came out.

The overwhelming majority of people who participate in this hamster wheel don’t think the protests they are calling for and attending will really bring about revolution. In fact, often, they’re not thinking of the protests in terms of the material at all. Think about how many times you’ve seen people chant “stand up, fight back” while marching peacefully down the street with cops next to them and when someone tries to actually act on the rage they are being told is legitimate and really stand up and fight back, the protest organizations’ safety marshals/peace police step in to stop them. It is not that they don’t understand what the words “stand up, fight back” mean, it is that they do not connect that slogan to the actual material reality of fighting in the physical world. It is simply a gesture, a representation of anger.

Protest in the so-called u.s. is a simulacrum of protest. While some of the components that make up a ‘protest’ are present, those that imbue the protest with its revolutionary character are absent. It is protest theater. This doesn’t just happen with protests, by the way. Rather, it happens with many different (formerly) radical methods of change-making. Over the past couple of years, many of the popular protest orgs have started calling for “strikes” that last one day, carry no strike fund, and basically only operate at the individual level—in the sense that the call is simply put out and individuals participate or don’t. These orgs put out graphics telling people to skip work and school, with ‘demands,’ and claim that this will grind the economy to a halt. The day comes and goes. No one really knows how many people actually heeded the call. No economic impact is ever really assessed. Did it work? Were the demands met? Does the organization even care? It’s a simulacrum of a strike.

Recently, some protest orgs did as they do and called for a protest outside of the jail where President Maduro is being held. Leading up to the protest, they talked about how Maduro must be freed by any means necessary. But at the jail, the protestors basically just stood around and chanted. None of the people who called for the protest or who showed up believed that that protest would have any impact on actually freeing Maduro. Of course, actually freeing Maduro would be quite difficult to pull off. But the difficulty of such an action is not the reason these organizations don’t earnestly try to achieve what they claim they want to. Rather, the call to free Maduro by any means necessary is totally compartmentalized from the material task of doing so. Again, the protest is separated from the material. Despite the chants and the demands and the slogans, the goal of the protest calling to free Maduro is not to actually free Maduro. The goal of the protest is to have the protest. To register dissent, to raise awareness, to speak out.

These ineffectual actions aren’t simply a product of bad organizing but rather of liberal, idealistic ways of understanding and formulating political struggle. You ask people how they are measuring if the protests they are calling for are working and they look at you like you are speaking another language. They aren’t thinking in terms of the protest ‘working.’ Rather, they protest because it is ‘good’ to protest and to show that we oppose what’s happening. There’s often this unspoken hope that the state will see how many people show up to the protests and will base its decisions on that. But then the protests happen and the state ignores them and the protest orgs keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Revolution is the process of totally upending society and this will only be accomplished with revolutionary methods. But the liberal idealist way of approaching struggle treats the methods as inconsequential; it is the ideas, the chants, the slogans, the images, not the methods, that matters. So to finish this long-winded way of responding to the question—if you want to assess whether a tactic is revolutionary or just revolutionary-sounding, look at the actual methods being used. The underground railroad wasn’t people marching peacefully in the streets and chanting that slaves should be freed, it was enslaved people freeing themselves. There were no gestures.

W4G: I can’t help but feel that so much of what you’re describing is rooted in the class character of much of what we call the “u.s. left” — people from a middle class or petite bourgeois background, or those aspiring to such a status — who are trying to show their solidarity with poor and oppressed people, either here or abroad. In other words, at the end of the day, the issues they’re protesting or organizing around remain largely abstract because they are not materially impacted by them, and so their outlook, which necessarily shapes their tactics and strategies, is rooted in idealism. In other words, they want certain conditions to change, but they don’t need them to.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with middle class people’s desire to show solidarity, and of course, it’s not to say that revolutionaries or revolutionary potential has never come from the petite bourgeois class—in fact, there are many examples to the contrary—but revolutions aren’t made from ideas alone. They have to take hold of poor and oppressed people, the people with actual revolutionary potential, by speaking directly to their material conditions.

Ali Kadri recently said something along the lines of: revolutionary potential belongs to the people who have no choice but to fight against the conditions of capitalism and imperialism. But today, at least in the u.s., this isn’t so simple, because substantial sectors of the poor and oppressed classes have been bought off, pacified, or straight up conscripted into directly upholding some of the most violent arms of u.s. empire—which is evident if you just consider the racial and class makeup of the NYPD, ICE, border patrol, the military, or even prison guards or wardens at this point.

At the same time, we can also say that much of what is driving the endless repetition of ineffective strategies and tactics on the u.s. left is rooted in subjective factors, too, which include defeatism—the fundamental belief that revolution in the core isn’t actually possible (“it’s never the right time for revolution”). And no, revolution is not just “abolishing” this or that thing, or scoring an occasional win by getting some company to divest, it is the total upheaval of the entire system and society. Defeatism may be latent or unconscious, or even obscured by revolutionary-sounding rhetoric, but as you say, in the case of the Maduro protest for example, there was never any intent to actually free him, only to publicly register the fact of dissent: “The goal of the protest is to have the protest.”

What this ends up doing is vastly narrowing the scope of possible strategies or tactics that are even on the table. At a fundamental level, the options seem to be either mass protests or autonomous direct action, which are often framed as opposites (symbolic vs. material) but end up producing similar results. While the mass protest appeals to the ruling class through a show of numbers that is not actually backed up by the material threat of violence that would actually make those numbers consequential, the autonomous direct action appeals to the ruling class through a show of force that is not actually backed up by the numbers that would make that force consequential.

And of course, both of these tactics also suffer from a lack of long-term vision, a roadmap, or the kind of organizational infrastructure that would allow them to happen not just sporadically, but regularly, and in ways that gradually up the ante in attacking the real levers of the capitalist machine. And so, to the ruling class, the autonomous direct action becomes just as much of an empty or symbolic threat as the mass protest, because both are saying, “do this or else,” but the problem is there is no “else.”

People often respond to this kind of critique by arguing that we can’t go immediately from A to Z, and that all of these tactics and strategies are actually “building power” in a gradual way that will eventually lead to some kind of victory. But if these strategies or tactics are in fact working, and will eventually lead to some sort of revolutionary rupture, how would we know that? Is there any concrete evidence we can point to that would show us whether we are on a path that is actually leading somewhere, as opposed to running in place on a hamster wheel?

Occasionally, of course, we have seen impressive numbers of people coming out into the streets and engaging in militant rebellions — in Los Angeles or Minneapolis during the recent ice raids, during the George Floyd Uprisings, and before that, the Ferguson Uprising, the Oscar Grant rebellion, etc. One could go back through the decades and point to many such moments, when people get sick of the old tactics, and hope glimmers for a brief moment. But the issue is that rebellions are sporadic and largely unplanned, and therefore die out, get crushed, co-opted, etc, perhaps for lack of the kind of organization and infrastructure that could seriously defend people from state violence, allow them to strategize against the enemy in longer-term ways, and most importantly, to allow them to grow and develop the rebellion into an actual revolutionary force. But perhaps for other factors as well.

With all that said, what are some ways you think we can get people to reflect on and seriously engage in the question of revolutionary strategy and methods? What do you think are some of the main barriers to this?

EC: People are so resistant to any questioning of either mass-based organizing or autonomous direct action. When you’re in an org that’s focused on mass-based organizing and say “hey, it feels like this isn’t working,” you’re immediately met with almost reflexive responses of “well what’s your idea?,” or “oh yeah? Then why don’t you go do direct action!“ as if direct action is the real answer to what is to be done and mass-based organizing is the thing we do simply because we aren’t brave enough to do direct action. This sets people up to view their options as either shutting up and doing something they don’t think is working, self-sacrifice in the form of individual autonomous direct action, or quitting entirely. This makes lots of people burn out and believe revolution isn’t possible in the first place.

This dynamic where people reflexively respond to criticism or even vague frustrations about things not working with attacking the criticizer, is a vicious cycle that leads to orgs increasingly being filled with dogmatic sycophants. Folks show up because they agree with an org’s rhetoric or a friend invited them. Over time, if they really are there to make change, they start to question whether what they’re doing is actually making a difference. If they bring those frustrations up, they’re immediately shut down. They either stop raising their frustrations or leave. This happens enough times and the thinking in the org becomes so rigid that active ideological struggle is impossible.

To a certain extent, I think the “well what’s your idea?” kind of responses are fair, or at least understandable. It sucks when someone complains and criticizes what you’re doing but doesn’t have any recommendation for what you should do instead. But the requirement that people have the answer before bringing up a criticism basically makes it impossible to ever criticize the larger issues in the first place. Sometimes a vague sensation of “this isn’t working” is really all someone can give. To put it a different way, it’s only the smaller problems or issues that anyone could reasonably have a concrete solution to before bringing up. For the bigger issues, though, the answer is almost always unclear—it can only be figured out over time by actively struggling to find the answer, working through different possibilities, and testing and analyzing the results.

People don’t want to feel totally powerless, and I understand why they would think it’s better to “at least do something” rather than nothing. But I also think we have to simply confront the fact that we don’t have the answers. I certainly don’t know what the answer is. But I think if you don’t know the answer to something, it’s better to spend your time trying to figure it out than to do something you know isn’t working.

There are also larger material barriers, such as the fact that lots of people who are members and leaders of the orgs that make up the so-called u.s. left ultimately benefit from the anti-Black Islamophobic colonial imperialist patriarchal world system. It’s really easy to not care about whether the methods are working or not when your survival doesn’t depend on them. If you don’t need the method to work, moral grandstanding is enough. I do think this plays a really big role here, and speaks to the compartmentalization between methods and rhetoric that I touched on earlier. Because people don’t need the methods to work, it’s a lot easier to not even think about the methods as actual tools for doing something. This is also one reason why so many on the so-called u.s. left are resistant to studying. Instead of viewing revolutionary theory as a resource that we can use to hone our ways of thinking, gifted to us by those who carried out successful revolutions in the past, studying theory is viewed as either a fun social activity or a chore.

Another barrier to seriously engaging with the question of how to develop new revolutionary strategy and tactics is the vulgar invocation of “the urgency of the situation we’re facing.” I have seen so many people downplay analysis and reflection and study as activities that should only take place when we “have the time.” This is the total backwards approach. It is not that the situation is so urgent that we can’t afford to spend time studying and thinking, it is that the situation is so urgent that we can’t afford to NOT spend time studying and thinking. The situation is too urgent for us to waste our time making the same mistakes that revolutionaries before us made and we can avoid making if we learn from them.

I do think most of these barriers can be corrected through serious study of political theory, especially studying as part of a good group. At least, I want to believe that. So, I’d recommend that people try to find others they can study revolutionary theory with. Books are great, but you can use podcasts, youtube videos, whatever. Just try to meet with people regularly and talk about what is and isn’t working, why things are the way they are, etc. Maybe set up regular phone calls with a couple of friends and talk about your political work, ask them hard questions and encourage them to do the same to you and seriously try to think through the answer without being defensive. Be curious and be critical.

I also think, in a very grim way, as climate collapse gets worse, as social conditions get worse in general, more and more people will find themselves in positions where their survival depends on the methods working and so they will have to struggle to figure out better strategies and methods.

