Connecticut launched its “Mobile Crisis Intervention Services” with the 211 network in March 2020. 211 operates under a national NGO called United Way, managed by a small group of millionaires who earn six-figure salaries and spend their days fundraising for more donations. Contrary to popular belief, 211 itself does not provide any services; it is designed to connect people to services through its call centers. These have come under strain in recent years due to a 300% increase in call volume since 2019, even excluding Covid-19 cases. At the same time, social services in the state have been cut across the board. To increase 211’s funding at this stage of austerity would only exacerbate the growing frustrations with the network. People often spend hours waiting on the phone only to discover they do not qualify for any services, or the service has been discontinued, or under-funded to the point it is practically useless for them. The purpose of a system is what it does; NGOs like United Way are businesses for the executive board, and they exist to profit off of people’s misery.

When Everard Walker’s family dialed 211 in the morning of February 19, Everard was experiencing a mental health crisis after running out of the medication he needed to eat and sleep. The family specifically requested a social worker be sent to their home for an evaluation, stating that Everard did not pose a risk to himself or others. They deliberately tried to avoid a police response to their home. HPD responded anyway after social workers themselves asked police to arrive at the residence for lethal backup. Originally, two social workers arrived with two police; these responders spoke with the family through the door and at one point entered the home. But they would soon exit the apartment out of an apparent concern that Everard would throw a pot of boiling water at them (this part of the body cam footage has not been released). The “fact” pattern is similar to the murder of Sonya Massey, a Black woman gunned down in her home by police in 2024 for having boiling water on her stove.

The number of pigs arriving at Walker’s home quickly grew to 11 after this “threat” was reported: a Black man in crisis at his home surrounded by family. With this number of police in the hallway, the situation began to deteriorate. After an hour of attempting to get social workers and police into the apartment, Walker’s family began to ask the responders to leave. Perceiving the true quality of the 211 “Crisis Intervention Service” as an escalatory police response in disguise, they wished to deal with the situation on their own to prevent tragedy. HPD did not leave; instead, they rushed Walker’s apartment, shoving aside his screaming daughter who tried to stop them. At least three police officers broke into the apartment and moved to pile on Everard. Everard pushed them back and took out a knife. And this is when Hartford police officer Alexander Clifford shot him in the chest three times. The Attorney General’s Office released a 20 second body cam of the murder, but you do not even need to watch it to know the cops were the aggressors in this wellness check turned murder. The presence of cops in a settler-colony at all is aggression. For social workers to invite cops to a “wellness check” is aggression. Their entry into the family’s home was aggression. That they approached Everard and assaulted his family members was aggression. The family would have been entirely justified in defending themselves by any means necessary when the police approached their household after they were clearly told they weren’t welcome. The bodycam footage shows state sanctioned executioners of nationally oppressed people performing their role to a tee: control, coercion, and murder. There is simply no way for cops to be present in the vicinity of a nationally oppressed individual and for the power dynamic between them to be entirely non-antagonistic.

To label Connecticut’s “Mobile Crisis Intervention Services” as a “policing alternative” would be misinformation. 211 and the services it provides are not law enforcement alternatives; they are law enforcement partnerships. The social workers who receive mental health calls are instructed to work in collaboration with local police. Law enforcement are their partners, as stated by their CEO, and the two groups respond to mental health calls together. This means that if you call 211 and specifically request social workers – like Everard Walker’s family did – several pigs will still respond to the call, ready to arrest or shoot us at their will. The collaboration of social workers, healthcare workers, and the police reveals their character as weapons of the state. This is not to say that social workers and healthcare workers are individually social murderers; rather, the white supremacist system compels them to collaborate with the most violent aspects of that system on all levels. Police lack this nuance. They are taught that there are three types of people in the world: Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs. Sheep are those who want to go about their lives with as few problems as possible. They are weak and needing of protection. Wolves are the Bad people, those who would do harm to Sheep. And police themselves are the Sheepdogs, who corral Sheep and look out for Wolves. This is the lens through which police view us. You are either a Sheep needing direction and authority or a Wolf that needs to be put down. We know how they view Black and Brown people. These national oppressors cannot be reformed.

If police reform can be effective, why does the number of police killings follow a historic upward trend? Why have police become more violent, not less, since the widespread introduction of bodycams? And why do policing alternatives like 211 route directly to the same pigs they are thought to circumvent? In truth, police reforms are only effective for specific classes of people; those who oppress Black and Brown people directly and those who are materially invested in the local political machine. Within the latter we include every single politician and petty-bourgeois leader who pleads for these serial killers to act more demure. Reform is a losing battle for the nationally oppressed as a whole because every reform is enacted alongside the continuous deprivation of material conditions for the nationally oppressed as a class.

For every revolutionary moment that passes with a few reforms, revolution only becomes more remote. Fascism entrenches itself, becomes more disguised, more efficient in its oppression. Seeing reform for what it is doesn’t just provide clarity; it allows us to course-correct and implement some real revolutionary changes to the status quo of our movement. This is how the Black Panther Party responded when Black people were being killed with impunity by police and deputized white supremacists. They created CopWatch Organizations with real weapons and struck fear into their oppressors. They started by forming patrols; following the police, observing arrests from a legal distance, and carrying law books to assert people’s rights. A more modern version of the BPP CopWatch would make use of our cell phones, to film police activity and give us video evidence that the police can’t cover up for months, like they do with body cams. We can look to ICE Rapid Response networks as one current example coupling digital tactics with older models of community defense. Local phone trees direct observers to document ICE calls and interact with their neighbors. Rapid response networks could easily transition or multiply into CopWatch groups as contradictions sharpen. Police murders and surveillance overwhelmingly occur in the segregated Black and Brown neighborhoods. These are the best neighborhoods for residents to form CopWatch organizations.

A CopWatch organization involves a group of people (we have identified 10 as an appropriate benchmark) who respond to police presence in their community by showing up in person to achieve some level of confrontation; in the early stages, this will involve filming police activity with phones and ideally providing helpful information to whoever the police may be harassing. As the organization develops and becomes more trusted in the community, they may find it beneficial to explore more advanced means of intimidation than filming alone. White individuals in organizations need to be prepared to put their bodies between nationally oppressed people and the cops if the situation calls for it. White cadre need to be specially trained in best practices for interceding and deescalating cop aggression. The question of what exactly this should look like can only be determined by practice; interacting with the nationally oppressed to determine the best avenues for white socialists to antagonize the local government.

The police are often one of the sharpest contradictions in a community, but this can only be confirmed through investigation. Some neighborhoods either do not experience a significant police presence yet, or the community members feel that there are other, more pressing issues that deserve initiative from Scientific Socialists. One example of a formation that can still respond to these contradictions is a SafetyWatch. This group can respond to and address a multitude of reported issues in a community, from food scarcity, to housing costs, to unhoused people in need of material support. These groups can carry necessary resources on their person, like narcan, water, or first aid equipment. The purpose of a SafetyWatch is to replace the state-led social services which have proven to be ineffective and/or violent. Instead of state social workers who respond with police, a SafetyWatch responds with the real support that is requested, minus the pigs. The message to the community becomes, “Don’t call the city, call your neighbors.”

For each formation put forward here, CopWatch or SafetyWatch, the question to be asked is, “How does this work advance the cause of Revolution?” This is a question we should be asking ourselves in all the work we choose to do, and we should be able to answer it with confidence. To fail to plan for the decisive path forward with every step we take is to forfeit the future to the reformists, who will cry trained tears for every victim following Everard, while slipping his killers a raise.

The most violent thing you can do is nothing.

