Social revolution does not exist in the abstract; social revolution is always a concrete, embodied event or sequence of events. Those Marxists who make of revolution some nebulous virtue, rather than recognize it as a real process, are doomed to remain on the sidelines of the actual revolutionary movement. The social revolution comes clothed in actual struggles, and special tasks depending on where and when it occurs. This fundamental idealist error – the “pure class revolution” – has permitted the noxious rot of opportunism to destroy any chance for the Communist movement in the western imperialist powers. Because the leading “communist” organizations in those states refuse to grapple with the reality of the class structure in the imperial centers, they spend their time daydreaming, marching, and idling their time until a future where pure class revolution becomes possible – a future that will never arrive.

We Marxist-Leninists who truly understand historical materialism are left to pick up the pieces. For us to bring about the revolution in the imperial centers we must not only combat the powerful forces of the enemy state, but also their auxiliaries, the pure revolutionists, who insist on ignoring all existing conditions and carrying out their revolutionary daydreaming in a fantasy land based on their misreadings of past revolutionaries. Wherever these hollow revolutionaries spread their doctrine, they draw emerging class-conscious workers into their way of thinking; soon, these newly class-conscious workers are miseducated into becoming further ambassadors of the “pure revolution.”

While it is our task to build the revolutionary party in the United States-Canadian bloc, we must build it in such a way as to forever combat this source of opportunism and revisionism. Decolonial Marxism-Leninism is the only tool we possess that can inform the construction of such a party. Where the pure revolutionists decry that decolonial theory is the bane of Marxism, we know that it is only the bane of their fangless Marxism. They are terrified of it because it restores the fangs in the doctrine of social revolution.

Decolonial Marxism-Leninism embraces the two special tasks of the social revolutionary in the U.S.-Canadian bloc, namely the resolution of the national/imperial question and the woman question (which could more properly be phrased the domestic labor or reproductive labor question).

Decolonization is simply the national question applied to the conditions of the U.S.-Canadian bloc. The revisionists deny that there is a national question to address today. They often dress this denial in many colors; some say that there is no such thing as settler-colonialism, or that the period of settlement has ended and therefore settler-colonialism is wrapped up and done with. By this they mean that oppressed nations within the U.S. are not actually nations and therefore do not require self-determination. They subordinate the national question to the class question, and demand a pure social revolution in which the oppressed nations within the imperial centers must place their concerns for sovereignty aside. In fact, they deny a national struggle at all – these nations, which they have downgraded to ethnicities, must set aside their national demands. According to these revisionists, only the proletariat of each ethnicity need be approached and brought into the movement.

Do we need a special term to denote a kind of Marxism-Leninism that recognizes the need for the national struggle? Is that not the essence of Marxism-Leninism? Sadly, the term has been so perverted by the century of false struggle in the U.S.-Canadian bloc that we do need a special term. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxist-Leninists” (don’t laugh!).

Although we must draw from the entire corpus of works from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, we must also incorporate the critical analysis of the later 20th century from Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and George Jackson. The Russian and Qing empires did not engage substantially in the African slave trade or the Scramble for Africa – which is one of the reasons they lagged behind development of the European and colonial slaving powers – so the special task of national liberation did not take the form in the Tsarist or Qing empires that it must take here in the United States and its satellites.

To put it simply: the legacy of slavery and genocide at the hands of the settler population in the United States and Canada is not merely past, but continues on into the present. Combating this special form of national oppression is the task of Decolonial Marxism-Leninism. 

What Are the Central Tasks?

The formation of a guiding party is imperative for the revolutionary movement. It is impossible to form a militant revolutionary party while still being unclear about who our friends are and who our enemies are. Therefore, it is critical to the establishment of the revolutionary party-to-be for us to flush our enemies out into the open and draw a firm line against them. We want nothing to do with these pseudo-Marxist neocons, these Marxists-without-national-liberation; instead, we must actively seek to exclude them.

This can be done by openly embracing the two tasks of the social revolution in the U.S.-Canadian bloc: the liberation of the nationally oppressed through the establishment of national sovereignty (what our enemies contemptuously call “Landback ethnonationalism”) and the complete depatriarchalization of society. We must proclaim these tasks as the baseline for unity.

These tasks are the clothes that the revolution comes to us wearing, and they form a suit that would have been easily recognized by Marx or Stalin. They are the national question, as applied to the U.S.-Canadian bloc, and the question of reproductive/domestic labor, or the woman’s question, as applied to that same region. They manifest in the West as the tasks of decolonization and depatriarchalization, which are each composed of several necessary elements.

Departiarchalization must take the form of structural social changes, focused on true emancipation for women and LGBT people, the reorganization of productive and reproductive labor along 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; the exact programmatic answers to these questions, however, are outside the scope of this present manifesto. The need is currently to break with the opportunist elements of the Marxist movement, and that requires a firm and explicit program of decolonization.

Decolonization

Decolonization is the task of establishing national self-determination for the oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canadian imperialist bloc. The desirability of the national self-determination of oppressed nations is beyond the scope of this article. We urge you to study Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and the other Marxist-Leninists for the answer to this question.

Here we are speaking of real nations, not, for instance, the reactionary projects of Cascadia or the secession of California or Texas. The really-existing oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canada are the Indigenous nations, the Black nation, and the Puerto Rican nation. There may be others, but such a determination would need to be made by careful examination of the national question in each individual instance.

As for the Black, Indigenous, Hawaiian, and Puerto Rican nations, decolonization means:

1. Economic sovereignty – that is, land reform;
2. Political sovereignty – that is, the freedom to establish politically independent states; and,
3. Cultural sovereignty – that is, the freedom to engage in culturally significant practices.

To achieve these three parts or elements of the task of decolonization, we must commit firmly to a program that guarantees them. The party-to-be must promise, in action, that Decolonial Marxism-Leninism means:

1. The establishment of Land Tribunals to be carried out by the existing Indigenous nations and the guarantee to abide by all their decisions; these Land Tribunals to distribute the geographical territories of the continental U.S. and Canada, excluding the Black Belt, to the apportionment of the Indigenous nations or, should the Tribunals so decide, to set aside geographical territory for the  construction of a plurinational socialist state where no Tribune claims that territory as national;
2. The redistribution of all land in the Black Belt to the benefit of Black workers and farmers;
3. The redistribution of all lands in Puerto Rico and Hawai’i to the benefit of Puerto Rican and Indigenous Hawaiian workers and farmers;
4. The support of all forces that are actually national-liberationary in character regardless of their class composition;
5. The complete  destruction of the U.S. state and its departments at all levels; and,
6. The incorporation of national proletarian elements into the party-to-be with the structural guarantee of authority over all programs and strategy concerning land and liberation.

This struggle cannot be downgraded to a mere aspect of the overall class struggle. It is a task separate and discrete from the final social revolution — and a task that, if not undertaken, precludes the possibility of a successful revolution. The proletariat of the oppressor (“Great”) nation (the imperial whites) must be made to join with the struggles of their nationally oppressed siblings to control their own national destinies. This is the meaning of proletarian internationalism at this stage of the revolution. To the greatest extent possible, the party-to-be must encourage and prepare the oppressed national proletariat to command the new states that emerge, but this is not a necessary outcome, so long as the nation is freed from the shackles of economic and cultural control. Should it prove impossible to establish socialism in one blow, we must commit to a longer struggle. It may be that we must win each national revolution as part of a nation-democratic front and the struggle must then move to the contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the national proletariat. This would not be a defeat, but a victory! However, should we correctly navigate the struggle for self-determination, there is no necessary barrier to the emergence of the social revolution at once from the many national revolutions; that is, each national revolution may pass over into the social revolution.

On that same line, we Communists are not in a position to insist on the establishment of socialist construction within any of the resultant territories after a decolonial revolution. Without the establishment of sovereign national territories, national oppression will continue to persist and mar the construction of socialism. Should the Land Tribunals and land redistribution set aside or grant territories for the establishment of plurinational socialism, that will form the basis for a post-revolutionary socialist state. Should they decide against this, it will then pass to the proletariat of the former nationally oppressed nations to struggle within the new context for the victory of the social revolution.

What Is the Demand?

Marxism-Leninism is already decolonial at its very core. It is the science of liberation and its core is anti-imperialism. Decolonization is nothing more than anti-imperialism applied to the conditions of the United States and Canada. It is self-evident for any Marxist-Leninist who cares to apply the lessons of the Russian and Chinese revolutions to our current time and place. Why, then, must we add Decolonization as a term? Because of the perversion of Marxism-Leninism in the West.

Revisionist organizations have threatened to prevent the emergence of a real militant people’s party by devouring all the oxygen in the room, by misrepresenting the meaning of Marxism-Leninism, and by burying the truth in mountains of lies. Marxist-Leninists must not allow ourselves, the heirs of Marx and Lenin, to be drowned out by opportunists and chauvinists. Just as the Russian movement was forced to adopt the term Communist as opposed to Social-Democrat to distinguish itself from the social chauvinism of the Second International, we must do the same. The lessons of the Second International were never really learned in the West. We are fighting that same battle today in a disguised form.

So we say, down with the traitors of the Second International who dress up their chauvinism in fine-sounding socialist phrases and reduce the movement to serve as the ineffectual lapdog of empire! Instead we must forward our demands for self-determination and openly require the task be set forth as the foundational one for the establishment of a militant, revolutionary, Marxist party.

Yet another utterly foreseeable tragedy has come to the conclusion of its opening chapter. Capital, that monstrous creature of reaction, has blocked all forward progress, and the center cannot hold. For the next two months, the liberal establishment will be pointing fingers everywhere except at their own policies or lack thereof. The time has come to abandon the well-trod road of opportunism and economism, to shuck off the liberal chains that still bind you and blind you to the need for revolutionary action, to come together, and to build the movement that will destroy our common enemy once and for all.

Yes! It is time to come together on revolutionary lines. That means an actual assessment of the fallout, the wreckage, the ruin of the past century of political maneuvering and failed class struggle in the heart of the U.S. capitalist empire. The pretenses are gone, the veils rent asunder, and we must evaluate our position in the cold light of day. It will be unforgiving to the actual movement for progress and justice, which, at every turn, has betrayed its principles to fawn at the seat of power.

First, you will hear the liberals howling that democracy is dead because the American people are too stupid for democracy. “You’re voting against your interests!” they scream. But they haven’t taken even a moment to assess who actually did the voting and what those interests are. That’s the problem with vampires: they can’t look at themselves in the mirror.

No matter who won the election, we would be in a similar place today. We are watching the U.S. capitalist empire unravel before our very eyes. There is a huge swath of the imperial working class that sees the benefits of that empire as a right to which they are entitled, and there is no outlet for their economic fears to manifest. Why? The ruling class refuses to offer such an outlet. In other countries, it has always been the existence of a traitorous social-democratic party that provides the escape valve for this anxiety. When social-democratic capitalistic policies are unavailable, the desperate will turn to whichever option is open. That is, of course, the revanchist (that is, fighting for the recovery of lost territory or status) nativist drug of demagoguery.

Liberalism is dying, capitalism is contracting, and the capitalist empire is tottering. This is a scary time. But it is also our time. The only movement capable of progress is the Communist movement. The capitalist dreams of empire restored will only produce the utter exhaustion and destruction of the planet and organized society as we know it. As Marx wrote in the Manifesto: Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stand in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time has ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Who are the People?

Committed liberals make up only a small portion of the working people. Liberalism, particularly the milquetoast liberalism of this latter age of the capitalist empires, has a general tendency to attract the petit-bourgeois professional workers: lawyers, doctors, higher academics, etc. These are people firmly attached to the lifestyle made possible only through the worldwide exploitation of the international working classes and subject nations by the U.S. capitalist empire — by the existence of U.S. colonies and neo-colonies, debt traps, the IMF, etc. The great mass of liberal voters are less attached to these mechanisms, or attached through more attenuated means: cheap phones and cars, low-interest home loans, etc., and would be easier to peel off from the interests of the empire.

But a great number of people in the United States simply do not vote. Voter turnout information is still being collected, but the Washington Post is estimating that voter turnout is roughly 65% of the voting-eligible population. The total is estimated at 231 million people; this means that roughly 150 million people voted and 80.8 million did not. That is a massively disenfranchised population. This is less than the 67% turnout to “defeat Trumpism” in 2020, and far less than, for instance, the 81.8% turnout in Indonesia and 79.4% turnout in Sri Lanka this year.

The working class is divided between its settler components (the imperial proletariat and imperial petit-bourgeoisie), its comprador components, and its subject-national components. The settlers are those segments of the U.S. population that benefit from land-, goods-, and labor-theft. The subject-national segments are those from whom the land, goods, and labor are stolen, often under the color of “law.” Compradors are sections of the subject-national population that serve the interests of the big ruling bourgeoisie instead of their own nation. The victory of Trump represents the will of finance capital and its co-opting of the disenfranchised ranks of the settler, imperial working class. This should not be cause for despair on our part. The people mobilized by the big capitalists to re-elect Trump are either our enemies (labor aristocrats, compradors, etc.) or are people that our movement has failed to reach, but who will turn against the ruling class when they understand their true position.

The problem is, the liberal establishment is inevitably going to cast this as a failure of democracy. Never mind the fact that bourgeois democracy is a sham, that true democracy is not possible within our warped system. Put aside the warning given by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French socialist (“The USA could not choose the left: there wasn’t one. When there’s no more Left, there’s no limit on the Right. When there’s no fight over a program, the election becomes a casting call. The victory of Trump is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.”) Never mind all of that! The questions we must ask are these: who are the people? Can we trust the people?

We are Communists. The answer to our second question is emphatically yes. The working people did not create Trump. Certainly there are those sections of the U.S. imperial working class that gleefully voted for him. There are reactionary segments that will never be won to the side of progress and justice, of internationalism and tolerance, segments of the imperial working class that must be isolated and destroyed. However, they do not make up the entire U.S. working class. The election of Trump isn’t a failing of the people; it is a failing of the bourgeois state.

