Editor’s Note: In the continued flood of members leaving the Party for Socialism and Liberation many have been earnest in their desire to ensure the movement can learn from this organization’s impending collapse. This week we are publishing five new letters outlining various struggles within the organization and its utter inability to solve any internal contradiction.

The first letter conveys the collective frustrations and justified disgust of a NYC District Committee elected by membership to advance base-building, and undermined at every turn by a “duplicitous” central leadership. The next perspective (as well as the last) outlines not only years long struggles between the Salt Lake branch of PSL and national leadership, but the utter lack of any kind of institutional structures to help local leadership through internal or external struggles. Rather than play a guiding hand, national liaisons actively undermined criticism and struggle in favor of putting personal and political differences under the rug—hoping that through liberal interpersonal kindness contradictions would cease and the branch would wholly submit itself to the whims of Brian and Ben Becker (read more here). A majority of the letter writers have spent a significant portion of their lives in dedication to this opportunistic and parasitic organization. Rather than making the most use of these dedicated comrades, national leadership and national liaisons found every way by which they could miss-place this revolutionary energy into work that will never bring about the authors’ revolutionary aims.

Despite the betrayal by this so-called party, some of these letters still express hope that the PSL is capable of change, and that the members within have the means to change it. This could not be further from the truth. The PSL is an opportunist organization of the highest order which fundamentally cannot be saved. As more and more information is brought to light on the undemocratic behaviors of the organization’s central leadership, cover-ups of abuse, refusals to engage in criticism or collective struggle, and the strict enforcement of settler lines on colonial and anti-imperalist questions—there can no longer be any doubt that the PSL exists solely as a mechanism to de-fang the revolutionary movement by misleading earnest radicals into a counter-revolutionary machine. If you are a member you must leave, if you’re a group of disgruntled members leave together and contact the All-Empire Worker’s League. It is time to bring an end to this bloated carcass of a so-called party, to leave it festering will only bring further rot to our revolutionary movement.

The letters have been reproduced nearly exactly as they were received. Minor corrections were made to formatting, citations where added for some quoted text, and names of local members have been redacted. Regarding the redacted names, abbreviated letters have taken their place and our editors have attempted their best to maintain consistency with the references to named individuals. There are a handful of exceptions, with important targets of criticism (Ben/Brian), as well as public figures within or formerly within the organization being fully named. Walter Smolarek’s letter, which is frequently mentioned in the following documents, was published last week by our Editorial Board.

To all those who have been harmed by the PSL’s actions, and its further in-actions, we give our love.

In Solidarity,

Editorial Board of Unity Struggle Unity

NYC District 1 District Committee Letter:

Dear comrades,

We are writing to submit our resignation as the District Committee (DC) of District 1 (Brooklyn and Staten Island) of the New York City Branch and as members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Each of us entered this organization with the intention of dedicating the rest of our lives to it because we genuinely saw it as the most viable vehicle for the advancement of socialism in the United States. We were thrilled to have been elected by our members on the specific, openly-stated mandate of advancing base building in our district. We are resigning because we have come to know with full clarity that it is impossible to carry out that mandate from within the PSL.

We have known for some time that there is an opposition to base building that goes to the top leadership of the PSL, and that the democratic space to put forth our ideas on their political merit is intentionally and underhandedly shut down, both of which we have each experienced individually and collectively. As leaders within the New York City branch, we work in constant close proximity to a clique of national leaders (they call themselves “the center”), headed by Ben and Brian Becker, who have their office here. Publicly and with general membership, they agitate about the need for the working class to get organized. Privately, they are generally hostile to deep organizing work in favor of an agitation-only approach: constant mobilizations, forums, tabling, and flyering. When the PSL creates new organizations, they are primarily as fronts for PSL agitation, rather than means of raising the organizational level of the working class as a whole. Because of the proximity of the NYC branch to this clique of national leaders, we do not functionally have a Steering Committee (SC) that is empowered to draw its ideas and analysis from its membership’s practical organizing or a concrete analysis of our local conditions. We are not provided the practical skills or orientation to durably organize the working class of New York City. Any promising attempts at this kind of organizing are intentionally undermined. This has led to the deep political underdevelopment of our branch.

Those of us who believed that there was any democratic space in our branch were thoroughly disabused of that notion by the NYC Branch Conference held this past March, the first ever such gathering in the history of the PSL. Its stated role was as follows:

1. To directly address the stated challenges and harness the immense potential of our growing branch, we take inspiration from the Party Congress and propose the establishment of an annually occurring Branch Conference. This conference will serve as a dedicated forum for strategic alignment, democratic deliberation, and collective leadership development.
2. The Branch Conference will be constituted by a broad representation of the branch’s membership and activity, representative of the branch’s on-the-ground realities and diverse experience.

Despite the above, which the membership voted to ratify at the Branch internal, previously the nominally highest body of the branch, the Branch Conference was a farce of democracy. None of the base building experience that had accumulated in our district, by far the largest of the 3 districts in the branch, was included in the topics of discussion. In response to the document one of our members submitted on the base building work in his unit, a member of the Central Committee (CC) privately characterized it as a sign of the “anarchistic” tendency in Brooklyn toward mutual aid in a remark to a member of the former D1 District Committee. The document was not taken up for discussion at the conference. During the conference, when our members contributed their views on why the branch should take up base building, another member of the Central Committee openly stated, “The PSL is not a base building organization.”

In sum, we learned that a separate, unelected body had decided on the entirety of the conference agenda, which they organized to favor lengthy presentations by members of the center led by Ben Becker, followed by relatively short periods of discussion. They also decided that we, as elected delegates to the Branch Conference, would vote on a series of resolutions in the final half-hour of the two-day conference, resolutions that reflected the presentations of the center and were crafted by the aforementioned unelected body. When delegates motioned to request clarification on, amend, or table these resolutions, Ben Becker angrily hovered over the mic, eventually castigating the delegate who motioned to table a resolution that mandated the NYC Branch to commit to funding “a new center” as a top priority, declaiming that he didn’t understand why any member wouldn’t immediately understand its necessity. Most delegates had just heard of “the center” for the first time that day, when it was mentioned during a fundraising presentation that preceded the vote on resolutions. When a delegate asked for some definition, another member of the Central Committee dramatically hushed the crowd. We were all left without any clarity on where the center ended and the leadership of the NYC Branch began. Although the delegates voted to put the resolution to a vote by the incoming Branch Committee, the resolution was never raised in that body and it was subtly alluded to at a Branch Internal to appear as if we had voted in favor.

Despite all this, we had believed that it was possible to protect the space within our district for deep, neighborhood-specific organizing work to continue and struggle for a political realignment of the organization based on comrades practical exposure and assessment of its value. However, as the results of this work and comrade’s confidence in it has grown, we have only faced increasing and more direct pressure to squander it from the Steering Committee, and members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee. Often this was done under the guise of directing us to cancel any local activities or otherwise divert the necessary forces from it for the sake of clumsy agitational initiatives, attending recorded webinars, or ensuring maximum member attendance at mobilizations that do not draw from the working class in neighborhoods we organize in. This was done by design, even as the number of members in our branch exceed 280. Other times this was said directly. In a private conversation with one DC member, Ben Becker derided mass organizing for “tethering us to the lowest common denominator of our class.” His disgust for our work and our class is truly appalling.

The open, undemocratic attempts this past week by the top leadership of the PSL to crush our work has pushed us to the breaking point.

Last week, we circulated a strategy document for our district, which was a normal act for an incoming leadership body whereby we undertook an assessment of the previous period that reflected the work of our members, in deep conversation with them, and produced a strategic orientation and an accompanying set of tactics by which they could concretely measure their work going forward. We simultaneously shared the document with our Steering Committee liaison. Instead of receiving our ideas as a valuable contribution to the organization, one of us was called into a meeting with our liaison to be definitively told that our district’s strategic orientation to base building represented a “departure” from the strategy of the New York City Branch, and the national strategy of the PSL. When asked for clarity on what that strategy was, our liaison described it as (limited to) intervening in spontaneous mass movements and agitating for socialism.

In our strategy document, we defined base building as “a historically communist, long-term strategy of increasing the relative organization and strength of our class through working alongside it, winning its credibility, and building our influence. Practically, this is accomplished by committing to particular local areas, weaving ourselves into the fabric of their struggles, earning the leadership of our class, and positioning ourselves to lead the uprisings to come.” We see base building as the only way to durably build the level of working class organization needed to eventually wage revolutionary struggle, and the only way to durably build mass socialist consciousness. Alongside communist cadre, our class must go through its own practical experience by which it comes to see the correctness of our ideas. Simply relaying those ideas is not enough. That is to say, we see base building as the only viable long-term means of achieving the PSL’s stated political program.

In the week following the distribution of our strategy document, the Steering Committee, which contains members of the Central Committee and the Standing Committee, coordinated inactive rank-and-file members of the District to discredit the elected leadership of the district by disrupting the planned unit meeting discussions of the document, and further by sending this same group of members, which includes a current Steering Committee member, to disrupt our planned district retreat where we presented and facilitated discussion on the strategy document. After the retreat, we learned from multiple other comrades that this group had all been reading their talking points from a shared, pre-prepared document, and were text-coordinating throughout the meeting. These members have been entirely absent from any of the local, neighborhood work that the district has carried out the past year. For some of them, it was their first time attending any sort of internal Brooklyn meeting in years. The points they raised on both occasions were not based on the political merit of our ideas or the work of active district members, but instead relied on personal attacks against us and pulling rank based on seniority. At the retreat, when we presented a new mass organizing project that we are undertaking, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, for the first time to the whole district, this group sought to sour the broad member support for the project by launching pre-prepared attacks that accused us of wasting Party resources and “gaslighting” our members. Not only were these bad-faith criticisms based on distortions of our position, they were blatantly disrespectful to seven non-DC comrades who presented on the Freedom Center and to the others who had been leading this organizing and thoughtfully discussing and assessing this work for months. We were disgusted by this display of disrespect for our members and our class. It further cemented our certainty of the deep unseriousness of the leaders of this organization.

In addition to these open attacks, behind closed doors we have been undermined by the highest body of the entire national organization. We had invited (now former) Central Committee member Walter Smolarek to speak at our retreat, to which he accepted. We had cited his Liberation School article, “Dual Power and Serving the People in the U.S. Revolutionary Movement,” and experiences building the Philadelphia Branch in our strategy document and were excited for our members to hear remarks from a long-time national leader on why communists should care about the organizational level of our class, and for Walter to learn more about the base building projects in our district. Late into the night before our retreat, Ben Becker convened the Standing Committee of the PSL to vote to block Walter from speaking. We were not provided any explanation.

We were pushed over the edge by our experience at the Branch Committee meeting this week. Four of us are elected members of the Branch Committee and the remaining two are observers. At the meeting, we explicitly asked for clarification on whether the view of the Steering Committee is that our strategic orientation to base building is incompatible with the strategy of the branch and the party. While we had already accepted this, we owed it to our membership to raise this question with the highest body available to us. We also asked for an explanation of the attempt by the SC to undermine the democratic processes of the preceding unit meetings and district retreat, and for the author(s) of the shared talking points document to be identified, because rank-and-file comrades had raised this as a major concern. SC members lied to our faces about the coordinated nature of the attacks and avoided our question about the document entirely. Instead of providing clarity, the Central Committee members who participated in the discussion (with the exception of Walter) concealed their true views on base building, offering confused assertions that they were open to the deep organizing that has gained momentum in Brooklyn, but simply have concerns rooted in their political experience that base building doesn’t work. They concluded the discussion by asserting that it would continue within a smaller body, a future meeting between the SC and DC. The next day, Ben submitted a document to the Branch Committee that opens, “I’m all for neighborhood organizing.” We know this is another lie.

Following the BC meeting, Walter reached out to us. He shared his disgust at the duplicitous conduct at the meeting and informed us that many of the branch and national leaders present had been secretly strategizing for months to crush our neighborhood organizing and other PSL mass organizing efforts across the country. They have counter-organized members of the district to oppose this work. The recent Conference on Organization was designed with this purpose.

Further, Walter shared his resignation letter with us and plan to submit it. His experiences affirm so many of our own. One of us who is employed at the national office that houses some party staff, including members of the national leadership clique, has been repeatedly summoned to a Steering Committee member’s office to defend and explain decisions made by the DC and unit leads to prioritize their neighborhood organizing work. She has been reprimanded, told that these decisions are “unacceptable,” and pried for information. A number of us were previously members of other branches that have have historically had more autonomy, given their distance from these national leaders, and were shocked by the political underdevelopment of the NYC branch when we transferred. One of us has experience as a member of the SC of another branch, where he was directly told by Brian Becker that the branch had to cease its base building work in favor of an agitational flyering initiative.

We were outraged and horrified to learn that the national leadership has been conspiring behind our backs for months to put a stop to our district’s deep organizing work, and to crush the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, which our members have been building with great effort and political seriousness. We don’t see any point in continuing to engage in a farcical process to “resolve” our political disagreements with a leadership this duplicitous.

Our commitment to the members of our district, whether you choose to leave or stay, remains just as strong and sincere as it ever was. For a long time, we believed it was not only the best approach but our responsibility to shield you from the rot at the heart of this organization and the hostility of national leadership to your work. We wanted to protect the space for you to carry out the work you had seen was correct from your own practical experience undaunted by the serious deficiencies in the organization. We have reached the point where that is no longer possible. We have done our best to guide you through this period on the strength of your own practical experience and have reached the end of that runway. Now we must speak plainly. We do not see this organization as able to be reformed nor do we see the fundamental contradiction between base building and an agitation-only approach to be resolvable within it. We have taken the decision to resign with the utmost seriousness and consideration, not only for its implications for our lives, but that of our members, and our class, to whom we hold the highest fidelity.

We are so proud of the ways you have grown as leaders and organizers alongside us. The past several months of training ourselves to become cadre, organizers capable of helping our class to realize its power, and the beautiful, real work of building durable relationships with the organic leaders of our neighborhoods have forever fortified us with a living accountability to our class that far supersedes our commitment to the PSL. We understand why an undemocratic leadership who relies on our warm bodies to unquestioningly carry out their ideas would go so far to keep us from this work. The sober reality is that the ultraleftist rigidity they engender systematically underdevelops the organization and renders it incapable of becoming a serious political force in this country with a mass base. This deeply saddens us. And we agree with Walter that it would be irresponsible for us to continue building this organization.

Given the magnitude of our political difference with national leadership, the lack of democratic mechanisms to continue our work, and our real opportunity to start something new, we have decided to leave the organization with Walter.

We are setting out to continue our work and to build the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Freedom Center, an example of what we see as a definitive example of the next phase of our organizing: a mass organization that formally fuses cadre with the working class by way of base building. We have a proposed interim structure that will allow this work to continue, along with the base building work in Sunset Park, and for us to retain our community partners from across Brooklyn.

We hold great confidence in our ability to continue this work without the PSL. We have largely built it with our members and with our class without branch support in the form of connections, material infrastructure, ideological guidance, or practical skills, and with a great deal of constant undermining. We are excited about what we can build with full organizational focus and capacity.