W4G: It’s interesting that you highlight a lack of capacity for criticism and self-criticism on the u.s. left as directly connected to the prevalence of liberal / reformist strategies, even when the lack of tangible results is staring us right in the face. I do think it’s connected to the fact that again, much of the organizations on the “u.s. left” are made up of people from a petite bourgeois background. It’s not just that either. Too often, the people who make the decisions for a lot of these organizations receive their funding from donors that are directly connected to the capitalist class, etc.

Obviously the ruling class is not going to throw money at an organization or project that directly threatens its material interests, quite the opposite, and so many of these organizations will have to promote strategies and tactics that are intentionally designed to be ineffective or non-threatening. It’s not an accident or case of miscalculation. It’s designed that way, as controlled opposition. If someone joins an organization naively thinking it is actually invested in creating the kind of radical change that is advertised on its website at the level of rhetoric, and then challenges the leadership a bit too much, crosses the line a bit too far, asks one too many challenging questions, they will simply be expelled.

At this point I have to be kind of blunt and say that what I think is really needed is for more people on the so-called u.s. left to quite literally commit class suicide. Generally speaking, as people living in the imperial core, many of us are taught to aspire to bourgeois ideals and lifestyles in one way or another, even if we don’t necessarily come from that background. You could call it class aspiration vs. class status. So we have to commit class suicide, and the other thing is that we have to seriously de-identify with being Amerikan. We have to completely reject everything we have been handed by the u.s. empire, because they give us these things precisely to buy us off, to prevent us from doing what really needs to be done, and from uniting with the very people who are best positioned to do it.

I mean, if you are really serious about creating the kind of world you envision, again that is not going to happen just based on vibes. Are you truly ready to give up your subsidized apartment? Your salaried NGO or academic job? Your rock-climbing membership or weekend getaway trips and Air B and B’s? Your Netflix subscription? This isn’t about romanticizing revolution — I think it’s quite literally the necessary first step that has to be taken in order to deprogram ourselves from the horrifying matrix of propaganda, co-optation, and counterinsurgency that so many of us are completely bought off by without even realizing it. I really think we have to completely reject any careerist aspirations or neoliberal self-making projects laundered through entrepreneurism, social media influencerships, or the like in order to even begin to actually interface with reality—because so much of the lifestyle that is peddled to us is so skillfully designed to hide from us the very reality that the majority of the rest of the world actually lives in.

I really love the Mao quote that says, “In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” I actually feel like we need to take this much more seriously — that every idea we have is ultimately shaped by material conditions, that no one is immune from this. The idea that we can just think or imagine our way out of our class conditioning, that if we just become critical or intellectual enough, we can be immune from propaganda, is so sinister, and is really rooted in liberal idealism and individualism.

I’m not saying this to be defeatist or deterministic, actually the opposite. This was the whole reason they placed such emphasis on practicing “criticism and self-criticism” during the cultural revolution, because they understood how deeply capitalism and colonialism conditions people’s attitude and outlook and psychology, and that this is something we have to take extremely seriously. Again, not in a vibes-based way of “the personal is political” or “i need to work on myself” or “accountability processes,” but actually taking seriously the need to completely transform people into new human beings, that that is as much a part of the material process of revolution as redistributing land or wealth, and really understanding how long and difficult of a process that is. And maybe most importantly, that we can’t transform our consciousness alone.

We’re not used to relating to ourselves or each other in a way that isn’t thoroughly saturated with liberal and idealistic thinking. Which is why when someone says, hey, I don’t think this tactic is working, rather than examine that criticism for what it is (is it true that it’s not working? what is the evidence that it isn’t working? how are we interpreting that evidence? what other possible tactics could we use?) we instead become immediately defensive, and dogmatically insist that it is working, even if objective reality clearly shows otherwise. The only way we can explain this kind of reaction is that the person is motivated less by the desire to reach a tangible, objective outcome that really betters our collective conditions, and more by the desire to be seen in a certain light. So it’s individualism, idealism, and liberalism. If your goal was really to achieve change, and someone offered a criticism of your strategy to help you find a more effective one, logically speaking, wouldn’t you welcome that?

What you say about the need to see revolutionary theory as a resource, and that we are largely not seeing in that way, is so true. Like, we actually don’t have to start from scratch or just guess. We can build off of what people did before. Of course, conditions here are entirely different than they were in 1950s Cuba, but it is not that we live in a separate reality altogether, or that the laws of dialectical and historical materialism somehow don’t apply here. That’s just Amerikan exceptionalism. We can study what worked and what didn’t in other circumstances. We can consider whether past strategies make sense for our current context, or what about them needs to be adapted or changed. But again, we don’t just have to flail and guess and give up, or pretend like we have to invent something out of thin air, which is what it feels like we are doing a lot of the time.

The problem is that most of the people who are actually reading and studying past revolutionary movements with some level of seriousness and depth—the kind of study that could actually give us the roadmaps we need—are just sitting in their offices and publishing their articles on Jstor. So these ideas never reach the masses, which is where they actually belong. We need to find ways of translating these ideas to ordinary people, and largely that isn’t happening, because if a significant part of the poor and oppressed classes, the ones with actual revolutionary potential, have been conscripted into the military or ICE or the police, and the working classes have been bought off by the labor aristocracy and the spoils extracted from the global south, then the intellectuals, especially the ones who have radical ideas, have been bought off by academia or nonprofits and the like. And so while you actually need people from all of these sections of society to be working together in order to wage an actual revolution, in practice they have all been bought off in different ways by the different facets of u.s. imperialism. Because that is what it is designed to do.

But that brings me to my next question: in addition to strategies and tactics, you’ve also critiqued the kinds of default organizational forms that the u.s. left tends to fall into. Could you speak a little more on how we are limiting ourselves through a failure of imagination in terms of organizational forms?

EC: While there are hundreds of different ostensibly radical political organizations with different names and slogans and logos, the overwhelming majority of them fall into one of two categories: There are organizations that try to recreate what once was, and there are organizations that pretend they are not organizations.

The former groups are filled with people who pick some historical revolutionary group to dogmatically idolize and imagine they’re the vanguard of. The latter groups are made up of people who rhetorically claim to reject hierarchy and be above organization itself. Neither of these organizational forms are able to effectively confront the problems we face today, in part because they both, albeit in different ways, discourage active ideological struggle. Each of these types of organizations, again, in different ways, produces a rigid way of thinking that refuses to update to changing conditions.

When people start to become radicalized and search for an organization to join, they are almost always joining one of those two types of organizations, and because of the errors inherent to them, almost always end up burnt out by unfair divisions of labor (that typically fall along harmful race and gender lines), targeted by predatory creeps, or frustrated by chauvinistic behavior. After their experience, they either leave and try to find a different org, or they quit organizing entirely. But because nearly every organization falls into one of these two categories, the people who are persistent, who keep searching for better organizations, are repeatedly harmed until they either become so disillusioned with organizing entirely or they assimilate into the power structures of the harmful organizations.

In this way, the dominance of these two organizational forms perpetuates its own power and rigidity and endlessly chips away at any semblance of developing revolutionary potential. (So many radical organizations have absurdly high turnover rates that are only masked by the seemingly endless supply of new people who realize that the world needs to change.)

When you look at major cities, it appears that there are hundreds of organizations working on different political goals. But the reality is that it’s basically just a dozen iterations of the same org, which utilizes the same methods and tactics and which is made up of a rotating cast of the same small group of people. The different orgs are much more a product of interpersonal animosity than they are of genuine ideological, strategic, or tactical differences.

Over time, this failure has produced a “left” that is almost completely separated from the most oppressed masses, who (rightly) view popular “leftist organizations” as either nothing but a waste of time or as the enemy. The solution to all this is not yet another ideologically rigid organization trying to rehash the 1960’s protest movement or pretending like hierarchies are evaporated by claiming to reject them, but rather a rethinking of form—or, more accurately, a rethinking of everything altogether. Whatever it is that needs to exist for us to confront the moment we’re in doesn’t. We have to accept that.

W4G: So much of what capitalism does is give us the illusion of endless choice while really giving us no choices at all. When you were describing the seemingly endless choice of leftist organizations that one could ostensibly join, that quote about freedom under capitalism being the ability to choose between 20 different brands of toothpaste came to mind, which is something you’ve also written about in regards to the way social media has so deeply invaded the way we relate to each other, and thus also shaped the way we organize. You write:

In the same way that social media provides an endless selection of people to peruse, it provides an endless selection of political organizations to choose from. While it might seem good that there are endless organizations to choose from, allowing you to search for the organization that most perfectly matches your politics, in reality this leads to organizations held together exclusively by superficial bonds, filled with people who don’t know each other, don’t need each other, and don’t trust each other. And this is having disastrous effects on how people engage with political organizing.

It is somewhat incredible that even with the hundreds or possibly thousands of Palestine solidarity organizations that exist just in the u.s—and there have been so many that have sprung up after 10/7—none of them have been able to offer any real meaningful resistance to the ongoing genocide. I should be clear that I’m not dismissing any of the organizational efforts that have managed to offer very real, material and life-saving support to vulnerable people despite all of the odds stacked against them. What I’m attempting to do instead is zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

Part of me wonders how much of this is rooted in a refusal to take ourselves as seriously as revolutionaries in the 60s and 70s did. These were people who committed their entire lives to struggling against capitalism and imperialism. But in 2026, the idea of a “revolutionary,” especially in the imperial core, sounds laughably naive, deluded, romantic, maybe even arrogant (?) or some combination of the above. Revolutionaries are people who existed in the past, but not today. And to attempt to aspire to anything like that today would likely be met with extreme skepticism or ridicule. How dare we think so highly of ourselves. We should be more humble and realistic—better to be an “activist,” or “organizer,” some sort of regional or local specialist in a particular issue, like environmental issues, or prison abolition, which you can then confidently command expertise in by citing the number of years you have been a member of x or y organization, or been involved in x or y issue or struggle.

But that’s the problem. So much of u.s. left “organizing” has this quality of a side hobby, of “volunteering.” Something you fit into your schedule between work, dating, vacations, and hobbies in order to convince yourself that you’re “doing something” (as you said) or “giving back to the community.” Of course, much of this can be attributed to the realities of life under capitalism, and the fact that so much of our time is eaten up by the obviously very real need to sell our labor to capitalists in order to survive. But I don’t think it can be completely explained by this, either.

How would this kind of commitment to dedicating our entire lives to revolutionary struggle transform what kinds of organizations we could create? By “entire” I don’t so much mean in the literal sense as in the ideological sense—as in, your identity is not tied up in any kind of career, your life is not divided between your work and your hobbies and your “organizing,” but revolutionary activity takes priority and precedence over everything else even while of course you must work to survive.

What might be possible if we we had an organization that was based not on this or that particular issue, but on truly developing people’s revolutionary potential, in the fullest sense of the term, not just in rhetoric or branding or slogans, but in an absolute and sincere commitment to transforming ourselves into completely new people in order to build a completely new society? And that we were also extremely strict and principled about where we took our money from to prevent our politics from being compromised? What if we had infrastructure and mechanisms to ensure that people could dedicate themselves to this work entirely, without distraction? What if we began with very basic questions, such as: Who are the classes with the most revolutionary potential in the imperial core? In a settler colony like the United States (as opposed to a country in the global south) what would constitute the most revolutionary outcome on a global scale?