On February 27, 2026, eight days after killing Everard Walker, Hartford Police murdered 55 year-old Steven Jones during another mental health call in which an ambulance, not police, was requested. Joseph Magnano shot “Stevie” nine times in the street as residents tried to deescalate the officers. Magnano has since been fired (so he can be moved to another department). The Hartford Police Union is defending the murderer and seeking his reinstatement. A complete piece on the murder of Steven Jones is forthcoming.

The most violent thing you can do is nothing...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Ready

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a call to arms!

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

La luta continua!

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

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

Introductory Note

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

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

On Hobbyism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mao writes in Combat Liberalism:

“Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second,and this gives rise to ideological, political, and organizational liberalism.”⁴

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the facts of the US war against the Iranian people? First, you should know a little bit about the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its relations with the US; the Iranians certainly do. Public memory in the US usually begins with the 1979 hostage crisis. Iranian memory goes back quite a bit further.

In 1921, a cavalry officer named Reza Khan led a coup backed by the United Kingdom and overthrew the Qajar Dynasty of Persia. After World War II, the US started its Cold War against the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In 1951, the people of Iran elected Mohammad Mossaddegh as their Prime Minister. He embarked on a program of nationalization of the Iranian oil fields, which had until then been controlled by and for the profit of a British firm, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation.

The United Kingdom wanted to invade Iran to secure to oil. After all, the entire global economy had switched over to running on oil by 1951 and every Western military power needed oil to run their war machines. They couldn’t let Iran decide who to sell oil to. They might pick the wrong people! US president Harry Truman convinced the British not to act. At the same time, US diplomats assured the Mossaddegh government that the US was their staunch ally. Behind the scenes, the US was preparing to move against Mossaddegh because the US ruling class was afraid that the Soviets might get their hands on Iranian oil.

In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence agents from MI6 orchestrated a coup. They had the Shah issue arrest orders to detain and arrest Mossaddegh and the cabinet of ministers. The initial coup failed and Mossaddegh rallied the masses of Iran to his side. The US sheltered fleeing army officers in CIA stations across Iran, then unleashed them to counter Mossaddegh. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

The Shah needed to shore up his position, since his people despised him for what he had done to their elected champion. So, the US provided the Shah with a nuclear program. They bulked up the Iranian army with massive US weapons sales: the Shah was authorized to purchase almost any non-nuclear US weapons system, and spent over $4.3 billion on sales from the US in 1974. Most importantly, though, the CIA built the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK. They trained this brutal force and, under CIA tutelage, SAVAK tortured and murdered political dissidents until the Shah was overthrown.

In 1979, after nearly three decades of abuse, the people of Iran rose up against the Pahlavi monarchy. They were led by a coalition of Communists, socialists, and Islamic revolutionaries. The revolution in Iran took on an Islamic character because mosques were one of the few places where people could organize without being dragged away by the Shah’s secret police. Islam in Iran thus took on a revolutionary role, rather than a reactionary one such as in Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic Republic today is a Parliamentary Republic with a unique element: the role of the velayat-e-faqih, or the oversight of a political “guardian” and jurist of the faith – the “Supreme Leader” of Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (the IRGC you may have heard about recently) is a secular branch of the Republican government. Uppermost in the political philosophy of every branch of the Islamic Republic is the principle that the Iranian people should never again be pawns of the Western powers.

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been the target of punishing US sanctions. The US has consistently attempted to exert what it calls “maximum pressure” – the same strategy they are applying to Cuba today and that they applied to Chile in the 1970s – to isolate the Iranian economy. This has resulted in countless deaths, and subjected everyone in Iran to collective punishment for daring to overthrow the US-installed dictatorship.

The Fight Against the zionists

The crimes committed by the zionist state in Palestine are not new, but their full extent has only now become undeniable to the US public. Since it was declared, the Islamic Republic has been opposed to the continuing genocide committed by the zionists and has worked tirelessly to assist the Palestinian resistance. This, more than anything else, has been the reason for the continued hostility of the US ruling class against Iran.

The US requires its forward base in the zionist territory for several reasons. It is the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” of US power projection. It keeps the Gulf vassal stats like Saudi Arabia in line, ensures that oil can continue to flow, operates as a relief valve for domestic US class-strife, and helps the totally enmeshed US-zionist tech and computer economy remain afloat. It is, in essence, an extra “frontier” from which land can be stolen to reward corporate enclaves and individual technical specialists.

In the fight for the freedom of Palestine, the Iranian government has been the strongest ally of the Resistance. In a very real sense, it is impossible to stand up for Palestine without standing against the United States. That includes their aggression against Iran.

Are We the Villains?

The fact of the matter is, from a world-historical perspective – from the perspective of anyone who isn’t a white American – the United States is unequivocally and without question the global “bad guy” and has been since at least the end of World War II. The US government is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world. Everybody other than us already knows this! There is no government the US won’t overthrow in the quest for profit or “containment.” Whatever internal criticisms you have of the Iranian government and how it treats its people, never fear – the US government treats people worse.

Most non-aligned states feel the need to develop nuclear weapons to stop the US from invading them. There’s no need to look back in the history books, just look at how Washington treated the sovereign states of Venezuela and Cuba this year! For what? The acquisition of Venezuelan oil, to cut off the flow of oil to China, and to open up Cuba to American investors and hotel magnates.

But let’s walk through the latest timeline of the US interventions in Iran and try to see if there’s any kind of pattern:

July 2015. A comprehensive nuclear enrichment agreement is reached between Iran, the US, and the UN in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

May 8, 2019. Washington unilaterally repudiates the deal.

Jan 3, 2020. Washington kills Iranian general Qassem Soleimani with a missile strike for the crime of being anti-zionist and Iranian.

March 7, 2025. Washington says they want to restart talks.

April 12, 2025. First round of talks are held between intermedaries.

April 19, 2025. Second round of talks.

April 26, 2025. Third round of talks are held, the first where experts from both sides are present.

May 11, 2025. Fourth round of talks are held.

May 23, 2025. Fifth round of talks are held. Both US and Iran report that there has been progress.

June 13, 2025. The zionists bomb Iran while talks are ongoing.

June 22, 2025. The United States bombs Iran during the talks.

July 25, 2025. Iran and European authorities meet.

Sept. 9, 2025. Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog strike a deal.

Sept 28, 2025. The UN places new sanctions on Iran.

Jan. 13, 2026. Washington calls off all further talks.

Feb. 6, 2026. Washington restarts talks.

Feb. 26, 2026. Washington and Iran may have a deal.

Feb 28, 2026. While talks are ongoing, Washington and the zionists pummel Iran with missiles and kill the Supreme Leader and his wife without warning.

The Islamic Republic negotiated in good faith; it reached a deal not once, but repeatedly and it was purportedly very close to a deal on February 26. Their counterparts in Washington used the cover of talks not once but twice to strike Iran. So, who, then, are the villains here?

We Have the Same Enemies

The US ruling class — the capitalists — who control all government policy, who decide when and where the country goes to war, and who engage in the most hideous acts of pedophilia, rape, abuse, and even murder; those people who set up and run the US economy, who profit from your misery, who set the police on you, who pilfer your wages and retirement funds, who have been turning the screws on their economic vise since before you were born, who crashed the economy in 2008 and got away with it… those people are our enemy. If the people of Iran have grievances against their government, it is their fight to carry out when and how they choose. Right now, the might of the US imperial war machine is bearing down on the Islamic Republic of Iran… and the Islamic Republic is winning. Not on the abstract level of vague principles, but on the very real level of fact, Iran’s resistance to US imperialism is weakening our collective enemy.

We should be overjoyed that our oppressors are being bloodied by their ill-conceived attacks. The US strikes on Iran have not weakened it at all; they have made it stronger, unified the people of Iran, and placed command of the Iranian nation in the hands of the secular IRGC.