In terms of what broader organizational form comes next, we second the point in Walter’s resignation letter about it being too early to announce a full political program, but we are committed to building a project on a national scale. We know this will be difficult, but as communists we are committed to doing the difficult, necessary thing, rather than remaining in an organization that we do not believe in and whose national leadership is conspiring to crush the strategic approach and work that we wholeheartedly believe to be politically and historically correct. We invite you to leave with us and we also invite you to continue working with us in good faith as members of the PSL if you see fit.

It has truly been the honor of our lives to serve as your District Committee.

With unshakeable conviction and revolutionary love,

Your D1 District Committee: D. K., E. C., J. R., J. M., M. T., and R. H.

L.M’s Letter:

Dear comrades,

I am writing to submit my resignation to the party.

I write to you with both regret and excitement. As a portion of my total life I have dedicated more of my life to the building of this branch than any other member in the organization. With the leave of absence of Comrade Q I have spent more time in the party than any active member. I was 19 years old when I joined the party eight years ago. I was arrogant and didn’t know anything about organizing besides my limited experience with Planned Parenthood. I was honored to be elected to our first Steering Committee despite being one of our youngest members. The party provided me a political home, tempered my dogmatic and idiosyncratic understanding of theory and provided me a structure. I have dedicated my life to the party and more importantly to the class struggle. When faced with the choice of going to college to further my career prospects or to continue my work leading the branch I chose the party. I simply don’t know what it means to operate as an adult outside of the party organization.

This is why I am filled with a great sense of regret. I wish the party were the organization I thought it was. I wish that we were engaged in the work promised to us when we were recruited. I joined as a part of the first wave of socialist revival in the late 2010’s. Since then the movement and in turn the party have grown considerably and I have become increasingly aware of the limitations of the party to grow into the organization our class deserves and so desperately needs. I will return to these limitations but I must relate to comrades that I have experienced periods of extreme demoralization, not at the state of struggle in the US or of the supposed “backwardness” of our class, but at the state of our party. I’m sure many in our branch have had similar feelings in recent years.

Attached to this document you will find two letters. In the first of which you will find the resignation of Comrade Walter Smolarek. A comrade who joined when I was in 4th grade learning basic algebra. You may know him as the longtime editor of Liberation News and the occasional host of The Socialist program. Smolarek lays out many of the political as well as democratic issues with the PSL. This is why my writing today also carries a great deal of excitement. When I read Smolarek’s letter I felt a deep sense of joy because he was expressing many of the same criticism’s of our party I harbored. I have always made it a point to read every critique of the party I can so I could make a sober assessment of them. I have always found them to be unfounded and based in liberal and anarchistic ideals, until now. Prior to reading Smolarek’s letter I had already been considering whether to break with the party for some time. There is understandably little literature on when and how to split with an existing party. Lacking historical reference I created a set of criteria as to when a split is not only the right of a member but their responsibility:

• The party is organizationally or politically heading in a direction contrary to goal of revolution.
• The party is functionally not capable of reform through ordinary means.
• The member(s) splitting are capable of effectuating a split which has real potential to serve the goal of revolution.

The first two conditions are dependent on one another. If an organization is moving away from its revolutionary goals but does present the realistic possibility of reform towards such ends it is the responsibility of members to struggle towards that end. Let me not be accused of ultra-democracy because I believe if an organization is moving towards revolution even if it cannot be realistically reformed it would be wrong to effectuate a split because in this case the reformers would be those trying to turn away from revolution. However let it be said that inability to reform can itself be a hindrance towards the goal of revolution, especially when that horizon is not close at hand. The final condition has less to do with whether a split should be pursued and more with when. For a while I have been convinced that the first two conditions were met by the PSL. It was only with Walter’s letter that I became convinced that the third condition was met. I could have attempted to form a split months ago but I hesitated at the possibility of any new organization being isolated and suffocated due to its lack of support. This is what I told myself but it would be disingenuous not to recognize some cowardice in being afraid to take the dedicated cadre to do the hard work of building a new organization.

There may be some of you who think that splitting is inherently wrong as it weakens socialist organizations. To this my only response is that the party would not exist without the split performed initially by Sam Marcy from the Socialist Workers Party followed by the split of our founders from the Workers World Party. So the question cannot be reduced to splitters or non- splitters and must be taken on the basis of ideology and organization.

The second letter is something I wrote almost two years ago addressed to the Steering Committee outlining what I saw as the limitations of democracy within our branch. Although the letter was unsent at the time because I determined that our leadership was already struggling against growing factionalism within our branch I have shared it with multiple SC members in the years since. The purpose of its inclusion is to show that independent from Smolarek comrades across the nation, comrades you know, have been coming to similar conclusions. That letter to the Steering Committee was limited by the fact that at the time I thought the party could be reformed and that I limited my criticisms to the branch rather than the organization as a whole. In this letter I will attempt to address these limitations.

The PSL tries to critique American liberal democracy for its emphasis on the form of democracy without its actuality. We critique the idea that democracy is an event recurring every 2-4 years when we vote for leaders. However in function we accept a level of democracy which acts exactly like this. There is no effective recourse to hold elected leadership to account. In the first place our constitution has certain provisions which allow existing leadership an insurmountable level of control over the democratic processes. This is not simply democracy under centralized guidance but a hollowing out of democracy as a meaningful force in our party. The provision in the constitution which allows the central committee to appoint up to 40% of the voting members of congress allows existing leaders to hold a strong(if not insurmountable) plurality. Theoretically this plurality can be overcome but it is practically immovable. In effect it means that those who wish to change the composition of leadership or oppose the CC’s position must work to convince more than 4.5 times as many delegates as the CC does.

This is not to say that the CC should not be able to appoint voting delegates. In the years that I worked on the National Fund Drive Central Committee(NFDCC) I could have been the most diligent and politically apt comrade imaginable but since this work would not have been done at the branch level it would not be factored into members choice on whether to select me as a delegate. So in this manner there is a real need for the CC to have some discretion on delegates but 2 out of 5 delegates is an absurdity. The basic argument surrounding such a provision is that it creates a level of continuity. We should not throw away the concept of continuity but we must ask to what degree should it be prioritized over our ability to grow our working class democracy alongside the movement?

Secondly although the CC does not control a majority through the appointments they are also benefited by other extra-constitutional undemocratic practices. Chiefly a lack of transparency in the workings of leadership. Lenin was consistent in critiquing both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cadet parties for their lack of transparency. It was a point of pride for Lenin that all the problems inside the RSDLP were being laid bare so that workers could make up their own minds about the leaders and misleaders in their movement. In my letter to the SC two years ago I predicted that without transparency the SC as a whole would lose its legitimacy in the eyes of members since they could not see if it was a specific member or group of members behind a wrong headed tactic. This is also true of our national organization. We are able to see the reports from congress but without an ability to see the debates behind the choices we are unable to hold specific leaders to account. If our delegate voted contrary to our revolutionary values how would we know? How would we hold them accountable when elections came around for the next congress?

This is not a hypothetical question. Few rank and file members are aware that at our last congress some members attempted in good faith to disagree with the position put forward by the CC on the question of how to position ourselves relative to artificial intelligence. If we thought the CC was incorrect or that they mishandled the disagreement how would we democratically attempt to change the direction of the party on this vital question facing our class? As Parenti once said, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input.”

It seems as though such accountability and debate are anathema to those who currently run our organization. In pre-congress docs for years we have been told about the goal to massify the party. It is my belief that it is impossible to massify the party if we do not have a means by which to absorb and resolve the debates which will naturally emerge amongst our class. People can accept defeat in a debate on a specific proposal but they cannot be expected to take part in building an organization which doesn’t have any means by which to have such debate.

Many members have made arguments about transparency in recent months. Many of them have been in good faith. However there are members who have raised the banner of transparency from the SC only when it could serve their careerist ends. When they were in leadership they took advantage of this obscurity to misrepresent their fellow leaders to members. However as soon as they found themself in the minority transparency was an ideal to be fought for? No I doubt they will follow us because the cause of democracy and debate was a means towards their egoistical ends.

It is in light of these and other facts that I make the choice to forge a new path outside of the party. It is a difficult step, it is a scary step and there is no guarantees about the future. But I feel I owe it to my class to take it. I have seen too many hard working and genuine comrades become burnt out and turning away from organizing entirely due to struggling against the sins of our party. This is why a wrongheaded party is not just a mistake but something to be fought against as it siphons limited energy from our class that can be harnessed toward revolutionary ends. I have seen many leaders resign quietly. I respect this choice but I think it makes it difficult for the movement to learn any lessons for the future. In leaving the party I think it is vital that we do the work to reflect on the failures and limitations of the PSL as well as its strengths. Dialectics requires that we see the necessity for the party at a specific juncture in history and absorb its strengths while leaving behind as many of its issues as we can.

I have witnessed resignations before and know I may be slandered for many things by the party. I know many of you are dedicated fighters for socialism even when we have disagreed we have fought side by side. My hopes are that even if we have disagreed in the past you will remember that I have always been open and honest about where I stand. I hope that this letter will help those of you who are dedicated to the class struggle to see the limits of the PSL. I invite you to embark with us on a new path to build the kind of organization we were promised when we were recruited.

In Solidarity,

L.M

D.W’s Letter:

Comrades I have chosen to submit to this branch as a whole my resignation, I have done this in violation of the constitution and by-laws because I agree with you all that our branch is in need of transparency to tackle the political disagreements that have paralyzed us for so long, and I believe comrades deserve to understand the type of organization that they are in. I know that this will be characterized in many ways, it may be described as uncomradely, it may be described as disagreement with the possibility of socialist revolution, it may also be characterized as an unwillingness to submit myself to democratic centralism or the will of the collective by accepting the outcome of the SC elections. I want to assure you none of these things are true. I declined nomination because I knew I couldn’t complete the term.

I joined the party 6 years ago because I believe that socialist revolution is not only possible, but that as a mother I have a life long duty to the struggle for socialism. It is not a matter of sentimentality but of practical necessity, it is in it’s actualization that my own children’s future becomes secure. In those 6 years I have spent 5 of them in various appointed and elected leadership roles the last 2 as a member of the Salt Lake Steering Committee. I have worked tirelessly to build our branch and the movement for socialism. I was the State Chair of the Vote Socialist Campaign, at my own expense I have attended international delegations, answered the call for out of state deployments, and earned the confidence of our comrades being elected as a delegate to the 6th Party Congress. I have not made this decision lightly, but I hope that by explaining how I came to it, each of you can make an informed decision as to where to direct your energy without false pretenses.

I am leaving the PSL because I no longer believe that it is capable of carrying out the tasks required of any party that hopes to call itself the vanguard, despite it’s ability to raise its profile and increase its ranks well beyond its current numbers. In my time in the branch there have been recurrent struggles over our approach to mass work and the actual practice of democracy within the party. Having to struggle through differing ideas about a question or practice isn’t inherently a problem. However I have seen how a lack of internal structures and an unwillingness of the National Party leadership to assert authority where necessary has allowed flagrant violations of our constitution and bylaws to occur on a regular basis with no accountability. I have seen over and over the tendency to smooth over disagreements and debates with rhetorical unity, obfuscating all manner of political differences. I have seen first hand how one on one conversations are used to prevent the emergence of disagreement, which almost always relegates the disagreement to the realm of the interpersonal. The consequences have been felt by everyone in our branch even though many of you lacked the information to understand what was happening. I will fully acknowledge that as a member of the Steering Committee I have participated in withholding information that I thought comrades deserved to have to make informed decisions, my only defense is that I did so inline with Party discipline and inline with the directives of the National Party leaders.

Many comrades trace the problems in our branch to the retreat after the Palestine movement began to fade. The issue of democratic participation in discussion and debate, and the responsibility of comrades to carry out the resulting work according to the principles of democratic centralism has long been a flash point. It was the final iteration of housing unit work building the Tenants Union of Salt Lake that offered us the first real test of party structures from my experience. This period in our branch was marked by lively debate in our units and a high level of engagement from rank and file members, members in the units had a high degree of input on how work was unfolding within the confines of building out the tenants union. As a member of the Extended Steering Committee and a lead of the housing unit I attempted to resolve a question about our strategy towards developing TUSL between my unit and SC members in the unit. We had diverging positions and ideas about the appropriate way to move forward so I attempted to resolve the disagreement through all of the channels available, using our constitution and by-laws to guide me.

After having several questions taken to a vote in our unit with the SC members in the minority, our unit attempted to carry out our collective decision, members of the SC used their influence to formally and informally encourage comrades to carry out the work in the way the minority voted. When this was raised to the full Steering Committee in an Extended Steering Committee meeting, it was decided that I would develop a proposal laying out the concrete path we would take to build TUSL, and the SC and Extended SC would vote on it to end the debate. The proposal that I put forward was adopted by the full Steering Committee and immediately SC members in the unit started advising the unit to carry out work in contradiction to the adopted proposal. In response I planned to call a branch meeting on the basis that the branch meeting is the highest body of the branch where I planned to call for a branch vote on the strategy of TUSL. Up to this point the Steering Committee members in the housing unit had pushed for disagreements between comrades to be resolved through informal one on one or small group discussion until they reached consensus instead of encouraging the debate and differences to be clearly discussed in the unit meeting for all members to understand. My position was that if a disagreement existed among the leadership body of the branch and the membership we should be open with the branch about what those disagreements were. Not only so that we could gain the input of the branch but so comrades could adequately assess the decisions of the leadership body and the individual members elected and appointed to it.

Through out this time I was engaging in debate and struggling openly about the direction that we went, however my genuine political disagreement was treated first as irritation, then as an interpersonal clash, and eventually as full blown insubordination and subversion of Party norms. While leadership was understandably frustrated that the branch was bogged down in internal conflict, the position I was putting forward was that in a democratic centralist organization we are expected to have intense debates and disagreements and when consensus cannot be reached we should vote and all be held accountable to carrying out the decision reached by the majority. Given that I had seen members of the SC refuse to accept the decisions of the majority in their unit, gossip about comrades, and move to overturn a decision they didn’t personally agree with, I lacked trust that leaders in our Party are actually accountable to the principles of democratic centralism in practice.

My insistence on bringing this disagreement to the full branch would also mark my first experience with members of the National Organization Department coming to SLC to resolve internal dysfunction. During that visit our liaisons met with the extended steering committee and asked why we were pushing for our proposal to go to a branch vote, I told them I believed I was following the method laid out in the constitution for resolving disagreements like this, I was told that the language of the “branch being the highest body” does make it my right as a member to bring any decision before the branch to vote on, but that isn’t how we handle things in reality. I agreed not to bring the proposal to the branch and our national liaisons helped us come up with a plan for moving TUSL forward which I took up enthusiastically, shortly after their visit the Steering Committee removed me from my role as deputy of the housing unit and removed Liz as the lead. Along with other long time members of the housing unit who had sided with my position in the debate, we were removed from housing work all together. There was never a reason given other than the Steering Committee had decided to do a branch reorganization and that is what the needs of the branch called for.