After all, this isn’t just any country we’re talking about, but a country with the most powerful military, economy, and propaganda machine that has ever existed in the history of the world. Even if it were possible, is overthrowing the state an optimal outcome? Or is the best we can hope for to weaken the u.s. from within to increase the possibility of revolution or at least sovereignty for countries in the periphery? If the latter, what are the most effective ways of weakening the u.s. from within? Given the nature of the surveillance state that we all live under now, what are the most effective organizational forms for achieving those goals? What are the most effective methods and means for communicating and spreading revolutionary ideas to people?

It seems to me that, like you said, rather than creating more and more leftist organizations, groups, podcasts and collectives that inevitably employ the same tactics due to their class makeup, perhaps we should begin to look at the common organizational structures—many of which will not announce themselves as “leftist” or “activist” —that already exist in oppressed communities, and by which they already organize themselves, even if not yet toward an explicitly revolutionary goal. Churches, mosques, networks of prisoners’ families, parents associations, things like this. These are all organizations, networks of people that are meeting a common, tangible need, that play a real social function for oppressed communities, unlike most “leftist” organizations, which are only based on a shared abstract ideal.

This isn’t to say that we should just parachute into these kinds of spaces. But my point is that maybe the organizational structures with real revolutionary potential are not the ones that outwardly announce themselves as such, and maybe more people on the u.s. left need to carefully consider and familiarize ourselves with the organizational structures that already exist among poor and oppressed communities, that aren’t led by or cater to the petite bourgeois activist networks.

For example, it was impressive to me to learn that the infrastructure for a state-wide work stoppage organized by prisoners in Alabama in the last decade was largely built out through pre-existing gang networks within the prisons. There are whole communities of mothers and wives in rural North Carolina who organize themselves on Facebook groups to inform each other about what is going on in a particular prison where their sons or husbands are caged. There are networks of semi-illegal buses that take people across the George Washington Bridge from upper Manhattan into New Jersey that charge a fraction of the price of the official NY bus system.

Let’s be honest: most of the people who exist in the worlds I described above are not going to join a self-described leftist organization. They are going to spend most of their time with other poor and oppressed people in their communities, and the networks and organizations, formal and informal, that they are going to spend the majority of their time in are ones that meet a common material need—again, something they need to survive, not just an idea they believe in. The problem with most self-described leftist organizations in the u.s. is that there is still this inherent class divide between the organizers and the communities they ostensibly serve, that can’t be overcome by just offering occasional mutual aid services. Even if these services do meet a tangible need and help to at least ameliorate some of the intolerable conditions produced by racial capitalism, they are not for the most part using the kinds of methods or tactics that would actually enable or empower whole communities to actually self-organize, to seize power for themselves, on a scale that is significant enough to really shift the balance of social and economic forces in a serious way.

Of course, we have many labor unions which are made up of and organize among poor and oppressed and working class communities—but these unions do not have anti-imperialist politics. They are simply fighting for a bigger share of the imperial spoils. Which is why none of them were mobilized to stop weapons shipments at any point during the last several years of the accelerated genocide in Gaza. So it is not just a matter of methods or tactics, but of politics. We can have effective methods or tactics, we can read Secrets of a Successful Organizer back to back, but if we are not guided by the right principles or politics, we are still going to be ineffective. Like yes, congratulations, we raised the pay of New York City bus drivers by $2/hour. Unfortunately the U.S. is still beheading babies in Gaza and cutting off the fuel supply of entire populations in the global south.

There are many organizations that say that they are doing things like “mutual aid” or “social investigation” — that they are actually engaging with and organizing among and empowering poor and oppressed communities. But usually this amounts to a handful of, again, middle-class activists handing out food on the weekends, or going around with a clipboard and talking to some homeless people and asking them what their concerns are, because Mao told them that was what they were supposed to do in order to be serious revolutionaries. Unfortunately, though, I don’t think this is a winning strategy, because at the end of the social investigation, or mutual aid shift, most of these people are going to go back to their gentrified neighborhood, or maybe their non-gentrified neighborhood, but they are not living among the people whose needs they are ostensibly serving. They will publish their results or photos on Instagram—again, the intention being to prove to other middle-class activists that they are doing real revolutionary TM stuff. Or they do it for a few years in their twenties, only to burn out and eventually apply to that master’s program because the class forces pushing them in that direction eventually get too strong to resist through sheer willpower alone.

At the end of the day, no matter how much “mutual aid” or “social investigation” they do, a lot — perhaps not all, but a lot — of these activists are not committed to actually transforming themselves on a fundamental level. They are more so acting like anthropologists of the poor. It takes a long time and a lot of dedicated effort to really get to know a community, to earn their trust, to develop a real understanding of what they are materially struggling around and then to be able to meaningfully offer the kind of tangible support that might begin to allow them to create material change — again, for themselves. You can’t just walk around a homeless encampment with a clipboard or a bag of groceries a few times, or even a few years, and then call it a day.

If we really and truly want to put an end to the horrors of capitalism and u.s. imperialism, we have to be honest with ourselves about a) what that will really take, and b) who is most likely to make that happen. I don’t mean in any kind of moral or idealistic sense, but from an analysis that is rooted in actual historical materialism. It is not going to be the middle class activists in DSA. It is not going to be the labor unions. It is not going to be a few mutual aid groups or autonomous direct action groups, as inspiring as they are.

As you say, we have have to stop projecting idealism and start taking a really hard and serious look at oppressed people’s concrete, existing material circumstances, with all the contradictions that that will inevitably entail, and then not just offering them services but actually and truly committing ourselves to being with them, living among them, studying with them, speaking with them not just a few times but continuously, again and again over a long period of time, thinking and acting with them, struggling alongside them, committing ourselves to understanding and serving them and developing some sort of honest trust that is not just based in offering a service.

To go back to the idea of being a revolutionary, it isn’t something to be taken lightly, or something that can just be done part-time. It’s a total life commitment. You can be a part-time activist but you cannot be a part-time revolutionary. And yet, the problem is that we lack the infrastructure and the revolutionary commitment to actually make continuous, long-term struggle a viable possibility for enough people.

There is a reason why so many organizations on the u.s. left are filled with people who are either extremely young, in their late teens or 20’s, or elderly, perhaps retired, in their 50’s or 60’s. You notice that there’s this huge gap in the middle, because most of these 20 year olds, when they inch closer to 30, are going to start giving into the social forces that mold their class position. They’re going to go to graduate school, and start their careers. They’re going to get married and have kids and buy houses and cars. It’s a straight escalator from one thing to another, and people think they’re making these choices independently but there are these very real and powerful social forces that exist to take them out of the struggle. Perhaps after their kids are born, they’ll occasionally show up to a weekend protest with their toddler in a stroller and tell themselves that they are doing radical parenthood. I’m not saying people can’t have kids. But all of these ideas are tied up in class and property in a particular way, and it is that way for a reason. Idealism can only last for so long.

On the flip side, when people finally reach retirement age and their labor is no longer productive to capitalism, they will start to feel a bit lost, lacking in purpose, maybe lonely, so they will join an activist group as a way to “get involved” or “meet people.” But again, there’s this hobbyist quality to the whole thing. None of it is really serious. The basis of analysis is always the individual, their life, their preferences, their career, their goals, their aspirations and interests. It is not the collective, or collective need. This is how capitalism teaches us to think, and this is the governing logic of much of the u.s. left.

How do we get rid of this kind of conditioning? I think it is very difficult to reject these social forces. They are extremely real and extremely powerful. But again I think it has to begin with a real commitment to transforming ourselves, to totally rethinking our orientation toward struggle. To engaging in criticism and self-criticism. We need to learn to enjoy serious argumentation, to welcome being wrong or being convinced out of a previously held belief, not because we love debate for its own sake, but because we are sincerely committed to getting to the bottom of something, to really finding out the truth about it and not just copping out at “we can agree to disagree” or “you have this ideology and I have that ideology.”

Gravity is real! That is not up for debate or a matter of opinion! It has been discovered and proven! But somehow, we don’t treat social reality with the same level of seriousness, and just fall back into this easy idealism of, oh, well, you’re an anarchist and I’m a communist so we just think differently about this. This isn’t about dogma, it’s about being committed to figuring out what is actually real and recognizing that some ideas or strategies are going to lead to better or worse outcomes for real people leading real lives, depending on whether or not we got the math right.

This leads me to my final question, which is something we spoke briefly about before. What, to you, does true militancy mean? What does it look like? There is this tendency to reduce the idea of militancy to either rhetoric or actions, but it seems like there is more to it than that. Can you get into this a little?

EC: Militancy isn’t just chanting that you support the resistance or waving certain flags. It’s not something you say. I feel like there has been this really weird dynamic, especially over the past couple of years, where ‘militancy’ takes form in people trying to chant the “most radical” things at protests, and sort of laughing at or making fun of other organizations who they think chant “less radical” chants, as if the content of the chant is what matters. But it’s all still happening in the realm of ideas; It’s all still treating “the war” as something that is happening elsewhere.

So, I think militancy starts with acknowledging that we are at war, right here, right now. The state is waging war. It is waging war on the countries it is targeting with imperialist violence, it is waging war against the people of oppressed nations living in internal colonies within the imperial core, it is waging war against potentially insurgent elements. The most oppressed masses already know this, of course. But even though some popular leftist organizations might occasionally superficially acknowledge this in political rhetoric, it doesn’t seem to impact how they actually function as organizations.

Once you acknowledge that we are actually at war, then I think militancy can take shape. The specific chants don’t really matter all that much. What matters is skills, training, capacity, logistics—you know, the things that actually produce capable fighting forces.

Every so often, some video of Patriot Front or the Proud Boys training goes viral. I see leftist after leftist retweeting the videos of them practicing hand to hand combat or moving as a group. But the leftist response isn’t calling for the left to train, rather it’s usually simply making fun of the fascists for looking silly. The leftists laugh and shake their head about how silly the fascists look and then move on. I feel like this is another manifestation of people not really getting that we’re at war. How do you see the fascist enemy training and your response is to laugh, rather than think about what that means for you, for the most marginalized among us?

I also think of militancy in terms of forming objectives and assessing results. If a military general kept calling for their troops to fight the same battle plan over and over, and every time it was tried, the results were a bunch of casualties with no real gain, that general would be fired (or worse). But it’s normal to see the same leftist orgs call for the same protests over and over, with the same results: zero tangible gains but lots of folks getting sick, arrested, beat up, burnt out. We should be rigorously assessing the costs of these tactics and consciously deciding if they are worth it, not just using certain tactics because those are the tactics we are used to using.

Radical political organizations that want to embrace militancy should be studying, training, and directly trying to analyze and confront their internal contradictions. They should be trying to develop the infrastructure and skills that are necessary for struggling. They should be doing what they can to protect their members (and communities) from COVID and other dangerous health-threats—recognizing that viruses are also part of the war the state is waging. They should be thinking about loss of morale, about divisions of labor, about trying to constantly study what the state is doing and figure out why it’s doing it. In other words, they should focus on the material.