Iran is striking our enemies for us, dealing blow after blow to the imperialist economy, exhausting the imperialist war materiel with their strategy, while we sit idly by and do nothing.

It comes down to each of us to begin organizing local circles to support the world war on imperialism that is now being waged. We must gather all sympathetic people in our locality and plan ways to slow down or degrade the war machine that is firing missiles and dropping bombs in our names. As we do this, we must not lose sight of the true enemy; it is also up to each of us to combat the ruling class propaganda that asks you to be thrilled at the drama of a downed US pilot. What was that pilot doing there? Do not forget: the enemy of the world is our enemy too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We say that we must come to know the difference between mobilization and organization because the enemy will use mobilization to demobilize us. Mobilization is very easy. Very, very easy. Since we are a people who are instinctively ready to respond against acts of injustice, any time there’s one little act of injustice, we can blow it up and we will find people who will come and make some mass demonstration around it. […] And this is what mobilization does, it mobilizes people around issues. Those of us who are revolutionary are not concerned with issues, we are concerned with the system. The difference must be properly understood. […] Mobilization usually leads to reform action, not to revolutionary action. […] We must transform mobilization to organization. We say the enemy will try to use mobilization to demobilize us. Many brothers and sisters who’ve been to the million and more march will say to you, ‘I was there.’ Well, what are you doing today my sister?

— Kwame Ture

Organizing, Not Merely Mobilizing

We have all heard and seen the mass demonstrations, marches, and walkouts that erupted in the Twin Cities, signaling the start of this year of struggle. We’ve heard the tramp of ten thousand people marching against the occupation, the sounds of mobilization; but beneath it, and lasting beyond, for those who know to listen, is a steadier sound — like whispers, like chants. That of the organizers standing sentry on street corners in the aching cold, coordinating grocery runs, rapid response to raids, and transporting students and workers safely. These bands are built by grassroots organization, and it’s precisely the last lesson our enemies want us to learn.

Five years ago, Minneapolis erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd. For that summer, it seemed every city in the world became an uprising, as Democrats scrambled to take a knee and corporations writhed to retire racist brand mascots and grant better media representation. USU spoke with a Communist on the ground in Minneapolis who has witnessed the sweep of 2020 to the present moment. “During this period, it felt like people were taking power in a way that’d be much bigger,” they told us. “Living in south Minneapolis, a police precinct being lit and set on fire, grocery stores looted and turned into mutual aid sites, 200 buildings going up in flames – that was a lot happening. In that short period of time, it felt more than a moment, but it quickly went away.”

All the energy to abolish the police, or even defund them, was funneled by liberal counterinsurgents into tactics that either wasted the time of great masses of the oppressed, or narrowly appealed to the upper classes of the nationally oppressed through job prospects and investment opportunity.¹ The “moment” that was 2020 evaporated into an utter defeat for the oppressed, and a complete victory for the settler-colonial ruling class that ensures daily the death of a countless unnamed Floyds. The only price paid: a handful of temporary concessions this current regime has already pried back with vengeance, and a single sacrificial pig.

As our comrade in Minneapolis said, “As Communists, we were not organized enough to win the masses over when they were ripe to be captured.”

It is the general consensus of principled Communists that this was a watershed moment wasted. Every failure is a lesson, data in the experiment of social revolution; but if no one is keeping track, if no one is recording the results and learning from past efforts, the movement might as well be hurling human lives at the wall to see what sticks and looking away at each impact. But, as it turns out, something has stuck. Something has lodged itself firmly in the communities of Minneapolis, that all resulting efforts to resist occupation have been able to grow from: organizations, persisting from the embers of 2020 to now. It’s our responsibility to learn from them.

In Minneapolis, there was a massive wave of homelessness at the beginning of COVID. Networks of mutual aid popped up because of that. Then the uprising happened, and people started figuring out how to take care of each other. Figuring out food, how to handle work, those networks were built by organizers, and after the mobilized masses disappeared in 2020, these networks remained.

The remarkable pace at which these networks expanded, from the handful of organizations to the intersecting community webs connecting every single city section, neighborhood, and block proves the lessons that Kwame Ture described so perfectly more than half a century ago. It also shows all of us, empire-wide, a roadmap for how to prepare as these “occupations” escalate. Every city on this land is a garrison fort, palisades replaced by cameras, automatic alarms, and barbed wire, so to call any concentration by the federal government an “occupation” is essentially a misnomer. It is merely a reinforcement. It is a concentration of already-existing state repressive powers. But we must not ignore the difference in form. The organizers in Minneapolis have adjusted to the reality of their new opponents.

All law enforcement in this country can and will kill you, we know that. They’re parts of the same arm in this imperialist state. However, what has become clear with these federal agents is that they do not function on the same playing field as a local PD. They do not operate on the same playing field as the National Guard. […] I don’t know if it’s a martyr complex or just talking shit, but I see this tendency from people who don’t live here when they say, “Stop filming and go de-arrest.” Or, “I wouldn’t let this happen.”

I’ll tell you: you would let it happen, or you’ll get killed.

De-arrest is more common in anarchist circles; anarchists here are not calling for de-arrest anymore that I’ve seen, because it’s understood in the city that we don’t stand any chance. You can de-arrest with the local PD. Not with ICE, because there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll kill you and the person they’re trying to kidnap. In the end, you still won’t stop who they’re trying to kidnap.

The organizers in Minneapolis understand fundamentally the dialectic between theory and practice. They have gathered experimental data from their lives, developed practices, tried and applied this theory, analyzed the results, and developed new theory and new practices. They are at the forefront of the fight against the bourgeois government.

The Four Opportunists and the Spontaneous Movement

As the press organ of the All-Empire Worker’s League, we have already taken a stand against the Four Opportunists, those “organizations” that capture revolutionary and radical energy, sweep up developing Communists and the newly class-conscious, and then negate them by combining them with liberals, by denying them access to the levers of power in their own organizations, by teaching them bad theory, and by burning up their energy through endless mobilization with no strategic goals. The Four Opportunists are the CPUSA, the PSL, the FRSO, and the DSA. (See “The 2026 Outlook of the Central Press” and “Liberalism and Fascism With Communist Characteristics” in the Red Clarion).

In Minneapolis, the growth of the spontaneous movement has continued in the face of the Four Opportunists, specifically the FRSO and DSA. USU has had contact with other Communists in Minnesota who tell us that…

De-legitimizing action and organizing is being done by individuals acting on the behalf of FRSO (DSA was also involved on this front). The hegemony held by FRSO makes this possible, as their cadre members are involved in other orgs. There’s another Somali group in Cedar Riverside who call themselves the Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance, but are democrat adjacent and pro assimilation. They were attempting to de-escalate by gathering all the African folks into their homes for that day, telling them to stand down and not confront [Jack] Lang.² Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance was doing flyering, circulating statements via signal group chats or boosting messages that were calling [an] org ³ outside antagonists with no right to organize in Cedar. They cut off supply lines and disrupted organizing work doing this.

When the fascists came to town, Jack Lang and co., the Coalition Against the Trump Agenda (A group made up of a lot of FRSO front orgs) enacted the strategy of “shadowing” the fascists.

Basically, this amounted to them just following them around and yelling stuff at them. However, things did not play out as FRSO planned. Roughly 1000 folks showed up (the divide between the masses and org affiliated was obvious) to counter around 10 fascists with a banner. The FRSO marshals protected the nazis’ banner from the masses, until they eventually lost control and the banner was destroyed in spite of their efforts. Extreme peace policing.

