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.

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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On April 15, 2024, a series of coordinated but autonomous actions were conducted across the globe with the goal of disrupting the genocidal war machine propping up the zionist entity’s genocide in Gaza. The tactic of choice was economic blockade. Initially concentrated within the so-called United States, organizers hoped to have enough of an economic impact to force the imperial superpower to rescind its unconditional support of its colonial outpost. As word spread between organizers and activists internationally, the scope expanded to include a number of actions in other imperialist and settler countries. While the hope of forcing imperial powers to stop their support for genocide ultimately failed to materialize, there are a number of lessons to be drawn from this moment of decisive and principled escalation. We hope to highlight these lessons so that future actions may build upon them.

At the core of A15 was a dialectical navigation between national and local organizing levels. Organizers understood the necessity of collective action to effect meaningful change, and with this understanding started an ambitious project in the pursuit of a free Palestine. Recognizing the necessity for actions to be tailored to the material conditions of the regions in which they were occurring, organizers established a strategy of regionally-bound autonomous actions to facilitate collective national (then international) action. This resulted in an implicit national-local organizing structure lacking strong centralization, but which ensured action did happen.

It worked like this: national-level organizers spread the word of their intention to facilitate a nation-wide economic blockade. Organizers and activists from all over the so-called U.S. were invited to an initial online “All Cities” meeting where the idea was more thoroughly fleshed out: autonomous actions would be regionally organized against the largest, most influential, local economic target. The target didn’t have to be explicitly tied to the zionist entity and its genocidal pursuits, since the U.S. Empire’s war machine is ultimately powered by the entirety of the imperialist economy. The idea was to “stop pulling the levers of the machine,” even if only for a day, in the hopes of frightening the parasitic class facilitating genocidal violence. Actions were coordinated to occur symbolically on April 15th, tax day, in acknowledgment of the role U.S. tax dollars play in carrying out the genocide.

Several cities dropped out during the short period allotted for planning, but when April 15th arrived, dozens of cities around the world (including Melbourne, Dublin, London, and Toronto to name a few) saw blockades temporarily stop the flow of capital, or rallies, marches, and walkouts in solidarity with blockades. Participating groups took a variety of strategic approaches with different types of targets, but physical blockades emerged as a common strategy. Many arrests were made, and at time of writing, some legal battles are still being fought as a result of the A15 actions. For the purposes of this analysis, we will be focusing on national level organizing and the blockade of the SeaTac airport which was organized and executed in the Puget Sound. We invite those familiar with other actions to consider contributing their own regional analysis.

The ambitious scale and scope of A15 was admirable, and in some ways a wild success. Dozens of autonomous blockades were coordinated around the world, the significance of which cannot be overstated given the difficulties and barriers of mobilizing even one large group in one city. The size and spread of the mobilization garnered widespread mass media attention and, despite the undefined parameters, successfully centered economic impact as the primary strategy. At the same time as we celebrate the successes of A15, we feel it necessary to analyze its failures.

Critique is a necessary part of continuously improving our strategic orientation and tactical approach in order to learn and adapt in the pursuit of liberation. Through an analysis of available evidence, we’ll articulate both the successes and shortcomings of A15. Ultimately A15 proved the will of organizers and activists to escalate in their effort to shut it down for Palestine. Successes were shaped and limited by a number of strategic oversights and shortcomings, such as an extremely limited timeline for planning and execution. A number of social, cultural, and interpersonal barriers also emerged, including communication pitfalls, aversion to conflict and critique, and most prominently, the myriad troubles that emerge from a lack of coherent and mutually agreed upon structure. While A15 demonstrated the willpower and capacity of people to come together for wide-spread and coordinated collective action to stop a genocide, it also demonstrated prominent barriers the imperial core’s “Left” must directly address and overcome in order to effectively strike the beast from within its own belly.

Communication is Key

The A15 actions can claim a number of successes. At the national and international levels, organizers tapped existing connections to establish a broader communication network and coordinate collective action. Given the scale and number of actions, A15 quickly gained widespread media attention, presenting organizers an opportunity to make their actions double as propaganda. The communication network allowed organizers to coordinate support, resources, and messaging to the public. Here in the Puget Sound, local successes were due to existing affinity groups and informal activist communities. Their existing connections with one another and experience in mobilizing for previous movements supported quick mobilization. Ultimately, the execution of a collective action on such a scale proved its efficacy in terms of uniting a movement and proves the capacity for future actions.

An International Solidarity Network

One of the key factors in A15’s success at the national and international level was the establishment of an international communication network to coordinate collective action. National organizers had stated an intention to maintain the A15 network for the purposes of facilitating similar direct actions in the future. While this intention hasn’t manifested in the wake of the action, the network’s use leading up to and during the action contributed to the overall success of A15. Additionally, because of how widespread the A15 Actions were, organizers were able to garner substantial mass media attention, if only for a short time. The principal success of the A15 Actions at this level, however, was in demonstrating the strength of collective action and international solidarity, highlighting the strategic necessity of building these kinds of connections and strengthening our ability to do so.

Organizers were able to effectively collaborate and coordinate on a global scale because of the existing connections that organizers and activists built during previous mass movements, such as the George Floyd Uprisings. Information about the initial “All Cities” meeting was disseminated to different organizations and individuals in cities across the country, and eventually around the world. At this initial meeting individuals from the same city were able to connect with one another to build regional organizing teams which would then take the lead on planning an economic blockade tailored to their region’s material conditions. Communication networks that balance centralized coordination with regional autonomy enable organizers to collaborate and act collectively across regional boundaries, but the finer details must be determined at a local level to ensure the efficacy and relevancy of the action and its impact on the locale.

Routine national meetings ensured organizers across the world clearly understood the goals of A15 and dispersed ideas for what actions might look like, as well as a generalized understanding of the legal needs of direct actions, such as legal observers, bail funds, and other legal support. These meetings served to fortify the collective element of the action. During meetings some groups were connected to necessary legal resources (or given information on how to do so), and those with less organizing experience were able to connect with more experienced peers to facilitate knowledge and resource sharing. The A15 network was always intended to be a hub of support and solidarity and this was most evident in the early days of organizing.

At the time of this writing, the surviving A15 network exists in the form of an “All Cities” group chat. Members share updates about ongoing campaigns related to Palestine (such as one group’s project to bring potable water into Gaza) along with ways to support those campaigns and requests to connect with organizers in different cities or nations. For quite a while the chat appeared dead, but it came back to life on the night the Freedom Flotilla seeking to bring aid into Gaza was targeted by a zionist drone strike (the first of multiple such attacks) with detailed emergency calls to action being shared. Similar calls have since been shared. At one point, there seemed to be an effort to coordinate another mass economic blockade which failed to take off with the same gusto as the original A15 plan, with only a few responding to the initial proposal and discussion dying off rather quickly. To our knowledge, no action manifested from this, though the particulars of why this might have been remain unclear.

Just as important as internal organizing communications are external communications. Direct actions such as these pose a powerful opportunity to communicate to the world at large about our causes. Organizers should be adequately prepared to utilize captured media attention to this end, with materials designed to educate and agitate, not simply to spread awareness. It is therefore important to think about highly visible actions in terms of propaganda. As communists, our goal is to lead the masses in a revolution; such leadership requires trust that our actions are for their betterment. This is not to say that we should obsess over the optics of our actions, especially characterized by bourgeois media. Rather, consideration should be given to reaching the masses through an antagonistic media apparatus. Messaging should make our intentions clear in order to support raising bystander consciousness, cultivating understanding, and instilling revolutionary optimism. Creating a plan to interface with the public through media is critical to maintaining a level of trust with an organization and swaying other workers.

As a result of this national and international collaboration and solidarity, groups acting autonomously across the world executed dozens of direct actions despite short notice. This international coordination for Palestinian liberation was a potent indicator of what is possible through intentional, focused collaboration and unwavering solidarity. This was by and large only possible as a result of a communication network linking organizers together. Solidarity is our strength; we can’t build a new and just world alone.