Whenever an organization is founded for the purpose of advancing revolutionary struggle, you have to establish minimum principles with everyone involved (“what’s an organization?” start here!). These are usually written out in a form that all the prospective members read over and agree to. The list of principles is called the organization’s points of unity. It represents the issues around which membership is unified. These should be as broad as possible to permit continued internal struggle over details.

In order for an organization to function, it must be ideologically coherent. Every meeting can’t be a relitigation of the basic questions (do we support violent revolution? are we reformists? what theory do we agree on?) — that way lies both madness and liberalism. Without points of unity, an organization cannot make headway. It spends all of its time treading water, debating over and over again on topics that should be closed.

You’ve probably been in meetings like this. Something is proposed that seems like it should be agreeable. People start to agree to move forward on it as an action item. Suddenly, someone takes the floor and questions the very principles on which the proposal is made. The meeting quickly devolves into a debate club about whether or not the organization “has the authority” to “make this kind of decision,” or whether “we really want to be opposing the police directly” or some such pablum. The entire night is wasted. You won’t even be able to address other potentially actionable items because you don’t meet again until next week.

Points of unity spell out the ideological commitments that all members of the organization agree to in order to become and remain members. They allow the membership to ensure it has a sufficient ideological coherence that it can come to agreement on actions. The points of unity essentially create the basic ideological character of the organization, and help ensure that even new members adhere to the ideological direction that it intends to move in. These are critical in a revolutionary organization, because the immediate horizon must always remain revolution, and deviating from that goal is what creates rampant opportunism and tailism (like that experienced within the Four Opportunists).

What Do We Need to Agree On?

Your organization, in order to be an effective revolutionary fighting-force, and in order to express class-power, should, at the very minimum, be prepared to agree on the fact that Marxism-Leninism is the revolutionary theory that guides your actions, and that it is a living doctrine comprised of the culmination of all experiences and theory from the entire history of the class struggle rather than a dead orthodoxy to be transmitted from dusty books.

The minimums required for a principled formation with a proletarian outlook in the imperial center are:

• Decolonization
• Sex liberation
• Disability liberation

Other commitments are up to your individual organization to determine based on its theoretical understanding of what is necessary for a revolution and for total liberation. Remember, without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

What Other Purposes Do Points of Unity Serve?

When you are ready to begin work with another revolutionary organization, you should compare your points of unity and determine what degree of unity exists between the two organizations. Understanding strategic and theoretical overlap can help you quickly identify shared areas of work.

We are in a moment when the Communist movement for liberation in the US, Canada, and Mexico needs to unify. This is the period in which we must unite all that can be united. If your points of unity show sufficient unity with another organization’s, you may be able to simply unite the two organizations and operate with more available resources and labor, coordinate more efficiently, and accomplish greater and greater feats of revolutionary action.

For Example…

If you need help drafting your points of unity, we have an example from a real, existing organization.

The River Valley Liberation Organization has the following points of unity that help it remain coherent and ideologically aligned:

Article I. Ideology.

Section 1. The ideology of the RVLO is Decolonial Marxism-Leninism.

Section 2. Marxism-Leninism is a living body of revolutionary theory and method; it is the culmination of revolutionary experience from the whole history of the class struggle.

Section 3. This cell shall take ideological and practical guidance from the relevant experiences and contributions of revolutionaries from every land and region.

Article II. Self-Determination.

Section 1. All peoples have the right to self-determination.

Section 2. This cell shall work toward the universal realization of that right within and without the existing US empire and its junior partners of Canada and Mexico (the US-led bloc), that is, the decolonization of North America, as a precondition for a just society.

Section 3. The anti-colonial and national liberation struggles constitute a special stage of the social revolution.

Section 4. The social revolution includes the liberation and self-emancipation of the Black nation of New Afrika, all pre-columbian Indigenous peoples, and the US Empire’s colonial territories.

Article III. Sex Liberation.

Section 1. This cell shall study a revolutionary materialist feminist theory and work to enumerate and expand it.

Section 2. The materialist feminist theory shall be distinguished from the reformist and unscientific feminist trends by: (i) recognition of gendered oppression as structural and (ii) recognition of the failure of reforms to bring about true emancipation.

Section 3. This cell is committed to depatriarchalization, entailing the full legal emancipation and structural liberation of women, LGBT persons, and gender-variant persons, and all efforts will be taken to ensure this is practiced in the cell organizations.

Section 4. This cell shall vigorously defend the rights of women, LGBT persons, and gender-variant persons within its membership and shall endeavor to make study and work accessible and safe for such persons through a process of internal depatriarchalization.

Article IV. Disability Liberation.

Section 1. This cell agrees that the abolition of disability as a social structure and the liberation of disabled persons is a vital component of the social revolution.

Section 2. This cell shall ensure that disabled comrades and members are included and empowered to participate in all branches of this organization’s work and study.

Towards the Formation of a League

The RVLO is a Member Organization of the All-Empire Worker’s League. By joining the League, the RVLO adopted the League points of unity as well. The League principle allows small local organizations to band together in a form that is more coherent than a coalition, but something less than the militant party-to-be, which must still be formed out of the broadest possible consultation with Communists across the US settler-empire.

We urge all local primary organizations that have compatible points of unity to begin building or joining secondary organizations that allow them to coordinate their efforts and move toward organizational unity. The AEWL is an all-empire secondary organization, collecting and coordinating the efforts of a number of local organizations with the plan of building up the necessary consensus to form the militant party of the (new) new type necessary to confront the settler state.

If you believe your organization is already unified around a line that is compatible with that of the AEWL, we urge you to reach out and begin discussions. If it is not yet unified, we urge you to work on your internal development until you reach unity on these questions.

The AEWL points of unity are:

1. The overthrow and total abolition of the fundamentally illegitimate and irredeemable United States and its junior partner, Canada;
2. Black and Indigenous sovereignty over their respective indigenous homelands and/or rightfully claimed national territories, in forms that will be collectively and democratically decided by each people, nation, and community on its own terms, on the basis of mutual respect for the right of all peoples to self-determination;
3. Partition of any remaining (that is, unclaimed) territories into a centralized union of local socialist states, wherein self-determination for all oppressed peoples, nations, and communities is guaranteed;
4. Reparations in the forms of wealth, land, and labor, to be forcibly extracted from the U.S.-Canadian imperialist and settler bourgeoisie, landed colonial aristocracy, and other exploiting classes, as well as from the colonial police and imperialist military, and justly redistributed to the victims of U.S.-Canadian colonialism and Western capitalist imperialism;
5. A program for structural depatriarchalization, focused on true emancipation for women and LGBTQ+ people; the reorganization of social labor, the labors of production and reproduction, on gender-equal lines; the abolition of all outmoded institutions, industries, and medical, professional, and cultural practices that rely on gendered violence and maintain gendered oppression; justice for all victims and survivors of sexual violence — in short, the beginning of the end of gendered oppression in all its forms;
6. Preparation for humanity’s collective survival of the ecological devastation wrought by modern colonialism and capitalism in the pursuit of worldwide environmental justice through internationalist cooperation and reparations;
7. Abolition of outmoded and inhumane models of “justice,” including modern police, jails and prisons, psychiatric “hospitals,” and other such institutions, to be replaced with models of revolutionary justice;
8. Defense of the revolution, including the ruthless defeat and suppression of all reactionary classes and counter-revolutionary forces, especially the forces of white supremacy, within North America, through an organized and sustained campaign of Red Terror;
9. Internationalism, put into practice by supporting the independent economic development and self-reliance of the world’s underdeveloped countries and regions, by forming comradely alliances with socialist countries, and by supplying aid to revolutionary struggles across the world;
10. The democratically self-determined, cooperative, ecologically sustainable development of socialism in every state that emerges from the total decolonization of the North American continent, planned and administered by the revolutionary Dictatorship of the Oppressed.

The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

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.’” ︎

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a Mass Meeting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do You Need?

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

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

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

Running the Meeting

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

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

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

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

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

The Meeting is Not the End

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

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

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

The existing countrywide formations that claim to represent some form of proletarian class-power (in whatever embryonic state) are hopelessly compromised. It has been one of the major labors of Unity–Struggle–Unity Press to investigate each of these organizations to determine the theoretical rigor, organizational design, and strength of principle. Since the foundation of this Press in 2022, we have investigated and determined that each of the major “Marxist-Leninist” groups — PSL, FRSO, CPUSA — suffer not only from fatally anti-democratic structures, but also from terminal and fundamental errors of theory that cannot be corrected because of the entrenched leadership and opportunism or chauvinism that still reigns in each formation. We have witnessed CPUSA’s disastrous embrace of social fascism at and after its last “convention” and the expulsion of the pro-democracy clubs, precisely as we predicted, and following the very same pattern laid out by the CP Canada a year earlier during their bankrupt “convention.” Indeed, by analyzing the conditions of CPUSA and CP Canada, we were able to warn that the CPUSA would repeat the errors of CP Canada and the result would be the same: that is what occurred.

Last year, we published a pamphlet (“Towards a New York City League of Workers and Students”) in which we established an analytical framework and plan for local organizing in a major U.S. city. This pamphlet applies the same methodology to the city of Boston.

It is necessary for the working class to possess a weapon to confront the ruling class. It is necessary for the working masses in the U.S.-Canadian bloc to be educated (and to educate themselves) on the duty of internationalism and to chart a path not toward the aggrandizement of their current positions, but towards the destruction of the imperialist state itself, in order to bring about not only the liberation of the oppressed masses of the Global South, but to secure its own liberation. It is necessary to strike at the chains the workers of the imperial centers have helped forge and to draw them away from the side of their “own” bourgeoisie.

The formation of this weapon of class-power is already under way. League-type organizations have been formed in several cities and localities in the U.S. This Press has been continuously reaching out to existing local Marxist-Leninist organizations in an effort to knit them together, to realize the completion of that weapon. The fact remains, however, that the number of existing organizations that are prepared to adopt a sufficiently (decolonial) Marxist-Leninist program is still too low. More organizations must still be formed. The advanced ranks of the working classes must be united with the most advanced theory. In order to overcome our numerical deficiency and the theoretical deficiency of the currently arch-chauvinistic movement, we urge the formation of advanced study groups in the major cities of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

We urge our readers to begin by reading our pieces on organization: “Organize!”, “What is Organizing?”, The Study Group, and “Towards a New York League of Workers and Students.” The purpose of the study group is not to simply remain a study group, but to gather who can be gathered and set the right foot forward in formation.

Why the City?

Marxist parties and modern socialism are the products of the cities. Even in semi-feudal or semi-colonial countries, the parties that eventually won the countryside were formed in the cities. Advanced workers are naturally to be found in greater concentration in the urban areas. This is where advanced industry, even in the “late capitalist” United States, is to be found.