What Happened?

As we warned in March, the Democratic party has exhausted any progressive potential it may have had from its historic alliance with the imperial working class. The ruling class has successfully shut out any semblance of the Left from imperial politics. That has, in fact, been the purpose of the Democratic “coalition” (machine) since it was dreamed into existence during the Great Depression.

Every election year, progressives trapped in the Democratic Party or its wake ask themselves why they are told to “hold their noses and vote” while the Republican base is given everything they ask for. Why do the Democrats and Republicans invariably tack rightward? It’s not because the working class is inherently reactionary! It is because the property relations of this country are inherently reactionary. What do we mean by this?

The United States is a settler-garrison. The country is occupied territory, held by the presence of armed bands of police and paramilitaries. Oppressed nations are incorporated into the U.S. territory in the form of New Afrika, Puerto Rico, and the Indigenous nations, and their oppression is realized through extractive economics. Land is routinely and continuously stolen from the oppressed nations; money is taken from them; they are jailed and exploited; their property is stolen by the state, by banks, and by private citizens; they are subject to predatory lending practices. For instance, since 1950, 98% of Black-owned farmland has been appropriated by banks, agricorporations, and state governments. This isn’t idle academic chatter. This means that the basic relations of land and property ownership continuously reinforce the dominance of a single segment of society — the white ruling class.
The Democrats are left without room to maneuver in every election. The ruling class must see its profits preserved; they fund the Democratic and Republican parties. This means the Democrats are forbidden from offering meaningful economic concessions to the working class. They cannot support strong unions (remember, it was the current Democratic regime that broke the rail strike and supported treasonous labor agreements of the imperialist unions). They cannot offer anything except mealy-mouthed promises to, for instance, codify Roe (which they failed to do when they had the chance).

They cannot take meaningful steps to counteract the extreme fascist Supreme Court because if they took some kind of action outside of Washington norms, the people might expect them to provide some other kind of relief. The Democrats are tied to procedure, they are forced to shrug guilelessly and smile dumbly, as the warmonger Harris did at her concession speech. “Aw shucks, we lost. We gotta keep using the proper channels to challenge the Republicans, and just put our shoulders to the grindstone.” Had she said anything else, the people might have learned to expect aid from their politicians. The truth is, the Democrats have never been interested in helping the working people. They simply want their votes.

For the political class, for the Harrises and Cheneys, the elections feel like everything. This is the life and death game for them, when they’re in it. But it’s just that: a sport. U.S. politicians are primarily sports stars, performing in a controlled match against an opposing team. Ultimately, their pay doesn’t depend on winning the game, but rather on simply showing up and putting on a good show. When the game is over and the election is concluded, the owners of both teams get together for a drink. When the season ends, the players go off and have their own future.

Bourgeois politics is a show for our sake. It is a circus.

That’s what happened here. The electoral strategy of the Democratic Party — to chastise and cajole, to promise nothing else besides not being Trump, to demand loyalty in exchange for some vague hope of cheaper gas and grocery prices — failed. The game is over. The season is ending. The owners of both teams are toasting to each other and we, the sports fans, bemoan or celebrate the victory or loss of “our side.” Nothing was ever at stake. Harris would have allowed the eradication of trans and gay life in the South. Trump will do the same.

What Do We Do?

Class consciousness will rise in the hours and days to come. The wave will grow higher and higher as the reality of the election washes over the working classes. Every time they play this game, the ruling class tips a bit more of their hand. As the footing of the empire stumbles and its wealth depletes, the ruling class must be more and more obvious with their schemes. People can see what happened. They are ready to fight.

But we’ve left them nothing to fight with. As Communists, it is our job to provide weapons to our class, to fuse it together in a concerted effort against our true enemies. It is the Communist movement that has failed, not the people of the United States. But now we have the opportunity to build, and this election has provided us with the raw material to do it.

We must go into our communities and explain what happened to the shell-shocked people around us. We must make it clear who our enemies are. Now is the time that all the vampires will come out to feast, but in revealing themselves to us, they make themselves known. We must gather and prepare for them.

We recommend connecting with other Marxists and Marxist-Leninists in your immediate locality. All of the major Marxist organizations in the U.S. and Canada are hopelessly compromised in one way or another. Form a local study group. Prepare it to act. If you’re not sure how to start, take a look at our handbooks or reach out to us directly. Affiliate with Unity–Struggle–Unity Press and bring your local organization into the All-Empire Workers’ League.

Now is the time to build.

Soon it will be the time to fight.

As with so many of the crises in our movement, this issue of inconstancy, of failure to advance a truly revolutionary strategy, is at heart a failure to forge an organization with the basic revolutionary commitments necessary to see the task through. Because the flaccid “parties” intermingle both revolutionary Marxists and reformist counter-revolutionaries, they are incapable of acting except in vacillation. Indeed, these very tacking maneuvers reveal to us the truth of these “parties” — they are not only inconstant, but they have made inconstancy their overriding nature. As the fascists in power have expanded their suppression of the working  classes, the “Communist” parties in the U.S. capitalist empire have filled up their undisciplined ranks with “red” liberals.

What is the task of the Communist? It is to stand out at the forefront of the progressive movement wherever it manifests, and to ensure that movement remains firmly oriented to true north, to revolution. “But,” I hear you cry, “that kind of purity of vision requires unity, militancy, and organization that we lack!” And that is, in a sense, true. But which must come first? Which is primary? Organization or firmness of purpose? Only once the lodestone of revolution has been sighted and a core of committed revolutionists begins to plot a course (no matter how much they may mistake the road) is such a revolutionary organization possible. Before revolution, must have a mass movement; before a mass movement, a militant revolutionary organization; before a militant revolutionary organization, a revolutionary theory and firmness of purpose.

So we say to you; Do not waver! Now is the time for real Communists to show their mettle. Demonstrate the firmness of purpose and unity of conviction across the U.S. capitalist empire, in every conversation. Why now? Because the ruling class is engaged in naked infighting that it barely attempts to disguise, because the future of the capitalist empire’s dominion of blood, terror, and looted treasure is in doubt. The time is critical. We must make hay out of the indecision of the U.S. ruling class. It is now divided and its partisans are lobbying for support from us workers in the hope of overthrowing their opponents. Yet, today more than ever before in our lifetimes, the ruling class stands exposed, their differences held up as relatively minor deviations from a general plan they all share. The working classes have seen that unified plan of Trump and Harris, and it is genocide in Palestine, extermination of gay and trans life (by neglect under Harris as the GOP runs rampant, by design under Trump), the destruction of all vestiges of labor organizing, even their pet unions, the annihilation of the environment in the pursuit of wealth, and the installation of a country-wide police state in which surveillance, arrest, and extrajudicial murder are no longer reserved for Black and Indigenous populations, but are extended to all.

In light of this increasing disillusionment of the working classes and the unfiltered bloodlust of the ruling class, it is more important than ever that all Communists who lay claim to that title spend their energy exposing the bourgeois state for what it is. We cannot make exceptions. We cannot equivocate. We cannot waver.

The United States is a bourgeois republic. It is a class dictatorship. It can only be overthrown, not reformed. As John Brown said, the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.

For every five minutes we spend speaking of reform, of strategic and critical support, of mitigating the fascist onslaught at the federal level, twenty-five minutes must be spent pointing not to tomorrow but the tomorrow after that — to the coming revolution. The ruling class elections are not a time to compromise or moderate, but a time to demonstrate our principles, and to help the rest of our fellow workers see the puppet show for what it is.Do not step back. Do not waver. Confront the enemy wherever it lies, and accept no treasonous, temporary, class peace!

We have already discussed the executive branch of the federal government in a prior article. Citizens of the U.S. are told from the time we’re old enough for a civics lesson that this is not only a democracy, but is the democracy, the pattern upon which all modern democracy is based, the model to which all modern democracies should aspire. This series is written with an eye to answering a question: is the United States a democracy? Is the power of the state vested  “in the people,” as our civics teachers say? What does that mean? If the U.S. is a democracy, then a democracy for which class?

The U.S. is a federated bourgeois republic, with two major “layers” of politics: federal and state. Each of these layers has its own “branches” as theorized by Montesquieu in the 1700s (for more on this, refer to our article, The Executive Gambit). The Congress is the legislative “branch” of the federal government, which makes laws and sets budgets. But let us see how exactly the senes, the old men, of Washington and the representatives in the House control the affairs of the U.S. state. Are they, in truth, exercising a power that is ultimately vested in the people, or are they merely the representatives of a moneyed — that is to say bourgeois — class?

The Functions of the Congress

Neither of the houses of Congress begin their work in full session. Rather, the partisan process requires that a bill be introduced to a subcommittee of the House and the same bill be introduced to a subcommittee of the Senate. The composition of these subcommittees is rigorously controlled by agreement between the Democrats and the GOP. That is to say, anyone who is not approved of by one or both of the two sitting bourgeois parties will not sit on a subcommittee and therefore will lack the power to review legislation.

A draft bill must first make it out of the subcommittee, which requires the approval of one or both parties (depending on the current political landscape and the makeup of the subcommittee). From the subcommittee, the bill is moved up to the committee that oversees it. There, it must be forwarded by majority vote to the full body of the House or Senate (depending on which chamber the bill is in). The majority leadership determines the calendar for when a bill is heard in the full session. This means that, if a majority of the party with a majority in the House does not wish to pass a bill, even if a majority of the House members are in favor, the Speaker of the House can simply refuse to bring it to the floor for a vote and let it languish and die. This has been codified as the so-called Hastert Rule. Because a bill must pass both houses of Congress in order to be given to the president to sign, a derailment at the House by the Speaker kills all legislation.

The House has strict rules about speaking on bills… the Senate does not. This means that the Senate can kill a bill exactly like the House does, but rather than through the maneuvering of the Speaker, this is done through the Senate filibuster. Because debate is generally unlimited, the Senate can only bring a bill to vote if the body invokes the rule of cloture. It requires three-fifths of the Senate to vote for cloture to end debate.

The Congress also has the power to impeach and try federal officers, such as the president, as well as to investigate and exercise oversight on the administrative and executive agencies (which were discussed briefly in The Executive Gambit). Although the Congress technically declares war, since the Korean War at the earliest, the executive office has unilaterally decided when the U.S. capitalist empire is at war, even though no formal declaration of war has issued. Declarations of war as a matter of state are passé. This is because the U.S. is in a state of continuous warfare, against all peripheral states. The only question that is left to decide is when and where that simmering war requires the use of open violence.

Congressional Elections

The amount of money involved in Congressional elections is estimated at between $8-10 billion USD for 2020-2022, or half of one percent of the entire gross domestic product of the U.S. in any given year.

Every two years, the entirety of the House (435 seats) is up for re-election. This ensures that House candidates must continuously spend money to stay elected. The average winner of a House seat must spend approximately $2.5 million every 2 years in order to stay in place. Senators, who are elected on a rotating basis with terms of 6 years each, spend on average $26.5 million to maintain their seats. The re-election rate of incumbents in the House is 93.5%, and in the Senate 100%.

In addition, House elections are dominated by political machines. These are disciplined and hierarchical party organizations that operate on patronage at the local level. Political machines control cities and neighborhoods through the patronage system (jobs, grants, etc., in exchange for the mobilization of votes) and through the coordination of campaign efforts. In machine politics, everyone marches in the same direction or they lose ballot access, find their office sidelined, or otherwise drop out of electability. The recent indictment of Eric Adams demonstrates the manner in which a political machine operates. Of course, political machines make a party vulnerable to the “law and order” elements in its opposite party, and the bourgeoisie take great delight in exposing the corruption of their neighbors while shielding their own rotten machinery.

The House is especially susceptible to this process because of the way state-level legislatures are in charge of shaping the Congressional electoral districts. On either side of the aisle, aggressive redistricting has been used to divide up large blocks of population that would vote for the party’s opponents into bite-sized groups that are then lumped together with friendly voters, essentially removing seats from the contest and “granting” them to the party that controls the state. The legislative warfare behind redistricting has been stepped up to a new height in the right-fascist strongholds of the U.S. South.

A System of Cooptation

As we have seen, because of the way the Congress is structured, all “progressive” politicians are co-opted into the fold of the Democratic Party or else find themselves sidelined. Empire-wide organizations exist to help corrupt these politicians and convince them to adopt the legislative agendas supported by these so-called lobbyists. Congresspeople need money for their campaigns. They must be supported by the business interests of their districts. They cannot turn their noses up at party politics for fear of being sidelined and replaced.

The function of the House is thus to absorb radical energy (where it exists) and to break it on the wheel of the subcommittee and the lobbyist campaigner. The show put on when votes are called is merely that; politics are not done in public in Washington, but behind closed doors where the working class is never admitted. All real politics take place at fundraisers and dinners, at donor meetings and lobbying events, at closed party palavers and in the palaces of the ultra-rich. Policy cannot be made in public because the ruling class cannot afford to show the people how its legislative sausage is made.

The mark of a real progressive or, heaven forbid, a Communist, would be that, after election, they stand in the way of all reactionary legislation. Such a politician (one we will never live to see) would use whatever influence they have to expose corruption and back-room dealing from both parties. They would attack the government itself, restrict the expansion of government bureaucracy, choke the state repressive apparatus of funds, and provide relief for the poor and working class while tightening the leash upon the most egregious of the capitalists.

The average age in the U.S. Congress is 58 years old. Over half the members of the Congress are millionaires. 72% of Congresspeople are men — whereas only 49.51% of the population is. 10% of Congress is Black — as against 12% of the U.S. population. 0.9% of the Congress is American Indian — as against 3% of the overall U.S. population. This is the effect of both history and the electoral process, which requires multiple millions of dollars to retain a seat in office. Congressional salaries are set at $174,000, but the expenses required to commute to the capital and live in Washington during Congressional session far outstrip this meager stipend; the cost of living in Washington D.C. is roughly $80,000 a year.