An additional note to further illustrate the resource strangulation and white chauvinism of FRSO: [a] Somali organization that led the defense action against Jake Lang in Cedar Riverside reached out to the SRA [Socialist Rifle Association] of Minneapolis for a firearms training. They later learned that there is a strong FRSO contingency in SRA. Once SRA realized this Somali organization was the one that held the defense action, SRA informed the organization that they would not move forward since they “created confusion and gave other (FRSO) organizations a hard time.”

From the comrade in Minneapolis:

One thing I can speak to is, right now, not just in Minneapolis, but nation-wide — we’re seeing opportunism. There’s this tailist need to use this term “general strike“ to try and illicit buy-in from people. For these days of action. We saw this last Friday. The labor unions involved, the orgs involved, it was never called a general strike. It was clear we weren’t calling for one. There were outside groups that decided to call it a general strike. […]

When we mislead people into thinking a day of vacation is the same as a general strike, we do an insurmountable amount of damage to education and getting working people to understand the actual risk-reward of going on strike. And dealing blows to capital which is the point of a strike. That is the big criticism I Have right now. The organizations that should and do know better, continue to use words like general strike.

PSL has pursued a similar strategy in Minneapolis: more than any other group, they have misrepresented the effort to organize petty-bourgeois businesses to voluntarily close as a “general strike.” They encouraged people to use paid time off to participate in marches. This is the PSL’s strategy of class struggle — not as the struggle of the lowest elements of the proletariat against the imperialist system, but as the struggle of the petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic layers to achieve limited political aims. This is not revolution. This is counterinsurgency.

The spontaneous development of the people is breaking free of the chains long cast over the struggle for liberation by the Four Opportunists. In every corner of the US Empire, the grip of the opportunists and the tailists is weakening. We must unite the most advanced theory with the most class-conscious elements of the people and we must fight against the settler-socialism of the opportunist groups. What is this settler-socialism? It is the Marxism of capitulation, a form of revisionism that sees reform as the only path forward and puts the question of revolution forever over the horizon. (See “Revolution in Our Lifetime” in the Red Clarion). In FRSO and PSL, this is partially accomplished through the deceptive organizational structure in which access to internal documents and planning is entirely isolated and inaccessible; day to day members of these organizations are encouraged to pay into them and attend marches, but the strategic and tactical level operates at one remove from the general membership. All decisions are made by a secret group of select few — Blanquism, in other words. (See, for instance, “The Cult Building Tendency” in the Red Clarion). Have you seen calls for marches spring up with less than 24 or 48 hours notice? That’s the work of the Four Opportunists. Whether it is their intention or not, the material result is the bleeding off of revolutionary energy into channels that are acceptable to the ruling class. In truth, it is an attempt to find accommodation with the ruling class and demand a different distribution of power within the imperialist system. It is the plea of the imperialist labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie (who overwhelmingly command the Four Opportunists) for more spoils to be allocated to them and for a greater degree of input into the empire’s political system.

For more on the Four Opportunists and our criticisms, see generally “Stagnant Parties Don’t Deserve Your Time” in the Clarion, and…

CPUSA – “A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words,” “Why I Left the CPUSA”

PSL – “Revolution in Our Lifetime”

FRSO – “The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO,” “Forward Out of FRSO”

DSA – “Triumph For the Zionist Left”

We, and the organizers in Minnesota, reject this settler bargain.

The League Principle

We require a country-wide organization to fight both the Four Opportunists and their labor-aristocratic/petty-bourgeois base and the bourgeois state itself. The lessons of Minneapolis are clear: it is possible to bring elements of the imperialist working class into direct and antagonistic contradiction with the state when we move our strategic goals out of the narrow realm of wage increases and into the realm of the national liberation struggle. White anarchists and Communists, petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic elements, have joined the national liberation struggle against ICE. Breaking the law for the first time, acting directly against the state for the first time, opens a new world of revolutionary potential among the labor aristocracy. Show them that it is possible to oppose the state, rather than seek accommodation with it, and we develop the subjective awareness of revolution. Revolutionary potential is created within otherwise reactionary elements of the population.

However, this is only possible with uncompromising proletarian leadership. Without the anchor of a revolutionary, proletarian organization, opportunism is the unavoidable result. Those members of the imperial labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie who will not voluntarily surrender their class-outlook and who will not voluntarily subject themselves to proletarian class-leadership are our objective enemy.

The principle of the League is the intermediary principle between our present stage of development (scattered, ideologically incoherent, with the presence of small pockets of developed Communist organization at the local level) and the militant party-form. Yes, we need a party of the new (new) type, as the All-Empire Worker’s League has put it,

It’s not enough, though, to just state the obvious: that the US in 2025 is not Russia in 1917, it is not China, it is not Viet Nam, it is not a semi-feudal country or a country in the global periphery. The US is the center of world-capitalist reaction, an imperial hegemon that acts as the backstop and system of last defense for capitalism across the entire world. No metropolitan country has ever seen a successful proletarian revolution….

We must create a vanguard organization of the working class that can purge all opportunism and revisionism from its ranks, educate and elevate the working masses, defeat internal and external chauvinism, unite the liberation struggles of the colonies and semi-colonies, and prepare the reserves of the revolutionary proletariat for direct confrontation — for direct class war — with the enemy state, with bourgeois civil society, and with the world-bourgeoisie themselves, who largely reside within the US-Canadian bloc. In order to satisfy these requirements, we must creatively apply the lessons of 1905, of October, of the course of struggle in China, Viet Nam, Ghana, and the whole periphery.

While we work to create this party, we must organize our various local organizations together and take advantage of the benefits this centralization can provide. While a League is not yet a party, it is an organization of organizations. We have discussed the formation of regional leagues in the Clarion in the past (see “Towards a New York City League of Workers and Students” and “Towards a Boston League of Workers and Students”). It is through this process of regional organization that we can build our capacity to resist the state as well as the class forces that tend to drag Communist-oriented projects in the US empire toward opportunism.

Since 2025, the All-Empire Worker’s League has worked to integrate local organizations and propagate, develop, and advance the theory necessary to combat the opportunists and the bourgeois imperialists. In areas with a high concentration of developed local organizations that are actually engaged in class struggle against the state, we urge them to band together to resist opportunism and form centralized organs of class power.

In regions where the struggle has not yet been heightened to the same degree as in Minneapolis, we urge local organizations to prepare for the same degree of struggle. Our sources on the ground warn that unless we prepare in advance, we will be caught off guard. Washington is willing to kill to suppress class-consciousness and solidarity between the imperialist labor aristocracy and the US proletariat. We have to be ready to counter that violence with the main weapon we have: organization!

Footnotes:

1. Black, Too and Rasul A. Mowatt. Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. Routledge, New York, NY, 2024. Introduction, xi-xxiii and 138-145. ︎
2. Jack Lang is a pardoned January 6th rioter and fascist agitator. ︎
3. “[…] a group of communists who have been organizing in Minneapolis and Saint Paul who are critical of the established Left in the region and are actively attempting to build a viable decolonial Marxist alternative[…]” — From the Communists in Minneapolis. ︎

Editor Note: This piece was drafted before the empire and its vassal state escalated into all-out war with Iran. We have kept the language the same. For more info on our analysis and position on that subject, see our article, “TURN THE WORLD WAR INTO A CIVIL WAR”.

On February 24, 2026, the goblin-king of the high petty bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the settler labor aristocracy took the podium in the heart of the Burgerreich to deliver his paean to US military and economic power. Amidst what has become an all–too–typical celebration of US empire, the chief executive officer of the imperialist plunder machine delivered a few remarks that we should pay attention to. Yes, his rambling, often unfocused speech was full of little misrepresentations and outright lies,¹ but more importantly, it was filled with signals about class policy.