The reasons for the primacy of the cities at this stage are many:

1. The living, working, and transportation accommodations of cities are social, as opposed to individual. Apartment buildings encourage the mingling of interests as well as social groups. Public transportation throws together all manner of people, but mostly working ones. Public spaces provide the opportunity to meet, interact, and spread ideas and literature. This is in sharp contrast to the atomization-by-design suffered in the suburbs where each “family” is cabined off from the other.
2. The absolute numbers of people living in urban areas mean there are more advanced workers overall available for organizing. When bystanders are drawn into the struggle by our actions in the cities, more of them are involved incidentally (and thus radicalized) than in rural areas.
3. Communication and meetings are both easier in areas with strong internal linkages — public transportation and public meeting places.
4. The supply lines of cities are narrower and more tenuous, easier to disrupt. Cities represent “nerve centers” of capitalist enterprises. Therefore, organized action in cities also benefits from a force multiplier as it can more easily affect larger numbers of capitalist organizations.
5. Politics are more “concentrated” and it is therefore easier both to exert leverage on politicians by means of class power where they live in the midst of the people or in places easily accessible by the people, and it is easier for local organizations to seize local political power. The degree by which workers outnumber the ruling class is heightened in cities where more workers are concentrated.
6. As the masses increase in size in an urban area, the state repressive machinery cannot keep pace. For instance, in 2022 Boston had 301.3 police officers per 100,000 residents, as comparable to the average for cities in the Northeast under 10,000 people (300 per 100,000). Because of the additional influence and power of large groups of people, this represents a force far less capable than that in small and medium-sized cities.

Class Analysis of the Boston Metro Area

The total population of the metropolitan area of Boston is roughly 4.9 million people. Of that, some 250,000-350,000 people are students in attendance to one of the 50+ schools of higher education in the region. The absolute population of students is higher than many mid-sized U.S. cities!

However, we must be cautious about the class-character of Boston as a whole. It is overwhelmingly petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic. This necessitates concrete considerations as to which professions to begin to organize in and around, which localities are necessary to organize, etc.

Here it becomes critically important to examine the question of national oppression: In 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reported that median net worth for white households in the metro area was $250,000, while Black households held a median net worth of $8.

There are, therefore, two routes toward establishing the primary organizations required to build a league in Boston. Both avenues should be pursued simultaneously by different groups, with the decision of which avenue to be dictated primarily by the differing access of the involved organizations to different communities, resources, and tools. Essentially, organizing must start among the proletarian/sub-proletarian populations and the petty bourgeois population and work toward unification into the league-form.

Boston Metro Is Over One-Third Petty Bourgeois

Taking data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wages reports, we can quickly see that the predominant minority of productive relations in Boston are petty bourgeois. There are, for instance, 276,210 management workers (8 of which are actually bourgeois CEOS), 234,750 business and finance workers, 136,640 technical workers in computers and mathematics, 64,870 architects and engineers, 64,140 scientists, 26,730 petty bourgeois legal workers, 40,070 media workers, 184,560 healthcare practitioners, and several thousand post-secondary teachers.¹ The total number of petty bourgeois occupations is around 1,023,528, which comprises 36% of the 2,794,300 members of the Boston metro labor force.

The petty bourgeoisie must be organized not along wage struggles, workplace improvements, etc., but rather along their progressive ideological lines. As we know, the petty bourgeoisie are a vacillating class; they are sometimes progressive, sometimes regressive, as befits their position between the waged workers and the ruling class. In order to organize them as a class, we must be attentive to the positions they have that are progressive; by focusing on these and directing their energy to ever-escalating struggle in that arena, it opens an opportunity to introduce political education into their midst. While we cannot expect the majority of the class to shed their petty bourgeois ideologies, there are benefits to the radicalization and education of even a minority, as this class has access to resources (both material resources and social connections) that would otherwise be denied a Communist league.

Most of the students in the Boston metro area are also from petty bourgeois households, and the temporary nature of being a student means that even when they are not from petty bourgeois extraction, they have a tendency to adopt a petty bourgeois outlook. Thus, student organizations should consider themselves to be part of this class-stratum and address their political development and strategies accordingly.

Those groups organizing among the Boston petty bourgeoisie must identify the most pressing progressive issues that confront that class or into which that class is willing to get involved. This will likely include confrontation with the federal government over the withdrawal of imperialist superprofits in the form of school funding, attacks on cherished liberal institutions, reproductive health, childcare support, etc., as well as LGBTQ+ defense and forms of anti-ICE defense. We should be striving to organize them along lines of national and gender solidarity: 1) nationally oppressed community defense, 2) ICE defense, and 3) defense of transgender people (and the sex-oppressed, to fight against the encroachment of patriarchal reaction). These defense organizations would be the most progressive and most liberatory of all possible lines the petty bourgeoisie can be drawn into.

By drawing the progressive petty bourgeoisie into illegal and anti-governmental actions, the mental deadlock that surrounds their inability to conceive of radical social revolution will be broken up. When they no longer trust the institutions of class-governance, they will become amenable to political education on the abolition of class society itself. This doesn’t, of course, mean that they should be immediately integrated without proper proletarian education!

Once a strong, proletarian core of organizations has been founded to provide itself as the anchor of a Communist league, those organizations that are primarily petty bourgeois or which are primarily organizing and drawing on the petty bourgeois class can effectively act in support of the proletarian interests in the area to relieve the immediate hardships affecting nationally oppressed workers and the lower strata of the proletariat, which include the presence of capitalist police in their communities, food and housing instability, etc.

Who are the Proletarians?

To determine where the revolutionary proletarian line falls, we first take those who are employed in proletarian (waged) labor and then compare the present income of that labor against the superprofits redistributed to U.S. workers by weighing it against the global median income. The global median yearly income is around $18,000 per household.²

We must then calculate the value of socialized services that are currently private and paid for out of wages in the Boston metro area: rent, healthcare, food, transportation, utilities, and childcare. These are…

Boston metro rent: $42,336/year

Healthcare: $18,000/year³

Food: conservatively, $9,000/year⁴

Transportation: $13,575⁵

Utilities: $1,560

Childcare: $22,000⁶

The total costs of these services, which would be provided by a socialized government and proletarian class-dictatorship, is $106,471. Even if the median Boston household income of $78,000 were reduced to the global average of $18,000 (a $60,000 loss), the median income proletarian in Boston would still gain $46,471 worth of services and socialized guarantees if the regime of private property were overthrown tomorrow.

This means that greater than half of all proletarian workers in healthcare support (184,000 total), food preparation (212,080 total), grounds and buildings maintenance (78,720 total), sales (216,980 total), administrative support (299,890 total), production (101,830 total) and transportation of materials industries (166,340 total) are in the strata of the immediately revolutionary proletariat.

Even if only 1% of those above workers were able to be mobilized, that would represent some 12,500 workers, a sizable revolutionary force.

Obviously, this is somewhat complicated by the ownership of substantial real property (a house or apartment) or other investment capital. Those proletarians who own real property must be generally excluded from the revolutionary strata and considered to be labor aristocrats, as they will obviously stand to lose that real property in the near term of any revolutionary movement.

The rate of homeownership in the entire metro area is only 35%. There are variations within the city, the highest area being West Roxbury (63.6%), the lowest Fenway/Kenmore (8.6%).⁷ The eight regions of the metro area with the lowest homeownership rates are Fenway/Kenmore, Allston/Brighton (21%), Roxbury (33%), Central (27%), East Boston (27.5%), the South End (33%), Back Bay (33.8%), Jamaica Plain (34.9%), and Mattapan (35.5%). According to the 2023 U.S. census data, Fenway/Kenmore has a median household income of $59,612, Allston/Brighton has $74,672, Roxbury $52,364, East Boston $92,079, South End $90,142, Back Bay $118,367, Jamaica Plain, $130,533, and Mattapan $50,946.⁸ It should come as no surprise that the nationally oppressed New Afrikan population in the Boston metro area is highest in Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester.

Organizing is highly encouraged in the Fenway, Allston, Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester areas. Oppressed national groups should be organized into fighting formations by Marxist-Leninists and made capable of ejecting bourgeois state agents, particularly police, from their communities. At the same time, organizations must be established by workplace in all areas where the contradictions are sharpest for the working class. These must be geared toward an eventual all-out confrontation with the forces of capital on the economic front (production, transportation).

Billionaires in their Midst

Of the class of big imperialists, 24 live in the Boston metro area. These include Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity, Robert Kraft, CEO of the Kraft Group, Jim Davis, owner and chair of New Balance, John Henry, owner of the Fenway Sports Group (married to the CEO of the Boston Globe) and Stephane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna. There are 27,000 millionaires living in the metro area, cheek to jowl with the working classes of oppressed nations that support their extravagant and wasteful lifestyles.

This means that mobilization against the ruling class can begin inside the metro area itself.

The Noose Is Being Fashioned

We have seen the continuous expansion and increase of local police departments on the ground over the past 25 years. In June of 2000, local U.S. police departments had 565,915 employees, including 441,000 officers.⁹ As of 2024, there are now 808,700 local police across the country.¹⁰ That is nearly a two-fold expansion of local police officers alone. There were 17,654 officers employed by INS in 2000, 10,820 employed by Customs, and 11,523 employed by the FBI.¹¹ In 2020, there were 66,215 Homeland Security officers (which absorbed INS and Customs) and 13,575 FBI agents.¹² There is no question: the local and federal police state is being expanded. Now, it is increasing with ever-growing speed. The proliferation of the Homeland Security “fusion centers” (see the Clarion article, “State of Control”), as well as “cop cities,” is accompanied by ever-expanding budgets for police departments to outfit themselves as soldiers ($65.7 billion in 2000, $176 billion in 2024).¹³ Now, the White House is federalizing National Guard units and deploying them to occupy U.S. cities — presently in the District of Columbia, and soon to be deployed in Chicago.

We must realistically consider whether the old planter ideology of racists like Thomas Jefferson (the “peaceful” extermination of Black slaves to remove the threat of rebellion), most recently reclaimed by open fascists and white nationalists (beginning with Charles Manson, but continuing with The Turner Diaries, SIEGE, etc.) has been adopted by the leading clique of the ruling class. These expansions of the police and their integration into a country-wide network and the federal armed forces are the opening moves of the complete liquidation of the oppressed and colonized nations. The Euro-American nation will operate the U.S. empire as an overseer herrenvolk state; an acknowledgement that the nationally oppressed constitute an internal threat to capitalist order.

The fact that this system is being assembled without significant opposition from any of the ruling class “progressives” or “centrists” (including the entire roster of Democrats and Independents) suggests that all elements of the ruling class are at least passively onboard with this project, and we should expect no relief from that quarter. This makes it all the more pressing to organize Communist groups that can, and will, combat it. Only with conscious elements in the lead can we ensure that Euro-American workers are broken away from “their own” bourgeoisie, the leading imperialists.

The urgent tasks of Communists are, with respect to the white “great” national workers (the national-oppresser, Euro-American proletariat), to break their dependence on the captured unions and to set them at odds with the big bourgeoisie, to instill consciousness of internationalism and national solidarity with the internal colonies and semi-colonies. With respect to the nationally oppressed and colonized people within the U.S., the task is to establish self-defense units and organizations capable of uniting into a leading party that will strike back at the state and its operatives.

There is presently an opportunity to do just that in Boston; to create local organizations that can unify into a metro-wide league, capable of acting in concert and preparing the way for the unification of all local leagues into a Decolonial Marxist-Leninist party.