We are told that demographic representation is part of democracy. The ideologists of the bourgeois state (schoolbooks, the talking heads on television, and the political theorists in academia and the media that do their daily lip service to their bourgeois masters) insist that we can have a complete democracy where all demographic categories are represented in the institutions of power. My god, they complain, haven’t we had a Black president? This is meant to show that the injustices of the system are cured and the halls of power are not forbidden to anyone. Even if there were equal representation for women, for Black people, for any of the oppressed nationalities or those suffering from social oppression, in the halls of Congress, their representatives would still be of a different  class, a hostile class.

 The only way to break the stranglehold of these aged white capitalists on U.S. government is to undermine the power of the Congress itself, and eventually replace it with a truly representative institution: a single chamber that is both legislative and executive, which is elected by the working people, and in which each seat is subject to the instantaneous recall of the working people. There is, of course, no road to achieve such a state without the preparation among all the people to confront this corrupt government and do away with it. In short, the only way to sweep clear the encrusted privilege of the old order is to force it out. Until the day we do, we, the people, will always be subservient to they, the bourgeois capitalist class.

Although our Press has put out an updated version of Gracie Lyons’ Constructive Criticism, entitled Constructive Struggle, this work did not touch on the liberal-individualist trend directly. A little over a year later, we believe it is time to update some of Constructive Struggle, or rather to make this addendum to it: that we must purge our organizations of the twin liberal-individualist desires for absolution and for justice. Enough of absolution, then, and enough of justice!

We are Communist revolutionaries. Our task is to nurture the revolutionary energy of the masses, to construct the party-militant that can channel revolutionary fervor, and to lead in the assault on the rotten, tottering bastions of the old society so we can begin to build the new. One of the tools that we have inherited from social-revolutionary movements of the past century, one of the tools that can help us build the party and prevent the structural decay that has afflicted all other party-building efforts in the imperial West, is that of self-and-community criticism. However, self-and-community criticism may easily be distorted. We are prone to distortions of true proletarian tools and to their misuse, because we lack a highly educated and developed backbone of political cadre that form the institutional basis of correct action and the model to which political rectification should conform.

Let us begin, then, with what self-and-community criticism is. Then we may lay out the ways that Western deviations corrupt and distort it, so that all our comrades may be equally on guard against these distortions.

What is Self-and-Community Criticism?

Self-and-community criticism is a tool deployed by the Marxist-Leninist parties of the past. It serves several purposes at one and the same time. It mediates political disputes within a Marxist-Leninist organization and provides a method whereby those who stray out of the correct theoretical space can be brought back into the fold, but conversely it also provides a form of redress for the individual to air their political grievances with their organization.

Self-and-community criticism is a type of constructive struggle. It is the thorough discussion of an error or errors in the political-organizational realm. It generally takes the form of a discussion or meeting in which the errors to be criticized are brought up and put into the open, either amongst comrades or between Communist and the masses. In this meeting, the criticized person or people has a chance to defend themselves, dispute the criticisms, and make counter-criticisms. In this way, the organization rectifies itself, individual members rectify their political understandings, and the organization becomes rectified to the community. It is of the greatest importance that strict rules be observed during such a meeting to prevent it from becoming an exchange of personal attacks.

We can reduce this description to a list of elements or factors that make up a self-and-community criticism session. Self-and-community criticism is:

1. Community-based, and undertaken with the membership of an organization or a meaningful sub-unit of that organization;
2. Political and neither moral nor personal in scope;
3. Designed to correct, not to destroy;
4. Open to defenses and counter-criticisms.

What does it mean to be a political process? Self-and-community criticism is not designed nor should it be used for the redressing of personal grievances. Dislike over the way someone carries themselves, behaves, etc., is not appropriate. Criticism of these aspects should only come by way of the manner in which they affect the work. Disagreement with personal habits is not appropriate. Only the political should be addressed. All direct insults should be avoided if possible.

This is one of the hardest things to internalize or analyze. As subjects in a bourgeois political system, we have a naturalized tendency of thinking in terms of morals or property. If a serious harm is done that requires redress, the venue for that redress is not self-and-community criticism. This cannot repair damaged relationships and is not designed to. Should, for instance, a member of a Communist organization steal something from a comrade or strike a comrade, it is not the harm done to the comrade struck or stolen from that is being corrected by a self-and-community criticism. Many harms, however, have a political level or valence to them. In the above examples, stealing from a comrade evinces a lack of respect for the organization and a breach of organizational rules; striking a comrade may exhibit a level of chauvinism, depending on the relationship.

If there are serious breaches of behavior, serious threats to the security and well-being of other members of the organization, then there must be some other, much sharper process than self-and-community criticism. For instance, no organization can countenance serious inter-member violence or sexual abuse, and it should not require a criticism meeting to criticise that behavior; nor should any organization suffer moles or informants, and that is not behavior that needs to be criticised before the organization acts to protect itself.

What does it mean to correct instead of destroy? The purpose of the process is to correct the organization and the person or people criticized. On rare occasions this isn’t possible. However, this is not a punitive process. It is not meant to bring closure for personal grievances or wrongs done. It is designed to bring one or more people to an understanding of an error or errors and, in fact, it may be the initially criticizing party who is wrong and must undergo rectification.

What does it mean to be open to defenses and counter-criticisms? Someone who simply passively accepts criticism is not engaging in the struggle. They must grapple with the criticisms; should they feel they are incorrect or unjust, they must articulate their reasoning. Should they have criticisms of their own which are relevant to the criticized matter, they must air them.

Some censures that might be issued as the result of a criticism meeting include, in increasing order of severity: warnings, serious warnings, removal from positions in the organization, probationary periods, and expulsion. Even in the case of expulsion, it is incumbent on the organization to produce a potential road to recovery and re-admission. The submission of searching, thorough, well-reasoned, and pertinent self-criticisms in response to a criticism may help to mitigate the degree of the sanction issued by the organization.

The Left Deviation: Kill the Patient

One of the most prevalent deviations when it comes to self-criticism is an overemphasis on penitence and purging. This is an ultra-left position whereby the politically suspect are identified and then “burned out” of the organization, leaving only scorched earth behind where a former member once stood.

This is not the purpose of criticism. Self-and-community criticism is not a weapon, nor is it inquisitorial. It is not designed to hunt out and root out the non-believers or those who believe incorrectly. It is a tool of community-building, and an aspect of scientific socialist organization. When transformed into a weapon, it loses all its effectiveness in political rectification and becomes deadly dangerous, allowing whoever controls the criticism process to secure their position in command of the organization. The “kill the patient” model is most commonly manifest as the proverbial witch hunt, in which membership is scoured for the ideological deviants, who are roundly criticized and expelled, leaving the organization ideologically “pure.”

This is, of course, an illusion that only those in command of the witch hunt can possibly believe. Self-and-community criticism is not an investigative technique, and it can become the channel of serious abuse if it is distorted in this fashion.

Self-and-community criticism is also not line struggle, and should not be used to replace line struggle. We must be attentive that ultra-left tendencies are not permitted to use the tool of self-and-community criticism to adjust the line of the organization or otherwise set new, more restrictive, points of unity. It is also important for organizations to maintain a method of line struggle. If this avenue is blocked, it may burst forth in the self-and-community criticism process, wreaking untold havoc.

The Right Deviations: Cult-Building, Individualism, Moralism

The first right deviation is similar to the left deviation, but put to a different end. Cult-building, as we covered in our article, The Cult-Building Tendency, often makes use of criticism as a means of control. When deployed in this fashion, “criticism” becomes  the subjection of a member of an organization to a round-robin attack in front of their peers. Their very defenses are often thrown back in their faces as further proof of their guilt. Should they dare to show any interaction with the abusive form of criticism aside from meek acceptance and humble pleas of apology, they are subjected to further angry tirades and sermons about their deviation from the organizational norms. This is a form of emotional abuse, and is not to be tolerated.

The other two major deviations are individualism and moralism. These are intertwined, and arise from the view that criticism is about something other than the political rectification of the criticized person, people, or organ. The example which comes to mind for many seasoned Communists of a moralistic attack on another member of an organization is that of Nikolai Bauman, a member of the RSDLP. In 1899, Bauman had an affair with the wife of a fellow revolutionary, who became pregnant with Bauman’s child. He openly mocked her, and she later hanged herself. In 1902, several of the Iskra editors wanted Bauman expelled from the paper. In 1903, the Iskra board adjudicated the matter, but none other than Vladimir Lenin blocked the investigation, arguing that the party’s task “was to make revolution against the Romanov monarchy and to vet the morality of comrades only when and in so far as their actions affected the implementation of the task.”

Of course, we can now realize that there was a political aspect to this “crime,” which should have been criticized! But the manner in which the criticism was leveled, the attempt to expel Bauman for a moral crime rather than for his political deviation — that is, chauvinism and degrading the fighting-force of the revolutionary organization — was what drew the response.

Criticism is not a bourgeois trial, and is not used to establish the “guilt” of a person in harming a “victim.” Although there may be victims of the criticized as a result of their errors, criticism is a tool for determining if the criticized committed a political error and correcting the errors of the criticized if one has been committed.

Concluding Remarks

I hope that this has been a useful meditation on the processes that are currently used (or not) in our Communist organizations. The Press urges anyone with experience in criticism and self-criticism to submit their own critiques of this piece, submit stories, or update it.

While criticism is certainly important, it must be practiced correctly.

Its use will allow us to purify the ideological atmosphere of our organizations, to bring proletarian consciousness among all strata of our activists, and to rectify the unavoidable deviations of our revolutionists.

Onward, then, together toward revolution!

Normally, it wouldn’t be worthwhile engaging with discourse on Twitter, but because of the overwhelming positive response to the thread, including affirmations of its relevance to all organizations, not just DSA chapters, it is evident that this is a product of a widespread and troubling attitude among organizers in the U.S.

Now, there are some truths and some merits buried in this argument, if we can only excavate them from the worship of spontaneity that pervades it. What this person is attempting to describe is the concept of stagnation, which is very real. An organization is a machine; it is a vehicle. If it is not moving, if it is not progressing, it is failing to serve its purpose — not only that, it is beginning to degrade. That which is not growing and coming into being is already beginning to fade away. As Marxists, as Communists, as members and leaders of Communist organizations, we must always be engaged in the process of building revolution. We must take care to ensure our organizations are always moving toward this end and always furthering this goal.

Stagnation is a lack of qualitative movement or direction, and is characterized by wasted effort and wasted time. It is often the death knell of organizations, leading to burnout, despair, and nihilism. Stagnation is, in essence, the opposite of progress, a perpetual holding pattern whereby we are all just waiting for something to happen.

Stagnation does not necessarily mean failure. Failure, when it is part of the process of trial and error, is actually progressive. When we make mistakes, we learn. When we learn from our shortcomings and failures, we develop. Development is part of progress, and when we develop we are engaged in the process of building. As long as we are learning, we are growing. That is also not to say that we do not expect moments of calm when we are assiduously performing the plan we set out and agreed upon. Every moment is not necessarily a heightening of the struggle, and all organizations must make numerous strategic and tactical retreats, withdrawals, and breaks. None of these things are bad in and of themselves. (After all, we are Marxists — nothing has any positive or negative quality in itself, but derives those qualities from how it relates to the project).

Stagnation can also appear in the form of circular movement, where completed actions and programs leave you right where you started with no qualitative advancement. In cases like these, success does not always constitute progress. If an action is performed, regardless of how “successful” it was, if there is no real outcome, no lessons learned, no structures built, you have not really moved from where you were. In fact, a “successful” action can disorganize your organization and demobilize your cadre if the tactical or strategic direction is incorrect. Think, for instance, of making a push to elect a certain local politician in the hopes that they will open a breathing window for socialist discourse in your region. Once the election is over, many of the structures that were built to mobilize voters, because they were highly specialized (over-specialized), collapse. When this politician instantly turns coat and betrays the socialist values they claimed to espouse, you may lose morale and membership. This “success” was actually a failure.

When we make a mistake and learn from it, it was worth that time and effort. If we refuse to learn from it and continue to repeat the same mistakes, it is not and we have stagnated. We have failed to make progress towards our goal. This is the danger of stagnation, and it is a danger we must do our best to avoid.

This former staff member identifies one way to avoid stagnation, which is to find a direction and move in it. Programs and projects, with defined goals and practical milestones, are essential to construction and progress. An organization must have a direction around which to focus its efforts. If a vehicle has all of its wheels pulling in different directions, it does not move, but when all of its wheels are united and moving in the same direction, it makes forward progress, motion. So it is with organizations. Without a direction, there is no motion; there is no motivation, there is no unity.

Where our friend’s argument fails is that it lacks an understanding of progress, construction, and priority. Their “Danger Zone” doesn’t actually give an adequate definition of stagnation. We can restate this in a clear way as the answers to the following series of questions:

What exactly is the “Danger Zone” that this person describes?

DSA chapters fall into the “Danger Zone” when they focus on internal work instead of external work. It is in these moments, they say, that ideological differences among members become clear, issues between members erupt into conflict, and less active members are neglected and grow distant from the organization.

Is the “Danger Zone” actually stagnation?

No. In fact, if the “Danger Zone” makes existing contradictions between members clear and ideological struggle comes to the forefront, it is not actually dangerous at all! Debate, struggle, working through contradictions with your comrades; these are essential elements of development. This is how correct positions are adopted and direction and unity clarified.

This person effectively makes a distinction between internal and external work, arguing that external work is the only progress possible. However, internal development, building structure, clarifying ideology and political position is organizing. It is progress.

If this is the case, why is the “Danger Zone” so destructive to DSA chapters?

