Over the last century, the class struggle in the U.S. settler-republic has been, from time to time, embodied in a struggle for Communism. However, where and when it has existed and come to the fore, this struggle has been consistently sabotaged by failures of Communist organization and theory. During that time, our ruling class has had ample opportunity to study our movement at home and the larger Communist movement abroad, to pry into our methods, and worse, to identify the weaknesses of the domestic Communist movement — inherent since its beginnings in the U.S. — and to develop potent weapons against it. These weapons have been designed for us by our enemies; they are shaped for us, to exploit the natural fault-lines and flaws in our movement.

No one can see into the minds of the Democratic party functionaries or the Democratic party’s political agents — Senators, Congresspeople, mayors, appointees, etc. — but we need no special powers of mental acuity to examine their actions and gauge their effects or to comprehend how they work and the role they’ve played in shaping the political landscape. Since approximately 1945, the two political vehicles of the ruling class, the Democratic and Republican parties, have worked out, by experiment, their respective roles in a repressive anti-Communist machine. This machine’s primary function is first to mediate conflicts among ruling class interests, but second, and of much more interest to us (and the direct subject of the present article), to suppress proletarian class consciousness and avert a revolution.

Are there self-conscious agents at work within this atmosphere, building this machine of repression? Almost certainly. Is the entire thing built up this way? Absolutely not. This is the result of an emergent process of habituation, of individual elements of the ruling class following their own narrow interests and coming to accommodation with one another. However, in each of these interactions, the ruling class shares a common and underlying interest: the repression of the working classes. To the extent that this machine has a “soul,” a ghost guiding its processes, that soul is in the U.S. intelligence agencies, which were crafted to be the self-conscious element of the entire apparatus. The purpose of the FBI and CIA is to fight Communism. The ultimate effect created by this apparatus can be termed the “Hostage Syndrome,” and it has successfully defused the revolutionary potential of proletarian organizations claiming to lead the working classes in the struggle for Communism more than once. Of course, this syndrome is the result of the political strategies pursued by these two parties. It is an effect achieved in the minds of the so-called Communists who fall prey to it — most commonly and predominantly those Communists from the settler population of the empire and the labor-aristocratic or petit-bourgeois classes.

It is this Hostage Syndrome that a revolutionary in the heart of the U.S.-Canadian settler empire must counter. Any revolutionary strategy must defeat this tendency. This cannot be done by will alone. The Hostage Syndrome cannot be overcome by sheer “moral character” of those involved in the struggle. The solution must be at once theoretical and organizational. The solution must be arrived at by theory and then made manifest by organizational form.

The answer of course is a specific manifestation of the general principle of proletarian internationalism. The bedrock guarantee of national self-determination for the Indigenous nations, the Black nation, the Puerto Rican nation, and all other oppressed nations within the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire. This theoretical commitment must manifest in armed wings of a party dedicated firstly to the class war, and secondly to the war for national self-determination. Only armed, working people of each of the oppressed nations can form the anchor through which to hold a working-class party in the U.S.-Canadian empire accountable to its ultimate aim of class liberation.

To correctly identify and do battle with this Hostage Syndrome, we must ask two questions: “What is the appearance of this Hostage Syndrome?” (How do we recognize it?) and “How does this Hostage Syndrome function?” (How can we fight it?).

What is Hostage Syndrome?

The logic of Hostage Syndrome goes like this: “We cannot afford to risk revolution now, because we stand to lose the gains we’ve already made if we don’t support the left-most of the bourgeois political parties.” This formulation can be altered in various ways, but it always boils down to this same thesis. For instance, the claim that “revolution would endanger the already endangered communities” is another incarnation of this hostage syndrome. To act radically and challenge the system that exists, our hostage-taking logic says, we would put the people who are still receiving a benefit from that system at risk.

There are two exceedingly common manifestations of this syndrome. The first is focused around elections where the contest is between a Democrat (or other “left Progressive”) and any Republican or right reactionary. This is what we may call the naive Hostage Syndrome, which is a result of the unconscious operation of the system of bourgeois government. In this case, the left wing of the ruling class, in its guise as the “Democrat,” announces that it will preserve the present distribution of power. They promise to safeguard the advances of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movements and women’s rights movement. Often, they do this by broadcasting a kind of revisionist history in which it was the Democrats’ battle in the political arena, not the blood of the working classes physically fighting the state and corporations, that won the victories of the mid-century movements. The lackluster social safety net, like employer-covered health insurance, which barely qualifies as a nod to social democracy, is waved around as proof that there is something to lose. The same is done with basic rights like the right to abortion or to organize labor unions. “This is the most important election of your lifetime,” is the slogan, despite the logical flaw that it is trumpeted at every single election.

The Syndrome, the attitude this produces in so-called radicals, is the mental construction of defensive barricades. “We don’t have time for revolution, we have to forestall fascism.” This is the breathless battle cry of many a pseudo-Communist. Regardless of the evidence that electing the Democratic candidates invariably produces a rightward shift in the policies of the U.S. empire — because the material conditions dictate a continuous rightward march as being in the basic interests of the class both Republicans and Democrats serve — they fall prey to the threat.

We may metaphorically phrase it thusly: the Democratic candidate, in order to maintain the ever-weakening ties that bind the coalition of nationally oppressed groups, labor, and petit-bourgeois graspers that gave it power in 1932, acts as a hostage taker. The hostage is the status quo. Partnering in this game is the Republican party, acting as a bad cop in a good cop/bad cop duo. The Democrat warns our pseudo-revolutionary that he is trying to de-escalate. “Listen to me and I can convince the Republican not to shoot the hostage!” he warns.