I must admit that my removal from housing work was a deep blow it was an area of work I’d done since before joining the party, I wrestled with feeling wronged and lied to and I questioned if the Party actually operated the way leaders said it did. I reflected and decided I could look at my removal from housing work as a personal attack, or I could see it as an opportunity to show the members of leadership that viewed me as combative that I was serious about party discipline. I put my all into developing the first iteration of an organized comms team in the branch right before the Palestine struggle would start picking up momentum. The uptick seemed to settle tensions in the branch for a while, we got into a regular work flow but as the movement endured for months we were faced with the question of developing a strategy for our work in the Palestine movement. This was something that the SC said they did not have the capacity to develop and said that it would have the unit take up. Myself and another leader developed a proposal that the unit voted in favor of. This strategy was then challenged by members not in the unit at the behest of SC members in the unit who disagreed with the strategy and found it too confusing for people to understand. This led to the strategy being put up for a vote in a special meeting where anyone from the branch was able to attend. Before this strategy was able to be adopted we had the 2024 SC elections where 3 long time SC members left the Steering Committee. With the election of a new steering committee the contradictions left unresolved from disagreements over the correct approach to mass work and base building and the correct approach to developing political strategy again came to a head immediately.

The period following the election of the 2024 Steering Committee was marked with an extreme amount of disunity internally because it was grappling with it’s members D and K breaking party discipline and sharing internal SC deliberations with a former SC member X and her partner N. This led to a campaign to create a faction in the branch where D and X were hosting secret strategy retreats with student comrades without the knowledge of the elected steering committee. Simultaneously N and X were actively calling decisions made by the new SC into question before the full branch, and used their informal relationships to gossip and disparage the new SC to emerging student leaders. The refusal of a highly respected former SC member to accept the legitimacy of the newly elected SC, represented the first time the authority of an elected Steering Committee as a body would be challenged in the branch. We would later learn in early 2026 that these strategy calls with N and X, never stopped, but I’ll write more on that later.

Following the departure of X, K, and N from the branch D remained on the SC, without K on the SC and finding himself frequently in the minority, he continued to meet with student comrades attempting to counter organize against the decisions of the SC that he personally disagreed with. While Devin was not solely responsible for the hardened positions within the SC, his repeated violations of the constitution and by-laws represented the primary contradiction preventing our branch from being able to become unified around a shared path. This culminated in irrefutable proof that he had knowingly encouraged comrades in Mecha to call a counter event to one he knew the SC had just voted on calling. The SC and our liaison worked at length to consolidate the student comrades being influenced by these actions and open the door for any questions about what they had heard from D and others, our mistake was in not being absolutely clear about what was happening and providing our perspective so that comrades could decide for themselves what to believe. At the time talking about the specific violations comrades had been carrying out was seen as a threat to the unity of the branch and our ability to win over those student comrades, who through no fault of their own had been mislead by leaders of the branch that they trusted.

The lull in the Palestine movement in the summer of 2024 and the final stretch of the Vote Socialist Campaign would follow a familiar pattern, D, L, and, I found ourselves faced with similar questions, and similar diverging understandings of what it meant practically to apply the party line on mass organizing and how we prioritize the interests of base building with the interests of flexibility to respond to the surges of the protest movement or other national campaigns like Vote Socialist 2024. This was also when the branch formally started approaching CU. As I mentioned above D was not alone in hardening the positions in the SC, during this time he did have moments of explosive rage directed at him in SC meetings by L. Instead of being called out directly in those moments, L was privately talked to later about the need to engage with D constructively. Unfortunately the mediation with members of National that was meant to finally resolve the underlying diverging ideas on the correct path for our branch was not scheduled by them. D’s position was that the best tool to build a relationship with CU was TUSL, L and I advocated for us to build an organizational relationship with CU as PSL, our suggested first attempt was in the final weeks of the VS24 campaign, the SC had decided to launch a branch wide push directing all activities to tie back to promoting the campaign. D agreed to talk with B and feel out how she felt about us doing outreach for Salt Lake Immigrant People’s Agenda and sharing materials about the campaign too where it made sense, he also got approval from the SC to bring a handful of comrades to participate. After several outings and no discussion about the Vote Socialist Campaign going on between PSL and CU leadership, Liz and I pushed for us to pause trying to build the relationship with CU until after the election. This was met with resistance from D and meetings with the SC grew increasingly tense. Around this time the SC found out that Devin was hosting a private Black August event with student comrades to do an independent study on the National Question despite members of the NOD actively trying to discuss those questions and provide clarity on them from National. This was the final straw for the SC in which we demanded the NOD take some sort of corrective action towards the factionalizing being carried out by an active SC member.

As a consequence D was asked to stop attending SC meetings and informed by the NOD that he would need to participate in party work with CU accompanied by a comrade who could report back what happened to the SC. Following the election in November the branch launched into interest meetings and in January of 2025 began preparing for the Jan 20th inaugural We Fight Back rally. We approached CU to collaborate and partner with us on the event which they agreed to, after a challenging start and misunderstanding about the social media announcement we pulled off a successful rally. Comrades expressed excitement about the success of those attempts, and the SC hoped to build on that. We attempted to launch an emergency response network that would be developed through organizing meetings held at the LC. Failing to establish any partners or real involvement from CU, we determined we lacked the man power to effectively create these networks with so many people in different areas. We stopped hosting the organizing meetings and attempted to determine a more comprehensive approach to the We Fight Back days of action as the No Kings movement was starting to develop. This would lead to a pivot away from CU and us looking for other opportunities to engage with immigration defense. Devin disagreed with this approach but was no longer in SC meetings, so he used committee meetings and unit meetings to raise what he saw as failures of the elected SC to secure the relationship with CU. Comrades not in the faction were seeing SC members give contradicting directives and were confused by the constant tension. As the end of the term was drawing to a close Liz and I informed our National Liaison that we planned to refuse to accept nomination and threatened to demotivate at the election if Devin was allowed to run without answering to the branch about his misconduct.

Agreeing that some sort of disciplinary action was warranted but unable to approve anything more within the NOD, our liaison told D he could not accept nomination for the 2025 term and that failure to change his conduct would result in expulsion. The plan after elections was to take up the question of immigration work, develop a strategic outlook for the branch, and plug D into work that he enjoyed. It was deeply important to the incoming SC to show him that we saw his contributions as a comrade and that we weren’t going to spend the term trying to punish him or get revenge.

After the SC retreat in April there was a flurry of activity we moved quickly to implement a structure that would allow for comrades to participate in the decisions about carrying out our work, but would centralize the relationship building and strategy development in the SC. It wasn’t perfect and the SC attempted to build a second tier of leaders through one on one asks and opportunities working closely with a handful of comrades. The limits of this were felt immediately, without the explicit role and responsibility of being an appointed leader in the branch comrades we hoped to raise up didn’t have the clarity about what we were expecting of them. Without a regular division of labor and regular meetings comrades were incentivized to pick only the meetings and events that interested them.

Another variable arising out of the SC retreat was the break up between A and L which created a dynamic where often L would verbally attack A and Dodge if they asked clarifying questions or suggested that there was disagreement with her positions. There were many meetings where we were unable to finish our agenda because L would storm out or shut the conversations down. For a lot of this period I attempted to play a mediating role where I was trying to translate the legitimate issues L had to the rest of the body, but also act as a support so that L didn’t feel attacked by the legitimate questions being raised by other SC members. This was an error because it reproduced the dynamic in which SC members and liaisons had one on one conversations to attempt to indirectly deal with the problem which only created the conditions for suspicion.

After an intensely scary experience at an immigration rally that A was the tactical lead for, police appeared to be kettling protestors and Liz in the lead truck got caught between them. She developed a deep distrust of other SC members acting in a tactical role. Only exacerbating this distrust were the tragic events at the No Kings rally in June. L and I had been the tactical and security leads, but after getting to the front of the march that had missed the end point at Wallace Federal, L and I were separated from the rest of the contingent. We had just brought the runaway crowd back around the corner, and were a few yards ahead of the Sky apartments when we heard the shots. We tried to get back to the comrades behind us and turned around not knowing where they had come from and saw Z. The next period was chaotic but at almost every turn we took to get back to the contingent police were charging towards us. Unable to find our way back we called A and told him to lead comrades out of there. Afterwards L experienced severe PTSD which she later expressed not feeling supported in by the SC.

All of these factors had the effect of creating explosive meetings that left every member of the SC stressed out about our weekly meeting. After coming back from Congress, M was assigned as our National Liaison because she would be able to provide the close consultation that the SC needed so that we could finally get work moving in our branch. After several attempts to talk to L and the SC together and individually, she asked L to take a leave of absence for a few months so that the rest of the SC could have some space. L refused and the NOD put her on an LOA from the SC but they did not want us to tell the branch in an effort to protect L’s privacy and to keep the peace. Complicating matters was a convergence of interests of L and D both wanting to engage in immigration work with Bailfund and CU. Liz then knowingly pushed bailfund in chats and directed her partners to lobby for bailfund in other committees against the directive of our liaison. In an unprecedented move in December the NOD formally suspended L for 6 months for uncomradely conduct and failure to abide by democratic centralism. This was the opportunity for the National Leadership to reassert norms and expectations in our branch that even elected members of the the SC are accountable to the constitution and by-laws. Unfortunately P left the party and we were faced with reality that we were starting completely over with a new liaison H.

The approach that H wanted us to take saw the issues in the branch as mostly rooted in the realm of the interpersonal. He spent more time communicating with D than he did asking the SC how things had developed in the branch. When presented with irrefutable proof that X and N had just told comrades to call for new SC elections because they had concerns about the disciplinary action taken against L, H asked if we’d ever talked to X and asked her to stop interfering in the branch, when we said we had and so had our former Liaison, he assured us that he would talk to her and tell her how serious what she was doing was and that she needed to stop. Then he told us the next step was a convo between A and D to determine if it was possible for them to move forward that was mediated by C. D and A reported extremely positive feelings about their discussion. However at the May branch meeting D would then ask A and O to motivate for U’s return and insinuated that to not do so would be undemocratic. Following that meeting he went out with student comrades and shared his disagreement with the SC’s approach to branch work.

Despite no evidence of real resolution, H provided the SC, D, J, R, and E with 4 points to serve as a basis for unity and turning the page in the branch. This is supposed to clarify the problems and help us understand what we need to do to move forward, yet it opens with a point about not litigating the past despite acknowledging we have differing interpretations of what happened over the last “few months”. When I asked how the NOD intended to ensure that the next SC put the agreement into practice and what they planned to change to provide the level of support that a brand new SC would need given the experience of the last two years where the needs of the party often meant that our branch was waiting for National to respond on disciplinary matters long after they needed to be addressed. H assured me they’d be in close consultation and available to support facilitating conversations about branch strategy including about CU with the branch, and that if a comrade were to violate the agreement they would be talked to because they shouldn’t be here. When I clarified, great so you’re saying the NOD is committing to expelling any member that violates this agreement, he said no, he couldn’t commit to that in the abstract.

Another example of the disconnect between the practice of our party and the way that it is defined in our constitution and by-laws was demonstrated when H came to SLC last week ahead of our nominations, the question of L’s suspension ending was looming. As a member of our central committee, he did not know what the suspension was for or how long it was. He told us it would probably be easier for her to meet with members of the SC and as long as she agreed to the agreement then she would also be able to come back. This was shocking to me, why doesn’t the party have some sort of standard practice for handling disciplinary measures? Why is there no record of the discussions or decisions of other liaisons to ensure continuity and fairness for members dealing with such things?

So far I’ve attempted to detail the understanding that I had as an SC member of the problems in our branch. These problems are not comrades, they are structural. L.M’s letter explains some of the possibility of effectuating change through the Congress. I however want to share my experience of how the Party Leadership handles debate and discussion when a controversy is raised. I have witnessed first hand a fellow congress delegate brought to tears on the congress floor for raising a passionate demand for a thorough analysis and debate on a party line. She was told that she was harming the unity of the party and that she needed to speak in favor of their proposal for ending the session on the AI question. They then asked other attendees to also speak in favor of it, without those comrades reading it ahead of time. All of this would have been concealed from the delegates if not for Kei Pritsker formerly of Break Through News, sharing those details with the whole congress on the basis that it was not the right way to engage in democratic debate and delegates deserved to know. Both of those comrades have since left the party.

I waited until today to send this so that I could hear the response from our National Leaders to Walters’s letter, I wanted to ask them what general lessons can leaders take from this to ensure the unity of our branches and I wanted to know what the Executive Committee sees as it’s biggest area of growth. I am a firm believer to fix a problem, you have to admit you have it first, I don’t believe that the Party is willing to acknowledge to it’s rank and file members the real truth about the way the party functions and the calculations that are being made in how their branch is engaged with. It’s obscured from us, and often under the pretense that we are missing context or can’t understand the complex background which made up a certain period.

However the Party also is raising up many cadre who will be capable of winning, because the rank and file members that join this party do so on the basis that they are really building what we say we are. I cannot stay in this party because if I did I would have to lie to my comrades about where I stand. I refuse to accept that we must keep making the same mistakes, or to cover up the mistakes and mishandling of our branch on the basis of false unity.

For those comrades that read this and have questions, I will be honest with you. For those that want to stay, I’m rooting for us to see revolution in our lifetimes. For any comrades that read this and feel like me that you cannot go on this way any longer, rest assured you are not alone and we welcome you in charting a new path.

With Revolutionary Optimism,

D.W

Logistical Question

There is an inherent complexity in this break that due to our longstanding position within the party we have been entrusted with the control of the 501c4 which holds the financial resources of the branch. It is our belief that in any meaningful split with the party there is cause for a just division of resources as we just as much as you have build those resources and intent to use them for revolutionary ends. However the party has historically held the position that anyone who leaves the party due to political disagreements is counter revolutionary and persona non grata. Therefore we make the offer that we sit down for negotiations as to a reasonable division of resources. For legal reasons the 501c4 cannot simply give a large portion of funds to an individual. Therefore we offer to put down several months rent and continue to pay for the existing subscriptions the branch has(canva, comcast, zoom etc.) until such a time when the branch can set up its own 501c4 which can legally receive its share of the funds. Once said organization has legal standing we can begin the process of the aforementioned negotiations to find a means by which to perform such a division.

L.M’s Letter to The SC:

Comrades of the steering committee,

I have long had questions about the real practice of democracy within the branch. I have at different points voiced aspects of these questions but I must reflect upon my own unwillingness or inability to formulate them in any systematic manner. The fullest exposition of these doubts was raised after the SC changed its policy regarding observation of their meetings, which happened in the last few months after I had attended a few such meetings. Comrade A was kind enough to have a call with me to try and explain the reasoning for the change and to hear me out for well over an hour about my concerns. It was my hope that such concerns would be brought to the SC but so as to return his kindness I would like to formulate these concerns so that he doesn’t have to represent a comrade in their absence. I also would take this opportunity to flesh out my arguments—with the benefit of time to research—and respond to some of his initial counter points. In a sentence my concern could be put that unity requires the light of open debate to build. I intend to show that this isn’t just an ideal of “freedom of criticism” but a result derived from the experience of the socialist struggle. I hope that the good faith extended to my initial doubts raised with comrade A will continue in the reception of this piece and that anywhere in which I err I will receive a similarly good faithed critique.