We have to remember the intended audience for big events like this. It’s televised and scrutinized by the politically active members of the US labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie and sometimes analyzed by the ruling class of other countries for signs about presidential plans.² This isn’t the imperialist bourgeoisie talking to itself; this is the executive branch of government setting out its bait for the masses of labor aristocrats. We have to keep that in mind when assessing the truth of the regime’s claims. This isn’t a board meeting, but rather an advertising campaign.

So what did the Burgher King say?

He was less combative in defense of ICE and CBP than he has been in the past – in fact, he didn’t mention any DHS agency by name. This reflects the government’s awareness that the federal occupation of Minnesota is deeply unpopular. Trump’s regime has been widely unpopular with the middle and lower petty bourgeoisie, but it can only continue its course with support from the labor aristocracy and upper petty bourgeois elements.³ Trump himself must be seen to bridge the gap between the ruling class and the reactionary labor aristocracy in order for the right-fascist coalition to maintain its integrity. 

The speech was peppered with shout outs to members of the US imperialist armed forces,⁴ and “victims” of immigrants as well as a handful of labor aristocrats who, thanks to the Burgher King, have finally managed to become landed property owners and fulfill the American Dream of owning a plot of land. Kissing the dirty boots of this sovereign, every parasite can be a franchisee – to every roach, a toy with their meal. 

Yes, Trump also thanked some members of the ruling capitalist class by name (Michael and Susan Dell and Brad Gerstner) while at the same time sounding the false populist drum of the Stop Insider Trading Act.⁵ The goal of this rhetorical move, of course, is to contrast the “good” ruling class (capitalists) with the “bad” ruling class (politicians) while obscuring the real relation between them, that members of Congress are the servants of the capitalist class.

By far the bulk of the speech was devoted to nativist fear mongering about immigrants. It also included naked threats issued to Iran, demanding the Iranian state surrender its nuclear weapons program or suffer an invasion.⁶ There was a token reference to the policy of trans genocide (inverted, of course, as “saving” children). In its entirety, the speech was clearly aimed at stoking the traditional US middle-class militarism and strengthening the regime’s basis among the labor aristocrats they have been alienating with their Minneapolis operation. The Burgher King attempted to negotiate this while downplaying the fault-line he has opened with the US vassals in NATO.⁷

The regime’s rhetorical commitment to the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie remains loud and steadfast. Trump referred to: a state college savings program for children designed to increase class mobility, a federal pension program for private employees to maintain government savings accounts and putting them on the federal dole,⁸ his success in keeping mortgage rates down to make housing affordable, and keeping property rates high for the value of housing and land to remain a viable path for investment and class ascension to the labor aristocrats.

In the wings, the imperialist bourgeoisie are slavering for war in Iran, occupation of Venezuela, and increased pressure on the US working class.⁹ The main media outlets, which deliver news to the vast majority of the US population, have neither attacked nor defended the speech except to note where it was factually inaccurate. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Democratic “opposition,” stood and applauded when the Burgher King called for war in the Middle East.

As long as the labor aristocracy stands by the side of the big imperialists, the revolutionary situation will never mature fully. There is an opportunity, here and now, to break this connection. As the Trump regime moves into territory ever-more-fervently desired by the big bourgeoisie, our window for the wedge grows wider. We must break the complacency of the labor aristocrats away from the imperial bourgeoisie; the only way to do that is to build up the revolutionary consciousness and organizational level of the real proletariat and force the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie into a reckoning with its material complicity with the terror-regime of Washington.

1. The rate of inflation has been 3% and 2.8% for the first two months of this year, not “the lowest level in more than five years,” even if you take just the CPI. ︎
2. Nielsen estimates that 36.6 million people viewed the SOTU address and 70.7% of those viewers were 55 or older. https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2026/32-6-million-watch-2026-state-of-the-union-address/ ︎
3. The MAGA approach has been to try to fuse the labor aristocracy (the middle and upper ranks of the imperialist proletariat) with the high petty bourgeoisie. ︎
4. Buddy Taggart, a WWII soldier; Sarah Beckstrom, the West Virginia National Guardsman who was killed in DC; Andrew Wolfe, another Guardsman; Eric Slover, one of the Special Forces animals who kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela; 10 other unnamed special forces dogs; and navy murderer Royce Williams, who fought against the self-determination of the Koreans in Korea and the Vietnamese in Viet Nam. ︎
5. He named Nancy Pelosi by name as a corrupt politician. ︎
6. “[T]hey were warned… yet they continue starting [the program] over…. We are in negotiations with them…. But we haven’t heard those secret words, ‘we will never have a nuclear weapon.’” ︎
7. See, for instance, “Too late, Trump envoys try to reassure Europe,” in The Economist. ︎
8. Direct payments to the labor aristocrats for their loyalty! ︎
9. The Wall Street Journal recently published the articles “Violent Militias Stand Between the US and Venezuela’s Vast Mineral Riches,” “Trump Hails an Economic Turnaround Many Voters Don’t See,” and “America’s Bills Will Come Due.” ︎

This past January the All-Empire Worker’s League resolved that Unity–Struggle–Unity shall officially be the League Press, making it the central voice of the AEWL to combat the Four Opportunist organizations, and to help guide and unite our comrades.

Together, through struggle toward unity!

Presently, the primary aspect of the Communist movement in the US-Canadian bloc is disorganization and incoherence. This is not accidental. It is caused by the underlying primary contradiction in the settler-states: that between settler-relation and national liberation. In our movement, this manifests as a contradiction between settler socialism — in essence, nothing more than a virulent form of the “great nation” chauvinism that poisoned the Second International — and the national liberation struggle of the oppressed nations in the colonies and semicolonies, both internal and external, of the US empire and its junior partners Canada and Mexico.

At this time, there is no one organization embodying the class power of the organized US proletariat. The existing “Marxist” organizations are universally anti-democratic; they universally embody the class power of the US petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy. They are vehicles of chauvinism and tailism for this reason and can do little more than trail behind the Democrats, or march around in the street doing nothing meaningful, or join in the corrupt industrial business unionism of the settler unions.

Unity–Struggle–Unity Press was initially founded to address the general incoherence of the Communist movement. During its four-year history it has been forced to confront the underlying contradiction again and again in its work to unify the movement. To put it clearly: it is good that the movement is not presently unified, because this would be a false unity. It would be a stifling unity under the leadership of the chauvinist, opportunist, and tailist elements that presently dominate and control the CPUSA, DSA, PSL, and FRSO.

We do not arrive at this conclusion lightly, but through long struggle with each of these opportunist organizations. Although each may contain individuals or cliques of eager revolutionaries, the net effect of the four all-empire “Marxist” organizations is to isolate these revolutionary individuals and negate them by intermixing and countering them with innumerable reactionaries, tailists, and American and Canadian chauvinists. Even where whole cliques and groups of principled Marxists manage to gather within these organizations, they are eventually cut out to preserve the essentially counter-revolutionary character of the Four Opportunists. As proof, we point to the debacle of the 2022 CP Canada convention in which they violated their own rules to protect sexual abusers, to the expulsion and silencing of avowed Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries within the CPUSA in 2024 for the crime of advocating revolution and community self-defense, to the purge of members concerned with sex abuse and cover ups in the leadership of PSL and, most recently, the same within FRSO. The structure of these organizations does not permit constructive struggle. They cannot be saved. Their structure ossifies a self-selecting leadership caste that can never be ousted and whose chosen heirs are anointed to their seats. It reposes in this caste both money and resources, giving them added incentives to ensure they can never be removed.