It is necessary to resolve or reconcile contradictions between members, because their resolution is motion. However, there are some contradictions that are irreconcilable. A dogmatic anti-Communist liberal who refuses to engage with Marxism in good faith cannot be reached through struggle because you cannot establish unity with them. The nature of DSA being a big-tent organization, which allows anyone to obtain membership and makes no central structural attempts to develop them, means that people like this can become members of the organization. They can, and do, amass significant influence and take up positions of leadership. Therefore, when the organization attempts to take up internal work, which involves ideological and political struggle, it is destructive instead of constructive.

It is clear that this is the result of a massive structural failure endemic to the DSA as a whole. It is a product of petit bourgeois liberalism which can put forward no scientific analysis and instead defaults to liberal conceptions of democracy and individualism. They have no internal structure upon which to develop their various chapters. Some chapters develop their own education programs, but without standardization they are variable in scope and effect. As a result, members do not engage in adequate political development. Additionally, a lack of a central protocol for “grievances,” or criticism, causes struggle between members to quickly devolve into destructive pettiness and personal conflict.

Why is focusing solely on external work not actually a solution?

Imagine a merry-go-round. If you pick a point on the outside edge, it appears to be moving very fast. If you pick a point closer to the center, it is moving much slower. If you pick a point in the center, it is not moving at all.

External work only gives us the appearance of movement if it is not also paired with internal work. When we engage in canvassing, tabling, holding protests, even engaging in aid work, it makes us feel as if we are progressing. We are, after all, “getting out there.” We are putting boots on the ground, we are talking to our neighbors and community members. We say we are “organizing” them.

But mobilization is not the same as organizing. If you get a thousand people to come to a march, but then they go home afterwards and never come out again, what progress have you made? What have you built? If you pile a hundred people on a merry-go-round, where are they traveling to? Nowhere. In fact, they are not really moving at all.

As such, it is entirely possible to be thoroughly engaged in external work AND ALSO be stagnated in your development. In fact, focusing solely on external work obfuscates stagnation and lack of development, making one feel as if they are organizing when they are not.

The U.S. left, and DSA in particular, is obsessed with action, with what we call spontaneity. All of DSA’s major efforts have been organized around spontaneous events in American politics; falling in behind Bernie Sanders and M4A and the “Fight For 15,” all of these things are products of spontaneous populist demands. 

In many ways, organizing is the antithesis of spontaneity. Organizing is deliberate, it is planned, it is paced, it is controlled and directed. It is the work that happens behind the scenes when the streets clear of protestors and everyone else goes home. Organizing prepares us to take advantage of spontaneity, because moments of spontaneous passion and rebellion from the people are times of consciousness raising and opportunities for qualitative leaps in growth. It is the structures built between spontaneous moments that allows that momentum to be taken hold of.

For someone who lacks a holistic, scientific view, external work appears to be the preferable, or indeed, the only, form of motion. They see a person running on a treadmill and shout, “My, how fast they’re going!” But if the building is on fire, who is making more progress, the person sprinting on the treadmill or the person walking towards the door? 

Is this not the real “Danger Zone”?

We must reframe our understanding of what actually constitutes organizing. We must refocus our efforts from circular, wasted time and effort towards actual development and construction. We cannot use external work as an excuse to avoid the hard work of ideological struggle and commitment. We cannot use it to ignore contradictions and shortcomings in our structures and among our membership, pushed down like repressed emotions. Those contradictions must be dealt with or they will erupt.
At this time, our movement has no political formation capable of realizing class power and fighting for the interests of the working classes. Therefore, while external work is important, internal work, organization building, is primary. We cannot shy away from it as something dangerous or scary or incorrect, we must embrace it and engage with it wholeheartedly. Comrades, the “Danger Zone” is not actually dangerous at all. It is necessary work that must be done if we are to make forward progress towards our goals. If we avoid it, we fall into stagnation, regression, and irrelevancy. If we refuse to engage with it, if we refuse to engage in learning and development, then our failures truly are failures and our efforts are in vain.

It is necessary to clarify here that by “queer” we are referring to all people who do not fit within the dominant normative notions of gender, sex, and sexual and romantic orientation. GSM, LGBT+, queer etc. are culture-specific labels for these people. Though there is of course always some controversy or other regarding the specifics of terminology, we will use “queer” for the sake of requiring a single one, and because we like it.

The queer question is as old as class society itself, although it hasn’t always been phrased as such. While the modern forms that queer consciousness takes are younger than Marxism and the Communist movement, we know from decades of scientific, historical, and anthropological scholarship that queer people have always and everywhere, in some cultural form or other, formed part of class society, and their recognition and rights within those societies have constituted class struggles.

Recently the answer to the queer question, as posed above, has increasingly been “Yes”. However, there has also been a continuation and diversification of political tendencies that galavant as Marxists but which actually serve to obscure and mystify the very heart of Marxist analysis, dialectical materialism.  Such groups put forth vulgar positions which seek to justify chauvinism and oppression against queer people, and they do this by disguising themselves as Marxist. Although the specific details may vary from group to group, the goal is the same: to use pseudo-Marxist or Marxist sounding nonsense to exclude some particular groups of queer people, or all queer people, from the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat.

Queer people, if even just by sheer happenstance of being part of the working class population, have always been among the ranks of the Communists. We can safely discard any arguments asserting that queer expression is a purely modern, western liberal phenomenon. The old trends within 20th century Marxism which rejected or did not have a firm answer to the queer question lacked the access we now have to modern scholarship on gender and sexuality, and have been scientifically outmoded by it. Those few organizations which still cling to notions of “bourgeois decadence” or other such wholesale rejections of queer liberation are therefore objectively unscientific and do not warrant further discussion here.

More common than wholesale rejection of the queer question these days is an error of idealism which asserts that the struggle for queer liberation is either secondary to or irrelevant to the cause of proletarian revolution. 

Some argue that “Queer liberation is unpopular with the masses broadly, so it should be rejected or set aside so as to make Communism more appealing to those masses.” A principled Marxist knows immediately that vulgar populism is not revolutionary — the Communists lead the masses on the path to liberation, we don’t tail their backwards ideas and errors in science while begging them to join us. Those who hold this position need to go all the way back to their unopened copy of The Communist Manifesto and actually read it this time. Marx and Engels clearly explained there that the task of the Communists is to guide the most advanced class conscious section of the working class: 

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. (Manifesto chapter two, emphasis mine.)

It is clear that the task of the Communists is to unite all sections of all the oppressed classes, not exclude one or the other on the grounds of populist appeal. 

Others argue that “Some queer identities, such as the homosexuals, are recognized by Marxism as having a material basis. However others such as the transgender and transsexual identities ignore or contradict the material basis of sexual biology, are therefore idealistic in nature, and must be discarded in order to arrive at a materialist position.”

This second idealistic deviation is one of the most subtle and insidious of the social-chauvinist arguments, and is a slow poison to materialist analysis. In the course of properly refuting it, we will arrive at a more correct, more scientific analysis of the queer question. The fundamental flaw in the above argument is in how it assumes the “material basis of sexual biology” has any bearing on the queer question. It does not. The deviationists either forget or are unwilling to admit that sex itself is a social construct.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State Engels explains: 

Thus, monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes entirely unknown hitherto in prehistoric times. In an old unpublished manuscript, the work of Marx and myself in 1846, I find the following: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for child breeding.” And today I can add: The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative regression, in which the wellbeing and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other.

Here it is explained quite clearly that sex is a social category based on the division of labor. Men and women became defined in dialectical contradiction with one another. They are not eternal immutable categories, but categories which arose from the conditions which existed at a particular historic time. One common theory about this division of labor is that it was made necessary by child rearing;  women were biologically equipped to nurse newborns and men were not, and this took shape in the social consciousness as the first dichotomy. The material necessity of this division of labor has long since been abolished by developments in society. Today infants can easily be fed from bottles and reared by anyone. The original basis for the sex dichotomy has passed into history. What remains is the institutions to which it gave rise.

As societies developed and grew in complexity, they began to rely more and more on maintaining a pool of labor to continue to serve the increasingly complex social functions necessary for survival. The development of animal husbandry gave rise to a production surplus which enabled the development of manufacture; weaving, pottery, etc. Men, not being bound to care for the children as the women were, were driven to take up the task of maintaining the pool of labor through acquisition and exchange of women’s reproductive labor — and therefore the acquisition and exchange of women. 

For a more detailed discussion of this process see The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner.

Further developments in production led to settled agriculture, by which point the nature of women as the exchangeable property of their tribe became fully entrenched. The great increase in surplus brought by settled agriculture enabled the overall population to rapidly increase beyond that of older modes of production, a process known by historians as the Neolithic Revolution. Methods of manufacture became more complex, metallurgy was developed and further revolutionized agriculture with the plow. Class society began to take shape as the acquisition of wealth became possible, and control over women’s reproductive labor became a primary form of wealth. The concentration of wealth into fewer hands led to the development of private property to institutionalize this control, which first took the form of ownership of women-slaves and livestock. Ruling patriarchs were then compelled to compete with one-another in order to maintain their control over society, and therefore competed on the basis of violent acquisition of property. Women were seen as a resource which could be obtained through force, and those societies who still treated women as equals were largely subsumed by the violent expansion of the enslaver state.

We can therefore see how differences between individuals in their biological characteristics (configuration of sexual organs, ability to nurse infants) at one point made necessary the first division of labor, which later gave rise to the institutionalization of the patriarchal state. Ruling ideology adapted to serve the continuation of this state of affairs on behalf of the ruling elite — the sex dichotomy became “naturalized,” seen as immutable and eternal, and encoded as such in countless religious scriptures and legal codes ever since. But we can easily see how this sex dichotomy is the product of a particular stage of social development, and we can therefore easily see how it will pass into history. 

A useful comparison is the categorization of human beings into racial groups: though there is a “material biological basis” for this division (skin color and minor differences in constitution and disease resistances), we know that “race” is not an eternal natural category but a socially constructed category which was developed to legitimize the institutions of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Racial ideology emerged from a particular moment in historical development and will in turn fall as the conditions which gave rise to it recede into history. So too will the sex dichotomy.

As capitalism develops, it breaks down the old class barriers as it proletarianizes the masses. It is not a coincidence that the feminist movement first arose in the 19th century, when proletarianization began to hit its stride and the “natural” nature of women’s disadvantaged status began to be more consciously questioned. Increasingly, women began to perform the exact same labor as men, working at first in parallel factory operations and later directly alongside men. It is evident that “woman” represents an oppressed class just as much as “proletarian” or “Indigenous,” and as the social division of labor which enforces this class division becomes increasingly obsolete the necessity of its overthrow begins to crystalize. 

How does the queer question figure into this analysis of sex? We must look at the emergence of queer identity and consciousness as a historical process. It is nowadays a well-known fact that societies in which class had not yet developed had different notions of gender and sexuality than the patriarchal rule of class society. “Two-Spirit” First Nations people are a common example of this. There are as many notions of gender and sexual diversity as there are different cultures, which makes it clear that this diversity is common to all human groups. 

The emergence of class society and the rise of the rigid sex dichotomy condensed the wide spectrum of human expression into two classes, an oppressed class of “women” and an oppressor class of “men.” Queer expression fundamentally challenges the naturalization of the sex dichotomy. If women can choose to have romantic and sexual relations with women, then the naturalization of female sexual subordination to men is directly challenged. If “woman” is not an immutable natural state — if it can be altered, transcended, or cast off — if a woman can simply become a man, or something else outside the binary dichotomy, then the sex dichotomy is revealed to be materially meaningless. This is a threat to existing class relations, so queer expression is violently suppressed by patriarchal ideology.

Capitalism continues to require the sex dichotomy in order to function. Capitalism requires that the population continue to grow with each successive generation. As production improves, the amount of labor crystallized within commodities falls, and so too does the rate of profit. In order to maintain a steady rate of profit capital requires that production always increase, which requires increasingly more workers to produce and consume commodities. Therefore it is necessary for the continued existence of capitalist class relations that the working class grow without limit, and in order to facilitate this women must continue to be exploited for their reproductive labor.

As the process of proletarianization continues, the perception of the sex dichotomy as “natural” begins to wither away. It is not a coincidence that queer consciousness has primarily risen first within the most advanced capitalist economies. It is here that proletarianization has reached its most advanced state. It is also here that the forces of reaction respond most harshly to the rise of queer expression. This is why fascism (which we know is how capitalism reacts to a state of crisis) is so concerned with “traditional family values” and rigid gender roles. It is a violent reaction to the emergence of real human expression, an intensified reimposition of ideological structures of bourgeois oppression. Language accusing queer people of “defying the natural order” and other such anti-materialistic nonsense is slung about. “Communists” who parrot this rhetoric are communistic in name only: they objectively serve bourgeois reaction.

In communist society the requirement for endless growth is finally done away with. Absent the necessity to generate profit, production is purely on a needs-driven basis. The absolute volume of production can be consciously set to ensure everyone is provided for, and further improvements in production reap a reduction in the working day for all. Reproduction becomes a personal choice rather than a social imperative, and so the material basis which gives rise to the sex dichotomy is abolished. Men and women become true equals, and thereby the distinction between them ceases to be of any consequence and individuals become free to express themselves however they like. Queer liberation is not merely adjunct to communist revolution, but is in fact an intrinsic aspect of it.

This then should make clear the scientific socialist position on the queer question: as an oppressed class within capitalism, the very existence and free expression of queer people holds boundless revolutionary potential. The task of the Communists is not to set aside queer issues in favor of “the working class,” but to recognize that the vast majority of queer people are of the working class and make up a highly class conscious revolutionary element.