1.  According to the 2023 survey by the BLS.
   ︎
2.  World Population Review, calculated at roughly $9,000 per individual.
   ︎
3.  Calculated per capita at $9,097 according to researchers at JAMA. “Tracking U.S. Health Care Spending by Health Condition and County,” Joseph L. Dieleman, Meera Beauchamp, Sawyer W. Crosby, et al. (Feb. 14, 2025).
   ︎
4.  According to the USDA.
   ︎
5.  Bureau of Labor Statistics.
   ︎
6.  Per child, according to a LendingTree study.
   ︎
7.  All homeownership rates taken from the City of Boston, Research Division and Planning Department, “Boston by the Numbers: Housing,” 2013.
   ︎
8.  According to U.S. census data collected during the 2023 American Community Survey.
   ︎
9.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Local Police Departments 2000.” 
   ︎
10.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    ︎
11.  Bureau of Justice Statistics “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2000,” (Jul. 1, 2001).
    ︎
12.  Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2020 – Statistical Tables,” (Sept. 29, 2023).
    ︎
13.  U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Government current expenditures: State and local: Public order and safety: Police,” retrieved from FRED 9/2/25.
    ︎

We urge all principled Communists to form a primary organization or take their existing primary organization out of the dead “parties” and begin the work of unification. Please contact us if you have questions.

To: CPUSA National Committee & District Leadership

From: “Disco Ambition”

Re: Formal Resignation

Date: 09/07/2025 (effective immediately)

After due consideration of the facts and my experiences within this organization, I hereby resign from any role in the Communist Party United States of America (CPUSA). Currently that role is chair of the Sedgwick County Club.

I am a Revolutionary Communist, in that while I recognize the usefulness of acting within the political field for delivering the message of Communism and reaching the masses, I do not hold to the idea that our liberation can be achieved via democratic or political means. I have no respect for the opinion that we can achieve anything by voting in a nation that has never had a real democracy, and I hold a commiserate level of respect for those who hold that view.

I came into the party, as many do, because of its legacy within the world communist movement. A legacy I see now is capitalized on by those in charge to serve their own ends. I was also foolishly unaware of the party’s entanglement with liberal politics and deviation from Communist principles until much later. I wanted to fight fascism. But fascism is here.¹ People are dying in the streets while the party that is supposed to be fighting it commits itself to singalongs and holds hands with the kinder face of the capitalist class in their vile support for the Democrat Party.

A Communist party is supposed to be the vanguard of the workers revolution. It must therefore be capable of meeting the needs of any moment in time by adapting to current material conditions. It is also supposed to maintain its independence from bourgeoisie movements and political parties. The current CPUSA is structurally incapable of meeting any of those requirements. This is because the leadership is an inbred structure composed entirely of liberal democratic apologists put in place through non-democratic means based on loyalty to leadership rather than competence² or Marxist-Leninist views. More unfortunate is the fact that the general bulk of the party is made up of passionate and committed Communists, which creates a revolving door of members as they come to realize the limitations the party has imposed on them and the movement as a whole. All this has resulted in an organization that takes up space in the cause for Communism while being at its heart distinctly anti-Communist in its refusal to conduct open dialog (material dialectics) and rejection of democratic methods of decision making (while decrying itself as conducting “democratic centralism”). These good members are left blindly organizing their communities while party leadership continues its uselessness.

Due to the time and effort I had invested in this organization³ and my belief in the need to change it from the inside, I too long ignored the lack of democratic decision making and stagnant leadership in the hopes that I could help build the party to the revolutionary Communist organization that it purports to be, problems which result in the party being impossible to change, even if there were enough people attempting to do so. In order to allow that new trajectory for the party, I saw as important two main goals. Those were the eventual reunification of the many Communist organizations in the U.S. and the reorganizing of the current party under a more democratic and flexible system, built to develop leadership and facilitate advancing Communist theory. My attempts at initiating formal procedures to those ends were met with years of neglect due to the incompetent and indifferent leadership of this organization at all levels.⁴

At the local level, I tried initiating a system similar to that which I outlined in a Reorganizing Proposal,⁵ hoping to demonstrate its benefits to national leadership. However, it has become more apparent that leadership is made up of people not interested in developing the party or advancing the cause past writing articles for a newspaper nobody reads or giving lectures on topics they are not qualified to give  in a desperate bid to remain relevant.⁶ Using the methods I outlined there, we had taken our club from two people holding infrequent meetings at a bar, to within three years a group that is playing a leading role in local activism composed of dozens of people across the state of Kansas. We did this while our apathetic district leadership were members of a defunct club of retirees.

While I was spending mental energy and time trying to convince non-members of the virtue of our organization and prove that virtue with tangible action, I faced accusations of having bad intentions regarding this party, being called a “wrecker” or participating in factionalism.⁷ The patronizing attitudes I have seen expressed to myself and others trying to effect change in this organization is demonstrative of a culture of elitism and a focus on dogmatic adherence to a misconception of Communist theory and its processes, where structure has been replaced with formality and work has been replaced with words, despite the known dangers of bureaucracy becoming the focus of a party.⁸ 

More patronizing was the constant attempts at gas lighting by some of our members demanding concrete proof of instances of undemocratic actions that we personally witnessed, such as those that occurred at the 32nd National Convention. I will not beat that dead horse more than necessary, but suffice to say that calling something a democratic decision does not make it so, and trying to convince people that witnessed it that they require proof of what occurred for their views to be considered valid is a childish act of bad faith. It is revealing of the direction of this party that most of those I met at that convention, people chosen by their Districts to represent them at the national level, have been either forced out of the party⁹ or have left due to their own frustration with it.¹⁰ I had remained in an attempt to raise the objection to the way things were done while hearing from my now non-member Comrades of the success they have experienced in different organizations that are more committed to ML doctrine.

Recently, I brought up a question for discussion on our club chat concerning a phone call I had just had with a club member who is part of the National Committee. In the effort to present the options for actions we could take in regards to our use of “Kansas Communist Party”¹¹ vs “Sedgwick County CPUSA”.¹² As it pertained to our relationship with our close allies in the local activist community, I also asked for their views on the matter in order to inform my own.¹³ This was seen as a breach of club discipline. This member has, in nearly every instance, raised objections to the presentations of questions or actions before the club or has attempted to subordinate the club to the views held by the leadership he is so unquestioningly devoted to, even when those views run counter to those held by the club members. Many of these objections have been based on an unoriginal devotion to obscure party lines or rigid readings of theory that this party has widely misapplied.¹⁴ It is tedious and interrupts the work being done, but at least it’s in keeping with the party leadership as a whole.

Another instance which now shines bright in my memory is my experience attending the “Peace Conference” in New York City in 2023. During my stay in the assigned dorms, I overheard “Noah”, a member from Illinois speaking about how they had purged members for not being sufficiently supportive of the Democratic Party. When I brought up my concerns with that claim at a club meeting in which Joe Sims was in attendance, Joe called me a liar and demanded proof of those statements, perhaps thinking that I would be carrying a tape recorder wherever I went, but more transparently in an attempt to silence any criticism or concerns with the party (this is made all the more hypocritical due to articles written in which he makes even more damning and unsupported claims, including accusing Kansan clubs being led by “ex-communists”, and other outright lies¹⁵). I later met that same Comrade at the 32nd Convention,¹⁶ in which he called me “chauvinist” for questioning the leadership’s continuing hold on power despite the obvious stagnation we are experiencing.

These stories outline a repeating pattern in the Party in which its leadership ignores its own bylaws and processes and then works fast to expel, silence, or otherwise exclude any member who raises objections to their policies. In the immediate past, the Party has done things like putting people in governing roles as a reward for loyalty, rather than due to competence or the will of those they will be governing, or refusing to issue the required financial reports to what is supposed to be the organizations highest authority¹⁷ (the Delegates of the National Convention). For an example, when the District Organizer position was about to open up in the Kansas/ Missouri district, rather than consult the membership, as is required by the CPUSA Constitution,¹⁸ the leadership unilaterally and unanimously decided to put in place the previously mentioned local club member without any vote or consultation with the membership.¹⁹ Due to these types of actions, we see good members leaving the party in favor of those who do not delve too deeply into the Party’s history or methods of “activism”. The Party cannot fathom itself as anything but the leader of any and all movements, even as they continue to prove themselves unworthy of leadership.

A great Comrade of mine once asked me “at what point [am I] fighting for an acronym”. I can no longer offer my support or participation in the CPUSA. I am tired of making excuses for a bunch of liberals and pork choppers more interested in what they consider journalism and singing than in the success of communism. I’m tired of trying to build a party only interested in perpetuating itself for the benefit of a few in leadership²⁰ while taking up space in activism. I’m just plain tired.

I know it will not happen, but I would encourage this document to begin a series of self-criticism within the party leadership. I would also encourage the present membership to use the structure we have built in the Kansas Communist Party as an example of the way to unite the U.S. Communist movement (at least locally) rather than putting it into the control of the CPUSA.

Update: Since sending this letter to the District and National leadership of the CPUSA, they have engaged in the predictable course of accusations against me, declaring that I am a “wrecker” and removing me from chats they control (overriding a club vote to do otherwise), as well as attempting to gain control over all the assets I created for the use of all local activists (they are claiming that my work was the work of the party, in an echo of the claims used by capitalist corporations when an employee leaves). Furthermore, they claimed entitlement to the name “Kansas Communist Party”, and have decided that they will not work with any organization I am a part of without permission from the national leadership , who will now directly oversee all local elections. They are perhaps forgetting that the entire sequence of events around my final decision here involved the confusion created around having two names for the same organization, and how we created the KCP to be under the sole control of the members as a group and not the national party, even including bylaws to that effect (objected to from those close to leadership). It is clear that the Leadership takes issue with any club acting independently, even when those clubs are doing the work they are supposed to be doing. It does not matter to Joe Sims or Rossana Cambron if the cause is benefiting, if they themselves are not getting the credit and a cut.