Our current SC has inherited certain issues which have pre-existed its election and I do not envy your task in trying to handle these historic weights on your back. I think the previous SC(that prior to the election of D.W) identified an aversion to disagreement whether that be in professional or interpersonal spaces. I think in general our culture encourages us to look for some higher structure to resolve debates whether that be the boss, HR or the police. Further I think the culture within Utah makes such open disagreements extra uncomfortable. That SC assigned readings which dealt with disagreement and has proposed a mediation process both of which were oriented toward the productive resolution of primarily interpersonal squabbles. I think these are good steps but I think they fail to address that unless we can have productive, democratic and professional debates we will never become a party of a class; a party which can absorb thousands, hundreds of thousands of members. As we grow so too will the contradictions and divergent opinions within our party. Our strength will be in our ability to maintain these contradictions while still being able to act decisively.

One of my long-time concerns is the lack of awareness within the rank and file membership of the real debates and divergent tendencies of our branch. I think this has been caused in the first place by the aforementioned aversion to open critique but also by the tendency for debates to be held in one on one conversation or in conversation between rank and file members and leadership. I will make reference to debates within our TUSL and pre-TUSL work which I think are both emblematic of the issues and were where many members first realized these challenges within the branch regardless of their divergent interpretation of events. The first example will reveal that I do not see myself as above the critiques I level at our branch.

Early in the debates around our housing work, comrade L and I thought there were certain tendencies which revealed a lack of understanding about party principles and the practice of democratic centralism. Specifically around our openly identifying as socialist and putting forward a concrete party program. While we had done some work to make these critiques in our meetings around specific tactics we were employing she and I also went to comrade A to voice our critiques. I believe in a healthier environment and with greater experience we would have made these critiques plain within the bounds of those housing meetings. Over time we did not feel that these concerns were properly addressed within the body and it became clear that there were differing tendencies within our work. These tendencies began to solidify as they tend to into blocs however these blocs and their positions were hardly clear to newer members both of the branch and the committee. Especially when the LC committee was dissolved and absorbed into TUSL the history of the debates was not clear to members. Many of these disagreements over tactics took place between formal and informal leadership in private chats. When you enter a committee and you witness what had at that point become a heated debate without the context it is easy for what were at their core political struggles to appear as interpersonal or petty squabbles. This appearance would inevitably become reality as the increasingly solid blocs had no real method by which to settle their differences. These issues were only exacerbated by problems which have been recognized by subsequent steering committees of the inconsistent reporting of committee work to the SC by its members. Comrades who had legitimate political lines, regardless of their veracity, were viewed as obstinate. The question of their continued membership within the party was even raised. We speak of resolving interpersonal issues but we have had little discussion of how it was a failure of branch structure that they became interpersonal in the first place!

I apologize for the digression into branch history but I feel that it will be helpful in understanding my concerns and why until recently I have had fear to raise them. I appreciate that we are in a less tenuous position as a branch and I believe the work of this and the previous SC have gone a long way in making me feel able to raise real concerns without being viewed as the branch “reply guy” or as contrarian. However as stated I feel we need to continue our work in order to become a party which can claim for itself the place of vanguard. Namely I think while the debates have somewhat simmered down we have not addressed the lack of political openness necessary to have real legitimacy.

In my call with comrade Q I raised my concern that we as a branch do not know what the SC is discussing nor do we know the results of the discussion. I gave the analogy to if the public were unaware of who voted for a specific bill in the houses of the senate. How would we know which senators to condemn and to protest? Which to vote for or against? We would view such lack of openness as a severe lack of accountability and a testament to a lack of democracy. This is the reality within our branch. Comrade A raised a counterpoint that he did not see it as a fair comparison as there is a large qualitative difference between a bourgeois congress and a revolutionary party. I would ask what are these differences? First that they hold state power and secondly that they are viewed by the general populace as more legitimate than our party. The first of which is the goal of all parties which have ever existed and thus I do not think should be relevant to our discussion on democracy. The second I believe only proves my point. They are viewed with greater legitimacy than our party and if they hid their deliberations as we do to our members they’d lose legitimacy as a whole rather than of this or that part of their body. This or that leader.

Much has been made about projecting unity from the SC for fear of exacerbating the fractures within our branch. I ask, does hiding your disagreements build real unity? Or does it lend to the discrediting of the whole membership of the steering committee? When three of you make a bad call and we, the rank and file membership, are ignorant as to the two dissenters, how are we to hold you accountable at the next election? How are we not to condemn the whole of the SC for its errors? Despite pedagogy becoming a buzz word within our branch we have shown little interest in the education of our membership about the tendencies within our own branch.

Let it not be said that this is just my opinion. As I raised in my call with Comrade Murphy the RSDLP was the only party within Russia to go to such lengths as to publish the minutes of its congresses. In his work, “But Who Are The Judges” Lenin went so far as to critique the liberal party, the Cadets, for their lack of openness:

“The liberals sneer at the struggle within social democracy in order to cover up their own systematic deception of the public in regard to the cadet party…There are no records of the proceedings of the cadet congresses. The liberals issue no figures of their party membership either as a whole or by organizations. The tendency of different committees is unknown. Nothing but darkness…Lawyers and professors, who make their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and their career in parliamentarianism, hypocritically condemn the underground struggle and praise open activity by parties while actually flouting the democratic principle of publicly and concealing from the public the different political tendencies within their own party.” (bolding is my own)¹

Let it be remembered that the RSDLP was an illegal party! Which we are not! Yet we feel so unconfident in our disagreements that we hold ourselves to a lower standard. Not just for the public but for our own members? In gleaning lessons from historical examples it is necessary to move beyond the simple question of what was done but to the political purpose for which it was done. Toward this end Lenin’s critique of the Socialist-Revolutionaries is more exemplary:

“[D]uring the period of the greatest liberties, the period of most direct influence upon the masses, they concealed from the public the existence of two different tendencies within the party. The differences of opinion were as great as those within the Social-Democratic ranks, but the Social-Democrats tried to clarify them, whereas the Socialist- Revolutionaries tried diplomatically to conceal them…’Not to wash one’s dirty linen in public’ is a thing the S.R.’s are adept at. The trouble is they have nothing to show in public but dirty linen. They could not tell the whole truth about their relations with the Popular Socialists in 1905, 1906, or 1907…Our Party’s serious illness is the growing pains of a mass party. For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organizations of the Party are pursuing this or that line. Without this, a party worthy of the name cannot be built, and we are building it. We have succeeded in putting the views of our two currents truthfully, clearly, and distinctly before everyone. Personal bitterness, factional squabbles and strife, scandals, and splits—all these are trivial in comparison with the fact that the experience of two tactics is actually teaching a lesson to the proletarian masses, is actually teaching a lesson to everyone who is capable of taking an intelligent interest in politics.”²

The RSDLP made its disagreements public but we as a branch can’t even acknowledge them to our members!? The purpose of open debate as revealed by this quote was to instruct and build the competency of the class in understanding its leaders, misleaders, and the real political lines they represented. If there are fractures within our branch as Comrade Murphy put it we are doing all of these class fighters a disservice by hiding them under diplomatic language! We are treating those who are the most committed to the struggle with kid’s gloves. When we ought to be educating them as to the real sources of division. Is the cause a fear that they won’t understand these divisions? Or is it that we ourselves do not? And thus cannot claim any right as educators. If it is the former I say you are casting doubt on our members and their ability to understand politics intelligently. If it is the latter then it is your responsibility as leaders to stop pussy-footing around issues and get to the heart of matters.

As a more modern reference to support my position let us look at the wikileaks of the DNC in its attempts to obstruct the primary election of Bernie Sanders. When these leaks were revealed a great mass of his supporters saw what Marx and Lenin had said countless times: when the working class wins by the rules the ruling class will do everything in their power to subvert the rules. As such the democrats lost a great deal of legitimacy. While I don’t think we would go to such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not such undemocratic lengths as the DNC, I think if the debates amongst our leadership are not open, in this most open of times for organizing, we risk losing legitimacy if the ruling class should ever reveal the lack of unity amongst our leaders.

If the lack of transparency should be doubted I will make reference to one of the few real debates I was witness to. Before the policy of SC observation was changed I was at a meeting where you voted on the proposal raised by comrade Hovermale in regards to our masking policy. After an intense debate, which left some comrades visibly on the verge of tears, a vote was taken to settle the matter. Three comrades voted in favor and two against. I must admit I was grateful a vote was even taken. However since this vote I have not witnessed, and I may be wrong, any announcement as to this new policy?

This leads into my concerns about the policy about SC observation. Whereas the previous policy allowed one to attend any SC meeting save the portions regarding matters of membership and security now members are expected to provide a concrete reasoning behind their observation. How is one ever expected to do so in this reality in which we actually live when the questions being discussed by the SC are not published? When the ongoing position of the SC is to not reveal the debates going on in its halls? Whether intended or not this policy makes observation of your actions almost exclusively by invitation.

I want to be abundantly clear that I do not advocate for any form of ultra-democracy by which every choice is debated by the full membership. Rather I call simply for real mechanisms by which that membership, which elected you, can hold you accountable. To quote Michael Parenti, “Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure,open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry,”³ or in this case members.

When I brought up the importance of publicizing the minutes of their congress to comrade A he raised a good question about whether the RSDLP had a similar policy for their local bodies. While I still would like to better understand how they were organized locally I think this misses the historical trees for the forest. As we repeat often there is no one mode of organizing which is eternally correct. My point thus far has been about the Leninist principled commitment to educating the masses as to the different shades of opinion within the party. It must be repeated that the RSDLP existed as an illegal party and we do not. Even within the context of intense political repression of the RSDLP their newspapers did publish their disagreements within the St. Petersburg branch. Our party does not have such localized newspapers as modern communication technology has allowed for a greater degree of centralization through the apparatus of Liberation News.

The last point I will address regarding comrade A’s reply to my initial concerns was that he said comrades in national said they felt we had allowed too much debate to occur without a unified response from leadership leading to fractures within our branch. While he would not share specifics which might be relevant to my reply, on first glance I cannot accept this position.

As stated earlier it was our lack of openness in regards to debate which led to fracturing and the development of petty squabbles. Had leadership issued a unified response during the intense period of debate within TUSL it would have been based on largely unreliable reports from the SC and would only have led to resentment not to real unity. Perhaps if the SC at the time had a real unity based on accurate reporting of the events such an assessment would be correct but as I’ve said in previous meetings: one can declare unity between a hair brush and the kingdom of mammals but this does nothing to give the brush mammary glands. Unity is to be won, not declared.

In conclusion, I don’t have a perfect solution to building unity within our branch which must be built by concrete struggle over our real disagreements but we only do ourselves a disservice by glossing over these disagreements with diplomatic language. I have raised the need before to have real meeting procedures for debate and resolution and I feel I was viewed as being overly formalistic but it is through such procedures that the ruling class has learned to maintain its hegemony regardless of their personal disagreements. If we are to build a truly mass party which can maintain the disagreements which will inevitably become more intense I think we ought to learn from them.

If I did not view the SC and our party with a certain level of legitimacy and hope for our ability to overcome such struggles I would have already left to organize somewhere else. My real hope is that we can shine a light on our disagreements so they can be resolved, not in an anarchistic fashion of perfect consensus but through us being able to disagree and submit to the will of the majority. I hope for no more than something accepted by Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and the whole of European social-democracy in the 20th century: democratic centralism.

In Solidarity,

Comrade L.M.

Anonymous Letter:

Hi all, I am writing this letter to express my resignation from the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Growing this organization has been the major focus of my life for the past 7 years, and I do not make this decision lightly. However, through my experiences with national leadership, especially after moving to NYC 2 years ago and operating in close proximity to the Center, I no longer believe this organization to be capable of bringing about broader, meaningful change for the working class in this country. While in NYC, I have been involved in trying to base build with my class, a strategic orientation that is so diametrically opposed to the PSL’s strategy of agitation and protest that the highest levels of PSL leadership have worked to undermine and sabotage base building work in Brooklyn. My belief in the need for socialism and working class organization is as firm as ever, which is why I believe it my responsibility to take the best possible road to build working class power, which is outside the PSL. I joined the PSL in Pittsburgh shortly after graduating college, but I met the party in Boston as a student at MIT. My first exposure to the PSL was a few weeks after Trump was elected in 2016. My initial enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders turned into a deep disillusionment with the electoral system when the DNC systematically sabotaged his candidacy, and this led to a search for new ways to fight for change outside the electoral system. My first ever protest was the night after Trump’s election. I began getting involved with some student organizing and attending more protests regularly around Boston. My decision to join the PSL came as PSL members built the MIT graduate union from the ground up. I saw how involvement in the union built power to fight for meaningful change for people I knew, and how being a part of a union changed people’s outlook from cynical to hopeful and empowered. I wanted to learn to organize from the people capable of building something as impactful as the MIT graduate union. I was the 5th member in the Pittsburgh branch at the time I joined in March 2019. My time there was mostly consumed by attending protests throughout multiple mass upswings, from the 2020 BLM uprisings to the Roe v Wade decision getting overturned to the Palestine movement. I became well-versed in the rinse-and-repeat cycle of tactics I later learned was the essence of PSL life: protest, flyer, forum, protest, flyer, forum. I knew it was insufficient. I knew we needed to go deeper. I experimented with new ways of organizing around widely felt issues, but attributed any lack of success to my relative inexperience as an organizer.

In summer 2024, I got a new job and moved to Brooklyn. I was excited to learn from new mentors and develop my ability to organize from those in the leading branch initiatives that included writing software for a member management system, creating an education portal for socialist political education, advising PSL members across the country on legal rights when being charged for free speech activity, and more. I was asked by Brian Becker to leave my software job to go to law school, then a few months later asked by Brian again to make staying up-to-date with AI development my main political focus, Brian seemingly having lost interest in encouraging a contingent of comrades to attend law school. I felt the effects of whiplash at the changing speed and urgency for an extremely wide array of national priorities, almost none of them having anything to do with organizing our class. I eventually dropped involvement in the majority of these responsibilities to focus on neighborhood organizing in Brooklyn.

In summer 2025, I was asked to attend the 6th Party Congress as an observer. When a debate around AI was sparked, I was asked to be involved in the resolution as a professional machine learning engineer. I took part in “secret” meetings which consisted of numerous meetings with a small group of about 8 people, including the person who raised criticisms of the party’s AI position. At the same time, the person who raised criticisms privately expressed concerns to me about the nature of the Congress and the lack of comradely debate. At the time, I didn’t understand her concerns and tried to use my role to keep the peace. When asked by national leadership to get on the mic in open discussion about AI to share specific talking points while establishing my authority on the subject of AI, I complied. However, this experience left a bad taste in my mouth and the comrade who raised the debate in the first place shortly thereafter left the organization.