The oppression experienced by queer people, even today under liberal “tolerance,” is highly intense and acute. Queer people are subject to rampant discrimination in all areas of life, with the most visibly queer people relegated to the extreme margins of society. They are subject to severe violence, and in many places it is still fully legal to murder queer people. They experience the worst of the brutalities of capitalism, with homelessness (particularly among youth) higher than any other demographic. This severe oppression leads queer people to band together and support one-another as a matter of survival. They regularly form their own organizations, community support groups, activist groups, community defense, and so on. They are of course naturally drawn to radical politics in search of answers to their oppression — the “transgender communist” stereotype exists for a reason. They often go on to form a vanguard of sorts for other liberation struggles, making up a disproportionately large section of and often being the leaders of labor activists, Communists, anarchists, antifascist militants, national liberation activists, and so on. It should be difficult to miss how this spontaneous organizing and spontaneous arisal of class consciousness by queer people represents a heightened form of class struggle in embryo, yet somehow certain “Communists” appear to be wearing blindfolds. 

It’s long past time we change that and start making serious efforts towards uniting with queer organizations. This starts with forming a coherent political line on queer issues. The resurgence of fascism endangers us all, and queer people most acutely and most urgently. We need to be able to provide community defense, political activism, medical support networks, and education to queer adults and youth. The Communists have until now largely left queer people to their own devices on these fronts, and this is a fatal error in analysis. We cannot afford to continue to allow this revolutionary potential to go to waste. The victory of communism must be the victory of all oppressed people.

We are faced with a world that, we are told, bears little resemblance to the crucible of the 19th and early 20th centuries from which came the most valiant fighters of the class struggle. We are told that the world of today is not one where where the proletariat has any power, where we are no longer the makers of the world. We see, at every turn, the breakdown of the workshop and factory floor — the growth of the “gig” economy, designed to circumvent worker solidarity and ensure continued precariousness, to prevent the growth of social and economic bonds between workers by shuttling them from one job to another.

We have been told these things, and we, for the most part, grow up believing them. But who told us? The bourgeois ideologists, textbook writers, journalists, and academics whose access depends on parroting the systemic “truth.” Why should we take their words for granted? Is the world more decentralized than ever before, or is this a bourgeois lie? Is the workplace atomized, or is that merely what we are shown? We must remember that the apparatus of cultural production has never been as powerful, and has never been as subject to the whims of its bourgeois owners. We cannot trust the mythmaking of bourgeois culture, we must investigate for ourselves! This means not only gathering data from bourgeois sources, which can be useful, but social investigation on the ground.

This document represents only the first step in a plan to ground our analysis, as a movement, firmly in reality, and to depart from the bourgeois mythmaking. As someone who does not live in New York City, I do not have continuous first-hand access to the conditions on the ground; however, as someone close enough to go there periodically, I hope that this document provokes a series of investigations through which we — Marxists — can collate sufficient data with which to forge a city-wide league of Marxists engaged in collective struggle against the imperialist state.

To begin, then, we must perform a class analysis of the enormous urban site of New York City, including not just Manhattan but all its boroughs. We must also take the measure of the advantages and disadvantages of the urban environment of New York City. While many of us across the U.S.-Canadian empire are organizing in second- and third-tier cities or what is effectively an imperial countryside, we must not lose sight of the special conditions present in built-up urban centers. These include a very large and densely situated population (among which it should be easier to locate radicals), a well-developed system of public transportation, etc. but also includes a large presence of the old, revisionist-opportunist-tailist parties (which Cde-Editor Myrrh has given the clever acronym ROT) as well as the most developed groups of social democrats, all of which work to demobilize and neutralize potential Marxists and redirect popular discontent.

Using this analysis, I suggest a number of measures that can be undertaken to help create local organizations within the city; these organizations can gather more information, study, prepare, and deepen connections with their communities to act. They can publish this information with Unity–Struggle–Unity to share experience with siblings in struggle across the continent and together we can refine our understanding. We must establish not only local organizations, but meetings between them. We must establish not just letters and correspondence, but standing conferences to discuss conditions.

We propose the foundation of a non-sectarian New York League of Struggle, in which many primary organizations act as the cells of membership. We also hope this document may help others outside of New York City perform their own analyses by serving as a model. Obviously, we are in no position to lead the formation of these primary organizations — where USU members exist, they are already doing what they can to do so. Should any of the analysis be mistaken or the recommendations be unrealistic, we urge readers to inform us and help correct the movement.

Class Analysis

Before we can attempt to determine a course of action, we must first analyze the locality in which we intend to act. Historically, the proletarian movement has not emerged in the rural districts, but in the urban centers where manufacturing gathered together thousands of workers, placed them in close confines, and forced them to cooperate by the design of the machinery and workshops.

As mentioned in the introduction, we are often told that the world today is basically different from the world of the 19th century factories. We certainly do not see the same explosions of spontaneous, militant worker’s power that were the hallmarks of the half-century between 1870 and 1930. But has the basic condition of the proletarian changed so much in that time? Essentially, we are tasked with answering the following questions:

1. Is there still an urban proletariat in New York City?
2. Has the system of imperialist spoils established by the U.S.-NATO alliance made class-consciousness of the urban proletariat impossible?
3. If the answer to the first two questions are yes and no respectively, then we must determine i) to what extent the imperialist system has “bourgeoisified” the New York City proletariat, ii) the current consciousness of that proletariat, iii) the allies of that proletariat, and iv) the size and location of that proletariat.

It is clear, from the experiences of Occupy and the 2024 student revolts that, at the very least, a stratum of radical students still exists and is capable of mobilization. Thus, we should also attempt to account for the student movement, and analyze the current position of the student stratum in regard to the U.S. imperial project.

This section relies almost entirely on data gathered by the federal government. It must be supplemented with interviews, examinations, and social investigation. This data is not differentiated for our purposes. While the listings for number of employees in each sector does not include the “managerial” layer (that is recorded separately), distinguishing between petit-bourgeois workers, labor aristocrats, and true proletarians is a task that must be undertaken by Marxists and gathered from more accurate data. The capitalist government simply does not care to record class-status.

New York City: the Epicenter of Haute Bourgeois Power

The largest financial firms in the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire are headquartered in New York City, and the largest among those is BlackRock, Inc., but the city also houses the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, the Goldman Sachs Group, and Morgan Stanley. JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley are the first, third, fifth, and sixth largest banks in the United States by market capitalization; between them, they account for roughly $870 billion — more than the other six banks combined. In assets, these four banks command $1 trillion (one thousand billion) in owned assets while the remaining six top U.S. banks own a mere $700 billion. It should come as no surprise that New York is also the seat of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, two of the largest financial institutions in the world. Every bourgeois economist agrees: New York City is the financial center of the U.S. Empire and the world.

The nerve center of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire — the corporations that run the chief bourgeois institutions throughout the world — is located in New York City alongside these banks. This makes it one of the chief seats of the imperialist haute (big) bourgeois of the U.S.-Canadian empire. It is the center not only of banking, finance, and communications, but has offices from many of the largest corporations in the world. As a result, New York City has the largest urban economy in the empire. This has an effect on the class structure of the city and its boroughs.

If we failed to take the time to examine this economy closely, we might easily be misled by the rhetoric of the bourgeois economists and politicians and believe that there is essentially no productive work done in New York City, that it is merely a parasitic entity living from the blood absorbed by the banks. However, despite the fact that the city employs around 498,000 people in finance, 300,000 people in the tech industry, etc., it also employs 200,000 people in manufacturing jobs. This will be discussed in more detail below. Most of those 200,000 people are nationally oppressed.

The fact remains that the imperialist haute bourgeoisie — the leaders of finance capital — cannot physically do away with the necessary workers to support their financial machinery. Thus, the presence of these enormous offices and management centers necessitates and calls into being the existence of custodians, paper manufacturers, logistics systems to truck in food and fuel, the staffing for grocery stores, restaurants, department stores, warehouses, docks, public transport, and all the other systems that represent the essential arteries of a city.

Decaying Finance Capital and the New York Economy

According to the New York State department of labor, 498,000 people are employed in the financial sector, whereas the total labor force in the city consists of 4,705,000 (four million, seven hundred five thousand) people. Direct support for finance capital accounts for roughly 10% of the overall labor performed in New York City. In 2000, there were 481,000 people employed in the financial sector against 3,640,000 (three million, six hundred forty thousand), or 13%. In 1990, that number was 525,000 against 3,562,000, or nearly 15%. In other words, finance capital in New York City is beginning to decay.

Despite the fact that financial services accounts for a mere 10% of the total employment, it provides 6% of total city tax revenues, 17% of the statewide tax revenue, and 20% of the city’s total wages. The average salary in the financial services sector was $398,000 a year in 2018. The average industrial salary in New York City is $41,000/year. Those employed by the financial bourgeoisie make 9.7 times that average.

Reportedly 113 billionaires — members of the country’s monopolists — live in New York City. One in 24 residents in the city, nearly 350,000, are millionaires. The next-wealthiest city in the U.S. domestically is San Francisco, with 52 billionaires. By far, New York City is the residence of the most concentrated elements of the ruling class.

The Monopolists

Michael Bloomberg, the world’s seventh wealthiest capitalist, not only calls New York City his home, he also owns one of its largest businesses and served as its mayor for a decade between 2002 and 2012. He was a law-and-order mayor, increasing sentences for gun crimes, and lending his name and support for the racist, fascist, “stop-and-frisk” policy, helping it expand and lending it credibility. He supported George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, Obama’s re-election in 2012, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. In March of 2019, despite his claim to support trans rights, he said that “If your conversation during a presidential campaign is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people.”

In this way, Bloomberg stands as the archetypical member of the monopolist class as represented in the capitalists of New York City. A political weathervane. He and the bourgeoisie as a whole are interested only in the protection of their class and expanding their profits. These monopoly capitalists have battled for control of the city for the past five years, since the mayoral races were opened to Super PAC money. Although U.S. social democrats and “Communists” (the Working Families Party, the CPUSA, the DSA, etc.) claim that there are “right wing” and “left wing” billionaires fighting for the soul of New York City, in fact the debates being held amongst the monopoly class are between the left and right wings of capital, between two different camps of billionaires debating the best way to crack down on crime and choosing between subsidizing labor aristocracy and breaking the city’s unions and public services. In other words, the debate occurs ultimately between the right and center right.

The monopolists are the primary enemy of the working and oppressed classes in New York City, but their influence is mediated through their lackeys in the labor aristocracy and their petit-bourgeois foot soldiers on the one hand and the city government on the other. That is, the big monopolists generally do not have their hands directly on the wheel of government or repression, and therefore may be somewhat obscure, their position mystified. Outside of billionaire mayor Bloomberg, the big bourgeoisie act through their economic and political agents. In the workplace, these are the labor-aristocrat or petit-bourgeois managers and professionals. In the political arena, these are the city employees: the tax assessors, permitting officials, police force, and judiciary.

The monopolist class also includes the city’s primary landlords whose incomes have catapulted them into the ranks of financial bourgeoisie. Many of what would, in a second- or third-tier city merely be regional or even full-scale non-monopolist bourgeoisie with industrial concerns, are able to become monopolist bourgeoisie in New York. The profits they obtain  in New York City selling their commodities to their haute bourgeois fellows can catapult these otherwise small-scale bourgeois onto the world stage and allow them to invest in multinational corporations through the stock market and investment banks.

New York, therefore, serves as the nerve center of the world-imperialist empire.  Although Washington runs the political machine, the financials that drive it are, to a great extent, concentrated in New York City. The imperialist haute bourgeoisie are vulnerable to attacks here — witness Occupy — and we can reckon that this accounts for the extremely violent responses of the NYPD to all students and workers movements in the city.

As a result of this confluence, and because the bourgeoisie of the zionist state are by and large also members of the U.S. ruling class, we have seen the similarly brutal police response to solidarity organizing in the defense of Palestine. The ruling class cannot afford to permit insurrection in the heart of their financial fortress, which is uniquely weak to such insurrection. Flow of goods and information to and from Manhattan, their world headquarters, must pass through a handful of narrow bridges, wires, and cell phone towers.

If our analysis proves it possible to organize a revolutionary league within New York City, it is most certainly desirable; as citizens in the heart of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire, close to its pulse, we would be a dagger clasped at the breast of U.S. world imperialism. It would be our moral duty and pride as true proletarian internationalists to chance it.

Real unrest here would threaten the entire fabric of the world-empire.

The Non-Monopolist Bourgeoisie

The transitory, smaller-scale bourgeoisie in New York City are a vanishingly minor class. There is simply no room between the petit-bourgeois strata and the monopolist stratum. The gap is too great. For instance, over the course of 2000-2022, “small” landlords were replaced primarily by corporations, and almost all landlords in Manhattan own at least 30 buildings. Data maintained by the New York City government indicates that some 98% of businesses in the city are “small” (employ fewer than 100 employees). These are the owner-operated small businesses of the petit-bourgeoisie.

A random sampling of medium-sized businesses bears this out: DO & CO, a 500-employee catering business, is actually a branch of a global restaurant group headquartered in Vienna. The small luxury soda company, Boylan Bottling, was purchased by Emigrant Bank in 2002 and is now part of their portfolio. Altronix Corporation, a small Brooklyn electronics manufacturer, is owned by Alan Forman, who has a net worth of $6.5 million dollars.

The 350,000 millionaires in New York City in fact compose what we might think of as the pre-monopoly bourgeoisie. They are the haute bourgeoisie that are not yet directly involved in monopoly finance. However, because they are entirely funded by monopoly finance in the form of the big banks, because they purchase raw-material inputs from the third world, and because they sell commodities directly to corporations owned by monopoly finance (like Altronix, which supplies other commodity-producers) they are inextricably linked to the monopoly bourgeoisie such that they cannot be separated in interest. The non-monopolist bourgeoisie therefore, can be said to barely exist; they are a passing phase of the growth of the bourgeoisie.

Every non-monopolist is on their way to being either entered into the monopolist category, or altogether expelled from the bourgeoisie. They are a transient class, almost totally adhering to their “big brothers” in the imperialist ranks.

The Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie — Parasitic Professional Class

As we have seen, there is a huge layer of petit-bourgeoisie in New York City. Small businesses and professional services, the remora of the empire, make up the absolute majority of businesses in the city. We can further divide this group into the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie, who service empire directly by providing the big bourgeoisie monopolists with necessary professional services, the non-imperialist petit-bourgeoisie who generally find their clientele among the petit-bourgeoisie and working classes, and the imperialist labor aristocracy, who are technically proletarians but who work directly for imperialist big bourgeoisie and receive enormously inflated compensation as a result of their position relative to the colonized periphery.

The imperialist petit-bourgeoisie is primarily composed of professionals working in large firms whose primary clients are the imperialist bourgeoisie. It’s worth noting that the corporations employing this strata are generally owned by the imperialist bourgeoisie themselves. For instance, the imperialist international law firm Shearman and Sterling, with offices at 599 Lexington, is run by senior partner Adam Hakki who, although he still practices law, makes a $20 million/year salary from his position, not as a practicing lawyer but rather from his “work” as a capitalist.

Top-flight doctors who make their living treating the wealthy and the trained accountants at firms like Deloitte also fall into this category, as do the many cold warrior academics still employed at the city’s universities. These last are ideological support pillars of the ruling class, endlessly churning out a nauseating anti-Communist bile.

The “professional and business services” sector of the New York City economy employs a huge number of people — 776,000. If we take the 498,000 people employed in finance who are not themselves bourgeois (a vanishingly small number) or labor aristocrats (for instance, certain banking positions), we can estimate that there are around 1 million of the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie in the city. We may also mark the 75,000 people employed as “management” as petit-bourgeoisie. Whether they are imperialist or not depends on what they manage.

These petit-bourgeois workers do have class interests that are in contradiction with the interests of their bourgeois employers. Like all petit-bourgeois professionals, they are subject to profit maximization (theft of surplus value), a certain amount of precarity or fungibility in their positions (although this is, by necessity, less than the fungibility of a proletarian worker — petit-bourgeois professionals are harder to replace, and their skills are more individualized and unique), and the generalized need for the bourgeoisie to realize their profits by the sale of commodities to their own workers, whose pay they minimize.

However, unlike proletarian workers, the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie are consciously cultivated by the haute bourgeois class. This means they intentionally suppress the contradictions that arise between their classes. The imperialist petit-bourgeoisie is excessively overpaid, they are granted political and economic participation in the imperialist project, and they are lauded with social rewards for their complicity. They are the managers of the empire, without whom the empire cannot function.

We should look at them as an inveterate enemy class. The risks of agitating among this class are very high, and there is very little chance that such agitation finds any success.

The Imperialist Labor Aristocracy — “White Collar” Financiers

Legal secretaries at Shearman and Sterling make, on average, $88,000 a year. At Deloitte, the salary for a secretary is $60,000 a year. The average salary in the city is $41,000 a year. The median secretary’s salary is reportedly $51,000 a year in the city. What is the difference between an “average” secretary and one who works at Deloitte or Shearman? Deloitte and Shearman benefit directly from their connection with the imperialist bourgeoisie, and purchase the loyalty of the proletarian workers in their employ. That is to say, these workers are compensated at far higher rates — and thus suffer far less exploitation than other workers in the same position at companies that do not directly service the imperialist bourgeoisie.

This class strata of essentially bribed workers includes functionaries who manage paperwork; “number crunchers” and “spreadsheet miners” as the joke goes. These white collar desk workers, when in proximity to the imperialist bourgeoisie and working to maintain their empires of finance, are, like the secretaries at Deloitte, exploited at a rate far less than their peers in other branches of industry.

We can estimate the numbers of this group roughly by looking at the employment data for administrative and support staff (244,000). The average income of administrative support staff in the metropolitan area is $80,000 a year. This places most administrative support at the very high end of the proletarian wage scale. But we can and must be more precise. A great deal of this money is made by brokerage clerks, office supervisors, executive secretaries, legal secretaries, and desktop publishers (who should fall under the petit-bourgeois heading). This accounts for twenty percent of the support staff workforce, or approximately 50,000 workers.

Like the imperialist petit-bourgeoisie, this strata of the proletariat is dangerous to the revolutionary movement. While the contradictions between the interests of the imperialist labor aristocracy and the entire bourgeoisie are much more acute than that between the petit-bourgeoisie and their haute bourgeois siblings, this doesn’t mean that they are currently aligned with the revolutionary movement. Individuals, or even small groups, in this layer of the proletariat may have revolutionary potential, but the effort required to reach or convert large segments is not, at this stage, worth expending. There are many groups that we can reach, many with high degrees of revolutionary potential or material resources; these labor aristocrats on the balance, have neither.

Non-Imperialist Petit-Bourgeoisie

The remainder of the petit-bourgeoisie are not the direct servants of imperial power. This includes fractions of the already-listed 700,000 petit-bourgeoisie professionals above, as well as a large percentage of the 1,209,000 private education and health services professionals (private educators at colleges and universities across the city number about 150,000 while an enormous 968,000 work in health care and social assistance).

This group should be divided into strata — upper, middle, and lower — based on income and precarity. The entire class, excluding those directly attached to the imperialist project mentioned above, are typified by having interests that sometimes are aligned with the big bourgeoisie and sometimes are in contradiction with them. This is why, as a class, they have a vacillating or uncertain consciousness that often demands socially progressive policies from the state while at the same time being generally unwilling to attack the root cause of reaction, namely capitalism. The anarchist and social democratic movements are the result of growing petit-bourgeois consciousness: highly individualized on the one hand (anarchists), and unable to confront capital on the other (social democrats).

The lowest strata of petit-bourgeoisie are barely distinct from the proletariat and are being proletarianized. Who are these downwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie? They are the lowest ranks of professionals who do not serve the imperialist bourgeoisie, as well as small-time bodega owner-operators and the owner-operators of restaurants and failing businesses. Obviously certain positions, such as owner-operators, will be more prone to reactionary politics. Since at least 2019, the real median household income in New York City has been falling. Severe rent burdens have increased among middle-income households. Half of all families in New York City cannot afford living expenses without government assistance. For instance, in 2000 the average annual cost of living in South Manhattan was calculated at $76,000 a year while the same cost of living was calculated at $152,000 in 2023. Across all boroughs, cost of living has increased by 131% on average, while the median earnings have increased only 71%. This is a 60% rise in the city-wide average cost of living between the years of 2000 and 2023. The percentage of families making over $250,000 a year increased by 1.2% between 2000 and 2021; the percentage of families making $60,000 – $100,000 a year decreased by 1.5%; a similar decrease occurred in the families making $40,000 – $60,000; however, families making the lowest wages increased by 2.6%. This represents a marked pressure on petit-bourgeois incomes. Calculated at today’s population, this would be approximately 210,000 families at the lower-end of the petit-bourgeoisie being shifted downward, potentially out of the class altogether.

This year, the New York Times reported a drop in overall city-wide population by 78,000 but the city government added the reservation that this does not account for increased “migrants.” We can see, then, that petit-bourgeois positions have been vacated and transformed into proletarian or sub-proletarian positions throughout the city’s economy.

The result of this economic pressure is that the lower ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie are essentially becoming working poor despite their access to professional training, a process that has a long historical precedent and is most visible in the deteriorating incomes of teachers and the creation of an underclass of adjunct professors at the university level. We can demonstrate this in the labor data quite easily: the decline in self-employed workers from 10% in 2003 to 8% in 2021 agrees with the sharp drop we have seen in the “middle income” group. The city government compiled data relating to jobs lost during the early phases of the COVID pandemic, and not regained; there are losses across all sectors, proletarian and petit-bourgeois, that were never regained except in health care and information services. The unemployment rate in New York City stands substantially above that of the rest of the state and the U.S. as a whole.

As a result of this pressure, the petit-bourgeoisie are faced with loss of station and even, in some cases, loss of self. They are increasingly shut out of the electoral processes held out by the ruling class as the bounty of imperialist participation — big money, in the form of Super PACs and dark campaign donations clearly and evidently plays the deciding factor in most important U.S. elections, and the petit-bourgeoisie (with its thirst for rules-based decisions, order, and boundaries that are clearly set out) have watched as the last several empire-wide election cycles for Congress and the U.S. presidency have been essentially stage-managed behind the scenes with a total disregard for any perception of process.

All of this is to say that the downwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie should be fast allies. They can be educated out of social democracy as they come to understand the true nature of the system that is destroying them. This, of course, has generally been true.

It is likely that even the middle strata of the petit-bourgeoisie in New York City can be mobilized for generally progressive issues (such as the support of public transportation and public assistance programs or ending the genocide in Palestine) and, given the pressures currently exerted by the bourgeoisie, won over to the side of Communism in large numbers, should a sufficiently organized formation exist to educate them and bring them into its ranks or its orbit little by little.

City Government — the Pig Class

The ranks of the city government are divided between the various classes. There are proletarian city workers, bourgeois politicians, etc. However, a specialized “guardian” class also works in the city government. We must take special effort to point out the danger of this pig class: cops, prosecutors, judges, magistrates, department of corrections guards, etc.

These are the ground soldiers of the enemy. They are the forefront of reaction. Not only can they not be organized, their organizations are our enemy. In every case, and in every way, we should be oppositional to the pig class. We must not cede an inch of rhetorical ground, but rather pick out the most egregious abusers of this class and hold them up to the community and demonstrate that these creatures belong to the forces oppressing us.

There are city politicians that we should be able to work with, but not under. However, all consideration of any such tactics is premature before there is a city-wide league, as will be discussed further. Therefore, all basic organizing at this time should avoid the government altogether. The risk is too great to organize government proletarians, the organization does not exist yet to meet bourgeois politicians on their own terms, and any interaction with the pig class would spell disaster for a nascent movement.

There are 36,000 police employed in the city, by far the highest police-to-civilian ratio in the entire United States. There is a reason for this — this is the seat of imperialist power.

National Bourgeoisie and Petit-Bourgeoisie

There is another lateral division among the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie between the dominant national groups and the oppressed nations. 3% of businesses are  Black-owned, 6% are “Hispanic”-owned, and 18% are “Asian”-owned. For our purposes, the categories of Hispanic and Asian are more or less useless, as they do not describe actual national origins, but rather agglomerations of many national origins. However, for the purposes of estimating the revolutionary potential of the national bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, we can see that there is a substantially larger Black and “Asian” bourgeois/petit-bourgeois population in New York City than in the country at large (+0.6% in the first instance and +5.3% in the second).

Whether or not these groups are truly “national” (that is, capable of being played against the big imperialists) or comprador bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie (that is, serving as the agents of the imperialists in controlling and managing the national markets) remains to be seen and is beyond the capacity of this investigation. Real data must be gathered about attitudes and information must be collated about community involvement before such a question can be answered.

Suffice to say that there is at least the theoretical potential for the nationally oppressed in these classes to be maneuvered into an antagonistic relationship with the dominant imperialist bourgeoisie, and thus, at least for a time, temporarily allied with the Communist movement. 

The Urban Proletariat

Is there an urban proletariat? Let us examine the data: there are approximately 200,000 manufacturing jobs in New York City, primarily employing the nationally oppressed. This is, in absolute numbers, equivalent to the amount of finance jobs in the city. Some of these manufacturing jobs are actually petit-bourgeois (for instance, technical workers at Bristol Myers Squibb), but this doesn’t change the fact that hundreds of thousands are employed as manufacturers. There are 131,000 employed in mining and other extractive industries. There are 84,000 specialty trade contractors, who may be petit-bourgeois or proletarian, depending on the degree of technical skill and the degree of restrictions on practicing the trade. 42,000 are employed in building construction. 580,000 are employed in trade, transportation, and utilities, almost all of which are proletarian labor. 417,000 people work in the leisure and hospitality industry.

The myth that proletarian labor has vanished is exploded by this data. From the above sectors, we can see 1.454 million proletarian positions in New York City, which is one third of the entire reported labor force in the city. The actual ratio of proletarians is undoubtedly higher and could be reckoned by a more careful calculation of the available labor data, but even in that instance it would be higher still to account for unreported nationally oppressed and migrant labor.

The bourgeois financial company SmartAsset calculated the average salary to live comfortably in New York City at $138,000 for a single adult and $318,000 for a family of four. The salary of an average machinist (of which there are 9,900 in New York City) is $27 an hour, which works out to $56,160 per year. By every measure, these are proletarians struggling in an economy that leaves them insufficient income to cover their basic necessities.

Comparing neighborhood incomes throughout New York City reveals the most firmly proletarian neighborhoods are, unsurprisingly, the Bronx, East Harlem, Flushing, Astoria, and the waterfront on the Lower East Side. It should perhaps also come as no surprise that NYU and Columbia University are the most well-positioned schools in Manhattan in terms of solidifying a link between the student movement and the proletarian communities.

The city itself has also designated areas for manufacturing, what it calls “industrial business zones” (IBZs). These are located in Brooklyn Navy Yard, East New York, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, North Brooklyn, Southwest Brooklyn, Bathgate, Eastchester, Hunts Point, Port Morris, Zerega, Jamaica, JFK, Long Island City, Maspeth, Ridgewood, Steinway, Woodside, North Shore, West Shore, and Rossville. The city provides a tax credit of $1,000 per employee and up to $100,000 to industrial and manufacturing firms that work in these IBZs. Because firms are economically incentivized to move into these areas, and because these firms are more likely to require the government support offered, it is likely that they have high concentrations of highly exploitative industrial production. This would seem to present the perfect opportunity for organizing.

The urban proletariat should form the basic material of any movement. It is among the ranks of this group that the advanced workers will emerge in numbers. Their interests are irreconcilably opposed to the big businesses and capitalists that live in the city. The price per square foot of real estate in Manhattan was $329 in 1997. By 2019, property was worth $1,657 per square foot on the island. A rising trend can be seen in the other boroughs. As of January 2024, the price of the consumer price index goods and services had risen to 1,000 times what it had been in 1967 in the city, about double what it was throughout the rest of the U.S.