The Strength of People Power

In the Puget Sound, major successes revolved around tapping established communities to quickly and effectively mobilize a significant number of participants. On very short notice, organizers were able to pull together an airport blockade that shut down traffic into the airport for around five hours with no injuries and no confirmed security leaks.

For this action, organizers cultivated maps of the target area to survey and select an ideal choke point. Later, reconnaissance was conducted to establish a more thorough understanding of the area, identify staging locations, and plan for action execution. Organizers tapped pre-existing affinity groups and reached out to some additional Palestine-focused organizations to rally forty-six people to participate.

Accounts of the action indicate that a car may have been used to create an initial stoppage in traffic, with organizers feigning that the car had stalled to create cover for deployment of the blockade. Protesters “locked in” at the site using the sleeping dragon tactic: they chained themselves together with their arms threaded through PVC pipes to ensure responding police couldn’t simply cut the chains. This lengthened the duration of the blockade and increased the resources required to remove the protesters from the site.

Operational security practices were implemented at a heightened level, with a keen awareness of the risk of leaks and potential impacts thereof. Encrypted Signal chats with disappearing messages were used for some communication early on, and a pivot was made to all in-person communication due to concerns about the spy-ware nature of much of modern communications technology.

The successes of the SeaTac airport A15 blockade were largely due to the numbers available to organizers. Not all actions will have as many organizers or participants available, nor do all actions require such numbers. The key take-away here is that actions must be scaled to the real capacity of the moment. This fact also works in tandem with the level of centralized organization required for particular actions. How many people do we need to be successful in a particular time frame? How centralized does the planning need to be to achieve its goals? What level of operational security is required to protect organizers and participants? Setting achievable goals allows for sustainable and consistent work and victories. As Mao teaches us in On Guerrilla Warfare, we must only engage in battles in which we are guaranteed victory.

Informal Structures and Movement Security

There were many lessons learned not only from the successes of A15 actions, but also from some critical failures in the planning phases that luckily did not result in worst-case scenarios. Excruciatingly short timelines bred a number of issues at the national level, from poorly considered media strategy to inability to fulfill promises and achieve unspecific, difficult to measure goals. On the local level in the Puget Sound, a complete lack of structure facilitated interpersonal breakdowns which posed a number tactical and strategic barriers. In consideration of these oversights and critical failures, there were many areas for improvement we can learn from. The most powerful lessons learned center on the necessity of giving ourselves time to develop effective strategies, be intentional in choosing targets and tactics, and more.

Communication is a Practice

At the national and international level, many identified shortcomings stemmed from the short timeline for planning and executing a national, then international, economic blockade. There was a little less than two months’ notice that there would be an “All Cities” meeting outlining the idea and intention behind a forthcoming national economic blockade against the United States — The Empire. Paired with the time needed to plan and host these initial meetings, this left organizers at the international, national, and local level with about a month and a half to identify targets, gather intel, set goals, plan, and execute.

On Urgency

The short time allotted for organizing these actions undermined the potential of a wide-spread and well-coordinated economic blockade in a number of ways. There is an undeniable urgency when people are being murdered en masse, but the way that urgency was treated in this case reflects a common tendency of organizers within the imperial core to treat the fight for liberation as a sprint rather than the marathon it is. Urgency requires not just timely action, but effective action. The minimal time allotted to plan and execute these actions had multiple impacts. Limited time to recruit participants meant many actions were quite small and therefore limited in what they were able to do. The pressure to pull together actions quickly meant that some organizers weren’t able to pull any action together at all, resulting in a number of cities dropping out altogether when they realized the severity of this limitation. Limited time to do recon and establish contingency plans also meant that riskier targets with larger potential impacts were off-limits for many. Finally, there were a number of actions which were sloppy and ineffective, not because the organizers themselves were sloppy or ineffective, but simply because they didn’t have the time to coordinate something better. The key takeaway from this is that we must be honest about and take seriously the time needed to effectively set our goals, plan for them, and accomplish them. Failure to do this undermines our efforts and betrays the people we are fighting for.

On Logistics

National organizers had offered in All Cities meetings to provide local organizers with support in accessing or connecting with resources including bail funds and legal support. Although never explicitly mentioned, offers of mentorship were implied. While some areas were able to receive support and guidance from the national level organizers, others in need of similar support were left with little or none. Many actions were able to coordinate their own support with the help of experienced organizers on their teams, but for others, the inability to access rigorous legal support was a deterrent to planning higher risk actions with more potential for greater impact. While the autonomous method of organizing was successful overall in this instance, more time and resources could have improved centralized organization and increased support and guidance from national level organizers. This would have supported better developed and more effective actions.

Furthermore, the economic impact of the blockades was much smaller than organizers had intended, and as a result, these actions were not successful in applying economic pressure great enough to threaten the Butchers of Gaza or their enablers. The idea of not limiting targets only to businesses directly participating in the slaughter of Gaza was simple, straight forward, and well intentioned. However, without greater numbers (both of actions and of participants) this spread the movement thin and diluted the message being sent. More time to plan and coordinate between cities would have enabled more robust, targeted actions, and as such, would have produced a greater economic impact. Consider the effect of multiple cities coming together to target their state’s largest weapons manufacturer rather than staying focused on unrelated industries in their own cities, for example.

On Propaganda

A banner reading “Our Taxes Are Funding Genocide” was displayed alongside Palestinian flags at the SeaTac airport blockade, highlighting the significance of tax day for the action and reminding onlookers of the way in which the United States government makes its citizens complicit. There was little planning or strategy for communicating to the media or the masses beyond this, however. Unfortunately, the opportunity to also highlight the ways in which the imperial core’s whole economy supports genocidal colonial and imperial violence, the intricacies of which aren’t easily recognizable or intuitively understood by the majority, was missed. In cases where targets aren’t explicitly related to the genocide in the same way a target like Boeing or Microsoft might be, it’s important to consider how to communicate these complex economic relationships in a way that is concise and accessible to your average working person.

Though there was mass media attention to the A15 actions, it was short lived and confused. Reporters identified that these blockades were coordinated and therefore connected, but at the outset not all reporting outlets seemed to understand that these were actions for a free Palestine (though eventually this was reported more confidently). This confusion spread to non-mainstream commentators as well, including supporters of a free Palestine, whose confusion or misunderstanding of the actions at times led to reporting and analysis that was frustrated and failed to recognize successes. Many actions lacked banners, signs, or other means of clearly communicating the causes and intended effects of the actions, leading to confusion rather than clarification. Ultimately these actions largely failed to utilize the opportunity for effective propaganda.

On Organization

This high intensity, unbalanced planning is a consistent habit of the imperial core’s “Left.” This strategy of reacting rather than acting leads to intense burnout among organizers and difficulties sustaining long-term activity. Paired with rumors of conflict and infighting among the national level organizers, it’s unsurprising that the communications network has declined to the degree it has. This all gestures to the problem of structurelessness that followed A15 from the beginning: with no clear roles, guidelines or expectations on conduct, and no system for accountability, the A15 movement inevitably became a one-off moment with minimal continuing impact or legacy.

Though the international network that was meant to be established through the course of this action technically still exists, its current form is a far cry from what organizers originally set out to build: a space for continued national and international collaboration for increasing escalation in the pursuit of a free Palestine. Some of this collapse reflects a general need in leftist spaces in Occupied North America to build conflict resolution skills, increase distress tolerance, and implement effective methods for addressing harm. It also demonstrates the importance of understanding and identifying roles, and formulating a clearly understood and articulated structure to support adherence to expectations around conduct, facilitate conflict resolution, and effectively make and execute plans. Unfortunately, these issues of interpersonal and structural development have been repeatedly observed as serious barriers to building or implementing successful strategy, let alone building a successful revolutionary movement in the so-called United States.