Shortly before the Congress, the PSL made the “Sick of ICE” sick outs in solidarity with immigrants a primary focus of political activity. As a liaison with two branches, I was tasked with ensuring those branches carried out this national priority. In an internal meeting, I raised that the steering committee of one of those branches received broad pushback around the initiative and the branch was not enthusiastic about participating. These criticisms were on the grounds that a general strike could not happen by raising a call on social media and that this looked immature. A central leader of the PSL, instead of being open to criticism, instructed me to intervene more forcefully in instructing the branch to carry out the directive, insinuating that they simply misunderstood the task. A few months later, the central directive of the PSL became the general strike orientation. In a national leadership meeting, Brian Becker motivated for the need to agitate around a general strike and that the task at hand was to raise the working class’s consciousness around the need for a general strike. I was disturbed by his orientation. It contained a number of completely ahistorical interpretations of the Russian Revolution, and completely ignored that a general strike can only be possible through a very high level of organization of the working class. After this, I became increasingly embarrassed by PSL national directives with which I increasingly disagreed, especially including a polemic against the leaders of the Minnesota Model, a statewide coalition of unions, community organizations, and other progressive groups aimed at building working class power who had also raised the call for the January 23 Day of Truth and Freedom in response to Renee Good’s murder. I had already considered the Minnesota Model a template to aspire to, and became incredibly frustrated when PSL leaders openly denigrated the leaders in Minnesota and took credit for the success of January 23. Since then, I have become increasingly aware of the undemocratic nature of both the New York city branch and the overall national organization of the PSL. I have witnessed both Ben and Brian Becker ridicule comrades I deeply respect, both in private settings and in open meetings such as the NYC Branch Conference. I have witnessed coordinated efforts by national leadership to stifle political debates around base building to reaffirm agitating for socialist consciousness as a higher strategic objective. I see base building as a common sense focus on organization of the working class instead of the PSL’s obsession with endless agitation. The fact that base building is such a major threat to the PSL that a debate around it cannot even be allowed leaves me with little hope in the future of the organization.

Through these experiences and many others, I have come to the decision over the course of the past year that I must continue building working class power outside of the PSL. This is an organization that is deeply politically flawed and whose leadership naively believes that agitation and mobilization alone can bring about revolution. If this weren’t bad enough, any democratic pathway to change this orientation is stifled or shut down before a debate can even occur. I believe that in order to win, socialists must organize the working class. I look forward to continuing to fight to make this vision a reality.

E.’s Letter:

Hello comrades,

I wanted to let you know that after careful and thoughtful consideration, I’ve decided to end my candidacy and stop pursuing membership in the PSL. This is a multifaceted decision that was not made easily or taken lightly. I have a few reasons, but before I get into that, I just want to make it clear that I am not interested in taking a break and coming back later; this decision is final for me and there is not room for negotiation, even if my concerns are addressed. I am sending this letter to our Ogden unit because I feel connected to each of you and care about everyone a lot, and I wanted to be as open and honest with y’all as I can.

First, it is important to clarify that I made this decision independently from D’s and L’s resignations. I have taken approximately a month long break and was not aware of their exit until Monday evening. I made this decision two weeks ago and have been trying to find my words since. I do find the things shared in their letters as well as Walter Smolarek’s letter alarming. It has definitely given me further confirmation that now is the correct time for me to exit.

I would be remiss if I didn’t address a few concerns I have had. In particular I have questioned the actual practical application of the constitution and bylaws for some time now, and I found myself returning to them and finding contradictions with what is written and what is practiced. On several different occasions, whether in readings, lectures, or communications, I have felt the familiar tinge of coercion that I know so well from being a member of the LDS church for 23 years. I have difficulty with the NFD, and as someone who is facing financial hardships, something about it has never sat right with me. Dues are something I can understand, but I have felt like I’ve been asked for money by National A LOT over the last year and it has made me uncomfortable. Especially when I don’t see the PSL doing anything that concretely improves the material conditions of anyone with those funds.

These concerns also coincide with the personal experiences of my best friend who was a candidate in another branch in another state. This branch knew of a city council candidate who was predatory and frequently sexually harassed queer youth in the community. My best friend informed their branch leadership and was promised the PSL would not endorse nor affiliate with that candidate anymore. This did not happen and the branch continued to affiliate with and support him despite the evidence. I tried telling myself “it’s just a bad branch” and realized how much that sounded like the oft repeated mantra I had while a member of the church, “it’s just a bad ward.” I know that what other branches do is their own business and not related to the Salt Lake City branch. However, for me it calls into question the integrity of National if things like this are able to happen on a local level.

When I consider also the things that Walter Smolarek wrote about in his letter, it brings many more questions to light about the actions and motivations of National. I have come to find that I no longer trust them, and so I can no longer pursue membership in this organization. I want to end by saying that the last year I have spent organizing with y’all has been life changing and I have learned so much. It has simply become clear that this is not the path that is right for me to take. Thank you for your time, and for everything this branch has taught me about organizing. I will carry this time and these experiences close to my heart always.

Thank you,

E.

Citations

1. Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. “But Who Are the Judges?” Proletary, No. 19., Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/05b.htm ︎
2. Ibid. ︎
3. Parenti, Michael. 2004. Superpatriotism. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 81. ︎

Editor’s Note: Aside from a few minor copy-edits for consistency across the piece, the letter has been republished in its original state.

The following is a letter I wrote to my comrades on June 4th, 2026, in which I formally withdrew my membership from the PSL. I debated whether or not to post it here publicly, and initially decided to post it with the PSL’s name redacted. However, in light of the recent wave in resignations, particularly that of Walter Smolarek, a member of the Central Committee and a 17 year veteran of the PSL, I have decided to post my own letter in full in solidarity with the numerous other comrades who have arrived at the same conclusions and quietly or vocally resigned.

Before I continue, I want to clearly state that the problem is not the individual comrades in individual units, these units are often filled with the most genuine, kindhearted, and passionate people whose energy and time are currently being exploited by a corrupt party. These comrades believe the work they are doing is toward the stated goal of a proletarian revolution, which is why they are defensive of the party and their work. It should be noted that the PSL’s central leadership does not represent these comrades as a whole, and as Walter’s letter points out, there is absolutely no transparency regarding the PSL’s decisions, and this has intentionally cultivated a membership that cannot see the corruption and has no real system in place to challenge it.

The PSL’s internal response to Walter’s letter contains the same deflection I encountered anytime I lent constructive criticism or voiced concerns to leadership. There is only a superficial acknowledgement of “organizational issues,” while the purpose and intent of the criticisms are shifted to personal grievances and a “misunderstanding” of the party line. This shift away from the central thesis of Walter’s arguments, which are overwhelmingly and demonstrably not about a petty personal grievance or a misunderstanding of PSL’s “political line,” is manipulative and dishonest.

Rather, his thesis is a confirmation of a current of dissatisfaction running across Party chapters nationwide, the same conclusions that I, and evidently many others, arrived at independently. It is now apparent that the inferences I drew are, in fact, an accurate description of the PSL’s actual internal workings. And while I affirm the patterns he documents, I do not endorse or validate Walter’s past or present conduct and have found many inaccuracies in his letter that I will detail at a later date. He offers no real criticism of the PSL’s participation in bourgeois elections, and he does not reckon honestly with his own role, as a long-tenured member of the leadership, in many of the errors he describes.

The PSL is already mobilizing its members on social media to discredit the validity of these criticisms, dismissing them as the work of wreckers, that to circulate these criticisms while the organization is “under state scrutiny” is doing the work of COINTELPRO. This is deflection, a pattern of PSL’s central leadership to avoid accountability. A party genuinely worried about infiltration and wreckage would tighten its analysis and its accountability, not move to crush valid criticism. And importantly, naming a pattern of structural rot is not sabotage, the rot is the sabotage, and will ultimately be the party’s own downfall if it does not address it.

I actively pursued membership with the PSL around April of 2025 and became a candidate in June of the same year. To be clear, I did not finish the candidacy classes necessary to become a “full” member, and this was deliberate because the classes, as I note in my letter, were filled with numerous historical/theoretical errors that sought to guide the conclusions of comrades away from their historical intent. In my repeated attempts to address my concerns about the PSL’s political education, strategies, and structure with various levels of local leadership, those concerns were often repeated back at me as though I had simply “misunderstood” the PSL’s political orientation, as though, because I did not understand it, I had not engaged with it, had not finished the classes, and was therefore incapable of grasping its purpose.

Effectively, regardless of how analytical, precise, and specific my concerns were, I was told by local leadership, in so many words, that it was my own deficiency for not “getting” the purpose of our feckless strategies, rather than that I fundamentally disagreed with them. The PSL is deliberately obscuring the fact that these are not trivial differences or simple “disagreements,” their behavior is a named ideological-political tendency within the history of revolutionary movements and parties, and that this tendency is inherently antagonistic to the working class.

The focus of my letter is on the tendency of opportunism (namely, right-opportunism) and revisionism within the party which I ground in the theoretical works of Lenin, Mao, and other revolutionaries. Importantly, my critique of this tendency is not purely theoretical, but is also based on the astounding amount of negative feedback from members of my community that have made me realize how dangerous this tendency is to the proletarian movement. The party’s leadership is deeply disconnected from the needs of individual units and the units themselves are disconnected from the masses.

The overarching thesis of my arguments is that the PSL has wrongfully titled itself the vanguard of the working class while distorting the meaning and function of the vanguard in revolutionary history. “Vanguard” is a relational term, there is no such thing as a vanguard party without the overwhelming support of the working class behind it. That support is not won by presenting the masses with “correct” ideas, it is built by fighting alongside them, by embedding ourselves in the real conditions and struggles of their lives.

The PSL’s work is not organized at the center of the our class’s struggle, it happens at the margins of it, orbiting leaderships own political line, brands, calls to protest or “boycott”, rather than the lived struggles of those exploited by the capitalist system. Because the PSL’s leadership is itself severed from the masses, it can only relate to its own units through top-down command, issuing directives that do not arise from any real struggle of the working class. Nor is there any channel running the other way to surface the needs and conditions of different regions back up to leadership. This is why so many of these commands make no sense on the ground, why, for instance, the PSL can insist on agitating for a nation-wide “general strike” without any of the infrastructure necessary to support one.

As I diagnose in my letter, this is a form of opportunism, called commandism. However, this opportunism cuts in the opposite direction as well, in which the PSL constantly tails after the spontaneous consciousness of the masses, echoing their own sentiments, rather than raising them up. Both of these signal a party that, regardless of how many people show up to our actions or vote for our candidates, is deeply disconnected from the actual daily lives of the people.

That is, turnout measures how many people we can mobilize for an afternoon or election, not whether our work has sufficiently elevated their consciousness by being connected to their struggles. A party with no meaningful connection to the masses is an irreconcilable contradiction. Stalin makes this most explicit in Foundations of Leninism, where he states that the party is “the vanguard of the working class,” but only insofar as it merges with the class, absorbs its best elements, and is connected to it by “a thousand threads.”

Walter offers numerous examples of commandism in his letter that we can draw from, and I touch briefly on my own, but it’s important to understand (as I’ve already stated) that this is a historical ideological-political pattern. In the 1970s, thousands of leftists turned toward Marxism-Leninism and began building new revolutionary parties in a period that came to be known as the New Communist Movement. By the 1980s it had largely collapsed due to relentless sectarian splits, dogmatism, and international communist crises. As it fell apart, organizations tried to account for what had gone wrong, and one of them, the Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee, wrote a study that named these organizational failures. Their description of commandism reads quite similar to what we experience now:

The discouragement of independent thinking and discussion in the party leads to an overdependence on leadership. We have noted the crucial role of organizational leadership. Yet if only officially sanctioned ideas have a place in the party, it can quickly develop a bureaucratic spirit: leaders command, members become ‘employees’… Commandist parties quickly tend toward dogmatism because the cadres will not or cannot take responsibility to apply the organization’s line in an intelligent way to the specific circumstances they face. Even though the members of the organization may discuss how to apply the line, their discussions cannot get very far–because applying a political line in a concrete situation requires dynamic understanding rather than dogmatic memorization. In this atmosphere members avoid reporting problems or failures for fear of being thought disloyal or defeatist.

In our movement, commandism has often reflected the leadership’s mistrust of the members (not to mention their mistrust of the masses) because of the members’ low level of political development. Yet commandism is not a cure for uneven political development; it is a prescription for continuing it. Commandism can never result in members gaining that critical grasp of Marxism-Leninism necessary to develop communist leaders and cadre.

The PSL, as Walter points out, is about as far from being the “vanguard” of the masses as a supposed “revolutionary” party could possibly be. There is a culture of deflection and a refusal to engage in meaningful criticism, in which anyone, or any group, who criticizes, distances from, or rejects the PSL is treated as little more than a “hater” or even a fed. The PSL encourages comrades to dismiss those who distance themselves from us as simply not understanding democratic centralism or Leninist organization, when in reality this is a gross negation of the mass line which only harms our work and our connection to the proletariat.

The PSL manages and contains working-class energy rather than organizing it in the direction of independent proletarian power, becoming what Lenin called a “bourgeois labor party.” Lenin explained that the opportunists are “better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie itself,” because they perform a service for capital that capital cannot perform for itself, which is keeping the proletariat tied to safe, non-threatening, system-preserving activity.

Those who earnestly seek to see the dictatorship of the proletariat in our lifetime must abandon the opportunists, and must realize that their energy has been driven into non-threatening measures that drill their passion into the ground. In the past, when the PSL has had membership ruptures, many of those comrades never rejoined any organization or returned to political work at all, which is far more a victory for the ruling class than for the PSL or the proletariat.

So, comrades, I ask you not to lose sight of why we joined the PSL in the first place, and to understand that there is a great deal of work to be done, and that every day we spend with a party that has abandoned its revolutionary premise is another day without challenging the ruling class, another day it gets to inflict violence on the masses. The remedy for this diagnosis is to complete the task set before us by Engels and sweep away the “colossal pile of garbage inherited by tradition,” namely opportunism, by going to the workers and the oppressed to engage in revolutionary mass organizing at the heart of class struggle.

We cannot allow ourselves to be lost to the wind, nor can we abandon the tasks before us. If comrades read this and are inspired to persist in our historic task of revolution, please reach out so that we may coordinate and determine the path forward!!! Had Lenin remained within the undivided RSDLP, the Bolsheviks would never have formed, and the October Revolution would never have happened. Lenin explained in an issue of Iskra that “Before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation.” You do not stay in the ranks of an ineffective, corrupt party, even when the alternative is a significantly smaller group.

As Comrade Mao said, “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”

Assalamu alaikum Comrades,

I want to begin by explaining how incredible I think each of you are and how much you’ve all inspired me. After having to start over in a state where I knew so few people, watching ICE terrorize my new home and feeling completely powerless without a community to fight back with, I joined the PSL, and it gave me both a community and a sense of purpose. Because of you all, I have so much hope for the future, and I genuinely believe that a revolution in our lifetime is possible and inevitable.

However, I have decided to discontinue my membership with the PSL.