This press and the All-Empire Worker’s League are thus implacably opposed to the continued existence, in their present forms, of the Four Opportunists. Our work requires us to continuously expose them for what they are: liquidators of the class struggle, engines of settler socialism, and, at the end of the day, social chauvinists and social imperialists incapable of mounting any real opposition to the bourgeois state even if they wanted to, which they manifestly do not.

The purpose of this Press is two-fold. First, it is our aim to expose those opportunist organizations that betray the social revolution in word and deed and, in exposing them, free those principled Communists who are held captive by them. We will strike them again and again. With each hammer-blow of truth, we will shake free some of those trapped by the mistaken hope that these revisionist organizations represent ready-made tools left by our forebears with which to attack our enemies.

The second purpose of the Press is to act as the central voice for the All-Empire Worker’s League. The League is a party-building secondary organization comprised of local, principled, decolonial Marxist-Leninist organizations. The Red Clarion is the League’s paper; it will carry news and announcements, analysis and guidelines, material suitable for both a mass audience and our more politically developed comrades alike.

The people need a press! The labor aristocrats must be broken away from their own bourgeoisie. The nationally oppressed peoples must strike at the state. The masses are moving, and we must move at their head or risk being left behind. Thus, ever forward, to heighten the struggle; we carry the fight to the foe!

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

Fight, fail, fight again!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dialectical method represents humanity’s most revolutionary approach to understanding the contradictory nature of reality and its potential for transformation. In order to understand something as it truly exists in the world, we need to study it from many angles and perspectives. Knowledge is a process, and it contains lower and higher stages; these stages of understanding proceed from shallower to deeper understandings of any given subject. The subject of our report is a single city in Occupied North America: the city of Hartford, Connecticut. We cannot expect to understand the city’s conditions based on what we as individuals can see and hear. On one hand, an individual cannot observe every occurrence in the city at once. On the other hand, our human sense perceptions are inherently skewed. Sense perception is biased according to an individual’s upbringing, class position, and other factors which tend to form different worldviews in different people. Since our perception of the real world is inherently skewed, we use investigation to develop our understanding from the shallowest to the deepest level; from sense perception, to abstract knowledge, to theory. The correct understanding we develop from investigation serves as a stepping stone for addressing the contradictions we find; before we can hope to change the world, we must proceed from a correct understanding. Our social investigation in Hartford, Connecticut is an attempt to better understand the city’s local contradictions beyond what we study in headlines and data. Regional history is summarized from a de-colonial perspective beginning at the time of settler arrival; this marks the beginning of the local settler-Indigenous contradiction, with indigeneity manifesting and receiving shape through its antagonistic relationship with colonialism. Current demographics and recent population changes are displayed through maps. Gentrification is occurring, as can be inferred from the 53% population increase in the Downtown area in the last 10 years, but more investigation is necessary to view how this economic displacement manifests across national (racial) lines. Our findings indicate that national (racial) contradictions continue to define the overall distribution of power and wealth in the city. Hartford as a whole receives unfathomable benefits from the US-led exploitation of the Global South, but the wealth which is stolen from the international Proletariat is not distributed equally among USians. It is distributed through the national, settler-governed hierarchy. This is one reason why the overall economic position of Black residents in Hartford has not changed in any significant way since the 19th century. Our findings indicate that state welfare programs are increasingly unable to manage the class contradictions between US workers and their capitalists. The number of homeless continues to increase at a steady rate. There were 9.5% more homeless people in Hartford in 2025 than in 2024. Since 2021, the number has increased by a striking 45%, primarily due to rising housing costs. One specific manifestation of the crisis is a new prevalence of tent-encampments in the city’s parks. We hope this social investigation of the Park St. area will lead to clear-sighted organizing efforts based on a correct understanding of local, national, and international contradictions. More social investigations are necessary in other parts of the city, especially the North End.

Local History

The Connecticut River Valley was home to many Indigenous tribes before European settler colonialism. The area now known as Hartford was held by the Suckiag Tribe until they were ethnically cleansed by Dutch and English settlers. Suckiag was valuable due to its prominent position along the Connecticut River. Ever since the displacement of its Indigenous populations, the city now known as Hartford has been a “rearguard garrison”¹ for settler colonialism in Occupied North America and imperialism across the globe. When English Hartford was founded in 1636, the Connecticut colony consisted of scattered settlements along the Connecticut River. These towns acted in self governance for the first time to declare war against the Pequot Nation, which governed what is today southeastern Connecticut. Settlers from the river valley towns sent delegates to Hartford, where the colonial court issued its decree to recruit 30 men from each town to commit genocide of the Pequot. The English also recruited hundreds of soldiers from the Narragansett and Mohegan Nations to assist in the war effort. Together, they killed most of the Pequot and forced the survivors into slavery, with the English seizing all their land. The English successfully took advantage of the competition between Indigenous nations in Connecticut, a tactic of exploiting existing contradictions the modern U.S. state now regularly employs to destabilize nations. Of course, the temporary allies, the Narragansett and Mohegan, also saw all of their land – at first slowly, then all at once – stolen by settlers in the ensuing, decades-long land grab. 

Hartford’s dominant industries at this time were agriculture and rum distillation. Both were dependent on slave labor; in Hartford, Black and Indigenous enslaved people worked the farms, while in the Caribbean they harvested sugarcane that was fermented and shipped up the eastern coast to Hartford and other northern cities. These Caribbean plantations were made dependent on such cities for food supplies, because even though the islands could grow ample food, sugar was the only crop produced on the land since it was more profitable to sell. The Caribbean experienced waves of manufactured famine that continue to this day. Census data for slavery in Hartford only goes back to 1791. In that year there were 263 enslaved people in Hartford out of 2,764 in the state. There were 430 “free persons” (free Black citizens) in Hartford who were members of the city’s proletariat and sub-proletariat. The first recorded murder victim in Hartford was a Black man named Louis Berbice, murdered by his enslaver in 1639. The enslaver, Edward Opdyck, faced no punishment. 

From Garrison Town to Inventor’s Workshop

Hartford became a manufacturing city beginning around the 1850s, when Samuel Colt opened the largest private gun factory in the world. Colt revolvers were key to westward expansion, used by both individual settlers and the U.S. army. A half century earlier, Eli Whitney initiated the local mass production firearms industry with the interchangeable parts design, developed out of a factory in New Haven. A year later, he would invent the cotton gin, kickstarting an exponential expansion of slavery production and New Afrikan misery. Additional companies, such as Billings and Spencer, Spencer Arms, Winchester Repeating Arms, and Smith & Wesson have bestowed a historic tie between settler militarism and Connecticut. 

The city’s role in colonial occupation did not change, but its form of service took on a new, advanced appearance. Amerika’s new settler armies needed advanced, mass-produced weaponry that could overwhelm the western Indigenous nations still fighting for their national territory. Tucked away safely in the Northeast and bolstered by several centuries of superprofits, Hartford was well-positioned to serve as an inventor’s workshop for the next era of military technology. 

We see the same transition fulfilled today by “israel” in Occupied Palestine. The zionist entity is both a garrison launchpad for the U.S. in Asia, and the empire’s principal inventor of military technology. Their weapons are primarily used against Palestinians to continue the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Their secondary purpose is that of testing and experimentation; advanced technology is exported from occupied Palestine to wherever in the world the empire needs them for asymmetric violence, including U.S. cities such as Hartford. 