On Structure

The issue of structurelessness appeared at the national level as rumors of conflict and infighting, but was well and truly on display at the local level. Without a clearly defined structure for organizers and action participants to operate within, one member was able to flood the Puget Sound organizing committee with their previously existing Affinity Group (AG). This ultimately led to the abandonment of all democratic processes and the de facto establishment of an in- and an out-group. The seizure of power by this AG led to a litany of safety and security concerns for organizers, participants, and the general public, ultimately resulting in an insignificant economic impact despite being publicly celebrated as a resounding success. Many of the issues discussed here are a result not necessarily of bad strategy, but of structurelessness. In essence, the failings of the Puget Sound A15 action is a case study validating Freeman’s thesis: the absence of a formal democratic structure only invites an informal reactionary one.

Once the original planning committee was flooded by the AG and a de facto leader emerged, an implicit social hierarchy quickly followed. While there was no intentionally defined structure, that does not mean an absence of structure. Rather, what formed in the absence of openly discussed and agreed upon structure was an unspoken but recognizable in- and out-group dynamic with deference to the implicit leader, who was then able to assume control over planning. This resulted in the discarding of the democratic process in order to focus on the preferred target of the unspoken leader, as well as select participants enjoying the privilege of having their ideas, concerns, and suggestions regarded seriously. The original lack of structural development appears to have arisen out of organizer naivety, and many of these original organizers withdrew from the project or were pushed out by the toxic dynamics that emerged in place of well-considered structure.

Citing security concerns, the group pivoted to in-person communications only, including daily meetings and sometimes multiple daily meetings with no plan (or apparent intention) to communicate with participants unable to attend. As a result, a culture of exclusion emerged. Working individuals, individuals with disabilities, and individuals with care-taking duties were effectively barred from participation. This strongly favored members of the aforementioned in-group, with some members of the out-group not being alerted to in-person meetings due to text communications being almost entirely abandoned. As such, many individuals who were not members of the in-group were pushed out of planning altogether. In essence, heightened security culture practices became an implicit enforcement of in-group/out-group dynamics and functioned to assure in-group dominance in the organizing process. Poor communication also resulted in numerous people appearing to be on completely different pages about how to handle the issue of independent press on the scene, leading to questions of what else people weren’t on the same page about. When participants voiced concerns about inaccessibility and exclusivity, they were roundly ignored, and no effort was made to find a resolution, increase accommodation, or improve communication. There was no follow-up with the individuals leveraging these critiques after they left the group.

Structurelessness also resulted in inadequate responses to safety concerns. One stark example of this was the handling of concerns about the potential for vehicular violence. When a member of the out-group raised this safety concern, it was brushed off as a matter of privilege. Later, a member of the in-group raised the same concern and was praised for doing so (though it is not clear that this concern was addressed in any practical way). Not only did such incidents reaffirm the in-group/out-group dynamic, it highlighted a lack of regard for participant safety or sustainability in the movement for Palestinian liberation overall. Beyond the tactical value of striving for safety, this example also highlights the fundamental strategic oversight of valuing high-risk adventurism over actions designed with safety and efficacy in mind: quickly burning through the risk tolerance of participants runs the risk of ultimately reducing our own numbers in the name of a spectacle, fundamentally weakening our position in future actions.

Many of these shortcomings would have been avoided with explicit communications about roles, expectations, decision making processes, and issues of accountability. Explicit communication would have supported more intentional collaboration, more effective adaptation in the face of critique, and could have avoided pushing people out, increasing the number of on-the-ground participants.

As previously noted, a greater allotment of planning time would have likely yielded a more robustly designed action capable of achieving greater success — this too was directly impacted by structurelessness. Already working on a tight timeline, a democratically selected target was rejected during an in-person meeting where only a fraction of participants were present. The time and effort spent on the original target had to be scrapped and restarted for the new target, leaving organizers with just weeks to plan.

Rallying forty-six people to join an action like this is a feat on its own, but the action would have been even larger with more time to recruit. More time would have allowed organizers to connect with local orgs and build better working relationships. With more time organizers could have also expanded their network rather than solely relying on existing affinity groups, increasing access to support, resources, and recruitment. There would have been more time to establish contingency plans in case something went wrong, and more time to work on additional materials to support the barricade or create clear and effective messaging.

It’s also worth noting that the Seattle Police Department developed an Apparatus Removal Team specifically to deal with sleeping dragons, making them uniquely capable of dealing with this tactic quickly and efficiently. This highlights the necessity of knowing our enemy. If this particular method must be employed in the Seattle area, utilizing a more effective variation is preferable. Styles of sleeping dragon which utilize barrels filled with cement through which the PVC pipes and chains are threaded, creating additional barriers to removal, have been used elsewhere and could serve as inspiration for out-maneuvering the Apparatus Removal Team. Researching SPD capabilities, getting materials, building these more robust sleeping dragons, and establishing and practicing methods for transporting and deploying them quickly and efficiently would have been viable with more planning time. This could have greatly increased the amount of time required for responding police to remove the protesters, increasing overall economic impact. Imagine if there had been time to plan for deployment of such a tactic with sixty, seventy, or even eighty participants.

The ultimate financial impact of the action was estimated to be in the low hundreds of thousand of dollars. To us working people this is a lot of money, but for the corporate ghouls being targeted it is barely even pocket change. It is significantly less than what was hoped for, yet it was celebrated as a resounding success, echoing concerns such as the false victory claimed at the earlier Block the Boat action. These concerns indicate two main areas for growth: 1) the ways in which goals are established, and 2) the ways in which we evaluate success.

Too often we’ve seen actions designed without clearly articulated goals in mind, or alternatively, with unrealistic goals. Setting clear and concise goals not only supports organizers in designing and executing an effective action, it provides a metric against which success can be measured. In the case of the Puget Sound A15 action, the goal was simply to “have a financial impact.” The fact that as little as a $100k impact could be called a success highlights how vague the goal actually is; despite discussion of the financial impact organizers hoped to achieve, specific numbers were never mentioned. This was a significant strategic weakness in the action design and planning. Without a specific and measurable goal, it wasn’t possible for organizers to calculate how long a blockade would have needed to be held. As a result, organizers did not design the blockade according to any specific length of time intended to meet a realistic goal. Furthermore, organizers must have a truly honest assessment of their successes and failures — victories should not be inflated and failures should not be minimized. To do so would be avoiding criticism and self-criticism, which is an integral part of successful revolutionary organizing. Refusing to engage in this process of (self) criticism, we lose the ability to facilitate learning, growth, and greater future adaptability and success. If we are to be serious about the cause of liberation for Palestine and all peoples, we must be serious about how we engage with critique.

Many of the issues discussed in this section would have been minimized had organizers established even a loose sense of structure, with identified roles and responsibility, decision-making processes, and systems for accountability. This is largely an issue of naivete on the parts of different organizers, but the constraints of an extraordinarily short timeline certainly didn’t help. Organizations require structure in order to effectively achieve their goals, and democratic processes must be core to the pursuit of equitable and just interpersonal dynamics within an organizing group. Organizers must maintain clear and effective communication to ensure that people understand what is expected of them and what they should expect from the organization. Organizers must also ensure that no one gets left behind. Security culture should be practiced in dialectical balance with consideration to accessibility needs of the people who make up the masses, most especially those with jobs, disabilities, caretaking duties, etc. Barring this, an action will never become a movement, and will instead become a quickly forgotten historical blip.

It is vital to note that all of these issues aren’t only a barrier to creating a successful action or movement, they are a barrier to developing effective strategy at all. Without an effective strategic outlook or orientation, getting something as ambitious as A15 off the ground and meaningfully achieving goals is next to impossible — as we have unfortunately seen in the aftermath of the day of action.