This is a decision I have been dwelling on for months, one that has tugged at my heart and led to immense guilt. My decision to leave has absolutely nothing to do with any of you, and I am so grateful to have struggled alongside each of you. Lenin was famous for announcing his departure from an organization and distributing it to the membership, so, in the tradition of Lenin, I will offer a clear explanation of why I’m leaving. Criticism is a longstanding tradition of revolutionary parties, and I genuinely hope my criticisms are understood in good faith, rather than as an attempt to sow disunity.

My decision rests on fundamental disagreements with national’s political orientation and strategies that, from my perspective, have led to a significant gap between the national leadership and the needs of local units. I have voiced many of these concerns in internal meetings and in private to leadership, and though I genuinely appreciate our incredible unit leads, leadership, and other comrades for patiently discussing them with me, I have not been able to reconcile them.

There is a tendency that continually emerges within revolutionary parties, one that every single revolutionary has had to reconcile with in the past, this tendency is what Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and others have identified as the biggest threat to revolutionary parties. This tendency is opportunism, and importantly, it isn’t a moral failing of individuals within the party, nor is it intentional! Its a structural drift that, according to Lenin and Mao, must continually be combated to prevent this tendency to cause the party to abandon the revolutionary cause altogether. A party that has drifted towards opportunism will still present as a Marxist-Leninist party.

And, indeed, the PSL identifies as Marxist-Leninist, its public political analysis is generally correct, and its propaganda and longer-form content retain the language and conclusions of Marxism, these are what drew me to the party in the first place! Diagnosing opportunism requires an analysis of the political character, content, and action of the party and continually holding it next to the ultimate objective, which is a proletarian revolution. This letter will break down my primary concerns with the party’s political character, content, and action by continually grounding it in the objective goal and pairing it with the wisdom of our revolutionary predecessors. My concerns break down into a few primary categories: political education, party propaganda, failure to convert spontaneity into action, lack of underground work, and electoralism.

(Addendum: I would like to note that the PSL carefully distances itself from identifying as a Marxist-Leninist party. In both their “About” and their “Party Program” sections on pslweb.org, the party never mentions Lenin at all. Instead, they frame themselves as simply ‘Marxists.’ They never specifically utilize Leninist or Marxist phrasing such as “vanguard,” or “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and instead soften these terms with less descriptive language. These specific terms are not “communist jargon” you can abandon for accessibility, they are literally the dividing lines that separate Marxism from reformism.

In The State and Revolution, Lenin writes that someone who extends the recognition of class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a Marxist, everyone who accepts class struggle but stops short of the DotP is a reformist or opportunist. This is an extension of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he is clear that the transition between capitalism and communism is the revolutionary DotP. Comrades, we must recall that the Gotha is a furious polemic against a socialist party watering down its program with vague, conciliatory language to make themselves palatable.)

Political Education

Beginning with political education. As Lenin states, “there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory.” Marxists have gotten a reputation for obnoxiously harping about the need to read theory, this has been exacerbated by those who treat Marxism as a dogma that must be strictly adhered to and applied. But Marxism isn’t a dogma, is it comrades? It is a science! And like any other science, it must be approached using skepticism, observation, hypothesis, and application, but we can build on the existing scientific research instead of starting from scratch. If enough evidence has disproven our hypothesis, we can begin to reanalyze and rehypothesize, rather than continue on without question (that would be dogma).

Theory represents the practice and research of revolutionaries who came before us, who diagnosed the problems in our society and how to address them, with each building off the work of the last, and all grounding their theories in the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. For a revolutionary party, theory is indispensable. Many challenges that Marxists face today are the same challenges that revolutionaries of the past confronted. Reading, understanding, and applying theory not only helps us become better agitators and propagandists, it equips us to make the right analysis and decision in a time of crisis.

Perceptual knowledge comes from our direct experiences with the world, and these perceptions are what help us to realize things like the unfairness in the justice system, wealth inequality, or that everything feels bad all the time. These data points reflect certain realities of the objective world, but they are one-sided and superficial, an impression that reflects things incompletely without revealing their essence. Rational knowledge is what you get when those scattered impressions are synthesized into an understanding of the why and the how. This synthesis helps to explain the laws and relations that produce these impressions. This is, as some of you may know, an overly condensed explanation of Mao’s theory of knowledge which isn’t limited to book clubs and study groups, it requires reflection and is incomplete without actual practice. Practice is what makes theory dialectical and material, rather than purely ideological.

The reason why many of us became leftists is because of this perceptual knowledge that helped us identify the impressions of capitalist exploitation in the world, rational knowledge is what leads us to become Marxists, and application is what transforms us into revolutionaries; this application is what produces new theory. Anyone can recognize and diagnose problems within society. But without taking these observations past their impressions, they will be captured by the ruling class, converted into an understanding that is compatible with ruling class ideology. Due to the nature of ruling class cultural hegemony, their conclusions are what seem most natural or inevitable to us. The theory is what produces the difference between a Marxist and a leftist.

This is why we need revolutionary theory. However, it is entirely unnecessary to start at step zero and to insist on rediscovering, by our own trial and error, things that were settled ages ago. The same way we wouldn’t need to come up with our own theory of gravity in order to understand that what comes up, must come down, as this has already been extensively tested and iterated upon. In the same way, revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin put Marx’s existing theories to the test and developed them further, which other revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro have done with Lenin’s ideas. The body of theory is the rational knowledge of the entire international proletarian movement!

However, theory without application is useless and produces dogmatists who are incapable of acting. As Marx said, the point of studying theory and discussing it is to change the world! Rational knowledge is only verified and developed when it is put to the test in our own material conditions, which is why every revolutionary party should pair practical application with a continual study and revisiting of theory. This doesn’t mean that “right” ideas come only from those who’ve read every volume of Das Kapital. The masses often have many right ideas, but those ideas are usually isolated to individual issues, and our role as revolutionaries is to systematize them into something coherent, a strategy. We cannot do this without theory.

In the PSL, theory is de-emphasized in practice. Our political education often vulgarizes theory and simplifies it to the degree of obscuring it altogether. The format is accessible, which is lovely, but this format cannot and does not supplement engagement with the revolutionary theory and pedagogical discourse that produces rational knowledge. The most important part of theory is NOT the conclusions drawn from it. The value of reaching the rational stage is understanding the analytical movement from impression to essence, so that we can perform that analysis ourselves on new conditions.

The PSL’s political education condenses almost two centuries of Marxist theory, supplemented with other PSL publications, all of which are secondary sources that place a barrier between us and the words of the theorists themselves. In the instances where actual theory is studied, it is often paired with study materials provided by the PSL. I’ve been informed that this is only to provide historical context, which is frequently what makes theory so difficult to absorb (so true). However, as I will demonstrate later in my letter, historical context is not neutral, and providing it pre-interpreted is where the PSL’s conclusions get inserted into the theory itself. (Note: It has been revealed that this is intentional, not incidental. In this letter I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, which I would revoke today.)

Leadership has framed the PSL’s resources as a pragmatic means of continuing education, one that alleviates the burden of study, which is time-consuming and often inaccessible. But theory isn’t just reading or learning, it is a cycle of analysis and application, and it is the PSL’s responsibility to treat political education as a continual project of sharpening our analysis and strategy. This isn’t to say we should hand comrades a stack of texts and wish them luck!

A presentation of historical context, in a classroom setting guided by analysis and dialogue, lets us develop our analytical skills against the texts themselves. A summary of that history paired with pre-determined discussion points intended to steer comrades toward a fixed conclusion does not. Education is the investment a party makes in its members to produce capable, confident revolutionaries, and the decision to de-emphasize it in favor of PSL-produced summaries is one I fundamentally disagree with.

Lenin himself already assessed the pragmatism in de-emphasizing theory in favor of practice, his conclusion is that there is no middle ground between ruling class ideology and Marxist ideology, without a full understanding of Marxism we will default into ruling class ideology. This default to conclusions that are acceptable to the ruling class, which is subconscious and unintentional, is what produces opportunism. This is what happened in Lenin’s time, in his polemics against the “Economists.”

These were Marxists who believed they should focus on the workers’ immediate economic struggles, wages, hours, conditions, because that is what workers “actually respond to,” and that they should meet workers where they are rather than ply them with abstract theoretical demands. They thought this was the practical, non-elitist, mass-connected approach, and they accused Lenin’s emphasis on theory and professional revolutionaries of being aloof and disconnected from the “real movement.”

Lenin argued that they fundamentally misunderstood the task, which was to elevate the consciousness of the masses, and that because they refused to study theory, they could not see that all they were doing was tailing after the masses. This brings my opening quote from Lenin fully into context:

“Those who have the slightest acquaintance with the actual state of our movement cannot but see that the wide spread of Marxism was accompanied by a certain lowering of the theoretical level. Quite a number of people with very little, and even a total lack of theoretical training joined the movement because of its practical significance and its practical successes… Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity.“

Public Propaganda

This leads me into political propaganda. Now, when it comes to the masses, they do not need to be experts in political theory, but it is our job as revolutionaries to bring theory to them. This doesn’t mean we should show up to No Kings chanting that the “bourgeoisie’s appropriation of surplus value from the proletariat is the primary contradiction that will lead to capitalism’s downfall!” However, we are supposed to use our understanding of theory to take the working class’s ideas and connect them to revolutionary theory in a way that they can grasp, and to continually raise their consciousness rather than just reaffirm what they already understand.

What I’ve noticed about the PSL’s agitation and propaganda geared toward the masses (think social media, campaign platforms, statements and speeches) is that it doesn’t seek to elevate the consciousness of the masses (though some of our longer-form content is better in this regard). When Lenin explained that the masses will always achieve a degree of political consciousness (”trade union consciousness”), he was trying to convey that the masses are fully capable of diagnosing the problems in their society based on their own experiences, as we’ve discussed. But this consciousness would not develop into revolutionary consciousness due to the hegemonic function of ruling-class ideology, which was always lurking in the shadows to redirect their political consciousness back into the system rather than away from it.

This is why populist phrases like “eat the rich!” and “people not billionaires” emerge organically from the working class! They’ve identified the economic element that leads to exploitation, but it is our responsibility to provide a class analysis that connects those phrases to the problem, capitalism. The masses are intelligent and will understand this. As Lenin put it, “the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.” When our propaganda only mirrors back what they already understand, we fail in our job to raise their political consciousness.

The Democrats and Democratic Socialists and other reformists center the entirety of their political agitation on socioeconomic “improvements” for the working class but they do not provide a class analysis. This is why Lenin explained that they “limit the tasks of the workers to a struggle for immediate, palpable results; they refuse to recognize that we Social-Democrats cannot reduce our tasks to those that are ‘attainable’ at the given moment… It is precisely the role of Social-Democracy as the vanguard in the actual struggle against autocracy to lift the spontaneous workers’ movement onto a higher plane, to raise it to its proper level of class struggle.” (Note: the Social-Democrats here are the Russian Marxists; Lenin would later break with this term.) Diluting our propaganda into left-populism that isn’t entirely dissimilar to that of the Democratic Socialists (like Bernie Sanders) is a grave error, as Lenin observes: “to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.”

What our propaganda should do is take that degree of spontaneous consciousness a step further by explaining that even if every billionaire disappeared, everyone’s material conditions would remain the same, because “billionaire” and “the rich” only describe a wealth category, and it isn’t the wealth in itself that produces systems of exploitation like wage labor and imperialism. In fact, not all billionaires are capitalists, plenty of capitalists are millionaires or small business owners. Whenever we simply reaffirm that billionaires are the problem, we allow the working class to conflate wealth with class, and we never help them understand that capitalism is the problem, and that IT needs to be abolished. We should have confidence in the working class’s ability to reason and to understand theory (insofar as it applies to their own conditions), and recognize that we may even have much to learn from them.

It is a common pitfall of leftists, not just Marxists, to underestimate the capability and smarts of the working class. Sometimes the argument is made that we still need to “dumb down” our agitprop because the average American reads at a sixth-grade level. This, too, is an excuse. Almost every historical revolutionary had to raise the political consciousness of an almost fully illiterate population. Lenin, Mao, Che, the Panthers, etc., all elevated the consciousness of a peasantry or working class that, in many cases, could not read at all! Lenin called out this tendency to belittle the masses’ capability as follows:

“Attention, therefore, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’ as the Economists wish to do, or to the level of the ‘average worker’… You, gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker’, as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation. Talk about serious things in a serious manner; leave pedagogics to the pedagogues, and not to politicians and organisers!”

Failure to Convert Spontaneity into Action

In the PSL, we have this idea that our primary tasks are to “popularize socialism” and “meet the moment.” Neither of these is inherently wrong. We should popularize socialism in the Marxian sense, and we should meet the moment. Wherever the masses are, as most Marxists argue, we should be there too, to listen to their needs, meet their needs, struggle with them, and elevate their consciousness. In the United States, the ruling class has successfully distorted the history and intention of protests, turning them into a pacifist performance, an outlet for working class rage. But even these entirely harmless, pacifist demonstrations are being pushed into less and less effective means (from protesting in streets to protesting on sidewalks, not being able to block traffic, police escorts, etc.).

As a result, protests are now viewed as a single solitary action lasting an hour or two at most, with everyone returning to business as usual afterward. Some on the left even refuse to attend due to the inefficacy of them. But protests contain immense potential, particularly for revolutionary parties, who should view them not only as a means to agitate and recruit, but as a way to turn the directionless rage of the masses into immediate, organized direct action. This shows the working class exactly what we are capable of while elevating their consciousness. If we show up to No Kings protests only to chant along with the masses, we once more fail to guide their consciousness a step further. As revolutionaries, we are the leaders of the proletarian movement, and it is our job to take the disorganized ideas of the masses and turn them into political action.

We should never push them to do something they aren’t ready for, but we should be able to gauge an individual situation and gently push them toward a more and more impactful flexing of collective power. This means turning pacifist parades into direct action by creating a list of demands, either in advance (with the entire objective of a protest oriented toward these demands) or being ready to create one and encourage a longer, sustained protest from the spontaneous one. This also applies to our current agitation for general strikes, which is one of significant error. When I’ve raised concerns about it, namely that it doesn’t make sense to agitate for one without the infrastructure to support one, I’ve been told that the PSL doesn’t intend to dedicate party resources toward building said infrastructure.

A revolutionary party that is only interested in vaguely gesturing toward the need for a general strike, rather than dedicating party resources and capacity to building the infrastructure, is unintentionally betraying its role as a leader within the proletarian movement. Strike funds, legal defense networks, food distribution, childcare, communication systems, and all the alternative systems are what sustain a successful strike. The historical strikes in the United States all had this infrastructure, built by communist or socialist organizers who prioritized these forms of organization. Such actions are prone to being co-opted by reformists, social democrats, and the ruling class, so it is paramount that communists build these networks rather than allow them to be diverted & squashed by counter-revolutionary forces.