It’s worth noting that union membership is down across the country, but New York state consistently has the highest union rates among all states. Of the 14.4 million union members in the U.S., 1.7 million reside in New York state. This indicates that contradictions are still sharp in New York and that basic trade union consciousness persists in millions of workers, even as it is decaying across the country.

There are millions of proletarians in New York City. Let us assume that agitation might be able to reach and draw in approximately one tenth of one percent of the proletarian population. That number, relatively miniscule as it is, is still 1,000 workers in absolute terms. There is no reason that 1% of all workers in the city shouldn’t be class conscious. There’s no reason why 10% of all workers in the city shouldn’t understand the proletariat not only as a class-in-itself, but as a class-for-itself. The fault doesn’t lie with the intermediate workers who are not yet conscious, but with the advanced workers who have achieved a degree of class consciousness but have failed to agitate and educate among their fellow workers. The working classes have not vanished in New York City, they are right in front of us. Advanced workers need merely begin the process of organizing them!

Students

Students are not themselves a class, but generally form a strata, like intellectuals, who can come from many class backgrounds. The majority of students in New York University, for instance, come from the upper 20% of income brackets. Students in the city are thus primarily drawn from the petit-bourgeois and bourgeois class, but their relations of production are suspended while they study. They are themselves more often lower petit-bourgeois, unable to access the wealth of their parents directly, despite being provided its benefits.

Students cannot form the basic material of revolutionary organization for many reasons, but they are extremely active and easily organized into militant formations. Students, while often eager, focused, and able to dedicate more time than other classes, generally are aware of the fact of the class they hope to eventually enter. This makes arrests, publicity, and other exposure more dangerous for students than for other proletarians in the same way that these things tend to be more dangerous for petit-bourgeois professionals. Students also “phase out” of the movement; their residences aren’t settled, and they tend to move without much notice. Lastly, students have a built-in deadline for their organizing, for relatively few will remain in the region or remain radicals/organizers after they graduate.

A 2003 estimate, by now woefully out of date, gives a total of roughly 600,000 college students in the city. If the ratio remains the same as 2003 (7.5% of the city population in that year), there should be around 620,000 students today. They are concentrated in a small geographical area with a broad public transportation system, enabling student activists to easily concentrate and disperse their numbers.

As we have seen throughout 2024 in the form of the student revolts, New York City is roiling with student discontent. This is the same discontent that fueled the 2008 Occupy protests in the city. The police and other pig classes (prosecutors, judges, etc.) are terrified of the potential for an organized student movement, and make every effort to crush any that seem to be arising. This partially accounts for the brutality of the arrests at Columbia over the past April. The students are a powerful force. The student movement must be joined to the worker’s movement. Historically, in most revolutionary situations, students are at the forefront of class consciousness.

The Sub-Proletariat

Over 350,000 people in New York City are homeless. Of these 350,000, approximately half are Black. This is an enormous number of nationally oppressed people without homes. They fall into the strata of the sub-proletariat, the lowest ranks of the proletarian class — those who are generally expelled from the labor force and act as the last ranks of the reserve army of the unemployed. It is important to note that a not-insignificant portion of this population may actually be the working unhoused, who can be reached through workplace organizing.

Like students, the sub-proletariat cannot be the basic material forming Marxist organizations, but they have suffered the most under capitalism and are prepared to despise and attack the bourgeois masters most of all. At this stage, it is too early to begin attempting to organize the sub-proletariat. A sufficiently advanced core of cadre must first be developed; local organizations must be formed on the ground, and a city-wide league must be proposed and carried out. Only then will survival programs yield anything more than the most basic agitation among the sub-proletariat.

The Urban Masses Need Marxist Organization

The question, then, is what do we do with this information? The urban masses are crying out for organization. The wellspring of proletarian action has never been the countryside. In the imperialized third world, the countryside has been a locus of action and agitation throughout the last century not because it is where the proletariat is located, but because it is where the third world peasantry is to be found. The U.S. does not possess a coherent peasantry. We must not apply lessons learned by the successful revolutions in the underdeveloped periphery indiscriminately to the imperial center. 

There are 2,500 police in Suffolk County, Long Island, to a total population of 1.5 million residents, or one cop for every 600 residents. New York City has 36,000 police officers, or one cop for every 230 residents. This is because the population density in Suffolk County is 1,600 residents per square mile, but the population density of New York City is 29,300 per square mile. The closely-packed nature of city life, particularly in the country’s biggest city and financial capital, means organization can proceed at an exponentially faster and easier rate. More people amenable to being organized can be reached, more quickly, with less effort, in New York City than anywhere else in the United States.

What the urban masses lack is not the will to resist the NYPD or anger at the system that continues to exploit and deprive them, but the organizational forms and dedicated cadre to run those organizational forms that will allow them to win confrontations with the enemy state. The bourgeoisie have used many cunning new means to divert and distract revolutionary consciousness among the working classes for fear of this exact type of urban uprising. The most advanced version of this misdirection comes in the form of the non-governmental agency or NGO. Political action NGOs purport to be interested in reforming the government and absorb many bright-eyed would-be radicals, redirecting their energy into phone banking, door knocking, and trying to pass progressive legislation.

This is not what the working people need. The working people need Marxist organizations. They need developed Marxist cadre who can help train new radicals and bring new organizations into existence. New York City needs hundreds of local organizations of radicals numbering 10-20 members, all studying to prepare for a city-wide League of Workers and Students. New York City can be, and should be, the epicenter of resistance to the imperialist order.

What do we mean by organization? We mean a group that has definite membership, standing rules, standing meetings, democratic decision-making, keeps minutes and records, and so forth. We mean a group with defined relationships, officers, and responsibilities. We mean professional revolutionaries who professionalize the task of overthrowing the bourgeois order.

The working people do not need the revisionist organizations like CPUSA. They do not need social democratic organizations like the DSA. Marxists can work within these organizations to build something else, but the organizations themselves are fatally compromised and held by the sympathizers of bourgeois power. We must build something new, something that can resist the great-nation chauvinism that has plagued all parties and formations in the West. We must confront that chauvinism and dismantle it before we can make any forward progress. Only by completely debunking the bankrupt vestiges of past (failed) attempts to establish revolutionary organizations can we embark on our own project.

We will start by building local organizations, cells, to become the constituent parts of an organization of organizations — a regional League. When this league is secure, a party may develop from many leagues.

Assembling Many Local Organizations

Those Marxists who are either in New York City or who can regularly access it should consider founding local organizations. The study group is the archetype of local Marxist organization, and serves to develop cadre and create Marxists capable of taking consistent revolutionary action. What we see more commonly is what has been referred to as “mutual aid,” but which is essentially a kind of charity. We reject the form of the “red charity,” but wholly embrace a revolutionary form: the logistics organization.

The study group is the optimal form in a locality without a sufficient number of developed Marxists to run a Marxist-Leninist logistics organization on a continuous basis. That is the case on the ground almost everywhere in the United States. Thus, we urge our readers to begin Marxist study groups and embark on cadre-development plans. A sample cadre-development plan has been included in this analysis. 

The Study Group

USU has published on the study group and on organization in the past. We recommend anyone reading this who is interested in pursuing this plan also read The Study Group and Constructive Struggle, both of which go into much more detail than is possible in this short paper.

Formation of a study group is the first step toward a functional Marxist organization. This is how cadre are developed, how advanced workers transform themselves into Communists. Although your study group can meander and pick books based on interest, this kind of broad, all-over study can take a long time to develop into a functional organization. Why do we urge the creation of study groups? It is not to sequester ourselves inside and remove us from the movement. However, we must counter the cult of action, that anarchistic urge that has pervaded all modern organizing in the West.

It is not possible to learn to tie your shoes while you are running a marathon. We should make no mistake, revolution is a grueling path that we have chosen. We cannot train ourselves, train others, and act all at once. We should begin with training and developing ourselves together, until we have a sufficient number of trained and dedicated Communists prepared to act in concert. This may, perhaps, strike readers as unnecessary caution. After all, anarchists and liberals run charities every day without training! We speak now from the bitter teacher of experience. When embarking upon a new revolutionary organizing project, a high number of the people who will join in that project will not be highly motivated to begin with. The basic requirement for every revolutionary movement is the capacity to create new revolutionaries. A revolutionary — a professional revolutionary — is not merely someone who knows Marxist theory. A professional revolutionary attends every action they pledge themselves to. They are consistent in their action, and they arrive early to ensure that actions are successful. They are able to engage in class analysis. They know how to write concise after-action reports and they are hardened against arrest and interrogation. This is what it means to be a revolutionary. Revolutionaries, in other words, do not fall out of the coconut tree.
It is through the basics of a study group that the historically successful parties (most notably the CPSU and the CPC) built up their membership prior to becoming parties. This is the course that we must take: one that simultaneously breaks up the ossified hulk of the old revisionist parties and builds the basis of the new party-to-be. In forming revolutionary circles that become organizations, organizations that become regional leagues, we build the basis for our work. Nowhere is that more important than in the financial heart of the U.S. empire.

The enemy, after all, is professional. The enemy is organized. We are facing the might of the capitalist state, embodied in the NYPD, FBI, and National Guard. The city government itself, despite being filled with workers, is our enemy. This corporate agency is highly organized and highly professional; revolutionaries must also be organized and professional. Only the reliable revolutionary will be embraced by the masses. No one wants to be agitated to by someone who doesn’t show up in the hour of need or can’t be trusted to offer consistent revolutionary aid.

If you are able to gather enough advanced workers who are interested in cadre development, we suggest the following plan:

Week one: How to Be a Good Communist, Liu Shaoqi

Week two: Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Week three: Class Struggle, Chapter 1, Domenico Losurdo

Week four: Critique of the Gotha Program, Karl Marx, Program of the Parti Ouvrier, Marx and Guesde, Critique of the Erfurt Program, Friedrich Engels, Programme of the Emancipation of Labour, Plekhanov, A Draft of Our Party Program, Lenin

Weeks five-ten: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, J.V. Stalin

After this, we have a number of “blocks” which accumulate texts on a specific subject, but which can be read in any order or combination.

Political Economy Block

• Blood in My Eye, George Jackson
• Capital, Karl Marx
• Class Struggle, Domenico Losurdo
• Dialectical and Historical Materialism, J.V. Stalin
• Foundations of Leninism, J.V. Stalin
• The Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, Otto Kuusinen
• Grundrisse, Karl Marx
• On the Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels
• Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels
• Wage Labour & Capital/Value, Price, and Profit, Karl Marx

Organization-Building Block

• The 18th Brumaire, Karl Marx
• On Authority, Friedrich Engels
• Combat Liberalism, Mao Zedong
• Constructive Criticism, Gracie Lyons
• Constructive Struggle, J. Katsfoter
• The Dreyfus Affair, Rosa Luxemburg
• Fanshen, William H. Hinton
• One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, V.I. Lenin
• Reform or Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg
• What is to be Done? V.I. Lenin

National Liberation Block

• The Apocalypse of Settler-Colonialism, Gerald Horne
• Assata, Assata Shakur
• Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois
• Blood of the Land, Rex Weyler
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Chicano Liberation and Proletarian Revolution, the August 29th Movement
• Decolonial Marxism, Walter Rodney
• For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question, Harry Haywood
• Hammer & Hoe, Robin D.G. Kelley
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
• Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, V.I. Lenin
• The Negro Nation, Harry Haywood
• The Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galleani
• The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

Sex Liberation Block

• Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici
• Lenin on the Women’s Question, Clara Zetkin
• Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, Anuradha Ghandy
• Revolution at Point Zero, Silvia Federici
• The Straight Mind and other Essays, Monique Wittig

The Logistics Organization

Logistics organizations can address a wide variety of survival issues: copwatch, food supply, community gardens, educational spaces, hot food for children, etc. These are what the Black Panthers called survival programs. However, many of those groups and circles seeking to emulate the Panthers’ survival programs do so without having anywhere near the infrastructure the BPP built up. In order to run a logistics program, you must have a dedicated cadre of Marxists. In order for a program to be logistics instead of simply charity, the program itself must also run political development classes — in essence, it must become a study group with a logistics element.

Despite our earlier warning against running and learning to tie shoes, it is possible to begin with a logistics organization if you have some requirements already met. If your organization or circle satisfies these requirements, you can feel confident in founding a logistics operation. If it does not, you should strongly consider putting together a study group first and attempting to meet the criteria.

1. Defined membership on a non-voluntary basis — formal membership requirements, including dues which will support the logistics operation.
2. At least 5 developed Marxist members who are at cadre-level in both political development and militancy.
3. At least 5 other members; development needn’t be as high as the core cadre group.
4. A method for arriving at binding collective decisions. This can be as simple as some rules of thumb on ending discussions and voting, or as complex as Robert’s Rules of Order. At any rate, it cannot be a procedure that allows endless talking.
5. Sufficient free time and effort to run the logistics program at a set time and place on a regular period. As close to a one-week repeating period as possible is best practices, since the people you serve will come to rely on you.
6. Sufficient free time and energy to run a political development program as part of your work, to develop those who begin attending the logistics operation.

Essentially, this is a way to satisfy the urge of action while also building political development; a study group plus a logistics operation, in other words. However, this is a draining, complex, and difficult task to undertake. If there is insufficient labor (that is, if there aren’t enough developed and militant members to continuously run the logistics program), it will be impossible to pursue continued political development. At this point, the political development of membership must be primary. We simply do not have enough trained and militant Communists. If your organization cannot perform both functions with time left to spare, it should focus on the study and development above the logistics aspect.

Worse, running a logistics operation and then stopping it damages the trust of the masses in Communist organizing. The result of running a short-lived logistics program is far worse than not running one at all. An assessment of capacity must be taken before the program is launched.