Building Movement Resiliency

The metrics for success and failure regarding the day of action were ill defined, but ultimately we understand that the broader goal was to mobilize in support of a free Palestine; in that regard, the A15 actions succeeded. The failures and shortcomings of the A15 movement lie not in the mobilization, but rather in the organization. Throughout much of her work, Jane McAlevey details the distinction between the two (see No Shortcuts), but to put it succinctly, Kwame Ture teaches us that “mobilization [is] temporary. Organization is permanent and eternal.” A15 was able to mobilize, but it was not able to organize. Without a clearly defined and democratic structure — both of which are equally essential to the health, longevity, and power of an organization — we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes ad infinitum.

The reason we see so much turnover and burn out among our organizers is not from an inability to mobilize, but a critical failure in establishing and maintaining organization. This is why we continue to see these outbursts of activism (e.g., Battle of Seattle, Occupy Wallstreet, George Floyd Uprisings, etc.), but not a sustained movement that will lead to revolutionary change. To remedy this, we must learn these important lessons and move forward to build stronger organizations that are capable of winning while withstanding repression.

In light of the lessons learned from this study, both in terms of successes and failures, we propose the development of regionally-bound organizations to facilitate the development of militant cadres capable of rapidly and effectively responding to and leading mass movements. While organizers in this case were able to get the word out to various cities, there have been countless other such attempts which have either fallen far short of their goals or failed entirely. The success of such future endeavors cannot be left to chance. These new organizations — free from the capitulationist, revisionist, and dogmatic tendencies of our movement’s leading organizations — could facilitate such communications, disseminating empire-wide calls to action in a more secure way than posting to social media, and structuring a response in collaboration with local coalitions and other ideologically- or issue-focused organizations. Beyond simply acting as a means to mobilize, putting time and effort into such development will lead our movements toward permanent organizational structures that can be adapted to the needs of the moment, helping to avoid the pitfalls of structurelessness observed in this study. These organizations will need to develop themselves based on their local conditions: organizational needs, barriers, available resources, class composition, geographic context, as well as a continually updated understanding of friends and enemies in the area. Such development will improve our overall strategic position, facilitate ease of collaboration within and across regional boundaries, and bring us closer to the permanent revolutionary organization we need.

It is evident, now more than ever, that we need our Party — the Communist Party that will lead our revolution and the liberation of this continent from colonial occupation and the world from imperialism. But as we are now still disjointed, uncoordinated, and disorganized, we must build the structures necessary to allow for its formation. This is possible only through developing our local means and capabilities, thus elevating class consciousness and proving we are deserving of leadership. Furthermore, principled organizations must coalesce into Intermediate organizations — an organization of organizations. This is the embryo of our new, revolutionary party. But what is the Party, what does it do, and what does it look like? 

The Party is the organized, conscious, and revolutionary vanguard of the working class — an essential instrument for the proletariat to seize and maintain power. Unlike our movement’s current leading organizations, who are unfit for revolutionary struggle, our new Party — a Leninist Party — will emerge as a militant, disciplined force prepared for revolutionary conditions. It is the most advanced organization of the working class, composed of its most devoted and politically conscious members. The Party leads, educates, and unites the working masses, serving as their leaders in the class struggle. It embodies revolutionary theory and action, guiding the proletariat beyond trade-unionism and reformism toward the overthrow of imperialism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Party is a tightly structured, disciplined organization with clearly defined and understood roles, centralized leadership, and structure that efficiently supports party work, mobilization, and both systemic and interpersonal conflict resolution. An ability to withstand internal struggle toward a unity of will is vital, with discipline toward minority compromise with majority will in the pursuit of much needed revolution. To support this, time and effort must be directed toward building robust, resilient communication networks, networks structured in consideration of striking balance between centralized coordination and regionally-bound material resources, needs, and autonomy. It is not a loose collection of sympathizers but a coordinated system of organizations bound by the principles of democratic centralism, adapting to shifting material conditions, and effectively coordinating collective action across regional boundaries. The Party functions as the highest form of class organization, uniting and leading all other proletarian institutions — trade unions, cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and more — under a single revolutionary direction. The work of the Party entails guiding the proletariat to power, consolidating socialist rule, and maintaining discipline by filtering out opportunist and reformist elements and investing the political education and development of its members and their associated communities. In short, the Party is both the mind and the will of the proletarian revolution: the organized force through which the working class acts as one to destroy the old order and build socialism.

We are not utopians, we are scientific socialists. Every action we take serves to better inform our practice. All self-conscious struggle brings us closer to fulfilling our historic task in overthrowing the imperialists. To end the tyranny of capital, we must first end the tyranny of structurelessness.

The Pied Piper is arguably more dangerous than the hunter, and neither should be discounted.

Background

Mamdani’s campaign started with a surge of popularity riding on radical anti-zionist talking points. A long-time “pro-Palestine” activist, supporter of BDS, and critic of zionist settler violence in Palestine, Mamdani has been a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America since 2017, and the New York State Assembly since 2020. Using his elected position to amplify his particular brand of “radical” politics, Mamdani’s public visibility quickly ramped up following his condemnations of the genocidal zionist reprisals following the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood uprising. By repeatedly stirring controversy within settler power structures and zionist media, Mamdani has spent the last two years building a popular image of a radical “socialist” Muslim within a key hotbed of settler political struggle, carefully ramping up the controversy to keep himself in the media spotlight by spouting radical rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada” and “abolish the police.” In October 2024, he announced his candidacy for the 2025 Mayoral race, winning the Democratic Party primary in June 2025. 

Surprising no-one paying attention, Mamdani began walking back his phony radicalism as soon as his candidacy was assured, currying alliances with key members of the NYC police force, choosing open zionists for his staff,¹ announcing his support for the zionist occupation’s “right to exist,” and declaring his intent to greatly expand the police budget for prosecuting anti-zionist activities. 

Principles of Settler Opportunism

The “socialists” who run for office are little more than political adventurists and opportunists. A political adventurist here means an individual who sees themselves as a heroic figure setting out to save the masses from their oppression. They believe they can “make a difference” by struggling within the system, so long as they retain their “principles.” They set aside the necessity of first constructing a class that is conscious of itself and able to coordinate political action according to a definite plan, and try to instead champion what they individually perceive to be the interests of this class (which does not yet exist!). This necessarily produces an eclectic undisciplined political line, because one individual, or group of individuals (like the many so-called “communist” parties) is not capable of producing a correct political line. Only a vanguard party with the backing of the masses, acting in their interests according to their will, can do this. Adventurists either do not know this, or do not care. They believe that by “showing the way,” the masses can be inspired to spontaneous action in support of their own liberation. They believe that by spurring the masses to all go to the polls, they are at the same time building working class unity, solidarity, consciousness, or whatever. Inevitably, they are ultimately defeated: either they fail to gain any purchase within the system and wash out, or they realize the futility of pushing a “revolutionary” line all by their lonesome and turn to opportunism. To this end, political adventurism is materially indistinguishable from opportunism.

Opportunists are in it for whatever they can get. They may agree in principle with a revolutionary line, but in practice they are more than willing to discard inconvenient segments of the masses in the interest of political expediency. Often they can be found eagerly doing this in anticipation of what they believe will win the most “support” at the polls. Inevitably, their most radical edges are rounded out and dulled by constant contact with the inertia of bourgeois/settler governance. In the game of musical chairs that is settler colonial privileges, the most vulnerable people are the first pushed out of the way, and the opportunists are the ones who take up the task of doing the pushing. Because it may be “politically inconvenient” to militantly struggle against the settler colonial occupation and genocide against Palestine, they tell us that these issues must be set aside “for now,” to be pursued “later” when the movement has built more momentum and mass power. Of course what they fail to mention here is that in doing this they are dividing the masses, weakening the movement by directing mounting class struggle into dead-end reformist avenues down which only a small section of the masses can advance. Their actions lead to the sacrifice of all principles on the altar of “pragmatism.”

Besides Mamdani’s tepid criticism of some of the most depraved zionist acts of violence, the key reforms he promised (and those which have won him such widespread support among the imperial left) are as follows: 

• To freeze rents and build “affordable” housing
• To crack down on “bad” landlords 
• To establish city-owned grocery stores
• To establish free public transit
• To raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030. (This in particular appears to be why the “progressive” settlers are so thrilled.) 