The PSL’s stance on the current moment is what seemingly prevents national from directing resources and capacity toward this. However, Lenin firmly believed that the party should stay ready so it never had to get ready. In their own period of “counter-revolution,” the Bolsheviks did indeed prioritize propaganda and agitation. But importantly, they also used this time to build the skeleton that could support higher-stakes actions, like a general strike, but that often included uprisings many leftists would wrongfully categorize as adventurism. Take the 1905 general strike, which actually shifted the political climate to one of revolutionary potential. Lenin wrote in a letter that the endless deliberation over whether the working class was ready for xyz, or whether to escalate, irritated him. Let me provide the passage in full:

“I need hardly say that I do not undertake to judge of the practical side of the matter… However, judging by the documents, the whole thing threatens to degenerate into office routine. All these schemes, all these plans of organisation of the Combat Committee create the impression of red tape… disputes and discussions about the functions of the Combat Committee and its rights, are of the least value in a matter like this. What is needed is furious energy, and again energy. It horrifies me— I give you my word—it horrifies me to find that there has been talk about bombs for over six months, yet not one has been made! And it is the most learned of people who are doing the talking…. Go to the youth, gentlemen! That is the only remedy! Otherwise—I give you my word for it—you will be too late (everything tells me that), and will be left with “learned” memoranda, plans, charts, schemes, and magnificent recipes, but without an organisation, without a living cause. Go to the youth. Form fighting squads at once everywhere, among the students, and especially among the workers, etc., etc. Let groups be at once organised of three, ten, thirty, etc., persons. Let them arm themselves at once as best they can, be it with a revolver, a knife, a rag soaked in kerosene for starting fires, etc. Let these detachments at once select leaders, and as far as possible contact the Combat Committee of the St. Petersburg Committee. Do not demand any formalities, and, for heaven’s sake, forget all these schemes, and send all “functions, rights, and privileges” to the devil. Do not make membership in the R.S.D.L.P. an absolute condition—that would be an absurd demand for an armed uprising.”

This is why a firm grasp on the history of revolutions, revolutionaries, their mistakes, and their successes, all of which is contained within theory, is crucial to creating a revolutionary party capable of making the correct assessment and decision at a moments notice. Many Marxists would be shocked to find Lenin advocating for what many would classify as “adventurism.” But please understand that I’m not at all stating that every protest should turn into violent “Combat Committees” lol. As I’ve mentioned, a simple list of demands would suffice, and whenever the working class sees victories from these types of actions, it moves their understanding of working class power from the ideological realm into the material realm, making it tangible and achievable.

The PSL has an admirable degree of discipline and responsiveness. As I mentioned, I am continually inspired by you comrades and your ability to set aside your individual needs to respond to the cries of the people! However, our inability to convert spontaneous uprisings into direct action we can support is of concern. We often hold the attention of the masses in a time of crisis, but once the momentum dissipates, so does the attention we hold. Ebbs and flows are natural, but if we are not building infrastructure in the interim to actually prepare the working class for the next crisis, we will continue to lose them when momentum dies down.

Importantly, this cannot be the decision of one individual unit. Dedication to building infrastructure must be agreed upon by the entire party and prioritized by ensuring we dedicate appropriate organizational capacity and resources to it. This is a slow-burning, long term project that requires continual renewal of our dedication. There are days when the free breakfast programs of the Black Panthers didn’t have a single child in attendance, for example, but refusing to give up and maintaining these long term projects will ensure that we stay ready so we don’t have to get ready.

But unfortunately, we often must drop even short term projects to accommodate national’s orientation to prioritize, for example, door knocking. This frequently includes canceling existing actions, like book clubs or community defense meetings, in favor of these more “urgent” priorities. To be clear, I am not discussing when we need to urgently respond to a working class crisis such as ICE raids or emergency rallies! I also understand that we are limited in organizational capacity, and oftentimes we need all hands on deck to be effective in our other strategies.

However, the continual habit of dropping longer and shorter term projects for shorter term ones signals to the working class that we have no interest in seeing these projects through. This continual pivoting is a form of commandism, which is a structural problem when a party grows in size, but it is worrisome that we do not have (many) long term projects we’ve sustained for more than a year. Comrades, I ask you to look into the history of revolutionary movement building and find one movement that has not sustained long term projects! Worse, these pivots are rarely discussed among the units first. They’re decided on by central leadership, either at the national or district level, and comrades are expected to comply.

This is not democratic centralism; abandoning a project, whether at the local or national level, is something that requires discussion when it is not emergent. This is national’s orientation for how the party should be run, and many of you may be okay with this as a strategy, but my analysis is that we regularly sacrifice long term strategies for shorter-term ones that produce small “achievements” but never larger, meaningful “wins” for the working class as a proletarian movement toward the objective of revolution.

(Addendum: Upon reflecting on the PSL’s assessment of the “current moment,” I would like to further push back on this claim. If we look at the political analysis of the world, it is one of revolutionary potential, as evidenced by the political uprisings across the globe. This is not a time of low political action or consciousness; even in the United States, we have had more protests in the last five years than at any other point in history, and more people are turning up to explicitly political action by the millions. Yet we continually fail to raise this spontaneous consciousness further.

So, what is it, exactly, that the PSL means by “meeting the moment,” and what if the “moment” in question is rooted in the same poor political analysis of a leadership that is more concerned with optics and “building the party” than building the capacity to support THE moment for the working class? Because the leadership does not understand what a genuine revolutionary moment looks like, and because they are not cultivating comrades who are capable of utilizing such a moment, we risk squandering the opportunity to elevate the consciousness of the masses to usher them toward that moment.)

Participation in Bourgeois Elections

Seeing as this essay is already approaching 12 pages in its current form, I will keep this critique short but for anyone who is interested, I have written a longer form theoretical polemic and analysis critiquing participation in bourgeois elections for all Marxist parties. Effectively, we spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars within the four year election cycle on these campaigns. We are told that this is a Leninist strategy, but it isn’t really. Those who make this argument rely on Lenin’s polemic in Left-Wing Communism, where he criticized the German and Dutch left for declaring bourgeois parliaments “historically obsolete” on principle alone, he insisted that communists were obligated to participate so long as the masses were still engaged in them.

Once we contextualize Left-Wing Communism, we find that its argument does not map onto our current conditions. Lenin wrote within a climate of immense revolutionary potential, among a working class that was already heavliy organized and politically conscious, and within electoral systems (the tsarist Duma and the Weimar Reichstag) that have absolutely no resemblance to our red-tapped, anti-communist, anti-third party “democracy.”

The Third International, the authoritative codification of how Lenin’s tactics were meant to be applied, also clearly states that any participating party must identify openly as communist, draw a clear line of demarcation from the social democrats, treat elections as a tactic subordinate to other work, and that if conditions are ripe for (as an example) a strike, electoral participation should halt. Our candidates platforms in our recent Vote Socialist campaigns are indistinguishable from those of progressive liberals and social democrats. This is a form of opportunism where we flatten our message to “meet the masses where they are,” but only to keep them there, echoing their spontaneous consciousness rather than systematizing it and raising it a step further.

More importantly, people who turn out to vote are overwhelmingly the labor aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie proper. Roughly half of all adults earning under $50,000 and $100,000 did not vote in 2024. That is over 100 million eligible voters who did not vote. For comparison, only about 22% of adults earning $100,000 or more did not vote. Those who are the most impacted by the system (systemically the poorest, undereducated, marginalized) are those who have already given up on it.

And while statistics do not reveal the complete nuance or the entire picture of one’s class, and those who earn a higher income (such as myself) are capable of joining the proletarian movement, they’ve been repeatedly identified as those with the least revolutionary potential. Further, there are at least 27 millions more (the unhoused, the undocumented, the formerly incarcerated, those in US colonized “territories”) who are legally barred from voting, who our campaigns are also not reaching.

I am not saying we should refrain from participation altogether, but it should heed the contingencies laid out nearly a century ago that distinguish us from the bourgeois Democratic Socialists, and it should be deprioritized. Dedicating party resources to building the infrastructure for a general strike, which the working class has expressed interest in, would be far more valuable. This means establishing distribution networks with storage and pickup sites, neighborhood committees and coalitions, alternative systems to sustain the working class like community gardens (some PSL units in other states are doing this short term), training in first aid, self defense, and childcare.

(Addendum: I am saying that running in presidential and governor races is a woeful misallocation of resources, whereas running in smaller elections across more cities would be significantly easier to win and would have a higher probability of materially improving policy to aid our class, providing the support necessary to engage in class warfare.)

This is exactly what the Black Panther Party did! Their programs were dismissed by other leftists as pointless mutual aid, but they were tactical, a skeleton built to support the proletariat in a time of crisis rather than an end in themselves. As Huey P. Newton put it, they were “survival programs, survival pending revolution, not something to replace revolution or challenge the power relations demanding radical action, but an activity that strengthens us for the coming fight, a lifeboat leading us safely to shore.”

We know their method works here, that it has shaken the ruling class, and we have the Panthers’ own mistakes to learn from, which is again why theory matters. The PSL already knows how to do much of this work, but we don’t currently sustain it long term. We take these types of projects up for short periods and let them crumble in our absence, when sustaining them through the ebbs and flows is where the difficult work is. And much of it must be sustained independently of electoral or bourgeois arenas, so that when the state inevitably moves to crush it, we remain afloat.

In Conclusion

I sincerely appreciate those of you who’ve been able to read through this entire letter. Now, the reasons I’ve provided, for those of you still tuned in, may still seem trivial or unimportant, certainly not a reason to leave the party. But these reasons constitute Lenin’s definition of a party that has unintentionally abandoned the revolutionary premise of Marxism. Without theory, we cannot distinguish revolutionary work from work that only resembles it, and without propaganda that elevates consciousness, the masses will continue to be redirected toward ruling class ideology. This is a critique of the party structure, not of any individual comrades! As I mentioned, each of you is a dedicated, loyal comrade, and I do not question your intentions at all. But opportunism is defined by the use of revolutionary language to legitimize strategies that do not threaten the capitalist system, and that is effectively what our propaganda and political education have resorted to.

Lenin’s point in What Is To Be Done? was that there is no middle ground between revolutionary socialism and liberalism! Any de-emphasis of Marxist theory strengthens bourgeois ideology by default. What makes this dangerous is that the party, functionally, absorbs the energy of dedicated, loyal people who want to be revolutionaries and channels it into work that never actually threatens power, abandoning the necessary and patient work of developing leadership prepared to support the working class in times of crisis.

Every revolutionary leader you’ve ever heard of (Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro, Sankara, Minh, Luxemburg) identified opportunism as the greatest threat to revolutionary parties, more so than violent state repression, because repression leads to revolutionary clarity while opportunism eliminates or distorts it. The worst manifestation of opportunism is what Lenin identified as social chauvinism, when the party actually allies with the bourgeoisie and uses its organizational capacity to achieve their objectives. Lenin explains: “Opportunism is our principal enemy. Opportunism in the upper ranks of the working-class movement is bourgeois socialism, not proletarian socialism. It has been shown in practice that the working-class activists who follow the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeois themselves.”

(Addendum: the PSL has resorted to social chauvinism by mobilizing our organizational capacity to support legislation put forward by the Democratic party such as the recent redistricting in California.)

It may seem as though I’m purity testing the PSL and failing it simply because it doesn’t live up to my ideals of what a revolutionary party “should” look like, that all these theorists I’ve been quoting represent the standard I’m measuring the PSL against, and that we simply aren’t “radical” enough. HOWEVER, opportunism is a structural diagnosis with a long history within Marxist movements, and not a single revolutionary movement has avoided it. It is not representative of the individual moral failures of comrades and their work.

It is identified when a party sacrifices the long term interests of the proletarian movement for short-sighted gains. It is also identified when the question of revolution is continually put off into the distant future and intentionally delayed, treating the masses and the climate as not yet “ready”! Personally, I find this assessment by Parvus (written in 1901, though for transparency, Parvus was a promising revolutionary before the material success of the war persuaded him to abandon the cause, nevertheless, his revolutionary theory remains decent) to be the most astute:

As is well known, it is the dictatorship of the proletariat that opportunism criticises most. It does not directly deny the possibility of realising it, but it doubts it, it pushes it as far as possible into the distance, and above all wishes to eliminate it from present-day political considerations. The conditions, it claims, are still so unripe that they are not yet ready for it. The conditions, claims opportunism, are still so unripe that if the proletariat were to get hold of the machinery of the state, it… would end in a colossal defeat for the proletariat. So, for the time being, we leave the running of the state to those who already do so… And we must regard with trepidation every electoral victory as a step that brings us closer… to our defeat. But due to the inconsistency on which opportunism depends, it of course avoids drawing this conclusion from its premise. But what does it offer us instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it no can no longer countenance as a political guideline? How is the proletariat to abolish capitalist exploitation if not by conquering political power? What should be done, how should the working class act in order to achieve this goal…

It is only logical that opportunism, having abandoned the hope of the political rule of the proletariat, should seek to mediate between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Where socialism has hitherto uncovered the fiercest class antagonisms, opportunism seeks points of agreement. It pursues a policy of compromise. It wants to break off the peaks, to bridge over the antagonisms. This is how the theories of adaptation, of growing over into socialism, arose, with which opportunism seeks to conceal the hopelessness of its standpoint from itself and from the world.

Allowing opportunism to remain unchallenged is tantamount to allowing the party to forfeit the revolution. We will continue to invest our time and energy into strategies that never pose a threat to the ruling class, we will tail after the masses to “meet the moment,” we will substitute left-populist sloganeering for class analysis, we will never earn the trust of the working class, we will make short-sighted pivots that sacrifice the long term project of cultivating the masses, and we will distort the revolutionary character of our messaging.

Worst of all, we will be unprepared to assist the masses in times of crisis. One of the most dangerous aspects of opportunism is that it is rarely intentional (though it certainly can be)! As Lenin states, the opportunist “does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless. Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.”

In conclusion, I hope my criticisms do not read as an attack on the decent, genuinely good work we have done for the working class. I am aware of how strong my critiques are, and how, like myself, many of you have found a political home and community in the PSL, and it is not my intent to diminish that. The point of this letter is NOT that the PSL’s work is totally pointless or unimportant, nor that everyone should abandon it. The PSL does meaningful and important work, and for many, that work is valuable enough to continue.

But I do not believe this work, in its current form, is building the infrastructure or capacity to support a proletarian revolution.

Though it may not be apparent to everyone reading this, I have tried to address these concerns with varying levels of leadership and to emphasize the need for improved tactics, strategy, and political education. Over the last year I have suggested internal book studies, strategic mutual aid, infrastructure building, self defense training, targeted strikes, and more. Many of these suggestions were supported by our (amazing) local leads, but they require the material support of the PSL’s central leadership, and cannot be carried out by one unit of 6 to 10 people. (Addendum: They have absolutely no interest in doing this type of work.)

I have insisted on different formats for our public-facing “meetings” and “forums,” which often become a lecture with preset discussion points. I’ve heard from at least a dozen people that this format alienates them from attending, people who came expecting their own observations to be heard and taken seriously as a contribution to the struggle, are instead lectured at and forced to engage in timed, predetermined discussions. This overly corporate formula for community organizing is what happens when leadership tries to formalize the cultivation of political consciousness in a way that is totally removed from the actual proletarian movement.