“Disco Ambition” – Previous Chair Sedgwick County, KS CPUSA

1. We live in a heavily militarized police state ruled by oligarchs & currently engaged in a genocide. ︎
2. Ex: After over a year, we were unable to get a list of present members contact information from the National or the District. ︎
3. Spent-cost heuristic is something I knew could happen, but ignored. ︎
4. My contacts in other clubs had faced the same, even when we proposed similar plans. ︎
5. See: Reorganizing Proposal. S.G.G. II. ︎
6. Such as the arrogance required for coastal city dwellers to talk about things such as rural engagement (& how Obama was good for us). ︎
7. Despite the party leadership itself having seemingly little understanding of that term. ︎
8. See: The fight against bureaucracy in the Soviet Union under Stalin | The Communists. Carlos Rule. 01/25/2022. ︎
9. I’m constantly told that these purges were “District Actions” in another patronizing and transparent attempt to protect the national leadership. ︎
10. On Why I’m Leaving the Party – The Red Clarion. Comrade Khadija. 08/01/2024. See also Why I Left the CPUSA – The Red Clarion. ︎
11. Registered openly as the “Kansas Communist Association” Kansas nonprofit, rather than by use of shell companies (see also) owned by party leadership (there are no Communist entities registered in NY). ︎
12. My analysis of the question can be found here, and the response can be found here. ︎
13. I, whenever possible, attempt to inform my opinions with those of people around me connected to the issue. ︎
14. I have long wondered if anyone constantly citing “Left Wing Communism” has actually read it. ︎
15. CP National Committee says “Keep your eyes on the prize” – Communist Party USA. Joe Sims. 07/22/2024 ︎
16. Where he was made a member of the NC for his devotion. ︎
17. Violating the CPUSA Constitution, Article VII, Section 1. (accessed 2025) ︎
18. Violating the CPUSA Constitution, Article II, Section 4, & Article V, Section 4. (accessed 2025) ︎
19. Minutes of the CPUSA National Executive Board. September 3, 2025 ︎
20. Ex: John Batchtell, the head of The People’s World and committed democrat, (I previously had access to IRS records indicating his income, but have since lost that access). ︎

By 1965, the old slave power had managed to beat back Reconstruction and establish itself as a constellation of terror-states in the U.S. South. While the capitalist ruling class in the North was content to hide or mystify the national oppression the U.S. system relied on, for the defeated Southern planter class and their petty-bourgeois hangers-on, this sublimation wasn’t enough. They were either ideologically incapable or materially incapable of joining the northern capitalists in adopting grand-sounding language about equality while maintaining the national oppression of New Afrikans and Indigenous Peoples; their deep-seated ideological commitments required them to constantly express their white supremacy in overt and terroristic ways. Sitting atop a semi-colony of brutally oppressed people, the ruling class in the U.S. South had, as the slaver Jefferson said, “the wolf by the ear.” In order to feel safe in that great prison, the Southern ruling class had to maintain absolute, fascistic, political supremacy over the Black population.

Indeed, the southern whites had been more or less permitted to do just that in the long period between the overthrow of radical Republican Reconstruction in 1877 (the period known to the Southern whites as “Redemption,” that is, redemption of the white supremacist power and the defeat of New Afrikan self-governance) and the alliance that emerged between Black World War II veterans returning to the South and the growing Black petty bourgeoisie. This period lasted from roughly 1877 until 1950.

In 1941, the racist policies of the FDR administration were challenged by A. Philip Randolph and his Black March on Washington; in 1954, the Supreme Court ended the legal basis for segregation in public schools when it decided Brown v. Board. Northern capitalists were insistent on bringing the southern slaveocracy into the modern day, not for moral reasons, but for economic ones. In 1957, the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act, the first signed into law since 1875. These decrees from on high were motivated by the need to free up labor in the Black Belt from the regressive agrarian prisons that the colonial relations still kept them in; but none of these decrees changed the balance of power in the South. Black New Afrikans in the semi-colonial states were held in a vice of property and labor theft, rape, arson, lynchings, and undisguised murder. In the U.S. South, the state ruled by terror. Despite the promise of the amended U.S. constitution, Black people who registered to vote took their lives in their hands.

At the end of the 1950s, the militant streams of Black resistance gained more and more currency and began to unite. These were often spearheaded by Black veterans or radical Black students, many of whom were explicitly Communists — Marxist-Leninists or otherwise. This period saw the rise of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act was the result of a tightening labor market in the U.S. at the same time that militancy was increasing and the consciousness was widening for the support of a Black national movement.¹ Economic pressure joined with the Black drive for liberation. There was a real fear in the halls of power that the U.S. state could face a Black domestic insurrection and an increasing desire to see the fragments of the Southern planter class and their dependents defeated entirely, to consummate the triumph of free labor, as opposed to low-productivity sharecropping and semi-slave labor that still reigned in the South. Even the former planters themselves had begun to realize that they couldn’t continue to manage their sections of the country by relying purely on terror. They realized they needed to find a way to accommodate the form and appearance of equality while maintaining the white supremacist content of the slaveocracy.²

The VRA established a relation between the planters and the federal government that was similar to that of Reconstruction. Its general provisions under section 2 of the law prohibit state and local governments from enacting any law or rule that denies or abridges the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language group. Other general provisions outlaw literacy tests and poll taxes. The special provisions granted the federal U.S. Attorney General and the District Court for DC power over Southern elections, redistricting plans, and so forth, that essentially put the Southern states into a kind of federal receivership for the purposes of voting.

The War on the Voting Rights Act

Although the VRA was a necessary concession to save the capitalist state by creating a veneer of participatory democracy in the US South, it wasn’t fully implemented all at once. This gave the ruling class time to find ways to empty the vote of its power. There remained, however, a significant faction within the broader US capitalist class itself for whom the VRA remained ideologically intolerable. Existence of international pressure from the Soviet Union and the national liberation and Pan-African movements forced the US to maintain this veneer. With the fall of the USSR and the declining world-position of the US ruling class, this clique of ideologically devoted racists has gained more and more adherents from their bourgeois colleagues. 

The Federalist Society is one of the bastions of the movement to reverse the changes in the US legal landscape and return to the early 20th century when capital openly ruled the courts.³ In 2013, the US Supreme Court, that bastion of ruling-class power,⁴ nullified the powerful special provisions of the VRA in Shelby Counter v. Holder. In the 2021 decision Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court weakened the general provisions of section 2 of the VRA. Now, the court is poised to rule on the constitutionality of section 2 as a whole. The legal war waged by the growing right-fascist bloc for half a century is nearing its conclusion. We must ask: does it matter if section 2 is struck down? If it does, why and how? Is there any way we can agitate around this issue? Does it mean we Marxists must join hands with Democrats and other fragments of the ruling class?

To briefly answer each in turn: firstly, yes; secondly, it is a sign of how advanced the imperialist decay is; thirdly, yes again; and, finally, absolutely not!

What Will Be the Outcome?

Despite the fact that the VRA in and of itself cannot guarantee anything, and despite the fact that its passage was an accommodation that was fashioned as part of an overall effort to pacify Black militancy and disarm the Black national revolutionary consciousness of the 1950s and 60s, it is actually of great importance to us whether or not the fascist court strikes it down. Oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais have already signaled that the court does intend to roll back this final element of the VRA. This is part and parcel of the right-fascist drive to restore capitalists to open and undisguised power in all aspects of political and legal life. It dovetails with the same right-fascist attack on the administrative state presently being carried out under the guise of the shutdown, a political “conflict” in which the left-fascist Democrats are playing the role of useful idiot.⁵ Given the disposition of political forces and the economic situation (increasing inflation and unemployment) it is likely that the VRA’s section 2 will be struck down.

The fate of the VRA is a bellwether for the degree of decay of the old US imperialist system that prevailed from 1991 until today as well as the balance of power between the left- (Democratic/Progressive) and right- (GOP and MAGA) fascist cliques within the ruling class. If the VRA is struck down, Democratic Party operatives will ceaselessly and breathlessly fund raise and proclaim their old doctrines about emergency organization in the face of “Trumpist” fascism and the need to permit people from both sides of the color line to participate in and enjoy the capitalist system. In private, of course, they will signal more cynically that it’s just good strategy to give the nationally oppressed the illusion of democracy. After all, they will say to their donors in closed-door dinners, it’s not as if the masses of Black people — or for that matter, any working-class voters — actually have any way to influence the important policies of the US state.

If the VRA is struck down, it signals the right-fascists are extremely advanced on their path toward carrying out the genocide of the nationally oppressed that they have been preparing for Black and Indigenous people in the US.⁶ Striking down the VRA would remove entire layers and battlefields of intra-bourgeois political struggle — layers that are “wasteful” in the eyes of the ruling class, just like the “waste” of the administrative state that they are dismantling — but would also strip away the illusion that the US state can be altered by the oppressed voting in any meaningful way.

What Is Our Task?

If the VRA is defeated, the Democrats will attempt to lead the movement that organically emerges in reaction. Many will rightly be afraid of what the loss of the final provisions of the VRA mean for the nationally oppressed and other groups openly targeted by the right-fascist government. We cannot allow this to happen. Democrats will naturally frame the question as one of government participation. They will start new voter registration drives, demand mobilization to defeat the right-fascists at the ballot box, and exercise a full-court press for the election of Democrats to the Congress and in local government.

We must instead first agitate against the new terror-government directly, then propagandize to expand the consciousness of the masses to connect the striking down of the VRA with the entire rotten system. It will be clear to many that there are no self-correcting measures available. With the open and legal disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South and other right-fascist strongholds, the layer of mystification that promised government responsiveness to the people will be gone.

Now is the time to prepare for the VRA to be removed. Now is the time to lay plans. If it is not, and the right-fascists instead uphold the remaining section to buy more time before carrying out a direct assault on the ballot box, then our preparations won’t have been in vain; we can still carry out agitation and propaganda on the basis that the VRA could have been struck down, and likely will be struck down in the near future. We must broaden the call to include other landmark rulings and laws that were offered during the heyday of empire — Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board, and Obergefell v. Hodges — and warn that they too stand to be struck down by the right-fascists.

The moment is ours; the Democrats must not be allowed to stand at its head.

Footnotes

1. The tightening labor market put the pressure on to mobilize and “free” tied up labor; business interests wanted to draw from the pool of sharecroppers in the Black Belt.
   ︎
2. “By the 1950s the language of white supremacy was gradually softening in some quarters, becoming less shrill in an attempt to gain respectability for racism. Phrases like ‘states’ rights’ and concepts such as the need to protect ‘constitutional liberties’ from communist subversion and federal intervention were becoming stand-ins for raw racial rhetoric.” Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Duke University Press, 2015.
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3. See The Society Behind the Supreme Court’s Fascist Blitzkrieg in the Clarion.
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4. See Capital’s Supreme Defender in the Clarion.
   ︎
5. See This Land Ain’t Your Land: The US Government Shutdown in the Clarion.
   ︎
6. See DC Occupation: Coming to Your City Next in the Clarion.
   ︎

Mexico registered the 7th most cases of diabetes in the world in 2021, per the International Diabetes Foundation. According to the World Health Organization, more than 110,000 people died as a cause of diabetes mellitus in 2021, making it the third-most-common cause of death in the country, behind only COVID-19 and ischaemic heart disease. According to statistics from the World Bank and the WHO, the homicide rate per 100,000 people in Mexico is 28, while 71 out of every 100,000 people die from diabetes mellitus. 

The Beginning

The sun is setting in the town of San Juan Chamula, in the soaring mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. The streets hum with tourists during the day, but now the sidewalks are empty, and stillness hangs in the air. Souvenir sellers are packing up their wares, and a local man wearing a polo shirt and a battered baseball cap steps around them to enter a local store. A few minutes later he exits with a soft drink in his hand, and a gentle hiss and clink echo softly in the avenue. He takes a long drink and lights a cigarette. The point of light at the end of the Pall Mall reflects in the glass bottle, mirroring the fiery orange of the sky overhead. The swooping white script of the bottle’s logo is barely visible in the dying evening light. 