A full explanation of the flaws in the rent freeze is well beyond this article, but suffice to say that whatever attempt he may or may not make at expanding and stabilizing the private property regime, it won’t put a dent in the empire-wide land speculation that is the real cause of the housing crisis. Cracking down on “bad” landlords is laughable, considering the socialist position is not to hound out malfeasors, but to liquidate entire classes. And rather than feeding people directly, Mamdani would prefer to compete on the market by creating his own NYC brand grocery store!

This minimum wage increase will mostly benefit the service workers in the empire’s finance capital, the people who keep the gears turning in the nerve center of global imperialism. The claim being made by the settler “socialists,” is that this push for higher wages for some of the city’s workers is building the mass base necessary to push through some “real” reforms—just later on, at an unspecified date and time. There’s no word on how that’s to be accomplished or what the demands will be, but never mind that, they say, we’re getting paid. How exactly is socialism advanced by the appointment of a bourgeois politician as the mayor of the bourgeois finance capital of the empire in the middle of a holocaust being waged against Palestinians? That this disgusting mockery of human decency is being held up as a beacon of hope for the socialist cause hinges on the idea that wage increases are a victory in themselves, that advancing the conditions of some workers is always an advance for the socialist cause. We contend that this is simply not true. Let’s ask the real question: wage increases for who?

Simply being employed, however wretched that employment may be, is itself a position of privilege and power in the imperial system. Yes, the bourgeoisie remain the top dogs, but people who “work for a living” in the colonial economy are still a privileged group: their class position depends on the continued exploitation of people who can’t work for a living. 

There has never been a challenge to the employment problem, and a major reason why is that following along to the plans of the Imperialists keeps wages high and development uneven, securing employment while simultaneously securing unemployment. 

Example scenario: Capitalist introduces labor saving machines that double productivity. Rather than overproducing, they cut the workforce in half and raise the wages of the leftovers by 50%. Overall, the capitalist just reduced aggregate wages by 25%. The business operates at the same level. They don’t overproduce and break their market position, the workers who didn’t get cut have a huge wage increase that puts a contradiction between them and their laid off siblings.²

– @probablykaffe

Many people are excluded from the “productive” sphere on the basis of nationality, gender, ability, etc. We know that a Black person is much less likely to have access to employment than a white person—in fact, the Black unemployment rate in New York City is more than double that of whites (8% vs 3.5%). Disabled people are often completely excluded from a livable income, with less than 25% of people with any disability being employed, and fewer than 1 in 5 autistic people. According to the 2022 US transgender survey report, trans people in the US face a whopping 18% unemployment rate, more than four times the empire-wide average, which frankly should be considered a demographic crisis. These are entire populations of people who are excluded from the privilege of accessing employment, and those who do gain access are often limited to part time or sporadic/seasonal work. And all of this is before we even get into the issue of the role of US imperialism in inflating worker wages inside the empire at the expense of billions of global south workers. 

It can’t be dismissed how difficult it is to be a low wage worker in New York City. There’s a very good reason people are clamoring for this reform. But as the grip of capital tightens around your throat, disabled people who have been suffering under brutal austerity conditions for years are dying at atrocious rates under state eugenicist campaigns. The fact that these plans don’t address the needs of the most oppressed, and in fact perpetuate their oppression in a mystified and more acute form, should be a warning that Mamdani doesn’t deal in social revolution but rather in reinforcing the capitalist state with a “kinder” face. How does the “socialism” of Mamdami do anything to build solidarity between oppressed groups? What is the plan for carrying this movement to a higher stage of struggle? What is being accomplished here, except grabbing more for a select few while the most vulnerable people continue to languish and die in ever-increasing poverty and homelessness? Is the wealth supposed to trickle down from people with jobs to those without? Everyone needs to eat before you reach out your hand for seconds! If any group is forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of “progress” then inequality is reproduced and oppression persists. What does “universal emancipation” mean to you, seriously? If your “socialist” candidate isn’t running on the democratic mandate of the masses of the exploited, and held to account by that democratic mandate, following a definite plan to continually heighten the struggle and broaden the involvement of the masses, then they aren’t a socialist. Unfortunately, the democratic institutions necessary for this, a vanguard party or socialist state, do not yet exist in this land. Our efforts, therefore, should not be to run candidates accountable to no one, but to build the party capable of holding leaders accountable, so that we can finally seize the state. 

Whose Side Are You On?

We must be very clear on this point: Palestinian sovereignty is non-negotiable, just as much as all anti-colonialism is. There is no middle ground or compromise with the settler colonial system. Either we destroy it or it destroys us. Any position which leaves room for the continued existence of “israel” in any form is a denial of the sovereignty and humanity of Palestinians. In tossing out this issue, by “compromising” with genocide, they draw a line between themselves and the Palestinian people. They separate international humanity into two groups pitted against one-another: “us,” and “them.” In the arena of class warfare this division is fatal. When one section of our forces advances while leaving another behind, reactionary forces are afforded room to encircle and defeat both groups, usually by absorbing the opportunists and killing off the rest. Either all the oppressed advance in unison, or we get picked off one-by-one. Genuine revolutionaries demand that every oppressed group be respected, uplifted, and empowered; this will be done in opposition to the dominant groups, who recognize every gain for the oppressed as a loss for their profit. On the other hand, opportunists are content to allow reactionaries to pick off “inconvenient” groups, so long as they personally benefit in the end.

This strategy of divide and conquer, directed from the rear by the bourgeoisie and spearheaded by opportunism, goes back to the earliest days of the anti-capitalist movement. In particular it has come to dominate and define imperial politics over the last century. When the interests of those privileged enough to have jobs are prioritized ahead of those who aren’t, the material division between the two widens. The privileges of the advantaged group are reinforced at the expense of the disadvantaged group, which produces an incentive to keep it that way in the privileged group. This is how reaction breeds. The issue with homelessness is not “the lack of supply” but the capacity for landlords to evict tenants. Ensuring everybody is housed and safe needs to come ahead of reducing market prices on apartments.³ The speculative value produced by rent extraction is what drives the constant inflation of property prices, not “undersupply.” When the health and safety of disabled people is considered a secondary concern to the “comfort” of abled people, and (for example) masking is not enforced, disabled people are excluded from the movement, further weakening it. When trans rights are considered a “token” issue and worth ceding ground on in exchange for concessions for “the majority,” the movement further fragments as trans people are left behind to struggle to survive and to die alone. When Indigenous sovereignty is treated as a secondary concern, or a threat to the property “rights” of “the majority,” the settler-Indigenous divide deepens, and one of the most revolutionary elements of all human society is ejected from the movement. It is this way that, in the name of “the majority,” the opportunists carefully and meticulously carve up the movement into bite-sized chunks that the reactionaries are only too eager to devour. The bourgeoisie and settler masses will always demand that we sit down and shut up and in exchange they will grant some privileges to those of us who acquiesce while they slaughter those who won’t or can’t. Every “temporary” retreat from solidarity turns into a strategic defeat for the movement.

In the coming months, Mamdani supporters may pretend to be shocked at his complicity in settler violence and his leadership in maintaining the colonial occupation of Lenapehoking, just as they are now pretending to be critical of his zionism. The signs pointing towards his opportunism were always there for those willing to see. While he did condemn the zionist reprisals on October 8, 2023, he was quick to also condemn the Palestinian resistance within the weeks following, and since then has eagerly participated in spreading zionist propaganda lies about supposed “war crimes” committed by the resistance.⁴ Mamdani has carefully and consistently played both sides, spouting anti-zionist rhetoric out one side of his mouth while materially aligning himself with colonial hegemony with the other. This barefaced opportunism, and its inevitable tragic outcomes, should be wearily familiar by now to those of us with the slightest of principles. It’s plain as day now, just as it has been for years, that Mamdani is just another lying settler pig—perfectly content to take advantage of public outrage against the Palestinian Holocaust for his colonial ladder-climbing career. 