There is nothing wrong with having an agenda or discussion points to keep a conversation productive. The problem is that they reverse the pedagogy of the oppressed, resorting to a style of dialogue that treats the community as empty vessels to be filled with the “correct” knowledge and guided to the “correct” conclusion, rather than letting us be led by them and learn as much from them as they might from us. To assume that only we possess all the knowledge, and must therefore guide their conclusions accordingly, underestimates and, as Paulo Freire argued, dehumanizes the working class and their capabilities.

What has troubled me most in my time with the PSL is that every time I have offered productive criticism, a change of tactics, an improvement to our political education, I have not been truly heard. The responses from upper leadership are often so defensive that you would forget I am a member of this party who deserves to contribute to it meaningfully! My criticisms have, rather, been taken as an attack on you comrades and your hard work.

In my final conversation with [Redacted], I was told that the only way for me to “understand” the work is to “do it.” As if I have not attended dozens of protests and rallies, given speeches at them, driven 20-plus miles in the middle of a workday to defend my comrades from police, ICE, or counter-protesters, as if I haven’t been teargassed and shot at trying to aid my community and my comrades, as if I haven’t harassed my friends and family to vote for our candidates, as if I haven’t tried to bring the PSL to my Muslim community, as if I haven’t spent my own money, time, and energy struggling along the party line with everyone else.

As if it were not from these experiences that I made my observations and earnestly sought to contribute by analyzing where we could improve! For God’s sake, I have been in the PSL almost as long as I have lived in this state lol! It has been the center of my life here. How utterly demoralizing to have my critiques received as though they come from an overly dogmatic, unrealistic armchair revolutionary.

I ground this letter in theory to show that these concerns have a history, a solution, and a name. The PSL claims to be Marxist-Leninist and uses theory to justify many of its stances, and it is for that reason that I have brought theory into this discussion, to substantiate my perspectives with historical precedent, in the hope that they will be taken more seriously after my departure. (Addendum: I implore comrades to genuinely reflect on their work in the party and determine if that work is valuable enough to continue at all.) But I know leadership has meant no ill will and did not intend to push me away or diminish my perspectives. I know they are defending work they believe in, and I still believe in them as individual comrades.

Despite these efforts, despite my attempts to raise these concerns with higher levels of leadership, I have not been able to reconcile these differences. And because I cannot reconcile the party’s strategies, I cannot defend them. It is for these reasons that I have decided to leave the PSL.

I want to end with a special thank you to [redacted comrades] who have taught me so much through their own actions, who have offered me friendship and comradeship, who have had more faith in me than I have at times had in myself, and who I know will continue to do meaningful, hard work both in and out of the PSL, work that all future comrades can depend on to lead them toward the good fight. That love extends to each of you, and I look forward to seeing everything that you all will accomplish and cheer you on from the periphery. <3

Love you all! Salaam!

Recommended Reading:

• The Labor Aristocracy: The Material Basis for Opportunism in The Labor Movement
• Lenin’s polemics against the Economists
• On the Tactics of Opportunism
• The Foundations of Leninism – Theory
• The Foundations of Leninism – The Party
• BE CONCERNED WITH THE WELL-BEING OF THE MASSES, PAY ATTENTION TO METHODS OF WORK
• Mao’s Little Red Book
• How To Be A Good Communist

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

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

1. “Someone Should Do Something”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. “The Multi-National Working Class”

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

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

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

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

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

4. The Bourgeois Media Revolutionary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad rules make for a broken organization.

Enter the Stack.

If you’ve ever attended an academic conference, you already have some idea on how the Stack works. Participants can raise their hands at any time, including (and perhaps, primarily) while someone else is speaking. The hand is seen by the facilitator and then the person is added to the bottom of the “Stack,” the list of people waiting to talk. (Presumably this is modeled after the computing concept of sending something to the stack for processing). When the person presently speaking is done, the next person “on the Stack” can speak.

Hopefully, you can already see the problem inherent in this “method.” It was introduced, as far as I can tell, during the Occupy movement. It quickly became the procedural rule de rigueur for all kinds of supposedly radical meetings. Second only to the idea of open membership (in which anyone who shows up to a meeting is considered a member of the organization for the purposes of decision making), this process is perhaps the single most disorganizing element introduced in the left milieu this century.

“The purpose of taking stack is to facilitate discussion and decision making in which all participants have an equal say in the conversation.” So is the Stack described in a 2010 web post by the “Cultivate Coop” website. (The Cultivate Coop is an organ of the Reformed Church in America, and receives money from places like the Eli Lilly Foundation). This is precisely the central problem with the Stack. In an effort to equalize meetings, the Stack instead enforces a vulgar egalitarianism that destroys the capacity to work.¹

Should Everyone Have An Equal Say?

Emphatically, we must answer this question: NO. At first blush, this will undoubtedly offend the sensibilities of many, particularly those with unexamined or unreconstructed liberalism that still needs interrogating. A brief examination of the issue should be sufficient to set these reservations aside and dispel the mistaken belief that all people should have an equal say or that every contribution is inherently valuable.

Let’s start with the most extreme example: should a federal agent or a fascist have an equal say in a socialist meeting? You might object that we would never let such a person into the meeting in the first place. Fine, but what if they disguise themselves as a well-meaning socialist who’s just “asking questions?” Don’t we need a way to stop this kind of interference?

In a more anodyne and everyday example, let’s take the academic conference as a model. Anyone who’s ever been to hear a paper or a talk given has seen the person who takes the mic with the pretense of asking a question, but who instead goes on at length about their own interests, or research, or supposed insights. This type of groan-inducing off-topic interruption may be bearable (may be!) in an academic conference, but where there’s real work to be done, it’s an unforgivable waste of time.

In fact, we don’t really want everyone to have an equal say. We want to prioritize comments and questions in a pretty obvious way. We should give priority to statements and questions that are:

1) informed;

2) directly relevant to the discussion;

3) concise; and,

4) non-repetitive of other statements that have already been made.

Stack does not prioritize these statements. In its most general form, the Stack rules actually have no way of selecting for statements or questions at all. There’s no way to force the group to vote on something, there’s no way to cut off irrelevant statements, etc. without relying purely on the charisma of the facilitator or the tacit consensus of the group. If the meeting relies on this kind of informal methods to silence off-topic comments, it can rely on those same methods to silence on-topic, relevant, comments.

In fact, because you can claim the floor long before you take it, Stack promotes disjointed, circuitous, and repetitive meetings. People replying “on the Stack” may very well be responding to a minor point made five or six speakers ago – and for that speaker who was criticized to answer, they, too, may have to wait on the stack until their commentary is no longer relevant. There are modified Stack rules that allow for direct comments, etc., but this relies on the action of the chair. At that point, you should transition over to a more chair-driven set of rules that allows structure and intervention.

What Works?

The easiest answer is just to adopt Robert’s Rules of Order. The things that encourage and promote useful and meaningful debate in formal meetings are:

1) Time limits for speakers;

2) The floor may be claimed when it is open only – that is, no lining up on the side and waiting to have your “say”;

3) Speakers may only be heard once on any given point unless no one else wishes to speak; this can be waived where, for instance, a question has been directed to someone in particular;

4) The facilitator can override off-topic comments as out of order;

5) Some way to challenge the facilitator’s ruling.

This prohibits, for instance, someone from claiming the floor to bring up new business while old business is still being debated. It ensures that meetings follow a predictable flow that can be established. No business should be discussed until a decision is taken on the matter at hand – whether it’s to table it to another meeting, or to hold a vote. These rules require action. Off-topic derailment is prevented.

This isn’t debate-club pedantry. It’s the foundational organizational tool that permits organizations to combat intentional derailments, sea-lioning,² the Gish gallop,³ bad faith arguments and interruptions, or indefinite delays in addressing important issues.

If your organization uses the Stack, get rid of it. Immediately. Adopt almost any other set of rules. It is prohibiting you from acting – and if it’s not doing that right now, it’s only a matter of time before it will.

1. Open meeting structure allows anyone to come into a meeting – let’s say, an Occupy or Palestine solidarity camp – and start adding things to the agenda, or debating topics that were previously not up for debate. This is why we urged all Palestine solidarity encampments to adopt strict rules about who was a “member” during the Student Intifada. This, we can safely say, did not happen in most instances. As a result, for instance, the students at Brown were betrayed by their “committee” – an unelected body of organizers – when they gave in to Brown’s phony concessions for “studying divestment.” ︎
2. A common online right-wing technique, this is the innocent “just asking questions” trick of peppering a speaker with multitudes of questions that require long and complicated answers. This wears down the speaker, and eventually derails meetings. ︎
3. A technique wherein the speaker says so many incorrect things at once that it takes an exponentially longer time to explain all the incorrect statements and address them sufficiently, again, leading to a meeting being overwhelmed or shutting down. ︎

The decision was handed down just in time to allow a wave of redistricting in the run-up to the 2026 Congressional midterms. Washington’s pre-eminent capitalist clique, the controlling MAGA majority, has been on the edge of a rout since the disastrous imperial blunder over Iran began earlier this year. Prices of gas, fertilizer, diesel fuel, and jet fuel are all rising in the US, despite GOP assurances that the domestic market will be insulated from the oil shock that followed Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.² But the nazis in black robes that dominate the US Supreme Court have just handed their colleagues in the political class the tool they need to stem the tide of electoral losses they might otherwise face this November. Nor is the court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act the only tool in their toolbox of electoral manipulation.

The VRA, which had lent the veneer of participatory democracy to the domination of capital in the US South, has effectively been revoked.³ Without the threat of court oversight to prevent redistricting, states with GOP-controlled legislatures are about to witness a barrage of redrawn electoral maps designed to safely neutralize the Black vote and lock Black participation out of electoral politics for the foreseeable future. Even the Black petty bourgeoisie and those few compradors will find themselves unable to raise their political voice to any meaningful extent except as agents of the GOP.⁴ As of the writing of this article, Alabama and Tennessee have already begun efforts to district under the new guidelines; both states governors have announced special sessions to do just that.⁵

We have six months to contemplate and prepare for the right-fascist assaults that are coming in November. Between now and then the left-fascists in the Democratic Party will be tearing their hair and howling in outrage, demanding Black and other marginalized communities across the South and the country start furious campaigns of letter-writing to their representatives and prepare to vote even harder in the 2028 presidential elections.

We need to discredit the left-fascist approach while at the same time anticipating the tactics that the right-fascists will deploy in November. We should use the rollback of the VRA to agitate against these tactics in advance and prepare our organizations to take action. The possible tactics include:

1. Large-scale redistricting.
2. Dispatching FBI agents to seize ballots in already-cast elections.
3. Deploying ICE agents or other federal pigs to polling places.
4. “Federalizing” the elections in “contested” districts or states under the pretense of a national emergency.

Of these, we know that the first is already under-way in two states and will almost certainly go forward in others. The second tactic would be the lowest risk option for Washington because it avoids a direct confrontation with state-level Republican functionaries, courts, and election monitors that might otherwise balk at the direct intervention of the federal government.⁶ However, it has been the practice of the current occupant of the White House to prefer the most dramatic and flashy of any given option at any given time. Trump himself has floated deploying ICE agents to polling places and “federalizing” the elections in the press, likely to gauge what the general response of the political class would be. His proxies have spent several months discussing the potential legal justifications on various right-fascist podcasts and radio shows. The use of either tactics three or four would constitute the type of extremely visible, “muscular” action preferred by this White House. We should plan to confront both of these tactics as substantially likely. Even if the White House backs down, the potential propaganda value of meeting such naked aggression head-on more than outweighs the risk of preparing and having wasted our time if Washington doesn’t carry these threats through.

Get Ready

Communist organizations in the South should immediately make contact with one another if they haven’t and establish communications networks. These should be formalized into secondary organizations, leagues, with the operating goal of preparing affected communities for the November elections. This program should be undertaken not with the stated goal of legitimizing the elections themselves, but explicitly to prevent further advancement of the GOP terror-plan. In every interaction with the masses, communists should make clear that voting is not the solution to the problem, but that open opposition to white terrorism from the government is necessary to buy space and time to confront and destroy the entire system.

Under no circumstances should communist organizations phone bank, “support” Democratic candidates, or talk up the necessity of voting for them. Instead, they should be organizing along the following lines:

1. Safe transportation to and from polling places for Black and other marginalized communities.⁷ This means providing rides to and from the polling places that can be relied on and organized en masse.
2. Guarding polling places by dispatching squads of armed poll-watchers just outside of the forbidden “no agitation” zones. White comrades in particular should be putting themselves on the line in this way. These poll-watchers must be visibly friendly to the Black and other oppressed peoples, and their presence should be announced to the communities beforehand.⁸
3. Holding mass meetings to discuss and address the issues, to raise the level of alertness in the local communities, to spread the word of the poll-watchers and transport plans, and to draw the connection between the present struggle and the entire rotten system.
4. Preparing bail funds for any organization that is subject to targeted arrests for these actions.
5. Having on-call lawyers from the National Lawyers’ Guild or other Fellow Travelers prepared to argue bond and assist in criminal defense.

Communists may unify around particular strategic concerns for the poll-watching and transportation activities with liberals, but should be clear to demarcate themselves as against the system in general. Communists must not surrender their freedom of action to liberal organizations, NGOs, or other blocs. To do so is to cede the terrain of struggle to the liberals, who will only guarantee that a similar struggle will break out later, after their useless delaying tactics.

Communists in unaffected but nearby states should prepare to render aid to those organizations in the affected states. Labor-power, transportation, even (properly licensed) arms are all necessary adjuncts that can move into the regions of most acute danger. Communication networks must be established across the country to allow resources to flow where they are needed.

Money and materiel must begin to enter the regions of sharpest contradiction.

This is a call to arms!

If your organization is in one of these regions and needs to open lines of communication, please reach out to the press immediately. Our time to prepare is short, the stakes are high, and the struggle acute.

La luta continua!

1. Slip Opinion, No. 24-109, 608 U.S. ____ (2026), Kagan dissenting. ︎
2. Of course, we live in a world of global markets and global commodity prices, so the physical shortage of oil, liquid natural gas, urea, etc., that was certain to follow, means that claims the US can escape the price effects of Washington’s grotesque miscalculation are nothing more than bluster. ︎
3. For more on the history and politics of the VRA, including what it means for class struggle, see “Ruling Class Conflict” in the October-November 2025 edition of the Red Clarion. ︎
4. Republican-controlled legislatures include West Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Idaho, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Utah, Tennessee, Indiana, Kansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Mississippi, Montana, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Alaska. That places at least 29 states firmly in this at-risk category. ︎
5. For those in Alabama and Tennessee, that would be Kay Ivey and Bill Lee. Governor Ivey lives at the Alabama governor’s mansion at 309 South Perry Street, Montgomery and Bill Lee at the Tennessee governor’s mansion at 882 Curtiswood Lane S., Nashville, Tennessee. ︎
6. It’s important to note that this reluctance stems from the settler-mentality of the deputized garrison-state that deplores the “overreach” of Washington, but is just as dangerous and racist on the ground. ︎
7. Specifically, for the nationally oppressed communities in the affected states. ︎
8. Transportation and poll-watching should be mass actions, organized by hardened Marxist-Leninist cadre that can ensure the agitational and propaganda points are not confused or missed. ︎

“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.’” ︎