From Inventor’s Workshop to Financial Hub

Hartford’s modern image as a finance center is characterized by massive insurance companies whose offices take up most of the city skyline. Connecticut’s capital is the birthplace of the insurance business itself. River captains, dealing in enslaved people and foodstuffs for slavery plantations, wanted to avoid the expectable financial hits from the dangerous sailing business; storms, piracy, and disease were threatening enough to the capitalists’ fortunes that it benefited the overall class to compensate one another when an individual merchant lost their investment. Thus, they created a system of profit and risk sharing among the merchant class. The financial logistics of slavery laid the foundation for the emergence of the insurance industry. Hartford is still considered the insurance capital of the world, although there are fewer actual insurance employees working in the city than in the past. 150 of these companies generate $16 billion a year combined. They are centered in the downtown area and housed in the largest office buildings. This industry is, of course, white dominated.

Lastly, Hartford and Hartford county continue to serve the U.S. war machine with several weapons manufacturers. In West Hartford, the Colt factory produces M4 rifles that are continuously sent to Occupied Palestine. The modern “inventor’s workshop” has moved across the Connecticut River to East Hartford, where Raytheon operates a five-story “research” facility to engineer new weapons systems like radars, missiles, and drones for the US and its vassals. A short walk away, Pratt & Whitney builds engines for the F35 fighter jet. While many of these weapons workers are commuters, it is also the perception among community members that the companies are too powerful and entrenched for anti-imperialists to challenge them.  Tracking the city’s development from garrison fortress, to inventor’s workshop, to financial hub of global imperialism, can we really say Amerika was ever not fascist? No, we cannot; it is only the form and proximity to genocide that has changed. 

Demographics

The city has 17 neighborhoods, which are more sharply segregated by national and class contradictions than the average U.S. city. Population maps show that the New Afrikan population is primarily segregated to the north end of the city. The New Afrikan neighborhoods are separated from the Hispanic neighborhoods by insurance offices and the I-84 highway, constructed in 1964 to connect the downtown offices with the white suburbs in West Hartford. As in many cities, the construction of the giant highway through the city devastated the “minority” neighborhoods it crossed over. 

National Groups in Hartford according to 2020 census

Map of the I-84 Highway through Hartford

Although the downtown area saw the highest rate of population growth between 2010 and 2020 (increasing by 53%), this area is still notoriously empty at night and on weekends, when office commuters leave for the suburbs. Downtown is the only neighborhood with a majority white population in Hartford. Note that the North Meadows neighborhood has no official population, since the area contains the Hartford Prison and commercial businesses. (See below.)

Hartford Neighborhoods, Population Change 2010 – 2020

We began our social investigation at the intersection of Park and Main St. In 1969, this intersection was the site of an uprising of the Puerto Rican community against a white biker gang. As the story goes, a white man belonging to the Comanchero biker gang assaulted an elderly Puerto Rican, and the community decided they had had enough. The groups confronted each other in the streets, but Hartford police only arrested Puerto Ricans. This agitated the community even further. The cycle of protesting, followed by police repression, followed by even heavier protesting, would continue for weeks, until an even greater escalation occurred. On August 29, 1969, West Hartford police shot Dennis Jones, a 16 year old New Afrikan, to death. Two days after the murder, a slumlord tenement building burned down, killing three people. These two events were too much for the community to bear, and people took to the streets against both police and white-owned businesses in the north end. But unlike the “Comanchero clash,” this time New Afrikans and Puerto Ricans fought together. The protests spread from the Clay Arsenal Neighborhoods, through downtown, and into Charter Oak and South Green. By September 5, over 500 people had been arrested and 4 people were shot. 

1969 Hartford Uprisings, August-September 1969

This one and a half month period marks the most significant uprising of the oppressed communities in Hartford. Since then, Puerto Ricans have gained representation on the Hartford City Council, giving the community a chance for a larger “piece of the pie” of imperial superprofits. They now have a place in government to address economic inequalities and police oppression. Of course, representation in local politics has not smoothed over the glaring contradictions between different nations in Hartford. Puerto Ricans are still concentrated in specific neighborhoods that receive lower investment ratings than nearby white neighborhoods, and the contradictions of homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty are more present in the Hispanic neighborhoods than in the white-dominated West End. Puerto Ricans make up 74% of the Hispanics in Hartford, but there is a significant Dominican population (8%) now as well. 

Beginning each outing with a briefing of goals and logistics, we set out in both directions along Park Street and the surrounding area. Below are the major contradictions we observed. 

A Note On Methodology 

Methodology refers to a system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity. As Scientific Socialists, our area of study is the material world. Our activity is Social Revolution. This means that we study the material world in order to apply the data we perceive — creatively and usefully — towards our material goals. In the context of a social investigation in Occupied North America, our methodology guides us to find those pockets of space and human groupings which could be the situs of a Communist beginning. 

In practice, this means we need to do a cursory study of the local area before committing to a social investigation on the ground. This introductory investigation may require more than just visual information (the phenomena we can see with our eyes in a community). Most often, we will need to study economic and political data as well. For example, studying that an area has an average household income which is significantly less than bordering neighborhoods could clue us in towards an investigation in that area.  

We chose Park St. for several reasons:

1. The area has a high proportion of nationally oppressed people, primarily from Occupied Puerto Rico, but also from the Dominican Republic and other Spanish speaking countries. 
2. ICE has kidnapped more immigrants in Hartford than in any other city. 
3. Most of our political education work occurs in Hartford, making it the best area from which to draw labor. 
4. Visibly, we observe a high degree of homelessness in the Park St. area. 
5. The street has a number of empty residential buildings, indicating ongoing gentrification.

Groups committing to social investigation may use a variety of methods depending on their local area. We conducted our investigation using face-to-face conversations on the street level. Local zoning is commercial-residential, with all residences contained in apartment buildings (which prevented us from knocking door-to-door). We chose not to use a questionnaire, opting for open-ended questions that would generate the most variety of opinions. This was our first investigation conducted in this area, so we wanted to garner the widest possible web of information before narrowing our scope of work.

Homelessness

Roughly one third of the people we interviewed were experiencing homelessness of some sort. Some were living in a shelter or a halfway house. Others reported living outside in parks or under building edifices. One person reported an incident of homeless displacement by the city. According to the community member, a group of people were previously sleeping in tents at Barnard Park. The city reportedly moved them and their belongings to a larger park elsewhere in the city, after complaints of drug use. Of course, these community members reported huge difficulties finding housing in Hartford and Connecticut. 

For every one homeless person, there are 28 abandoned properties. At the site of the Comanchero riot, a new luxury apartment building sits empty. Buildings just like it are being built in several neighborhoods, increasing rent beyond what people can afford. For example, in the North End Blue Hills neighborhood, aging and starved of government investment, the Bowles Park Public Housing Complex was torn down to be replaced with Willow Creek. The new development having fewer dwellings is part of the reason why the Blue Hills population decreased 13% between 2010-2020. 

Of the people we spoke to who did have housing, many reported homelessness as the biggest issue in the city. Some had been homeless previously themselves. We also spoke to people who disparaged the homeless, to varying degrees, for presumed drug use and lack of social etiquette. Most, however, assign blame in both directions; they might blame the individual for poor choices, while the government is blamed for not helping them. There was a common understanding that the shelter and post-incarceration assistance programs do not help people find permanent housing. To this, several people brought up abuse that takes place within the shelter system.