Coca-Cola is ubiquitous in Mexico. Tables, chairs, store signs, billboards, upscale restaurants and street stalls — the red-and-white logo is seemingly everywhere. In a country awash in soft drinks, the state of Chiapas reigns supreme. According to a study by the Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur (CIMSUR), the average per capita consumption of soft drinks in Mexico is 160 liters per year, while the average resident of Chiapas drinks 821 liters per year, or an average of 2.5 liters consumed per person per day, making the southern state the global leader in soft drink consumption.

The iconic soft drink first arrived in Mexico in 1929, but didn’t spread to Chiapas until the mid 1950s. The lush southern state has always been among the poorest in Mexico, and in the middle of the 20th century most of Chiapas’ rural population lived in isolated towns, connected only by dirt tracks or beaten pathways through forests and across ridges and hollows. Before the spread of soft drinks, fruit-infused waters, pozol, and pox were the most popular refreshments in Chiapas. Pozol is a fermented drink made from corn mash, and pox (pronounced “posh”) is a distilled alcohol made from sugarcane and corn. The former is typically taken as a refreshment at meals or while working outside, while the latter is featured in parties, religious ceremonies and other special events.

The Spread

The small church is hazy with smoke. A carpet of herbs is neatly arranged on the floor. Flickering candles ring the small nave. Before the candles stand bottles of Coca-Cola, opened. The faithful pray, take a sip from a bottle, and pass it to their friend. The Coke is chased with a small glass of pox thrown back quickly. 

As The Coca-Cola Company transformed itself from purveyor of a bottled curiosity into a global symbol of United States imperial culture and extractivist power, the government of Mexico saw in it an opportunity to advance its political interests while turning a hefty profit. The ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) had consolidated political power within governmental structures, but attempts to expand into rural zones were hampered by the difficulty of travel and the insular nature of rural towns themselves. Often members of a single family ruled in remote towns, positioning themselves in the role of cacique — the only intermediary between the people and the local landowning class, or the bourgeois government in the state capital. 

The PRI granted Coca-Cola concessions to cacique families, in exchange for political loyalty to the federal Mexican regime. Many cacique families had held power for generations — often long before the solidification of the Mexican federal state under Benito Juárez and its subsequent expansion under Porfirio Díaz and Álvaro Obregón — and were long-accustomed to ruling impoverished populations with domineering cruelty. In addition to owning the local general store and controlling the routes in and out of remote towns, caciques also ran the local pox and pozol trade. These already-existing business concerns provided a ready-made structure for the spread of Coca-Cola throughout the Chiapas countryside. 

Coca-Cola entered Chiapas with a bang. Upon receiving access to a new zone of consumers, Coca-Cola’s marketing and distribution experts went to work expanding the company to every corner of the area. From the most exclusive restaurants in San Cristobal de las Casas and Tuxtla Gutiérrez to the most humble abode, nowhere was safe from the ravages of the soft-drink behemoth. Even religious ceremonies famously incorporate Coca-Cola into their rituals — impulsed largely by Christian missionaries preaching the evils of alcohol consumption to Indigenous communities. The missionaries — displaying the classic mix of arrogance and ignorance typical of moralizing U.S. social adventurism in underdeveloped countries — demonized pox and pozol and encouraged local religious officiants to replace alcohol with Coca-Cola. A local pest replaced by a massive and invasive parasite. 

The company employed outward-facing inclusivity to enter already-existing structures and relationships, monetize them, and reap enormous profit — a strategy more frequently associated with the 2020s than the 1950s. Coca-Cola tailored its trademark blitzkrieg marketing strategy specifically to the local Indigenous population of Chiapas. Billboards featured Indigenous models, stores carried advertisement posters with copy written in Tzotzil, and publicity campaigns featured Coca-Cola being used to celebrate a family gathering, to pay a debt, to say thank you, or to be a good host. Coca-Cola was pasted into existing social situations, creating a social dependency on the brand throughout the state.

As the century progressed, Coca-Cola concessions grew ever more numerous. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the federal government encouraged local power leaders to supplant the white landowning ladino class. Literacy programs and ever more Coca-Cola sponsorships fostered the creation of a local bourgeois class. In addition to peddling soft-drinks, these local bourgeois centralized agricultural production into local monopolies. Capitalist exploitation changed form; while imperious white elites speaking Spanish (castellano, as the language is called by many Chiapanecans) were phased out in favor of familiar faces that spoke the local language, the structure of theft and destruction remained the same. 

The strategy of political alignment was also employed by Coca-Cola’s biggest rival, Pepsi-Cola. The two brands separated along political lines. While the former allied itself with the PRI, the latter integrated with the rival Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) party. In a mafia-esque fashion, both brands pressured concession-holders to distribute their products exclusively, and threatened to withhold shipments to sellers who refused.  

Concession holders distributed the new soft drinks at town parties they sponsored, local sporting events, and schools. They created demand which could then be sated at the local store, also owned by the concession holder or one of their family members. Soft drink prices in remote villages were set much lower in urban locales. Pathways were hacked through the forests by machete to make way for the product. Trucks from the bottling plant often left crates of Coca-Cola by the side of the highway, where they were picked up by distributors on horseback and taken to their destination along trails and unpaved cart paths. 

The new drink proved a hit with consumers and caciques alike, filling the coffers of the latter and allowing the PRI, through the addictive properties of the sugary poison of Coca-Cola, to infiltrate the previously-impenetrable Chiapas countryside. 

Endemic

“Detrás de cada botella con el sello de Hecho en México, hay una comunidad entera que hace que todo suceda” (Behind every bottle bearing the Made in Mexico seal, there is an entire community that makes everything happen.)

Coca-Cola FEMSA

The inroads made by Coca-Cola and its concession holders in Chiapas have led to a flood of cheap junk food. Using networks established to distribute Coca-Cola (those aforementioned trails cut through the forest by machete), potato chips, candy, and a host of drinks high in sugars and salts have inundated rural Chiapanecan communities, with mortal consequences. 

The soft drink’s presence in Chiapas has also restricted local agriculture. In mid-1994, Coca-Cola FEMSA, a Mexican Coca-Cola subsidiary that owns and operates a bottling plant in Chiapas (and also the entire OXXO convenience store chain), inaugurated a new plant outside San Cristobal de las Casas. Soon after, nearby wells began to run dry, as the massive water requirements of the bottling plant began to deplete aquifers. Small farmers cannot access sufficient water to irrigate their crops, forced instead to rely on seasonal rains that grow more unpredictable with every passing year. 

Coca-Cola FEMSA has robbed previously self-sufficient agricultural communities of the means for their own survival, forcing many to travel to the state or federal capital, or the United States, in search of work. The little water that remains is not potable, so many residents buy drinking water from Coca-Cola. As usual, the Mexican government’s response to this crisis has been arrogantly detached from reality. In his term as president at the beginning of the 21st century, Vicente Fox placed the former director general of Coca-Cola in Mexico at the head of the Comisión Nacional del Agua. From 2000-2006, a former Coca-Cola executive directly controlled every drop of water in Mexico. 

The vast majority of the violence Coca-Cola wreaks upon Chiapas is not dispatched at supersonic speeds from the barrel of an automatic rifle (although the company is no stranger to such tactics). Neither does it manifest as kidnapping or torture (unless the company or one of its numerous global subsidiaries fears union pressure). Coca-Cola is a plague upon the state of Chiapas. Coca-Cola sells a little bit of death in every can of its insidiously addictive beverages. 

Even government statistics confirm the extent of the crisis. According to a study undertaken by El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, one-quarter of the state’s population suffers from obesity. In 2022 the Instituto Nacionál de Estatística y Geografía (INEGI) reported 7,617 deaths as a result of heart failure. In 2023 INEGI registered 4,531 direct deaths caused by diabetes mellitus, compared with 631 homicides registered in the same period. In a country that once elected a former Coca-Cola executive as president, the effects of Coca-Cola on Chiapas are too severe to be ignored. 

How does diabetes so easily lead to death in Chiapas? The Mexican government has refused to provide adequate healthcare facilities and sufficient supplies of medicine to rural communities. The Zapatista militant left movement, which has controlled much of rural Chiapas since their 1994 offensive, has prioritized the construction of clinics, dentists’ offices and other healthcare facilities since the beginning of their movement, filling in some of the gaps left by the Mexican state. While the popular success of Zapatista healthcare initiatives has in turn has led to grudging healthcare investment from the state and federal governments, many communities in government-controlled territory are still miles away from the healthcare they need. Once the people have fulfilled their role as consumers by handing over their hard-earned money to Coca-Cola, the bourgeois Mexican government leaves them to die. 

Conclusion

Fighting and bickering within the narcotics trade is a longtime favorite target of bourgeois media. Loud, brash characters brandish firearms carelessly, creating mountains of dead in a never-ending pursuit of riches and glory,  according to countless TV shows, movies, investigative articles, and documentaries. But what of the death toll accumulated by the vicious drive of capital to infest every corner of the earth — a death toll that exponentially supersedes the deaths caused by criminal activity in one of the most violent countries in the world?

Coca-Cola requires death. The company’s drinks are a contagion, a blight upon the land and the people living on it. Diabetes and heart failure are an acceptable cost to the company and its subsidiaries. Let them die, that we might be rich — the unspoken sentiment hanging in the air in every board meeting. Suffer, that we may profit — the terrible truth between the connections in every corporate Zoom meeting. The Coca-Cola Company and all its minions and facilitators around the world murder tens of thousands by selling a poison product. They have reduced millions more to a beaten, rageful capitulation, kicked into submission by the patent-leather boots of Coca-Cola corporate leaders. The victims must not dare to question the great whims and fancies of multinational capital. They must kneel, obediently, while their blood turns sweet, and the sugar kills them from the inside out. 

The Coca-Cola advertising machine — still one of the best marketing departments in the world — churns out a daily batch of lies and excuses. The website for Coca-Cola FEMSA proudly touts the company’s “sustainable management of water” and the “benefits of recycling” while making no mention of the negative health consequences resulting from consumption of their product. The website of The Coca-Cola Company provides a blurb that states that consumption of sugary beverages does not lead to diabetes, citing a 2005 study from the National Institute of Health. In a 2018 article in the New York Times, Coca-Cola FEMSA spokesperson José Ramón Martínez suggested that Mexican people are genetically predisposed to develop diabetes, a theory that has long been disproved, following a long tradition of racist so-called justifications for exploitation and violence.

Just as settler colonists plied Indigenous populations with alcohol in an attempt to subjugate them, so too does the settler colonial company ply death in a bottle to Indigenous communities in Chiapas.  Diabetes, heart problems, obesity, and tooth decay have all become as much a part of the landscape as the 355 mL glass Coca-Cola bottle. Despite marches, numerous expository articles in local media, false promises by The Coca-Cola Company and its subsidiaries to reduce waste, and a flood of corporate buzzword-based propaganda highlighting the company’s dedication to the planet and the community, the wave of deaths continue. Coca-Cola’s invasion of Chiapas is yet another episode in a long tradition of addictive substances foisted onto local populations by imperial capitalists desperate for a profit. Chiapas and the rest of the world suffering from junk food addiction will never know freedom until The Coca-Cola Company, all its subsidiaries and local partners, and every other junk food producer and seller are cleared from the land, and the people wrest control of their own health and nutrition from the iron grip of invading imperial merchants of death.