Finding Membership

This seems to be the part of organizing study groups and logistics programs that present the most difficult hurdle to overcome. In rural or lightly urbanized areas, membership can be very difficult to obtain. There are fewer central locations for flyers, posters, and handbills to be posted; distances between towns are greater, with less public transportation, requiring longer drive times, and so on. Large apartment buildings are fewer, and workers often live in more sequestered locations. There is a higher percentage of petit-bourgeois or labor-aristocratic workers living in the white suburbs.

In New York City, these problems vanish. To obtain membership and run a study or logistics organization, there are only a few simple requirements in a city as densely populated as New York.

1. Meeting place and time. You should have a meeting place and a regular time lined up before you begin seeking members for your study group or logistics organization. This can be a local radical bookstore, a church basement, a meeting hall or community center, a library branch, even your own apartment or a public park. If your group doesn’t require privacy, you should strive to hold the meetings in as public a place as possible to encourage walk-up attendance.
2. Contact information. You should have some contact information that people can reach. What type is a security question for your membership. Should you create a gmail account or a protonmail account? Can you afford to list a phone number? These questions should be answered prior to your first major recruitment efforts.
3. Flyers. Flyers containing the meeting place and time, your contact information, and a meeting call that will explain to workers the purpose of attendance without alienating them. A few sample flyers have been added to this piece. They’re designed to be easily customized.
4. Consistency. You should continue to meet, over and over again, even if only a few people show up consistently. You should strive not to postpone or cancel meetings. If you do this for a substantial period of time, eventually your attendance numbers will increase. Consistency proves that you aren’t a fed, proves that you won’t disappear tomorrow, and proves that you are serious about revolution. Advanced workers who are not yet Communists need convincing that revolution is possible. The best way to convince advanced workers that revolution is possible is to believe it yourself and act as though it were. That means acting in a consistently principled manner.

As to where and how to best gather recruits: we have identified in the analysis above several key areas in terms of the IBZs. Additionally, the largest and most well-trafficked subway and PATH stations should provide ample locale for flyering and postering with wheat paste or tape. The 1 train, for example, is the busiest train in the city and the Times Square-42 Street station is the busiest station. The Port Authority also provides a hub for bus travel and trains coming into the city from the surrounding regions and would be another suitable location.

We urge you to go forth and build!

A League Conference

It is possible that there are already a number of local organizations that meet the above criteria and that the authors simply do not know of them. Once five or more spring up or are located, the first steps toward the creation of a New York City League of Struggle can be taken. These organizations can participate in the foundation of a larger, umbrella regional organization. Rather than admitting individuals, a league would admit member organizations and serve as a central coordinating point for those organizations.

A conference to found a league would follow a simple progression:

1. Form a working committee of organizational delegates to determine the logistical questions of the first conference, namely: i) minimum organizational requirements for entry into the league, ii) method of determining votes and delegate ratios, iii) location of the conference, iv) time of the conference, v) rules of the conference, and vi) formation of a credentials committee to oversee vetting and attendance.
2. Advertising the conference to other potentially interested organizations.
3. Once the conference is held, the first order of business would be to verify credentials.
4. Then, the conference should elect a unity committee to propose basic points of unity which all members of the league would adhere to as their basic positions.
5. As the unity committee prepares the first draft of the points of unity, the general body of the conference should set up other committees to take care of other business, namely:
   1. An executive committee for carrying out decisions and for sitting in between future conferences;
   2. An agitprop or art committee for coordinating and pooling resources for the production of agitation;
   3. The establishment of sections for gender oppressed and nationally oppressed members;
   4. A rules committee for the creation or recommendation of the adoption of various rules and procedures, including grievances and harassment policies;
   5. And any other committee the general membership feels it is necessary to establish.

This is the road forward that we recommend. Form your organizations. Study. Develop. Unite.

Onward, to revolution!

Despite the fact that USU explicitly does not have political discipline outside of our minimum commitments — that it is, in fact, a place where factions are permitted and encouraged to grow — and despite the fact that we were quite clear that we do not have a “party line” on the People’s Republic of China, the W.P. mechanists insisted on having a meeting where they would (so we found out) put forward the thesis that the People’s Republic was not engaged in socialist construction. They then demanded that we defend the People’s Republic.

We declined to do so, not for any fear of tackling the subject, but because there were sufficient errors in the W.P.’s arguments that they required a thorough refutation before we could begin to have any constructive conversation. In essence, the W.P. thesis was that every socialist state reduces the size of state employees and its “state bureaucracy” until it reaches a “state of the whole class.” W.P. did not cite any reasons for this belief, but in fact referred to it as a “law” of socialist development. When pressed, they could only reference empirical data that they believed “proved” the existence of this law.

It was here that we began to suspect that the W.P. group did not have a deep understanding of dialectics. After further analysis, we were proved correct: the W.P. group rejects dialectical materialism in favor of pure mechanics, and their theorists referred back to the somewhat obscure Soviet debate between the mechanists (such as Stepanov and Bukharin) and the dialecticians (such as Deborin). This subsequent argument clarified the depth of the W.P. group’s commitment to mechanism and made it abundantly clear that they could in no sense be considered Marxist.

We bring up this short-lived controversy to demonstrate dialectical materialism to our readership and to help our readers understand the difference between dialectics and mechanics. This difference is an important one, because the general corpus of Western materialism is one of mechanical materialism. Mastering dialectics is much more difficult because of it. We must all be wary of falling into the trap that the W.P. group stumbled into.

Logic as the Basis of Argument

The fundamental issue of the W.P. group’s mechanical materialism is its refusal to apply logic to questions of “science.” Logic is a mathematical/epistemological system that helps outline arguments and conclusions. Where W.P. conjured up the “law” of dwindling state bureaucracy, they cited that “all observed societies that have engaged in socialist construction have diminished the size of their state and removed bureaucratic excesses.” Therefore, this “law” states that all societies engaged in socialist construction must diminish the size of their state and remove bureaucratic excesses.

But this is not how logic works. It is not how laws work.

A law cannot be proven by evidence. This is of critical importance. There is nothing you can see or experience that can prove that a law exists. Observation of the material world cannot, by itself, establish a necessary connection between cause and effect. Observation provides us with the raw material to establish connections and posit laws. Laws are not proved by evidence. A law may be supported by evidence, or it may be disproved by evidence. A proof comes by way of a necessary logical connection established between evidentiary premises. By referring only to the observable world, the mechanists make it impossible to draw any conclusions whatsoever.

Logical syllogisms — the basis of all argument, conclusions, and serious scientific inquiry — are constructed from a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. To establish a law, one must establish a logical connection between evidence.

Major Premise: This premise contains a general statement. The truth of that statement should be established by empirical evidence. For instance: Humans are mortal.

Minor Premise: This premise contains a specific statement. For instance: Socrates is human.

Conclusion: This is a combination of the necessary effects of the major and minor premises. Example: Socrates is mortal.

If we were to discover, through empirical research, that Socrates was immortal, we would know we had a flaw with one of our two premises. Either Socrates is not a human, or humans are not necessarily mortal. This is the basic, fundamental, mode of drawing conclusions. It allows us to see the chain of logical connections, and can act as a proof. A valid proof for the dwindling of the state under socialism would need to include a major premise such as: “Socialist production causes a dwindling of the state.” But this would simply beg the question, deferring the answer to a subsidiary proposition. What about socialist construction causes the dwindling of the state? By burying the “work” necessary to get to the outcome, the W.P. group (and all mechanists, such as the bourgeois positivists and economists) simply hide the question somewhere else.

Study Logic, Study Dialectics

Logic is not the end of study, but only the beginning. The W.P. group’s evidence that socialist construction was not occurring in the People’s Republic of China relied on the fact that the superstructure, here the political form of the state, cannot do anything other than express the exact makeup of its economic base in society. This reduces dialectical materialism to a simple machine, where causes and effects follow in one-sided succession. We must not forget that “Dialectics is the teaching which shows how opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical — under what conditions they are identical, transforming themselves into one another — why the human mind should take these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, transforming themselves into one another,” as Lenin taught in his “Conspectus on Hegel’s The Science of Logic.”

The historical conditions, the circumstances in which something comes into being, must be analyzed to understand the thing. Truth cannot be abstracted. “There is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete,” as Lenin wrote. The superstructure of any given society is not a simple or mechanical expression of its economic basis, but rather is the result of processes occurring over time, with both a past and future. To analyze them as a disconnected sequence of still images is to essentialize them and make them metaphysical concepts.

Although economic relations are always the primary aspect of the base/superstructure pair, economics are not always “in command” at any given time. This would defy dialectical motion. In any given constellation of facts or events, superstructure must temporarily be primary. Failing to understand this reflux of base upon superstructure and superstructure again upon base makes dynamic analysis into something dead, static, and metaphysical — something incompatible with historical materialism or dialectical reasoning.

We have seen this same mechanism at work in the public discourse on Marxism. A thing is this or that, it is or it is not, it possesses an essential feature or it lacks that essential feature. For the Marxist, however, things do not possess essential features in and of themselves but rather are in relations with other things and it is from those relations that attributes arise. As Lenin wrote in On the Question of Dialectics, “The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is then the ‘struggle’ of opposites. The two basic (or two possible, or two historically observable) conceptions of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites (the division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation).”

Defeat the Mechanist and Study Dialectics

Failure to comprehend the true nature of matter and development, the laws of dialectical unity and growth, leads to deeply flawed analysis. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” We can go farther. Without correct revolutionary theory there can be no correct revolutionary movement. We must defeat the mechanistic tendency that suffuses and invades Western science and study dialectics together so that we come to a deep and intimate understanding of the nature of contradictions and self-development. The Workers’ Paradigm group made basic errors in logical analysis because they did not sufficiently study logic, which is the foundation of science. Logic isn’t something that we are simply born knowing; it is acquired through experience. That experience can be refined by study, and in fact has already been refined by others into the rules of logic. By studying and mastering the forms of logic and its syllogisms (that’s how arguments are constructed), Marxists can more quickly analyze the flaws in their own arguments and the arguments of others and much more easily diagnose where the argument has gone astray.

First there comes the circle. These are founded organically and spontaneously by advanced workers and petit-bourgeois intellectuals to study the obvious problems that arise from the grinding wheels of capital. A circle is not an organization; it is a group of like-minded individuals who spend time together. They may pursue collective goals, but there is no permanent organizational form to guide the circle in its action. It is merely unspoken consensus which rules.

The circle can mature into a study group, a form that we at the Clarion have promoted for some time. Study groups harden and temper their membership into trained Communists with a basis in theory. There is currently an anarchistic urge in the West to push immediately to action and abandon theory entirely, or relegate it to a secondary role. We must strongly caution against this. In the period before the formation of the party, in the contradiction between theory and praxis, theory is the dominant aspect. “Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement,” Lenin cautioned. Should circles attempt to leap over theoretical development directly to organized action, they will be unable to chart a steady course, fall victim to major deviations, and eventually collapse from the lack of competent, cadre-level membership.

Study groups become cells, active organizations. Once a study group reaches a certain level of political development, membership, and spare labor-power, the study group can become active and begin practicing Red Aid, strike assistance, and organizing among the masses. A study group that does this has become a cell. Cells band together or expand in membership, sophistication, and capacity to become local organizations of many cells, which focus their activity on a narrow locality. These in turn eventually become regional organizations. The collection of regional and local organizations grows into the proletarian party. We find ourselves in a time when the Communist movement in the West is so disorganized and incoherent as to be nonexistent at any scale larger than individual local organizations. Because we are in this time of chaos, where the movement is not cohering, we cannot rely on central authority to build the party; we must instead, rely on local growth. We must grow from the seeds upward, not from the crown down, otherwise we will not put down stable roots — we will not have connection with the masses, and our local organizations will succumb to wooden dogmatism, opportunism, and blundering. As we wrote in our Unity Prospectus:

Local, primary organizations must be encouraged to grow and band together into leagues. They cannot be subjected to centralization at this stage; they must be free to experiment, raise the level of consciousness, etc. Marxist-Leninists, no matter how dedicated, cannot go into the field and create other Marxist-Leninists out of thin air. The synthesis of Marxism-Leninism must be achieved not by importing organizational practices, but by organically rediscovering them.

No central organization can seed primary organizations if it is determined to retain control over them at this stage. Central organs — of FRSO, for instance — are simply too weak and do not hold the undivided faith of the masses. It is only once the vanguard party is constituted that the primary aspect of this contradiction will shift to centralization.

You must thus become one of these Red Gardeners. It is not enough for a single, or a score of Red Gardeners across the U.S. capitalist empire (and its adjunct Canada) to begin their work. There must be hundreds of Red Gardeners, and ultimately thousands, seeding organizations and tending them. We must nurture dedicated, “high-quality” Communist recruits who will care little for their own personal gains and losses, who will subordinate their own egos to the movement, and be prepared to give everything for the advance of the banner.

Where will we find these seedlings? There are four sources of recruits: personal contacts, group meetings, ideological trainings, and raising class consciousness among the workers. As a local organization grows from a circle to a real organization, its capacity to recruit will expand from the first source, through the second and third, and finally reach the last. When it is a circle, you will draw from personal contacts. When it is a study group, you will draw from group meetings and then ideological trainings. When it is a cell, you will draw from the advanced workers directly, having raised their class consciousness through agitation, propaganda, and practice.

There are those who say that we should simply leap to organizing the masses now! They are mistaken. In the contradiction between the masses and the cadre, it is the cadre which is currently the primary aspect. We do not have a party, so we do not have a corps of dedicated cadre to help direct the movement; we act now as Red Gardeners so that we may create an army of gardeners. We must raise up legions of shepherds and caretakers.

We urge all of our readers: go forth! Tend your garden. Discover your love in the revolution.