For as much ink that has been spilled and attention monopolized for this man, little mind has been paid to the social processes underlying his ascent to international fame and infamy. Mamdani’s popularity and controversy could well serve as a case-study in how the left wing of capital uses radical window-dressing to conceal maintenance of the status quo, but we’ve had enough such case studies to fill a library. What is happening to us on the ground? Whether you’re cheering and applauding or booing and hissing, you’re watching the show — so how has the so-called “revolutionary left” become so enraptured by what amounts to performance art on a stage inside a colonial garrison? The complete hegemony of the settler empire’s cultural influence continues to mislead and dull the senses of our aspiring revolutionaries, but not by lying to us to convince us that one settler politician or another is a radical. Even the most ineffectual liberal “socialist” will openly admit that they don’t believe Mamdani will deliver anything resembling a radical break. After all, they’ve “learned their lesson” from former DSA campaign outcomes, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vile opportunism. But if they’ve learned their lesson and “don’t expect much” from Zohran Mamdani, what exactly are they doing? The answer is a parallel to Mamdani’s career.

The Social Technology of Settler Socialism

The mass base of Democratic Socialism is the lower and middle strata of settler colonists.⁵ These people are genuinely discontented with the system, but pay attention to their grievances! “Housing is unaffordable, wages are too low, social safety nets are not robust enough, and  education is too expensive.” Wealth and capital have become too concentrated in the hands of a minority, “the 1%,” and they aren’t getting what they see as their due share. Are these the grievances of a revolutionary, or of petulant settler youth and failed settler aspirants? Are these demands aiming towards the complete destruction of the colonial system and the restitution of Indigenous land sovereignty, or are these demands aiming at a “fairer” redivision of the spoils of colonial conquest and imperialist exploitation? Are the grievances rooted in a desire to end class society or to simply make it more comfortable for those fortunate enough to live within the colonial jurisdiction at which their reforms are aimed?

The DSA professes to be a “socialist” organization, so on the surface it appears to be approaching an alignment with national liberatory, decolonial, and communist struggles. But is this really the case? Remember to always analyze the class position of a given organization by the actions it takes, not by the ideology it professes. Ideology is always a more or less accurate reflection of class alignment, but recall the scientific tenet that the appearance of a thing does not perfectly match its content—therefore we have to look deeper. The reflection can be, and often is, inverted. Zionism purports itself to be a liberatory movement, which is an inverted reflection of reality. Amerikan liberalism purports to be interested in universal democracy, which again is an inverted reflection of reality. So, is DSA really socialist? What are the outcomes of DSA’s political activity? As of this writing, no militant organizations or movements have emerged from the DSA, and decades of organizing has yielded little but a few “more radical” Democratic politicians in colonial office positions. The standard explanation given by “communists” within the DSA for its lack of revolutionary action is that the masses have yet to be radicalized, and therefore struggle within the DSA is necessary to bring them the consciousness they need to begin to take revolutionary action. In 43 years, however, the DSA has largely remained ideologically stationary.

This “failure” to radicalize the masses is a constant point of debate and analysis. Many individuals and organizations within the communist milieu but outside the DSA contend that the source of this failure is because the organization is ideologically democratic socialist (i.e. not revolutionary in ideological outlook), and therefore a different, “more communist” organization is required to impart the necessary revolutionary outlook in its adherents. But this is putting the cart before the horse! Ideology does not dictate material alignment, material alignment dictates ideology. The DSA is not a stagnant ineffectual organization because of its backwards ideology—instead it has a backwards ideology because this is necessary to fulfill its actual goals. What are its goals? The purpose of a system is what it does, especially a system which has remained more or less stable and self-reproducing for over four decades. So what does the DSA do? It reels in members of oppressed groups (trans, queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, etc) and disciplines their activities into serving the interests of its colonial middle-class leadership by mixing them into a single “organization” under middle-class leadership. The profession of “socialist” aims is a smokescreen to obscure the actual aims of the organization, which is ultimately little more than colonial, careerist ladder-climbing.

What of the internal criticisms levied at the organization? Many of the members are often very dissatisfied with the outcomes of their political activity, and among the common refrains is the need for more centralized leadership, for the ability to enforce a political line on the politicians they get into office, and for the organization to divest itself from cooperation with zionism. Yet despite a resolution passing in August⁶ enabling the expulsion of zionist membership (which was barely successful, succeeding with 56% percent of the vote), the openly zionist Mamdani continues to be backed by the DSA, and the overall strategy of the DSA continues to be to maintain its involvement in the zionist Democratic Party. The reality of the matter is, despite professing anti-zionism for the first time in its long history, the DSA remains a zionist organization, and its new “anti-zionist” mask is the same “anti-zionism” of the broader imperial left—an anti-zionism that affirms the necessity of the occupation to continue. Little more than a barefaced lie.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The settler empire has long since perfected the social technology of penetrating organizational and community structures built by, or being built by, the oppressed, with the aim of taking them over from within and submitting them to colonial interests. Where the oppressed see a dire need for unity and solidarity in the face of colonial genocide against our siblings in Palestine, the lower and middle strata of settlers see an upsurge in laboring subjects available to fill the ranks of their latest campaign for redivision of the imperialist spoils. That, in essence, is what the Democratic Socialists of America is: far from a dysfunctional organization which routinely fails to meet its goals, the DSA is a well-oiled machine of settler-colonial annexation. In which revolutionary currents among the oppressed are carefully cultivated within a narrowly bounded arena of struggle, both in order to prevent a dangerous rupture of the colonial system, and in order to ultimately benefit the settlers served by the DSA. That this process occasionally settlerizes individuals from oppressed demographics is part of the point—in order for the DSA to function as intended it’s necessary that the occasional individual from an oppressed demographic attains an internal leadership position or a colonial office position, but this is always predicated on the condition that they closely adhere to the interests of colonial maintenance; they must not engage in illegal activities, such as organizing and arming militant struggle. “Class peace” remains the priority ahead of anything else, even when the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children hinge on the taking up of armed struggle. To the settler socialists, their deaths are water under the bridge so long as wages are increased enough to broaden the number of people who can access the colonial land exchange.

For revolutionaries, what the success of the DSA and Mamdani’s campaign represents is a complete capitulation of the “Free Palestine” movement to settler annexationism and zionism. We’ve failed to differentiate between friends and enemies, failed to take the actions necessary to expel enemies from our organizations and communities, failed to build up the militant organizational capacity necessary to wage armed struggle against zionism, and in doing so failed to defend the lives of our Palestinian siblings in their hour of greatest need for two years ongoing. And yet, Mamdani’s electoral success is lauded as a victory for the left! Indeed, this is a triumph for the left wing of zionism. With hardly a word to the contrary, we’ve rolled over and allowed this travesty to unfold for two years, all the while repeating the inane mantra that “any day now” the masses of settler oppressors will “radicalize” and join forces with the oppressed to aid in the overthrow of their colonial system. In doing so, we’ve demonstrated our own willingness to be complicit in a holocaust so long as this complicity keeps us out of the prison cell and out of the line of fire.

Our Place in History

When freshly stolen land became scarce and prices rose in the late 1700s, the lower and middle masses of settlers eagerly aligned with the planter bourgeoisie to oppose British rule and expand the colonial system. Indigenous peoples bore the cost of their genocidal brutality.⁷ Since then this pattern has repeated itself over and over. At each moment of crisis in the colonial system, the dispossessed and poorer settlers will seek out temporary alliances wherever they can find them to bulk up their ranks for coming confrontation with the ruling strata, but always with the sole aim of securing their own slice of colonial land and their own share of imperial wages.⁸ As times change and ideologies shift and develop, the colonial redistributionists will find alliances in different places. During the period of protracted economic crisis in the 1930s, the redistributionists found alliance with rising Black nationalism, only to cast off their allies the moment a fresh flood of booty came pouring in following the empire’s successful conquests at the close of the Second World War, and by the 1950s the Communist Party USA had successfully liquidated all revolutionaries from its ranks and disavowed national liberation. In the 1960s, a new wave of national liberatory struggles rose, and by the 1970s, settler “radicals” had successfully played out their role in crushing all resistance. The defeated liberation movement became a victorious “Civil Rights Movement” in the settler history books.