In connection with the lack of housing, another major contradiction we observed is the dominance of slumlords. Just about everyone we spoke to who had housing was a renter. Most, if not all, complained about their rents going up every year. We could have asked more follow up questions about people’s specific living conditions, such as whether repairs are made, whether security deposits are returned, etc.  At times, our investigators were too focused on getting a general sense of the neighborhood’s problems, and this likely caused us to leave certain wells of information untapped. One reason for this error was that we were looking for broad themes of oppression, themes that could take center stage in a future agitation program. But any possible theme would depend on the experiences of individuals in the Park St. area, therefore we should have sought a detailed explanation of exactly why housing access is such an issue in the neighborhood. The individual and the whole are two ends of the same dialectic, and we should ruthlessly investigate both if we expect to organize in any community. Going forward, we have a better idea of when we need to ask more follow-up questions, and we declare our intention to do so in the future. As part of our investigation process, some of our investigators created a hotline for community members to report incidences of abuse by the structures that be. People can now report slumlords, police brutality, ICE activity, and other instances of oppression to this hotline. This reporting would not only continue the investigation process, but refer us toward material injustices which could form the basis of a future program. A future program could take on one of several forms: agitation, Mass Meetings, Community Defense or CopWatch, Red Aid (Communist form of Mutual Aid), or another experimental program that solidifies our contacts with the masses. 

Police

Several community members reported feeling a sense of danger on and around Park St., especially at night. They reported high rates of crime and heavy drug use. When asked about solutions to these problems, several responded that more police were needed. This was a relatively prominent idea of a solution for many people. A slightly lower number of people had nothing but bad things to say about the Hartford police. They reported corruption, harassment, and a lack of material assistance from the police. Based on these conversations, the contradiction between police and the oppressed communities is not the sharpest contradiction in this part of the city, currently. However, this is an issue that needs to be “brought back” to the people in subsequent outings. Hartford currently has 3.42 police officers for every 1,000 residents, while the national average in cities of similar size is 1.6. Hartford already has over twice as many police officers as comparably sized cities. The city spends 8.8% of its budget on police. Hartford is happy to throw as much money as possible into the police force. 

However, the community either does not perceive this outsized number of police, or the police do not prevent crime in the way community members expect. We know that the latter is the case, and that police do not prevent crime. In order to bring this issue back to the community, our investigators need to explore some tactical questions that get to the heart of the fundamental antagonism between the community and the police force. Some questions we may wish to put forward are: 

• What kinds of crime do you perceive most in the community? 
• If the current number of police is not enough to prevent crime, how would increasing their numbers address the problem?
• How could the community itself perform the task of protecting local residents?

We should also bring forth the current statistics that show an already outsized police force to cast doubt on the idea that more police would reduce crime.  

Occasionally, the people we were interviewing would ask us about our ideas for solutions to these contradictions. We generally responded with a critique of state institutions and the fact that they do not help the people. We highlighted the need for grassroots organizing that did not simply participate in the election cycle. Most responded positively to these ideas, and were happy to share their contact info to keep up with our progress. On this note, we could have done a better job at seeking the community’s participation in the social investigation itself. A common goal of social investigation is to recruit those you are interviewing – the people who actually live there – into the project itself. 

Individualism 

Individualism was a very common outlook among the people we spoke to. In regards to problems in the city, one person phrased it as “caring but not caring.” We have heard nearly verbatim reports from other social investigations in the past. Previously, someone phrased it as, “It’s like I give a fuck but at the same time I don’t.” This tells us that community members perceive the contradictions around them, but do not believe there is any movement currently capable of addressing them. The result is a recognition of existing oppression, and perhaps feeling bad about it, but not yet taking the crucial step of organizing the community. 

Mutual Aid Groups

We encountered one mutual aid/ charity group, Food4Lives, conducting a free lunch program in Barnard Park. The organizers were from a different area, considering the large amount of cars they brought. They serve meals once a week, drawing crowds of over 50 people each time we see them. We did not interact with the group, mainly because all of the members were busy serving meals to the large crowd. We were also somewhat skeptical of what information the organizers could provide on the local community. In hindsight, this was an error on our part because we should not neglect interacting with organizers who may be from outside the community, especially considering we are also not residents of the Park Street neighborhood. We did speak to some community members who were waiting in line for food, who reported that the group has been serving meals consistently for several months. 

Based on their website, Food4Lives does not appear to have a firm ideological standpoint besides feeding the homeless through regular meal services. Their vision is “a community where homelessness is addressed with compassion, empowering every individual to rebuild their lives.” We will make sure to interact with the group the next time we see them in person. In the meantime, our investigators should brainstorm ways in which we can constructively struggle alongside existing charity groups such as Food4Lives. 

From Investigation, to Agitation, to Organization

Social investigation is an important first step to community organizing, but we cannot investigate forever. Once enough information has been gathered and the key contradictions are identified, the organizers should collectively synthesize this information before returning to the community with the “new” information. To “synthesize” means to combine a number of things into a coherent whole. By synthesizing contradictions, we are taking the reported issues and connecting them to the capitalist system as whole. Therefore, when we return to the community with this synthesized information, it is not “new,” but it is being presented in a different form.  

The agitation stage can take the form of speaking with people, posting flyers, or other creative means of propaganda. Whereas social investigation is primarily about listening to the concerns of community members, agitation requires a more mutual conversation. Social investigation is listen, listen, listen, while agitation is listen, respond, listen, respond. It is a conversation in which we expose the contradictions in their barest form, while gauging the community member’s own opinions and political consciousness. 

For example, we know that homelessness is a fundamental law of capitalist development, that this sub-proletariat serves as a reserve labor pool for the capitalist, and that the Amerikan welfare system tries to paper over this contradiction with a small percentage of imperialist superprofits. In the social investigation phase, we hear all varieties of opinion on the homelessness question. We hear both sympathy and chauvinism from property owners. In the agitation phase, we may push back on chauvinist ideas from the petit-bourgeois, in order to investigate which, if any, progressive causes can be used to organize small property owners. For example, a renter may say something along the lines of, “I feel bad for the homeless and I know pushing them out won’t solve the problem, but I hate it when they trespass on my property.” A statement like this shows at least some level of consciousness on the homeless question, but there is still a clear element of respect for private property and a short term interest in labor discipline against the homeless. This sentiment is also another example of individualism; empathy for the homeless person is subverted because they are being personally impacted in a negative way. While we may not fully challenge these ideas on a social investigation, we should challenge them when we return to the community for agitation. 

Among those already displaying a revolutionary, or at least anti-state, consciousness, we can take the conversations much further, and even begin to approach the person’s thoughts on organization. 

We should expect the politically advanced individual to hold unacknowledged contradictions in their ideology. For example, a person may agree with the need to organize the community, and to hold mass meetings outside the electoral framework. In this same conversation, the same community member might express the long term goal of setting up a non-profit organization, applying for grant money, and other forms of integration with the state. We would agree with the need for grassroots organizing and mass meetings, but would almost certainly disagree with the notion of embedding ourselves in the non-profit complex. Those grants generally come with strings attached. The agitation stage is the correct time to pose these problems to the community member, to start a conversation around correct organizing models. 

The agitation phase should be used as a precursor to more grounded and collective forms of organization. We have identified the mass meeting as one possible method having significant potential in many oppressed localities. The mass meeting is not a new concept, having been utilized by Indigenous nations for centuries, as well as among the “heretics” in Medieval Europe. In more recent times, both the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) took their original forms through a series of mass meetings. For more information on the Mass Meeting, read The Mass Meeting by the Red Clarion. 

Investigation Never Truly Ends

While we emphasize the need to create organizing models that extend beyond the initial investigatory phase, there is also the need to continuously analyze the situation through a dialectical lens. The contradictions are fluid; they may be exacerbated or reduced by a number of factors, especially the state, which may or may not make concessions depending on the situation. To say that the investigation never truly ends means to affirm our role as dialecticians, always looking to criticize and improve our past analyses. 

The All-Empire Worker’s League encourages all its member organizations to conduct propaganda among the masses with revolutionary potential. If you or your organization are interested in beginning or refining a social investigation, do not hesitate to reach out. 

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

1. A garrison refers to a fortified location from which military campaigns are planned and enacted against outside groups.
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