What these pseudo-Communists have forgotten is that we, too, are against the status quo. We must be willing to pursue change, even change that will harm the working class in the short run. If we are unwilling to change, we are not Communists, we are reactionaries. “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” Those who are not willing to see blood and take risks are not revolutionaries. They are rearguards of the bourgeois state.

The second form of the Hostage Syndrome comes through the integration of someone with characteristics of an oppressed group into the machinery of oppression. We have seen this form cynically deployed throughout the U.S. empire over the last few decades. This is the election of Black mayors and police chiefs, women on the boards of corporations, and so forth. A pertinent example is Minouche Shafik, a Muslim woman who serves as the current imperial administrator of Columbia University. In this incarnation of the system, the very existence of this person is meant to demonstrate that progress has been made, no matter if they act to repress the vast majority on behalf of the colonizing ruling class. “Don’t attack the system,” they say — and not necessarily with their mouths, but by their very conscription into it — “because it has clearly been reformed, and more reform is possible.” Again, the underlying logic is that we cannot afford to throw away the meager crumbs we have won in order to seize the whole feast.

How Does It Work?

One of the pernicious tricks of this strategy is that the candidates for political office who perform the dance that produces the Hostage Syndrome in their viewers can be entirely sincere. It is not required that the actors in this drama cynically manipulate their audience. They may have every intention, once they are elected “this time,” to pursue an agenda of social and economic progress. But the system protects itself. Therefore, the outcome of even the warmest-hearted reformer, the most earnest opponent of corporate greed and reactionary overreach, finds themselves confronted with intractable opposition once they actually take office.

In order to achieve anything within the bourgeois government, they are forced to adopt bourgeois methods. Politicians in the U.S.-Canadian system, as in all the bourgeois republics, are required to cultivate powerful backers and wealthy donors. Only with the assistance of these allies can they ensure even a fraction of their political plans come to pass. They must continually appease and placate big businesses and elder statesmen. This is how big businesses and elder statesmen exert control over the entire system. In fact, it was those same capitalists and lawyers who designed the system. They are the ruling class, and their machine serves their interests.

The effect itself is dependent on the working class of the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire receiving benefits from their position in relation to the exploited and colonized world. Superprofits extracted from the colonized world (the neocolonies like Ukraine, full colonies like Puerto Rico, and the semi-colonies such as the Black Belt within the domestic U.S.) are used to drive down the cost of commodities inside the empire and keep the imperial worker flush with out-of-season fruit, cheap gas, and freely flowing credit. These superprofits are also used to support a hugely inflated petit-bourgeois “middle class” of managers and professionals that far outstrips the number of professionals necessary to manage the productive domestic economy. Hordes of lawyers, doctors, and accountants are kept high on the hog by these superprofits.

As a result, all of these people — petit-bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats alike — have institutional buy-in to the system of government within the U.S. empire, even if they can’t actively change it. It works for them, so they work for it. Essentially, for this group of people, other than the fact that they cannot control their own economic destiny, nothing is fundamentally wrong. Why would they risk their spoils? From their point of view, it doesn’t make sense to shoot the hostage.

But the status quo is changing. The average worker in the U.S. empire is seeing less and less of those superprofits. Inflation is rising. The adventures of the U.S. armed forces are more and more ending in disgrace, ignominy, and terror abroad. As this continues and accelerates, the Hostage Syndrome will begin to lose its hold. The status quo, the hostage, no longer looks quite as appealing.

National Liberation: Killing the Hostage

There is another cure for the chauvinism common to this labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois class, who are poisoned by imperial bribery: that cure is a commitment to the national liberation movements. National liberation of the Black Belt, of the Indigenous nations, and of all subject nations in the U.S.-Canadian empire has a special place in the revolution. Each of these national liberation movements represents a special front in the class war; each must be treated with as much gravity as the war between the owning and working classes.

This means that the party-to-be (for no such party yet exists) must have a structural component grounded in national liberation. Only with national liberation sections, each of which with its own armed wing, each of which must have authority to veto the direction of the party-to-be, can the workers movement be purged of the chauvinism that now infects it.

In the past decade, every labor struggle has ended with a meek acquiescence on behalf of labor. The railworker’s unions were broken by Biden. The UAW and UPS unions accepted crumbs when they could have demanded the bakery. The great upheavals within the U.S.-Canadian empire have been, in our lifetimes, upheavals, revolts, and proto-revolutions focused around national liberation. Whether this is the Black nation in its expression of Black Power, Indigenous nations like AIM’s rebellion at Wounded Knee or Alcatraz, or the current wave of student revolts that aims to see the Palestinian nation free from interference, national liberation is the heart of the movement within the empire.

Only by adhering to a national liberation line can the movement regain its lost soul, which was bartered away so many years ago at some sordid party conference. Only through a national liberation line will it become clear that we can no longer abide by the Hostage Syndrome. Because national liberation cannot be achieved without shooting the hostage — the status quo — it can be our polestar.Enough is enough. We are done with good cops and bad cops, done with bourgeois courts and police, done with bourgeois politicians, and done with social democrats who are nothing more than lap dogs for the bourgeoisie. We are done with the Hostage Syndrome, and we now look to the future, when the hostage can no longer be used to control us.