Today the same pattern plays out yet again in real time before our eyes: with the colonial system’s internal stratification at historic highs, and faced with the objective necessity of violent armed struggle in support of the Palestinian resistance and against the US empire, the settler “left” floods into our organizations and our discussion spaces, reads our literature and learns our language of resistance, claims to be our allies in struggle, and spends two years marching in circles to maintain the facade, while shoring up support for their preferred reformist. Time and energy and resources that could be spent serving the needs of the most oppressed, building dual power institutions, organizing guerilla strikes against weapons manufacturers and zionist finance institutions, etcetera, gets repeatedly diverted into the same century-old discussions about whether socialists should vote. Those of us aiming to build the revolutionary forces necessary for winning this war find ourselves surrounded by the most dishonest dregs of humanity, grabbing and pulling us back from struggle to keep our labor squarely aimed at shoring up the structures of oppression holding us down. Make no mistake, when $30/hr is firmly in hand, these so-called radicals will ride into the sunset towards their very own mortgages on stolen land and pensions funded by imperialism. 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for personal gain at the expense of the Palestinian resistance is not a betrayal of the “socialist” movement, but the blueprint to be followed by each of its adherents. We’ve already failed to lend Palestine the support it needs for two years ongoing. If the aspiring revolutionaries of our new rising wave of national liberation fail to recognize the myriad methods that settler opportunism uses to exploit our labors for individual gain, we too will take our place in the history books as the defeated “extreme fringe” of a successful movement to redistribute the spoils of genocide and oppression.

1.  Julian Gerson, political director for Mamdani’s electoral campaign, previously served as a campaign manager for US congressman Jerry Nadler. Nadler describes himself as a “committed Zionist” and “a strong supporter of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people.” Gerson is on record saying, “Jerry embodies the idea that one can absolutely be pro-Israel and progressive simultaneously.” ︎
2. From Kaffe in the same thread: “The ratio of the sub-employed population has been roughly the same for the last half century, even as the role of ‘housewife’ has eroded (good riddance), with the shift in joblessness going mostly to the Nationally Oppressed. The abolition of unemployment (a Soviet right), is so little entertained for two reasons:
   1. The Labor Aristocracy refuses to let go of wages and security, even if that value could be re-allocated for increased employment, and erase the security problem. 
   2. The work that desperately needs to be done (i.e. land healing), would reduce dependency on Imperial relations, making it more difficult to compel the working class to reproduce them.
   Instead: insecure-security, stratified wages, uneven development (the cause of high economic migration — the medium of insecurity and stratification), and the ‘public works’ cages a million people yearly, militarizes the population, and (re)builds Bourgeois terrorism.” ︎
3. Hence why housing was a right in the USSR, “Thus a worker cannot be put out of his room, even for non-payment of rent. His wages can be attached, but if he is unemployed his rent is free. He cannot be charged more than a certain low sum, fixed in proportion to his wages.” Anna Louise Strong, The First Time In History, (New York: Boni and Liverlight, 1924),149. ︎
4.  “…of course I condemn Hamas. Of course I have called October 7th what it was, which was a horrific war crime,…” ︎
5. According to the 2021 DSA Member Survey Report, 85% of membership is white, compared with only 4% Black representation. 28% of members are full upper-PB with household incomes of $100k or more. 80% of respondents had bachelor’s degrees, and approximately 60% of respondents occupy petty bourgeois or labor aristocratic positions, split between scholars, academics, white-collar, tech workers, non-profit organizations, public sector employees, healthcare or social work, self employed, writer, performer, arts, and political org/union. ︎
6. See resolution R22. ︎
7. “This pretense toward ‘freedom’ continued in 1776 when settlers revolted when London seemed to be loath to continue funding their wars of dispossession against indigenes and the constant conflict with enslaved Africans that was an adjunct of that process” Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 154 in the PDF. ︎
8. See J. Sakai Settlers Ch. 4.4, describing the process of the settler economy importing Chinese labor to displace the Mexican population of the southwest, only to then violently expropriate Chinese industry and landholdings. Afterwards, the same participants in these genocidal purges urged “unity” with Afrikan labor, as the next phase of the developing industrial unionism movement: “Terrance Powderly, the Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor (who had personally called for wiping out all Chinese in North America within one year), suddenly became the apostle of brotherhood when it came to persuading Afrikans to support his organization: ‘The color of a candidate shall not debar him from admission; rather let the coloring of his mind and heart be the test.’” ︎

Up to half of this “aid” has been in the form of shrouds for Palestinian dead, and the remainder has not been distributed. No food or supplies have reached the population since the 2nd of March. Almost everyone inside Gaza is suffering from severe malnutrition, with disease rampant and medical services overwhelmed and under constant bombardment. Over 3,000 people have died in the past two months. Ninety-eight people were killed on Tuesday this week.

They aren’t sending aid.

They’re sending tanks.

A comprehensive invasion is currently ethnically cleansing the strip from north to south. The zionists have established increasingly shrinking “humanitarian zones,” outside of which Palestinians are killed on sight, and have forced the nearly 2 million surviving Palestinians in Gaza into highly concentrated “refugee camps” in the south. The zionist state regularly bombs these refugee camps, resulting in horrific casualties. Since the 15th of May, the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, israel’s bombardment of the surviving population of Gaza has intensified to unprecedented levels. Around 100 people are being killed every day by the relentless bombings. 

Every leading scholar on genocide worldwide is calling this what it is, but the mainstream media refuses to report accurately on conditions in Gaza. They refuse to admit that this is an intentionally targeted genocide, being waged with our tax dollars, our “defense” industry, and our complicity. Instead they are under standing orders to continue to run PR for the genocidal zionist occupation of Palestine. The world’s governments continue to make symbolic gestures, denouncing the occupation’s actions in words while continuing to support it in practice..

The United States is the primary beneficiary and driver of this zionist atrocity; all pressure must be exerted on the United States government to cease. This genocide is U.S.-backed, U.S.-funded, and is being carried out with tactical direction from U.S. soldiers.

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY IN THE ZIONIST HOLOCAUST.

Immediate action is desperately needed on all fronts:

Arms shipments to the zionist occupation of Palestine must be stopped immediately. Visit workersinpalestine.org/who-arms-israel for a list of weapons companies involved in materially enabling the genocide.

Relief is desperately needed for the hundreds of thousands of people starving under intense bombardment. Visit gazafunds.org to contribute to relief funds, every donation helps the people of Palestine resist genocide, every donation is a potential life saved.

Visit chuffed.org/project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza to help provide e-sims to keep Palestinians in Gaza in contact with their families and the outside world.

Visit bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott for information on which companies are investing in, or directly involved in the occupation. 

Spread this message everywhere you can. This Holocaust is being systematically covered up through mainstream media silence and social media censorship. Visit clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2025-05-23-emergency-bulletin-zionists-begin-last-stage-of-genocide for the web version of this article, or unity-struggle-unity.org/palestine-emergency-bulletin-tri-fold for a printable PDF copy. Get this message into as many hands as possible! With every hour that passes more innocent men, women, children, and babies are being murdered. U.S. bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes, built with parts from Canada, the E.U., targeted by surveillance drones from the U.K. 

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY. 

INACTION IS COMPLICITY. 

THIS HOLOCAUST IS BEING CARRIED OUT IN OUR NAME.

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENDING IT.

Over the coming weeks and years the three stages of the ceasefire agreement are supposed to be completed (that is, if the zionists do not reverse the process). The conditions are: the beginning of a ceasefire, the releasing of settler hostages, the freeing of Palestinian political prisoners, the clearing of IOF forces out of Gaza, and humanitarian relief. Stage two formally establishes the ceasefire and consists of more freeing of Palestinian political prisoners. Stage three is the great reconstruction of Gaza.

In the past, Democrats pointed fingers at the Bush family for their genocides in Iraq. Now, Palestine, Gaza, this is their genocide. The Democratic Party genocide. The Biden-Harris genocide. They said the other party would do genocide worse — but now it is wholly the operation of the Democratic Party. Still, arguing Trump is worse when it comes to Gaza can be ascribed only to ignorance and lies. Every Democrat who said there was no way to stop the genocide has nothing to say now. Nothing remains in the bank of excuses — it is empty, they have no choice but to embrace reaction even more explicitly and to deny the blatant reality that has arrested their efforts.

Reactionaries will try to sell the lie that this ceasefire changes the entire situation. Fundamentally, no change in the relation between colonizer and colonized has been affected. Palestine remains in antagonism with the zionist entity; struggle for the liberation of Palestine continues as long as the zionist entity continues to exist. It is a temporary move, not a permanent qualitative leap.

It is important to stress this because as we write these words, the zionist imperialist running dogs are now proceeding to storm the streets of Jenin in the West Bank (after already having stormed Jenin time and time again in the years of constant attack and bombardment). Zionists are ordering displacement of Palestinian people in Jenin and are trying to kill the Palestinian resistance there, which is itself, like Gaza, a home of refugees displaced from other Palestinian communities. To the degree that Gaza is able to live in so-called “peace” shall be the degree to which Jenin is being bombed and raided.

Gaza — every city; north, south and central — is left completely in ruins. Not a single part has been untouched, there are but rubble and broken families scattered about, the people dreaming of relatives that today only exist as memories. Already before October, Gaza suffered high rates of PTSD, depression, and poor mental health — particularly among youth. How much has it risen, after 400 days? Now more than ever before, the terrorized Palestinian people will fight for their nation; the Palestinian people have repeatedly had to bury entire family lines and have been militarized by it. If it was to be argued that this was about clearing Gaza of resistance fighters, even the highest-ranking zionist officials know (though perhaps want to forget) that this is impossible — unless every Palestinian person is murdered. The women and youth are now militarized. Gaza’s streets were filled with civilians chanting “we’d rather die than be humiliated.” And this is why zionism can only mean the complete extermination of the Palestinian people. A permanent ceasefire is impossible — it will not hold, it is simply extra time for the zionist entity; a ceasefire is an unsolved antagonism, it will last as long as the previous ceasefire that was agreed to in 2021. There have been many ceasefire agreements — practically every zionist operation in Gaza has ended with a ceasefire, though the firing never ceases — and soon after the zionist offensive against Palestine started back up in full swing.

We have to stay vigilant. Palestine must remain our pulsing priority, all the more so because we are in the imperial core — the decaying, moribund, spiritually dead core that has been trying and failing miserably to wash its hands of all of the Palestinian blood that has stained it. 

What, in any case, is a ceasefire when the West Bank is still under attack? What is ceasefire while relentless, unyielding settler expansion continues into Gaza, along with the continued colonialist whitewashing and demolition of everything Palestinian? What is a ceasefire when Palestine is still under blockade, when Palestine still cannot control its resources and the zionists can cut them off at any time, when Palestinians do not even have houses to live in during wintertime?

Criticism must be made of those who insisted only upon “ceasefire now” in the west: a westerner is someone drowned in material privileges from the super exploitation of the entire world. On this basis, chauvinism is a conditioned trait of the westerner. To be cured of it they must be persistently, unceasingly educated in a decolonial Marxist politic that leads them to supporting resistance of the third world against “their own” bourgeoisie, imperialism, and colonialism. “Ceasefire now” accomplishes nothing in this direction — it only requires temporary attention to a colony, rather than the persistent demand for the immediate liberation of the colony. We will not stop and shall not rest until the dissolution of zionism. “Ceasefire now” only means taking the knife out of the back of the oppressed by a few inches. It neither removes the knife nor covers the wound. It does not start any process of healing and restoration. This demand being so strongly emphasized will bring with it many “pro-Palestine” westerners who only care for Palestine when the terror is most explicit — and they will be distracted and apathetic. These people will forget about Palestine and will turn away to join the rest of the world in its collective amnesia and complicity. 

We have a ceasefire, but it is a ceasefire within the bounds of genocide. On the part of zionists and the imperialists which direct them, the point is still to make Palestine nonexistent, and to make the Palestinian people a bygone fact. Netanyahu tried to delay the ceasefire agreement — one of the many signs that the zionist entity is simply, by virtue of existence, incompatible with peace. And on the morning of January 29th, a zionist air strike murdered ten Palestinians in the West Bank, purportedly “militants.” Every Palestinian is a militant to the zionist entity because the Palestinians have dared to not be eradicated. 

It is being argued this ceasefire is an agreement the Trump administration helped push — this interpretation is incorrect. A certain use for this claim might be found as a jab at the genocidal Biden administration and the genocidal Democratic Party to show how, for all their supposed “progressivism” and “concern for human rights,” they did not stop the genocide or even bring about the ceasefire. Instead, they did the opposite. But this forgets what is crucial; the ceasefire agreed to was the same one the Palestinian resistance itself several months ago proposed, which the zionists initially rejected. When it comes to the ceasefire, one point must be borne in mind: the Palestinian resistance has forced it through political-military power. They have forced it through mortars and explosives, through liquidating tanks and by shooting back at zionist invaders. It was not the doing of any one person, but rather of the Palestinian resistance going on the offensive. The zionist entity spent 400 days fighting against the Palestinians for daring to refuse quiet submission to holocaust. The spirit of the Warsaw ghetto uprising existed within them, and all the passion went into fighting zionism. All the genocide, all the killing, and yet the Palestinian resistance has only become stronger. By the end of it, the zionist entity was simply losing, and they couldn’t possibly make it appear otherwise except to their most rabid supporters.

The zionists cannot win what they have already lost. They bombed all of Gaza, terrorized all its people but Hamas and Al-Qassam are still standing in Gaza today. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Al-Quds brigades are still standing. The PFLP and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades are still standing. And more brigades are emerging in the embrace of mass spontaneous demonstrations.

Marxists will always support armed resistance by Gaza and Palestine. “Well-meaning” young Marxists like to argue that zionists are first to attack in nine cases out of ten, and that in the case of October, the al-Aqsa flood, they had no choice; that the root cause stems back far before October. Perhaps in the context of talking to very confused people, this is sensible (hasbara monopolizes upon the insistence that there was no sign of this uprising coming and that it was some wanton act of violence), and most certainly this has to do with social context before October — but ideologically speaking, this is fundamentally not the point, because regardless of when the oppression began, Marxists support uprisings of the Palestinian resistance, supports national liberation wars, and supports them with utmost enthusiasm regardless of who attacks first, regardless of if it seems “unexpected” or not, regardless of whether or not it seems to have been timed correctly or strategically, regardless of all the ploys of the oppressor to placate the population and surrounding countries with deceptive promises and false peace treaties. With Palestine, the concern is not whether one side or the other attacked first. The concern is national liberation and the blow against imperialism and settler colonialism — an attack on capitalism itself. The violence of the oppressed is supported because it is scientific and a cleansing force against colonialism and imperialism.

All eyes must remain on Gaza because the zionists will violate the ceasefire again; it is not a matter of if but of when. It will come in the form of savage zionist terror that manages to surprise the entire world again and become even worse than before. 

All eyes must remain on Palestine, but also on Lebanon and Yemen, both of which the zionist entity will repeatedly aggress against regardless of this ceasefire agreement. 

And all eyes must remain on all the agents of terror who in one way or another perpetuated this genocide. They must not be allowed to sleep in peace. We shall swamp them with the irate and strenuously haunt them with the deceased. And when the ceasefire inevitably fails, it is they who will be at fault for all of the renewed suffering and the renewed terror.